Comments on: CCCC07 I14: Our Uses of http://www.vitia.org/wordpress/2007/03/31/cccc07-i14-our-uses-of/ faults | sins | abuses Mon, 06 Oct 2008 23:44:38 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.1 By: mike http://www.vitia.org/wordpress/2007/03/31/cccc07-i14-our-uses-of/#comment-69545 mike Mon, 02 Apr 2007 01:42:07 +0000 http://www.vitia.org/wordpress/2007/03/31/cccc07-i14-our-uses-of/#comment-69545 Disclosure: Mariolina Salvatori was the teacher and mentor and friend who most helped me figure out how I wanted to be a part of the field when I was working on my graduate minor in composition as an MFA at Pitt. Every time I'm at a conference where she's speaking, I go to see her talk, no matter what. And the way she talks and thinks and writes about student writing, concrete or abstract, is something I continue to try to emulate in my own work. But the more important sense of it, Clancy, is the sense of student writing as concrete material practice: Mariolina offered an account and showed slides of the outcomes of her interaction with the publishers of <a href="http://blogs.setonhill.edu/MikeArnzen/010483.html" rel="nofollow"><em>The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty</em></a>, and talked about how she and Patricia Donahue tried to work with the <em>Elements</em> series editors and publishers to get students credited in the Works Cited and such -- and the best they were able to do was to get student contributors' names listed in the Index. The tacked-on nod-to-students thing at the end is evidence of the problem, but it's not the problem itself. The question that Salvatori and Whately raise, in conjunction with one another, is that those IRB hobbyhorses that folks like to ride are ways of minimizing the importance of students as authors and instead commodifying their writing as the work of informants that serves to help "real" scholars get tenure. Rhetorically speaking, the protective moves performed by IRBs can also be seen as a minimizing move: they say, "This writing, inasmuch as it requires protection that other forms of writing don't, stands in a certain status relation to those other forms of writing." Those protective moves minimize students' writerly agency in relation to teachers' scholarly agency. Given today's changing nature of <a href="http://kairosnews.org/blogging-and-publicy" rel="nofollow">publicy</a> and the ways in which students engage that publicy, I'm finding myself on Salvatori's side, and composition's IRBers are sounding to me more like those who engage in the possessive rhetoric of "protecting our children." Disclosure: Mariolina Salvatori was the teacher and mentor and friend who most helped me figure out how I wanted to be a part of the field when I was working on my graduate minor in composition as an MFA at Pitt. Every time I’m at a conference where she’s speaking, I go to see her talk, no matter what. And the way she talks and thinks and writes about student writing, concrete or abstract, is something I continue to try to emulate in my own work. But the more important sense of it, Clancy, is the sense of student writing as concrete material practice: Mariolina offered an account and showed slides of the outcomes of her interaction with the publishers of The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty, and talked about how she and Patricia Donahue tried to work with the Elements series editors and publishers to get students credited in the Works Cited and such — and the best they were able to do was to get student contributors’ names listed in the Index.

The tacked-on nod-to-students thing at the end is evidence of the problem, but it’s not the problem itself. The question that Salvatori and Whately raise, in conjunction with one another, is that those IRB hobbyhorses that folks like to ride are ways of minimizing the importance of students as authors and instead commodifying their writing as the work of informants that serves to help “real” scholars get tenure. Rhetorically speaking, the protective moves performed by IRBs can also be seen as a minimizing move: they say, “This writing, inasmuch as it requires protection that other forms of writing don’t, stands in a certain status relation to those other forms of writing.” Those protective moves minimize students’ writerly agency in relation to teachers’ scholarly agency.

Given today’s changing nature of publicy and the ways in which students engage that publicy, I’m finding myself on Salvatori’s side, and composition’s IRBers are sounding to me more like those who engage in the possessive rhetoric of “protecting our children.”

