Via email comes a question from a prospective composition teacher in California. She notes that she’s interviewing for jobs, and one institution has asked her to write an essay comparing two equally good ways of teaching composition. What sorts of things might she say?
I was a bit flummoxed, and when I asked a couple other teachers today, they weren’t quite sure how to respond, either. It’s certainly an interesting question, and something I imagine I ought to think about before going on the job market. I think the impulse behind the question is to ask you to show that you have a fairly broad theoretical grounding and an awareness of how different theories imply different pedagogical practices, and it sounds to me like there’s an opportunity there to offer specific practical examples as a way of differentiating theories. And I think that another goal might be to ask you to demonstrate some flexibility as a teacher who theorizes your own classroom practice.
But what would you say? Would you talk about asking students to write reflective essays that attempt to identify the complexities of their individual relationships with broader forces in the world as an enactment of a Freirean critical pedagogy, and contrast that with an emphasis on the “contact zones” and close readings of transculturation associated with a cultural studies composition syllabus? Such a comparison — like any comparison — seems to beg just as much attention to the commonalities and overlaps as it does to the differences, which suggests that those who framed the question may be interested in precisely those commonalities as a set of “best practices”, and perhaps in having the respondent acknowledge the process-pedagogy practices that seem to undergird so much of what we do, no matter what our theoretical preferences are.
And there are so many other ways to go, too: what are the differences between teaching with a rhetoric (say, for example, Corbett’s Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student) and a reader (Bartholomae and Petrosky’s Ways of Reading, perhaps). Does anybody even use rhetorics as texts anymore? And the mere act of mentioning such texts doesn’t preclude using them in, say, a collaboratively-oriented classroom, or a feminist classroom.
What do other folks think?
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