Reading Lynn Bloom’s “The Great Paradigm Shift” and Patricia Bizzell’s “Cultural Criticism: A Social Approach to Studying Writing,” I am reminded of how far the fledgling discipline of rhetoric and composition has come in the past thirty years, in large part because, as a discipline, we have “come back” to one another. Those of us who study rhetoric and composition tend to see our field as split down the proverbial middle: At some point, graduate students are prompted to choose between the “rhetoric” or the “composition” half of our discipline. But, as Jane Tompkins so elegantly puts it in Reader Response Criticism, language is power, and these two readings have reminded me that what we teach is language.
Speaking to the College Conference on Composition Research Network Forum in 1989, Patricia Bizzell made an impassioned plea for an ethical movement in rhetoric and composition, a movement away from the individually-centered, expressivist-oriented process movement toward what she calls “cultural criticism,” what Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed calls “critical literacy.” “Cultural criticism,” Bizzell, one of rhet/comp’s earliest social constructionists, explains, takes as its text “ideologies that may be not only taken for granted but also actively suppressed from the consciousness of the people acting on them…I think it is important for academics to become cultural critics…because I hope that the activity of cultural criticism will foster social justice by making people aware of politically motivated ideological concealments” (225).
To put it simply, Bizzell wants the discipline of rhet/comp to take a hard, critical look at the work of rhetoric and composition; she wants writing teachers to foster in students a willingness to look at texts and at culture as constructed, to identify the sources of their deeply ingrained beliefs so they can redress injustices and prejudices in their own minds, to critically analyze others’ texts for “concealed” injustices and prejudices, and to actively (and collectively) advocate for cultural awareness and social revolution that redresses these injustices.
Lofty goals for a discipline that is oft described, by itself and by others, as a “service” discipline. I can’t quite imagine how my English 101 students would react if I announced that our project in the course was to recognize and redress social injustice; I suspect that 24 out of 25 minds would be wondering when we were going to have time for developing thesis statements, learning MLA citation, and correcting comma splices. Yet since 1989, more and more rhetoric and composition scholarship has taken up Bizzell’s call. College English, CCC, Journal of College Writing, Pre/Text – many of our major journals and national conferences feature all sorts of research on feminist rhetoric, the rhetoric of race, the rhetoric of class. And many of the essays that are now anthologized for composition deal directly with issues of social justice. After all, who can teach Malcolm X’s “Homemade Education” without confronting head-on the paradox of a violent criminal espousing the merits of education, or Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” without raising the specter of on-going racism in our own day and age?
What Bizzell promotes as the focus of rhet/comp has, perhaps surprisingly, grown naturally out of our discipline’s process roots, however far afield her work may at first seem from Flower and Hayes’ neat and tidy Cognitive Process Theory. Flower herself is a rhetorician, and as co-founder of Carnegie Mellon’s Community Literacy Center, an outreach program for inner-city youth, she has certainly brought the “power of language” to the forefront. Bloom reminds us that in the 1970s the process movement saw itself as “inherently democratic” for “it was calculated…to produce a nation of good writers committed to their own process and invested in their own writing…By decentering the classroom…, the process paradigm was compatible with Paolo Freire’s liberatory pedagogy, and a fitting response to the turbulent 1960s” (34). In other words, for all of the accusations that have been labeled against it, the process movement in its inception was never intended to be “self-indulgent writing in contrast to real-world demands for meaningful, goal-directed communication” (35).
Like all theories, though, the process movement was not perfect, and it has been usefully updated and expanded by what has come after, particularly (in my mind) the social constructionist movement which insists upon the endemically social nature of writing, thinking, speaking and knowledge. Social constructionism helped shift rhet/comp back toward its rhetorical roots; rhetoricians, especially the Sophists like Isocrates, preached tirelessly about the importance of audience, the role of kairos, not because they were interested in manipulating audiences but because they recognized that speaking and writing are necessarily transactive. That is, language has the power to move people, to persuade them to action, to convince them to hold some beliefs while rejecting others. Bizzell and other social constructionists did not deny the importance of process in helping student writers become cultural critics. Bizzell herself contends that “we can look at student and professional academic writers and readers as participants in a complex literary genre…To practice cultural criticism, then, us to study discourse” (229). Bizzell sees cultural criticism as a teachable process, one that is not at odds with the expressivism of the process movement but which does, in usefully and theoretically sound (from the perspective of rhetoricians) ways, move us beyond the stereotypical process concerns of invention, organization, revision, voice, and so on.
