Comp Studies Full Practice Exam
- Discuss how technology has changed the traditional concept of literacy. Assert a stance in which you articulate the relationship between digital technology and writing. What major literacy issues do at least three authors on your reading list associate with technology? What are the implications of these issues for writing pedagogy in particular?
In Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong explains that literacy is grounded in the ability to read and write with language, ostensibly in physical texts since digital ones were not yet an omnipresent part of Western culture. However, with the rise of digital technology, new kinds of literacy are in demand. Some of the main issues that need to be addressed are how we ensure all students have access to the same literacies, as well as what we mean when we use the word “literacy.” Such scholars as Cynthia Selfe, Charles Moran, Gunther Kress, and Anne Wysocki and Johnson Johndan-Eilola are some of the leading voices in this discussion: Selfe argues that we absolutely need to teach students how to compose in digital environments, Moran addresses issues of access in relation to technological literacy, Kress calls for attention to visual literacy with the rise of new media, and Kress and Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola examine if “literacy” is the correct term to use for what we mean when we say “digital literacy” or “technological literacy,” which has implications for how we treat it in the composition classroom.
In Technology and the 21st Century and elsewhere, Selfe argues that it is imperative that we teach students how to compose in digital environments. She argues that in today’s high-tech world, the highest paying jobs are those that deal with technology. As such, we do a grave disservice to students if we deny them access to such skills and literacies afforded by working with texts in digital environments. She explains that the majority of poor, underrepresented students who do not have access to technologies at school and at home are being left behind; thus, the inequality gap in America is growing. Selfe also refines what she means when she says “literacy.” She is careful to clarify that she does not mean just a set of skills; in other words, she does not mean just being able to use a computer, run programs on it, and type in a word processor. She defines “technological literacy” as being able to use technology to create and analyze texts, while also being critically aware of the political and social implications of technology in society. Selfe wants students to not only be able to engage with digital texts in digital environments, but she also wants them to be aware of the inequality that such technological literacy promotes while also working to change it.
In his article in Hawisher and Selfe’s Passions and Pedagogies, Charles Moran also discusses the implications access has on literacy. He echoes many of Selfe’s arguments that students who do not have access to technologies at home and school are losing out on opportunities for advancement later in life. He places some of the blame for this on composition scholars and teachers who excitedly research how new and expensive technologies can help our students write, think, and compose better. These technology enthusiasts emphasize the pedagogical effects of new hardware and software, but such impacts and pedagogy cannot be used by instructors who teach underrepresented students at underprivileged schools because they cannot afford the new technologies. As such, Moran argues that we need to spend some of our time and energy exploring low-tech alternatives to the new high-tech options. He wonders if we can affect the same pedagogical benefits on our students using older technologies or non-digital platforms. Though Moran provides a potentially viable option for students who have very few opportunities to work in digital environments, such options will not provide them with the technological literacy Selfe argues that they need in order to work successfully in the high-tech jobs that she explains are the highest paying. His solution may work over the short term, but at some point, students need to be given access to real digital technology in order to succeed beyond school, especially since technology is requiring new forms of literacy that are only available (or best served) in digital environments.
Gunther Kress, in both “Gains and Losses” and Literacy in the Multimedia Age, shows that digital environments have made possible new forms of literacy, specifically visual literacy. He points to the rise of visuals and graphics (and the decline of alphabetic text) on webpages as a sign that the visual has become an effective mode of communication and argumentation. Kress argues that visuals are filled with meaning that can be conveyed easily as soon as the viewer sees them, but printed words are waiting to be filled with meaning as the reader reads them; thus, visuals are more efficient. His research implies that the ability to produce and read visual texts has become imperative, so we must teach students the value of composing digital texts that incorporate visuals: they need to know how to use such software as PhotoShop (to create and edit visuals) and place them appropriately within a text, as well as how to interpret and respond to others’ visuals. As per Moran’s suggestion, it would be possible to perform these actions via low-tech means (perhaps having students cut out and paste together images from magazines in order to place them into a physical text of some sort) in order to teach students the same skills, but unfortunately any profession that requires extensive work with visuals will require students to have some familiarity with the digital software that can perform the same tasks faster and more efficiently.
