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?
Caitlyn, I agree with a lot of what you're saying here. I'd also like to add on to say we have to remember, as grad students, that the political landscape of our syllabi is also heavily tied to the things we've been taught about rhetoric and composition, so if it that hasn't been expanded to reflect these curricula, then that's extra labor for the already exploited grad students. In sum, we need to change RhetComp curricula just as much as FYC.
ReplyDeleteIf I am being candid in regards to what you raise here, I still have a lot of way to go and learning to do in order to further work toward a cultural rhetorics-focused classroom. My own classroom this semester has the theme of "Disruption." Throughout the semester, the students are working on learning about privilege, oppression, and difference in as many ways as I could fit into the 16 weeks. They are looking at systematic structures and how rhetoric, language, and ideologies are currently perpetuating oppression. Almost every reading is from a marginalized scholar and/or writer, but I want to add more and continue to learn more with them. They're writing narratives, doing critical media analyses, and also working on an archival project where they investigate the BSU archives in order to disrupt the traditional campus history. I'm grading with labor-based grading as an anti-racist strategy. But, I still don't think I'm doing the work I want to be doing or if it's radical enough.
Caitlyn,
ReplyDeleteI agree with your analysis of Miller's book. Her writing style is so difficult to get through that I find myself having to take breaks when reading her chapters. I wish this book was rewritten into a simple, condensed version so that her important ideas shined through more. Rhetoric and Composition seems to be one big contradiction, and her book did very little to help to clear that up for me.
I haven't started teaching as I am in the first semester of my GAship, but Miller's book has given me a lot to think about in terms of how I want to run my classroom. I worry that I'll waste my time "teaching to the system" and feel like I make absolutely no impact on my student's lives. I want to be able to give them the tools to fight back, but how do we find a balance between what we want to teach and what we "have" to teach according to the standards and goals we are given? I also do not want to be a willing participant in the "bread and circuits" that Miller presented in her book, but I do think I have a long way to go before I can put together a class that challenges that idea.
Caitlyn,
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes to politicizing my classroom, I have made a lot of forward progress compared to last semester, but I still have a long way to go. Before, I hardly ever mentioned anything that wasn't related to apolitical writing instruction (which I know isn't an accurate view of writing at all) out of fear and ignorance. As I continue to become more self-aware, I realize that I could make that choice because of my privilege: if I was afraid, I could choose not to address systemic racism, colonial practices, and ableist language, and it would have no impact on my life.
Now, I constantly address those oppressive structures in my class. Just the other day we read a large portion of Post-Truth, thinking about who gets to question truth--who has the power to deny truth? Who has the power to write a new narrative? I think it works well in ENG 104 when students come in with preconceived notions of academic research and academic writing. I push them to always ask questions such as, "Who sets the rules here," "Who gets published," "Who has access to academic material," and "What part of this story is left out or ignored?" Breaking down the idea that the university is a neutral, liberal space is key--something that Miller advocates for. And while I still have moments where I shy away, I am learning to embrace the fear I feel when addressing oppressive structures. When I feel that fear and discomfort, I know that I am doing something right.