Composition Pedagogy

Response to Curtiss & Jenny

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Education

It’s taken me a while to work through my thoughts on Curtiss’s recent comment to me, which is pretty much par for the course, since Curtiss’s thoughts always tend to offer a big, complex mouthful of analysis to chew on. (I know you work in IT, Curtiss, but damn academia could use a technology critic as insightful as you. You’d give Professor Feenberg a run for his money.) But Clancy was good enough to e-mail me a link to Jenny’s excellent recent thoughts on critical pedagogy, which I’d been lame enough to overlook, and some stuff started to click between what Jenny and Curtiss had to say. Let’s see if I can start to make some connections.

Jenny notes that the for-sale paper mills offer “a plethora of ready-made essays” in the “critical pedagogy” mode: “an analysis of gendered constructions in film, the hidden ideology of class within certain ads, the circulations of men’s magazines”, and so on, and such essays “are just as common as any other kind of ‘usual English essay assignments that can be bought at these sites.” These essays, Jenny suggests, “have now entered a kind of general equivalency”, in that their “analyses [comprise] a ‘universal’ vocabulary and methodology of critique”. In other words, they’re a genre, with easily recognizable and replicated generic conventions — which, Jenny points out, removes “such ‘cultural analyses’ from the actual content of cultural operation”.
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Heuristic Response

preterite Composition Pedagogy

John at Jocalo has posted a comprehensive and thought-provoking draft of a teaching heuristic as a means of working towards organizing his pedagogical thoughts and writings. I like the hierarchies and sequences he sets up: context and texts certainly seem to be appropriate starting points in the movements from the outside in and from beginning to end, said end — at least in the context of the semester — being evaluation and assessment. (Of course, teachers might hope that teaching and learning never actually end.) I might suggest that John’s category of technology is often difficult to separate from context, but then, that’s not really so much a difficulty with what John’s put together as it is a difficulty with taxonomies in general. (The professor who taught my qualitative research methods seminar noted that the first time you try to code your data, the kitchen sink category is always going to be the one with the most entries. Hence my “Asides” category.) What was more surprising to me, though, was the way that student writing seems to be tucked away into two bullets under “tasks”: I know that John and I teach at very different institutions, with very different types of courses, but student writing, to me, is one of those categories that drives all others when I think about teaching: what are the uses of students’ private writing? Their public writing? Who are their various audiences? How does their writing connect to texts and contexts? And I might ask John whether “collaboration” is precisely the same thing as “peer response,” and from that question I might extend a question about the place of teacher responses to student texts that occur prior to assessment.

Which isn’t to say that I don’t find what John’s done quite valuable. I look at his rubric and my questions, and I think about the recent Comment and Response section in College English (May 2004), where Sharon O’Dair fiercely and rightly upbraided Tim Mayers and Leann Bertoncini for misreading her essay, for missing her point, and for poor argumentation (my reasons for strongly disagreeing with her conclusions in the “Class Work” essay are different from those that Mayers and Bertoncini make, but I very much agree with her response to them), and where Joe Harris was much more (and perhaps excessively) gentle in his response to the strange comments Jennifer Beech and Bill Thelin make on his essay on “Revision as a Critical Practice.” Beech and Thelin seem to desire a course that focuses entirely upon certain elements of John’s “context” category, to the complete exclusion of the “texts” category, which Harris resists, although they completely mischaracterize him as focusing upon “texts” to the exclusion of “context”, absurdly conflating a “critical essay” with “literary criticism” (are essays written in critical pedagogy courses uncritical?).

Also, a common thread running through all of the essays, comments, and responses mentioned above is a concern with the identities and subjectivities of students and teachers. Perhaps that might be another way to extend John’s heuristic, either by setting up a new and separate category, or else by addressing concerns associated with the identities and subjectivities of students and teachers as a context within rather than beyond the classroom. Thanks for the helpful stuff, John: you’ve got me thinking.

Hybridity & the Everyday

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Computers

Only one more full day left here, and then a long, long flight back Thursday afternoon and into Friday morning. I’ve been having a fine time, though, and I’ll post some pictures of my day trip up to the North Shore.