Part of the problem of the disparity in technological literacies between and among various classes of people could be the way we define it. Kress points to this problem in Literacy in the Multimedia Age when he explains that we tend to conflate three different definitions under the term: having the skills needed to produce a certain text, being able to work in the space in which the text is produced, and being able to work in the space where the text will be disseminated (Selfe implies a similar distinction when she clarifies the definition of “technological literacy” I explain above). He suggests that all three refer to distinct aspects that should not be grouped together under the term “literacy.” In their chapter in Hawisher and Selfe’s Passions and Pedagogies, Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola agree, but for different reasons. They argue that “literacy” has become such a politically charged term that is it potentially dangerous: those who have traditional “literacy” (being able to read and write) are successful, and those who do not have it are not only unsuccessful but also somehow deficient because they have been unable to acquire a skill that most of us were able to at a fairly young age. Thus, the term “illiterate” has come to mean more than just not being able to read or write: it has come to be a term of denigration and disparagement. Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola ask if we really want to carry such a stigmatized term into studies of digital technology and writing pedagogy by using it in phrases like “digital literacy” and “technological litearcy.” If we choose to do so, we risk widening even further the inequality gap that Selfe points out in Technology in the 21st Century.
When we talk about “literacy,” we clearly no longer mean it in the same strict way in which Ong uses it in his work; it has expanded to include more aspects than such a term has room for. Like Kress, I think it seems useful and necessary that we designate each of the three actions currently grouped under “literacy” into three separate terms; although, also like Kress, I have no suggestions what those terms could be. In many of the texts I read (including Kress’s), I came across references to a term coined by Ullman that appears to make steps toward uncomplicating the issue of what we mean when we refer to “literacy” in digital environments: he uses the term “electracy” to replace such terms as “digital literacy” and “technological literacy.” Such a term helps to untangle some of the political implications of “literacy,” but if we choose to use it to refer to composition in digital spaces, we have to be careful to 1) ensure that it only incorporates one aspect of “literacy” (not three), as Kress explains, and 2) avoid stigmatizing it the way that Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola argue we have done to “literacy.” Such stigmatization is damaging to students who believe that their inability to work and compose in and with technology (even if it’s because of lack of access, not any kind of incapability on their part) makes them somehow less capable as people.
On the other side of the coin, I agree with Selfe that it is imperative that students learn how to use these technologies and that it is our responsibility as composition teachers to help them learn how to do so. Moran’s suggestion of using low-tech alternative to high-tech pedagogies appears to address the issue in a viable manner, but really it is just treating the symptom of a larger political and economic problem. We need to find a way to give all students access to technologies and to teach them to work within them; thus we also need to give teachers training in such technologies in order to effectively teach their students. To deny students access to what Selfe calls “technological literacy” is to deny them opportunities for the best jobs available. I also agree that the best way to teach students “technological literacy” is to not only help them to compose and analyze texts in digital environments (perhaps also learning the “visual literacy” Kress emphasizes in his work, thus creating and critiquing multimodal works), but also to teach them to critically reflect on the social and political impacts of using such technologies. It seems to me that this is the best option for teaching students what we mean when we say “technological literacy” because it opens up opportunities for them beyond the composition classroom while also giving them the critical awareness they need to be able to change the disparity between classes when it comes to issues of technological access and “technological literacy.”
- Please discuss your view of first-year composition in relation to compositions studies’ current preoccupation with the genre knowledge and situated learning. Using appropriate sources from your reading list, explain and critique the major research findings and implications of genre studies for college writing instruction in general and first-year composition in particular.
