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Articles Conference Reviews |
J.11 Searching for the Owner of WritingJ.11 Searching for the Owner of Writing: Contesting the Spaces of First-Year Composition, WAC, and the WPA Neal Lerner, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, “I Taught a Jihadist to Write” Lerner starts with a metaphor of student writers as “cutting their teeth” in college writing. Then, he brings in the focus of his talk, and perhaps what some students may do once their teeth mature. Lerner narrates working with a particular Muslim student at MIT, Terik Mahana, who is currently awaiting trial for terrorism. Did Mahana’s training in writing and thinking at MIT contribute to his current situation, and how much did Lerner aid in this as his FYC instructor, Lerner wonders. What effect did the fact that Mahana’s father was a faculty member at MIT have on his current situation? Mahana had been previously arrested for communications during travels to Yemen in 2009, communications involving armed attacks with automatic weapons. An FYC student with Lerner in 2000 and 2001, Mahana wrote about selfishness in society and ended up earning a B for the course. Again, Lerner opines, did anything done it that course with him help operationalize Mahana’s militancy? Lerner summarizes media reports ranging from family members and acquaintances who did not see this coming to polemicists (who did not know him) who attacked Mahana. Lerner is left to ponder the “possibilities for and limits of our writing class.” Anne Ellen Geller, St. John’s University, Queens, NY, “When Everyone on Campus Owned Writing and the Government Paid for It” Gellar begins by narrating the seemingly routine 1983 assigned journal writing of a student, Lily. But audience members quickly learn that, soon after, Lily began working with Elaine Maimon on a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) project at Beaver College—and continued to journal her experiences. “Meta, meta, meta: how can you get freshman to think about what they’re doing?” Geller asks. She goes on to report how there was $830,000 in NEH funding between 1981 and 1982 to study critical thinking and collaborative learning in writing. Geller describes how Lily journalized her prolific research and publication activity as a result of these experiences. Working with faculty from across the disciplines, Lily described what it was like being a student in this NEH research, then moving on to being a lead researcher. Lily wrote about files with copies of student writing thanking professors for what they learned in these writing classes, including how linked cluster classes had great impact on WAC in those days. For example, she describes a student who reflected on links between FYC and biology, which brought the real natural world to him in writing for the first time beyond a textbook. As a biology teacher now, this former student thinks of this as he decides which readings to plan and books to order for his class. As a scholar, he wonders how much an impact his NEH funded WAC experiences affected his article on his teaching of writing with students for English Journal. Geller is left to wonder why such experiences are not even close to being as well-funded now as they were then. (Maimon was in the audience, and, during the Q&A session, she provided a little behind-the-scenes information, saying that this was a radical time and that she and colleagues wanted to make sure that students were enfranchised. She explained how when Reagan came into power she was at Brown working on research on why the Great Books agenda was problematic.) Melissa Ianetta, University of Delaware, Newark, “Who Owns Writing? I Do!” Ianetta begins with a hilarious description of her position as Director of Writing at her institution, how she is in charge of FYC, W-courses in other disciplines, and is director of the writing center and the WAC program. And since she reports to different people, they are not usually in conversation with each other. She is the “place you come if you have an idea or have a complaint.” In answer to Doug Hesse’s 2005 question, “who owns writing?” she succinctly answers… “Me.” But what about collaboration, that benchmark of composition theory and practice? Ianetta goes on to discuss the pros and cons of distributed leadership. When she started out six years ago, she was the only comp person on campus, so it made sense that she would be the one and only director of writing. She describes questions of money and where to put it as she envisioned the choices and options she had in designing her program’s future. Ianetta argues that one voice arguing for where and how much money gets allocated is most efficient and effective. She talked about her serious efforts toward making the Writing Program independent of the English Department. She emphasized how all of her meetings, planning, etc., go in the service of securing full-time faculty lines and “getting the adjunct-exploiting monkey off your back.” She jokes about the difficulty and ambiguity of decision-making, making tough decisions that she may or may not really have the authority to make. Yet she concluded her talk by insisting that distributed leadership does not necessarily multiply the power of the program. Rather, she urges administrators to make decisions to choose the best leaders they can. (During Q&A she did admit that she was “being provoking for art’s sake.”) |