my pedagogy

When I was in high school, I taught a Sunday school class for a year. I sat on the back of a pew and a half dozen junior high students sat in the pew behind. We had a text, but none of us were all that eager to look at it. We began each class by talking about whatever and sometimes we never got out of the mode. One Sunday, we talked about drug use. In our small Iowa town in 1972, the topic was pretty much a hypothetical one, gleaned from TV. To put it in context, we compared drug use to booze. Which was worse? How did addiction happen? How did a person become a victim?

One of the parishioners was listening to our conversation. Bruce Lee was an alcoholic. He was an usher who didn’t drink anymore, but he still attended AA meetings. He invited us to one. A few nights later, my class and I sat in folding chairs in front of a group of adults. The group talk was followed by a question and answer session. The only thing I remember about what was said that night was Mr. Lee’s comment—“Good question”—when I asked my mine. I have no clue what the question was that I asked or the particular story that prompted it. No, I do remember one other thing--the bodily sensation of being nervous as hell.

That year of teaching Sunday school constitutes my formal teaching experience. On the surface, not much would seem relevant to teaching freshman composition in an academic setting. We were a largely homogonous group—white, mostly farm kids. Ethics was a fairly cut and dry matter of getting good grades and doing your chores. We all had a sense of the benevolent old man sitting on a cloud looking down even if we didn’t know exactly what He wanted of us. However, at least in the world of comp theory, I do see some parallels.

Maybe it was Dr. Souder’s syllabus, but I gleaned a definite sense of “mission” from the early readings about Hopkins running himself into the ground with his concern for student writing. Wendy Bishop’s “burnout” sounded like something from Kierkegaard—“Sickness Unto Current-Tradition.” Even that apparent apostate Bartholomae had a sense of some mysterious power taking over his charges, filling them with dark misunderstandings from which they need to be enlightened.

I few weeks into the semester, the deity changed genders. She seemed to be behind the talk of “world views” and questions of authorship. She informed her ministers to encourage collaboration and the creation of “social artifacts” that would be pleasing to her sight.

I don’t have a problem imagining god as female. It still makes me nervous, of course. I mean, She can get as pissed off as He ever could. Maybe, it’s the monotheism involved. But then, I feel just as a nervous when I contemplate a pagan’s two deities and a Hindu’s hermaphroditic one gives me the willies, too.

I think the problem lies in the word “god” and whatever reality is constituted by it. The word was never mentioned in class, but I heard echoes of it in the theory/practice dichotomy that was a very central issue to our discussions. Listening to the disparity between the experience of teachers and pedagogical theory, between what went on in the classroom and the ideals it was supposed to uphold, I heard something that reminded of nothing so much as the talk heaven and earth.

In that respect, maybe I can take something from my early experience as a teacher and have it mean something in relation to modern theory. The goal of my pedagogy would be to enable my students to ask a good question when they are outside the classroom.

The body of knowledge

A long time ago, man learned to write stuff down. Of course, he’d always doodled on cave walls, but that was just art. He didn’t get serious about his symbolic ability until about 8000 BCE when the Sumerians started scratching clay. They didn’t begin by recording great speeches or how-to manuals. The earliest writing was done on clay tokens, a sort of e pluribus unum that turned otherwise worthless shards into valuable coinage. From there, the scribbling of symbols developed into commercial documentation of who owed who and how much.

It paid to be literate in this new technology. If you knew what token to hand the dude who placed your date beer on the oasis table, you didn’t just have to spread them all out and trust the bartender to pick the right one—or ones. Certain unscrupulous people began to notice how the people who couldn’t read got taken. They decided to use the confusion surrounding signs for their own nefarious purposes. They started inscribing clay tablets like hell and thus, out of deception and debt, was born law and religion. If you got in with the right circle and were fluent in the newest arcanum, your span on the planet was going to be a whole lot easier.

This pattern of introducing new technologies so that a man or a group could put one over on his fellow man has proven very effective through the centuries. Some have argued that first the pen and later the printing press were advancements in communication technology that have lead to greater understanding among the populace. What a crock. Wars have only gotten bigger and a guy who couldn’t pronoun “nuclear” took over the world.

From sundial to atomic clock, technology has had only one purpose: to enslave the befuddled.

Just look at the latest promise to unify the global village. On the surface, the World Wide Web now instantly connects bloggers around the world. My Space and Facebook are touted as a revolution in social networking. But even though a person can now post word of his conversion to Scientology with the click of a button to three hundred friends, what kind of intimacy is that? What are we really communicating?

Any medium which was developed by the defense department and made popular by pornographers is not a medium to be trusted. I can’t shake the suspicion that we’re all just insects caught in semi-invisible threads, waiting for a giant spider named Bill to come and finish us off.

Okay, so paranoia is one of my personality traits and, yes, I did write “we” are caught. Right now I’m sitting in front of my computer writing this on Microsoft Word.

In spite of the fears which I know are not just grounded in illusion, I like Word. I know how to use about five of its ten thousand functions, but the cut and paste feature alone has seduced me. I used to write on yellow legal pads. By the time I was done, the page was so filled with blacked-out lines and arrows crossing each other, pointing bracketed phrases to different places on the page, that even I couldn’t read it. Those pages often ended up balled and bouncing off the wall.

How neat the page on this screen looks by comparison. It seems to tell me that have a neat and orderly mind, that the path I took to get to this point was a straight line instead of the curving, back and forth thing that it was. And just where is this point that I’ve gotten to?

Well, I guess it’s pretty much the same one I started out with—that the relationship between people and technology is ambiguous. Technology both reflects and changes the way people think about themselves and the world. But let me start over and make my point a little clearer.

Before the people learned to write, knowledge had a human face. Science and religion came out the mouth of a storyteller around the campfire and medicine was a crazy loner who danced outside the village. People had an unusual capacity to remember things because all were conscious that knowledge had a tendency to disappear when she or he who held it did. Time traveled in circles.

But when the technology of writing things down came along, knowledge and time changed. Symbols on a page could outlive the writer by centuries. Knowledge came to be regarded as outside the person, something contained in a body of texts. All one had to remember was how to open a book and interpret the signs.

Certain types of knowledge recorded in these texts began to outpace others in their ability to affect the very human matters of life and death. Those types of knowledge which progressed were called science and given priority over those that just kept going in circles like religion. Science progressed along a line that easily documented by the ever increasing size of explosions.

Which brings me again to where I sit in front of the computer. I’m sure that just behind the screen that holds my words are the words of others. Thousands of texts have be transcribed or freshly composed by people around the world. Right now, they lie in servers and quite a few are available to me through typing a few keys.

In one sense, that knowledge is still outside a human body. It is contained in something I nostalgically imagine to be a text, but I know that’s not true. Today’s texts aren’t like a book that exists in a specific place, can be held in hand and smelled—in a word, owned.

Today’s texts exist in space as virtual as consciousness itself, suspended in a gray matter of chips as small as cells. Recovering knowledge is a process of sending tiny electric signals through a body that is sprawled across the globe.

I have a decapitated head of the body of knowledge resting on my desk. It talks and sings and occassionally answers me when I ask it something. It displays those answers in images as ephemeral as the expression on a storyteller’s face.

It is not an illusion to see a human face on technology—and that’s the thing that truly frightens me.

Thomas on Bruffee

The first point to prick me in Thomas’s presentation of Bruffee was Bruffee’s assertion of an influx of nontraditional students in the 70’s and 80’s. Other articles have made that same observation of a university overwhelmed by students who weren’t prepared for academic work—but those articles put a different date to this event which signals a need for a different type of pedagogy. Some of the articles we’ve read for this class locate the event in the late teens and twenties after WWI, some in the late forties after WWII, others now identifying the shift from tradition to the advent of modern information systems. If I couple these observations with one from the other class I’m taking (research methods and theories)—that the designation of scholarship as “recent” now means that which is less than five years old—I’m stuck with trying to define exactly what this “tradition” is that each pedagogical theory is rebelling against.

In one sense, this changing notion of tradition might prove Bruffee’s point that knowledge is part of a social context—each generation defines itself in opposition to the one that preceded it. But from my perspective, the hypothetical time span between knowledge and its decay into irrelevance is showing an ever decreasing half-life. It begs a question to Bruffee’s assertion that knowledge is “common property” within the social context—common to whom? I might ask.

