I just finished a full practice exam in Composition Studies. I feel good about this one. I don’t think Comp Studies will give me much grief on test day. My real concern has always been (and remains) the Rhetoric exam.
***Update nearly two years later. I passed both exams with distinction. My fears about the Rhetoric exam, it seems, were absolutely unfounded.**
Issues of Power and Powerlessness
Shor, Mitchell
As I sit to work on this theme, I realize that I don’t really know what it means, or at least what it will achieve that my work with feminism and multiculturalism didn’t already accomplish. As such, I’m only going to look at Shor and Mitchell, but in a question on this topic would probably also bring in some of the people I’ve already talked about.
Ira Shor
In When Students Have Power, Shor experiments with making his classroom more democratic in an attempt to defeat the dreaded Siberian Syndrome. He allowed students to negotiate some of the course policies and how classes were conducted, and even created an after class group (ACG) of students who would tell him how he did and what he could do to serve them better. The result of the experiment seems overwhelmingly positive. Shor explained that more people than ever were invested in the course and its content simply because they had some say in how it was run. He even reached some of the students who began in Siberia; they didn’t move, but they were more engaged in the class than they probably would have been otherwise. The implications of Shor’s research are that when students have some of the power, they are more invested in the course and engaged in the content. They’ve been conditioned to sit in a subordinate position within the classroom their whole lives, but Shor gave them an opportunity to level the playing field and take control of some aspects of the classroom.
Candace Mitchell
In Writing and Power, Candace Mitchell argues that academic power lies in the ability to write in academic discourses. Students who are not given access to the genres and skills required to craft an acceptable academic essay are denied the opportunity to grow through writing, and their chances of succeeding in college and beyond are lowered. Implicit in this systemic hierarchicalization is the notion that if one does not become a good writer, it is the individual (not the institutions) who is at fault; a further implication is that failure stems from the misapplication of skills or failure to work hard enough. Such mindsets are dangerous for students (usually underprivileged or foreign) who think this way. It can cause them to drop out, thus continuing the cycle of keeping power with the few elite (usually white) who have mastered the dominant discourse. Thus, Mitchell argues that comp teachers need to reflect critically on our practices and assumptions (a la Hillocks) to ensure that we do not perpetuate a cycle of marginalization.
How I would answer a question on this theme
As I said earlier, I would incorporate Shor’s and Mitchell’s explicit notions related to power into a larger cultural discussion that could include such authors as Pratt, Hawisher and Sullivan, and Elbow. Including these three sources could lead to an interesting discussion about where power is located in the university and how the comp classroom can serve to deconstruct, decenter, redefine, or displace it.
Multiculturalism in Composition Studies
Kent, Foster, Pratt, Elbow, Mitchell, Smitherman
David Foster
Post Process Theory, as Kent describes it, is based in the notion that there is generalizable writing process to which everyone could comfortably adhere. He argues that the three main assumptions behind Post Process Theory are that writing is public, interpretive, and situated, all of which suggest that each person has an individualized process that cannot be universally codified. However, David Foster is hesitant to let process theory go and embrace post-process theories, specifically a cultural critical approach. He argues that process theory enhanced the importance of schooling by naturalizing it in a framework of analytic conversation between student and teacher. Foster also argues that by leaving behind process and moving to a cultural critical pedagogy, teachers introduce a lot of unnecessary risk to the composition classroom: turning toward the social and emphasizing difference leads to unpredictable and unstable interactions, which then leads to conflict. Thus, comp studies must think carefully about the effects of dissonance and conflict on writing scenes because articulating difference is risky, stressful, and potentially painful.
Mary Louise Pratt
Pratt does not support the Process Movement, but argues for classrooms to confront difference in the way that Foster urges us to refrain from doing so. She explains that classrooms are “contact zones,” or social spaces in which cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other. Pratt points out our classrooms are potentially full of underprivileged and underrepresented students, and that we can change our classroom practice so that they can gain more of a voice in the composition classroom. She suggests that teachers should embrace the difference and incorporate nontraditional assignments (like ethnographic narratives) in order to allow cultures to deal with the tension each one has because it is different from the others. Pratt does not deny that this could potentially be risky (that students could get angry or upset as their culture clashes with another), but she urges that the pedagogical benefits are worth the risk because we will be able to produce a critically aware student body that can approach social and cultural issues in an appropriate manner.
Peter Elbow
Elbow has made many contributions to comp studies, but one of the most important ones is the notion that students should be allowed to compose initial drafts of text in what he calls their “mother tongue(s),” by which he means the dialect(s) with which the students are most comfortable (likely the one they were raised speaking with their family). This means that students could stop worrying about their writing being judged incorrect or inadequate; the classroom becomes a safe space in which they can use their own dialects freely. However, in order for this safety to continue, Elbow argues, it is imperative that students’ final drafts are in Standard Written English (SWE). In other words, they can write as many drafts as they need to in their “mother tongue,” but by the time their final draft is submitted, it must resemble an academic essay (although he admits no such thing truly exists). If students do not learn to translate their home dialects into SWE, we are doing them a grave disservice; though our classroom may be safe for the time being, the rest of the university will not be. Elbow’s notions have implications for multiculturalism because they provide a framework from which to both teach students SWE while encouraging them to maintain their “mother tongue.” He acknowledges that no one speaks SWE as their “mother tongue,” but some have had access to language that is closer to it; the ones whose “mother tongues” are vastly different from SWE need to work through a period of transition, and we should encourage and help students who need it. On the other hand, if we simply try to quash out any minority dialects, we run the risk of writers drifting toward the dominant language and losing their “mother tongues” through lack of use; therefore, we risk wiping out minority dialects. Elbow argues that such dialects will not flourish unless there are legitimized in our classrooms.
Candace Mitchell
Mitchell also grapples with the tension between students being required to write in SWE but also needing to hold onto their home discourse. She argues that we must absolutely teach them how to write in academic settings. Mitchell brings up an instance from her own experience in which she witnessed composition teachers whose only graded writing assignments were journal entries. Such assignments were valuable in that they validated the writing of (especially underprivileged) students who were able to write in whatever way seemed comfortable to them. However, she argues that relying so heavily (indeed, entirely) on a nonacademic form of writing did those students a grave disservice because they did not achieve practice in writing academic discourse. Mitchell explains that the genres of the academy hold the key to power; the students who succeed in such genres as the academic essay are the ones most likely to succeed in college and beyond. Thus, it is imperative that students learn how to write correctly in academic genres; to refrain from doing so is to deny them access to particular forms of discourse that could prove indispensable in the future. Mitchell does not think requiring underprivileged students to learn SWE is unfair or Imperialistic; she sees it merely as a tool for advancement. Indeed she appears to draw from Spivak’s answer to her own question at the end of “Can the Subaltern Speak?”: yes, but only through the dominant discourse. But Mitchelle does not believe the two (a student’s home discourse and the dominant discourse) to be mutually exclusive. Like Elbow, she encourages a classroom space where students’ home dialects are safe but where they are also learning to use translate their writing into the dominant discourse.
