Composition Theory

Someone Not Trained

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory

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?

Benkler Meets Murray

preterite Composition Theory

What happens when we take the (allegedly old or superannuated, according to some) process pedagogy approaches — in fact, I’m thinking primarily of those who have been labeled (accurately or not) expressivist — and put them into play with the approaches of those (of whom I am one) who concern themselves with emerging technologies? When one reads Peter Elbow’s Everyone Can Write with care, with generosity, with a critical eye, what might it tell us about student writers and the condition of being digital?

If we go back to Donald Murray’s “Teach Writing as Process Not Product” or A Writer Teaches Writing, what might we gain from Yochai Benkler’s three observations from The Wealth of Networks that “first, non-proprietary strategies have always been more important in information production than they were in the production of steel or automobiles” (or other industrial goods); that in a networked information economy, “the aggregate effect of individual action, even when it is not self-consciously cooperative, produces the coordinate effect of a new and rich information environment” (or what we might call a new commons); that we have recently seen the emergence of “effective, large-scale cooperative efforts — peer production of information, knowledge, and culture… typified by the emergence of free and open-source software” and the overflow of the open-source ethos into domains far beyond those of the programmer (Benkler 4-5)? Quite a bit, I think. Murray’s and Elbow’s concerns with individualism and ideas mesh quite well with Benkler’s focus in ways that the so-called social turn in composition studies could not at all anticipate.

Interestingly, so much of that theory in the social turn was derived from Marx and his inheritors, but today seems inadequate in the context of Benkler’s observation that the Internet “is the first modern communications medium that expands its reach by decentralizing the capital structure of production and distribution of information, culture, and knowledge. Much of the physical capital that embeds most of the intelligence in the network is widely diffused and owned by end users… This basic change in the material conditions of information and cultural production and distribution have substantial effects on how we come to know the world we occupy and the alternative courses of action open to us as individuals and social actors” (30). Ownership of the means of production and distribution is returning to individuals — is decentralizing — and we’re needing to turn back to a focus on those individuals, not as isolate or solipsistic, but as networked agents, as writers and composers whose actions have concrete and tangible effects.

Benkler’s Production Grid

preterite Composition Theory, Computers, Economics

In my CCCC presentation, I tried to mash together Yochai Benkler’s diverse motivations for production, my own thoughts about the work > appropriation > ownership > use > work cycle, and Gibson-Graham’s tabular charting of the various market, alternative market, and nonmarket forms of economic activity, and to apply that mashup to the composition classroom. Right now, I’m planning out how to turn that mashup into an article, and I’ve gone back to Benkler and re-stumbled across yet another table, on page 43 of The Wealth of Networks. Benkler charts three types of strategies for “Cost Minimization / Benefit Acquisition” across three domains: the public, the intra-organizational (he calls it “intrafirm” but I want to open up that term to more explicitly include noncapitalist or alternative capitalist enterprises), and the semi-private. His three strategies are those of rights-based exclusion (in other words, profiting from copyright and associated strategies), nonexclusion-market (producing information from which to profit, but not via exclusivity), and nonexclusion-nonmarket (e.g., reputation economies and the like). I think Benkler’s taxonomy is helpful, particularly in considering the domain/context/scope of activity, and I want to work to map it over Gibson-Graham’s and my own subsequent elaborations, but I also think it’s somewhat incomplete, particularly in light of Benkler’s own work on non-market motivations for information production.

Which is what I’ll be working on as soon as I see the light at the end of the end-of-semester forced march.

CCCC07.P04: Pedagogic Violence

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Conference Notes

The full title of this session was “Pedagogic Violence and Emotions of (Self-) Assessment: Anger, Mortification, Shame,” or, as panel chair Elizabeth Weiser summed it up, “The Happy Panel!”

Amy Robillard began her presentation, “The Functions and Effects of Angry Responses to Plagiarism,” with some questions to the audience: “How many of us have suspected plagiarism?” All hands went up. “Felt insulted by it?” All hands. “Felt angry?” Again: all. Robillard offered an anecdote from a course she had taught wherein a student turned in a paper with one passage in a noticeably lighter font than the rest of the passage. She Googled the passage and discovered that the student had actually plagiarized three separate passages in the paper from weblogs. Robillard described her anger at the attempt at deceit, and her anger at the student’s implicit presumption of stupidity on Robillard’s part; the presumption that Robillard would somehow be dumb enough not to recognize plagiarism when she saw it. This anger, Robillard suggested, helped her to maintain an identity as a writing instructor sufficiently expert to make the distinction between that which is plagiarized and that which is not. But of course, she acknowledged, she could have missed it as well, because it was the font color that spurred her curiosity — and that acknowledgment led for Robillard both to a possible anger at self for writing teacher and to the question (itself carrying an inherent affective teacherly freight) of how many plagiarizers go uncaught.