Feminists posit a gendered tradition, ethnology defines a multitude of cultural traditions, Marxists have a conception of tradition as the hegemonic power of economic control. For Bruffee, rewriting and interpreting the past into the present is a function of some larger process than is modeled on the interaction of peers within a tutorial, a social transaction that is as much a generation as it is an analysis of traditional knowledge and means of expression.

But I would just like to have a little more perspective on what exactly Bruffee meant by “tradition.” Maybe some elaboration on “ontogenic cognitive development” might have helped—but probably not.

essay question--pedagogical influences

Several years ago, I started writing again. I had written stories throughout a couple decades following my undergraduate degree, but without the kind of success that felt satisfying. When I moved to Pueblo in ’96, I just wanted to start a carpentry business and lead a simple life free from the issues I’d wrestled with a writer. For awhile, I worked hard and kept things simple. But no matter how simple and unidirectional life appears on the surface, there is a level to it in which time is not linear. Events occurred which demonstrated its circular nature and I was back in that state of mind where I had to write.

After a year of writing, I found that the time off hadn’t helped. Although school hadn’t taught me to write the first time around, I decided to take a class if only because I wanted someone to read what I’d written. If I had to pay them to do it, so be it. Chas Clifton encouraged me and I took more classes. I enrolled in the graduate program only because I had to in order to get into the writing workshops. I took the required theory course thinking that that might help with an overall structure for what I was writing and because I felt that a philosophical perspective, whether overt or not, is a part of any writing. And now, I find myself in this pedagogy course . . .

Initially, I was attracted to the expressivism of Elbow and Murray. Critics have often linked their work more to creative writing than academic. Another coincidence was that both had trouble with school. I don’t know if it’s a statement about the educational system in the “old days” or just similar temperaments, but I identified with their trouble. Elbow wrote the notes for his first book on writing as he was doing his doctoral thesis concerning double and triple irony in Chaucer’s work. He was writing what amounted to autobiography alongside his scholarly work. Going back and forth between the two, he was attempting to write himself into the university. It was a sort of dialectical process: school, me, school, me—ultimately aimed at a synthesis of the two. In one way, it happened. Elbow did become a recognized figure in composition. But in another way, it didn’t. Elbow never lost the feeling that a great divide existed between the academic world and “true” writing.

I liked their acknowledgement of a “resistance” factor when it came to the process of writing. I liked their theories of freewriting and focused writing followed by periods of critique and looking for what was really being said, of multiple drafts and being open to surprise and changes of direction. I liked their concern with voice and students as individuals. Although that latter point has drawn some criticism for its sentimentally romantic and isolationist connotations, I don’t think those critics fully acknowledge what Elbow and Murray were really proposing.

Murray especially desired passionate writing. Love, hate, joy, fear—emotion is often seen as private to an individual. But I think writing that has those qualities is aimed at more than individual expression. The aim of an emotion is to connect with others in some fundamental understanding. The individual that loves and the individual that fears are the same individual. Elbow has written that though he is concerned with the individual, that individual in neither unitary nor unchanging. Writing in the expressivist vein is an attempt to integrate to those disparate selves, to achieve some sort of wholeness.
Which brings me to one of my own divisions. On the one hand, I am a student of writing. But on the other, I am learning to be a teacher. I suspect that not all the students who would attend a class I might teach would have 54 years of experience in need of consolidation. If fact, their needs might be just that opposite. In light of that consideration, I would try to incorporate something from the guy who opposed Elbow so often.

America has a long history of pragmatic thinking which runs something like ‘society is a collection of people pursuing their own self interest and, in line with the laws of evolution, the most energetic in that pursuit are justly deserving of their rewards.’ I agree with Bartholomae in his suspicion of this philosophy. Bartholomae’s concern was to educated students into how their culture had sought to define them in ways which upheld that status quo. He did it through reading difficult academic texts in class.

Lindsay Aegerter describes teaching Jamaican born, English educated Michelle Cliff’s novels in her class. Cliff’s novels are filled with rage at now only how the colonial system has ravaged her country, but rage at herself for how she has incorporated the language and ways of thinking that colonialism inspired. Aegerter talks about her student’s resistance to identifying with Cliff’s sentiments because they resist looking at people and issues which have those same implications in our own country.

Although this is a comp theory class, I think this is getting a little too theoretical. These are my major influences to this point, but they influence me as much towards hermitage in a cave as they do towards teaching a classroom full of students. I need an influence that can synthesize the social and the individual perspectives, theory with practice. Bizzell comes to mind.

Bizzell writes about the inner and outer approaches to pedagogy in terms of home culture and academic culture. She finds that the two have come to be regarded more as concepts in an argument rather than as useful descriptions of a changing world. She also says that the two are not as mutually exclusive as would appear from the debate. She calls for more research into the “world view” of students entering the university, a broader understanding of rhetoric as a way to bridge the gap in the classroom between the individual student and the academic world, and a move from “cognitive models to discouse communities”—all things which I recognize as things as theoretically important to me as I approach a classroom. Exactly how to implement those theoretical influences in actual pedagogical practices remains the question, though.

Nick on Lanham

The part of Nick’s presentation on Lanham that stuck with me the most is the diagram that he used to demonstrate a theory of reader attention in relation to style. The reader’s attention is described by a line that hits the horizontal line of stylistic surface at an angle. At the point of intersection, the attention line is refracted into two—one line bounces off the horizontal line at an angle equal to the one that the attention approached and the other continuing through the point of intersection without any degree of deflection. The diagram reminds me of one of those diagrams that describe the process of subatomic particle formation. I like it because it seems to render an invisible, baffling, complex process in a simple way to my grasping mind.

I liked the diagram for what it implied more than the lesson I was supposed to derive from it, though. When the reader’s attention struck the stylistic surface, we were supposed to pay attention to the line that deflected off the surface. That line held the significance of style, the “how” of writing rather than the “what.” That line runs parallel to other lines we’ve studied like “the medium is the message” or “discourse is socially constructed.” Of course, in order for that attention line in the diagram to truly be representative, it should have bounced back to the reader. As it is diagrammed, the attention line just shoots off into empty space. Unless the reader’s attention to style line is returned to him somehow . . .

I know any diagram is a representation and simplification of reality and I shouldn’t be so picky. If the reader had squarely faced his text, the “at” line would have returned at a ninety degree angle and would have been indistinguishable from the “reader” line and Lanham’s point would have been lost. But I’m not really bothered by that—at least, not too much.

The thing that I really like about the diagram was that the reader’s attention line passed through the stylistic surface at all. That language can pass “through” at all that it has a referential function seemed the major point. To me, the world of theory is one where the influence of postmodernism is so strong that any theorist who even hints at a shared world instantly becomes a hero—just implying an “objective” reality made me more comfortable with his focus on style.

Much of Lanham’s work seems to fall under the social constructivist rubric. Like postmodernists, the social constructivists says that language is a series of signs. Meaning is constructed of language so that so that discourse communities are ones that share understanding by agreeing on the meaning of certain words. But where the social contructivists differ from the postmodernists is in the real of referentiality. Beyond that system of signs, the social constructivist assumes an objective world we all share. It is an assumption that isn’t always apparent in the complexity of their focus on the constructed nature of humans and reality, but it is there, thank goodness.

the rhetoric of computers and all

The part of Mr. Burns discussion I enjoyed most was his retelling of his discovery of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. He had left the Air Force, gone to college, taught for awhile. He looked at his student’s papers and didn’t feel like they were any better at the end of class than they were at the beginning. He was having his doubts about what composition was, what he was trying to teach. I felt some real sympathy for his position at that point—confusion about where one fits between theory and practice, an existential moment between one’s personal past and future. It was like we were both sitting on the same branch in the tree of knowledge—high enough up that a fall was going to be painful, but absolutely no confidence about how to proceed through the tangle of branches overhead.

And then somebody gave him Aristotle and it was a revelation, everything was made clear. The roots of the educational system with its division between arts and sciences had been growing in Greece and they still supported the tree of knowledge. Aristotle’s Rhetoric broke down language into its component parts and that analysis was still valid. The world was arranged in words and those words were arranged by logic. All the disparate facts of the world, all the disparate facts of Burn's life began to make sense. The world was an atomistic arrangement of meme’s that were held together by logic. The memes were like brain cells in the universal mind of man that was still thinking the world into being.