In the mid-1980s, Carolyn Miller’s “Genre as Social action” redefined genre as socially constructed, socially responsive, and as having social consequences. Such redefinition unseated most definitions of genre that saw it as just a form; in other words, that saw “genre” to mean that any poem with 14 lines in an ABABCDCDEFEFGG pattern must necessarily be classified as a sonnet. Under Miller’s reconception of genre, it becomes a social choice as a response to a social exigence. Since Miller’s key work, genre studies has taken a foothold in composition studies as a viable space of research and pedagogy. Three scholars in particular—Charles Bazerman, Amy Devitt, and Candace Mitchell—have interesting notions about genre that have important implications for composition studies. Bazerman sees genre as a force that stabilizes the rhetorical situation, while arguing that genres should be regularized across genre; Devitt argues for an approach to genre pedagogy that teaches students what she calls “genre awareness” while building a supply of “antecedent genres”; and Mitchell exhorts composition teachers to teach students the most powerful academic genres available in order to ensure students success.
In Shaping Written Knowledge, Bazerman builds on Miller’s redefinition of genre as social action. He argues that genres not only respond to a social exigence, but that they stabilize the rhetorical situation by providing the speaker/writer with a set of social choices that they can perform in order to respond to that exigence. He argues that even though some perceive genre as limiting because it restricts the amount of choices available, it is actually liberating because, without some restriction, the amount of choices in any given situation would be overwhelming. In other words, part of the work of deciding how to respond is done for the speaker/writer; all that is left now is for him/her to decide what to say within the constraints of the genre. Thus, Bazerman argues that students need to learn about genres. He clarifies that he does not mean that we should teach students a cookie-cutter approach to genre as form; he means that we need to teach students about the choices that are available to them within each genre so that they can make those choices consciously and deliberately, rather than potentially haphazardly.
Bazerman also points out that since each discipline has so many distinct genres that sometimes overlap with other disciplines’ genres, we need to regularize genres across disciplines in order to make it easier for both students and scholars to write within a variety of fields. Such a suggestion seems helpful, especially since teaching a room full of students from a variety of fields (as composition teachers often do) can be overwhelming, especially if the teacher wants to take an approach that exposes students to the intricacies of writing in their field, but it seems a difficult task that many disciplines (stuck in their disciplinarity) would be hesitant to accept. However, it could be something toward which willing disciplines could work in order to further limit some of the rhetorical choices with which writers/speakers are confronted at the moment of utterance/writing, thus freeing more room for writers/speakers to focus on saying/writing what they want to within the constraints of the genre their social situation necessitates.
Devitt, in Writing Genres, further builds on both Miller’s and Bazerman’s conceptions of genre. First, she adds two more constraints to Miller’s definition (Miller limited herself to constraints Bitzer defined in “The Rhetorical Situation”: persons, events, objects, relations, and the exigence): contexts of culture and other genres. In other words, Devitt explains that the contexts of a person’s culture (background, education, ethnicity, race, sexuality, and any other aspect of their identity) determine what kinds of genres that person is likely to pick; likewise, the persons exposure to and mastery of other genres limits what genres are available to them. Thus, like Bazerman, she argues for teaching genre awareness, only her notion of what that means goes further than Bazerman’s. Bazerman argues that students need to be made aware of the choices available to them in a given genre, but Devitt explains that they also need to be aware of how genres work and why, and even how certain genres work better than others in some rhetorical situations and why. She argues for teaching students a wide range of genres because each new genre they master is added to a mental storehouse of “antecedent genres” from which they can draw when responding to new rhetorical situations. Devitt posits that such genre awareness and development of antecedent genres can be a useful way to maximize transfer; the skills students learn when writing may not carry into future assignments, but the knowledge of the rhetorical choices available to them in certain genres—as well as their potential impact and a general mindfulness that a certain genre could be more appropriate than another—may be more accessible to them beyond the composition course.
