Listening to and
Learning from Popular Representations of Literacy and Writing Instruction
Rebecca Moore Howard
rehoward@syr.edu
Conference on College Composition and Communication
Session F35, "Composition and Its Publics"
San Antonio, Texas, 25 March 2004
In composition circles today, it is common to hear allusions to The Day, in which our field worried about means of becoming a discipline. That time, it is assumed, is past; we are now a discipline, established as a discipline; hence claims to disciplinarity need no longer consume our discourse.
This assumption is fallacious, itself functioning as a claim to disciplinarity and thus an argument for that status. But because it is now taken up as an assumption rather than an argument, all sorts of unfounded or questionable claims are being made. Recently, for example, I heard comp/rhet compared to mid-century linguistics. Just as linguistics established Ph.D. programs, scholarly journals, and thus legitimacy as a discipline, so now has composition. Because composition is now assumed to have disciplinary status, such comparisons can be made while ignoring the contrasts. Disciplinarity, Sharon Crowley makes clear, is founded on "the disinterested pursuit of knowledge" (253-254).
Yet regardless of whether composition has established itself as a discipline, its original exigence continues to dominate public and academic conceptions of the field. And that is not a holdover from the past, something that people will eventually be dissuaded of. It is a continuing, implacable feature of composition studies: the field exists for the purpose of teaching correct writing standards to error-making students. That exigence may imply the empowerment of those students, giving them access to the standard code and the socioeconomic power associated with it. Or it may imply an institutional means of keeping those same students down, demonstrating to them that their class- and race-based home codes are part of the circumstances that will forever serve to exclude them from the circles of power.
But regardless of how one interprets the correctness-based, remediation-driven exigence
of composition studies, that exigence is a constant for the field. We cannot now, nor will we ever be able
to, retreat to the exclusive "disinterested pursuit of knowledge." Abolishing
first-year composition doesn't erase the exigence; nor does the proliferation of Ph.D. programs and scholarly
journals. Comp/rhet has always
been and will remain different
from other disciplines, fueled and funded by a culture-wide desire for
correctness-based instruction in writing.
The "and funded" part of the preceding sentence is
crucial. When writing programs are
perceived to have failed their Prime Directive,[1]
they are closed down and outsourced.
As Tom Miller has pointed out, this outsourcing can take
not-readily-visible forms; in his
analysis, the excessive use of adjuncts is a form of outsourcing composition,
in that it deprofessionalizes composition, relegating it to non-scholarly
"work" that is not supported as part of the research mission of the
university. And of course
outsourcing can become very visible, indeed, when writing center work is
outsourced to proprietary companies such as Smarthinking.comÑreducing, as
Christina Murphy and Joe Law observe, "the role of the physical space of
the writing center and the physical bodies of tutors and tutees"
(134). Back in 1997, the Chronicle
of Higher Education described the move to
outsource remediation to Kaplan and Sylvan Learning Systems (Gose). Since then, we've seen basic writing
programs discontinued at one university after another, outsourced to community
colleges. Yet another means of outsourcing is to
take comp instruction out of the hands of comp/rhet professionals and turn it
over to literate folk whose ideas accord with public representations. It is possible, I believe, to see recent
events at the University of Florida in these terms. Apparently because of institutional perceptions that the
writing program was insufficiently focused on a common syllabus of
correctness-based pedagogy, the teaching of writing was outsourced from the
English department to others in the university who demonstrated explicit
adherence to the Prime Directive.
Because composition instruction itself is widely regarded as remedial, the threat of outsourcing is one that every writing program should take seriously. If we want to continue teaching college composition in what we consider to be responsible ways, we have to avoid incurring sufficient institutional wrath or indifference that we cease to have the opportunity to teach college composition at all.
But I want to focus not on institutional threat but on dialectic possibility. If we collectively or individually think of our institutional relationships only in agonistic waysÑ"they" might shut us down!Ñor if we think of ourselves as a discipline comparable to others in the academy, without recognizing the enduring difference of the Prime Directive, we miss the possibility of acting, collectively and individually, as public intellectuals in contemporary society.
That's what I'm advocating today: that instead of denying, ignoring, or arguing with the public and institutional investment (some might well say "interference") in the work of composition studies, we engage with it, developing an academic field that is, on a fundamental level, in a dialectic with its publics.
