There’s an excellent article in the June 2007 CCC that’s had WPA-L abuzz with excited discussions, objections, and elaborations. I think the excitement over the piece — “Teaching About Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning ‘First-Year Composition’ as ‘Introduction to Writing Studies'” by Douglas Downs and Elizabeth Wardle — is merited: there are some startling ideas here, provocatively posed, and Downs and Wardle have certainly got me thinking. Composition, they suggest, isn’t only (and shouldn’t be) about teaching a set of discrete and isolable techniques that help students write good essays in standard academic discourse for their other classes; and they thoroughly demonstrate how the study and teaching of writing has been shown in our discipline’s research to be considerably more complicated than that. (My inadequate account of the article does it discursive harm: please, read it yourself, rather than relying on my poor summing-up.) As some on WPA-L have pointed out, the article is not without its difficulties, and there are perhaps some underexamined terms and arguments, but overall, it’s a smart and exciting piece that’s sure to continue to stir discussion.
One passage in particular got me going, because of my institutional situation here at the Point, but I imagine others might have found it provocative as well. My situation: I’m civilian faculty, an assistant professor, with a PhD. As in most departments here, our faculty split is around 70/30 or 80/20 military/civilian. Military junior faculty come in with an MA, teach three years, and rotate back out into the Army, possibly coming back when they’ve got their PhDs, while civilian faculty tend to be more permanent. This proportionally faster turnover rate for military as opposed to civilian instructors creates some unique instructor training exigencies, as does the fact that the Army pays full ride for its military instructors’ graduate degrees, and strongly discourages (perhaps even forbids?) them from working as teaching assistants. So our Army instructors come to us with no college classroom teaching experience, although of course they’ve held company command and have immense experience leading and managing hundreds and sometimes thousands of soldiers. The military junior faculty are, on the other hand, burgeoning experts in their chosen fields, which tend for the most part to be associated with literature.
And therein lies the rub. According to Downs and Wardle, the pedagogy they propose “cannot be taught by someone not trained in writing studies” (574). Later, they elaborate, describing and indicting
the myth that content is separable from writing — that a FYC [first-year composition] instructor need not be expert in the subject matter of a paper in order to evaluate the quality of writing in that paper, or need not be a subject expert on writing in order to teach writing. Such claims accept the premise that writing instruction can be limited to fluent English syntax, grammar, and mechanics.
The first statement raises some difficult and complex concerns for me, but I very much agree with the latter sentiment. I can’t help but bristle when I get well-meant emails from friends or family equating what I do with teaching basic rules of grammar and mechanics. I am an expert on writing, just as my friends who teach chemistry or literature are experts on their topics, and I teach writing well. And this summer, I’m taking part in our arriving faculty workshop, and helping to talk to junior officers about best pedagogical practices for teaching first-year composition. Some of them — who’ll be teaching sections of first-year composition — have barely heard of our discipline. Certainly, some are enthusiastic: one major, although she wasn’t presenting, registered for this year’s CCCC in New York and took the train down two mornings to attend as many sessions as she could, and came back (to teach her afternoon classes) deeply enthusiastic and quickly put together a proposal for 2008. And certainly, we’re training them, to the limits of our time: we’ve got sessions on the rhetorical situation, the writing process, peer response, conferencing, commenting, reflection; we’ve got a set of required comp-theory readings; they’re watching Take 20 — but does that constitute being “trained in writing studies”?
I don’t know. It’s a start, maybe. But it’s a question Downs and Wardle raise: how does the pedagogy they propose intersect with academic labor practices? Even if the pedagogy they propose is a good thing, which I most definitely think it is, how can it be done? What do we do at my institution, if we have only a tiny fraction of our composition instructors with expertise in writing studies — and what does it mean to have expertise?
Funny this article. I’m working on a project that involves Activity Theory (the background to all of this), and I’m mulling over this issue. My hesitation, if there is one, is summed up here. (although it is Dr. Brooks, and not me, summing it up). I’m not sure that “we’re not sure writing can be improved, so we should do something that helps our status” is quite enough. I think that if we re-cleave the Ramus content/style split, we might be able to unravel the “grammar nazi” stereotype of the composition classroom, but I’m worried about the initial findings in this article of the reverse bell curve. The consequences of a lot of students struggling with this type of course may be more than we can handle and I think we should think hard about how we might ameliorate large numbers of alienated students. Treating the classroom as an activity system, complete with “real world” content inherent in the process strikes me as a good place to start. Defining how “Writing Studies” differs from, say “Cultural Studies” or “Literary Studies” (say, the junction between narratology, semiotics, and rhetoric) could be a valuable way to bring some of our scholarship to the writing space and turn it more into a true studio.