In Writing and Power, Mitchell implies that certain genres, especially within academia, have more rhetorical power than others. She addresses a pedagogical practice she has seen at her own institution: some composition instructors (particularly those who teach underprivileged and foreign students) base the course grade almost entirely off of journal entries. Mitchell acknowledges that the journal genre can be a useful mode of writing for students who are used to being stigmatized for their “inability” to write in Standard Written English (SWE) because it allows them to write in their home dialects without punishment; however, she also argues that relying solely on such reflective and informal writing as the main basis for a grade in a writing course is unethical because it leaves students disadvantaged as writers. Instead, she asserts that, because the academic essay is the genre that hold the most power in academia, we need to teach (especially underprivileged) students how to write in it and genres like it. Mitchell posits that when we deny them the opportunity to learn to write in the dominant discourse, we do them a disservice because they will be unable to be successful in other classes that require them to write in SWE. However, Mitchell’s assertion uncomplicatedly accepts the view that there is such a genre as “THE academic essay.” She does not distinguish between or among various fields for whom “the academic essay” can call for entirely different generic requirements. Still, she is right to point out that if we grade underprivileged students on the basis of journalistic or other informal writing, we do them a disservice by not helping them learn to write in the genres that hold power in the academy and beyond.
Mitchell’s notion that students need to learn to write in the “academic essay” genre seems to draw on both Bazerman’s and Devitt’s belief that, in order for students to succeed in a given rhetorical situation, they must first master the genre it necessitates. In other words, Bazerman, Devitt, and Mitchell all imply that in order for a student to successfully write an academic essay they must first understand all of its conventions, the rhetorical choices their selected genre engenders, and the potential impacts of selecting such a genre; if a student does not understand how the genre works and thus misuses it, they will likely fail in their rhetorical situation. For example, if a student must write a research paper but does not understand the rhetorical choices available to them within the constraints of a research paper (or if, as Devitt implies, they have not written in genres similar to this one in the past), they will likely fail the assignment and the rhetorical situation created by its prompt. Thus, it seems to me, it is imperative that we teach students some form of genre awareness.
But, though I think genre awareness should become a key part of any composition pedagogy, I exercise the same caution as Bazerman and Devitt in explaining that genre awareness should not mean teaching cookie-cutter approaches to genre; such approaches are damaging and restrictive. And, like Mitchell, I think part of the territory of teaching students genre awareness means showing them that some genres have more power than others; they need to understand that turning in something that resembles a journal entry in response to an assignment prompt in an upper-level physics class will likely receive a low grade because it does not meet genre expectations. However, I also think such hierarchicalization of genres is problematic. Bazerman seeks to regulate genres across disciplines, and, while I do not disagree with him, I also think that a wider range of genres needs to be recognized in those same disciplines, especially since multimodal and digital composition have created opportunities for new genres that can make arguments in different ways from a standard “academic essay.” In other words, it seems necessary for us to rethink our notions of what makes a genre “academic” in order to provide more chances for all students to compose texts in the genres they choose to; we need to redistribute the power certain genres have over academia.
- Taking into account the histories of composition instruction on your reading list, as well as the theoretical shifts in the field represented on your reading list, what major ideas, if any, about composition should be disregarded or not? And how specifically should newer ideas in the field take their place or not?
Composition studies has seen many pedagogical shifts in its relatively short history. Since writing began to be taught in universities in the 19th century, composition studies has ostensibly seen as least five theoretical paradigm shifts, from current-traditional rhetoric, to process, to expressionism, to cultural studies, to social pedagogies. These shifts have provided a complicated history of composition pedagogies and classroom practices.
The first major theory in composition is current traditional rhetoric (CTR), which Robert Connors and James Berlin have described as an emphasis on surface features, largely inspired by the work of nineteenth-century rhetoricians like Blair, Campbell, and Whately. Such pedagogy has called for error-free essays that follow a set format, and its proponents have focused heavily on perfection with strong penalties for those that fell short. It is product-oriented, focusing solely on the end-result, or goal-text, of composition. CTR is often ostracized, especially by proponents of the Process movement. However, as Connors explains in Composition-Rhetoric, there is no such thing as a coherent CTR movement. In fact, it was only misnamed “CTR” well after the fact (by Fogarty in 1959, and again by Young in 1978). Connors points out that though CTR deals with rhetoric, there is nothing particularly “current” or “traditional” about it. He argues that it was likely developed as a kind of straw man against which the Process movement could define itself as superior. Still, the echoes of it are seen in any composition classroom that focuses heavily on grammar and mechanics instead of (or in supplement to) the ideas students are trying to convey in writing.