]]> By: Clancy http://www.vitia.org/wordpress/2007/03/31/cccc07-i14-our-uses-of/#comment-69399 Clancy Sat, 31 Mar 2007 17:43:52 +0000 http://www.vitia.org/wordpress/2007/03/31/cccc07-i14-our-uses-of/#comment-69399 One shower and meal at Cracker Barrel later, I realize that perhaps Salvatori meant "student writing" not literally, as in one particular group of students, in a specific place and time, writing a specific essay (or series of essays). Perhaps she means it in a conceptual sense, like in your work, Mike, in which the act of student writing has a kind of logical priority before anything else. Do you think that's what she meant?--that she was criticizing articles published in rhetcomp journals that are talking about rhetorical phenomena outside the classroom, but then have that tacked-on, oh-yeah-by-the-way, "implications for pedagogy" paragraph at the end? In that case, certainly she's right to call it problematic. One shower and meal at Cracker Barrel later, I realize that perhaps Salvatori meant “student writing” not literally, as in one particular group of students, in a specific place and time, writing a specific essay (or series of essays). Perhaps she means it in a conceptual sense, like in your work, Mike, in which the act of student writing has a kind of logical priority before anything else. Do you think that’s what she meant?–that she was criticizing articles published in rhetcomp journals that are talking about rhetorical phenomena outside the classroom, but then have that tacked-on, oh-yeah-by-the-way, “implications for pedagogy” paragraph at the end? In that case, certainly she’s right to call it problematic.

]]> By: aerobil http://www.vitia.org/wordpress/2007/03/31/cccc07-i14-our-uses-of/#comment-69379 aerobil Sat, 31 Mar 2007 14:36:33 +0000 http://www.vitia.org/wordpress/2007/03/31/cccc07-i14-our-uses-of/#comment-69379 THIS was one of the panels I really really wanted to see, so thank you, Mike, for this summary. Also, you made it to nearly all of the panels I wanted to see on Thursday when I was helplessly traveling not from across the country but from CHICAGO. Lordie. THIS was one of the panels I really really wanted to see, so thank you, Mike, for this summary. Also, you made it to nearly all of the panels I wanted to see on Thursday when I was helplessly traveling not from across the country but from CHICAGO. Lordie.

]]> By: Clancy http://www.vitia.org/wordpress/2007/03/31/cccc07-i14-our-uses-of/#comment-69375 Clancy Sat, 31 Mar 2007 13:49:16 +0000 http://www.vitia.org/wordpress/2007/03/31/cccc07-i14-our-uses-of/#comment-69375 "Burnett, Salvatori pointed out, deploys student writing only in the essay’s final “Implications” section, names the student only by her first name, gives no page numbers from the student writing, and does not list the student’s essay in the list of Works Cited. This practice is still quite common in our discipline, and we need to invert it, Salvatori argued: we need to use student writing as a starting point rather than an afterthought. Doing otherwise marginalizes and excludes students from our theoretical landscape, and minimizes pedagogy." Sheesh, we just can't get a break. Double bind city over here. Given the arguments about IRB issues, which the second presenter covered, not to mention the methodological (case studies aren't valid! sample size isn't generalizable to the population!) and ethical (these are your own students?!?!) hobbyhorses a lot of people have, it's no wonder the state of affairs is as Salvatori describes it, and furthermore, I think it's a little unfair to make that criticism of Burnett and others. I'll be very impressed and grateful when Salvatori offers some solutions to this problem and recommendations for researchers. Not to be too harsh toward Salvatori, to be sure, but is it enough just to make the rhetorical move of <em>reclamation and insistence</em> here? “Burnett, Salvatori pointed out, deploys student writing only in the essay’s final “Implications” section, names the student only by her first name, gives no page numbers from the student writing, and does not list the student’s essay in the list of Works Cited. This practice is still quite common in our discipline, and we need to invert it, Salvatori argued: we need to use student writing as a starting point rather than an afterthought. Doing otherwise marginalizes and excludes students from our theoretical landscape, and minimizes pedagogy.”

Sheesh, we just can’t get a break. Double bind city over here. Given the arguments about IRB issues, which the second presenter covered, not to mention the methodological (case studies aren’t valid! sample size isn’t generalizable to the population!) and ethical (these are your own students?!?!) hobbyhorses a lot of people have, it’s no wonder the state of affairs is as Salvatori describes it, and furthermore, I think it’s a little unfair to make that criticism of Burnett and others. I’ll be very impressed and grateful when Salvatori offers some solutions to this problem and recommendations for researchers. Not to be too harsh toward Salvatori, to be sure, but is it enough just to make the rhetorical move of reclamation and insistence here?

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