Geneva Smitherman
Smitherman discusses the “Students’ Right to Their Own Language,” the document that worked toward wider social legitimacy of underprivileged and foreign students’ languages and dialects and to bring about mainstream acceptance of marginalized cultures, history, and language. The goals of this document are to 1) Heighten awareness of language attitudes, 2) Promote the value of linguistic diversity, and 3) Convey facts and information about language and language variation that would help teach nontraditional students more effectively. Smitherman’s discussion goes well with Elbow’s and Mitchell’s (and really, Foster’s and Pratt’s as well) because, even though this document has been in effect since 1974, it addresses a language issue with which comp studies still struggles today.
How I would answer a question on this theme
Pretty much as I have here, except I would add one more connection among the resources. In order to enact Pratt’s contact zone classroom in a way that would not bring pain and hurt to students (as Foster fears), the teacher would need to adapt Elbow’s and Pratt’s notions about nontraditional discourses in the classroom.
Feminism and Composition
Sullivan, Gearhart, Annas, Lunsford and Ede, Lamb, S. Miller, Selfe, Hawisher and Sullivan
Pamala Annas
Annas argues that women should be allowed to ground their writing in the self (personal experience) and women’s lives. She asks, is it fair to ask marginalized students to ignore these aspects of themselves? In order to achieve the required academic distance. No, it isn’t. For some, it’s impossible. Instead, students should use writing to validate their own lives. As instructors, we can help them to find a way to do so.
[Plays well with Elbow and Mitchell, who argue on a similar topic.]
Sally Miller Gearhart
Gearhart recognizes that students have a variety of backgrounds and languages (literacies?), but that not all of them are recognized by the academy. She asks, is this an act of violence? An extension of Imperialist ideals (asking them to give up their “home” ways of expression for traditional academic ways)? Yes, it certainly can be. Gearhart argues that feminism rejects this notion in favor of creating a classroom space that invites (rather than forces) students to change.
[Both Annas and Gearhart focus on politicized approaches that combine feminism and comp in order to create a classroom space where all aspects of the self come together to stimulate and create change.]
Patricia Sullivan
Sullivan argues that composition studies is too slow in examining how gender informs writing. She analyzes several aspects of the writing classroom and finds that androcentrism remains pervasive in comp studies. Thus, we must ask how gender shapes the meaning of a writing situation.
[This works well with Annas and Gearhart because all three recognize that different backgrounds lead to different approaches to composition; thus, being female can lead to a different approach to composition than being male would.]
Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede
Lunsford and Ede found two primary modes of communication in comp studies classrooms. The first is hierarchical and was determined to be masculine: writing is delegated by a superior and implies bureaucratic writing; the superior values efficiency; multiple voices and shifting authority are problems. The second is dialogic and was determined to be feminine: writing values fluidity in meaning, openness, and creative tension; writing is producing (not discovering) knowledge; it has the potential to challenge phallogocentric, subject-centered discourse.
[Lunsford’s and Ede’s study has implications for Sullivan’s notion that gender shapes the meaning of a writing situation. They have shown that it shapes how a writer will respond to and write within a particular situation.]
Catherine Lamb
Lamb argues for a “maternal” view of argument that does not promote conflict. Power is not a quality to exercise on others, but is instead a force that energizes and enables competence and reduces hierarchy. Lamb explains that adapting negotiation and mediation (cooperative approaches to resolve conflicts) to writing will help avoid the divisiveness of monologic argument (which emphasizes its own interests and only acknowledges opposition to refute it). In other words, monologic argument is only interested in winning, whereas Lamb’s maternal argument is interested in finding a resolution that is fair to all sides: the goals are to see knowledge as collaborative, cooperative, and constructed. Lamb argues that written argument should be a give-and-take and power should be mutually enabling.
[Lamb’s argument plays well with Sullivan, Lunsford, and Ede because she suggests a kind of argument that is “maternal” (not paternal), and therefore feminine in nature. Thus, she suggests that this negotiative, collaborative, knowledge-making, and hierarchy-dissolving kind of argument is feminine as well.]
Susan Miller
Miller points out that the notion that composition is feminized must be challenged; she shows that the negative connotations with feminist approaches to composition reinforce the notion that composition is marginalized. Instead, we need to use political action to change the negative connotation of the “feminization” of composition, and for intellectual/political movements toward gender balance in composition studies. We must explore the status of females as lower on the hierarchy of the academy. Miller argues here and in Textual Carnivals that composition studies is a culturally designated space for political action. She adds that composition is the discourse of the majority, so it’s an effective place for counterhegemonic intellectual politics.
Gail E. Hawisher and Patricia Sullivan
Hawisher and Sullivan study women’s self-representation in digital environments. They point out that feminists have focused almost exclusively on the textual environments of computer-mediated composition, but since the Web has more possibilities for self-representation, they argue that a simple transfer of arguments about women’s verbal online lives is inadequate as a strategy for exploring visual representations. In other words, new methods for examination must be created or adapted in order to study women’s visual self-representation.
It was once promised that online spaces would be egalitarian, but, since women and other underrepresented people are often unduly harassed, that has not happened. Often, women are shut out entirely of mixed-group electronic discussions; they make fewer and shorter contributions than men, and both men and women respond more frequently to men’s postings than to women’s. Neither have these spaces proven to be devoid of communicative power for women, as was also predicted.
Hawisher and Sullivan argue that in order to extend and complicate electronic discourse theories, we need to examine online visual depictions in a variety of discursive settings. In other words, the digital realm is full of images that people view and interpret daily, and which exert influence over them; thus, we need to examine how these visuals impact their viewers. When women become visual objects online and have no say in the ways in which they are represented, the outcome is predictable. Old identities like the “pin-up girl” or academic talking head are reproduced, and traditional narratives are re-created with new technologies.
Cynthia Selfe
Selfe reinforces what Hawisher and Sullivan argue. She explains that the representations used to sell computers often reinforce the same traditional gender narratives of our culture. These conventional stories told in the context of new technologies remind us of our ethical responsibilities to work as college English teachers toward productive change. It’s our job to both analyze, critique, and deconstruct these hierarchicalizing narratives and replace them with egalitarian notions, and to teach our students to do so. Some cultural stories we are telling ourselves about computers are that 1) the electronic landscape is open to everybody (it isn’t), 2) gender will no longer be a predictor of success (it still is). Just because we now have technology does not mean social progress will automatically follow. Instead, we must educate students on how to culturally critique electronic artifacts so that they may recognize the inequalities that challenge humanity (ethnocentrism, racism, classism, sexism).
