Writing Maternity

Major's response

Since I posted Jerry Nelms' comments on Bill Major's IHE piece, it seems only fair to post Major's response to Nelms here, as well, rather than burying it in the comments.  The ongoing discussion is here.

I appreciate everyone’s thoughtful comments. I had a fairly well-known professor in grad school who wrote a very well-received book in the popular press, save for the review in his hometown paper. He felt the need to respond, much to the department’s delight and consternation.

I’m not sure I feel the need. On the other hand, it’s still early.

Professor Nelms makes a number of important points, for which I am grateful. On the whole, however, I wonder whether he was reading a different essay. My main question was quite simple: why aren’t more professors of English teaching writing? I make very few claims in the article about rhetoric and comp, per se, or the nuts and bolts of teaching it. I don’t talk about the scholarship of rhet/comp since this is not the subject of my column. Thus:

“I do not think it an exaggeration to say that the teaching of writing appears secondary to the other, more lofty work of professing literature. Since when did writing become anathema? If writing is so important thatvirtually every student at nearly every college and university must take at least one composition course (and usually two), why aren’t more professors of English teaching it?”

I simply offer a number of theories as to why writing instruction often has second-class status in the university, especially within English departments.

Moreover, professor Nelms:

1. I make no assumptions that all English professors are the same. I wonder—perhaps naively—why English profs (rather than rhet/comp) avoid writing instruction like the plague;

2. Grunt work: Indeed, it is. Just ask your local adjunct or five and five English prof. Check out the teaching schedule for both full and part-time English instructors at your local community college.

3. Composition theory: Where did I suggest or imply that there is no past and present history of rhetoric/comp theory and criticism? Foucault/Bakhtin/Kristeva? Please. I worked my way through them and decided that getting my students to understand the art of the semicolon was more important.

4. English profs and interpretive reading: I think I made this very point in my article.

5. Grammar: Ah! the rub! I’m afraid that I can never be convinced that grammar is *not* one of the more important features of good writing. It’s not the only one. Duh. Since when does talk of grammar/mechanics, etc. turn one into an ogre? What are we afraid of? Success?

6. Transfer-based question: Here I am in complete agreement with professor Nelms. I’m not sure where I addressed this issue in my article, however.

7. Language is changing: Did I suggest or imply otherwise?

8. Undergrads and writing: I teach enough basic composition courses to know that, yes, there is a problem. To argue otherwise tells me that we are winning the war in Iraq, too.

I obviously value rhet/comp and its long history. I did not imply—or mean to imply—that depts. of writing are not doing their jobs. On the other hand, I haven’t seen enough evidence to suggest that a more catholic approach to writing instruction might not be a bad thing. After all, if we value writing across the curriculum (and most of us do), we might wish to get the English (lit) professors off the bench and into the game.

who should teach writing?

William Major argues in today's IHE that (essentially) everyone in an English department should teach writing -- that we shouldn't*** farm it out to the academic proletariat, be that graduate students, adjuncts, or some other lower-tier, less-well-paid category.  He isn't alone in making this kind of argument, although within Writing Studies it tends to be tied to arguments for secession from English, departmental status for composition, and so on.

I have reservations about the departmentalization of my field on many counts, but I'm writing about them elsewhere, so I'm going to hold off on the ins and outs of my feelings about that issue for now.  I agree with Major that the marginalization of teaching writing is a problem, and that it's a problem not just from the perspective of labor issues but also from a pedagogical perspective.  There's plenty of evidence that shows that retention rates go up when students have smaller classes taught by tenure-line faculty in their first year.  And as long as we frontload writing instruction, that's going to make for a pretty compelling argument for having those on the tenure-line teach first-year students the expectations and genres of academic writing.

It's difficult to even begin to list the variety of reasons why writing instruction is marginalized.  It's more practical, and we've been convinced since at least the eighteenth century that the abstract is more "serious" and "difficult" and "interesting" and "worthwhile" than the practical.  (And, yes, that's both gendered and racialized, as we all know.)  But it's also marginalized because, frankly, it takes time.  There's no way to teach writing without assigning writing; and there's no point in assigning writing if you aren't going to respond to it, giving students feedback.  Which means that it's necessarily more difficult to do research and publish if you're teaching writing.  Which means that with the rise of "academic professionalism" in the 1960s, it became increasingly difficult for institutions to reward faculty who were dedicated and even visionary teachers but who didn't publish.