Of course, what I heard Burns say and what Mr. Burns thought he was saying are almost assuredly two different things. But in that moment, sitting on the same branch with him looking down, I did share his assurance that the tree wasn’t simply a trunk balancing on the hard ground. That it did have roots and that it had organically developed to this height. It was “of a piece” with the past.
But then Mr. Burns extrapolated that past into the future and computers and I was suddenly on the branch alone. The rest of the lecture, he was like a squirrel rustling in the leaves, jumping from branch to branch, teasing the old dog I’d become, suddenly wondering all over again what the hell I was doing sitting in a tree.

Okay, time to abandon this metaphor. They say confession is good for the soul, so here goes: I have an old dude’s fear of computers. No matter how many times I hear that hear that computers are simply a tool to dig through a pile of facts, I always feel like I’m digging with an ice pick instead of a shovel.

Okay, back to the tree metaphor. I don’t want to encourage this steak of self pity. In fairness, I did catch a few phrases from those rustling leaves that did orient me a bit to my place in the tree. It was reassuring to listen to someone who understood the relationship of people to computers. I was reassured to learn that a human being (who seemed like a nice guy) was actually doing the programming, telling the computer how to behave. I also like the thought that the reasoning he used to tell this computer how to think was in some fundamental of a piece with the reasoning that Aristotle used.

I’m sorry I missed you all at the restaurant. I walked through at about eight thirty and the place was so crowded I thought you’d probably gone somewhere else. I should have known they’d stick English majors in back room, I guess. I would definitely have liked to put an even more human face on these machines.

Response to Rebecca's Tug of War

That quote from Gearhart reminds me of one from Cixous--that a female language be one that comes from the body more than logic. Others have argued that the structure of language with its rules of syntax and grammar are inherently masculine and, therefore, unable to express a truly female point of view. It is hard to know what to make of that. Maybe an expressive sigh is about all. (I couldn't figure out how to post this in the comments section--it refused to give me a word to copy. I trying not to see this as a technological bias against female language.)

Kratzke

In his article “Recopying to Revise,” Kratzke decries the superficiality that has taken over the modern classroom. He blames democratization and multiculturalism for a “dummy down effect,” a political correctness that includes differences by ignoring them in the name of being “easy, free, forgiving, attentive, comfortable, interesting, unchallenging, fun.” He also blames the computer. He quotes Neitzche: “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” The spell and grammar check give students a false notion that the machine is correcting their errors; the instantaneous of information made available gives even scholars a sense of the transitory nature of knowledge, how rapidly it moves.
To offset this superficiality, Kratzke would have students return to a pre-computer mode of composition which included recopying a paper before it is handed in. In recopying the paper, a student is almost automatically inclined to revise it. Recopying is almost a metaphor for reflection. Writing a first draft is an experience, but the meaning of a draft is shaped by revision in the same way that reflection is a way of processing experience for its deeper meaning.

students and statistics

In this study, authors Brammer and Rees try to quantify a notoriously unquantitative process. They attempt to measure subjectivity, something only a social constructivist would attempt. They attempt to measure what any expressivist or sane person would only try to describe in qualitative terms, if they tried at all.
The authors do make an interesting point when they point out that peer review, a staple of expressivist-introduced process, now occupies the same ubiquitousness in the classroom that the current-traditional approach once did. As such, it has become a matter of faith among teachers—a faith that is shared occasionally by students 31.1 percent of the time and usually shared 32.6 percent of the time.
I don’t have anything against a scientific point of view. Science and mathematics are subtle tools for understanding the world and the mind. Science is about measuring and being objective, quantifying data. I don’t even mind pseudo-science that imaginatively explores some aspect of the inner and outer universe in quantitative and qualitative terms--as long as it is done as a matter of arousing wonder and speculation. But this article did bother me for what I saw as a presumptuous use of quantitative terms to make qualitative judgments.
I didn’t mind the authors’ interpreting the data as saying that students who had been schooled in how to respond in peer review were more prone to view the process favorably. But the classification of responses into the categories of satisfactory and unsatisfactory (since it was a scientific study, they didn’t use “good” and “bad”) was problematic. I think it has to do with the number of students (20%) who “would not participate in peer review if were not required—even though they found it helpful.” That would seem to cast doubt on the categories of satisfactory and unsatisfactory. The student who said that “Peers never seemed to be willing to be open and give honest feedback” was “coded as negative.” But maybe he gave that response because he had begun to suspect that he wasn’t being honest and open with them—the value of peer review may have been that it made the student’s dishonesty with himself a little closer to awareness. This isn’t to say that students should be forced to do what they don’t like—I’m only saying that quantifying subjective reactions is an unscientific process. And how the authors could conclude that the statistics show that we "need more emphasis on peer review as a global activity" is beyond me.

Bizzell

Male/female has an even longer history than conservative/liberal of organizing public discourse into two separate camps. Male is associated with aggression, ego, separateness, rationality—female with nurturing, the unconscious, connectedness, intuition. No how many times actual existential beings prove the generalizations false, the generalizations persist and their effect on human life is as constant and obvious as sunlight and gravity. Composition theory seems to be taking shape in my mind (admittedly male, even if I am extremely left-handed) in relation to these age old polarities.

Lunsford and Bizzell seem to define the female influence on composition. They stress the social context of a student. Bartholomae also stressed that social context, but as a sort of threatening, hegemonic influence that the individual had to fight against through rigorous rationality. Lunsford and Bizzell stress social context in a more benign way: as the natural setting from whence an individual comes and, even more importantly, the goal towards which an individual should strive, the place where he or she is integrated into the world of others.

Lunsford’s emphasis on collaboration seems paradigmatic of a female methodology. So, too, does Bizzell’s theory of a “holistic” manner of teaching. In my imagination, I can see her listening to two men arguing the points of inner and outer directed methods. She listens with, if not outright disgust, at least with impatience as the two ramble on and on. She sees them as two men who are so egotistically wrapped up in individual theories that they’ve lost contact with life on earth. Holistic teaching is something that is ultimately perceived through intuition, not rationalization.

I don’t mean to imply stereotypes when I talk of male and female principles. Although I’ve never met the women, I doubt that Lunsford and Bizzell got where without being aggressive individuals. I’m sure they fought against the stereotypical reception of their ideas even as the propounded the larger principles which supported the ideas. They probably had to fight those who saw collaboration as another form of gossip and holistic teaching as an inability to decide one way or the other.

I tend to get lost in theory. Shaynee’s comment that a teacher had to look at the goals of his or her students reminded me again of the context of teacher. When I think of teaching, I think of college—and not always undergraduate teaching. Most of theories we are studying seem aimed at that level. But for a teacher whose students are not demographically destined for the university, how does one find a method of teaching so that exceptions can be inspired and challenged while acknowledging the fundamental validity of not moving on. Male theory seems to be a one size fits all sort of thing—female theory seems more . . . contextual.

Scott on Graff

Scott’s presentation of Graff’s ideas struck a responsive chord in my experience of composition. In the last couple years, I’ve taken four writing workshops here at CSU-- two in fiction, two in creative nonfiction. All the courses have involved peer review. The stories I read, my own as well as others, are often rambling and unfocused. A person has to write for awhile before he or she begins to see what the story is really about. It often turns out that the first five pages are irrelevant to the resolution of the last page. That resolution is usually unsatisfying because it seems to come out of no where, it hasn’t been developed. Of course, it’s not always the case that the most effective writing appears at the end. The best writing, the clearest and most vivid, can appear anywhere in the body of the text and the story will leave it for things far less interesting. But one thing the resolution or those moments of truly gripping writing do is point to the main conflict. That conflict is the thing that has generated so many muddled, rambling words and images.
Once one knows the conflict, either through the resolution or as a result of contemplating what peers pointed out as the parts that most deeply affected them, the story can be revised to develop the conflict more clearly. The relation of disparate parts of the story can more closely related to the conflict—exactly how to they touch on the conflict in its development through time or theme? Those details which don’t relate can discarded as irrelevant and other details included which do relate to develop the story. In either case, the conflict becomes that point which organizes the piece.
I know this analysis of conflict seems to concentrate on composition theory as if were just a story, a fiction. But I can its relevance to Graff's approach to “academic obscurantism,” a way to approach the postmodern influence on theory to try to find a way to make those theories of relevance in a context where students and teachers actually exist. Argumentation (which necessarily involves focus on a conflict) as a meta-practice can function as well in an internal dialogue as well as a social one. Thanks, Scott, for a very engaged and evocative argument.

