WAC/WID: challenges and possibilities for English teachers

I believe that English teachers should learn other Discourses to help teachers of disciplines other than English develop assignments based on the writing to learn philosophy. However, if genres and their typical rhetorical moves and linguistic formulae can be studied and acquired in a reasonable amount of time, it is difficult to fully grasp the Discourse of a discipline understood as a historically situated human activity. English teachers can gain an understanding of the superficial structures of a discipline but clearly need to collaborate with the instructors of these other disciplines to develop programs that can really help students immerse into the discursive practices of a field of study. Two observations in Thaiss and McLeod article stood out for me: first “teachers must be aware of ways in which student writing  and learning are happening in the rest of the institution” (p. 287). Second: “[the discourse conventions of their disciplines] seem so natural to those fluent in them that it is difficult for them to see why students struggle as they learn them” (p. 287). Let’s start with the first point. Ideally, English teachers should see themselves as detectives who try to understand what teachers in other disciplines do with writing assignments. This is an important step to take if we really want to integrate pedagogical practices and make our classes more relevant to our students. It also true that teachers of other disciplines rarely have a meta-awareness of how their disciplinary discourses function in conjunction with precise modes of thinking, structured activities, disciplinary habits and rituals.  It is a responsibility of English teachers to invite other instructors to reflect on their practices so that they can devise ways to have students engage with them on a deeper and more authentic level.

Concerning the section on Filaments of growth in WAC/WID, I have a provocation to launch: are we sure that technologies have made student writing far easier? Undoubtedly there are now several avenues for the students to express their linguistic creativity but sometimes I wonder whether there are too many tools to choose from. Abundance of choice can paralyze users of technology, just like it paralyses consumers when they enter a store that is exploding with items on sale. CMS are used side by side with WordPress blogs, Google Drive, and, in many instances, social media and other writing platforms. Every tool comes with its own idiosyncrasies that partly detract from the experience of writing by posing a variety of obstacles that can be rather distracting. Writing can certainly improve our learning experiences but when the flow of our ideas is interrupted by technological glitches or by sounds and beeps that come from our machines, the software installed, or internet pages left open, well, we become less absorbed in writing, and the whole activity becomes less beneficial.

How far should we go in our attempt to learn the discursive practice of other disciplines?

Do technologies always assist the writing to learn process? What can go wrong?

Service learning, Guatemala, and Kelly Clarkson: Just me, myself and I

I believe that we all agree that community engaged-pedagogies provide compelling ways to stimulate experiential (and independent) learning and social activism. Students who have the opportunity to use their literacy skills to solve problems that afflict a variety of social groups learn the value of pluralistic liberal education. Ellen Cushman makes a very strong case for service learning when she describes knowledge generated by service learning as “exoteric” and made in interaction as opposed to isolation (Cross Talk, p. 513). Cushman also points out that the most sensible strategy for community engagement projects is to tie community partnerships with teachers’ research agenda and opt for “long term, well resourced, stable collaborations” (Guide, p. 64). This configuration of community-engaged pedagogy is a good antidote to half-backed and glib projects of collaboration that may impact negatively the process of education.

Now I would like to dwell on the problems and challenges that come with the implementation of this approach. Julie, Livingstone and Goldblatt write: “As students interact with others outside their classroom around issue of social justice, economic disparity, or identity…they are building a knowledge base that allows them to ‘join the academic conversation from a position of authority’” (Guide, p. 59). The assumption behind this claim is that the world that is outside of the classroom is populated with enlightened people whose influence on students can only be positive. But it is the second part that I found even more puzzling. How can experience outside academia help students to join the academic conversation with a position of authority? Would Gee and Johns agree with this idea?

Very sensibly, Julie, Livingstone and Goldblatt point out that before sending students out into their communities it is important to thoughtfully consider “the meaning, mutuality, and purpose of the work with community partners” (Guide, p. 60). They seem to be perfectly aware that good intentions can breed bad results. Ideally, instructors should spend time with groups and organizations to analyze their motives, their philosophy, to find out who is sponsoring certain programs and why. It seems to me that American corporations are constantly trying to whitewash their public profile by sponsoring countless service experiences and “giving back” initiatives. Halliburton wants to revitalize neighborhoods, support local youth, and protect the environment. Monsanto claims that “philanthropy and community outreach have always been a big part” of their life. The point that I am trying to make is that we need to carefully assess programs, organizations, charity initiatives before we ask our students to become involved with these groups.

