Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing

Oh, professors. If I've picked up anything about this mysterious brand of human being over my four years of college, it seems to be that "professor" is more of a state of mind than anything else. A state of mind that, when harnessed properly, is seen by the special select few who could afford grad school (or thought they could) as almost a super power, a divine gift bestowed upon them that can be used for good or evil. This is a mindset that can be incredibly useful in teaching, but almost blinding in other aspects of daily life (many of which do not include academia). For example, when Hairston started out talking about the present growth of the composition studies field by citing tenure tracks and conferences, I just about laughed out loud. Shouldn't we measure writing courses by what students are learning and producing, rather than how much someone gets paid to teach it?
I think the true problem with freshman courses, rather than the political slant Hairston criticizes, is that writing professors just don't know what to do with freshmen. Often times, the class is a requirement, making it a mixed bag of gen-ed students writing professors would rather not deal with, and for good reason, I suppose. They signed up to teach writers, and the business and physical therapy majors who would rather be spending their time elsewhere only take up space in the intellectual vaccuum they had hoped to create. Hairston's argument, however that the freshman course should be moved away from the political mindset, in my mind, is incredibly short-sighted, as political issues are one of the few things college ids can get worked up about enough to write a paper. You take politics away from freshman writing classes, and you're going to be reading a lot more stories about high school boyfriends and sports heroes.
Honestly, the section titles "New Possibilities for Freshman Courses" made me laugh out loud. The whole previous section is dedicated to how we can make students more comfortable and productive in their freshman writing classes, and then the first two paragraphs of this section describing the exclusivity of "multicultural courses." For these reasons, I couldn't help but wonder what she imagined would happen when her idealistic little Benetton ad of a class tried to workshop, or even describe their work for one another.

The "Public Intellectual"

At the beginning of the "Activist Research" section of this paper, Cushman outlines one of the negative side-effects in the students of the service learning course, what she calls the "liberal savior" complex. To me, this whole paper stunk of liberal savior complex. Ideally to me, a paper on how educated people can use their knowledge and means to help out those less fortunate would be full of applicable ideas and solutions, not ONE case study and sentences like "Theories of praxis can be united with notions of emancipatory pedagogy in an effort to create a theoretical framework for activist methodology." To me, that's just an attempt to prove the "intellectual" part of the claim made in the title. Cushman paints a picture of these "intellectuals" (a meaningless buzzword term in itself) as the benevolent instructors, handing down divine knowledge from on high. In the case of the YMCA case study, she seemed to talk about the "non-intellectuals" as a sort of untamed species, wild animals that needed to be tricked (if we give them journals, they won't realize they're learning!) in order to fully embrace education. While I think Cushman's motivation are admirable, her execution and professional tone, to me, leaves something to be desired. Perhaps it's that sinking feeling that in order to truly affect the literacy and education of people in the inner city, you need more knowledge and practical experience than "a three and a half year long ethnography."

Delpit

I think the problem that I have with so many of the articles we've read is that they do a great job of laying out a problem, explicating it, providing examples, etc., however, when it comes time to start proposing solutions, they are so freaking idealistic that I lose all faith in the buildup they gave me. Delpit's articles are no different. Her speech is all about helping kids, but I had a hard time seeing past the condescension. They want to teach all children how to read, but reject the system that proves effective because of the unfair power dynamic it presents (after all, it's important they learn how to read WITHOUT hurting their feelings). They agree that children need different instruction based on their home life, but shudder at the idea of physically classifying them like that in the public setting of school.
I also have a problem with the issue of race that I feel the second article projects on some of the scenarios mentioned. The black student in the "process" writing class, for one. What did it matter that the crappy teacher was white, and the good teacher was black? That seems like a case of competence versus incompetence and I feel like she was grasping to pull a race issue from it. Similarly, I think the differences in rhetoric style she suggest have far more to do with class than color, as I have had black teachers who were soft-spoken and used the "upper-middle class" suggestion technique of instruction, and white teachers who were no nonsense. I have a hard time being optimistic about issues like this, as I see the endless cycle of "benevolence" and hypocrisy regarding race and education to be almost inescapable at this point. We don't want to treat anyone differently, but we want them to have equal opportunities to learn. But they have different backgrounds which necessitates different forms of instruction (ie: treating them differently).

Technology and Writing

My article on Gender and Writing

The article I found is "Writing from the Trenches: Women's Work and Collaborative Writing" by Janice Doane and Devon Hodges. the article is essentially a response to Christopher Lasch's publication The Culture of Narcissism, in which their work was included but used, as they put it "to provide Lasch with feminist whipping girls." Because of this, the tone of the article is very defensive. Nevertheless, it is interesting to hear these two writers detail their process as collaboraters as well as the impact that has had on the response and reaction to their work. Though it occasionally comes off as a "look at us, look at us!" expose, it is an interesting look at the perception of collaborative work and gender in the "feminized" field of composition theory.

LINK: http://www.jstor.org/stable/464246

Composing as a Woman

I think it's interesting to look at composition theory in terms of gender, as it seems to be one of the only fields I've researched so far in which women didn't have to "emerge." A fairly new area of study, composition theory came to be recently enough that there are female minds who are considered the "founders" or "experts" in the field, and for that reason, I think it presents an interesting case study from which to approach the question of gender.
Flynn's opening statement that composition studies is a "feminization" of conceptions of writing and the composition process ties in with an article I read on womens art. This article began by outlining the psychological differences between men and women and then traced these differences to their physical manifestations. One of the observations made by this author was the tendencies of males to focus on singular details, whereas females are much more inclined to look at the big picture. I believe that it is this tendency that led to study of writing to be limited to product versus process for so long. The technical "masculine" style of analysis also is evidenced in Carol Gilligan's views that Flynn ties in, the idea that men view morality in terms of competing rights and rules, whereas women see it in terms of conflicting responsibilities. The evolution of composition studies away from the technical nit-pickery to a more comprehensive study of why people write the way they do does then seem, to be a "feminization" of sorts, shifting focus from the concrete product to the abstract process, and illustrating the differences in the individual writer while doing so.

Inventing the University

This is another article which starts out addressing the phenomena of students reaching for overly academic rhetoric in order to sound smarter than they are. It is an idea that continues to surface in the comp theory papers we are studying and what fascinates me is not the phenomena itself, but the belief system from which it seems to have arisen. We talk about writing as an art, but unlike other forms of art, there is very little credence given to raw talent in the field of writing. There are child prodigies who can play Mozart on their recorder based on hearing it, and visual artists who have risen to the top of their field with no formal training whatsoever. But unlike these other "less academic" forms of art, there seems to be no writing prodigies. There seems to be a level, a higher plane in which the walls are decorated with diplomas and other worthless pieces of paper, where these composition theorists exist. They write these articles on composition, addressing only those on their level, yet designed to "fix" the problems of the rest of us down here on earth. They write about students, but with a remarkable distance from the time when they themselves were students, producing "written Anguish" and substituting in five dollar words they found in the thesaurus. to tie in an idea of Shaugnessey's, why work so hard at "correcting the problem," when the source seems to be the academic atmosphere which fosters the desire to sound smarter than you are? Why not work to dissolve some of the stigma around academic writing, making it more accessible and less daunting to all involved. This would, inherently, ease the pressure on students to sound smart, and eliminate the deisre to use words one doesn't know.