The process movement came on the heels of CTR in the latter half of the twentieth century. Donald Murray, in “Teach Writing as Process Not Product,” argues exactly what his title implies: he identifies prewriting, writing, and revising as three steps through which every writer goes in the process of writing. Other process theorists such as Janet Emig, Nancy Sommers, and Sondra Perl examine the processes of student and adult writers as they revise their compositions and identify the nonlinearity of the writing process. And Linda Flower and John R. Hayes examine the recursive mental processes through which writers go as they compose a work. Often, the Process movement is credited with legitimizing the field of composition studies because it gave us a subject we could student scientifically. However, Susan Miller contends in Textual Carnivals that there was never a dramatic paradigm shift from CTR to Process; in fact, she argues that the two theories are quite similar because they both assume the existence of a goal-text (through which the author can express his/her intended meaning) and that both assert themselves as “student-centered.” But Lisa Ede points out in Situating Composition, there was no such thing as a coherent process movement anyway (just as there was no such thing as CTR). She argues that none of the process scholars I mentioned above defined themselves as part of a “movement.” Thus, she argues that the Post-Process scholars misnamed it (just as the “Process” scholars ostensibly misnamed CTR) in order to provide themselves a denigrated other against which they could define themselves as superior. Ede also acknowledges that, though “Process” helped professionalize composition, it was not the only factor: the founding of CCCC and the rise of summer workshops, publications, and conferences all played a role in professionalizing composition studies, not just “Process” alone. Yet, Process remains a popular approach from which composition instructors teach: any writing course that asks for multiple drafts (and many of them do) is propagating a Process approach to writing, which shows that Process scholarship continues to impact how composition is taught.
Another theory that gained popularity in the latter half of the twentieth century is Expressionism. Berlin titles this movement “Neo-Platonism” because of its focus on the internal discovery of truth. Such an approach refers back to the Romantic notion of the solitary genius writing alone in order to convey their subjective truths to others. Peter Elbow is often thought to be the Father of Expressionism. His pedagogical focus blends process and Expressionism in order to provide a supportive space in which students can write and revise their work. He also devised “freewriting,” the act of writing whatever comes to mind without stopping in order for students to both see what they think about a particular topic, and to use their freewriting as fodder for a larger composition. However, George Hillocks performed a study that shows freewriting appears to have little impact on helping students to write better; it only increased their performance very slightly, a miniscule impact that Hillocks explains could have been caused by other circumstances. In general, Expressionism appears to have fallen out of fashion. Echoes of it can be seen in composition classes that call for narrative-style essays and/or journal writing, but it seems to have largely been superseded cultural and social theories of composition.
The rise in popularity of a cultural approach to composition began in the 1980s (and it is often grouped under one of many “Post-Process approaches”), but perhaps its biggest impact can be traced back to Mary Louise Pratt’s essay “The Arts of the Contact Zone.” Pratt defines the contact zone as any space where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other. She argues that the classroom, and especially the composition classroom can provide a contact zone in which students can learn about and from others’ cultures in order to more critically approach economic, social, and political issues. Feminist approaches to composition also fall under this category because they acknowledge and critique cultural differences while seeking to balance the inequalities they can create. For example, Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford notice that men tend to favor hierarchical writing that uses a unitary voice and tends to be agonistic, while women tend to favor dialectic writing that can use many voices while being negotiative; they argue that both types of writing need to have a place in the composition classroom.
