Rebecca Moore
Howard Keynote
address
Syracuse
University Fall
Retreat
22
August 2002
The Violence and Promise of
the New Curriculum
Welcome one and all to a new
year in the Syracuse Writing Program, a well-established, nationally renowned
undergraduate and doctoral program.
We have reached a critical moment in the history of the program, one in
which that very history is at stake.
A major task for me in the coming year is information management: preserving and organizing the texts
that document the history of this program. By year's end, I hope to have online and hardcopy archives
that make the philosophies and practices of this program readily accessible to
researchers in composition and rhetoric, as well as to members of this program
who want to learn about or review the present practices or history of this
program. Among the online archives
will be a bibliography of publications about this program. I think we'll all be surprised and
proud to see how extensive that bibliography will be. As we work together on this project, Michael Lasley and I
will be contacting many of you with questions such as "when was this
document written and by whom?" As we begin a year of implementation for
the new 105/205 curriculum, it's important that we not lose the textual traces
of our past.
By now everybody in the program
has a pretty good idea of this new Writing 105 and 205 curriculum that we'll
all be teaching this year. Many
pilot sections of this curriculum were taught last year, and Spring Teaching
Conference was devoted to the pedagogy of the curriculum. Now, however, we'll all be teaching
these new courses, and it is my informed belief that the continuing vitality of
WRT 105 and 205 as required courses at Syracuse University depends on our
collective success. Throughout
American higher education, the era of genteel affability regarding the pedagogy
of required composition courses is behind us. We are now in an era of accountability. This is a decidedly uncomfortable
transition for us, but it is not an entirely bad one. Explaining the principles
of chaos theory as they apply to organizational change, Susan McLeod and Eric
Miraglia say, "Problems are our friends (problems are inevitable and you can't learn without
them)." [1] In the
same vein is one of my favorite quotations, from Peter Elbow in 1983:
"Good learning is
not a matter of finding a happy medium where both parties are transformed as
little as possible. Rather both
parties must be maximally transformedÑin a sense deformed. There is violence in learning. We can not learn something without
eating it, yet we can not really learn it either without letting it eat
us" (331).[2]
If this writing program's
experience as it moves into the age of accountability is to be productive and
not merely painful, we must accept that we are, in fact, in a position of being
learners. We don't already know
how to teach in an age of accountability.
On the contrary, what we know about accountability is to fear it. The phrase "teaching to the
test" turns our blood to ice.
Accountability means the death of authentic pedagogy.
Or does it? What I want to suggest today is that we
can turn accountability to our advantage.
In fact, we have already set upon that path.
The accountability comes from
Middle States, our accrediting body.
It comes from our dean and from our vice chancellor. It comes from the Vice Chancellor's Signature
Committee on Writing, and from the Advisory Committee on Writing in the College
of Arts and Sciences. It comes to
us from Undergraduates for a Better Education. And it comes from within this program. The demands for accountability are
fairly straightforward: what's
wanted is that we teach in such a way as to benefit our students in their
college writing and that we teach in such a way that our students' selection of
a section of a writing course is not a game of Russian roulette. In other words, one of the demands of
accountability is that the multiple sections of a single course be recognizable
from one section to another by someone other than the teachers. Let me put it simply: our students should be able to
recognize that their section of WRT 105 is the same course as the section that
their roommates are taking.
Otherwise, how can we justify its being a required course?
So the Lower Division Committee
has labored for two years and produced two well-designed documents, learning
outcomes for WRT 105 and 205. This
fall we will all be teaching WRT 105 syllabi that speak to fourteen learning
outcomes, addressing:
Friends and neighbors, that's a
tall order for a single course.
We've talked a lot already about how we're each going to do this, and
the rest of this day will be devoted to continuing that discussion about both
WRT 105 and 205Ñas will our coordinating groups and colloquia this year. A number of teachers in our program
have already demonstrated how well these fourteen outcomes can, in fact, be
incorporated into a single successful course. It takes workÑlearningÑviolence to many of our previously held beliefs and
practicesÑbut it can be done, and done well.
