For years
the leaders in Rhetoric and Composition have espoused a "new rhetoric,"
a process-oriented, student-centered, collaborative pedagogy. Virtually
no one seriously researching the subject would disagree with the benefit
of a much-heralded shift from the tenets of "current-traditional" rhetoric,
the emphasis on the strict formalisms of the nineteenth century, and the
"myth of the isolated writer," as Lefevre describes it.
Yet nothing much is really changing in
the vast majority of public school and even college classrooms. The "practitioners,"
as Steve North calls them, who compose the huge majority of those teaching
composition, continue to look not to the researchers and scholars in the
field for their instructional guidance, but to people in the classrooms
to the right and left of them, to what North calls teaching "lore." This
"lore," drawing heavily upon presumed common sense and intuition, continues
to emphasize formalism, drill, lecture, and strict management of in-class
behavior, the remnants of the Prussian model that had so much to do with
encouraging disciplinary specialization and the incrementalization of learning
in the nineteenth century, eventually to succumb to a full scale "scientific
management" of classroom instruction described so enthusiastically and
chillingly by Ralph Tyler in the mid-twentieth century.
Frankly, all our liberal prognostications
about empowering students, giving students the right to their own language,
holistic evaluation, liberatory pedagogy, and such, whatever the value
of such advice, are simply bouncing off the rank and file teacher, who
seems bulletproof to real change. Like our literature friends, who are
quite successfully separating the nature of aesthetic texts from anything
that makes any sense to anybody but a literature Ph.D., we, in our continuing
intellectual apotheosis from what seems to be happening to most
students in most classrooms, are excusing ourselves from doing what our
real job should be: to influence education.
If the intellectual leaders of our discipline
are therefore impotent to effect real change, then where's the hope?
The hope, as Orwell would say, lies with
the proles. The practitioners will indeed move into a progressive pedagogy,
one that includes all the attributes of writing as process, student-centeredness,
and collaboration, but they will not do it because they are reading College
English or attending 4C's. They will do it because the ground, quite
literally, is shifting beneath their feet.
The face-to-face, shoebox classroom is
the culprit here. As an environment trying to support an effective learning
ecology, it fails miserably. It's like the alley where the druggies hang
out; you can detox the kid and put him in a halfway house and counsel him
for years, but it you put him back in the hood and back in that alley,
he will revert, sucked in by the forces of his environment.
Same thing happens to the teacher who has
been carefully brought out of the deceptively common-sensical and intuitive
tenets of current-traditionalism and coercive instruction. Once she goes
back into that box, facing those 25 hostiles who have been carefully taught,
in the memorable phrase of Ira Shor, to expect education to be done
to them, and who, as a condition of their environment, operate under the
seductive pressures of the "underlife," as Robert Brooks phrases it, all
informed bets are off. Many many teachers have reported to me that they've
fallen off the wagon of "the new rhetoric" because, in so many words, what
the eggheads at the University have come up with just won't work in the
trenches.
The problem, of course, is not with the
eggheads or with the teachers, but with the trenches. We need to get both
students and teachers out of those hundred-and-eighty-year-old trenches.
I am confident that the pressures of a society becoming rapidly emeshed
in digital communication will force the locked box of the classroom to
open up, and eventually to break up and disappear. Formal learning will
escape its cell block mentality and begin to pervade all aspects of society
and living, just as the telephone is now practically a condition of hour-to-hour
living. The current-traditional concept of "delivering" knowledge will,
necessarily, morph into the postmodern concept of stimulating knowledge-making,
of making life-long students knowledge workers who navigate the vicissitudes
of a knowledge economy in ways that Mrs. Grundy, glowering and framed by
her blackboard, could never imagine. |