As a way of getting back into the post-holiday swing of things, I’m going to rehearse some of the things I’ve talked about in the past, and try and draw them together into something resembling a problem statement. This’ll probably go at the front of my Chapter 2, where I try to review the literature in composition on class. I’d be grateful for any pointing-out of elisions, fallacies, misrepresentations, gross over-generalizations, or other critical comments folks might offer.
The histories offered by Raymond Williams (in Culture and Society) and James Berlin (in Writing Instruction in Nineteenth Century Colleges, in Rhetoric and Reality, and in two chapters of Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures) illuminate the ways in which economic, cultural, and institutional change are profoundly interrelated. In fact, a discussion of class in the context of Williams’s and Berlin’s writings might define class as the armature by which culture is connected to economy in the figure of the individual (who, of course, inhabits a multiplicity of societal groups, said groups themselves being sometimes called ‘classes’). Williams illustrates how the economics of industrialized mass production made possible the refinement of taste which defined the nineteenth century ‘cultured’ individual (who was, in part, produced by the programs of writing instruction at Charles Eliot Norton’s Harvard and John Genung’s Amherst). Today, the conventional wisdom is that a similarly massive economic shift is already well underway; a shift from an economics of monolithic mass production to an economics of mass consumption and flexible production. That shift is driving a shift in our conceptions of culture and the individual similar to the one described by Berlin and Williams, although the shift is still underway and its implications imperfectly understood.
We are aware, however, that the shift is simultaneously making heightened demands on some classes of people (including, for example, those with full-time jobs who take online or community college courses in their own scant ‘leisure’ or evening time) while offering heightened opportunities to other classes of people (including, for example, the digerati who construct new forms of online art and hyptertext literature). Furthermore, we ought to understand that the writing work undertaken in our composition classrooms in this changing economic and cultural environment helps to constitute changing classes of student selves. I think there’s an obvious cultural progression from the nineteenth century Romantic individual to the unitary self of Peter Elbow’s expressivism; what seems less clear to me is where the cultural progression from the postmodern individual leads.
Clearly, though, these selves are not merely cultural selves, but economic selves. (Again, that above tentative definition of class as the armature connecting the cultural to the economic feels useful to me.) And the literature of composition has devoted considerable ink to understanding instructors as economic individuals, as demonstrated by the focus on academics from working-class backgrounds in such anthologies as Coming to Class and This Fine Place So Far from Home, and in any number of journal articles on academic labor issues. We certainly don’t have all the answers, but we know what the questions are about instructors as economic entities, and what the parameters of those questions are: position, money, tenure, work, culture, exploitation.
As Ira Shor has pointed out, there is at the very least an indirect link between the working conditions of instructors and what happens in terms of student learning in the classroom. But aside from that link, I’m not certain how economic concerns — as manifested in socioeconomic class — play a part in curricular and pedagogical activity. Certainly, some scholars (particularly those who declare themselves as having an interest in working-class issues) advocate that we ought to take students’ class backgrounds into account when designing assignments and exercises and syllabi, and to pay particular attention to the needs of working-class students. (One wonders if there ought to be institutions of higher education founded on the model of Spelman and Howard, or of Smith and Vassar, but specifically oriented towards working-class students. Or — if you’ll pardon the bitter joke — is that what most composition scholars consider community colleges to be?)
The thing is, such suggestions — that we pay more attention to the class backgrounds of students — focus on economic concerns as existing outside of or previous to the university. It’s unclear how composition scholars think about the work and activity of students in the university and in the classroom in economic terms — or even if they consider such questions at all. When scholars describe some students as “working class,” they are not describing the economic activities of the students themselves, they are talking about the economic framework — the student’s family — in which they were raised. If scholars were to talk about the work of the academy as somehow making students “working class,” then all students would be working class — and so, apparently, scholars who talk about students as being “working class” are denying that the economic activities of students as economic beings within the economic contexs of the university have anything to do with that class position. Apparently, even for people who talk about class issues in composition, college — for students — is not an economic activity, and class is not an economic concern when considered within the context of college.
I think this is a problem.
Mike,
A question that comes to mind, is what are the implications of viewing the students as economic beings in their everyday studies within the university?