Our new curriculum also demands
that we all adhere to common grading practicesÑincluding the stipulation that
70% of final course grades in WRT 105 and 205 will be based on instructors'
evaluations of students' finished, formal texts. This is a bold move, I know, but one that I wholeheartedly
endorse. We need to be known among
our students and colleagues as people who teach process not for its own sake
but as a means of enhancing learning and producing finished, polished
texts. I'm well aware that no text
is ever really, really finished.
Yet I am equally aware that every text must finally be delivered. I must deliver this keynote address to
you this morning. Our students
must deliver their completed assignments to their instructors. We writers must deliver our manuscripts
to our editors. We Writing
teachers need to be known among our students and colleagues as people who take
finished texts seriously and are willing and able to make judgments about those
texts. And our final grades need
to signal to our colleagues what our judgments are.
In the year that is upon us, we
will all teach the new curriculum, we will follow its grading standards, we
will debate the details of both, and we will make necessary revisions. We will ask our students to evaluate
our success in delivering the new curriculum, and our program's evaluation of
teaching will include the question, "How successful is this teacher in the
new curriculum?"
These are, in my home
vernacular, "big doin's" in the Writing Program. Does it mean we'll now be doing our own
version of "teaching to the test"? I surely hope not. If it does, it means we have
failed. If we all join together in
lock step, we are marching to the wrong drummer. For the real challenge before us is not to teach a
curriculum aimed at academic writing and bearing recognizable similarity across
sections, but to do so in our own individual ways. Our real challenge is to teach this curriculum while
remaining the exciting, innovative, individual teachers that the Syracuse Writing Program is justly
famous for. Yes, we have to
change. We can't just dress up our
old stuff so that it looks like what's being asked for; that won't get by. But we do have to retain, in our new
classes, the elements that made our previous curriculum nationally famous in
its day: our courses, for example,
must continue to be based on the principle of inquiry rather than top-down
delivery of foundational principles.
I am particularly happy about the last two items in the WRT 105 learning
outcomes, the ones that address contemporary
authorship and the social consequences of literacy standards. I have high hopes that these learning
outcomes, taken seriously by both teachers and students, will help us keep at
bay the counterrevolutionary tendencies that Harriet Malinowitz has associated
with writing across the curriculum.
Most of us in composition and rhetoric think of our work as
oppositional, subversive of the academic status quo. Harriet points out that WAC instruction can too easily accept
hegemonic disciplinary standards. If writing in the disciplines is going
to actually accomplish a subversive agenda, she says, its students need to
learn how "to examine the extensive, though largely hidden, hybridity of
disciplines; they should learn
"how disciplinary conventions and belief systems are structures";
they should read "the work of non-canonical as well as established members
of the field"; and they
should evaluate "the reasons existing disciplinary margins and centers
contain the particular inhabitants they do. . . . Students should know that they have strategic choicesÑto
play by the established rules or to challenge themÑand should be helped to find
appropriate support for either choice" (309).[3] What
Harriet says about WAC and WID is equally applicable to a Writing curriculum
that focuses on academic writing.
If we are to facilitate our students' college writing without simply
initiating them into the status quo, we need to maintain in our curriculum a
critical perspective on the very task that we are undertaking. And, to
use our WRT 105 learning outcomes as a laboratory, I have high hopes that
addressing issues of contemporary authorship and the
social consequences of literacy standards will accomplish that work.
This is a particularly difficult
challenge with regard to Writing 105 Learning Outcome Number 12: Editing. How in heck do you teach EDITING in a spirit of inquiry? It is, to my way of thinking, the
toughest challenge in the new curriculum.
We absolutely have to make editing a serious part of our pedagogy. In this age of accountability, no one
outside the Writing Program is going to tolerate our shirking this
responsibility. Moreover, many if
not most of us think that sentences (and their component parts) matter. We pay attention to style and editing
when we read our students' work, our colleagues' work, and published
writers. But most of us have some
pretty bad experiences under our belts when it comes to teaching on the
sentence level, and most of us are aware of all the research that asserts that
top-down instruction on the sentence level doesn't take. It just doesn't work.