So I am not concerned with where we have been or where we have arrived, mostly because I agree with Bloom that the process movement never died; instead, I think it has been resurrected in wonderfully useful ways by feminist rhetoric, social constructionism, social cognitivism, and cultural studies. I am concerned, however, by where the next vaunted movement in composition, the so-called “post-process” movement, might take us. I have read Thomas Kent’s Post-Process Theory: Beyond the Writing Process Paradigm in its entirety, and I found it to be the worst kind of postmodernist nihilism. I don’t take issue with any of Kent’s theoretical tenets: that writing is public, interpretive, and situated seems to me the ideological bedrock upon which process theory was founded in the first place. I do take issue with post-process’s desire to “make a composition class an oxymoron – as well as an unteachable algorithm” (39). And I don’t find Bloom’s question about whether “students actually write better…in a process curriculum than under other competing models” (41) a satisfactory place from which to begin critiquing post-process theory. The fact is, I do believe that writing can be taught. I am committed to the original process pedagogy that wanted to create a nation of writers, a nation of empowered, educated individuals who would see writing as a tool for discovery as well as for expression; I am equally committed to the social constructionist position that wants students to recognize the power structures inherent in language and to learn how to critique both texts and culture. I believe that students need language, and teaching students to use and to study language is not an impossibility, anymore than finding a center in a text is an impossibility. Postmodern disciples forget that Derrida did not say the center didn’t exist. Derrida said the center was a function created by each individual based on her/his own experiences, and furthermore, he insisted that the center’s function was absolutely vital to meaning-making.
So, too, is the belief that we can teach writing indispensable for the field of rhetoric and composition. We shouldn’t be tempted to theorize ourselves into oblivion. We shouldn’t apologize for taking students from “no words to words,” as Elbow puts it (11). We should be willing to critically revisit process pedagogy, to let ourselves get “past process” (Bloom 28) into whatever other useful theories exist for the teaching of writing, but I don’t think we will ever find that we are post-language.
Friday, January 23, 2009
Monday, January 19, 2009
The reading/writing connection
I suppose all writers intuitively know that writing and reading and intrinsically connected skills. Even my basic writing students, most of whom would not describe themselves as writers, usually articulate (after a fashion) Janet Emig’s assertion that writing and reading are inextricably connected verbal thinking skills ("Writing as a Mode of Learning" 282-283). However, in early process theory, these connections between reading and writing were not so easily or clearly drawn, and I wonder if today our ready acceptance of those connections doesn’t come more from a place of theoretical contentment than from true understanding of how those languaging processes interact.
Specifically, I question how reading influences writing. Emig touches on the kernel of my issue when she posits that reading and writing cannot accurately be split between the “passive” and the “active”: “The less useful distinction is that between listening and reading as receptive functions and talking and writing as productive functions. Critics of those terms like Louise Rosenblatt rightfully point out that the connotation of passivity too often accompanies the notion of receptivity when reading…is a vital, construing act” (283). I agree with Emig and Rosenblatt, although I’m less convinced than they seem to be that reading is always-already active; I’m equally skeptical that writing is inherently “active,” however, since I have seen many students approach writing with the determination to complete an assignment without learning anything about writing (or content, for that matter) from the exercise. Thus if writing or reading are to qualify as representational or symbolic ways of learning through “restatement in words” (Emig 285), both endeavors must be approached with a reflective self-awareness that one is trying to learn from these activities.
Such a contention, however, doesn’t neatly answer my question of how reading influences writing, because it doesn’t suffice to say that reading can improve writing if one approaches reading with the appropriate mindset. When I put this question to my basic writing students, one writer – I’ll call her “L” – insists that reading expands a writer’s vocabulary, teaches the “rules” of writing (such as paragraphing), and essentially offers styles of writing to imitate. As sophisticated as this answer is, another student, “B,” immediately argues that “good” writing is not imitation; good writing must express the writer’s own ideas through a unique voice. I find myself inclined to agree with both L and B, which leads me back to my original question along a different route: If reading influences writing by showing a writer the ropes, in the same way a novice boxer learns his moves by watching the heavy-weight champion from the sidelines, then why do we consider “good writing” to be a unique combination of those learned skills? How, in other words, does a writer move from emulating what s/he reads to controlling language in such a way that her/his own authorial identity is created?
