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Articles Conference Reviews |
F.31 New Directions in Writing ProgramsF.31 Revisiting the Status Quo: New Directions in Writing Programs The panelists during this session presented a nice range of papers that touched on issues relating to pedagogy, writing program administration, and the politics of higher education. Indeed, the sheer scope of the subjects under consideration was such that it is difficult to speak cohesively about this panel. With that said, all three speakers, with perhaps the exception of Kurt Spellmeyer, clearly articulated arguments for challenging (or, perhaps, changing) the “status quo” that directs such things as curriculum and assessment in writing programs. Mary Rist (St. Edwards University) opened with her paper “Forgotten Relatives: An Argument for Teaching Grammar and Style in the Undergraduate Writing Major.” Rist sees in our current disciplinary discussions about the undergraduate writing major an opportunity for writing programs to offer more courses in grammar and style. If the undergraduate writing major is going to succeed as a separate major distinct from English departments, then program administrators will have to carefully construct writing curriculums (the operative word here) as opposed to simply grouping together a handful of writing courses. Rist shaped the bulk of her paper around a summary and refutation of what she argues are the commonplace arguments for not teaching grammar in writing courses: instructors don’t know grammar well enough to teach it; grammar instruction focuses the attention of both teacher and student in the wrong place; teaching grammar is not necessary; and, finally, even if students need to know grammar, they learn it natively. The organization of Rist’s paper was smart, especially given the conference format, and I was able to follow her argument without difficulty. With that said, I have mixed feelings about the way Rist discussed grammar instruction in writing curriculums. She rightly cautioned at the beginning of her paper that bringing up grammar at a rhetoric and composition conference is like bringing up politics and religion at the dinner table, and while I applaud her willingness to push our thinking towards the grammatical, there wasn’t much of an argument to her paper except that grammar and style classes should occupy course selection lists in undergraduate writing majors. The bulk of her evidence seemed to be personal experience, and in fact Rist referenced at several points how much students at her own institution enjoyed grammar classes. We all have anecdotal evidence that influences our pedagogy, but here it did not offer the persuasiveness that other, more empirical evidence would. Of course, there is only so much one can do in a 10-15 minute paper; nevertheless the idea of “grammar” is such a loaded concept that Rist might have better served us with a discussion about how to conceptualize what grammar courses might be (and do) in relation to the writing major—how we define them, how we might imagine and organize their content, and how we can connect them to a fluid understanding of rhetoric. Moreover Rist seemed to conflate grammar and style in her paper (something I am sure she doesn’t actually conflate in practice), but herein emerges another avenue for critical discussion as it concerns undergraduate writing curricula: what is the value in offering courses in “style” and how do we differentiate the idea of style from the idea of grammar? Nevertheless in the end Rist effectively points us to the important work of remembering that grammar and style instruction can widen the scope of undergraduate writing majors and we need to make room for such discussion. William Carpenter (High Point University) followed Rist with his paper “Does Transfer Require Disciplining? A Writing Program Emphasizes Invention and Reflection.” The purpose of his paper is to question composition’s recent interest in the “writing about writing” model and pose the question articulated in his paper’s title: Is transfer more successful when composition students have been schooled in the discipline of writing studies? Carpenter’s answer is both funny and frank: “kind of sort of.” For heuristic purposes Carpenter imagines a continuum with Wardle and Down’s take on “writing about writing” on one end (what Carpenter calls “direct disciplining”) and on the other end a much less formalized kind of disciplining that does not rely on the heavy use of writing studies scholarship in one’s pedagogy (“indirect disciplining”). The major difference between direct disciplining and indirect disciplining is simply located in whether an instructor introduces students to the scholarly conversations that shape how a writing class (presumably the one he or she is teaching) is pedagogically constructed. For example, while most writing instructors utilize process pedagogy in some shape or form, the direct disciplining-approach might ask students to not only reflect on and intervene their own writing processes but to also read and respond to scholarship that debates the idea of process itself. Careful to articulate that he is not proposing a binary, Carpenter says that there is a lot of room on this continuum for instructors to negotiate the amount of direct or indirect disciplining they incorporate into their teaching. Given the popularity of debate concerning the “writing about writing” model, Carpenter’s take is quite utile for those of us interested in experimenting with it. He acknowledges that there is value in direct disciplining, but he also cautions that disciplining is only valuable insofar as it accords with a writing program’s goals. Carpenter talked at length about his own institution, High Point University, and how it has incorporated a number of “self-awareness competencies” that make up an important part of how the writing program does assessment. In short, the writing program at HPU has made self-reflection a central component in how it thinks about transfer. Carpenter’s presentation would have been all the more useful for the 25 or so people in the audience had he prepared a supplementary handout, for there were ideas he mentioned that I remember sounded useful but, alas, I could only scribble so quickly. Nevertheless he offered an interesting method for imagining how the idea of “disciplining” might figure into the future organization of writing programs. The final paper on this panel, “Writing in the Era of the Shadow Elite: The Twilight of the Professions and the Rebirth of the Public Square,” was given by Kurt Spellmeyer (Rutgers University). Not so much concerned with composition programs per say, Spellmeyer has concern with “the system” itself in which composition takes place. That system is what has become the corporate university. But this much we know. What Spellmeyer adds to our understanding of the corporate university is an understanding about the way higher education is becoming privatized as the idea of the entrepreneur continues to emerge as the new model of what academic success looks like. Much of his talk was dedicated to teasing out these implications via a discussion of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), in which the world’s wealthy elite gather to tackle the myriad problems that confront us today: pollution, poverty, etc. The CGI, explains Spellmeyer, now does the work of the United Nations, and as a result discourses of diversity are being replaced with discourses of finance. In the university, by consequence, humanities courses are now being imagined as service providers to professional schools, and, as Spellmeyer argues, when we break the structure of traditional disciplines through the imposition of an entrepreneurial ideal, all that is left is economics. I’ve been a fan of Spellmeyer’s work for several years, and I especially enjoy his collection of essays, The Arts of Living. With that said, I’m not sure what to do with this particular talk—in my case how to actualize its value for what I do as a new junior faculty member at a small liberal arts college. Perhaps I am not part of Spellmeyer’s target audience, or perhaps I have failed to grasp the aim of his argument. To be sure, I am schooled in Bill Readings (The University in Ruins) and the work of Spellmeyer’s colleague at Rutgers, Richard Miller (whose arguments in Writing at the End of the World seem germane to Spellmeyer’s talk), so perhaps I am simply undergoing a kind of cynicism fatigue. If there is a message to garner from Spellmeyer for writing program administrators, it perhaps might be something to the tune of “resist the entrepreneurial imperatives of the corporate university,” but then again the humanities are in the state that they are, in part, because too many of us have assumed that the humanities are self-justifying. Don’t tell Spellmeyer, but perhaps maybe we could benefit from some old-fashioned entrepreneurial innovation. We won’t call Clinton, though. |