If I had to answer a question on this theme
Since a lot of these texts play well together, there are a few different approaches I can take. Annas and Gearhart argue that women (and other underrepresented) writers should write in their own voices, even if that means using personal experience or disrupting traditional hegemonic-academic notions of writing. Ede and Lunsford tie into their arguments well by showing that men and women write differently, thus calling for an acceptance of feminine/dialogic writing as well as traditional masculine/hierarchical writing. Then, Lamb goes into greater depth about what such feminine/dialogic/maternal argumentation could look like.
Susan Miller kind of stands on her own, but her notions could easily fit into a discussion of Comp’s power/powerlessness in the university, or of the politics of composition.
Finally, Hawisher and Sullivan and Selfe discuss issues of women’s identity in electronic spaces. All three scholars show that visual representations of women reinscribes traditional gender narratives into new digital spaces. They call for new approaches to studying women’s self-representations, and well as cultural productions of women in these spaces.
History of Composition Studies
Berlin, North, S. Miller, Connors, Crowley, Smit
James Berlin
Berlin makes an argument in Rhetoric and Reality that we should consider “rhetorics” (plural) instead of “rhetoric (singular) because rhetoric is epistemological and therefore each rhetorical system is based on the natures of each knower’s reality. There are three epistemological categories of rhetoric: objective (reality is within the external, material world of experience), subjective (reality is within the subject and discovered internally), and transactional (reality is the interaction of subject and object, mediated by audience and language). For objective rhetoric, the writer’s job is to record experience exactly as it has been experienced; CTR is objective because it requires finding truth through observation and then finding the language to describe it. Subjective rhetoric is demonstrated by Plato, who believes that truth transcends the material world; it can be known, but not communicated or taught. Weaver sees rhetoric similarly, but its possibility is expanded by the suggestion that metaphor can suggest the supersensory. The writer’s role is to offer positive knowledge or correct error in order to help lead the audience to truth via a private discovery. Transactional rhetoric types are classical (truth is located in a social construct); cognitive (correspondence between structures of mind and nature); and epistemic (reality involves all elements of the rhetorical situation). In this view, rhetoric is implicated in all human behavior, and language mediates reality and truth. In another article, “Contemporary Composition,” Berlin argues for the superiority of epistemic rhetoric because it is the most practical.
In the 19th century, the university was opened to anyone from the middle class who could meet the requirements, and at Harvard in 1874 Eliot introduced the writing test as an entrance requirement. This led to the rise of what has been called CTR, a pedagogy that focuses heavily on surface perfection, like an error-free composition but pays little attention to thought processes; the influence of CTR is still felt in classrooms that focus mainly on grammar and mechanics.
In the early 20th century, there were three main approaches: CTR; an approach that inspired only those who possessed “genius” (usually elitist and aristocratic); and an approach that emphasized writing as training for participation in the democratic process. There was also an “ideas approach” that connected learning to social political life. The Efficiency Movement study of the NCTE determined that composition classrooms should have no more than 50 pupils per teacher and that the course should only be taught by the best teachers.
Between 1920 and 1940, college enrollments grew. CTR still held dominance, but began to be challenged by a subjective rhetoric that favored the individual. FYC programs were developed and headed by directors to provide an administrative structure for students and faculty. Objective writing tests were used to place and evaluate students who were grouped into classes by ability in order to respond to their individual differences. Expressionist rhetoric began to form as an indirect result of the liberal culture’s philosophic idealism and emphasis on self-cultivation.
Between 1940 and 1960, the most significant curricular development was the general education movement, which resulted in the rise of COMS (writing, speaking, and listening). CCCC was developed in 1949 after a 1948 NCTE conference presentation spawned a long discussion about composition that needed to be continued; the founding of 4Cs led to a burgeoning sense of professional identity. Many comp teachers taught writing through literature; great literature was needed to provide knowledge and stimulation to keep the teacher’s career active and vital. In the 1950s, there was a renewed interest in rhetoric as a discipline of historical importance and contemporary value.
Between 1960 and 1975, there were growing numbers of graduate programs in rhetoric; it began to be seen as a respectable specialty, especially with the growing numbers of students demanding more teachers and leading to a need for professionalization. The process movement began to take off during this time as well. There were many theories grouped under the category “new rhetoric,” but none of them became dominant. Instead, there was a multiplicity of rhetorics in which each was unique in describing elements of rhetoric. The major pedagogical approaches of this time were CTR, Expressionistic, Classical/Transactional, Rhetoric of Cognitive Psychology, and Epistemic Rhetoric. The biggest transition from the 19th century to 1975 was the shift from writing courses for cultivation of taste, to writing for preparing students for a profession, to writing for preparing students for citizenship in a democracy and enabling self-discovery.
Stephen North
North describes and accounts for the emergence of a methodological community in composition. First, he describes the Practitioners: scholars and researchers make knowledge, but practitioners apply it. They contribute to the “lore” of how writing is done, learned, and taught; lore is a body of knowledge housed in either ritual (passed along by example), writing (textbooks), and/or talk (conversations with other practitioners).
There are three kinds of Scholars: Historians, Philosophers, and Critics. The Historians write the pedagogical history of composition through a complex web of cause and effect relationships. The making of history is a neverending cycle of interpretation and reinterpretation. The Philosophers account for, frame, critique, and analyze the field’s fundamental assumptions and beliefs. Thus, they can help us choose teaching methods. The Critics establish a canon, interpret it, and generate theories about both how they created it and how they interpreted it.
There are four kinds of Researchers: Experimentalists, Clinicians, Formalists, and Ethnographers. The Experimentalists discover generalizable “laws” that can account for the ways people do, teach, and learn writing; they try to measure the impact of a manageable feature of a pedagogy on students. The Clinicians focus on individual “cases” and how they do, teach, and learn writing; they are concerned with what is unique or particular to some unit within a population, but bring the larger population to bear on their observations. The Formalists build modes and simulations to examine formal properties under study; they focus almost exclusively on modeling writing in order to highlight what we do not understand. The Ethnographers make stories or fictions for people as members of communities. North is not very optimistic for ethnography’s potential, but it has become one of the most valid approaches for cultural inquiry.