Linda Flower and John Hayes’ research on Cognitive Process Theory and rhetorical problem-solving moves us closer to this answer. Making the argument, as Emig does, that writing promotes learning, Flower and Hayes assert that “if one studies the process by which a writer uses a goal to generate ideas, then consolidates those ideas and uses them to revise or regenerate new, more complex goals,…one sees why the process of revising and clarifying goals has such a broad effect, since it is through setting these new goals that the fruits of discovery come back to inform the continuing process of writing” (“Cognitive Process Theory” 386). To put it simply, writing, when the writer goes beyond dully plodding through an assignment to find something s/he wants to convey to readers, is an active, meaning-making process. So too, I believe, is reading, when it falls under the category of a “vital, construing act.” Readers who fully engage a text understand that they are not discovering meaning inherent within those words; they are creating meaning out of their own knowledge, experiences, and beliefs, and that in the act of reading, they also have the opportunity to change their knowledge, experiences, and beliefs. Writing offers the same (re)generative power for writers who recognize that “writers don’t find meanings, they make them. A writer in the act of discovery is hard at work searching memory, forming concepts, and forging a new structure of ideas, while at the same time trying to juggle all the constraints imposed by his or her purpose, audience, and language itself” (Flower and Hayes, “Cognition of Discovery” 21).
The answer to my question therefore involves both a reader/writer’s orientation toward reading and writing as meaning-making, learnable and learning-saturated languaging tasks as well as a reader/writer’s willingness to experiment with new ways of thinking, believing, and expressing. My basic writing student “R” perhaps came closest to this mark when, joining the debate L and B sparked, he insisted that reading opens up a whole new world of writers. This world is not simply a world of vocabulary, genre, or correctness; rather, it is, as R described it, a world of ideas that helps a writer find her/his own ideas. In describing writing as a mode of learning and writing as rhetorical problem-solving, early process theorists like Emig, Flower and Hayes showed us the outlines of how reading and writing “work” in individual minds. As writing teachers and researchers drawing upon their theories, however, we can’t assume that the mystery (to use a Peter Elbow metaphor) of how reading and writing interact has been solved. We need to put this question to our students, to ask it of ourselves, and to find, as the early process theorists did, ways to see these processes at work in the minds of reader/writers.
Specifically, I question how reading influences writing. Emig touches on the kernel of my issue when she posits that reading and writing cannot accurately be split between the “passive” and the “active”: “The less useful distinction is that between listening and reading as receptive functions and talking and writing as productive functions. Critics of those terms like Louise Rosenblatt rightfully point out that the connotation of passivity too often accompanies the notion of receptivity when reading…is a vital, construing act” (283). I agree with Emig and Rosenblatt, although I’m less convinced than they seem to be that reading is always-already active; I’m equally skeptical that writing is inherently “active,” however, since I have seen many students approach writing with the determination to complete an assignment without learning anything about writing (or content, for that matter) from the exercise. Thus if writing or reading are to qualify as representational or symbolic ways of learning through “restatement in words” (Emig 285), both endeavors must be approached with a reflective self-awareness that one is trying to learn from these activities.
Such a contention, however, doesn’t neatly answer my question of how reading influences writing, because it doesn’t suffice to say that reading can improve writing if one approaches reading with the appropriate mindset. When I put this question to my basic writing students, one writer – I’ll call her “L” – insists that reading expands a writer’s vocabulary, teaches the “rules” of writing (such as paragraphing), and essentially offers styles of writing to imitate. As sophisticated as this answer is, another student, “B,” immediately argues that “good” writing is not imitation; good writing must express the writer’s own ideas through a unique voice. I find myself inclined to agree with both L and B, which leads me back to my original question along a different route: If reading influences writing by showing a writer the ropes, in the same way a novice boxer learns his moves by watching the heavy-weight champion from the sidelines, then why do we consider “good writing” to be a unique combination of those learned skills? How, in other words, does a writer move from emulating what s/he reads to controlling language in such a way that her/his own authorial identity is created?