One politic response

The Elbow/Bartholomae debate—why did it become so publicized? I think it became such a hot topic because it so neatly invoked the words of the large political debate—that between conservatives and liberals.

The argument between conservatives and anticonservatives has been going on a long time. It can easily be read into the right/left movement of recent elections, the platforms of presidents from Bush to Clinton to Reagan/Bush to Carter. The dichotomy goes well beyond recent campaign rhetoric—back to the days when the constitution was debated into words as not so much a balance as a tug of war between state and federal governments.

The Elbow/Bartholomae conversation got caught up in this debate almost by accident it seems. Well, maybe it wasn’t quite by accident--Bartholomae did frame part of his argument against Elbow’s views of writing in a political context: it was conservative and promoted the status quo, an ideology of sentimental realism. But the neat fit of their pedagogy into the conservative/liberal debate depended on limited view both their platforms. I think they were both complicit letting certain aspects of their theories be emphasized by others and the rode the wave of public acclaim for awhile. But they weren’t the surfers that politicians are—they got too high on it and crested. Although teaching has political implications, neither of the two men was a politician. The same way, although writing has political implications, at some point, it is an individual shaping thoughts in words. I think the public pressure so many eyes critiquing their words made both men try to reclaim their status as teachers rather than political celebrities.

Elbow’s view of the self as a sort of Jeffersonian carapace filled an essence of fundamental, inalienable rights seemed to alter. He still used a singular article before the noun, but he acknowledged that the self was neither “unitary” nor “unchanging.” Bartholomae also modifies his stance. He acknowledged the “empowerment” that comes to a student who recognizes the validity of his own experience, that he is the “Author” of his life—even though he does turn his and mutter in writing that “authorship in that sense is a lie.”

I’m uncertain exactly what I should make of all this. In one sense, I think their fall from the spotlight proved Elbow’s point of view: a self is not synonymous with the political forces that shape them. Man does have some agency even if it’s only stepping out of the spotlight. But in another way, maybe the fact that both have been used and discarded by political forces proves Bartholomae’s position. Or maybe it just proves the two were men.

I think it interesting that women seem to be the ones pointing to the academic (in all senses) nature of the debate. Nancy quoted Lunsford as saying that the two aren’t that far apart in their views. Shaynee’s presentation of Bizzell’s argument that inner directed and outer directed approaches need to be combined in a holistic manner seems very much directed towards the Elbow/Bartholomae deabate--a sort of Hegelian application of history as a dialectical assumption of thesis by antithesis into synthesis. Emily, too, pointed out that the debate had run its course and was now a submerged part of any composition theory.

Still, looking back on the debate, it is interesting to wonder what it was truly about. I never did see Elbow as a “frontier guidesman.” He was always more a hippy guru to me and hardly an archetypal conservative. And I never saw Bartholomae as a radical so much as I saw him as a stern Puritan father chastising his children about the evil ways of the world.

Obama’s campaign focused on the ideological divide between parties, the divisiveness that has has paralyzed our government. He said that the legislators were so concentrated on reacting to whatever happened on the other side of the aisle that they weren’t seeing the problems that actually faced us. Like Graff “teaching the conflict,” Obama wanted to school the populace into a different perspective on approaching government. His argument that we could transcend dualities to become unified as Americans sounded good to enough people that he won election. I hope that his both/and approach is effective even while I know that either/or is as old as ying and yang and will always be a fundamental part of the decision making process. And writing, as well.

Lunsford

In reading for another class, I came across a line from Catherine Gallagher’s “Historical Scholarship’: ‘When critics specify exactly which aspect of authorial identity was thus threatened, it often turns out to be masculinity, and hence the submerged topic of the historical gender of authorship arises.” The phrase “historical gender” gave me pause. The author went on to put it into a context of the feminist desire to recover a history of women writers, but I couldn’t shake the anthropomorphic connotations of the phrase: the huge, dark body that keeps following on the heels of the present has a gender. In anthropomorphizing history, it does appear a single entity—genderizing it introduce a conflict. Exactly how does this entity work out its bipolar sexual identity?
I’m sure it is influenced by people like Lunsford. As Nancy gave her presentation, I didn’t develop an image of an individual woman so much I thought about a historical movement—an identity that has come about through a hard core social contructionist attitude. The idea of a “self creating, self expressive subjectivity” is historically gendered male. The ideas of Lunsford are opposed to this notion in every way possible: collaboration, ownership issues, multiple intelligences. I can see how she could regard the conservative/radical debate between Elbow and Bartholomae as academic.

Murray

I like the comparison/contrast manner of Tony’s presentation of Murray’s view of writing in relation to Elbow’s. Both focused on process and the chief difference seemed to be that Murray began writing with “a clear vision of the product”—even though he did welcome surprise in writing. Maybe that tone is the difference between a guy who wrote for newspapers and a guy who wrote for academia, a guy who often wrote with a definite subject matter in mind and a deadline and guy who didn’t. But when the both wrote about the process of writing, I don’t see much contrast.
In his ’72 article, “Teach Writing as a Process Not Product” (an article that predates Elbow’s first book on writing by a year), Murray’s views are identical to Elbow’s. Murray says that teaching writing by critiquing literature is teaching students to do an autopsy instead teaching them to make “language live.” He calls true writing the process of discovery through language, a process of revealing “the truth to himself so that he can tell it to others.” In the classroom, “we should teach unfinished writing, and glory in its unfinishedness.” In this focus on the student as an individual appropriating knowledge for himself rather than being appropriated by that knowledge into a system of discourse, the product-drivenness of Murray’s view of writing fades.
His major tenets (at least at this time) are exactly those of Elbow: the text of a writing course is the student’s own writing; the student finds his own subject, uses his own language; multiple drafts are written on the same subject; mechanics come last. Writing is a process that occurs between a fluctuation between two poles—unpressured time “to think and dream and stare out windows” and pressured time, “the deadline.” The latter parallels Elbow’s dichotomous view of writing: freewriting/critiquing, believing/doubting game.
In his ’78 article, Murray writes: “Most of all, we need to move from failure-centered research to research which defines what happens when the writing goes well.” In this I hear echoes of Elbow’s critique of methodological doubt: that it is focused on finding flaws rather than looking for positives in writing. If Elbow propounded a weird, hippy sort of attitude like the “believing game” to overcome the problem, Murray seems only slightly different, more in tone than substance.

On Ong

Ong says of his thesis in The Presence of the Word that it "is sweeping, but it is not reductionist, as reviewers and commentators, so far as I know, have all generously recognized: [my] works do not maintain that the evolution from primary orality through writing and print to an electronic culture, which produces secondary orality, causes or explains everything in human culture and consciousness. Rather, [my] thesis is relationist: major developments, and very likely even all major developments, in culture and consciousness are related, often in unexpected intimacy, to the evolution of the word from primary orality to its present state. But the relationships are varied and complex, with cause and effect often difficult to distinguish" (Interfaces of the Word, 1977: 9-10).
This business of cause and effect is one that gives me the heebie jeebies. It involves the notion of control, of agency. The aphorism, “good things come to those who work hard,” implies a notion of cause and effect that—no matter how often it has been proven wrong—still seems to be somehow true (at least, true enough in the realms of ethos and pathos to be an operative principle in deciding how to approach a life—or a class.
Logos is another thing, though. The sophists used the term to mean discourse, and Aristotle applied the term to rational discourse. The gospel identifies the Logos as divine. Second-century Christian Apologists identified Jesus as the Logos or Word of God, a distinct intermediary between God and the world. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (who would become Pope Benedict XVI) referred to the Christian religion as the religion of the Logos. It is my sense that both Ong and Kinneavy focused on language in a way that reflects this history. Language is essentially something that is rational and discursive, but separated from the pathos of the mundane world. Language is both an intermediary between humans and divine meaning and it also be seen a meaning itself. Of course, you don’t have to be religious to believe that the medium is the message, but it doesn’t hurt.
Ah well, my head’s starting to hurt, so I’m going to leave off this line of thought.
I enjoyed Eric’s presentation of Ong’s thoughts on the oral nature of language as cyclic; the connection (though not necessarily cause and effect) between the written word and notions of linear progress, between the printing press, democracy, and capitalism. I would have liked a more detailed description of secondary orality, though. Maybe I was too wrapped up in the theoretical world and I missed it, but would have to heard if Ong had some pedagogical methods for the classroom to incorporate those theories into the lives of students.