With all of these different approaches available and competing, North explains that there has been a “methodological land rush” as various inquiries scramble to claim what constitutes knowledge in composition. There are two themes that result from this inter-communal struggle: 1) there is the notion that there is a knowledge and method crisis that justifies radical action in teaching writing, and 2) Practitioners have been targeted as lacking knowledge and methods to do anything on their own. Therefore, some have pointed out that since the ability to generate or control knowledge rests with non-Practitioners, they must import their knowledge in order to repair the practices of the Practitioners. There are two assumptions operating here: 1) that Practitioners are 2nd class knowledge users (not makers), and 2) they should become the recipients of a random flow of information.
Since Practitioners have become a communal target, there hasn’t been much inter-disciplinary conflict. In fact, many inquirers use knowledge from various groups. However, as each community puts out new research, the field’s self-image of multi-methodological “progress” is harder to keep up. The stakes for methodological dominance are power, prestige, professional recognition, and advancement. However, North does not envision comp studies as a discipline because such a term implies unity and preparation for doing something. He offers three conditions that must be met in order for composition to be an independent discipline: heightened methodological awareness, methodological egalitarianism, and re-establishing the validity of practice-as-inquiry. North fears that each community will be absorbed by other fields and literary studies will continue to dominate. In order for composition to survive, he argues that we must break away from literature by either taking a larger share of knowledge making or by moving out of English departments, and/or we must establish inter-methodological peace to keep its vital core. North ends by predicting that composition as we know it will disappear and we can only survive by breaking institutional ties with English; however, he also clarifies that he prefers for composition more strongly with English.
Susan Miller
Miller argues that writing in higher education is simultaneously marginal and central. Part of this is because composition is confused about its own goals; thus, it is undermined in universities, and especially by literary studies in English departments. Literary studies are devoted to displacing the ordinary composition circumstances around texts it calls extraordinary; in other words, literary studies must be dissociated from the textual product so that the history of literature is told by “authorship,” whose origins, successes and privileges are considered unbound to the material circumstances of readers and writers.
One justification for why composition became part of English departments is that literary studies needed something practical to add to burgeoning English departments. Both replaced the classics, both were utilitarian means to an educated populace. Each could instill refinements of taste and correct grammar (both necessary in order to be “cultured”). Composition became the location where the unwashed were cleaned; where the masses were convinced of their dirtiness while being saved from it.
The subjectivity of a composition student is often infantilized: comp is seen as a transition-to-college course and often relies on pedagogies used at earlier levels. The student has no choice how the course is run; instead, they are unified with the university’s ideologies, often unaware that such a thing is happening. Miller argues for a politically aware composition course that prepares students to generically “be” writers in the classroom and other settings. Such a move could allow the students and teachers to acknowledge and analyze these hegemonic demands and their implications for the composition students.
Process theory has become one way in composition as legitimated itself as a field (though Lisa Ede would disagree with this notion). However, Miller argues that the paradigm shift for which it called has not yet happened. In fact, she still sees elements of CTR everywhere, and CTR and Process share some elements: priority of speech over writing, student-centered but independent individual, a “goal text” that can accurately represent intentions, and seeing words as having settled meanings. Still, Process Theory stabilized the field because it is “scientific” and gives composition an object of study and allow it to discover self-contained “meanings” in the act of writing. Miller also brings up the issue of the feminization of composition. Not only is it a marginalized field, but it is also taught by more women than men, thus further marginalizing and stigmatizing it. Composition is not considered to be a respectable field to teach. But Process works to reinforce the profession’s claim on a “normal” identity among colleagues. Miller ends by arguing that Composition could make a new identity by acknowledging that it is a culturally designated place for political action; it can work counterhegemonically while showing that making new knowledge is a shared process. We must reconceive the student subjectivity as responsibly, participatory, and potentially influential in writing.
Robert Connors
There is no such thing as CTR: Fogarty (1959) coined it, Young (1978) refined it, but no one has ever claimed to be part of a CTR movement (Eded points to a similar occurrence for Process Theory).
In the 19th century there was a shift from oral/argumentative rhetoric to written/multimodal rhetoric, which required that the 2500-year-old rhetorical tradition adopt new theory, pedagogies, and cultural status. Women entered the university for the first time, which shifted the possibilities available to genders; the rhetoric in the classroom shifted from agonistic/male to irenic/males and females. Writing tended to be perceive as something both men and women could do, not only men. Through most of the 19th century, information on composition disseminated through textbooks, not journals or other publications; in 1949, CCCC was founded and journals began to be established. From the 1940s-1990s, journals and textbooks struggled for epistemological primacy.
Connors also points out that the composition teacher used to be revered and well-paid, but is now overworked, ill-paid, and often marginalized.
Sharon Crowley
One of the reasons comp is marginalized is because it tends to focus on processes of learning rather than on acquisition of knowledge. Composition pedagogy focuses on change and development, encourages collaboration, and recognized the work of women long before other fields. In general, composition has little status in the university simply because most other fields tend to forget that it exists and can be a fruitful location for materialist, feminist, ethnicist, and postmodern theories. Teachers of comp are overworked and underpaid (as Miller pointed out) and often employed on a contingent basis. The majority of teachers are part-timers and graduate students, ostensibly because nobody wants to teach it. FYC is associated with teaching, not scholarship; research lead to promotion, but teaching is seen as drudgery.
Like Miller, Crowley also picks up on the tension between comp and lit in English departments. Using literature texts in composition classes only affirms the universal importance of literary study and reinforces the dominance of literature over composition. Also like Miller, Crowley determines that one of the reasons there is such tension between lit and comp is because literary studies suppresses the role of composition in producing literature; they have redefined completed literature as an embodiment of “full, central, and immediate human experience” without accounting for the process it took to get there.
Crowley finds impractical the notion that Comp must prepare students for their fields; every field has such specific requirements that they cannot all be contained in one course.
To Crowley, the pedagogy of tastes (19th century) is a policing mechanism that works to naturalize that which is culturally instituted and harden class distinctions.
Crowley argues against a universal FYC requirement. She says it exploits teachers and students while having negative effects on curriculum, classroom climates, disciplinary and institutional aspects, and professional issues. She wants us to instill writing vertically and horizontally, across fields. Crowley thinks enrollment will remain high, especially with high caliber instruction. The FYC requirement has nothing to do with student needs, but everything to do with the academy’s image of itself as a place with special language needs.
David Smit
Despite ongoing efforts to unify and professionalize composition studies, Smit argues that we still haven’t come up with a unitary definition of what it is. Smit offers four tenets that can help work toward interdisciplinary consensus about language and how it works: 1) Writing is always constrained by students’ interest and motivation (background and experience), 2) Formal instruction will never be able to supply novice writers with adequate training because language development happens via acquisition, 3) All writing is subject to a range of interpretations, whether intentional or not, 4) All writing is constrained by social context and by the circumstances/concerns of the reader via introspection. He makes two assumptions about comp studies: 1) Writing is a global activity, 2) It is foundational to advanced learning.
