Credo

At Kairosnews, Clancy recently pointed to “some likely caricatured” characterizations of things that “go without saying” in the field of composition offered ten years ago by Bob Connors, and asked: “Ten years later, how has the field of composition changed? Has it changed at all? Are these still the issues?” I think they’re important questions Clancy’s asking, and I think the characterizations offered by Connors are worth reproducing here. (I’ll be on the job market in the fall, and so one task between now and then will be to revise my teaching philosophy — and thinking about Connors’s characterizations seems like a productive way to start.)

According to Connors, “very different things seemed to ‘go without saying’ before lunch and after lunch.” Here are the before-lunch characterizations:

1. Our most central task as literacy educators is understanding and acting on issues of the cultural and ideological contexts of writing.
2. The “process” (expressivist/cognitivist) paradigm of teaching and research is naive and outmoded, and we have to move beyond it.
3. Individualism and concepts of personal agency are delusions, and we must avoid being trapped by them as we consider issues of literacy education.
4. All meaning is constructed socially, and our choice as educators involved working to further that construction with or striving to further that construction against the grain of the larger culture’s ideologies.
5. The goals of literacy pedagogies should thus be to assist adaptation to existing academic realities through teaching conventions or to work for social change through analyses of economic and cultural forces.
6. For either of these purposes, the personal essay is a questionable form and is proof of the low status of composition.
7. Being middle class is a somewhat ignoble status and an unsophisticated goal to wish for our students.
8. Most composition teaching is naive if not destructive.

And after lunch, “it seems to go without saying that:  

1. Our most central task as literacy educators is teaching students to write more effectively for themselves and for their other classes.
2. Students are genuine individuals who have real needs, desires, and agency. So are we.
3. The process paradigm of teaching is a kind of default setting for us, what we all naturally assume and use, the methodological sine qua non underlying all other pedagogies we try out.
4. Meaning inheres in feelings and emotions, which may be constructed socially but which are felt, acted on, and written about individually.
5. The personal essay is a central genre from which many others can grow.
6. Being middle class is a reasonable thing to want or to propose for our students, and most of us are and always will be inescapably middle class.
7. Most composition teaching does help students, if the teacher truly cares about helping students.

Connors then concludes: “How are we to meld these multiple personalities? Perhaps we do not need to worry about it too much. They are our heads and our hearts, and they do not work well apart from each other.”

Clearly, some of the premises are intended to function in pairs. My “central task” as a literacy educator? I don’t think it’s “understanding and acting on issues of the cultural and ideological contexts of writing,” but I don’t think one can teach “students to write more effectively” without doing so.

And I do believe that “teaching students to write more effectively” is my central task as a composition teacher, although I would assert that I’m not merely helping students to do so “for themselves and for their other classes,” but for the benefit of their peers, as well, and for the benefit of society at large, and for the prospect of making the future a better place than the present. I’m a little uncomfortable with the “more effectively,” though, because I want immediately to ask, “more effectively than what? And what does being ‘effective’ mean?” So I guess, in that way, I’m asking what it means to teach writing well — and I’m afraid that’s not a definitional task that I’m quite up to tonight.

I certainly don’t believe the process paradigm to be outmoded, but nor do I believe that it should be a naturalized assumption: the insights offered by Janet Emig in 1971 and by Donald Murray in 1972 were genuinely startling — revolutionary, in fact — and we shouldn’t forget that. Helping students to understand that writing involves a series of decisions, a series of overlapping and sometimes recursive stages may seem self-evident to us, but it wasn’t always so. I also don’t agree with the way Connors equates the process paradigm to so-called expressivist or cognitivist models. Certainly, there are parts of Donald Murray’s essay that sound very much like everyone-find-your-own-personal-truth expressivism. So, too, there are moments in Janet Emig’s work that really line up with some of the work done by Linda Flower and cognitive psychologist John Hayes: it’s important to keep in mind that the Psych 101 course John Hayes teaches at Carnegie Mellon is called “Cognitive Processes: Theory and Practice,” and the focus on discrete and isolable processes in Hayes’s work is in many ways similar to the ways we as writing teachers label things like “freewriting” and “pre-writing” and “drafting” and “copyediting” — but that doesn’t make people who teach the writing process cognitivists. Anyway: those are minor quibbles. I do firmly believe in the process paradigm and its value.

The contrasting proposals Connors offers about the uses of individualism are a little difficult to sort out. They strike me as being, in part, responses to the “conversation” about individual agency and institutional forces that David Bartholomae and Peter Elbow were having at about the same time. I certainly don’t believe individualism and personal agency to be “delusions,” but I do believe that meaning is constructed socially, even as I agree that it’s “felt, acted on, and written about individually.” Does that mean I disagree that we should “assist adaptation to existing academic realities through teaching conventions or to work for social change through analyses of economic and cultural forces”? Hm. That’s hard to say. Those are two different proposals, and two distinct threads of composition pedagogy, but they’re not necessarily mutually exclusive. To risk a couple of crude oversimplifications, “Teaching conventions” is, in some ways, what’s today getting called “genre theory,” while those “analyses of economic and cultural forces” are the methods of today’s weird blurring of cultural studies pedagogies and Freirean critical pedagogies.

I mean, the argument’s been made that you can’t not teach conventions, since that would be a disservice to your students. But the argument’s also been made that many conventions are the instruments of hegemony, and so we need to unmask and critique them via the aforementioned analyses. So, yeah, as Connors implies, in any given pedagogical situation, those are both going to be options available to you. But constructing them as the only options strikes me as a crudely reductive binary. So what are the other options?

I’ll have to get back to you on that one. I will say, though, that I was interested to see the question of class raised, and even more interested to see that it was the only aspect of identity politics that got raised — especially from Bob Connors. So that’ll certainly bear some further thought, as well — but not tonight.