I meet with Charlie and Donna this week, so I’ve spent the past several hours re-reading old blog posts and trying to come up with some sort of condensed version or way to encapsulate for my self the idea I’ve been working with. One thing Charlie suggested was to take all these different versions of class and attempt to apply them to a classroom study that talks about class, so maybe that’ll be one of my goals for tomorrow. Tonight, some brief insights.
First, I feel like the most exciting and useful stuff I’ve been doing has been the stuff that tries to connect directly to classroom practices. No big surprise there; composition as a field has historically been a place for people who find the day-to-day realities of practice more engaging than the abstract flights of theory. So, some classroom-type thinking.
In the classroom, student writing — an essay — always has at least one value, its exchange value: this paper is worth a certain grade. Most composition teachers I know also agonize over that paper having a second value: they want the paper to have some use value to the student; they want it to be worth more than just a grade, more even than just a learned skill they use in other classes to get good grades there or in the workplace to earn a salary, since those are forms of exchange value as well. But the first value — the exchange value — is a given.
So how do writing teachers measure that exchange value? There are, again, two models. The conventional model of writing — the societal assumption that some people are “just good writers” and others aren’t; the myth of inspiration — relies on the tastes and preferences of neoclassical economics to distinguish between good papers and bad papers. We know good writing when we see it, or so the story goes. The 1970s revolution in writing instruction — the process model — introduces the labor theory of value into the evaluation of student writing. The process model of writing instruction, when asked to give a student a grade, asks in response: how much work did the student put into prewriting and revising activities? How much did the paper change as a result of the student’s labor? (With their “process not product” slogan, you just knew they had to be communists.)
Both models stand as instances of the phenomenon of commodity fetishization: they construct their valuation of the papers as a result of qualities belonging to the paper itself. Both models ignore or deny the complex of socioeconomic relationships surrounding the production of the paper: the vocational and liberal education models of the university, the training for or selection into the workplace, and so on.
Furthermore, the computer exists as yet another fetishized commodity whose instrumental qualities are parts of its inherent nature rather than functions of the social relations surrounding it, and the computer has for most writing teachers become inextricably linked to to the immaterial labor of writing (I don’t know a single teacher who accepts handwritten final drafts) within the broader context of a post-Fordist information economy that itself relies more and more upon immaterial labor connected to the computer. Even the “secondary” topics being addressed in the discourse of composition — visual rhetorics, evaluating information on the Web — are functions of this economy. And, as I’ve suggested before, the predominant forms of the discourse of computers and composition — efficiency and equity — themselves obscure the class functions they stand for: increased productivity and protection from exploitation, functions that almost stand diametrically opposed to one another.
I wonder to what extent we* comp teachers act and believe that the value of the paper is, if not a measure of, then an instantiation of qualities of the student. I don’t mean that in the belles-lettrist inspired genius way so much as the “good thinking makes for good writing, so I’m rewarding good thinking” way. Substitute “revision” or “peer review” for “thinking” as you will. I know I certainly must do this to an extent.
[* Disclosure: I’m turning in grades for my last class (ever?) today. I’m not really a comp teacher anymore, am I?]
You mentioned the “socioeconomic relationships surrounding the production of the paper.” I don’t know exactly what you mean by this, but here’s what popped into my mind: academic preparedness. Lots of times as I’m assessing student writing, I wonder if I’m basically rewarding a student for having gone to an expensive prep school that prepared him or her amply for writing academic discourse, whatever that is. It’s very capitalist–the person who’s already on third base doesn’t have to work as hard to get that home run (grade of A), whereas a less-prepared person has to work that much harder and might still not get that A. Got any solutions, Mike?
Chris,
You’re always a member of the Invisible Society of Composition Teachers, moving almost invisibly through the basement hallways of institutions of higher education across the nation. That’s why you have those four Cs tattooed across the inside of your elbow, just as all of us do, so we can identify ourselves to one another and make the secret composition-teacher hooting call when we meet.
I mean. . .
You do have the tattoo, don’t you?
Mike–
As you explore correlations between college composition and class, how have you accounted for the community college? Back in the early 70s, Sam Bowles and a colleague did this analysis that suggested American higher ed is stratified, with the lowest classes going to community colleges and never getting out. They drew in part on Burton Clark’s study about the “cooling out” function of CC’s. That’s about the only intellectual construct I’ve seen university researchers use regarding CC students. It was useful and provocative in its day, but my own experience says its way out of date.
In my view, class analysis is not terrifically useful at a community college. Everyone comes and we try to find the right program and the appropriate challenge for them. My college is in the middle of a an affluent suburb. Many students who qualify for the university come here by choice or necessity (parents’ divorce, for instance). The bulk of our faculty have strong anti-hierarchical and anti-elitism attitudes.
Now economic and material circumstances certainly affect our students, but I’m wondering how your research would address class in a community college context.
[The CCCC tatoo is no longer authorized, due to budget cutbacks in Urbana.]
John,
Tough, tough question. I’m aware of the Bowles and Gintis study — it shows up in every flippin bibliography I see — so yeah, “Schooling in Capitalist America” is on my list for this month. And I kinda agree with their thesis. John Alberti had a nice piece on “second-tier” schools in the May 2001 CE; it seems to me instructive that a number of the Ivies don’t have required first-year composition courses (though, yes, of course, Harvard-where-it-all-started still does).
My own undergraduate education makes me see things a little differently from you. I started out at Small Expensive Competitive Private College, decided I didn’t like it after a year and a half and transferred to Small Impoverished Campus of Big Wealthy County Community College for a semester, and then went to Big State U. Students’ class-as-wealth and class-as-educational-preparedness and class-as-job-they-hoped-to-get-upon-graduation correlated very closely to the perceived “prestige” of the institutions.
I’m also aware that — although composition gets taught in community colleges — there seems to be a bit of classism in the journals; from what I understand, there’s a perception of CCC as somehow belonging ‘more’ to 4-year schools and TETYC being the marginalized Other. So I think there is a class system in higher ed, and there are concentric or interlocking circles of class systems.
But none of that really answers your question. From reading your weblog, though, I’d suggest that community colleges seem to be even more on the vocational side of the vocational education / liberal education binary than do Alberti’s “second-tier” schools. What’s your take?
And Clancy, I guess the class-as-educational-preparedness phenomenon I mentioned ties in very much to your question, and I’m afraid I have no answer. (No surprise there, right?) In some ways, the situation seems to involve conflicting ideals over how democratic education should work: should instruction be the ladder that gives all students an equal amount of rungs to see over the economic fence, so that those who are taller maintain their natural advantage (I know, lousy metaphor), or should it be the rising tide that lifts all boats to the same level? Do you give every student the same thing, or make sure every student gets to the same point?