The full title of this panel was “Our Uses of Student Writing: Thinking Critically About Composition Scholarship.” Mariolina Salvatori presented first, giving a general overview of the panel as a whole — she would focus on scholarship, Jennifer Whatley would focus on research, and Richard Parent would focus on student writing in the context of the internet. Salvatori then moved into her portion on scholarship, offering as an introductory condition the assertion that a student text is to composition scholars as a literary text is to literature scholars. The difficulty, however, lies in that literature as a discipline has developed clear (albeit evolving: note the widely ranging reactions to Moretti’s work) rules of engagement for literary texts, whereas composition’s rules for engagement with student texts are still emerging, ad hoc, in process, to be determined. Furthermore, some of our conventions of engaging student texts are not in line with our theory, and this may indicate our ambivalence about the status writing about students may not grant us.
In fact, as Salvatori argued in a 1999 talk, student voices and textual practices have if anything become less visible and audible in our disciplinary conversations. These “accidental erasures” in the ways that College English and CCC position the visibility of student writing, Salvatori contended, need to be revised. Such accidental erasures are often central features of the journal articles’ structure or design, and position the student’s writing as an appendix; something unimportant, an afterthought. As an example of this practice, Salvatori pointed to the March 2005 College English article by Timothy Burnett. (Salvatori is in no way attacking Burnett here, and in fact made it quite clear that she valued his writing: rather, she’s using Burnett’s article, which is certainly careful and nuanced and quite smart in the work that it does, as a representative example of the ways in which genre frequently structures the ways scholars in English studies interact with student texts.) Burnett, Salvatori pointed out, deploys student writing only in the essay’s final “Implications” section, names the student only by her first name, gives no page numbers from the student writing, and does not list the student’s essay in the list of Works Cited. This practice is still quite common in our discipline, and we need to invert it, Salvatori argued: we need to use student writing as a starting point rather than an afterthought. Doing otherwise marginalizes and excludes students from our theoretical landscape, and minimizes pedagogy. In a 1988 article in the journal Reader, Salvatori pointed out, Joseph Harris cited a student by last name and included the student in the list of Works Cited, but Harris later revised that convention as the editor of CCC — and Salvatori wondered aloud why so many of us have neglected to productively engage citation practices in the way that Amy Robillard does in her recent College English article. Our conventions for representing student texts is an ethical issue central to our disciplinary identities, and thinking critically about those conventions is perhaps our best way to leave behind these last vestiges of the deficit model of teaching composition: we need to see our students as incipient theorists of the writing process. Let’s cite them as such.
Whereas Salvatori’s presentation focused on scholarship, Jennifer Whatley looked at concerns of representing students in research, and more specifically at how institutional review board (IRB) conventions complicate and illuminate our attitudes toward students and their writing. Whatley’s dissertation research focuses on the commenting conventions of college english instructors, and she noted that her focus on comments on student texts falls somewhere between composition’s person-based studies and literature’s text-based studies. There was an interesting split, then, Whatley asserted, between the ways she saw the way student identities as being constituted by their texts for the representational concerns of her research and the ways that IRB conventions constructed students as the embodied and vulnerable human subjects of research. Whatley offered a brief précis of her process likely familiar to anyone who’s done human-subject research in composition and dealt with IRBs: the extensive research protocol, the case-specific informed forms, and so on. I don’t want to diminish the protections such conventions offer students — I think such protections are absolutely essential — but as Whatley later pointed out (and as Heidi McKee acknowledges in her response to the 2001 College English statement on research on student writing), the ways that the discipline of composition works with human subjects are very different from the ways that the disciplinese of biology or psychology work with human subjects. For composition, IRB protections work by removing ownership of writing from students and depersonalizing and anonymizing them — and so what would seem to be a protection actually interferes with what might seem to some to be the ethical and careful representation of students as writers.
