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Articles Conference Reviews |
D.18 Metaphor, Habitus and EthicsD.18 Metaphor, Habitus and Ethics: Re-theorizing Writing Classrooms I arrived late to this session, just as Eric York was finishing his thoughts on cell phones in the classroom in his presentation, "Underlife, Cell Phones, and the Writing Classroom." I gathered from the Q & A at the end, though, that his presentation stimulated a lot of thought among the audience members regarding how we handle this seemingly ubiquitous nuisance in the classroom. I must admit that I am also unable to share much about the next presentation, "The Ethics Remix: Re-thinking and Re-newing Ethical Assumptions in College Composition," by Matthew Jackson, as he relied on a single theorist, whose name I was not even familiar enough with to guess how to spell, to proclaim that we must “unthink” everything about first-year composition because it was “impossible” to apply that theorist directly to the curriculum as it is currently constructed. Jackson made several references to needing to leave time for other speakers and was reading directly from a laptop so my impression is that his exploration of this particular theorist required more time than a paper on a concurrent session would allow. Several audience members who were familiar with the theorist, however, seemed to be nodding in agreement, so I’ll have to rely on their impressions that his call for us to be “otherwise than we know how to be” holds promise for, as the overall session title says, “retheorizing writing classrooms.” The third presentation, however, was a thoroughly engaging tag-teamed paper with Josh Mehler of Florida State and Daniel Richards of the University of South Florida taking turns sharing their theoretical and pedagogical applications of Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By to the composition classroom. In "Accessing the Active Potential of Metaphor: Restoring Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By," the two presenters advocated bringing these ideas back into our teaching as a means for making the abstract more concrete and physical and then reviewed the ways in which scholars themselves have used metaphors to describe what we do, both in the classroom and more theoretically. Mehler and Richards then shared their experiences using metaphor theory with their students to generate discussion and reflection on the writing process. They encouraged their students to build their own metaphors to describe writing and some of the results included the researcher as DJ and argument as dance. This presentation’s blend of theory and practical classroom applications made it both accessible and insightful and it was clear that much thought and preparation went into the paper Mehler and Richards presented, which was much appreciated by this attendee. The final paper on this panel, "Habitus and the Composition Classroom: Reimagining Classroom Practices," presented by Megan Titus, also mixed theory with pedagogy in her similarly well-considered perspective on the classroom as a social space that is embodied by participants who are enacting roles within it. Titus described the potential for using Bourdieu’s definition of habitus as a system that is the product of history to describe the internalized expectations our students bring to the writing classroom as a result of their previous experiences. She then noted the ways in which composition pedagogy can violate those expectations, with the now familiar circular seating arrangements and instructors' non-authoritative methods, and the resistance that often follows from that violation. Titus then ended her presentation by describing the ways in which she used Bourdieu’s concepts, though not the exact terminology, to ask students to reflect on their experiences with writing, including the five-paragraph essay. This presentation was more focused on using the composition classroom to intentionally “violate” conventional notions of education, echoing, it seemed to me, the critical pedagogy thread of composition studies, rather than on the actual writing instruction. Titus had clearly thought through the implications of Bourdieu’s theory but in a way that seemed to put the theory first, pedagogy second, while the balance seemed to be reversed in the previous paper. Overall, as a “theory” panel, this combination of papers felt uneven, but I must admit that I left the session energized by the ideas Mehler and Richards were working with and see much potential for further investigation in those ideas. |