First of All--I’m Not Trying to Save the World

Even before I read this text, I had an issue with the title for two reasons. 1) “Saving the world” implies that I am trying to make the world better for everyone. I honestly don’t even know what that would look like. You can’t make the world better for both the privileged and the oppressed, and I promise you, I am not interested in the former. 2) On my own time? As a graduate student, all of my time is somehow linked to my work (apart from the occasional Netflix or Xbox session—which is riddled with slight guilt for not doing work). In that regard, I found it funny. On a more serious note, I have the privilege to reflect on oppressive structures “on my own time.” I can pick and choose when to address them with little to no impact on my personal life. But what about a student of color? Suddenly, “on your own time” becomes “every second of your time.”    

So, what exactly am I doing with “my time” in the classroom? Or, Fish might ask me, “What is your job as an FYC instructor, and are you doing it?” A large part of my job is dictated by the Writing Program at Ball State, but I am working under my belief that higher education is more than job preparation. Yes, I hope my students leave the course knowing how to construct logical arguments, evaluate texts, conduct reliable research, rhetorically analyze language, and write coherently. I also hope that they can apply that knowledge to the world around them—can they see the components of systemic racism in the language around them? Can they see how language surrounding gender literally controls our day-to-day actions? This is where I take issue with Fish’s argument about “doing my job.”

If part of my job, in ENG 103, is to teach students how to engage with the “rhetorical choices” an author makes and the “rhetorical elements” of a text, how can I do so without talking about race? Without talking about gender? Class? These structures control the world we live in, and language is the vehicle for that control. It makes me ask a few questions:

1.     How can I accurately and effectively do my job without showing students the role that language plays in constructing the world around them?  

2.     How can I teach them to write effectively without showing them how oppressive structures influence the texts they create?  

3.     How can I teach them about making rhetorical choices without showing them how those choices can perpetuate oppressive structures?

I agree that there is a difference between discussing partisan politics and making students aware of the social politics that govern society, and to give Fish a little credit, he does mention this; however, he equates “announcing one’s political allegiance” with “[discussing] various forms of discrimination” (17). I didn’t know that discrimination and oppression were partisan issues.

I think that it is easy to approach this text with disdain—in fact, one of the first comments I read in the margins of my book was “This guy is an asshole.” To the person who owned this before me, I agree with you. But just like lamenting over the sorry state of Composition won’t get us anywhere, ranting over Fish’s “asshole-ness” won’t either. I am more interested in the assumptions he makes when constructing his argument. How do his assumptions differ from mine? What are the consequences of this text in general? And, something I want to explore as I continue reading, why bother even reading this text?

Diversity, Ideology, and the teaching of compliance

In "Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing," Maxine Hairston observes what she thinks is a problematic trend in freshman English classes--that is the shift from process oriented, student centered work to a more political model where students are subjected to a brainwashing of liberal proportions. Hairston observes this "disturbing" trend where some composition instructors feel it is their duty to push their "radical" (180) politics before a Hairston defined composition emphasis on student growth as a writer.

If Hairston were to frame this argument within a baseline structure of "pushing a political agenda in an educational setting is problematic," then I think there would be more merit to her piece--at least initially. However, much like her sabre-rattling in "Breaking our Bonds and Reaffirming our Connections," Hairston gets carried away with superfluous metaphors that ironically cause her arguments to mirror the same simplicity, silliness, and undemonstrative nature that she claims Marxist critics possess. It is not outlandish in my estimate for Marxists to equate previous co-opted movements like expressivist writing as a perfect fit for assimilating students into a conditioned behavior in which they become a commodity. If we are to read Hairston's assertions that freshman composition students are "largely unsophisticated" (185) and even momentarily bypass a rather tasteless metaphor that compares students to a fertile field to cultivate, then there is an opportunity to offer a constructive point to work off. If freshman English students are somehow in need of sophistication, can it be achieved in a freshman English class in a political nature without Hairston's concern of a sort of liberal brainwashing?

Today, my students talked about their research questions. I have framed the project in a way where they will interview someone they call a mentor and synthesize that with secondary research to explore their question. Topics ranged from the climate to protests in Hong Kong. There is a student desire to explore politically charged content without Hairston's fear of forcing them into liberal ideological thinking. I think the goal is to teach them to think critically about the content they are already consuming or seeking out. So far, that is my best guess as how we can retain student-centered agency in a world of inescapable political context.