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CCCC07 N: Re/Visions of a Field

preterite Composition Theory, Conference Notes

At this excellent (and disappointingly under-attended) featured session, “Re/Visions of a Field: Representing Disciplinary Identities in the Pages of College Composition and Communication,” Deborah Holdstein began by talking about her work as the editor of CCC and offering an overview of article titles from the journal from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Her rhetorical intent in so doing was quite clear: the titles sounded very similar in focus and scope to the concerns our field discusses today. That they sound familiar, as Holdstein put it, is a “modest revelation,” but one that we ought to heed and act on for important reasons. Holdstein pointed to Joseph Harris’s 1999 comment as editor of CCC that in 1949, composition didn’t yet exist as a discipline: in fact, Holdstein pointed out, a prototype for the current state of composition studies was set in the 1950s in the pages of that same journal. Yet despite the longstanding disciplinary concerns that recur in those pages, we are largely neglectful of our bibliographic reach and scope: the CCC bibliography was for a long time unavailable, and we’ve all but lost our deep connection to rhetoric and rhetorical history. We ought to use our past more than we do, Holdstein argued, pointing as an example and possible model to Cheryl Glenn’s 2006 MLA examination of the usable past of rhetoric in the pages of 1960s issues of CCC. The journal has been an accountable voice for scholarship, and we stand obligated to use that history of the “golden age” of composition as a precursor and foundation upon which to build our scholarship today, lest we continue to find ourselves rehashing old debates. Holdstein’s argument seems beyond dispute here, and I might extend it beyond CCC (which was, of course, the focus of the presentation: this is in no way a criticism of Holdstein): Helen Sard Hughes anticipated by 70 years or so the controversy among James Berlin, Linda Brodkey, Maxine Hairston, and others about what should and shouldn’t be taught in composition courses in her 1922 English Journal piece on “English, Economics, and Literature;” and Arthur Coon’s 1947 College English essay “An Economic X Marks the Spot” prefigures the debates over the labor of teaching college writing by half a century. The bibliographic reach and scope Holdstein describes is part of her reason for instituting the Re-Visions feature at the CCC Online Archive, she said, and she hopes to continue such conversations in the journal’s paper and online pages. Ultimately, she said, she’s humbled to peruse the journal’s old pages. Many of our practical concerns remain the same, and we ought to take this history and use it as we seek change: the past, as Jefferson said, is prologue.

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CCCC07 I14: Our Uses of

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Computers, Conference Notes, Writing

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.

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CCCC07 C.26: Textual Transgressions

preterite Composition Theory, Computers, Conference Notes, Writing

Collin Brooke acknowledged at the outset of this panel that there were technological difficulties coordinating this panel’s presentations, and the start of the presentations was delayed by six minutes as Collin (the chair) and others worked to overcome those difficulties. The panel’s full title was “Textual Transgressions Online: Plagiarism and Fraud in Weblogs and Wikis,” and the presenters offered a useful body of insight into the various ways that textual appropriation functions online, and how those various functions of appropriation serve to illuminate our practices and preconceptions surrounding the teaching of writing.

Clancy Ratliff’s presentation, “Negotiating and Regulating Plagiarism in Everyday Blogging Practices,” began from a personal example: her weblog, CultureCat, has been repeatedly plagiarized, in various and interesting ways. Ratliff has posted a brief recap with slides of her presentation, but I think she’s being too modest in the account she gives: as is typical of her work, her presentation was insightful, witty, and focused. The first example of weblog plagiarism she offered came to her via an email that read: “You hv posted a very kewl blog. I have stolen a few things from It just to start with my own blog.”

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CCCC07 E: The Global Economy and Class Identity

preterite Class (Meta), Composition Theory, Conference Notes, Economics

Note: I’ve made some corrections in what follows in response to requests by presenters.