So are we just going to pretend
to teach editing while really giving it short shrift in our courses? I hope not. Are we just going to assign a few exercises and call it a
day? I really hope not.
Instead, I hope we can find ways to accomplish what would be a beautiful
task: to teach editing in an
inquiry-based pedagogy, rather than
as mastery of preordained principles.
How are we going to do that?
I don't know yet. But I'm
hoping that CCR 760 (the writing program administration course) and the faculty
development seminar that Maureen Puetzer and I will be leading this fall will
come up with some answers, or at least help us ask the questions in a more
productive way.
Related to the new curriculum,
this year I'm working with the Center for the Study of Teaching and Writing and
particularly with Bron Adam (who, incidentally, returns to teach in the program
this year) on empirical research about students' and teachers' perceptions of
college writing skills and experiences.
At the center of this empirical research will be a four-year
longitudinal study of this year's incoming class. We'll begin in just a few weeks by asking first-year
students to respond to an online questionnaire that will list our learning
outcomes and ask them their beliefs about how important each of these outcomes
will be for their college writingÑin courses other than WRT. We'll
survey them again at the end of the semester to see how their perceptions may
have changed, and also to ask them how much writing they have done in their
courses outside the Writing Program.
And we'll survey them once a year in succeeding years.
Later in this semester, we'll
also survey teachers across the curriculum, to ask them the importance of each
of these outcomes for students' success in their courses, and also to ask them
how much writing they have assigned in their courses. I'm hoping to include on these teachers' surveys a few
questions about what they would like to know more about when it comes to
assigning and responding to students' writing.
You can also expect that we'll
be surveying you, to ask you your
opinion of the importance of each of our learning outcomes for students'
college writing, and also to ask how well you think the majority of the
students in your classes have learned what you were teaching them.
The results of these surveys
will not determine the Writing curricula of the future. But they will inform those
curricula: they will tell us how
our own ideas accord with and diverge from those of our students and our
colleagues. The surveys will, in
other words, facilitate the dialogue that I believe is so important, the
dialogue between Writing specialists, their students, their colleagues, and
their public. The Writing courses
required by a university must speak to and respond to that university's
literacy values. Done well, those
Writing courses will affect those values, and also be affected by them. The surveys should also help us with
some very practical issues, such as WAC faculty development workshops.
Let me conclude by speaking to
the rest of our undergraduate curriculum.
Last spring I had the privilege of chairing a fractious yet constructive
interdisciplinary committee, the Vice Chancellor's Signature Committee on
Writing. Working with the Vice
Chancellor, that committee undertook the task of designing an interdisciplinary
major in writing, a task that I warmly endorsed. By the end of spring term, the committee had drawn up a
tripartite writing major. Now the
specifics of that major remain to be filled in. When I reconvene the committee for fall term, we will
determine the means by which our work will be completed, and I am hoping that
we will have concrete recommendations to take to the Vice Chancellor by the
conclusion of fall term.
So this is an exciting year in
our program. We are teaching a new
105/205 curriculum that is challenging to students and teachers alike; we conduct our work in dialogue with
the entire university; we gather
empirical data that will enrich our understanding of program-external practices
in and perceptions of writing; and
we participate in the construction of a proposal for an interdisciplinary
major. We will surely experience
the violence of which Elbow speaks, but we will just as surely experience the
success that this program has been accustomed to and known for. We're the Syracuse Writing
Program. We're good, and we know
it.
[1] McLeod, Susan, and Eric Miraglia. "Writing Across the Curriculum in a Time of Change." WAC for the New Millennium : Strategies for Continuing Writing-Across-The-Curriculum-Programs. Ed. Susan H. McLeod, et al. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2001. 1-27.
[2] Elbow, Peter. "Embracing Contraries in the Teaching Process." College English 45.4 (April 1983): 327-39.
[3] Malinowitz, Harriet. "A Feminist Critique of Writing in the Disciplines." Feminism and Composition Studies: In Other Words. Ed. Susan C. Jarratt and Lynn Worsham. New York: Modern Language Association, 1998. 291-312.