Linda Flower and John Hayes’ research on Cognitive Process Theory and rhetorical problem-solving moves us closer to this answer. Making the argument, as Emig does, that writing promotes learning, Flower and Hayes assert that “if one studies the process by which a writer uses a goal to generate ideas, then consolidates those ideas and uses them to revise or regenerate new, more complex goals,…one sees why the process of revising and clarifying goals has such a broad effect, since it is through setting these new goals that the fruits of discovery come back to inform the continuing process of writing” (“Cognitive Process Theory” 386). To put it simply, writing, when the writer goes beyond dully plodding through an assignment to find something s/he wants to convey to readers, is an active, meaning-making process. So too, I believe, is reading, when it falls under the category of a “vital, construing act.” Readers who fully engage a text understand that they are not discovering meaning inherent within those words; they are creating meaning out of their own knowledge, experiences, and beliefs, and that in the act of reading, they also have the opportunity to change their knowledge, experiences, and beliefs. Writing offers the same (re)generative power for writers who recognize that “writers don’t find meanings, they make them. A writer in the act of discovery is hard at work searching memory, forming concepts, and forging a new structure of ideas, while at the same time trying to juggle all the constraints imposed by his or her purpose, audience, and language itself” (Flower and Hayes, “Cognition of Discovery” 21).
The answer to my question therefore involves both a reader/writer’s orientation toward reading and writing as meaning-making, learnable and learning-saturated languaging tasks as well as a reader/writer’s willingness to experiment with new ways of thinking, believing, and expressing. My basic writing student “R” perhaps came closest to this mark when, joining the debate L and B sparked, he insisted that reading opens up a whole new world of writers. This world is not simply a world of vocabulary, genre, or correctness; rather, it is, as R described it, a world of ideas that helps a writer find her/his own ideas. In describing writing as a mode of learning and writing as rhetorical problem-solving, early process theorists like Emig, Flower and Hayes showed us the outlines of how reading and writing “work” in individual minds. As writing teachers and researchers drawing upon their theories, however, we can’t assume that the mystery (to use a Peter Elbow metaphor) of how reading and writing interact has been solved. We need to put this question to our students, to ask it of ourselves, and to find, as the early process theorists did, ways to see these processes at work in the minds of reader/writers.
Monday, January 12, 2009
Are We Really Teaching Writing?
In "The Truth about High School English," Milka Mustenikova Mosley writes of the difference between high school and college writing:
In general, I would call high school writing formulaic. We have too many students and too little time for grading, so we often allow students to follow a formula to produce a product. This strategy helps both students and teachers: students learn how to get to the point quickly and organize their ideas logically, and teachers are able to grade a large number of papers more efficiently...In contrast, I believe college-level writing should focus more on the student's ideas and exhibit his or her individuality. 58, 59
Reading this, I couldn't help wondering if these and other distinctions between "high school writing" and "college-level writing" are evidence that, as a discipline, rhetoric and composition is quite simply missing the point. Frankly, in conversations like the one Mosley joins, the way we teach writing seems utterly divorced from the way we do writing - for I don't know many writers who know of a "formula" that produces what should be the ultimate goal of any writing, namely, IDEAS.
It seems to me that this interrupt between what writing is and how writing is taught cannot benefit either students or teachers, since what we seem to dedicate ourselves to teaching, both in high school Language Arts classes and remedial or first-year composition college classes, is not really writing but what Michael Carter has termed "scribing." Writing, as Carter defines it, is a dynamic, creative act that transforms every aspect of the rhetorical triangle - writer, text, and reader; scribing, on the other hand, is following a formula to produce a product that will please a teacher, striving for "correctness" instead of "voice," producing generic prose intended for no reader. And scribing, however simple it may be to teach and to evaluate, has no relationship to the interactive, transformative, creative work of meaning-making that is Writing.
If the field of rhetoric and composition adopts Carter's definition of Writing as what we really want to teach, I believe the entire conversation surrounding what constitutes college-level writing would become moot. Instead of talking about "competency" or "proficiency" and trying to measure at what level of each a high school student should be at compared to a college student, we can begin talking about strategies for helping students of all levels, from elementary school through post-secondary programs, realize the creative, cognitive benefits of Writing. What's more, Writing is then no longer the domain of high school Language Arts teachers or first-year composition college teachers; Writing becomes a valued and valuable part of all curricula, as the best WAC programs have done.