I struggled somewhat to follow the highly abstract train of reasoning in Min-Zhan Lu’s presentation. Lu’s talk was more densely theoretical than the following talks by Tom Fox and Joseph Harris, which isn’t a criticism on my part, but an acknowledgment that I had to work harder to follow the complexity of her argument, and in fact failed to follow quickly enough at times — so any instances of incoherence in the following account should be taken as failures on my part, and not Lu’s. Lu began her talk on “Rethinking How We Talk About Class in the Global Free Market” by pointing to higher education’s increasingly prevalent invocation of the language of job security, career advancement, and marketable job skills. These terms, Lu noted, are not self-evident. They are, however, associated with a class of students increasingly subjected to the demands of global capital. If we’re going to develop a pedagogy that takes seriously our students’ economic concerns, we need to address their career goals as well as the increasingly volatility of global flows of capital and people, and in this sense, we would do well to keep in mind the additional meaning of career as unrestrained headlong rush. Lu expressed reservations about the limitations of the conventional stratifying markers of class, and proposed that we look instead to the extraterritorial mobility of the global elite as marker of class distinction. The conditions of the global free market today push the economy towards production of the volatile, the ephemeral, and the precarious, and the extraterritorial careering of the global elite constrains the middle class.

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CCCC07 B.30: My Presentation

preterite Composition Theory, Conference Notes, Economics, Writing

I think I’m beginning to learn how to give a good conference presentation.

Or maybe at least the kind of conference presentation from which I tend to learn the most. I know I don’t learn well when people read papers, no matter how eloquently they’re written: written prose, when performed, has a fundamentally different quality. We see things in drama that the page does not show, and vice versa. But the model of the talk guided by slides doesn’t work well for me either: it feels too paratactic, too off-the-cuff, a series of impressions. Lawrence Lessig’s CCCC presentation seemed to me an ideal middle ground, and I’ve lately seen Collin and Clancy taking similar approaches, and so I tried this year to do something similar. I think the resulting presentation was the best I’ve so far done.

I first wrote a long paper, maybe 20 pages double-spaced, that worked through my argument. It’s something that I’m going to be trying to expand into a journal article over the next few months. I then went through and cut, cut, cut it down to somewhere near conference length: nine pages, double-spaced. After that, I put together a slide show to go with key terms and phrases and concepts in the paper, in imitation of Lessig, and also following the excellent format that I’ve seen Clancy and Collin start to turn toward. After some coaching and feedback from friends and colleagues, I cut it down further, and turned my writerly prose into bullet points from which to read, so as to avoid the deep hypotaxis that becomes so difficult to follow when listening to someone read a written paper: basically, I index-carded it.

I was happy with the result. I got out from behind the speakers’ table, walked around, used my wireless clicker to advance the slides, and talked it. I’d be curious to hear what the audience thought, because for me, it was the most energetic and engaged presentation I’ve done: it was fun, impassioned, and — to me — far more lucid and to-the-point than other presentations I’ve given.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have the technology to record as I presented, so what I’ve got to share here is the presentation’s static counterpart: my written talk; the extended prose that I cooked down to bullet points.

If you’re interested, though, you’re also welcome to take a look at the slide show and the bullet point script that I used to talk through that slide show.

slide show (1.1 MB, .ppt file)

bullet point script (55 KB, .doc file)

I’m especially grateful to my colleague Karen Peirce for her feedback and suggestions for revision.

Presentation prose follows.

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CCCC07 A01: Institutional Forces

preterite Composition Theory, Conference Notes

(Note: I’ve made some changes at the request of presenters.)

Joanna Castner started this session by offering an initial overarching framework of techné, based on Janet Atwill’s conception of an always changing, never static, transformative “productive knowledge” that works to disrupt lines of power. Techné, Joanna suggested, can be used as an operating procedure and a way of looking at overdetermined (q.v. Althusser, Freud) situations as spaces of possibility. In this sense, techné is not knowledge but the production of knowledge, deeply associated with the kairotic moment and the importance of local factors. Castner then used John Alberti’s hierarchy of differently classed institutions of higher education to assert that so-called working-class institutions — second-tier open-admissios regional institutions where many students hold jobs and other material concerns that lie beyond the scope of the classroom — are now to be considered the norm or the typical case in higher education. (Castner here also cited Johnathan Mauk’s scholarship on working class students.) In such a way, Castner asserted, Mauk’s physical and human material geography of the institution (or, perhaps more properly, the material context of the institution) constructs student identities and the way those identities intersect and interact with the classroom context.

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