Richard Parent’s presentation focused on the questions that the practice of asking students to put their writing online raise for our theory and pedagogy. As Parent put it, his practice in teaching digital composing and multimodal argument classes of asking students to compose native online documents raises significant complications. First, as discussants on Kairosnews and the Techrhet listserv know, there are the concerns raised by the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which outlines what information about students it’s permissible to put online. FERPA guidelines suggest that only “directory information” is appropriate, so asking students to put their work online for a course Web site may violate all sorts of FERPA disclosure guidelines. And this is indicative of the problem that Whatley and Salvatori point to: such widely accepted practices actually stand in direct contrariety to the ways we think we’d like to honor and respect student writing. When we ask students to post their work online, we’re changing the nature of the rhetorical and pedagogical situation, Parent asserted. I’d agree somewhat, but I’d also say: they’re putting stuff online already, whether we ask them to or not. Our students are far, far ahead of us in this regard, and the most fundamental thing we need to do is catch up to the way they’re working with information online. Parent also raised the question of who owns student writing online: does ownership change if it’s on a university site, on a course site set up by a professor, or on a student’s personal weblog? Certainly, and these are issues that have come up before, as well, especially in the work of the CCCC Weblogs SIG, which merged this year with the Wiki SIG into the CCCC Social Software SIG. What Parent’s presentation seemed to me to share with Whatley’s and Salvatori’s, though, was an abiding concern with how we represent student writing, and how we try to do it justice by representing it fully and ethically. None offered easy solutions. All made quite clear, though, the centrality that the act of representation of often otherwise undervalued texts holds for our field.
“Burnett, Salvatori pointed out, deploys student writing only in the essay’s final “Implications†section, names the student only by her first name, gives no page numbers from the student writing, and does not list the student’s essay in the list of Works Cited. This practice is still quite common in our discipline, and we need to invert it, Salvatori argued: we need to use student writing as a starting point rather than an afterthought. Doing otherwise marginalizes and excludes students from our theoretical landscape, and minimizes pedagogy.”
Sheesh, we just can’t get a break. Double bind city over here. Given the arguments about IRB issues, which the second presenter covered, not to mention the methodological (case studies aren’t valid! sample size isn’t generalizable to the population!) and ethical (these are your own students?!?!) hobbyhorses a lot of people have, it’s no wonder the state of affairs is as Salvatori describes it, and furthermore, I think it’s a little unfair to make that criticism of Burnett and others. I’ll be very impressed and grateful when Salvatori offers some solutions to this problem and recommendations for researchers. Not to be too harsh toward Salvatori, to be sure, but is it enough just to make the rhetorical move of reclamation and insistence here?
THIS was one of the panels I really really wanted to see, so thank you, Mike, for this summary. Also, you made it to nearly all of the panels I wanted to see on Thursday when I was helplessly traveling not from across the country but from CHICAGO. Lordie.
One shower and meal at Cracker Barrel later, I realize that perhaps Salvatori meant “student writing” not literally, as in one particular group of students, in a specific place and time, writing a specific essay (or series of essays). Perhaps she means it in a conceptual sense, like in your work, Mike, in which the act of student writing has a kind of logical priority before anything else. Do you think that’s what she meant?–that she was criticizing articles published in rhetcomp journals that are talking about rhetorical phenomena outside the classroom, but then have that tacked-on, oh-yeah-by-the-way, “implications for pedagogy” paragraph at the end? In that case, certainly she’s right to call it problematic.
Disclosure: Mariolina Salvatori was the teacher and mentor and friend who most helped me figure out how I wanted to be a part of the field when I was working on my graduate minor in composition as an MFA at Pitt. Every time I’m at a conference where she’s speaking, I go to see her talk, no matter what. And the way she talks and thinks and writes about student writing, concrete or abstract, is something I continue to try to emulate in my own work. But the more important sense of it, Clancy, is the sense of student writing as concrete material practice: Mariolina offered an account and showed slides of the outcomes of her interaction with the publishers of The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty, and talked about how she and Patricia Donahue tried to work with the Elements series editors and publishers to get students credited in the Works Cited and such — and the best they were able to do was to get student contributors’ names listed in the Index.
The tacked-on nod-to-students thing at the end is evidence of the problem, but it’s not the problem itself. The question that Salvatori and Whately raise, in conjunction with one another, is that those IRB hobbyhorses that folks like to ride are ways of minimizing the importance of students as authors and instead commodifying their writing as the work of informants that serves to help “real” scholars get tenure. Rhetorically speaking, the protective moves performed by IRBs can also be seen as a minimizing move: they say, “This writing, inasmuch as it requires protection that other forms of writing don’t, stands in a certain status relation to those other forms of writing.” Those protective moves minimize students’ writerly agency in relation to teachers’ scholarly agency.
Given today’s changing nature of publicy and the ways in which students engage that publicy, I’m finding myself on Salvatori’s side, and composition’s IRBers are sounding to me more like those who engage in the possessive rhetoric of “protecting our children.”