Rose, Recchio, Brodkey, Lewison and Heffernan, Myers, Flowers and Hayes, Berlin

When I picked up Mike’s Rose’s 1985 article on “The Language of Exclusion: Writing Instruction at the University,” I breathed a sigh of relief. After some of densely written and pedagogy-critical readings we’ve been doing for this class, I found momentary consolation in his description of  composition specialists in the American curriculum setting [at least since 1874] as ones who “must debate and defend and interminably evaluate what they do.” The composition field berates itself and others for not bringing students up to a constantly moving target called “the standard.” To counter this, Rose states that writing is more complicated to transmit than the other disciplines; it is more than learning, recalling, and applying information in short bits. He advocates moving away from remediation theory and toward more engagement with the writing pedagogy to date and, instead, conduct more research to determine what is effective for teaching writing. Clearly, a lot of research has taken place since he wrote this piece.

Thomas Recchio’s 1991 article on “A Bakhtinian Reading of Student Writing” discusses possible modes of writing on discourse topics and some problems this presents for students. Part of the problem is the wide variety of terms used to describe these modes, so I appreciate how he tries to name the modes in one student paper on Freud’s article on the incest taboo: moral indignation; pseudo-psychological understanding; Freudian discourse; and confessional, narrative discourse. However, reading Recchio’s suggested dialogue with his student, I wonder how useful a struggling writer would find his complicated language to “begin to find her own voice.” Nonetheless, I think learning how to name and navigate discourse modes is useful, and I hope to use a simplified version of the process in my own teaching with intermediate and advanced ESL students.

Linda Brodkey: I believe we previously looked at the Brodkey 1989 article, “On the Subjects of Class and Gender in ‘The Literacy Letters’.” We’ve had some intervening readings since then (including Myers’ 1986 article that highlights social class), so I feel there’s more to say about Brodkey’s study. As ethnography, it’s useful. It highlights the differential in power relationships between teachers and ABE students and how, in the study, they degenerated into similar patterns through an exchange of letters. The results suggest future ethnographic studies where correspondents are given more direction. (I doubt that Brodkey thought an exchange of letters would fix the power differential.) Given that many of us would like to change the power relationships between teachers and students, at least two questions need to be answered: (1) Is it possible? (2) How can it be achieved? (3) To what extent can it be achieved?

Mitzi Lewison and Lee Heffernan: “Rewriting Writers Workshop: Creating Safe Spaces for Disruptive Stories” (2008) was my favorite of this group of articles for a variety of reasons: (1) It has students study and discuss texts communally in a workshop-style atmosphere. (2) It uses critical writing pedagogy successfully. (3) It deals with a young population (third graders) and thereby has the potential for a long-range impact on writers (and citizens). (4) It has some do-able parameters and achievable results. (5) It holds promise for future research that can be applied to other groups of writers, including adult writers.

The readings and student dialogues remind me of Katie Wood Ray’s, Wondrous Words: Writers and Writing in the Elementary Classroom and What You Know by Heart: How to Develop Curriculum for Your Writing Workshop in which she has students examine together examples of word and textual craft to use in their own writing. Although the purpose is quite different—a linguistics orientation aimed at developing young writers’ creativity—the focus on writing process and Bakhtinian notions of intertextuality are similar to Lewison and Heffernan. So are the means: reading, noticing, discussing, and applying. Because this model of students helping students fits into a communicative method framework (in this case, to have small groups of students read and analyze texts for meaning), I will likely try it in my ESL classrooms.

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Reading the four articles above has encouraged me to look again at Greg Myers, Linda Flower and John Hayes, and James Berlin.

Greg Myers (1986), “Reality, Consensus, and Reform in the Rhetoric of Composition Teaching”: Myers, critical pedagogist, warns that classroom consensus (through “a social group organized for mutual help” as promulgated by Sterling Leonard around 1917) can be a way of suppressing and excluding variant groups and ideas. I agree, but I also think a prescriptive, dogmatic instructor can do the same thing. Foremost in my mind is that my job—along with teaching—is promoting diversity, diverse ideas, fairness in the classroom, and what Lewis and Heffernan would call “safe spaces in classrooms.” Lewis and Heffernan quote Lensmire on this issue:

Lensmire (2000) argues that in both writers workshops and critical classrooms, conflict and risk are present in “relations between teachers and students . . . That complexities and conflict continue to trouble student and teacher communication even after the teacher rejects traditional practice sand embraces alternative, progressive ones (p. 70). We acknowledge that despite the successes we have experienced with social narrative writing, these are not achieved without conflict, struggle, and resistance.

So even in critical writing classrooms, teachers must be aware of the power differentials between themselves and their students. Nothing eliminates power; it is always present. We have to deal with it always.

Myers makes me consider my pedagogical purpose. I must face the ever-present question of where my duty lies. Is it to my employer, to my students, to their future teachers, to their future employers? The best answer I can come up with is to our democracy. For me, this means I must teach my students to read, think, and write about diverse ideas; to be accepting and inclusive of differences; to think critically; to consider what kind of world they want to live in; and to then determine for themselves where their best interests lie. Knowing how to express themselves clearly, artfully, and appropriately in writing will help them in whatever path they choose to take. As much as I may want them to think and act in a certain way, that is not my job. As my mother used to say, “The main problem with democracy is you have to let people choose it for themselves. Unfortunately, you cannot force it down their throats. You can only lead them to it by example.”

Linda Flower and John Hayes (1981), “A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing”: When I first heard about the recursive nature of writing, I was relieved. It meant that I wasn’t alone in my seemingly disorganized method of going back and forth between idea generation and organization and purpose and audience. Flower and Hayes describe the writing process as a cognitive process in which writers must make recursive decisions—as opposed to a linear process of “decisions and choices.”  In their model, the planning part of the process is idea generation, organization, and goal setting, all done in what may seem as disorderly but is in fact a fairly systematic interaction between main processes and sub-processes to do with composing and considering audience. This is good news for us multi-drafters, which isn’t to say I wouldn’t like my process to become more efficient.

James Berlin (1982), “Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories”: Berlin offers a summary of four theories of writing pedagogy: Classicists, Positivists or Current Traditionalists, Neo Platonists or Expressionists/Expressivists, and New Rhetoricians. I am not entirely clear how to tease out my teaching philosophy. It partly depends on what type of writing I’m teaching. I went to a couple of websites to see what others have to say about the four theories. I found the following one particularly helpful: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~writing/materials/faculty/pedagogies/philosophies.html).

From the Classicists, I take logos, ethos, and pathos because they are convenient terms to describe how writers make their appeals to audiences. I also think that deductive reasoning works sometimes (general to specific).

From the Positivists or Current Traditionalists, I think that it is sometimes appropriate to emphasize concision and clarity over style (science, social sciences). Also, I agree that some questions can be answered inductively (specific to general).

From the Neo Platonists or Expressionists, I take the process approach because I have found invention and brainstorming activities helpful to my writing, and it can be used to help students revise their work and develop their own writing styles. I also am comfortable with a dialogic workshop-style atmosphere because that’s one of the ways I learn.

From the New Rhetoricians, I acknowledge the dialectic approach between language and truth. This approach also seems to incorporate a lot of the good features of the previous three approaches. I’m for an eclectic philosophy that helps my students (and me) write better.