Guatemala and Kelly Clarkson

Two years ago I went to  a conference entitled “Global Perspectives on Civic Engagement” and centered on the experience made by six NDSU students who volunteered with God’s Child Project in Guatemala for ten days. The students reported on Guatemala’s problems with a broad brush and focused on how they were emotionally affected by the sight of poverty. Pathos in spades but no mention of the causes that led to the present situation (how social inequality is connected to the legacy of Guatemala’s colonial past, for example).

The students also prepared a video streaming photos taken during their stay. The video featured a soundtrack made up of American hits such as What Doesn’t Kill You by Kelly Clarkson: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, stronger // just me, myself and I.” Not the best choice of lyrics when it comes to provide a description of a service experience that is all about moving beyond narcissism and selfish individualism. It was hard to find a photo that did not portray one or two students posing and smiling for the camera while mixing cement or playing with a skinny orphan child.

I am not sure what students took away from this experience.

Questions

How can experience outside academia help students to join the academic conversation with a position of authority?

In your experience, do success stories with service learning outnumber failures?

What makes these kinds of experiences successful for students?

Should we save the word on our own time?

As I read Ritchie and Boardman on Feminism in Composition, Ann George on Critical Pedagogies, and Paulo Freire one issue kept bothering me. Drawing from stasis theory I could assert that there is a central question of definition that has to be addressed. Knoblauch and Brannon ask: “who is to be liberated from what?” (cited by George, 87)

I believe that feminist movements can be particularly effective in questioning orthodoxies when the question of gender functions as a metonymy for the larger question of privilege and lack of privilege, power and disempowerment, enfranchisement and disenfranchisement. Underprivileged people can be male and female, they come from all countries, belong to all possible ethnic groups, speak many different languages or dialects. The oppressed are the students who participated to Brodkey’s commendable and eye-opening study on discursive hegemony. They are oppressed because the very people who should help students find ways to actively participate to social life and the construction of culture are unwilling to listen to what these students have to say. Booth’s rhetoric of listening might be considered utopian in scope but is a sine qua non for the liberation of the oppressed. But teachers Don and Rita can only offer tangential replies to the issues raised by their students. They don’t really listen, they are too engrossed in the narration of their own story, in the reproduction of safe orthodoxies and topoi. Whenever they are invited to empathize with the plights of the oppressed and establish what Freire would call a “dialogical relation” with their students, bourgeois teachers lapse into paternalistic social action by clumsily diminishing the import of a statement, by changing the subject or by simply deluding themselves that situations are not as bad as they seem: got evicted from your apartment? Buy a house.

Who gets to do the liberating? Maxine Hairston and Stanley Fish scorn privileged teachers who put “politics before craft.” Perhaps they have a point, perhaps we should save the world on our own time and focus on the best way to serve our students because that’s what they expect. I don’t have a neatly wrapped answer for this question, especially when an advocate of diversity like Victor Villanueva voices doubts about enforcing our liberating agenda on students who just want to be successful.

It is hard to dispute the idea that we have better chances of being successful when we conform, when we accept dogmas, when we use prestige languages, even prestige accents.  That’s what English learners want: in my 10 year experience as an EFL teacher in Italy I have never met a student who did not fret because he/she could not exactly reproduce the British accent. In “Living-English Work” (College English 68.6, 2006: 605-618) Min-Zhan Lu reports on news stories of tongue surgeries in developing nations, where people’s goals are to speak “accent-free English” in order to be successful in the global marketplace.

Perhaps students are right, perhaps Hairston and Fish are right; perhaps we can disrupt the status quo only when the times are ripe, when we have become insiders and we speak the language of power. Good. Does this mean that we have to accept the idea of tongue surgery? Do we have to accept the mutilation of students’ identity for the sake of being competitive and successful?

Finally, Elizabeth Ellsworth raises the very important, and often bypassed, issue of context. In what context is it effective to adopt critical pedagogies? Should we carefully assess class dynamics before we decide on our pedagogical strategies? Ira Shor argues “that not all students or teachers or institutions can accommodate an activist agenda” (86).  I agree with Shor and Ellsworth but I still can’t answer to the questions below. Perhaps you can, dear friends.

