I had two conversations about class today and yesterday, one with a fellow PhD candidate in the Rhetoric & Composition program here, and the other with Charlie, who’s on my committee, and gleaned some small and useful insights from those conversations.
First: in composition (and in many other places as well; the Raymond Williams I so frequently invoke is certainly an example), there exists a genre of the social mobility narrative; the story of the professor from the working-class background. Victor Villanueva and Mike Rose offer perhaps the foremost examples, but there are plenty of others, and in fact one of the things I’m trying to work against is the use of the authenticity of lived experience as the class marker that trumps all others. My small insight, though: within the context of composition’s engagement with identity politics (our assumptions that race, gender, age, class, sexual preference, and other markers of identity influence the teaching and learning of writing), the narrative of the academic’s transition from the working class to the professional class is always going to be a narrative of isolation and betrayal, because the academic can no longer claim working-class status. She can’t go home again. Other identity-politics narratives of entrance into the academy are not so bound by definitions: the queer professor is not made un-queer by becoming a professor.
Second: Charlie observed that the view of technology in composition’s subfield of computers and composition has changed from an understanding of technology-as-efficiency to an understanding of technology-as-equalizer. Early theorists in computers and composition believed that word processing would make writing easier, that computers would help students to write better papers in less time. The enthusiasm for this view waned, and writing teachers began to focus more of their hopes on technology as furthering egalitarian ends, on computers as the tool that might help to remedy social inequalities in the classroom. We’ve moved from asking “How can computers make writing more efficient?” to asking “How can computers make writing more egalitarian?” In this same conversation, Charlie also again suggested that I need to consider whether I’m going to use my dissertation to ask, “How does class affect what students do in the wired writing classroom?” or to ask, “What do compositionists say about how class affects what students do in the wired writing classroom?” In other words, am I doing a literature study or classroom research? A possible answer: I think both efficiency and equity are concerns associated with class; the former with the relationships of production, and the latter with relationships of privilege. And yet nobody in computers and composition ever talks about class. My research question, then, might be: how does the specter of class mobility hide behind and/or inform the discourse of computers and composition? How and why are people in the field avoiding explicit discussions of the very real ways in which concerns of class intersect with our ideals of efficiency and equality?
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