Smit believes that Comp should not belong in English departments; instead, individual disiplines should teach their own version of writing.
How I would answer a question on this theme
I probably won’t need to. This document is really just to organize the main theories about the history and state of comp studies.
How these readings have influenced my approach to composition pedagogy
McComiskey, Bruffee, Berlin, Shor, general self-awareness (via Hillocks)
I will undoubtedly be asked a question about how all this reading has influenced how I approach pedagogy. I will bring up McComiskey, Bruffee, Berlin, and Shor, as well as discussing the general self-awareness I have gained (via Hillocks perhaps).
McComiskey, Bruffee, Berlin: writing as social epistemic and social process
While doing these readings I was struck by something so obvious that I have always been aware of but have not really put much consideration into: writing is social. I have been doing assignments with my students for a few years where such an assumption was the basis of the project, but had never thought through just how important those assignment are or could be to helping students realize that writing is not just about coming up with what to say, but also saying to others and spreading knowledge.
McComiskey argues that we should teach writing as a social process of cultural production (the creation of social values), contextual distribution (the contexts of cultural values), and critical consumption (the social uses to which readers put their interpretations of produced and distributed cultural values). The example he gives of how this process plays out in the composition classroom involves college viewbooks (brochure-like booklets that promote universities and colleges). Each viewbook propagates its own cultural production of specific values: diversity, educational standards, campus appearance, etc. Then, contextual distribution refers to where the cultural values are presented to audiences: this can be socio-economic class, education level, gender, etc. Finally, critical consumption refers to how the audience interprets the values manifest in the viewbook, such as that the college as a beautiful campus with diverse students and faculty bodies as well as top-notch educational programs. McComiskey has students analyze these viewbooks, looking for both what they show and what they leave out: what cultural values are encoded in these viewbooks and how are they manifested? But what I find most interesting about McComiskey’s argument is that he does not end any of his projects with analysis. Such critique leaves students with the helpless feeling that their world is less than perfect and that there is no way to change it. So he adds an additional step. For the viewbook assignment, he has students make their own viewbooks and comment on how and why they represent what they do the way they do. In another assignment, students analyze a problem on campus then write a letter to campus personnel suggesting how that problem can be solved. I have my students analyze various cultural artifacts, but I have never had them produce their own artifacts or written letters suggesting solutions. It is a useful exercise because it shows students the importance of their writing and how it can impact the world in which they live; it shows them that they can make a difference while teaching them how to address a broader range of audiences. Importantly, it also gives them a sense of closure by allowing them to voice their opinions in the public sphere.
My approach has also been influenced by Bruffee and Berlin, both of whom argue a social constructionist/epistemic approach. Bruffee argues for a social construction pedagogy that recognizes that thought is internalized conversation and, since writing is externalized thought, writing is re-externalized conversation; thus, students must work collaboratively in order to both refine thought and practice conversation, therefore leading to better writing. Most importantly, collaborative learning also challenges authority by revealing that is a social artifact; in other words, it shows students that knowledge is negotiable: it can be challenged and changed through conversation with others. This plays right into Berlin’s social epistemic approach. He argues that knowledge and truth are constructed socially via dialectic, and that such conversations determine reality and knowledge.
The notions of McComiskey, Bruffee, and Berlin have inspired a new project my students will work on next semester in ENGL 104. In the last five or so weeks of the semester, students will work collaboratively together to use expertise from their major field to solve a problem on campus. In groups of 3-4, they will identify and analyze a problem or shortcoming they find here on campus, perform research on it, and suggest how to solve it. The example I’ll give them is that an engineering major, business major, physics major, and environmental sciences major could work together to argue that the Huskie buses should be replaced by more efficient biodiesel or hybrid buses, drawing on each other’s expertise to show the cost benefit, environmental benefit, and other benefits their field’s knowledge can bring them. In the process of this project, they will present their research at the Showcase of Student Writing. The final product will be a research proposal in which they will target someone on campus to whom they can appeal with their solution to the problem or shortcoming. Thus, they will gain a greater understanding of how their writing is part of a social process and that their knowledge is socially constructed.
Ira Shor
Another resource that has influenced my pedagogy is Ira Shor’s notion of making the classroom more democratic. He worked with the students in his class to negotiate course policies in an effort to get them more invested in the class and to alleviate the Siberian Syndrome (the name he gives to some students’ penchant for sitting in the far reaches of class in an effort to, in some small way, challenge the authority of the teacher). Shor also implemented an After Class Group (ACG) to meet after each class session to discuss how it went and how he can do better. I’m really interested in this idea of giving students more power in the classroom in order to help them become more civically and democratically engaged citizens beyond the classroom, but I’m not yet ready to give up as much power as Shor did. After reading this book (near the end of the semester), I altered my approach to preparing students to write their semester reflections. I engaged them in a discussion (with some light reading) on what reflection is, how it benefits them, and what kind of rhetorical moves a good one should make. Then, as a class, they came up with a list of 10 questions an effective reflection should be able to answer. Then, they negotiated the criteria on which I would grade them. The result was some of the most interesting reflections I have ever read; the students were clearly invested in the assignment because the guidelines were more transparent, and they had a hand in determining every aspect of it. As Shor cautioned, not every student was on board and invested, but more students put more effort into a usually hastily completed assignment than I had previously experienced; I’m excited to see next semester if this was just a one-time fluke or if it is a consistent pedagogical success.
General Self-Awareness (via Hillocks)
The most important influence on my pedagogy is a general increase in my self-awareness as a teacher. It was genuinely fun to read these works and discover how the assignments I’ve been doing (many of which have been inherited from ENGL 600) fit into the map of pedagogical approaches out there. For instance, ENGL 103’s arch from personal to public draws on elements of Expressionism’s writing to express oneself and Social Constructivism’s/Epistemic’s notion that knowledge is produced socially and that writing needs to be adapted to various audiences. Assignments like the visual analysis draw on a Cultural Criticism approach, while the blog project draws on aspects of digital composition and new media. I obviously knew that these assignments were valuable to students, but now I know why they are useful and have resources on which I can draw in order to perform the kind of critical reflection Hillocks calls for teachers to do. Hillocks says that we must reflect on our teaching constantly (both in the classroom while teaching and out of it) in order to assess how we are helping our students and how we can do it better. I’ve already started making changes to my course curriculums based on the readings from my list and will undoubtedly make more as I reflect on my teaching and adapt it to help my students as much as possible.
