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.
Hello Professor Hawkins:
ReplyDeleteThanks for the thoughtful posting on the essay by Milka Mustenikova Mosley that appeared in the collection edited by Patrick Sullivan and myself.
As a former director of a multidisciplinary writing center, I certainly understand the perspective that you establish here. Writing achieves certain purposes within certain disciplinary frameworks. Clearly, an analysis of historical events needs to convey evidence of historical thinking. Ideas, and ways of knowing, matter.
But I'd think you'd agree that when students write in particular disciplines they are engaging in the act of transfer as well: in other words, they are calling upon skills and knowledge that they acquired across various domains and classroom settings. I believe that it was to such knowledge that Milka Mosley was referring when she mentions "formulas."
I'd also like to add this caveat as well: students in high school may not be at the stage, developmentally, to be able to discern the disciplinary ways of knowing to which you refer (drawing upon Carter). Indeed, some have said that it is only until the last two years of college, if at that, when students are prepared to acquire such metacognitive awareness. Is it a stretch, therefore, to assume that prior to that point, students need to receive training of a different sort, at least in terms of their writing behaviors? We may not call such writing "formulaic," but we surely need to distinguish what students are ready to receive from what they are not.