(Some of this is cut and pasted from Wikipedia.)

sources for Elbow

Bartholomae, David. “Writing With Teachers: A Conversation with Peter Elbow.” College Composition and Communication, 46 (1995), 62-71.
This article by Bartholomae was written six years after the debate with Elbow began. He argues that there no writing without teachers, that to hide the role of teacher is to “hide the traces of power, tradition, and authority present at the scene of writing.”
He also argues that Elbows classroom of uncritical comment is the longing for a utopian space “free from institutional pressures, a cultural process free from the influence of culture, an historical moment outside of history”—a sentimental longing for transcendence. Bartholomae would emphasize a classroom in time, present to all the forces that are acting on any cultural situation. Whereas Elbow has argued the teacher’s position as a coach of students in uncritical partisanship, Bartholomae would make the classroom “available for critical inquiry, for critique that is part of the lesson of practice.” Bartholomae does recognize the “empowerment” that comes to student who recognizes the validity of his own experience, that he is the “Author” of his life. But in a move that is reminiscent of both/and argument, Bartholomae says that authorship in that sense is also a lie.

Bartholomae, David and Elbow, Peter. “Interchanges: Responses to Bartholomae and Elbow.” College Composition and Communication, 46 (1995), 84-92.
In another installment of the debate, the two address each in written statements. Bartholomae begins by summarizing the argument between them: Elbow would encourage students to see themselves at the center of the discourse, trusting language to convey meaning whereas he would place them on the periphery and teach them to skeptical. Bartholomae begins by being dismissive of a student voice, opting instead to show how that voice is not hers but written by the culture as part of culture’s larger attempt to “preserve the idea of an independent, self-determining subjectivity.” The voice of a writer isn’t present until the student shows evidence of “work directed against writing (that is, against the culture’s desire to tell a certain story . . .).” Bartholomae says that he would spend more time reading in a writing course, difficult reading at that. He wants students to adopt a critical perspective on those texts in order that they can be “able to work closely with the ways their writing constructs a relationship with tradition, power, and authority—other people’s words.” Bartholomae also addresses the role of the teacher: whereas Elbow finds significance in appealing to what students can learn in the “absence of instruction,” he would have teachers who prompt students to write “in way that they would not if left to (not their own) but the culture’s devices.
Elbow answers that his approach isn’t in either/or opposition to Bartholomae, but an and/both approach. “You assume without argument that if I celebrate ‘independent, self-creative, self-expressive subjectivity,’ I must be against the notion of people as socially constructed;” he isn’t “attacking” academia so much as trying to reform it of it dependence on skepticism. Elbow defends the practice of freewriting, allowing the students space and permission to write whatever they want, saying that it is not just a celebration of the individual feeling but a practice that can show “more nakedly than other kinds of writing all the junk that culture and the past have stuffed into our heads.” Freewriting is a “paradigm of the real and the utopian: an example of how we can use our authority as teachers in our institutional settings to create artificial spaces that can heighten discovery and learning.”
Elbow also points out that Bartholomae does believe in a self governing power within the individual, one that “must engage in the critique of language and culture and recognize their power over us so that we can step somewhat out of the way.” Elbow suggests that if students “attend more and more closely to their experience,” they will come to the same realization but in a manner that allows them more self confidence and fulfillment.

Elbow, Peter. “The Believing Game—Methodological Believing.” Paper at the CCCC, New Orleans. Apr. 2008.
In this paper, Elbow describing the “believing game” which he now sees as “the core of all (his) work.” He defines the believing game as the discipline practice of “not just listening to views different from our own and holding back from arguing with them; not just trying to restate them without bias; but actually trying to believe them.” In justifying the attitude, he says it has been “evolutionarily” useful in educating children to the wisdom of parents and others with authority. In his book, Writers Without Teachers (73), he recommends it as the operative principle in a learning situation where peer writers share their work with each other.
The believing game is contrasted with the doubting game which Elbow defines as “the most widely honored and taught in our culture.” It is the methodological skepticism behind the scientific method and the doubting that questions religious and political authority. Elbow says that the success of that sort of doubting has caused us to lose sight of the necessary benefits that can come from the believing game.
While he believes that both modes of thought are necessary for good writing, he believes that the doubting game is so dominant in society that the believing game needs to be stressed in order to overcome the imbalance. The believing game can: 1) enable us to find flaws in our own thinking by exposing us to viewpoints other than our own normal one, an act which can reveal the assumption we normally don’t recognize; 2) enable a more extended analysis of competing points of view to see virtues in a position which the doubting game disqualifies on a sort of technicality of logic; 3) enable us to “achieve goals that the doubting game neglects” through exercising a different “dimension of intelligence” and a “different way of interacting with others.”

Elbow, Peter. “Voice in Writing Again: Embracing Contraries.” College English, 70.2 (Nov, 2007): 168-88.
Elbow stresses the importance of voice in writing, relating it closely to author’s intent. He asserts that “everyone have a real voice,” that voice is the “true self:” and source of “rhetorical power,” and that “the goal of teaching to develop the self.” He contrasts his position with that of others who claim that “we do not write, we are written by out culture. We are socially constructed, and what we mistake for a self is a subject position that changes as we are differentially interpellated from one social context of our life to another.”
Elbow traces these conflicting views through history. The Greek sophists, he says, believed that they could craft as speech that could be delivered effectively by any self. That view was opposed by Plato who said that the power of language came from the self who delivered the speech. Aristotle took a position between the two saying that speakers could fool listeners with a consciously constructed voice, but that one is more likely to believe a man of good character.
In modern times, Elbow traces the conflict to the New Critics. The NC’s stressed voice in a work, the persona that was embodied in the text. But they also stressed this persona was relevant only inasmuch as it was embodied “in the text.” The author’s intent was of no relevance. “They were interested in the self in a text but insisted that this self was continually made and re-made by language—not a reflection of the historical self or author.”
While Elbow takes the position that author is not dead and that his intent is a function of the work, he doesn’t discount the extent to which the self is created in a social context. He criticizes the either/or attitude that has separated the two views. He says that his own work has been represented by people who failed to see that he was “carving out a both/and analysis and making arguments that embrace contraries.” He isn’t rejecting the either/or attitude toward self as a private or public entity, but neither is saying that simply both/and approach is correct. Both are valid
He doesn’t argue for a compromise between the two points of view, but a fluctuation between them which will reveal perspectives that neither point of view alone could offer. His position is related to the doubting and believing game which he formulated twenty five years earlier. He argues for the ability to accept the contradictory notions which, while not synchronically logical, functions with the added element of time to create a self with social resonance.

Elbow, Peter. “Come to See Myself as a Vernacular Intellectual: Remarks at the 2007 CCCC General Session on Receiving the Exemplar Award.” College Composition and Communication, 59.3 (Feb 2008): 519-24.
Elbow begins by discussing his 1973 work, Writers Without Teachers. He says that he was “bothered by the gateway power that teachers have in institutional classrooms to determine a student’s experience of writing and the judge whether writing is good or bad.” His intention in Writers Without Teachers was to encourage writers to meet outside an institutional setting, that what writing needed was “naked empiricism: careful accounts of what written words make happen inside reader’s heads.” He knew that the ‘no arguing’ rule and the lack of authority or sanction to judge writing would cause dissent among professionals so included an appendix on the believing game in which he attempted to show “how deeply intellectual it is to harness both intellect and will in the task of trying to believe multiple and conflicting views.” Elbow says that his long term goal has been “visionary, but pragmatic too: to change our very conception of literacy so that all vernacular dialects and languages are deemed appropriate for serious writing.”
Elbow uses the term “vernacular intellectual,” coined by Grant Farred and developed by Carmen Kynard, to described his own career as one who “functions at the intersection of the intellectual and the popular.” That position is prominent in today’s cultural studies. Mohammed Ali and Bob Marley are examples of people who moved up from popular culture to take a place at the intersection while others, including Elbow, are people who have “turned away from the accepted, dominant intellectual modality and vocabulary” to adopt a “new positioning and idiomatic language.”

