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.