Too quickly we might move to the received models of the public intellectual, that genius who acts alone and who instructs not only his (that's a deliberate pronoun choice) students but the entire society. I see two dangers in that two-part model.
One danger is that the public intellectual, as commonly understood, is a variation on the heroic individual. Richard Ohmann refers to the public intellectual as the "freely speculating mind" that pursues "wide-ranging, curious, adventurous, and humane study," and who pursues this study "far beyond professional boundaries" (745). Similarly, Stephen Parks names an individual, Lionel Trilling, as an exemplary public intellectual (240). Often these public intellectuals become superstars, functioning as academic capital that institutions hope to acquire for themselves (Healy)ÑCornel West comes to mind. At other times they are heroic critics of those very institutions, the sorts of faculty whom administrators tolerate with clenched teeth. (I won't name any examples of this category; you can supply your own!) Karl Marx speaks to this version of the public intellectual when he refers to "the contribution made by certain intellectuals to the production and diffusion, especially among the dominated, of a vision of the social world that breaks with the dominant vision. . ." (Bourdieu, Language 244). Marx's successor Antonio Gramsci takes up this theme of the organic intellectual, he who would be "the voice of the oppressed class" (Villanueva 58).
A second danger of the familiar figure of the public intellectual is his position of superiority to the public whom he would instruct. In some accounts, the public intellectual will save the public from its worst impulses; hence Harriet Malinowitz's call for public intellectuals who are "galvanized by the notion that independent, thoughtfully articulated ideas matter, and need to be heard by a populace often narcotized by the myth of national consensus." Quite frankly, I share Malinowitz's concern for the myth of national consensus, and I applaud those public intellectuals who are successfully challenging it. My concern is not with the existence of such agents, but with the possibility that we in composition studies might not recognize this as just one model of the public intellectual. And the center of my concern is with the public intellectual as superior figure.
It would be lovely to have compositionists achieve the public stature of Noam Chomsky and Skip Gates. Now, that would be validation of disciplinary status! And it is essential that compositionists take responsibility for (in the words of Scott Lyons' graduate course description) the task of "writing back to the 'New World Order.'"
But I believe our discipline would benefit from the activity of a third type of public intellectual, as wellÑwhat I'll call the "dialectic" public intellectual. Stephen Parks' description of public intellectuals offers only a binary choice: knowledge production as the provenance of universities, or of corporations (240). I'd like to propose a third possibility: knowledge production as the provenance of universities working with and listening to their publics. Our discipline has embraced the underlying principle of community engagement, and Parks is himself one of the exemplary practitioners of that principle.
Our discipline has not, however, rushed to apply the principle of community engagement to the definition of our "own" work. To work with our publics to define our own work would be to assert our disciplinary status as different from rather than identical to all those other disciplinesÑearth sciences, human geography, linguistics. And it would be to open the door to the very thing that we have been so energetically arguing against: the image of writing and writing instruction as based in correctness. We can't allow reductive public misconceptions to take us back to the bad old days of current-traditionalism!
Yet I want to propose that we can and should position ourselves as dialectic public intellectuals, talking with and listening to our publics about the very nature of the work we do in our classrooms. I do not believe that this would necessarily deliver us to current-traditionalist pedagogy. To make that assertion is to engage in us-versus-them scare tactics. Nor do I believe it would undercut our status as an academic discipline. Rather, it would acknowledge the particular terms of our disciplinary status, and engage those terms in constructive ways.
This is not a simple task. It requires tools and attitudes that our field has yet to develop. So I would like to conclude my talk today by listing some of what I believe are necessary components of developing practices of dialectic public intellectual work:
1. We should undertake that work not as heroic individuals but as disciplinary collectives. This principle is provided by Pierre Bourdieu, who asserts that public intellectuals are most effective when they become an "autonomous collective individual" (42). Elementary school teacher Cathy Fleischer acts on a parallel principle when she builds a coalition of teachers and parents to successfully challenge state-mandated language arts content standards. In Fleischer's account the teacher is still in a superior situation, charged with "the task of informing and educating others" (5), but that teacher is at least not a heroic individual but a member of a collective.
2.
We should undertake that work with the assumption that we have
much to learn from our publics. I
am not proposing that we simply take our mandate from those publics and act on
it. Although Katherine K.