Elbow, Peter. “Being a Writer vs. Being an Academic: A Conflict in Goals.” College Composition and Communication, Vol. 46, No. 1 (Feb, 1995): 72-83.
Elbow again details the conflict he feels exists between being a writer (who principally functions through the believing game to create texts based on personal experience) and the academic (who functions through the doubting game to analyze given texts for relative meanings). He traces the conflict to the composition classroom and the nature of texts to be studied: are they peer created or are students asked to write about traditional texts? Although he uses both, Elbow primarily focus on the first.
Much of the essays is a discussion of the conflicting goals of the academic and the writer. Elbows associates the academic with readers who consider meaning to be fluid and indeterminate, who distrust the nature of language as a set of arbitrary symbols, who position themselves in the context of important others who have written on the subject. Writers are those who have an intention to communicate a certain understanding, who trust language to be able to communicate that understanding, and who Elbow sometimes encourages to act as if they were the only one to ever speak on the subject.
Elbow addresses some critiques of his position as “naïve” or “romantic,” that it encourages “arrogance” in the notion of self being above or apart from its relational nature to others. While he acknowledges that his position can “appear” this way, those appearances are deceptive in the same way that theory doesn’t always reflect empirical reality. It ignores the social nature of what actually happens in the classroom among individuals who study each other’s writing.

Elbow, Peter. “A Method for Teaching Writing.” College English 30 (1968): 115-125.
In the abstract of this article, Elbow states that he “proposes to teach writing from the hypothesis that true writing and good prose are only end products rather than the primary objectives.” He directs the teaching method toward college freshmen who aren’t already excellent writers (whether he has a different program for “excellent” writers is a question he doesn’t address).
Elbow identifies two criteria that teachers normally use to judge students writing: is the true in that good reasoning and documentation; is the writing good in effectively using form and style. Elbow identifies a third way of judging writing that isn’t normally used: “does the writing produce the desired effect in the reader.” He says that this quality “tends to be intangible and difficult to specify,” but it is the one that people exercise in judging language “whether consciously or not, from the day they begin to use language at all.” The course he describes is one to reestablish this basic premise: “putting words on paper to produce a desired effect.”
Elbow recommends writing letters to government officials or newspapers, anything the class can “take seriously.” Each member writes a letter which is then copied and distributed. Class hour is spent judging the effectiveness of each. Such an assignment enables a student to identify the skills he already possesses, to realize that he does “in fact have standards and criteria for judging writing.” Such a specifically imagined audience also helps the student clarify his writing. Elbow also discusses the benefits of peer review material saying that it helps students to study material that is flawed in order to better comprehend what makes good writing good, that they are more likely to accept the judgment of peers than they are a teacher’s, and that is it simply more interesting.
In the second half of the article, Elbow discusses his experience helping conscientious objectors write letters to the draft board during the Vietnam War. In helping the writers, Elbow says he discovered the importance of voice, the expression of self. This sort of writing stresses sincerity and belief, clarifies the understanding of rhetoric as “a transaction between the self and the audience.”

Elbow, Peter. “Opinion: The Cultures of Literature and Composition: What Could Each Learn from the Other?” College English 64 (2002): 533-46.
Elbow addresses the relationship between literature and composition teachers from the same point of view as he talks about being a writer vs. being an academic: from “a personal and subjective point of view,” in “large arguable generalizations” that are “based on my ‘feel’ or ‘sense’ of things.” He says that he misses the “comfort and pleasure” of planning a class around a literary text, but feels a duty to the students to teach in the more difficult manner of focusing on students and their own writing.
He says that he is writing at a time when people in “people in composition have taken to using rubber gloves for the word ‘process.’” He goes on to defend process in composition by saying that it parallels the way that close reading is still revered in critical theory even the school of New Criticism (which developed close reading as a technique) is now discredited.
The teaching of composition finally made Elbow feel “useful” in that his concern wasn’t just for teaching, but “also for students: attention, interest, and care for them, their lives, and what’s going on in their minds,” “a felt value in identifying with students.” He views literature as it is taught today (2002) as promoting a “distancing mode” of reading, of “critical detachment,” of reading a text as “a complex artifact rather than as a device for making sense of their (student’s) lives and feelings.” He isn’t promoting an “either/or” between the two perspectives, both are necessary, but he feels the approach that focuses on students personal lives—and the emotional attachment to issues that come from such an approach—is neglected to such a degree in the present culture that it needs to be emphasized in the composition classroom.
His argument is based on feelings—he says that as a student he felt was “supposed to learn to be in some subtle internal sense different—somehow ‘higher’ or ‘finer.’” But if his argument is mostly couched in his feelings, he also offers a defense for so doing by arguing that it is “a common failure of rationality or intelligence to restrict the definition of rationality to the exercise of conventional reasoning,” that there is a link between “feelings and cognition.” Focusing on feeling as a precognitive awareness enables a different perspective on the problem of false consciousness.

Fishman, Stephen M. and McCarthy, Lucille Parkinson. “Is Expressivism Dead? Reconsidering Its Romantic Roots and its Relation to Social Constructionism.” College English 54 (1992): 647-661.
In the first part of this paper, Fishman addresses the charges of social constructionists against expressionism, that it makes students “suckers” and “powerless” by failing to teach them an academic language, that it serves the forces of conservatism and the status quo by teaching them that they already possess everything they need to write well, and that it teaches a naïve view of the writer as independent.
Fishman agues against this perspective on expressionism as isolationist by comparing the expressionist view to that of German romanticism. He likens the age of Enlightenment to modern life wherein individuals were seen as independent and nature mechanical, a critical intelligence in opposition to larger forces, who banded together in uneasy political arrangements to protect themselves. Romanticism, in reviving interest in personal experience, Fishman identifies romanticism as an attempt to reestablish a connection between individuals in a “transformational” rather than a “transactional” manner. He views expressionist writing as more than simply self discovery, but an attempt to clarify and realize the fundamental connection between people. In this way, Fishman sees the radical nature of expressionism, not the conservative.
In the second part, McCarthy examines Fishman’s composition class to show how helping “students grow in their ability to understand their own experiences” is not “incompatible with learning disciplinary language” or other social constructivist goals. McCarthy conducts her study by monitoring the class and its writing and through student interviews. From this research, she provides examples of classroom activity in line Elbow’s methods and precepts which show that “expressivist and social contructionist approaches are not mutually exclusive.”

Gardiner, Ellen. “Peter Elbow’s Rhetoric of Reading.” Rhetoric Review 13 (1995): 321-330.
Gardiner begins by addressing criticism of Elbow’s methods as conservative and writer focused. She feels these comments ignore the social implications of Elbow view on the reader in the writing process. If Elbow can criticized as regards the social nature of his method, it’s that he tries to “manage” it, not ignore it.
“Discourse as used by human beings is always interested, always located in a person speaking and an audience listening.” Gardiner uses this Elbow quotation to establish the fundamental nature of writing as a social act. She identifies his method of discouraging criticism during peer reviews as a reaction to capitalism and its influence in the educational system—“Elbow wants to help insecure, vulnerable student writers stave off ‘hostile corporate takeovers’ of their texts by readers who have internalized the harsh critical voices of those who belong to the academic discourse community.” But in doing so, in limiting the exchange between writer and audience, he is preventing the dialogue from being authentically social.
Gardiner recommends more latitude in peer and teacher review of student writing: “to argue, to negotiate is, implicitly or explicitly, a necessary part of all authentic language relationships.”

Larson, Richard L. “Review: [untitled].” College Composition and Communication 25 (1974): 66-70.
The juxtaposition of these two book reviews from 1974 illustrates the impact of Elbows first book on writing, Writing Without Teachers. Larson criticizes a book by Donald Hall for not appreciating the history of composition enough to build on priori knowledge in the field and simply repeat the same information but with a slight difference in structure and style. Although he doesn’t use the term “current-traditional,” Larson critiques the book in much the same way in that it simply repeats long standing precepts and advice.
Of Elbow’s book, Larson identitifies new approaches: “a learning environment that is radically different from the environment Hall assumes;” Elbows interest in “what goes on in a writer’s life—in his mind—as he writes.” Of the latter, Larson writes: “That emphasis alone is enough to differentiate his book from virtually every book about writing now available.
Larson discusses the originality of ideas like freewriting and the doubting/believing games and calls the book, an “earnest” one.

