I guess I’d sum up my point yesterday by saying that it sees to me John’s making an indictment of specialization that I don’t quite buy. However, I would strongly agree with John that more interdisciplinarity and integration in English studies would be a fine thing. John writes that “composition is a part of English”, and I’d respond that I see composition as connected to English, and add that composition in English uses English, but the reality of academic specialization — as John acknowledges — demonstrates that speech, linguistics, and journalism all share similar characteristics, yet remain separate from English as disciplines.
I got my BA in English literature, my MFA in fiction writing, and now work on my PhD in rhetoric and composition, and from my experience at large public universities, the cultures of literature, creative writing, and rhet/comp are all already pretty radically Balkanized within many English departments — although some departments, departments in which I’d love to work, make a habit of breaking down those disciplinary walls by team-teaching and cross-teaching. Fiction writers teaching courses in Appalachian literature. Compositionists teaching courses in close reading. Literature scholars and creative writers co-teaching courses in community service learning and teaching. These, to me, seem to be wonderful ways of re-integrating the splintered curriculum of the liberal education, and I wish they might extend further, into courses cross-listed and co-taught with Classics departments, with Comparative Literature, with Geography, with History, with Speech, with Communication, hell — you know me — with Economics, even.
One might suppose, by this point, that I believe writing classes should exercise only academic writing in order to produce only academic writing. That’s not true. I think other forms of writing inform and broaden and better academic writing. It’s worth pointing out that I take my contention that a composition course is, at heart, a course in essay writing from Peter Elbow’s advice to a writing program he ran — but as someone whose pedagogy is also very influenced by the writing and practice of the wonderful teacher Mariolina Salvatori, I also strongly agree with John (as I think Peter does, as well) that reading is a part of writing. To state the obvious: writing well involves many skills, and extends to practically every discipline.
Interestingly, here at my Big State U, not all of our Writing Program teachers are from the rhetoric and composition, creative writing, cultural studies, and literature components of our English department: the director here hires teachers from all disciplines who care to apply, so we have a sizable and brilliant School of Education contingent, some folks from History and Political Science and Philosophy, and from other disciplines as well. I’m pretty happy with this state of affairs, and — as I note in my first paragraph, above — I think it’d be interesting to push such interdisciplinary tendencies even further, and remedy the Balkanization of English by lowering disciplinary boundaries even further. As an across-the-board requirement at most American colleges and universities, I think composition would be an ideal site to apply what Eric Raymond calls the “bazaar” model of software development to higher education conceptions of disciplinarity. And the ubiquitousness of composition suggests that the teaching and learning of writing are not merely instrumental; that what writing teachers do is educative far beyond its direct applicability to writing essays for other courses. Rather, writing is — as I’ve written before — a mode of learning, and a mode of making meaning. Both are ends that higher education must serve.
Wow, Mike, you’ve been having at me pretty good. I’ll try to respond to some of your points here and I may extend the conversation back at my own blog in the next few days.
A small point first: the current state of the K-12 curriculum and student preparation is best judged empirically by what current students report as their experience, not by what you and your friends experienced 15 to 20 years ago. About half of my current students have posted comments indicating the central message they got from high school is “there’s one way to write.” That’s a bad message.
You got pretty worked up over Ross Winterowd’s comment that no one sits down to “make meaning.” I’m not sure you and Ross are that far apart. Based on conversations I’ve had with him in the past, I’m pretty sure his response would be along these lines: when you decide to write, you think “I’m going to respond to John” or “I’m going to develop more ideas about class and computers” or “I’m going to report on my cats.” If it all works out, then, yes, you do make meaning–for yourself and others. But that’s not the way writer’s formulate their plans. When we talked about the wiki discussion, none of us said: “hey, everyone, let’s make meaning together.”
I think you can read Ross as being disingenuous with such comments, but he’s been consistently “disingenous” his entire career. When “voice” became a popular topic at CCCC meetings, Ross challenged any and everyone to show him “voice’ in writing. His bulldog style is very different from Peter’s very quiet, self-effacing style, but I wouldn’t write off Ross’ critiques on style points.
Ross offers an institutional critique of how English departments operate in the book I referred to. He has a compelling argument about the intellectual underpinnings of the lit/comp split. This issue is still alive. David Bleich took a crack at it on a panel a year ago at MLA, suggesting we needed a new formulation. In the discussion period, Wayne Booth said we already had a formulation: rhetoric. And so it goes. Folks in graduate programs give a lot of energy to disciplinarity, creating borders and policing them. That’s their bread and butter. But I don’t see those discussions as terribly helpful for understanding what Freshman English is or should be or could be.
Those of us who specialize in the first two years of general education have an appropriately different set of concerns than those who plan majors and graduate degrees. But the power system in virtually every state gives the power to shape the lower division curriculum to the university profs and the community college faculty are obligated to “articulate” their curriculum with the university.
So I’m not arguing against specialization. I am arguing that, say, Charles Altieri at UC Berkeley who lectures brilliantly on lyric poetry should not have much to say about what Freshman English should be. In fact, when they make me czar of California (a likely post-Schwarzenegger development), I would arrange that Freshman English would be designed by all the tenured faculty in the state who teach the course at least twice a year. I would argue that those who specialize in General Education are best suited for such work, that those who specialize in lit, comp, rhet or ling are best suited to design majors and graduate degree programs. And if you don’t agree, then let’s reverse the process: the lower division faculty design the major and the upper division/graduate faculty can design Freshman English.
Well, I’m sure I haven’t gotten to all your points, but that might give us something to chew on.
