Boot Camp Mentoring

(Some minor edits made on 3/27/04.)

I’ve already mentioned, both in passing and at length, how much I like the ways that folks at the University of Pittsburgh develop arguments. I’ll develop that a little more here: this afternoon, I went and saw a terrific panel given by Emily Bauman, Malkiel Choseed, Jen Lee, and Brenda Whitney on mentoring new teachers of first-year writing. The panel’s title was something like “Taking the Boot Out of Boot Camp: Mentoring First-Year Teachers of Writing”, and like I said, they gave a set of fine, fine presentations. It’s a mode of argumentation that, on hearing again, I kinda miss.

Malkiel began with the assertion that the goal of a teacher training program ought to be to make clear the theoretical underpinnings and presuppositions of his program’s staff syllabus (and associated teaching practices) given to new first-year teaching assistants in the writing program, while offering assistance with basic teaching practices, as well. Addressing the theory, according to Malkiel, helps to give new teachers an authority over a staff syllabus that was designed without their input, and this move can help new teachers to understand teaching practice as an enactment of a particular and specific body of pedagogical theory. In support of this contention, he offers Mariolina Salvatori’s notion that any pedagogical practice has a (not necessarily explicit) self-reflective awareness of its own theoretical underpinnings. Here’s the important part: as a consequence, the sharing of simple teaching “tips” may fail because of the differing theoretical presuppositions each teacher brings to her classroom. Again, we’re reminded that practice versus theory is a false and reductive binary, and in fact, the enactment of a theory often necessarily changes that theory. For these reasons, the semester-long act of teaching a syllabus not of one’s own design is always and inevitably alienating to new instructors, and this alienation is compounded by the fact (according to Malkiel) that students tend to see instructors — even new instructors — as embodiments of the values of the staff syllabus.

Jen Lee’s introduction: “Learning to teach feels much like falling out of a window.” Many first-year teachers are familiar with the dizziness, the sense of on-the-fly adjustment to wind and gravity, the sense of acceleration cubed as the semester flies up past you, until you somehow — in a desperate feat of balance, swift movement, the rapid convolutions of adjustment — manage to land on your feet at semester’s end. For Jen, in her mentoring role at Pitt, offering to new TAs a combination of a critical approach to pedagogical theory with the practical bent of week-to-week face-to-face mentoring practices led to a sense of vertigo and disorientation among those new TAs, to a confusion over how to learn to theorize about teaching while engaged in the new and unfamiliar practice of teaching. According to Jen, TAs need more than exercises to fill their class plans: they need ways to access what’s behind the day-to-day practices of teaching writing. In the mentoring of new TAs, Jen contends, the generative and the critical are problematically conflated.

Emily Bauman’s title put together two questions: “‘Why Didn’t They Identify With Us?’: What Makes Teaching Teaching Different?” Her initial contention was that, as a member of Pitt’s mentoring staff (CEAT, the Committee for the Evaluation and Advancement of Teaching), “we weren’t just teaching, we were modeling.” In other words, mentoring — as perceived by Emily and her CEAT peers — was a practice of portraying oneself as an embodiment of the practices that one is attempting to teach, and this is an important difference between teaching composition and teaching the teaching of composition. The problem Emily described in her presentation was that the new TAs didn’t identify with the self-reflexive critical practices modeled by CEAT: in her words, “They didn’t want to be mentored. They wanted advice.” Ultimately, the mentees wound up identifying not with their CEAT mentors, but with their own students, and in such a fashion, idealism and pragmatism seemed to butt heads and then simply go their own separate ways. You know, like that Journey song.