“Are we all equally credible as liberators?”

“Should we adopt critical pedagogies regardless of context?”

“When do we draw the line between students’ needs and our moral obligations as educators?”

Collaboration and the dark side of consensus

The conversation between Bruffee and Myers represents the typical conflict between two seemingly conflicting pedagogical goals. One goal is to allow students to enter the discourse communities and the circles of power and prestige that will allow them to be successful in life. At the other end of the spectrum we find the goal of educating students to question the very discourses that they are trying to reproduce and interrogate the very practices of power that exert a fascination over their minds. This clash between the need to conform and the ethical call not to conform runs as an undercurrent in many debates in the fields of composition and English Language Teaching. Should we teach the prestige varieties of English to empower international students (in terms of opportunities) or the more democratic, compromising, hybrid, and accessible English as a Lingua Franca (or global English)? Should we teach collaboration or competition (“leadership” appears to be a mantra in the US)?

The issue at stake in our readings for this week is cooperation: the importance of negotiating consensus in the classroom, where the classroom is understood (or should be understood) as a microcosm of the ‘real word.’ Leonard and Bruffee seems to argue that students must find their way towards consensus by playing down their differences because this readiness to conform is what the ‘real word’ values and rewards. Their emphasis on the importance of the social dimension of writing, peer collaboration, and task-based learning is laudable, almost intoxicating but Myers asks that we explore the dark side of consensus. He paints bleak portraits of students forced to renounce thoughts that are incompatible with the orthodoxies of a given social group (or discourse communities) with the goal of being productive as an undifferentiated ensemble.

Myers brings the limelight on some of the dangers and weaknesses of collaborative pedagogies. Reaching consensus, from his perspective, means to enforce conformity at the expense of diversity and healthy conflict. In a similar vein, he claims that the emphasis on the needs of the ‘real word’ stems from the naïve idea that the ‘real word’ is “natural, outside of our control” (p. 440). Well put, and there is more. Myers is also right when he points out that the growth of knowledge and the change of paradigms can never be reduced to factors internal to a discipline or a narrow discourse community (p.453). His call for an alternative way of seeing change in terms of social and economic factors is right on target. In other words, ideology must be accounted for; ideology cannot always sit outside of the classroom door, half-heartedly waiting for a chance to be invited inside for a show and tell workshop.

Now, these brilliant thinkers leave us with a problem that keeps resurfacing in all the debates that cut across English Composition. The mother of all dilemmas: How do we reconcile a pragmatic approach to teaching with our surreptitious and a bit clandestine desire to embrace critical pedagogies? Perhaps, we should save the word on our own time, as Stanley Fish polemically suggests, or else, we could try to save it in subtle ways, with the lightness of the butterfly, rather than the heaviness of the elephant. While I side with Bruffee and his call for collaborative learning (of course, I am a TAPPer, after all), I believe that teachers have to be ready to throw the production of consensus into disarray when they notice that creative pluralism is being threatened by cheap conformism.

My questions:

Do you see the dangers and limits of collaborative pedagogies in the same way as Myers sees them?

Do you see other problems that perhaps he overlooked?

What is the greatest danger with cooperation?

Expressivism and social epistemic rhetoric reconciled (through Gramsci!)

In “Expressive Pedagogy,” Chris Burnham and Rebecca Powell review the story of Expressivism in composition studies. At the center of Expressivist theory, they explain, is the “writer’s imaginative, psychological, social, and spiritual development and how that development influences individual consciousness and social behavior” (p. 113). As a product of this approach to writing theory, Expressivist pedagogy encourages freewriting, journal keeping, and reflective writing as activities that help an individual find her voice. Donald Murray, Ken Macrorie, Peter Elbow, and William Coles are singled out as the most influential proponents of a shift from emphasis on the acquisition of academic language to writing as a means to create an identity: “know thyself” (before you know the others) became the tacit motto of expressivism. However, when I read of inviting students “to use their own language” (p. 114), I can’t help wondering what language is the students’ own language. The language they use with their peers in their social groups? The language of intimacy they use with their loved ones? In fact, we are all multilingual, aren’t we? A limitation of this theory is the use of the word “language” in the singular form, the platonic idea that buried in our ego is the secret language of the unconscious, the one and only true language.