However, some scholars like Maxine Hairston and David Foster argue strongly against cultural approaches in the classroom. In his chapter in Post-Process Theory, Foster asserts that cultural pedagogy is dangerous because it could potentially create painful conflict between students; he urges that anyone who decides to use a cultural approach should do so with care and be prepared for a potentially negative outcome. Hairston’s response to cultural pedagogies in “Diversity and Ideology” is more vehement than Foster’s. She argues that such approaches are damaging to students and that they undermine the real focus of a composition classroom: writing. Interestingly, after arguing passionately against cultural critical pedagogies (at times even performing ad hominem attacks on other composition scholars), Hairston promotes a multicultural approach to teaching composition that involves students naturally allowing various aspects of their cultures to come forth in their writing and class discussion, thus giving other students the opportunity to learn about another person’s cultural background. As I understand it, this is exactly what cultural studies is, even though she argued passionately against it in the first half of her essay.
One last popular group of theories in composition studies are those dealing with the social aspects of the composition classroom: James Berlin’s social epistemic rhetoric, Kenneth Bruffee’s social collaboration, and Bruce McComiskey’s social process. In “Composition Pedagogies,” Berlin outlines four dominant modes of composition, but stresses that social epistemic is the most practical. He argues that knowledge is socially constructed: it is a product of interactions with the world around us while simultaneously constructing the social world in which we live. Such an approach is a direct response to Expressionism’s tendency to isolate writers from their peers and colleagues. Instead, Berlin acknowledges that in order for writing to produce new knowledge, it must recognize the impact that social forces have on it. Bruffee agrees with Berlin in “Collaboration and the Theory of Mankind.” He argues that not only is knowledge socially constructed, but that, since thinking is internalized conversation, writing is conversation re-externalized. Thus, if we want students to write well, they need to learn to converse with others first through collaborative group projects and assignments. Finally, in Writing As Social Process, McComiskey argues that writing follows an entire process of cultural production, critical consumption, and cultural distribution of which student writers need to be aware. Every text produced generates cultural values and ideas; every text consumed must be done so critically in order to make its values and ideas transparent; and each text is distributed in certain manners and through certain means that say something about how the producers perceive their viewers/readers. For example, a college viewbook produces values like diversity and scholarship that the reader/viewer must discern, and to whom and where that college distributes its viewbook implies what they think about their potential students. But McComiskey asserts that simply critiquing such works is not enough: students must also learn to make their own texts in response. Such social views of composition promoted by Berlin, Bruffee, McComiskey and others are currently one of the dominant approaches to composition.
Compositions studies has had a complicated history of theoretical shifts since the nineteenth century, but elements from each approach carry over into the next in ways that make it difficult to pick one particular approach to disregard. CTR’s emphasis on proper use of mechanics and grammar should not be the main focus on any composition class, but teaching students to use language properly in a range of situations should receive some emphasis; Process’s proposal of a universal method of composition and revision may not be viable, but sometimes components of it (prewriting and drafting multiple copies through revision) can be useful to many students; Expressionism may focus too much on the internal aspect of composition, but reflective writing has its benefits in the composition classroom; Cultural pedagogies may increase the possibility of offending students, but the critical awareness they could receive as a benefit outweigh that risk; and Social theories draw from elements Cultural and Process pedagogies in order to react against the Expressionist notion that knowledge discovery is internal. Thus, aspects of each theory seem important to a balanced composition curriculum.
Instead, I will argue against the remnants of the belletristic tradition that remain part of some teacher’s classrooms. Such a pedagogy uses literature texts (often works of fiction or poetry) as a way to teach writing: they provide models for students to emulate as well as texts for them to critique. Such an approach, which reaches as far back as Hugh Blair’s notion that reading good literature helps students develop good taste, is damaging for students because it restricts them to only one potential writing subject. Instead, students would benefit from a pedagogy that introduces elements of CTR, Process, Expressionism, Cultural, and Social approach because such an approach will give them exposure to a wide range of skills and writing experiences while helping them to become critically aware of how the production of texts affects the distribution of power, both in the academy and in the real world.
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