Brenda Whitney’s presentation began by interrogating our historical notions of mentorship, pointing to the supposition that mentors are supposed to somehow alleviate the mentee’s sense of confusion and powerlessness in a unique way, summed up by the truism that “Teachers talk and mentors listen.” Brenda then looked to two early instances of the role of the mentor, in Homer’s Odyssey, and suggested that compositionists might usefully adopt Athena, goddess of war and wisdom, as a model to point out the ways that mentoring is often enacted as a role or a disguise that hides certain power relations. However, Brenda suggested, masks — at least in early Greek drama — could facilitate rather than impede the recognition of roles. After all, we might ask, why shouldn’t Athena have disguised herself before Telemachus? The things he needed to learn could not be learned by mere revelation, as that mere revelation would lead to a too-easy comfort and complacency. As I understand Brenda’s point, the difficulty of the mentoring relationship is something that needs to be worked through: in a way, it’s something that can’t be easy. This makes a basic and simple sense to me, since learning, at its core, is always a labor-intensive practice.

Anyway. Like I said, it was an excellent series of presentations, and I’ll ask here the questions that I wish I’d asked in the Q&A session. See, during the Q&A, Malkiel suggested that part of a mentor’s job is to make each of her mentees into scholars of rhetoric and composition, and I had to say to myself: is it really? Emily drew some interesting parallels between learning composition and learning the teaching of composition, so I might ask, is part of a composition teacher’s job to make each of her students into English majors? (Notice I’m drawing a disciplinary analogy here. Some will contend that the writing teacher’s job is to make each of her students into a writer, with which I might have less argument.) If so, is this a matter of indoctrination?

Let me be a little more explicit. At my northeastern Big State U, writing program TAs come not only from the literature, MFA, and rhet/comp tracks of the English department, but from psychology, African-American studies, women’s studies, comparative literature, political science, history, and other departments. And I’m not sure that a mentor’s job is to make people from all those fields into rhetoric and composition scholars — although that uncertainty (and this is where it gets problematic) points towards the insulting old assertion that anyone can teach writing.

Now: in her presentation, Emily made reference to metaphors of war (being “in the trenches” and so on) and of boot camp (or, for the non-Marines among us, basic training) for teachers, and quoted a new TA who griped that boot camp ought not to be about theory, but rather about helpful tips and practical advice for individual teachers. Here’s the thing: in the military, boot camp is basically the exercise of ideology through power on a massive scale in an attempt to break down individualism in the service of getting ideological buy-in — in other words, in the service of indoctrination into military values such as putting the welfare of the unit or the team before one’s own welfare — so that one might ultimately take that ideological buy-in so for granted that one is able to act uncritically and without thinking. Many teachers will see this and immediately dig their heels in, saying: no way.

But some aspects of orientation and new TA training do seem to do a fine job of breaking down some of the ideology of individualism, particularly when it comes to new teachers who see themselves as self-serving writers and scholars, dependent upon their own genius, before seeing themselves as teachers who might serve broader, community-based ends. And sometimes, this is a painful lesson; one that has to be learned by doing and by struggle, and not a lesson that can be learned by comfort and complacency, by mere revelation. Teaching tips, certainly, are easy, and easily taken; the problem is when they don’t quite fit with our own ideological frameworks — and those ideological frameworks only shift slowly, and with struggle.

The Army distinguishes between tactics, the small-scale maneuvers that units and individuals use to win battles, and strategies, the overarching philosophies that allow one to choose between tactics. (Yeah, I know de Certeau uses the terms in a similar way, but I think the Army’s field manuals came before de Certeau.) I don’t think extending the Army’s practice of always learning tactics before strategies works well when extended to teaching composition or teaching the teaching of composition. However, I’m running out of steam on this post and getting ready to go out and have some drinks and dancing, so I’ll pose — as a semi-half-assed conclusion — this question that I hope might suggest one small direction for further consideration of the issues that Emily, Malkiel, Jen, and Brenda raised: for the field of composition, how do we understand the link and/or boundary between disciplinarity and professionalization? How is it that composition is one of the rare fields in the humanities that still offers halfway decent job prospects for its PhDs, and — at the same time — is the field that is responsible for a huge portion of academia’s problems with adjunctification? Isn’t there a deep and problematic contradiction here?

Or, to ask the big devil’s advocate question: how disingenuous is it for a such a field to ask its students, as well as students in other fields, to take responsibility for inhabiting and internalizing a carefully theorized construction of that field’s practices?