Pemberton, Michael A. “Modeling Theory and Composing Process Models.” College Composition and Communication 44 (1993): 40-58.
Pemberton purpose in this paper is “to broaden the discussion of epistemology in composition studies by connecting it to research in the branch of scientific philosophy known as modeling theory.” He notes that as composition studies have become more theoretical, they have adopted methodoligies of the social sciences and are using models as conceptual frameworks to understand complex behaviors and structures for underlying patterns.
A model can be used by theoreticians whose concepts are so far removed from observation and experience to make explicit the connections between the theory and the everyday world, or a model can be use to organize a field of empirical data into a generalized or representative example. He examines the ways models are made for their epistemological and philosophical assumptions, how they can both help and hurt an understanding of the processes they are designed to describe. Pemberton uses the observations in relation to expressivist, social constructionist, and cognitive models in composition.

response to McGee and Eriksson

In this article, McGee and Ericsson revise the debate in composition between current-traditional rhetoric and those in the process movement. But whereas authors like Donald Stewart located the problems involved with the “doctrine of correctness” in uninformed teachers, the authors indentify a new direction from which the stultifying forces or conformity are coming—Microsoft Word. In their argument, the authors claim that Word is getting more “teaching opportunities” than English teachers. By virtue of its grammar and spell check options (always on in the default position), the Word program is insidiously inserting itself too early in the composing process and thereby short circuiting the uninhibited flow of thoughts on which good writing depends. Moreover, the grammar it teaches, based on algorithms and statistics, encourages a mechanistic view of language rather than an organic one.
Although I’m not impressed with the importance of this particular path in which technology is linked to an influence on language, it does serve to highlight the problematic nature of the relationship. Microsoft easily brings to mind the monopolistic tendency of corporations today: the wealth and global influence; its hegemonic influence that masks power as convenience; the way its products become so pervasive that the influence is unrecognized because it becomes so habitual.
Maybe if the authors linked the Word program to other ways technology is influencing language, their argument would be more convincing. As it stands though, it reminds me more of the facile way that the argument was shaped to define process against the education industry.

response to Matsuda

Matsuda calls relates the historical movement of process to post process a discursive practice that involves all the reductionism and name calling of ethnic warfare. Process came into vogue by a propaganda technique of naming the powers that be “current traditional.” It formed itself as a “new” entity by ignoring the history of its own beginnings—and how those beginnings were intertwined and implicated with that current-tradition power structure.
Post process isn’t any more unified than process was a movement which shared a definable epistemology or set of practices or philosophy. Ostensibly, process was a student based philosophy. But exactly what a student was—or how or what he should taught—was not a matter of consensus. For Matsuda, post process is nominally in vogue by the same method of name calling the enemy to hid its lack of understanding itself.
It calls to my mind the same general observations were made about the movement from structuralism to post structuralism and deconstruction. Derrida tried to deny he was a member of any particular school or movement, but that didn’t help. But it seems the post process people (that is, if they accept the label) have more appreciation for the power (in the political realm of institution sponsored theory) that comes from a name.

comment to Sidler

Sidler has a very fluid notion of the relationship between language and people. People use language, but are used by it. Technology, like culture, is a human creation that has a life of its own to use people for its own, almost anthropomorphized (vaguely insidious, power hungry, definitely heartless), purpose. And now, the factor by which this process occurs in increasing as another level is added to the equation. Humans who created language to communicated with each other, created a language to communicate with technology. That technology has become an agency with its own rules and logic that have gone beyond human control to change. And now, this two way conversation has added a third dimensional element—the cellular and chemical nature of life that has always been as hidden as a soul. The talk about essentialism and ethics becomes very complicated in Sidler’s world.
In this new world, she argues for the need of an ethics written in the words and sentences of everyday speech. That has been complicated in a relative universe that can only really be stated in mathematical terms. Exactly how we are supposed to cope practically with ethics in a universe where even the human body needs to expressed relatively is something Sidler deems the province of composition studies (with its head start in understanding language as symbols). I hope she knows what she’s talking about. Or not.

response to Williams

In his essay, Jeffrey Williams laments the fact that theory in relation to practical criticism is “no longer subordinate to practice but a significant if not the foremost activity, in and of itself” (282). He sees the wave of theory anthologies published in the late 80’s as having “polemical significance and legitimates a certain line of criticism and a particular direction of doing work” (282). The number of new texts formalizes for Williams the movement in literary studies from scholarship to criticism to theory.
For Williams, the formalization of theory is also the death of theory in a way. Being accepted into the academic classroom changes the nature of theory from a critical perspective outside a culture and its power structure to a sort of consumer product, closely related to “institution structures: the university and its exigencies—which includes professional concerns and pedagogical imperatives; the economics of publishing; the confluence of historical factors, such as the shift in the demands for legitimacy in a post-1960’s environment” (285).
Theory has become associated so closely with the theorist who had the principle hand in its development that a sort of personality worship has replaced the active principles involved in the theory. Williams argues that these histories are misleading in another way: they tend to make all theory appear to be the same in relation to importance or sphere of influence.
To compensate for the foreshortening effect, Williams recommends that theory be taught in to “institutional-professional narratives” as well as “historical narratives” in order to construct a temporal and spacial context in which to give more dimension to the theory narrative.

response to Schultz

Lucille Schultz looks at 19th century composition from a perspective like that of Donald Stewart which opposes a “doctrine of correctness” with a more organic view of composition. Schultz identifies the current-traditional approach as “dominated by grammar, rules, style, abstract topics, and other easily named features” (10) and locates it as the dominant approach in the mid 19th century, especially at the university level. She also identifies an opposing point of view in some text books aimed at younger students.
Her essay takes the form of an argument in which she brings up a point from the dominant theory and opposes it with suggestions from the marginalized texts. To three current-traditional guidelines found the olds texts—“students learn to write by learning rules; young writers are not capable of inventing their own subject matter; and students write about general, abstract topics” (14)—Schultz gives examples of a counter approach in the other texts that value personal experience and learning to write by writing. The purpose of her essay is to acknowledge these dissenting viewpoint and to show how they prefigure much of contemporary composition theory.

response to Fulkerson

Like Dante giving order to chaos in The Inferno, Fulkerson seeks to systematize composition theory. Unlike concentric circles, he graphs the various theories on a grid. One axis plots the “axiology” or intention of the theory, the other plots more empirical elements like specific process, pedagogy, and evaluative elements and the epistemology on which those elements are based.
The axiologies he defines are “critical/cultural studies, expressivism, and procedural rhetoric” (655). The first two would seem to be dialectical pairs. In cultural studies, the emphasis is on the varied forces which work to shape the fluid self; in an expressivist view, the emphasis is more on self as unified and autonomous. The third approach, rhetorical, would seem to be a sort of synthesis between the two. Rhetoricians are generally not comfortable with “the claim that ‘all truth (reality) is a social construct’” (671), but they do hold that the purpose of comp theory is more focused on the individual in a social context than as an independent entity: “composition as argumentation, genre-based composition, and composition as introduction to an academic discourse community” (671).
Most of Fulkerson’s essay is concerned with describing how each of those schools of intention are manifested, detailing how the classes are taught as well as implications for the supposed “process” which happens in a student’s mind as he writes in accord with the axiology.
But in the final paragraph, Fulkerson suddenly turns from a primarily descriptive mode to a valuative one. He calls the current situation “dangerous” for comp studies. The different schools are set in their own grids and there is no unification in sight.

response to Stewart

Donald Stewart’s article places the composition teacher in a universe that has distinct parallels to the universes of Bishop and Popken. The comp teacher is unappreciated and at odds with a mechanistic institution.
Stewart focuses on writing that is based on a “principle of organic unity” in which the writer gives himself over to the subject and lets it guide him to the proper form in which the composition should take. That the subject itself should have some essential nature to be given form isn’t too far removed from a view of the individual as having some unique quality which needs to be expressed in the surrounding world.
The rules of grammar and spelling, the tradition of teaching set forms for composition, even the “current-tradition” of rhetoric and theory which posit deterministic forces are set in opposition to this unfolding of an organic unity. This “doctrine of correctness” (136) results in the “tyranny of mental habit” (137) with the result that writer doesn’t trust himself enough to “submit implicitly to the guidance of his subject” (137).
But unlike Popken, Stewart does posit a way out of determinism and into freedom of choice. Much as Freud posited freedom of choice through a process of analyzing the ways one’s behavior has been determined by unconscious forces, so too can the comp teacher can free himself from the dominance the “current-traditional approach.” It is a rigorous and ironically rational program to achieve this mystical union with the organic unity: “read and assimilate recent research on invention, arrangement, and style; on protocol analysis and problem-solving; on rhetorical epistemology; on the recursiveness of the composing process . . .” (139) That’s just a partial list.
Unlike Bishop and Popken, Stewart doesn’t emphasize the affective element of such a process. Burnout and alienation from the dominant discourse don’t win out. That the writer is granted some mystical union with his subject seems to pave the way for the comp teacher to achieve some union with larger world of students and colleagues.