But then Burnham and Powell bring up Kinneavy’ s claim that “through expressive discourse the self moves from the private meaning to shared meaning, that “expressive discourse traces a path away from solipsism toward accommodation with the world.” The question arises spontaneously:  how so? What is the path that leads from focus on the self to focus on the other? Another question is stimulated by Britton’s work: how can the expressive role mediate between the participant role and the spectator role?

Berlin’s critique appears to be grounded in a concern that expressivism privileges individualism and a detachment from the real world.  Expressivism eschews the demands of a transactional society by implicitly divorcing ‘voice’ from social responsibility and political action. From Berlin’s perspective, instead of focusing inwardly on personal languages, students should study hegemonic languages and analyse the discourses by which they are defined.  In line with Freire’s claim that language is a social construct always prior to individuals and that social experience both shapes us and informs the languages we use, Berlin advocates renewed focus on language understood as an agent that creates the real world.

I believe that while it is important to place emphasis on writing as a means through which we construct our identity and forge our unique voice, it is also important to recognize that the language through which we construct our identities is laden with cultural assumptions that inevitable shape every effort at identity-building. In other words, the bricks that we use to build our identity do not belong to us; rather, we borrow them from the community in which we live.

In medio stat virtus, the ancient Romans said.  Perhaps we can reconcile the opposite theoretical camps (expressivism vs social epistemic rhetoric) by going back to Gramsci’s ideas on personal and social languages. Gramsci was a linguist by training.

In a letter written from prison (March 26, 1927), Gramsci recommends to his sister that she lets her son speak in Sardinian, to “facilitate his free spontaneity of linguistic expression during the first stage of his learning, without making the mistake of constraining his child’s fantasy in the ‘straitjacket’ of an inadequate Italian” (Rosiello, 2010). Gramsci’s understanding of language as a cultural product does not stop him from recommending that, before learning the language of hegemony (standard Italian) to participate to the political life of the nation, it is a good idea to let children develop their cognitive abilities by writing in their personal language. But these words must not mislead us, Gramsci also argued that if popular masses want to organize themselves to become hegemonic class, they must move beyond the sectarianism of dialects to gain control of a more powerful communicative instrument — standard Italian — an instrument through which they can exercise a new hegemony.

My questions are embedded in the second paragraph of this post.

References

Luigi Rosiello “Linguistics and Marxism in the Thought of Antonio Gramsci.” In Gramsci, Language, and Translation. Ed. Peter Ives and Rocco Lacorte. Lexington Books, 2010, p. 34

Massimo on Post-process

Post-process theorists (Kent, 1993), and proponents of Activity Theory place emphasis on language-in-use as public interaction with others in the world while advocating a “problem-posing” concept of education a la Freire. The rejection of the idea of teaching and learning as exercises of mastery is also central to these theories, as is the move away from foundationalist perspectives. Writing, reading, and speaking are situated social acts influenced, in their unfolding, by a plethora of external factors that we have to include in the picture if we want to provide a thick description of various types of verbal interaction. I use the expression “thick descriptions” to intertextually evoke anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s similar focus on context and externalist perspectives as delineated in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973). If I understand correctly, David Russel himself associates the move from Process to Post-Process to the corresponding transition from an approach based on psychology to an approach based on sociology and anthropology in the study of writing. Looking at the big picture, the historical evolution of composition theory appears to move from the simple to the complex in response to a theoretical urge for inclusiveness, a drive to expand the scope and the boundaries of research from the text and the solitary (and a bit sad) author to the world that surrounds the author and text, with its bustle and din.

