Yeah, so I derailed some. On the good side, the chapter manuscript got sent in to the editors, so I don’t have to worry about that for a while, and I got my CW2004 proposal submitted. On the bad side, I look at my main page and see that I haven’t posted any dissertation-related writing in over a week. Time to get this research stuff back on the tracks, ‘specially if I’m gonna try to have a better draft of a prospectus within a couple weeks. What that means for tonight is burning through the rest of Crowley to try and get her out of the way, get an understanding of how her thoughts on class fit into the history of composition as a whole, and then finish Derek Bok and move on to The Knowledge Factory.
The project of Sharon Crowley’s “polemical” book, I should point out, is to do away with the universal first-year composition requirement: she doesn’t think all entering students should have to take a writing course, and offers a careful critique of the discourse of student need that’s well worth any composition teacher’s time to read. It’s enough to make me ask myself whether I think all (or practically all) students should have to take a first-year writing course, and in some ways, I’m inclined to agree with Crowley.
In every section I’ve taught, there have been at least a couple students who I think probably didn’t need to take the course — but that’s not the same thing as not learning anything from the course, and that’s something that sets first-year composition apart from first-year chemistry. You can have a super-brilliant first-year physics student who doesn’t need to take that first-year physics course and probably won’t learn anything from that first-year physics course if she does take it, because the course is so basic. On the other hand, I think a super-brilliant first-year writing student can learn something from that first-year writing course, because of the nature of the work. First-year writing is fundamentally different from first-year physics.
How so? Well, that’s where it gets even more difficult, because first-year composition is different from itself depending on which institution you look at, as John at Jocalo has pointed out, and as Crowley points out. And, as I’ve cited Crowley to point out in other places, composition has undergone considerable change historically, as well. But in terms of institutional differences — well, some programs teach the five-paragraph theme, while others teach writing as closely connected to close reading in a cultural studies context (think Ways of Reading), and others teach the personal essay, and others like Clancy’s institution break it down according to genre (the abstract, the proposal, the research paper; other institutions do the lab report, the memorandum, and so on), and still others, according to Crowley, choose to focus on “traditional grammar, orthography, and punctuation” (229).
I’ve written a lot about how different types of education at the university are classed, using “vocational” and “liberal” as shorthand descriptions for the most prominently different forms, but these widely varying instances of composition instruction have their own class connotations within those wider university contexts. This, of course, is another reason compositionists can’t seem to agree on what class is in their classrooms: the various models of composition instruction and of the university are connected to differently theorized purposes for education, which in turn make people see the dynamics and movements of class differently. If you’re teaching a course that traffics largely in the personal essay, you’re going to have a definition of class as it functions in the classroom that relies more upon personal experience and authenticity claims. On the other hand, teaching the genres seems to be more of a service-oriented approach, in that they’re the forms students will need to succeed in school, which would seem to me to incline more towards a view of class more reliant on occupational definitions.
In this sense, class has a significant effect on writing instruction. The converse is not necessarily true: writing instruction need not have a direct effect on class. Sometimes when I ask myself “How will this dissertation help students?” I find myself falling into a despair that research on class will have no direct one-to-one visible effects upon individual class mobility in students: the thing is, that’s not quite the point, and demanding an immediate and visible payoff for my research in my classroom is a good way to give myself an ulcer. I can believe that this stuff I’m doing is useful and important without having to posit a positivistic one-to-one cause-and-effect relation between dissertation and classroom.
Class mobility is not a necessary reason for the existence of composition, any more than class mobility is a reason for the existence of Physics 101. At the same time, I do believe that the university can and should be a place where teachers work to remedy societal inequalities. While I appreciate the way that Crowley’s critique of composition points to some of the ways in which the mandatory first-year composition course has served to perpetuate a gatekeeping function by practicing exclusions closely connected to race and class (231) and constructing hierarchies based on spurious assumptions about literacy, I don’t believe that composition instruction can always provide all students with class mobility, and I’m not even sure it should set itself up as carrying primary responsibility for such a function. What I am suggesting is that class works within composition courses in ways that it doesn’t work in other courses, largely because of the problems Crowley points to with the construction of composition as a universal requirement. While I’m not prepared to serve as the speaker for justifying composition in class terms, I am prepared to examine the way that class and classed discourses work within the frame of composition. One of those ways has to do with how computers foreground class concerns because of the ways their technological associations with economics make visible certain material practices that we tend to otherwise take for granted.
Fair enough. On to Derek Bok and Stanley Aronowitz and some prospectus-writing.
I’m reading both Crowley (at your suggestion) and Bok’s Universities in the Marketplace as well. I’m not really far enough into Crowley to have had a chance to think about the class aspects, but historically speaking, I think Crowley’s call for abolition of first year comp makes some sense.
If you go back to English A at Harvard in the 19th C., it was instituted as a remediative to the “shocking illiteracy” of applicants. After the rise of the meritocratic middle classes, it got a kind of kick from the instrumentalist direction. What I do five days a week is about neither remediation nor drill-and-kill.
Ways of Reading is quite possibly the best book I’ve ever used (for two years of junior-level writing requirement courses). It succeeds where it intends to, and avoids the trap for so many comp texts–trying to be a reader, rhetoric, and handbook and doing none of it that well. I skipped the rhetoric text and recommended a handbook. The syllabus was rhetorical, but because of the text, it could both rhetorical and thematic. I look forward to teaching from it again.
I cut my comp teeth on WoR and its text-oriented approach, and yeah, I think it’s pretty dang good — for its approach. The thing is, after I got my MFA and decided I wanted to do a PhD in rhet/comp, it kind of dawned on me that there are other approaches, so I wound up coming to my current institution.
Now here’s the thing: honestly speaking, I’ll say that a WoR-oriented curriculum seemed to produce better papers in the first-year writing sections I taught. At the same time, I’m of a mind that the curriculum here (which is much more conventionally process-oriented and much less text-oriented) may produce better writers. But I’m not sure, and I’m well aware of how much of a gut check such a judgment is, so I’ll say don’t quote me on that, and suggest it as a tentative hypothesis rather than a definitive conclusion.
I’m grateful to have your perspective again, by the way, and I’m always glad to hear from you, to the point where I’d be inclined to pester you to keep a weblog of your own. 🙂 But in any case: thanks for the feedback.