Composition Gone Rogue

I'll be honest, I've about had it with Miller. She has great things to say but her writing is dry and convoluted and inaccessible without some impossible, stone cold focus. I don't have that focus, nor do I have access to an environment that encourages that focus. Oh, well. Que sera sera. Moving forward.

So, composition, and rhetoric & composition, especially, as a discipline or field, is kind of hard to pin down. We've established that. Composition is sorted under English, but Rhetoric is the object at center of a tug of war between English and Communications. Our fight for legitimiacy affects everything from our pay to the number of available TT positions to the issues of adjunct labor. We're in, suffice it to say, a pretty precarious place.

How does that determine what we do in our classrooms? Does it influence the political landscape of our syllabi? Composotion has no status, remember? We're bottom-of-the-barrel, fix their writing, and run the writing center, remember? Well, for a lot of us, a lot of radicals in the field...we're taking what we can get and politicizing the hell out of it. Because the history is important, but more important is the shift to present day and action.

A friend's Writing Inquiry course is completely focused on Land and Story and Cultural Rhetorics, another friend's FYW begins by allowing students to learn about positionality, writing about their own, and reading articles by marganilized scholars continually throughout the semester. Regardless of whether our history reflects a strong, politically motivated field (outside of it's utility for gate-keeping), the classroom is being politicized--mostly utilized for social justice and civic engagement work.

So what I want to leave us with is a reflection on if and how we are politicizing our own classrooms? Do we think that makes for a more meaningful field of study? Because I don't want to be in the land of bread and circuits, cost analysis, administrative duties outweighing research and tangible work. So how do we keep changing it?

Now, what?: A Look Back at Friday’s IEI Presentation

I’d like to ruminate on the following quotation from Textual Carnivals before returning to it later—Miller declares:

Thus institutional boundaries between human and not quite human, which composition first drew, have been rebuilt between two kinds of composition students, the not quite and the even less suitable, with the latter group in some measure imagined to be hopelessly ‘low.’ These administrative practices […] define composition as a particular kind of universal test, a task to be got out of the way. (86) 

Let’s backtrack a bit before we discuss the quotation above. On Friday afternoon, the Writing Program had a workshop called “Transitioning from the IEI to FYC” (re-watch it here or below). Faculty from Ball State’s Intensive English Institute (IEI), Professor Nidia Flis and Dr. Susan Luo, discussed how the IEI works with international students and how they transition from the IEI to first-year writing. Dr. Luo and Professor Flis have conducted a few studies where they observed English 103 classrooms, interviewed English 103 instructors, and also interviewed the former IEI students who were now in 103. Using their experiences as faculty as well as their studies, they not only presented about how they prepare students in the IEI, but also how we, as instructors, can better help and empathize with these international students. Overall, I gained a lot of insight into the IEI and international students in FYC. I thought their presentation was extremely valuable. What I’m about to discuss is not a judgment upon either FYC at Ball State, nor the IEI, but rather a presentation of some of my observations and the questions that they generated for me. 

Here are my three observations I’d like to discuss:

• Within their presentation, they discussed that the FYC classroom gives the international students much more time to revise compared to the IEI, as they give timed writing, which typically only generates 4 paragraphs (20:56). 
• Moreover, during the Q&A, Yusi Chen asked about what types of writing the IEI taught, and they replied that they covered four types of writing in level 2: process, definition, argument, and narration (49:34-50:15). In level 3, they cover comparison and contrast (50:26). In level 5 and 6 is argumentation with sources they provide (50:26-51:19). They also discussed how they don’t currently use rhetorical terms (55:13).
•  In their closing remarks, one of their main suggestions for us as FYC instructors was to stress grammar instruction in very contextual ways of using it (42:27-44:10). Related, in the Q&A, there was also a question about “Will focusing on grammar give the misconception that good grammar equals good writing [for both international and native students]?” (51:20), which didn’t get answered because we transitioned into a different question.

As we discussed in class when we read essays by Connors, Ohmann and Crowley, the modes may not be dominant, but they’re still very commonplace in FYC. We can see that the modes of writing are extremely dominant in the IEI, and these are the modes that they are expected to write in through their timed writing. These writings in the IEI, as of now, are not explicitly rhetorical in nature either, but that may change as we further our commonplaces with them and visa versa. Finally, grammar is a main focus for the IEI, as these students are learning the norms of Standard Academic Written English.