It appears to me that Russell is not dismissive of Process theory but he warns us against the danger inherent in this approach: the danger of overgeneralizing processes until they are useless, the dangers of commodification. When we see how too many textbooks reduce complex theories to dry, lifeless, and template-based instruction, we can’t help wondering what happens to the beauty of theory when theory is gradually translated into pedagogical practice. Perhaps theory is like poetry, as soon as we try to translate “amor ch’a nullo amato amar perdona” (Dante) we lose all the beauty of the verse. In other (less-poetic) words, commodification is a dangerous pollutant that can contaminate Activity Theory as well, especially if we try to force students into interpretative patterns and modi operandi without having (gently) guided them towards an in-depth understanding and appreciation of the theory that lays at the foundations of a class activity/assignment.
Kain and Wardle offer a useful set of questions as a starting point for activity theory analysis; their effort is commendable; undoubtedly, they identified a good starting point and a valid method, provided that we constantly try to expand and update their list in keeping with the ethos of this dynamic approach to the study of situated writing.
Gracious and patient reader, before I conclude let me add that Kain and Wardle’s list of questions evoke a similar set of questions that guide research efforts in rhetorical criticism. Shakespearean scholars will also recognize the silhouette of Stephen Greenblatt (neo-historicism) hovering around Activity Theory: what the New Historicists reacted against was the idea that the text stands alone, isolated from the audience, separated from its historical context, from all other works that came before it, etc.

My questions:

How can you describe the connection between Post-Process and Activity Theory?

Is Activity Theory a way to translate the vagueness and poetic beauty of Post-Process into operative prose and a pedagogical strategy?

Post on Cognitive Process (Massimo)

Linda Flower and John R Hayes address a crucial problem in the field of Composition, a problem that, if solved, could provide a way out of many excruciating pedagogical dilemmas. They opt for a scientific method and elect protocol analysis as their research tool. Now, I believe that this is where the problems start. Saying aloud has an impact on the very cognitive processes that the researchers are trying to investigate. If I need to report orally on what I am thinking when I write and as I write, other areas of my brain are likely to be activated and my writing task will have to compete with other tasks that I will have to complete. In other words, the whole writing process will be impacted by the research protocol.

The second problem with Flower and Hayes’ is that they want to move beyond the linear model by using metaphors that are ensconced in linear models. At the foundation of their theoretical constructions lies the keyword “hierarchy.” Events in a hierarchical process “are not fixed in a rigid order,” they claim. The Oxford dictionary defines hierarchy as “A system or organization in which people or groups are ranked one above the other according to status or authority.” The semantic prosody of a word is shaped by the words that tend to co-occur with it, two important ones, in the case of hierarchy, are ranking and power. Is ranking non-linear? Are power structures non-linear? In opposition to the arborescent model that works with vertical connections, Deleuze and Guattari have proposed the terms “rhizome” and “rhizomatic” as the kernels of an alternative metaphor to describe structures and networks. I believe that Flower and Hayes could have chosen better metaphors to ‘translate’ their cognitive theory. Patricia Bizzell deals with this word choice issue with a touch of irony: “we find out eventually that ‘monitor’ means simply ‘the writer’s mind making decisions.”

Besides methodology and terminology, Flower and Hayes’s approach and the assumptions that sustain their research raise criticism for the lack of focus on context. As Patricia Bizzell argues, their inner-directed approach does not take into consideration the “social processes whereby language learning and the thinking capacities are shaped and used in particular communities.” Our cultural affiliations have a profound impact in the development of our cognitive faculties and functions. I learnt how to write essays in Italian from educators (both teachers and parents) who always emphasized the importance of the stage of ‘translation’ whereas I notice that in the US the focus is on invention and arrangement. We could ask ourselves if these two different approaches to the teaching of writing have an impact on cognitive processes.

While not dismissive of the cognitive turn tout court, Bizzell is right on target when she shines a light on the limits of Flower and Hayes’s research: “what is missing here is the connection to social context afforded by recognition of the dialectical relationship between though and language.” Because she understands language as an expression of the culture of social groups and discourse communities, she attributes educational problems associated with language use to the difficulties that students have when it comes to join unfamiliar discourse communities; when it comes to speak a language and follow rhetorical conventions that they do not understand. Bizzell concedes that perhaps learning language does not exactly teach us to think (Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) but it certainly “teaches us what thoughts matter,” in a specific social group, I would add. I believe that Bizzell deconstructs Flower and Hayes’s theory in a very effective way, not by simply belittling their efforts, but by advocating for more inclusive theories that can reconcile inner and outer-directed approaches to the study of writing.

Question I: can we formulate universal rules for context-based activities?

Question II: does bilingualism have an impact on cognitive processes?