Visual Rhetoric in Composition
George, Kress, Yancey
Diana George
George calls for us to go beyond a basic call for attention to visual literacy; we need to realize that despite the fact that students are raised in an aggressively visual culture, visual communication is still complicated and sophisticated to them. Thus, reading and using visual information is part of learning multicultural literacy. George argues that visuals are important, but that they are no substitute for the complexity of language. Thus, though one can make sophisticated and relevant arguments through visuals, alphabetic language is equally as important (if not more so), particularly because, though real-world writing has been digitized and visualized, academic writing is still largely alphabetic.
Gunther Kress
Kress argues that writing is being displaced by image in many instances of communication where it previously held sway. The traditional page only has one entry point and sets a strict reading path; there is only one way to read a text, so access to power and authorship were strictly governed. However, webpages has multiple entry points, multiple reading paths. Thus, it can appeal to a wider range of readers/viewers who are able to construct the text as they work their way through it. Importantly, Kress argues that words are empty of meaning and need to be filled with the hearer’s/reader’s meaning, but images are full of always-specific meaning. [I tend to disagree: Kress seems to imply that images are less obscure than speech or writing, but I think they are just as susceptible to misinterpretation and, unlike alphabetic language (particularly immediate speech) cannot defend its meaning as easily. But I still support the use of visuals in most cases.] Thus, images are more efficient at conveying meaning than words. Kress believes that the printed page will continue to exist, despite the image’s increase in popularity. Kress’s notions have implications for comp studies because students must consider how to compose in an image-saturated world where images are in fact viable options for conveying meaning. His work implies that we need to teach our students more multimodal and visual composition techniques, skills, and knowledges so that they can succeed beyond our classroom.
Kathleen Blake Yancey
During her chair’s address to the CCCC, Yancey told us that “we have a moment.” In this moment, she argues that we need to embrace digital literacies and technology in the classroom. Among these literacies, she implies, is visual literacy. She asserts that, since writing is social, we need to teach our students how to write to broader audiences beyond the teacher-student relationship while helping them become a thoughtful, well-informed, tech-savvy public. Students need to understand that texts circulate across space and through time. In order to do this, they need to compose in digital modes; in order to compose in digital modes, they need to understand how to compose multimodal texts that involve not only alphabetic characters but also visuals, video, and audio.
How I would approach a question on this theme
Well, I’ve only got three authors here and will probably need a minimum of three. To kick things off, I’d probably establish the importance of technology in the composition classroom by bringing in Selfe’s and Yancey’s call for technological literacy. Then I’d move into the discussion of George’s hesitance to put full credence in visual communication, contrast it with Kress’s notion that visual communication is important and valuable (perhaps more so than alphabetic), then end with Yancey’s call for us to seize our moment and help students create multimodal texts that are capable of reaching wider audiences.
It would really help if I could remember which resource I read that argued that today’s webpages navigation and general digital writing could not exist without images. I suppose I can make a general argument from accepted knowledge that visual design is absolutely key to a successful webtext or digital artifact.
Technology and Composition
Selfe, Bolter and Grusin, Johnson-Eilola, Yancey, Moran, Landow
Cynthia Selfe
In Technology and Literacy in the 21st Century, Selfe argues that we must teach students how to write with technology in order for them to survive in today’s fast-paced high-tech work environment. In fact, those high-tech jobs are often the highest paying, so in refusing to teach writing with technology, we are denying our students the opportunity to earn those jobs. This leads to the issue of access. Many lower class, non-white students do not have access to these technologies, and so are left behind; thus, the technology initiative leaves them even further behind and increases the inequality gap in America. Therefore, we must be aware of these differences and work with all students to help them gain what Selfe refers to as “technological literacy” while having discussions amongst ourselves about the complex relationships between technology, literacy, education, power, economic conditions, and political goals.
One important issue Selfe discusses is the definition of technological literacy. She urges that it should not be understood as simply as a functional understanding of what computers are and how they are used; instead, it should be a complex set of socially and culturally situated values, practices, and skills involved in operating linguistically in the context of electronic environments. In other words, not only do students need to understand how to use computers, but they also need to be critically aware of the issues generated by technology use.
[It is important to note that while Selfe’s notions may have received push-back in the early 21st century, most theorists appear to agree with her now.]
Charles Moran
Moran specifically addresses the issue of access. He points out that we spend a lot of time chasing after the newest technologies and finding ways to implement them into our classes, but this excludes many lower-class and underprivileged students who do not have access to these technologies. It also excludes teachers whose schools do not have sufficient funding to support such technological demands. Moran insists that we should also pay attention to and study how to use low-tech, inexpensive technologies that can teach the same skills and knowledge as their more expensive, high-tech counterparts.
Kathleen Blake Yancey
In “Composition in a New Key,” Yancey insists that we absolutely need to help our students develop what she terms “the third literacy”: technological literacy. Her motivations are slightly different from Selfe’s (who argues that such knowledge will help them have access to better jobs): she argues that students and general non-academicians are writing online frequently now, but without our impetus. In other words, they don’t have to do this writing for class or for a grade; they are simply doing it for some intrinsic value by posting to blogs, Facebook, etc. Working with our students to write in digital and multimodal platforms will also help to create “writing publics”: fostering civically engaged, informed, and literate citizens who vote and are committed to humanity through their ability to write and think for purposes that are unconstrained and audiences that are nearly unlimited.
Johndan Johnson-Eilola
Johnson-Eilola talks about hypertext and how it encourages both writers and readers to confrtong and work consciously with deconstruction, intertextuality, the decentering of the author, and the reader’s complicity with the construction of the text. Specifically, he argues that composition pedagogy can take advantage of hypertext by encouraging conceptions of writing and reading that are simultaneously product- and process-oriented instead of primarily one or the other. In other words, hypertext can help students understand that writing is both process and product, and that you cannot have one without the other.
George P. Landow
The most important chunk of information to take from Landow is his notion of hypertext as a rhizomatic structure that allows the reader to create the text for themselves as they move through it. Ideally, a rhizome is a text that has an infinite number entrances, exits, and paths through it; hypertext is currently the closest thing to this kind of text since readers can enter it in many locations and work their way through it according to their own volition while exiting whenever and wherever they choose to. This decenters the author by making the reader into a sort of author as well.
David Bolter and Richard Grusin
Remediation has some interesting implications for technology in composition. Bolter and Grusin argue that many texts are remediations (literally mediated again) of previous media (ie: videogames have remediated photographs, paintings, television, and film). These remediated texts are both homages and rivalries: they draw on the remediated elements in order to claim that they are more useful or superior. This has implications for composition studies because now that many teachers are engaging students in digital and multimodal texts, those students are also engaging remediation. This increases the exigency of audience and motivates students to consider broader audiences than their classmates and teacher; they must understand that writing and composition do not happen in isolated vacuums, but in the larger world of human interaction.