I'm thinking, as I write this, about the career of Theodore Baird, who taught at Amherst from the late '20s through the late '60s, and who was the architect and guiding spirit behind Amherst's famous freshman English course, English 1-2.  (I've been reading Robin Varnum's book about Baird and English 1-2.)  It's pretty safe to say that Baird and that course have influenced Writing Studies and the teaching of first-year composition in ways too subtle and varied to list,* but what I'm most struck by today, putting Varnum together with Major, is the extent to which Baird's career and contribution are essentially impossible today.  Baird was a teacher, first and foremost.  He was also what we would now call a writing program administrator, although he probably would have scorned the title, and not because he saw the work as beneath him.  And in that teaching and administrative work we can now see -- and could probably see from the various memos and the incredibly elaborate assignment sequences that he developed -- that he was engaged in intellectual work as substantive and wide-ranging as much of the scholarship happening at the time. 

When Baird got tenure in the 1940s he could do so for being a good teacher and, let's be honest, being the right sort: white, male, upper-middle-class, Ivy League-educated.  While I'd like more institutions to pay more attention to teaching,** and (on the flip side) I'd like fewer institutions to offer time off from teaching as the most desirable, valuable, honorable reward graduate students or faculty can aim for, we also need to think about how we go about seeing teaching in the review process -- that is, how we make it visible.  I'd bet that relatively few of the students who went through English 1-2 had deeply positive things to say about it; from Varnum's interviews, it seems that it was a bewildering, somewhat excruciating course to take.  "Boot camp" was the most common image.  And while I think that student course evaluations are important, I think that we also need to think about how else we read what happens in the classroom.

In other words, if we're going to take Major -- and all the others making similar claims, including notables like Graff and Fish -- seriously, a lot of things have to change.

* It's pretty clear that Baird was deeply influenced by Robert Frost, and also that the assumptions and pedagogy of English 1-2 bear the stamp of that influence.  And given the direction that Writing Studies has taken, it's kind of trippy to think about that.

** A professor I worked with as a graduate student once told a class (when they were clamoring for papers back on ridiculously short notice): "It takes me a long time to read your papers because I take a pretty long time for each one.  There are many things in this profession that I can't tell whether or  not I'm being paid to do; but reading your papers is one of the things that I know is an important part of my job."  It's perhaps telling that at that research-intensive institution he didn't get tenure.

Added on Wednesday, 7/23 @ 9:02 AM: *** As Major himself pointed out, I misrepresented him here, an inadvertant typo on my part.  I've corrected the text in bold above.

assessment round-up

Oddly enough, on a day with 1 CHE and 2 IHE stories about assessment and higher ed, a confidential letter came through my inbox that also got me up in arms on the issue.  I'm going to satisfy the outrage I'm not allowed to spew to the world by chortling mightily at the fact that although Margaret Spellings has just made "another high-profile attempt to convince colleges that they risk painful government interventions if they don't improve the quality of their programs and help more students identify and afford them" "colleges seem increasingly willing to keep taking that risk" since she only has six months left in office.

I also have to say that of the regional accrediting agencies one might have to deal with, Middle States is looking pretty good.  Here's what a member of their executive committee says about some of the DOE's current take on higher education's responsibilities: "What the public wants is to get a good education at a reasonable cost," said Mr. Chambliss, a member of the executive committee of the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, one of the six regional accrediting agencies. "Rather than focusing our efforts on trying to somehow convince the public through various data strategies," he said, colleges should "just do a good job and let them figure it out."

My sense is that many major colleges and universities have been playing an admittedly passive-aggressive waiting game with Spellings and questions of accreditation.  While going through the motions -- although what's required to appear to go through the motions has been pretty sustained and developed, I have to say -- most if not many institutions have done their best to adopt a mode of passive resistance, as described here in a slightly different arena:

"As a group of state leaders at last week’s Education Department summit on higher education began a discussion aimed at identifying the biggest problems facing higher education and potential achievable solutions to them, the session’s moderator asked for a volunteer willing to report back to the larger summit about the fruits of the group’s brainstorming. The previous day, the moderator explained, a department staff member had done the reporting out for each of the breakout groups, but the summit’s leaders thought it would be better if the reports came instead from participants.