Though my college is quite different from yours, the problems are fairly similar. I’m sure it is quite common to find that college writing instructors have little or no background in rhet/comp. I agree that it would make sense to at least try to train those faculty, as best as one can, into the philosophy of one’s program (which would likely be very different from giving them a broader disciplinary understanding of the field). Maybe, we could at least start there. But the analogy of composition as an intro course comparable to intro to biology doesn’t work for me either. The discipline of biology is not about the study and teaching of biology courses. Studying composition theory and pedagogy does not strike me as an effective route to becoming a better writer, which has to be the purpose of FYC, no matter how we end up defining all these terms.
i’m synthesizing DocMara and ALex’s comments. what we have to teach in FYC, the sort of “how to” is always in question, and so too is the “what” . . . we’ve been arguing over what we mean by “academic discourse” forever, and the article seems to assume that that’s all perfectly clear. and this is frustating. and i’m not sure that what D & W propos will, as ALex points out, map out “an effective route to becoming a better writer.”
i’m re-reading Sirc’s book, and i keep thinking, along with him, where’s the expansive and complicated notion of writing we had historically infused into our courses? it seems that there is so much work *validating* our FTE that we have boxed ourselves into a dry, expository corner.
and yet i’m seeing cool blogs, short films, visual essays . . . one student handed in his portfolio to me recently as text printed on 3 XXL Fruit of the Loom t-shirts (i’m still pondering it, but i sort of love that he felt inspired to do it . . . we “wear ourselves” . . . ).
also, and i saw this at D’s C’s presentation . . . assumptions about how “we” teach FYC that no longer hold as broad generalizations. i see a bit of that in the article, and it doesn’t seem, well, fair. assumptions, assumptions . . . they guided the building of the course and are now getting everyone so excited and hopeful . . . but hopeful about what? funding?
i work with D, so he knows my position, so i don’t feel . . . that is, i hope i’m not wrong to share my thoughts here. thanks for opening this up.
Interesting responses — if I can borrow Peter Elbow’s terms, my temperament usually inclines me to play the doubting game with a piece of scholarship before playing the believing game, so comparing my reactions to the three of yours leaves me scratching my head a bit.
I suspect that having just finished my first year as a new professor may have blinkered my perspective a bit: I’m at a military academy where current-traditionalism is still the dominant regime and I’m doing everything I can just to advocate for a bit of process pedagogy, so Downs and Wardle’s forward-looking perspective feels very refreshing and engaging to me.
Andrew’s suggestion of defining differences between disciplines seems important, but part of me balks at the idea of continuing to define what we do in terms of its difference from what other people do — that feels too close to the same bad old subaltern position that Downs and Wardle kick against — but then, that’s a minor quibble, and I think I’m largely in agreement. Alex’s point about our object of study — the “what” versus the “how,” as Bonnie puts it — is one I don’t know that I have any easy answer to. I was trained at UMass, which still had a deep and substantial process orientation (and I confess I get frustrated when I see the too-easy and reductive conflation of expressivism with process), and so I’m inclined to agree with the assertion that for teaching writing, the direct method of instruction — one learns to write by writing — is best, and the burden of proof lies upon those who would advocate other methods, such as reading lots of composition scholarship. Still — there’s something that does strike me as deeply exciting about the Downs and Wardle piece, and perhaps it’s the stance toward students as reflective writers engaging complex and difficult texts, very much in the mode of scholars and teachers like Mariolina Salvatori.
i cited Paul Kei Matsuda because of the concern i share with you, mike. that is, students *are* and can become increasingly reflective learners/writers . . . AND “teaching writing is very complex” (Matsuda, “Take 20”). we know that our students are up to the challenge of *actual writing*, even writing that exceeds our expository bounds (maybe especially so), writing that is rhetorically sophisticated and inventive and, dare i say it, celebratory in its alternative structuration (which moves us, disallows a stale sense of “placement” and “status”).
i could not agree more that UMass has it going on w/r/t process, and i have written and spoken many, many times on the ways in which the vilification of expressivism was a clunky power move (however also well-intentioned in its excitement about the social nature of writing, a thing expressivism did not reject or deny but maybe nuanced for the sake of honoring the actual writer writing).
Mike! I haven’t read this article yet, but after reading your interesting thoughts on it, I’m going to.
I’m really just giving you a personal shout-out to say hello. And a question … is there some way I can feed your blog into my livejournal account so I don’t get all forgetful and check in with you at ridiculous 6-month intervals?
I forget if I’ve given you the addy before, but it’s http://mirrormargaret.livejournal.com … post a comment and I can add you, if you have an LJ account. Kitties figure heavily in the (non-) narrative.
Margs! I’m happy to hear from you, and totally miss you. Thanks for the LJ — I left a comment.
I had/have some of the concerns you do Mike. I don’t have much, very little actually, training in comp and rhet, at least while I was a student, but it’s a lot of what I study and think about now. But I’m not even sure that comp/rhet is what they mean in the article by writing studies. Am I qualified to teach an intro to writing studies? Probably not based on the article, but I could teach myself I guess.
I’d been giving this some thought as I teach a summer online class. I’m using Locke’s Second Treatise and his A Letter Concerning Toleration in my fyc classes as the reading from which students springboard to their essays. It’s a tough text, for me and them, but they don’t have to “master” it, just understand it enough to build an essay from an idea they find within it. It helps students get a sense of the political and economic world in which they live, where some, if not many, of the foundational notions come from. But I’m no expert on Locke, even having read his text about six times in the last 12 months. But would I be any more of an expert reading a variety of writing studies texts? Would that be more appropriate content to work with because it’s at least nominally in my area of (questionable) expertise?
I think it would bore the hell out of students, even more than someone such as Locke, who they can at least connect to their world and life (because of my great assignments and teaching no doubt ;-)) I think it would bore the hell out of me too. If we were using fyc to introduce people to writing studies, to create rhet/com[/writing studies majors, perhaps then it would be more appropriate. Maybe we just have to admit that fyc and second year writing type courses are service courses, but being a service course doesn’t mean we aren’t content experts in our own ways, it’s just that our content is more about process perhaps.