How I would answer a question on this theme
I could have added more to this list of authors (Reid, Ridolfo and DeVoss, Urbanski, Kress), but these six seem to adequately represent the considerations to make when discussion technology and composition. I’ve also discussed the issue of delivery in new media elsewhere, and elements from that could be useful in this discussion as well. The key things to hit here are Selfe’s challenge for us to start teaching technological literacy and not just functionality but also critical cultural awareness of its social implications; Yancey backing up that challenge less than five years later from the perspective that our students are writing without us so we must keep up to stay relevant; Moran and Selfe bringing up issues of access to technology and how that impacts teachers and students; and Johnson-Eilola and Landow discussing hypertext as a kind of digital texts from which our students could benefit because it decenters the author and teaches product and process simultaneously.
Basic Writing Theories
Bartholomae, Sommers, Perl, Soliday, Shor, Smitherman
Sondra Perl and Nancy Sommers
Perl’s study looks at unskilled college writers to see what their revision process looks like. She used compose-aloud protocols in order to determine how unskilled writers write and if their writing process can be analyzed systematically. She found that many of her test subject could speak full, proper sentences but wrote partial, misspelled ones; part of the reasoning for this is when the subjects read the sentences back, they automatically corrected them. Perl found that the student’s writing processes were consistent (pre-, writing, and editing) and occurred in recognizable, sequential patterns. This suggests that the process was internalized. Some of the key implications Perl found were that teachers’ focus on fixing surface errors takes away the excitement of writing; as such, teachers instead need to find which aspects of each student’s process facilitate or inhibit writing and work to enhance or rehabilitate them.
Sommers’ study follows a year after Perl’s, and also looks at revision strategies. The student writers focused on rewording, which suggests that they believe the meaning is inherent in their writing and all they need to find is the “right” word. Also, students only recognize lexical repetition, not conceptual. They also believe that if their writing comes easily (if they are “inspired”), then they don’t need to revise; if they know what they want to say, there’s no need to change anything. Lastly, students lack strategies for global revision: they can handle local, but are often stumped on the larger picture. However, experienced adult writers see revising as finding the form/shape of their argument. For them, writing is a constant process of writing and rewriting. They can also view their work from the perspective of a reader and make changes accordingly. Finally, the adults tried to create/discover meaning through revision.
These two studies have implications for basic writing because they show how unskilled and inexperienced writers see both writing and revising. Both studies imply that we need to focus less on minute details of grammar and mechanics and instead treat larger global and conceptual issues first. Once the students have their thoughts organized, we can focus on the small stuff.
Geneva Smitherman
Smitherman explains the 1974 Students’ Right to their Own Language document. Its goal is to heighten awareness of language attitudes, promote the value of linguistic diversity, and to convey information about language variation that would help teach nontraditional students more effectively. This document has implications for basic writing because it makes it clear that students’ home dialects are allowed to be used in the FYC classroom; in other words, we as teachers need to be more open to language variation in our students’ writing. We need to respect (and even celebrate) their language differences.
Ira Shor
Shor’s book (When Students Have Power) is a personal story about when happened when students shared authority in his classroom. He emphasizes the individuality of each student and that we need to recognize that their backgrounds may not match ours. One of the most interesting points of Shor’s book deals with the “Siberian Syndrome,” which is the tendency for certain students to consistently sit as far away from the teacher as they can and disengage from the class as much as possible; this represents their subordinated and alienated position, as well as one of the few instances they have of exhibiting agency. They are defensive about the unequal power relations in the classroom (the teacher and the curriculum in which they have little say). As such, Shor wanted to distribute authority in the classroom. Beginning on the first day, he allowed them to negotiate the syllabus and course requirements (he later admits that he should have allowed them to negotiate the texts they read as well), then he expected them to talk a lot and produce a variety of texts in order to educate the teacher about their interests, levels of development, idiomatic diversity, cultural backgrounds, and thematic preferences. Short also created the After Class Group (ACG), a smaller group of students from the course who met after each class to discuss how it went and how Shor could better serve the students. In doing so, Shor created a democracy in his classroom because he consulted the students about policy and process, thus allowing them to develop as independent citizens. This means that Shor listened as much as (if not more than) he talked, and did not ignore, silence, or punish unhappy students.
Shor’s notions have implications for basic writing because often basic writers are misunderstood and underprivileged; they are used to being told they are not good enough and probably enacting the Siberian Syndrome. A democratic, power-sharing approach like Shor’s is a way to get them engaged in their education because they have a hand in creating the curriculum and standards to which the teacher will hold them. Such engagement would address a lot of inequality issues through the reinvention of power.
Mina Shaughnessy
In Errors and Expectations, she emphasized that students must be acculturated to academic writing. She urged teachers not to see basic writers as somehow deficient, but as beginners who are just beginning to understand how to engage in academic discourse.
Mary Soliday
Soliday points out that college students’ literacy was not a point of conflict until the mid-70s when Newsweek started the fake literacy crisis; remediation at the college level was not widely recognized until the mid-80s. The shift in attitude about remedial English are in part a result of the increasing middle-class need for the institutions to be exclusive: a college education is the defining feature of its social class identity.
One of the Soliday’s key points involves her questioning the ways in which students’ need for remedial writing instruction has become widely associated with the need to acculturate minorities to the university. She works to disentangle politics from remediation, thus challenging the assumption that a politics of language use is equivalent to the politics of access to institutions. She also challenges identity politics: she points out that those who think basic writers are simply refusing to assimilate are mistaken; often the writers want to assimilate, but we don’t know or understand how to help them to do so. Soliday urges basic writing teachers to explore pedagogies of translation, wherein students engage in rhetorically aware code switching. This allows student writers to act and think as intellectuals who discuss issues significant to each other and to their families as well as to the teacher. This could lead to students and teachers using negotiation to create new knowledges and identities, possibly even to fuse different cultures. In fact, Soliday argues, when students can present their private literacies to a readership in a broader public framework, they are more likely become politically active, which will also lead them to be more open to critical thinking and a critical consciousness about different discourses. Soliday’s core argument is that the politics of language should remain central to classroom work.
David Bartholomae
Like Shaughnessy, Bartholomae believes listening to basic writers requires close reading. One of the key ways to help students develop their writing skills is for us to understand why they make the mistakes they do. He asserts that basic writers’ mistakes are intentional and catalyzed by a deficient understanding of (and inability to identify) how academic language sounds. Therefore, in a move that hearkens back to classical and nineteenth century rhetorical theory, Bartholomae claims that one way to help basic writers develop is for them to imitate the styles and voices of other writers.
