The Composition Reform Debate

I found Myer’s piece, Reality, Consensus, and Reform in the Rhetoric of Composition Teaching to be of interest. Currently, in my graduate studies, I’ve read quite a bit about reform and how composition instruction is not an accurate representation of society, etc… And although I agree to this point to some extent, there is another side to the story as well. Myers makes an interesting response to some of the beliefs of likes of Leonard and Dewey: “It is not the connection of business that is in itself disturbing, but the sense of the naturalness and inevitability of this connection as the one way of reaching out to the world outside the school. For Leonard, as for Dewey, to criticize the subordination of education to the needs of business and government is to fail to face reality” (446).

The later part about “fail to face reality” really stands out to me and I agree; however, I also feel that you can take a more personal, multicultural perspective with composition and achieve similar results. For my high school English classes, I have my students engage in a variety of creative/alternative types of writing that allows them to express themselves and let their voices be heard, but I also take a more structuralist approach. A good way I’ve found to do this is by finding topics of interest for students write about, that are of interest to them and take a more formal approach. For example, I often do unit on expository writing with my ninth grade students; the topic is juvenile justice. Very popular with teenagers, as you might imagine. Although the culminating writing task is formal, students are very passionate about the topic and we spend a considerable amount of time familiarizing ourselves with the justice system as it applies to juveniles. Along with the writing process, I ask students to create an advertisement advocating their position in regards to the juvenile justice debate.

So although I agree with Myers that the people involved in the education process cannot escape the realities of government and business, students can be taught to formally challenge these positions (read: democracy) while also addressing their personal ideologies and beliefs.