I grinned to see that John and I agree on so many points and yet — in the midst of our agreement — seem to talk right past one another. First things first: I’d best apologize for the unforunate title of my recent post; it was indeed, as John points out, a poor pun, and not very creative. No abuse intended, John, and the only excuse I’ll offer is that — as someone who likes creatively worded titles, and who encourages his students to come up with things more descriptive than “Essay Two” or “My Narrative” — sometimes my titles that use words rather than numbers fall flat (wink, nudge).
John details and extends my point quite well, but I’ll offer my own version here: term papers, research papers, documented essays, whatever we call them, do good work. Not only do they prepare students for tasks they’ll encounter in other classes, they also require the exercise of other intellectual skills that will serve a student well in her academic career and beyond. This is hardly mere professionalization. Unfortunately, though, it seems to me that John misses my irony and my indictment of mere professionalization when he quotes my statement that “teaching writing only has direcly instrumental applicablily in students’ other classes”: my critique, there, is of the philosophy of “directly instrumental applicability”. We learn far more in college than the subjects of our classes taught, and such a simple fact obviates the obtuse conservative critiques of higher education that “it doesn’t teach the material”. In any good course, the course material extends beyond the syllabus.
Such a position leaves me vulnerable to John’s critique: he writes, “I both disagree with and resist approaches that make first-year courses simply an introduction to academic writing”. I’m arguing here for a limited syllabus that can be exploded; John, I think, is arguing for a universal syllabus that can be focused. There is so, so much work to be done with a one-semester first-year composition syllabus that one has to specialize and focus on the various forms and genres of academic writing. The inconsistency, of course, being that John is describing a two-semester course, and I’m describing a one-semester course.
There seem to me to be two possible middle grounds, although I’d be delighted to know others. The first middle ground: localization. John and I are simply talking about different institutions with different needs, and we ought to apply the anti-generalist theoretical perspective of Stanley Fish. (Who, I must say, knowing many people either love or hate his writing, was the first author I ever read who showed me the visceral pleasures of intellectual debate: whatever else you might say about Stanley Fish, he’s a hugely enjoyable writer, who educates by showing the joys and dangers of radical positions.) Different places have different needs, and we ought to focus on the community literacies that surround and inform such needs. The second middle ground: a wide-ranging reform of what “general education” means across college and university campuses.
Now: like I’ve said, my syllabus is full, and it’s full of mostly writing. How’s yours? Stanley Aronowitz, at the end of The Knowledge Factory, gets all Hirsch (about whom it seems to me that W. Ross Winterowd — sorry, Professor Rice, but it’s really not spelled “Winterwood” — is either disingenuous or myopic, and knowing his work, it’s very difficult for me to believe the latter) on us and offers something that looks very much like a revised cultural literacy syllabus. It’s a big, big syllabus; as such, it demands a return to a less elective-laden and more interdisciplinary curriculum, and I’m not so sure about it.
John’s point, on the other hand, seems to me to be the lack of interdisciplinarity in high schools. He takes strong issue with the apparent fact of the “domino effect”, but I would say that John, it just ain’t so. Primary and secondary schools do use other forms of writing. In the fourth grade, my school had a creative writing unit, and I wrote a grand and epic science fiction narrative; in the seventh grade, two classmates and I gave a collaborative product pitch to the rest of the class; in the tenth grade, I wrote a dramatic dialogue. I think my friends who now teach high school English would agree: English is a diverse thing, including instruction in reading literature, writing creatively, and writing critically. It’s only once one reaches the specialization of college and its majors that knowledge within and associated with English begins to specialize — as one who looks at the university’s educative processes in general might indeed anticipate.
And — sigh — that’s the best I can do tonight. More tomorrow on specialization, interdisciplinarity, and academic writing.
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