Nancy Barron, Sibylle Gruber, and Connie Sirois presented on “Theories of Technologies: Rhetorics, Embodiments, and the Everyday” for the conference’s second session, and offered some provocative and engaging insights. I was happy to have the chance to chat briefly with Sibylle and Gail Hawisher afterwards, as well. Most interesting were the theoretical perspectives that Sibylle and Connie offered, and the way that Nancy grounded Sibylle’s theoretical perspective in a description of teacherly practice in a hybrid learning environment.
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Proposal Weather

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Computers, Economics

Spent most of this gloriously warm and breezy and sunny spring day sitting out on the deck, letting the girls sniff around in their little circumscribed patch of outside-ness (they’re not allowed to go down the steps, because the steps lead to real outside-ness, with a very busy road right out front), and finishing drafting my proposal for the UNH Conference. And, well, doing a couple hundred pages of Hardt and Negri, too, and paging idly through the new Harper’s that came in the mail today, and putting off looking at the latest College English, but I’ll just share the UNH proposal, for now (which, aside from some contextualizing, is basically Chapter 4 of the dissertation). Keep your fingers crossed for me?
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Two Equally Good Ways

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory

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?

The Blogging Panel

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Computers, Writing

I took notes on other sessions I attended in San Antonio as well, but I figure it’s probably best if I only post on the ones that I found really engaging. That said, much of the notes I took on the weblogging presentation by Terra, Charlie, and Clancy are redundant, because they’ve put their presentations online. All were engaging, and all were radically different in style and content, and all three of them did a fine job of usefully pushing the boundaries of the way writing teachers talk and think about the practices associated with weblogging.
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CCCC on Class

preterite Class (Meta), Composition Pedagogy

Ira Shor, Bill Macauley, Jennifer Beech, and Bill Thelin did a session titled “In and Out of ‘Class’: Repositioning Ourselves and Our Discouse So That Literacy Matters” that mitigated many of the problems of their panel last year that caused such acrimony in the question and answer session. Still, I had some pretty significant concerns, and I think the structure of much of their discourse was in some ways self-marginalizing. At the beginning, Ira suggested that the discourse of class in composition is “anemic”, and asked: “What does it mean to understand class?” Parts of the presentations took steps toward such an understanding — and other parts took steps retreating from such an understanding.

Bill Macauley had a fine beginning, focusing on the Marvel superhero Ben Grimm — The Thing, from the Fantastic Four — as “the only working-class hero” in comics. Of course, this immediately raised questions for me of what we mean by “working class”, and what we see as the differences between class identity, class position, and class background: in other words, my usual concerns about the vague and unfocused terminology used by people who talk about class in composition. I immediately wanted to say: what about Luke Cage? And how working class do we consider farming families of modest means like Jonathan and Martha Kent? (The first-generation college students who come to my rural Big State U campus from the surrounding farms are certainly the sorts of students who many folks on the Working Class Studies listserv would refer to as “working class”.) In any case, Macauley used Grimm as a metaphor for working class college students, and moved on to talk about “traditional academic writing” and “academe-specific” writing as a monolithic construction, and then argued that there are “other cultural contexts” towards which we should teach, and extracurricular literacies about which we should learn, as a counter to the “rarefied air of academe”.
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Borders in the Balkans

preterite Composition Pedagogy

I guess I’d sum up my point yesterday by saying that it sees to me John’s making an indictment of specialization that I don’t quite buy. However, I would strongly agree with John that more interdisciplinarity and integration in English studies would be a fine thing. John writes that “composition is a part of English”, and I’d respond that I see composition as connected to English, and add that composition in English uses English, but the reality of academic specialization — as John acknowledges — demonstrates that speech, linguistics, and journalism all share similar characteristics, yet remain separate from English as disciplines.
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UNH in September

preterite Composition Pedagogy

This call for proposals looks interesting, particularly to those of us in the Northeast or New England (Cindy?). I went to the last one, two years ago, and had a wonderful time; it’s a small enough conference that you actually get a chance to interact with people, but there a lot of really good ideas circulating, and a lot of really smart folks there. This one is themed around issues of diversity, which I might anticipate addressing in terms of either a definitional diversity of socioeconomic class, or else in terms of rethinking writing in the context of a diverse economic landscape — or, if I can get my head around how to get this wiki working, maybe even revising our understanding the texts associated with the composition classroom as being multiply and diversely authored, though that might be a bit of a stretch. Anybody interested in putting together a panel?

The Open Source Syllabus

preterite Composition Pedagogy

Some rather loosely strung together elaborations on yesterday’s post.

I still don’t know a lot about open source methods, so tonight I’ll do my best to describe what little I do know, and then describe what I see as the points of possible overlap with the writing classroom.

As I understand it from Tom Adelstein (link courtesy of, again, Chris Worth), the open source software development process (and I’m appreciative here of the fact that the focus seems to be on process; thank you, Donald Murray) begins by defining a project and then looking to an existing base of standards and finding a software “vocabulary” and set of tools with which to work.
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