If we adopt this view, should we focus on the significance of the economic forces in their influence on the cultural side of education, or should we delve deeper into the economic forces themselves (that make students continuous economic beings) in an effort to find other (perhaps causal) factors of larger significance?
For example, the imperitives to receive good grades can be seen as hindering the reception of the intended cultural message of the course. So, because the students are forced to act as economic beings to satisfy their economic concerns (good grades), they may (and perhaps unintensionally) miss the larger cultural meaning of the course that could contribute to their enhanced personal utility (cultural side).
The implied subquestion being here is, what holds more weight as the main area of focus: how economic skews the cultural, or perhaps some other logic of greater significance (perhaps relating to our understanding of class relationships) arising from the better comprehension of students’ actions as constant economic beings?
Or does the focus on students as economic beings fit best only in localizing the questions to rhetoric and composition, and the larger questions are outside the realm of this specific rhetorical context?
Kirill,
Your first question about the implications of seeing students as economic beings within the context of higher education is pretty much my reason for doing this dissertation, in that it’s the question I hope to answer. So I’ll have to get back to you on that one. 🙂
To explain a little more fully: for the most part, rhetoric and composition has been pretty good in its recent grappling with identity politics. Rhet/comp scholars have done a lot of smart work in examining the concerns race, ethnicity, and gender bring into the writing classroom, and there are the beginnings of an impressive corpus of scholarship on the intersections of sexuality, literacy, and pedagogy, as well. But class, inasmuch as it always bears an economic component, has been thus far mostly neglected in rhet/comp studies except (1) as a look at the economic circumstances of instructors and (2) as an exigency, rationale, or starting point [rather than continuing circumstance] for certain types of pedagogy.
So, in that regard, I’m more interested in those “forces themselves” that you mention, but in understanding students as partly constituting those forces, rather than as being the powerless victims of them. The powerless victims thing seems to be a hallmark of the way that a whole lot of people think about their relationship to the economy, including most rhet/comp scholars vis-a-vis their students. (There’s that Susan Miller quotation I’m always invoking about teachers who think of students as “presexual, prepolitical, preeconomic beings.” Not an attitude I much care for.)
If I understand you correctly, you’re asking how much one might see students as being pushed around by the economic consequences of grading, and I don’t have an easy answer, because all of the transactions associated with higher education feel incredibly complex. Maybe I need to just sit down with a really big sheet of newsprint and draw out some kind of chart of all the economic transactions I see as being associated with higher ed, starting with the ways property taxes pay for primary and secondary education and the gatekeeping functions that income inequalities serve in such circumstances, and moving on to the market-based exchange transactions of cash for tuition, plus the economics of evaluation and the cash that writing programs bring into higher education, and the concerns students might have about the Marxian exchange value versus use value of education, and how much grades are worth, and what the economic value of the subjects you learn in class is versus what the economic value of the stuff you can’t learn from a textbook (time management, networking, group interaction, prioritizing, et cetera), and the economic payoff of different types of degree, at different schools, and in different majors, and how all those circumstances swirl around, influence, and are influenced by the actual work-as-economic-activity that goes on in the day-to-day doings of the writing classroom.
For which I’d be grateful for any feedback on: how do you see those factors as fitting together? Which seem more important, and which seem less important? Which are connected, and which not, in your eyes?
Jeez, Mike! You do realize you’ve got about a 13.5 line sentence here: 🙂
Don’t forget high-stakes standardized testing, which is like a kajillion-dollar-a-year industry; is that what you mean by the “economics of evaluation”? Then there’s the commercial textbook industry to think of as well, and the fact that many departments (including mine) have industry partners that provide internships and scholarships to students, buy computer equipment and software for universities, etc. Whew. You’ve got your work cut out for you, my friend. At CCCC 2003, my advisor from the U of Tennessee, Michael Keene, was part of a panel about high-stakes testing, and his presentation was called “Follow the Money.” I’m sure if you emailed him, he’d give you some information about the unholy alliances between the textbook industry and the standardized test industry.
Yeah, Clancy, the testing is what I was referring to, and the textbook angle is disturbing, too; the industry has a nice thing going where if you’re a name in the field and you’re not using a textbook, why, they’ll just invite you to write one — I know there have been articles in CCC on this, but I appreciate the connection you mentioned, and I might drop your advisor a line.
And as for the sentence: I’m gunnin’ for Molly Bloom’s record. 😀