Basic writers are often seen as pre-academic or pre-textual (like Ong’s orality), but they are really distinguished because they work outside the conceptual structures in which literate students work. He points out that since basic writers write sentences (however unconventional or incorrect), they are capable of thought; we do not need to “give” them sentences or thought, but only to help them understand how to translate or transform them so that they are more in sync with conventional expectations. Bartholomae’s call to action is that either the university needs to make its expectations clear for a univocal, common tongue, or it needs to accept that it is omnivocal and allow everyone to speak and write as they choose to. Most importantly, he asserts that writing needs to be taught as writing, not as sentence or paragraph practice. This methods allows them to realize that writing involves making choices, and they have control over which choices are made; thus, they begin to see the possibility for other decisions and options.
Interestingly, in contrast to Shor (who argues against all tests), Bartholomae suggests that an end of term 2-hour essay exam may be necessary for basic writers since a passing grade implies that they are ready for university-level writing. In order to pass, the writing must be reasonably error-free, coherent, and well-developed.
How I would answer a question on this theme
Only Soliday and Bartholomae actually talk about basic writing (the small bit of info on Shaughnessy came from either Soliday’s or Bartholomae’s book), so I would focus the most on them, despite the fact that their discussions of basic writing are so differently focused. Soliday looks at identity politics involved in basic writing, concluding that those who assume basic writers are refusing to assimilate are mistaken. She points out that often the want to, but do not know how to. Bartholomae studies the mistakes basic writers make, which could connect him to Sommers and Perl. All three have found that there is a systematicity to the writing of unskilled writers; they are not somehow deficient or pretextual, but are in the early stages of developing into more experienced writers: they need more practice and critical tools. Both Bartholomae and Soliday argue for basic writing to be taught as translation (code switching). This allows them to maintain their own voices, as per Smitherman’s explanation of the 1974 “Students’ Right to Their Own Language” document that is supposed make it safe for students to speak and/or writing in their own dialects while still being respected. One interesting comparison to bring up as well is between Bartholomae and Shor: Bartholomae gives his basic writers 2-hour exams at the end of the semester to determine if they will pass, but Shor argues that such tests are useless and punitive because they do not allow room for reflection.
Major Approaches to Composition Pedagogies
Belletristic (19th C): using literature to teach writing
Blair: the key to learning to write well is reading the best authors in order to develop taste
The problem with the belletristic tradition is that it focuses too much on the product of writing
Another problem is that the kind of critical thinking you use when analyzing lit, while important, is not the only kind of critical thinking
Current-Traditional (19th C – now): Fogarty (1959) coined it; Young (1978) refined it
Blair, Campbell, Whately, Bain: Good style requires purity and propriety
Berlin and Inkster show how the CTR method restricts writer engagement with audience
Process Theory (1972): developed as a response to CTR
Donald Murray: Three stages: prewriting, writing, rewriting
Janet Emig: teaching in intervention into a process to improve the process or the product of that process – the process is internalized and deliberate (not arbitrary)
Peter Elbow: Freewriting as a means of invention
Susan Miller points out that PT did not create some major paradigm shift – shares a lot with CTR
Lisa Ede argues that the Process Movement is not responsible for legitimizing the field
Post-Process Theory/ies argue against Process (see below), but David Foster defends it
Post-Process Theory: Actually a collection of (sometime conflicting theories) that are a reaction to process theory
Nancy Blyler: Flaws of PT: 1) The belief that composing is a systematic, codifiable entity that we can isolate and examine, 2) Assuming that understanding and mastering the codifiable entity are necessary prerequisites to learning how to write
Helen Rothschild Ewald: PPT acknowledges that teachers are tools of the dominant culture – to hide that is to hide traces of power, tradition, and authority present at the scene of writing
David Russell: Activity Theory – analyzing writing processes in terms of different networks of human activity can help us understand how writing works and people work with writing, individually and collectively
– An activity system is a unit of analysis of social and individual behavior
Fulkerson and Bloom both say that there is no such thing as a Post-Process Theory
Cognitive Process Theory (1981): developed by Flower and Hayes to describe how writers approach a writing task
Sondra Perl: examined unskilled writers moving through three stages of prewriting, writing, editing
Flower and Hayes – four points:
Marilyn Cooper and Michael Holzman dismantle Cognitive Process Theory
Expressionism: Truth can be learned, not taught, through the act of writing
Donald Murray: writing is a process of discovery and experimentation
Maxine Hairston: calls for a non-prescriptive atmosphere in teaching, including less focus on grammar and syntax
– Instead, focus on the process of growth experienced by the writer
Peter Elbow: Emphasizes freewriting as a way to translate the messy chaos of though to the page
James Berlin: Critiques Expressionism in “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Classroom” (1988) – says that the fragmentary nature of expressionism and its emphasis on the individual and her resistance to dominant “economic, political, and social arrangements” deprived expressionsists of real political power.
Social Constructionist/ Epistemic Rhetoric/ New Rhetoric: language and the mind are inseparable – and individual needs language to think
Patricia Bizzell: attacks cognitivists’ belief that writing can be understood as distinct sets of mental processes
James Berlin: Rhetoric is epistemic – it is a means of arriving at truth
Kenneth Bruffee: Reflective thought and social conversation are related functionally
Social (Process/Action) Theory:
Marilyn Cooper and Michael Holzman argue for composition as a social action
Bruce McComiskey: Social theory offers a wealth of critical methodologies for interrogating social institutions and cultural artifacts
Critical Cultural Studies / Feminist Approach: Both deal with critiquing culture, dominant discourses, essentialism, and identity politics (especially feminism for the last one)
Sally Miller Gearhart: recognizes that students have varied backgrounds and languages, not all of which are accepted by the academy
Pamela Annas: women’s writing should be grounded in the self and women’s lives – marginalized students should not have to ignore these aspects of themselves in order to achieve academic discourse
Gearhart and Annas represent a politicized approach that combines feminism and composition in order to create a place where all aspects of the self come together to stimulate and create change
Patricia Sullivan: Comp studies it too slow in examining how gender informs writing
Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede: Found two kinds of writing
Catherine Lamb: Favors a negotiative, mediating rhetoric (cooperative approach to resolve conflicts) over the divisiveness of a monologic argument (emphasizes its own interests and only acknowledges opposition to refute it)
Nancy D. DeJoy: feminist discourse allow us to accommodate critical practices within the dominant frame
Patricia Bizzell: the instructor should be true to herself (and her social/political/economic beliefs) in front of the class without inundating her students
David Foster is against challenging cultural cites in these ways
Richard Fulkerson also argues against it – he thinks they seem inappropriate
Exam. Play. 