I’ve been enjoying the discussion, John, and hope it hasn’t been taken as “having at” you — I like being led to clarify my own thoughts on things in relation to other folks’ positions, and you’ve certainly given me a lot of enlightening stuff to think about.
Re your first small point: I was actually talking about the three close friends I have currently teaching English in the public schools, not past experience. They do the variety of stuff I attempted to describe with their classes in a depressed post-industrial town in Massachusetts, a wealthy Maryland suburb near Baltimore, and a very economically and ethnically mixed city outside of DC. I might ask your students: one way to write what, precisely? But this may be another place for further exploration; I’d be interested in seeing what folks in NCTE’s School Talk, English Journal, and Classroom Notes are saying.
As far as “making meaning” goes, maybe we’re just talking semantics here — your middle option about developing more ideas sounds to me a lot like what I think of when I think of making meaning, and developing those ideas was the original point for me starting my weblog: I haven’t yet entirely articulated what my ideas mean for my dissertation, and the weblog has helped and continues to help me do that, which to me really is “making meaning”. I’ll have to look back at the book, but yeah, it struck me as kind of a bulldog swipe at Peter.
So your responses actually raise for me the question: what ought to be the relationship between the teaching of first-year composition and the graduate program in rhetoric and composition? I think I agree with your points on who should design first-year courses — but how might first-year composition instruction work to shape graduate programs? Shouldn’t there be some sort of reciprocity?
FWIW, I read notions of specialization and, taken further, expertise, as contributing to disciplinary Balkanizations across the curriculum. I agree with both of you that we can, in comp studies, devise rewarding and fruitful disciplinary coordinations (without exiling all experts). Unfortunately, some of these disciplinary marriages, where comp/rhet is coordinated with history, for example, leaves the comp/rhet person in a secondary role, yoking along under the service lurch of discursive accountability more than knowledge-base or content accountability. Example: I’ll handle the content of an Intro to Western Civ.; you get them writing well. I need to think some of this through a bit more because I’m not opposed to specialization. I understand the need for specialists, but I think we should aspire to remain receptive to what we might learn from smart, hard-working academics in other fields (heck, even non-academics, or, perhaps, especially non-academics). Maybe Altieri shouldn’t be shut in a windowless room and left with a charge to devise a suitable FY curriculum, but I’d like to think we might refresh our perspectives on the complexity of textual discourse by listening to people in other fields, thinking about the rhetorical forces in their work. Unless we’re content with the Balkanizing, cordial reciprocity might be order, especially if we expect folks outside English Studies to embrace WAC initiatives (which are vital to dismantling the partitions that team us into factions). Sorry for butting in–it’s too rich an issue to pass up and your interchange has been a great diversion from reading project drafts. Back to that.
This is interesting to me, in part, because the potential *merits* of Balkanization (if such a thing can be said to exist) have been discussed by a few of us in my department. We have suggested what John does–that the people teaching the course should be deciding what it is–for reasons of workload equity. Should someone who chooses the lesser workload–and let’s face it, it is–of teaching primarily upper-level lit courses, inter-disciplinary studies courses and the occasional comp course be making decisions about freshman comp, which necessarily include its workload in terms of how much writing students should do and teachers should have to respond to? Right now, our entire full-time faculty make these decisions even though the amount of comp taught by individual department members varies, as does the commitment to the teaching of writing in general. One of my colleagues has suggested that we divide the department into three sub-sections: comp, literature and inter-disciplinary studies, and creative writing. This was met with horror from most of the department (though not those of us who teach most of the comp).
Is it Balkanization? Only in a more formal (and honest) sense than it already exists. The lit and creative writing people clearly think they do more important work, they have a lighter workload, and they receive more recognition across and outside the campus. But it is also, in some ways, an opportunity to make freshman comp what we want it to be, to control our own destiny a bit.
I’m not suggesting those in other concentrations or fields don’t have something to offer. They can be part of the conversation. But I’m with John about who should be making the decisions that shape the pedagogy.
Sorry if I focused the discussion too narrowily. I realize your post began more broadly than this, Mike.
Narrowily? Huh?
Mike asked: “what ought to be the relationship between the teaching of first-year composition and the graduate program in rhetoric and composition? I think I agree with your points on who should design first-year courses — but how might first-year composition instruction work to shape graduate programs? Shouldn’t there be some sort of reciprocity?”
In my proposal, if tenured faculty who taught at least two comp courses annually were the designers of freshman comp, then in California, community college faculty would run the show and the UC and CSU faculty would have input but not control. If we ever got to such a place, then I’m sure the directors of graduate programs would want to consult like mad with the freshman comp course designers.
There ought to be a much closer link between the design of programs to prepare college teachers for rhet/comp work and the range of teaching settings in which those graduates work. In many universities, there is often a closer link, since the Writing Program Administrator usually participates in some of the training of graduate students. The breakdown occurs trying to get conversation across institutional borders. In that regard, based on more than 25 years of making these points at the state and national level, I will say with some confidence the problem lies in studied resistance by the university folk. Just one data point: review the books on your bibliography by all the major compositionists (Crowley, Hawisher and Selfe, Horner, Connors, etc. and count the number of sources by and about two-year college composition). Your neighbor in Massachusetts, Howard Tinberg, has done an important book titled “Border Talk.” Why didn’t one of your committee members suggest you include it? I mention those names specifically, because I know them (or knew, in the case of Bob Connors), and I respect their work. Still, they remain immune to looking at community college scholarship–and to critiquing freshman comp and basic writing in community colleges. In my more generous moments, I refer to this as an intellectual blindspot in the profession. After a couple glasses of wine, I’m not so polite.
And I’m happy to have Cindy’s confirmation about who ought to be designing first-year comp courses.