So, any volunteers? she asked again. Despite repeated entreaties, no takers emerged." (from IHE)

One of the big names in my field, Ed White, has a mantra that was repeatedly invoked at the WPA Conference a couple of weeks ago: "Assess thyself, lest thee be assessed!"  He's right.  And, frankly, between my own position in rhet/comp and as the daughter of someone who started her career in the field of educational policy, school change, and educational evaluation, I'm a lot more receptive to many of the ideas of what's now called assessment than most.  But the Spellings Commission's fixation on quantifiable results that document the "value" that's been "added" to students* as result of 4 or 5 years in a higher educational institution, not to mention the apparent goal of some kind of national standardization between higher ed institutions across the country, gives me the willies.

Which is just to say that I'm firmly in agreement with Diane Auer Jones and others in the debate over what this model of assessment could do to the liberal arts.

* If you can't tell what's wrong with that sentence, read Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  Now.  Please.

Hey there, Buffy fans . . .

check out Joss Whedon's new project.

I'm slowly

working my way up to more regularly and reflective blogging again.  In the mean time, several things came through my inbox this morning that I thought I'd pass along ...

... From CHE, news of a study done at U of Georgia that the writing section of the new SAT is more predictive of student performance in the first year than the rest of the test ...
My feelings about this are pretty intense and pretty mixed.  I'm delighted to hear that there's evidence that writing ability is fairly predictive of academic performance in college (and they controlled for parental education level and the like, it seems); not only does that ratify what folks in my field both at the higher ed. level and at the K-12 level have been saying for years, but it also suggests -- woo-hoo! -- that college students are being expected to write.  But the SAT writing test itself is pretty deeply flawed, in my view, and I worry that it's further entrenching a culture of descriptive exposition, rather than analytic, interpretive argument.

... From the College Board itself, the announcement that students can now choose which set of scores will be sent to the colleges they apply to, rather than having all the scores from every time they've taken the test sent ...
There's nothing mixed about this at all: it lets rich kids cherry pick their scores without anyone being the wiser, which gives them a further advantage with schools that look at these scores, and that's terrible.  There's a bit of control when the schools can at least see that Joey Rich Boy took the SAT eight times, whereas Charlie Ordinary only took at once; if we take that away, it becomes even harder to parse what the scores mean, and what an applicant's score owes to test-prep courses and test-taking practice.

... Over at CompPile, they're experimenting with CommentPress to launch a roundtable discussion at this week WPA conference early -- and, we hope, keep it going longer.
The topic of the roundtable is "How Can We Better Document, Preserve, Protect, and Share our Learning?" and you can currently see the original proposal for the roundtable, as well as statements from each of the participants (Glenn Blalock, Janis Haswell, Rich Haswell, Michael Palmquist, and Steve Wilhoit).

We interrupt these vacation musings to bring you an article about childcare ...

from Emily Yoffe's "Human Guinea Pig" column.  One moment I'd like to highlight:

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are about 1.4 million child care workers, and is it an occupation in high demand. The BLS says child care workers must be "mature, patient, understanding, and articulate and have energy and physical stamina." In exchange, the median national salary is $17,630. (At Gap, the average worker makes about $22,000.) The advocacy group Center for the Child Care Workforce points out that only a handful of the more than 800 occupations surveyed by the BLS have lower wages—these include parking lot attendants and dishwashers.

And, a really good phrase that I'd never heard before but will now have to use, routinely: the "late-afternoon period of childhood, when it's not time for dinner, when bedtime seems an eon away, is often called the arsenic hour."

It's a good piece, hitting on many of the most important notes.  But I'm a bit sorry that it concludes as it does:

So the pay is lousy, it's exhausting, but still the job comes with satisfactions no parking lot attendant receives. A week after Malik's transfer to the Lions, I went to check and see how he was doing. When I called his name, he emerged from amidst his classmates and ran to me and gave me a hug. Then he picked up a ball and said, "Ball, ball!" (who knew he could speak?) and threw it, which caused him to fall down, which caused him to laugh hysterically. Malik was happy now, and I was happy for him.