Gottschalk has offered a persuasive argument for the writing program's first
making itself integral to the already-established institutional agenda, and
then working from within to improve and revise that agenda (23), I do not
believe that this is a viable option when it comes to sentence-level
instruction. That would precipitate a return to current-traditionalism. Gottschalk's program for WAC work in
the university simply would not translate to issues of sentence-level
pedagogyÑnor does she propose that it should. Writing programs that devote themselves to sentence-level
pedagogy may win the favor of their publics, as Elizabeth Deis asserts for the
Hampden-Sydney writing programÑbut they raise the possibility of being charged
with having ignored the principles of writing and writing instruction that have
been developed over years of scholarship and practice in composition studiesÑas
Deis says has been the case when her writing program has undergone external
review. I am most definitely not
acceding to the demand of Stanley Fish, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at
the University of Illinois-Chicago, who declares, "Every dean should forthwith insist that all composition courses teach grammar
and rhetoric and nothing else." But at the same time, I am not subscribing to the underlying
assumptions of a statement made by Douglas Park in the 1979 College
English, when he asserted, "Most of
those outside departments of EnglishÑand too many inside themÑthink of writing
ability as a single thing or as a very simplistic relationship between clear
thinking and correct expression" (53). The subtitle of Park's article, significantly, was "On
Conceiving Composition and Rhetoric as a Discipline." And Park's statement is no less
inflammatory, no more dedicated to exploration and inquiry, than is
Fish's.
If
we can get past the illusion of a new discipline to compare with established
disciplines and if we can think of our conversations with the public as
potentially reciprocal rather than one-way instruction, we might be able to
work as collective public intellectuals to understand why our publics hold so tightly to the never-realized
ideal of sentence-level correctness.
Can we continue simply to write off Fish's assertion as an ill-informed
statement; as false
consciousness; or as complicity in
the operation of hegemony? Or can
we give such public concerns and demands an authentic hearing, using our skills
at rhetorical analysis to find the truth in them, rather than looking only for the fissures in their
logic? Can we make of first-year
composition something or than a retreat from or, in Crowley's words, "a
gesture toward general fears of illiteracy among the bourgeoisie, fears
generated by America's very real class hierarchy" (235)? As things stand today, our field is too
much given to speaking of a binary, mutually exclusive pair of desiresÑours and
theirs. We speak of "selling
out" to public desires. We
talk about "market forces" overwhelming the integrity of our
field. We speak of two products,
two writing programsÑtheirs and oursÑand we try to enforce our will over
theirs.
3. So I advance a third principle that I believe is essential to developing a new model of public intellectualism: dialectic. Not dialogue. "Dialogue" assumes an easy give-and-take, a conversation among equals. And there is no equality in our conversations with our publics. They hold the purse strings; we hold a deep understanding of writing, writing instruction, and the social uses of writing for maintaining economic and class hierarchy. These are not conditions of equality. So instead of dialogue, I speak of dialectic. But still I need to specify my terms. My advocacy of dialectic does not refer to the Hegelian variety, in which thesis is followed by antithesis and finally synthesis; I do not believe that our work as public intellectuals on the topic of what we should be teaching will come to a synthesis. There will be no resolution. Nor am I advocating the Marxist variety of dialectic as struggle that results in the defeat of one side and the victory of the other. There will be no victories. Rather, I am advocating what I would call a Nietzschean dialectic, one in which the process of debate is the outcome. Engaging in dialectic becomes an end in itself; everybody engaged in that debate becomes better informed about the possibilities and their implications; everybody exercises a measure of respect for divergent points of view, in contrast to the contemptuous terms in which so much of the conversation about first-year composition and sentence-level pedagogy now takes place.
We have to learn to listen; to listen respectfully; to make our publics co-inquirers in our work; to incorporate their perspectives into our work; to bring to them the fruits of the expertise we have developed in our classrooms and our journals. Not just to avoid the withdrawal of funding, but to genuinely engage our teaching of writing with the writings that are familiar to our publics, we have to listen and learn.
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[1] "It is forbidden to all spaceships and members of Starfleet to interfere with the normal development of any culture or society. This directive is more important than the protection of spaceships or members of Starfleet. Losses are tolerated as long as they are necessary to observe this directive." <http://www.trainerscity.com/startrek/primeen.php3?lang=en>. Accessed 12 March 2004.