How do we achieve this disciplinary redefinition of what Writing is and how we teach it? For starters, it seems to me that we need more communication and sustained interaction between high school and college English teachers as we create and revise pedagogies that support this new definition of writing. We also need robust WAC programs, and quite likely a greater national role for two-year college English teachers and WAC instructors, since in our information-saturated world all students, whether seeking a BA or an AS degree, should learn Writing.
Today, I taught my first basic writing class at a four-year university. I asked students to freewrite on this sentence: "I think writing is..." The responses I received convince me that these disaffected writers are more often than not in remedial writing classes because of well-intentioned formulaic approaches to teaching writing at the high school level - approaches that have fostered no interest in writing amongst these students, nor shown them the power and value of what it means to truly Write. I am now more committed than ever to seeing my field redefine how we conceive of student Writing, but I don't pretend that such a redefinition will be smooth, easier, or swift. It will in fact be very difficult, because it will mean that we must as a discipline be willing to:
In general, I would call high school writing formulaic. We have too many students and too little time for grading, so we often allow students to follow a formula to produce a product. This strategy helps both students and teachers: students learn how to get to the point quickly and organize their ideas logically, and teachers are able to grade a large number of papers more efficiently...In contrast, I believe college-level writing should focus more on the student's ideas and exhibit his or her individuality. 58, 59
Reading this, I couldn't help wondering if these and other distinctions between "high school writing" and "college-level writing" are evidence that, as a discipline, rhetoric and composition is quite simply missing the point. Frankly, in conversations like the one Mosley joins, the way we teach writing seems utterly divorced from the way we do writing - for I don't know many writers who know of a "formula" that produces what should be the ultimate goal of any writing, namely, IDEAS.
It seems to me that this interrupt between what writing is and how writing is taught cannot benefit either students or teachers, since what we seem to dedicate ourselves to teaching, both in high school Language Arts classes and remedial or first-year composition college classes, is not really writing but what Michael Carter has termed "scribing." Writing, as Carter defines it, is a dynamic, creative act that transforms every aspect of the rhetorical triangle - writer, text, and reader; scribing, on the other hand, is following a formula to produce a product that will please a teacher, striving for "correctness" instead of "voice," producing generic prose intended for no reader. And scribing, however simple it may be to teach and to evaluate, has no relationship to the interactive, transformative, creative work of meaning-making that is Writing.
If the field of rhetoric and composition adopts Carter's definition of Writing as what we really want to teach, I believe the entire conversation surrounding what constitutes college-level writing would become moot. Instead of talking about "competency" or "proficiency" and trying to measure at what level of each a high school student should be at compared to a college student, we can begin talking about strategies for helping students of all levels, from elementary school through post-secondary programs, realize the creative, cognitive benefits of Writing. What's more, Writing is then no longer the domain of high school Language Arts teachers or first-year composition college teachers; Writing becomes a valued and valuable part of all curricula, as the best WAC programs have done.
How do we achieve this disciplinary redefinition of what Writing is and how we teach it? For starters, it seems to me that we need more communication and sustained interaction between high school and college English teachers as we create and revise pedagogies that support this new definition of writing. We also need robust WAC programs, and quite likely a greater national role for two-year college English teachers and WAC instructors, since in our information-saturated world all students, whether seeking a BA or an AS degree, should learn Writing.
Today, I taught my first basic writing class at a four-year university. I asked students to freewrite on this sentence: "I think writing is..." The responses I received convince me that these disaffected writers are more often than not in remedial writing classes because of well-intentioned formulaic approaches to teaching writing at the high school level - approaches that have fostered no interest in writing amongst these students, nor shown them the power and value of what it means to truly Write. I am now more committed than ever to seeing my field redefine how we conceive of student Writing, but I don't pretend that such a redefinition will be smooth, easier, or swift. It will in fact be very difficult, because it will mean that we must as a discipline be willing to:
- Revisit curriculum,
- Devote time and effort to faculty development for teachers at all levels and in all departments, and,
- Perhaps most importantly, organize as a collective across lines of high school, two-year college and four-year college faculty to lobby for assessment standards that recognize the reality of teaching Writing.
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