I'd like us to get away from thinking that it's okay to pay child-care workers miserable wages because of the emotional compensation they get.  (Who is it who riffs on the impossibility of buying groceries with emotional compensation?)  While that's certainly not Yoffe's argument, this image gives us perhaps too happy a note to end on, given the state of that particular industry.

On a slightly related topic, Carolyn Steedman had a great article in Critical Inquiry recently about eighteenth-century servants being driven to violence by their responsibility for the diapers of their employers' kids.  When you think about the tremendous physical labor of laundry 200+ years ago, it makes a terrifying lot of sense.

good news from Elizabeth

(Although it certainly falls into the it's-bloody-well-about-time category.)

all my thoughts are being funnelled

into the Cs proposal I'm writing.  So I'm just going to direct you elsewhere:

• to Timothy Burke, to think about the difference(s) between disciplinarity and departmentalism;
• to blue milk, to think about why paid maternity leave and carers leave are important; and
• to IHE, for Bob Sommer's thoughts on the relationship of teaching and grading (specifically exam-giving and -grading).

(FWIW, I agree with the first two and disagree with the last.  Or rather, I think that he's right about the problem as exams and pedagogy are generally understood in relation to teaching, but I think that's a misapprehension.  Which isn't to say that I'm not deeply aware of and sympathetic to the problem of large, under-funded institutions.)

Originality, Imitation, and Plagiarism

That's the title of the book that arrived yesterday, and that I'm now devouring.  It's an anthology edited by Caroline Eisner and Martha Vicinus, and it's proving a smart, varied, thoughtful collection.  Here's a great series of questions from Eisner and Vicinus' introduction:

• How do we conserve and inculcate a tradition of ethical research and writing standards, while acknowledging and taking full advantage of the opportunities provided by new technologies?
• How can students be taught to evaluate sources and then credit the authors appropriately?
• Why have so many experienced researchers been found guilty of stealing from others?
• How can we encourage the free and ethical exchange of ideas?
• How can we encourage students, so accustomed to digital sharing, to understand citation practices, free use, and the legitimate ownership of ideas?

Not a question, but I can't leave you without this, too: "All too often these queries [that writing centers face about plagiarism] are framed in narrow, judgmental terms that leave little room for either the teacher or the student to understand the complexities of permission, atttribution, and copyright.  Teachers find themselves placed in an adversarial position in relation to students, as if all writing assignments involved the risk of plagiarism. . . . Across disciplines and fields, we find that plagiarism is not a simple wrong; a full understanding of its role in contemporary intellectual life depends on a broad approach that includes notions of what is original and what role imitation plays in the creation of new texts" (1).

I'd already been pretty sure that this anthology would give me material for the cornerstone of a unit on these issues for my fall course on theories of writing and pedagogy; now I'm certain.

arguments

There's a discussion going on over at The Valve about arguments in academic writing.  We humanists seem to need to have this conversation periodically, particularly in the last couple of decades, over whether or not we make "arguments" and, of course, what exactly we mean when we say that we do or we don't.  I think that we make arguments.  But I think that "argument" means something slightly different in academic discourse than it means in popular discourse, and I think that this difference confuses all of us.

Because I think that at their best, academic arguments aren't nearly as oppositional as popular arguments are.  They engage with other thinkers' and writers' ideas in order to develop and advance an idea or interpretation.  But "engagement" doesn't have to mean "disagreement."  Versions of this idea inform both Joe Harris' textbook Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts and the pedagogy of the Rutgers Writing Program.  At their best, academic arguments -- or, rather, at its best, academic inquiry -- seeks answers to pressing intellectual puzzles or problems or questions.  Those puzzles might arise from a sense that criticism had been blind to the complexities or nuances of a particular text, or that it as overlooked certain crucial issues; or they might arise from a reading of critical disagreements; or they might arise from the realization that a certain idea or issue or question or theory helps us understand something better than we did before.  In order to develop a response to the puzzle, you're going to have to make assertions.  And offer evidence (which must be analyzed to be evidence).  And you're going to have to engage with the ideas and writings of others.

It's not "argument" in the sense that Op-ed pieces are "arguments."  But it's more than "insight" or "description" because it cares about the implications or broader significance of the initial insight that gives it birth.