This makes me wonder: should we mitigate the practices of timed writing towards a longer writing process? If so, how? Also, how does this mode-focused instruction in the IEI transfer to FYC at BSU? What is the implication for IEI students when they focus on modes in their writing? Finally, to restate the question, will focusing on grammar give the misconception that good grammar equals good writing? Then, returning to the excerpt from Miller that I began this post with, where are we drawing these “institutional boundaries” for international students? Are the “administrative practices” they undergo just some kind of “universal test”?

If I’m being honest, I am in a gray area and have unformed opinions about what both the immersion language learning and FYC (in general, not necessarily at BSU) mean for multilingual writers and/or international students. What I do know is that that universities profit greatly off of international students attending their schools, and this “universal test” may be one where they’re designed to have to stay longer. This longer stay can be for a plethora of reasons, such as the dissonance between FYC and immersive language experiences and their actual academic goals, or that FYC that may not be designed with empathy and understanding for multilingual writers. In summation, I have a lot of observations and questions based on Miller, Crowley, Ohmann, Connors, and the presentation, but not a lot of idea of where to begin or what to think about it.

First Year Composition: A Quasi-Religion

I do say, what a refreshing break. No doubt like most of you, I spent the majority of my time this past weekend diving, swimming, and drowning in Susan Miller's Textual Carnivals. What a tough read, am I right? While attempting to understand thoroughly the arguments, examples, and claims Miller makes in both the introduction and first chapter, I noticed a fairly common used term: quasi-religion. Miller likes to use these abstract terms to describe the even more abstract field (or fields, whichever boat you float in) of rhetoric and composition. In my attempt to elaborate how I define this term, I think I can summarize most of what I pulled from the first forty or so pages of Miller's book.

We need to figure out who we are, damn it! No, really. In our very own class, we all express a desire to break free from the authoritarian demons we call, always with a hiss of hatred, "the administration" and to be a more inclusive field, open to all walks of life. However, and I'm sure we'd all agree, college is still elitist in its pursuit to educate the masses. Miller says it best herself, when talking about composition, that:

"it is like the Old Testament God...always in a state of becoming, of reinventing itself to compensate for its perceived lack of fixed goals and methods. But it is nonetheless in many ways a ritualistic performance that does not change except by substituting new rituals and codes for old ones" (12).

To put into my own words, I have to elaborate a bit more here. Composition, loosely explained here, started in order to meet the demand for an educated population, spurned in part by technology (mass dissemination of literature). Needs were met by teaching students grammar and analyzing examples of "good English." Essentially, a style's course. This in turn churned out a population that could read and, thus, better communicate with their neighbors down the road. But, as Miller quotes from George Gordon and Terry Eagleton, English literature (a combined discipline that included composition), became the "poor man's classics" and "literature would rehearse the masses in the habits of pluralistic thought and feeling...[to] curb in them any disruptive tendency to collective political action" (added "to", 20). It's hard not to read that as "brain washing" but I did.

So what does this mean for us? For us lowly TA's who please the establishment because we're "cheap labor" (Miller 11)? Our hands are tied and we can't do much. But don't fear! We will all be a part of the bourgeois, upper middle class and can soon try to make a difference. Where do we begin, though? It's a question I'm not sure I quite know the answer to. Instead, I want to copy and paste the course goals from English 103. I've emphasized the goals that match up with "poor man's classics". It is also important to note how these goals have "changed" to fit a need but, in essence, still perpetuated an elitist agenda:

Course Goals

• Understand that persuasion—both visual and verbal—is integral to reading and composing
• Understand how persuasive visual and verbal texts are composed for different audiences and different purposes
• Develop effective strategies of invention, drafting, and revision for different rhetorical situations and individual composing styles
• Compose texts in various media using solid logic, claims, evidence, creativity, and audience awareness
• Integrate primary and secondary research as appropriate to the rhetorical situation
• Develop strategies for becoming more critical and careful readers of both their own and others’ texts
• Demonstrate a professional attitude towards their writing by focusing on the need for appropriate format, syntax, punctuation, and spelling
• Take responsibility for their own progress
• Develop the ability to work well with others on composing tasks. 

So...I emphasized most of these and I want to leave you with a question, "Are we still teaching "poor man's English?" That is, what aspects of contemporary FYC are simply a reskinning of a systematic and elitist course meant to "curb disruptive tendency to a collective political action?" Are we free from that type of course or are we still teaching it, like a "quasi-religion"? And is it inherently a bad thing if we do? Our students MUST be prepared for their future in academia and beyond, right?  

Miller, Susan. Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition. Southern Illinois University Press, 1991.