What point are you at in your dissertation progress (process?)? Do you have a sense of when you’ll graduate? Be on the job market?

Joanna, Yenta of Academe

Notice the titles of various comp readers: Ways of Thinking, Ways of Seeing, Ways of Knowing (or variants thereof). Those titles emphasize “ways” of inquiry. I’m not certain the texts actually deliver in every case, but that seems the appropriate focus for Comp. Seeing reading and writing as ways to inquire into what makes us human (namely language and related forms of expression) seems a good task for composition.

The genius of Freire was a method using language as a source of critical inquiry. As you’ve pointed out, that all gets buried in political discussions, with lots of theorizing about oppression. Go back to the words. Go back to language. Make inquiry into the nature of writing the centerpiece of COMP, both as a profession and a first-year required course.

The biggest problem I see in most composition programs is they proceed as if the answers about how to write are known and they simply need to be provided to students who haven’t paid attention in high school or who simply haven’t written much. That construction of the student relative to the teacher leads to all sorts of bad practice, IMHO.

So for me, a comp reader should be filled with reading that engages and challenges students, arranged in ways that encourage inquiry. I think that means including writing outside of traditional humanities essays.

John — I was relieved, upon coming to UMass, that the first-year comp course was at least called “College Writing,” rather than Pitt’s “General Writing.” But I think that raises the question of how schools see comp as a discipline. Writing Across the Curriculum is much more solid here at UMass than it was at Pitt, but I think that many of the conflicts in our discipline really come out of questions of how much we see ourselves as generalists. So here’s a question: does teaching what now seems to be the only required-across-the-board college course deny specialization to us? Must compositionists be all things to all disciplines? I ask partly because I’m one of the co-editors for a comp reader, and I’ve been advocating a shift away from the humanistic focus (i.e., pretty writing and cultural analysis essays, for the most part) and towards a more all-inclusive focus (i.e., essays from journals in disciplines outside the humanities), but other co-editors (mostly, interestingly enough, being from the MFA side) are arguing that a comp reader really needs a humanities focus. How do you see the idea of the ‘general’ education playing out in relation to what students get — or ought to get — from a humanities-based education? Where does comp stand in relation to that?

Steve — I’ve been quietly following your (apparently new?) Progressive Teachers weblog for a few weeks, waiting for an opportunity to comment, but you beat me to it. But I’ll ask re your comment: you mention ‘professionalism’ and ‘labor inequity’ and implicitly connect them both to Marxist concerns, which seems to me to actually shift such Marxist concerns away from composition curricula and towards debates about professionalization. Part of the target of my critique is that tendency: why is it that we are OK with applying Marxist economic analyses to teachers, but automatically shift to a neoclassical economic orientation when we talk about students?

One way to understand Comp’s aversion to economic questions, for Donna Strickland, is to see it as a “mangerial unconscious” — the ability of composition to ignore the fundamental economic inequity of part-time instructors paying for the ability of full-tenured folk to partake in critical pedagogy. Critical pedagogy, based in Marxism, it seems to me would require the teacher to engage in a process which not only led to “seeing” labor inequity, but also to attempting to change it. (Critical pedagogues have only described the world, the point is to change it, ala Marx).

I wonder what it might mean, finally, for academics and institutions to partner with those populations that are not benefitting from the class stratification occurring today. Service-learning, I think, is a weak form of such parternship; critical pedagogy is the theory of such work; I’m wondering what such an economic-based partnership might entail.

Thanks for getting me to think about it all.

One small note: I had a strong grounding in the liberal arts and a liberal education at the Jesuit-run John Carroll University in the late 1950s. When I started teaching at Foothill College in 1965, the entire faculty was engaged in a discussion of “general education” in preparation for accreditation. I came to realize that the liberal arts concept of broad training had been subsumed under the vague title “General”. Liberal education had a clear focus as your analysis of the Latin root shows. “General” has no focus at all, unless you think of it in terms of General Motors or General Foods. Or maybe in educating generals.

[Silly note: Just as I'm typing this, I'm listening to The Silhouettes singing "Get a Job." A good theme song for general education.]