response to Popken

Randall Popken approaches his essay with a very similar view of the individual as that of Bishop. In choosing Edwin Hopkins as a historical archetype of the composition teacher, he has choose a man who was devoutly Christian, who believed he had a “calling” to teach—definitely a man who believed he had a choice in life. As a Christian, Hopkins equated the self with a soul. The self like the soul was an autonomous entity that wasn’t fundamentally changed by secular forces like psychology or politics. Moreover, the soul/self is set in opposition to these forces. No wonder then that Hopkins had such a tough time administering his duty in the profane world of the university.
Hopkins believed in a pedagogy in which “each student (. . .) should receive as an individual the attention of the instructor” (621). He believed that teaching comp wasn’t a process of lecturing to large numbers of students, but a process of reading large numbers of student-written papers. The time consuming nature of such a process wasn’t appreciated by an administration that was more attuned to the philistine world of science and commerce.
Popken details Hopkins’ attempts at labor organizing. Like Bishop’s longing for a “Burkean parlor” (325), Hopkins wants an environment where he and his colleagues feel a little more appreciated. But that doesn’t happen and—again paralleling Bishop’s article and her concern with “burnout”—Hopkins suffers a physical and emotional debility.
In choosing a man whose fundamental conception of self as entity forever separate from the world around it, Popken has almost guaranteed an unhappy ending to a story in which one seeks to be appreciated by that world. But then, the godless Marxists didn’t have much more success in the endeavor. Popken doesn’t formulate any suggestions to change the situation. Like a religious view of man’s fate, he seems to suggest that world is forever the same as it always was and will be and you just better get used to suffering.

response to Bishop

Wendy Bishop sums up the thesis of her address to the CCCC in one sentence: “Acknowledging institutional fatigue, I outline possibilities for individual renewal.” In the great debate on whether composition should emphasize the individual as a sort of autonomous whole or the social and political forces which shape individuals, Bishop approaches her topic from the first perspective. Compositionists, she says, are a “dedicated minority by choice: as agents instead of as those acted upon” (324). In positing free will, Bishop both defines the essential nature of self and uses it as the fulcrum for her argument.
Opposed to the individual is the institution of English education, a place where “activities and theories were being discarded or overwritten even as I felt I was just beginning to gain success with them,” a place where “scholarship appear(ed) to have a decade’s currency, if that long” (327). Staying current with changing theory and the various perspectives they offer of identity causes “burnout” (327). But again, she emphasizes the nature of man as opposed to the mechanistic universe as a way out of the problem. After comparing her colleagues to rocket ships crashing in the desert, she says: “I know these individuals continue because they have chosen to” (329).
Bishop restates the fundamental dilemma by quoting Joe Harris. Harris thinks that a different theory of intellectual life needs to be created: “one that admits to the ways in which we are positioned by gender, race, and class, but that also holds out the hope of a more fluid and open culture in which we can choose (emphasis his) the positions we want to speak from and for” (330).
In Bishop’s article, choice and free will trump the determinism of theory and leads to an education environment that is “not theory or practice, this or that, it’s person to person” (332).

What is comp theory

What is comp theory? Well, to the carpenter in me, it is a much simpler thing. It’s the way to compose a house—the most ergonomic way to hold the nail gun, the proper order of walls to be built, nailing patterns and bracing. It’s spacial and sequential, and revising is not a thing one plans on. It’s a one-way method that I’ve grown comfortable with. Unfortunately, that isn’t the comp theory I’m probably supposed to be talking about. Writing about.

In my mind, comp theory presupposes a teacher and students. A teacher has some sort of knowledge or understanding that he or she is trying to pass on to the students. Comp theory is about that relationship.

Comp theory questions both sides. Of the teacher, it asks: what is the nature of the understanding that a teacher possesses? Is it an objective knowledge of proper syntax and grammar? Or the themes that have been embodied in literature—how they are manifested in the words; the historical changes they undergone? Comp theory would seem to say that this is an old fashioned view—by objectifying knowledge, by considering it to be a factual as a rock, one’s underlying motive is more to preserve the status quo than enlighten the student as the forces that are constantly shaping one’s view of one self and the world.

Comp theory would seem to be about enabling students to express themselves. But if—in theory—the objective self is a sentimental illusion and the world keeps surpassing the concepts and attitudes that describe it, what exactly can one teach another? It would seem that the only thing properly taught is a process of change and flux.

Comp theory is about strategies to deal with the changing nature of understanding the self and the world. What type of assignments are given to enable the diversity students to each acquire this understanding? Are the assignments given to groups of students to work on collaboratively or individually?

At this stage in the class, my understanding of comp theory is awfully theoretical. I am not a teacher. I don’t have the hands-on experience to be able to immediately transfer these ethereal concepts into flesh and blood situations.

I came back to the university a few years ago because I wanted to write. I’d gotten my undergraduate degree twenty five years earlier and spent a good of intervening years trying to write stories—without much success. At the start of every writing workshop I’d entered during those years—and even the ones I’ve taken here at CSU—the teacher usually threw out the disclaimer that “no one can teach you how to write.” I’ve spent a number of years figuring out exactly what is meant by that.

These days, I think it relates to something Jane Smiley said. She was being interviewed about the process of revision in developing character and theme. “Where every student eventually arrives is a place where the formal problems of the work are the same as the psychological problems of the student and the philosophical problems of the student’s world-view.” At that point, only the writer can make the story work.

But although there is definitely a psychological aspect to writing and one would hope the process is therapeutic, writing is not psychotherapy. Writing seems to be a much more self contained act where both teacher and student, analyst and analyzed, are located within the writing individual. At least it seems so in my case—not being a teacher and unsure whether or that profession lies in my future. At this point, I’m more interested in comp theory from the student’s perspective than the teacher’s, how it applies to the act of writing itself. How, exactly, does one learn the thing that no one can teach?

On page 12 of the COMPbiblio text, the synopsis of a David Bartholomae article addresses an issue that plagues me when I think about theory in regard to writing--or maybe the issue simply plagues in me about writing in general. Bartholomae is responding to an article written by Peter Elbow in which he feels Elbow is perpetuating the myth of "an independent, self-creative, self-expressive subjectivity." Bartholomae suggests that this sort of attitude creates the false impression that the self precedes the forces which act on it, that it devalues the political forces and psychological mechanisms which operate to shape the self. He asks if the university has a right to perpetuate these myths which relate to ego and power by asking students to "participate in a first person, narrative or expressive genre whose goal is to reproduce the ideology of sentimental realism . . . a narrative that celebrates a world of private life and whose hero is sincere." Not just studying particular texts or authors would seem debated here, but whether holding students individually responsible for papers and grades might not be unconsciously teaching them beogeouise values. I was relieved to read that he answered tenatively "yes."

I'm a WASP male in my fifties. I grew up in a small town in Iowa, the son of Lutheran parents. My idea of a self is still tinged by connonations of a soul, some essential element that isn't subject to time or worldly forces. My parents did have the grace to posit this soul beyond race or gender, but it is still a concept that gives me problems when I study theories that posit almost any notion of self as illusory. Identity at its most definitive is a composite thing shaped by everything from global to peer group pressures, from economic to sexual forces. It's not hard to believe all these things are at work at once, but how to unify them in a soul-like self is hard. I'd like to posit some mechanism not unlike Freud's superego, some free floating demiurgic entity which runs around in my psyche creating little pathways of connection between the various identitys until the web is so thick that it becomes one thing. But since a mechanistic view of psychology doesn't seem valid anymore either, that concept doesn't hold much more promise than soul.

I think I am going to take some refuge in the ideas of people like Wendy Bishop and Peter Elbow. Bishop promotes a connection between composition and creative writing, which I transcribe as a way to connect theory with my personal life. She also discusses the "process and art of revision--and its importance to the classroom--through personal narrative" (25). It sounds like how I regard the process of writing, a way of distilling the facts of my life for the essential connections it shares with others.

But Peter Elbow might be my hero. He was told by "numerous professors that he could not write well" (77) so became a writer. He's apparently developed methodologies to overcome the "writing axiety phenomenon" (78)--I'm definitely going to look those up. "He even questions his own early desire to be the perfect student" (78). Sounds to me like he's grappling with his self as if his soul depended on it, too.