One of the more interesting points Christopher Newfield makes in his Unmaking the Public University is that academia as a whole has allowed itself to be controlled by the market place without attempting (or at least seriously attempting) to control the market place. First year writing instruction and its theoretical foundations are, obviously, deeply informed by and largely a product of these market forces that shape post-secondary institutions. However, if we as compositionists are interested in resisting this move, part of that strategy will necessarily entail thinking about the market place and how we as a field can assert some sort of control over it. But, what would it mean for composition to “control the marketplace?”
The “market’ largely doesn’t care about *what* students write, only that they receive a certain grade. What goes on in a first year, primarily freshman writing course is so completely removed from the realities of the workplace that students will eventually enter that we cannot pretend much of anything we do directly transfers to the writing students will do 3-6 years later on the job. In short, our value in this sense is only made meaningful through the successful completion and bestowal of a grade (credential). Therefore, we can change the requirements of “good writing” to writing that produces social development and amelioration.
The reason we do not is far more complicated. There is an unbelievable amount of labor that is put into this thing called “education.” However, the question that is often invisible is what are we doing all this stuff for? “Composition and Rhetoric” as a discipline provides its own tautological answers to this question: good writing is good writing and that’s what we produce. As long as this disciplinary response to the question of why we do what we do is unquestioned and un-interrogated, we will remain a mere pawn of these larger market structures and demands.
In other words, despite what you may have read, composition does (or at least could) have a unique position and function within academia that cannot be duplicated, replicated, or distributed (WAC, WID, WEC, etc). Our position and function could be to set the terms of what counts as “good writing” instead of simply accepting these terms from external locations and applying them in our classrooms.
Composition, markets, and a random summer thought
Boys, Girls, and Experience in the Classroom
Just like 4th grade, every semester I split the class up into boys and girls and put them into different rooms. Their task in these homogeneous groups is to list “how might we describe men and women in the classroom.” Before they head off into different areas, I tell them that what we are after are the “common assumptions” one might make about someone else based on their gender. That is, we’re after the generalizations, the stereotypes, the “things we all know.”
After allowing the two gender specific groups to get into the discussion (and usually it doesn’t take long until both groups are laughing at the commonalities of their observations) and generate a list for both “men” and “women,” I bring them all back into the same class and we put the lists up on the blackboard for everyone to see/discuss.
What follows is a fascinating exploration into normative expectations of gender as well as the mechanisms of social identification. First the images:
A quote on my mind the past couple months…
The paradox of education is precisely this–that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it–at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change.
– James Baldwin
Nailing THE question right on the head.
Oh how things seem to always come back.
A report issued in 1906 detailed how many young men were caught in dead end industrial jobs and unable to advance because they lacked specific skills. However, most of them reported leaving school because they felt it had very little to offer them. We must remember that at this time, “education” was mostly an endeavor set up as a sort of “finishing school” for the elite in which they learned good manners, social graces, and in general how to make the most of being part of the elite ruling class. For anyone not born into money, education typically had very little to offer.
But, with the burgeoning industrial revolution, calls were made that education needed to be extended to not just the moneyed and the elite, but that education should directly serve the needs of those headed into the industrial working class. In a sense, it was the true beginning of the fulfillment of the Morrill Act of 1862.
It is at this time that we see the first articulation of THE question of education in an industrial, capitalistic society: Do we educate students to fit into a system as it is or do we educate students to change a system?
There were those who advocated a “dual” system of education in which the elite and moneyed would continue on as normal and a second system would educate the “working class” for their eventual role as laborers in industrial manufacturing.
John Dewey saw this as the worst possible solution. As Westbrook writes of the “dual” system in which the two are separated (vocational and liberal arts), “He (Dewey) feared, above all, that the kind of vocational education favored by businessmen and their allies was a form of class education which would make the schools a more efficient agency for the reproduction of an undemocratic society” (175).
This leads me to one of my all time favorite Dewey quotes: “The kind of vocational education in which I am interested is not one which will adapt workers to the existing industrial regime; I am not sufficiently in love with the regime for that. It seems to me that the business of all who would not be educational timservers is to resist every move in this direction, and to strive for a kind of vocational education which will first alter the existing industrial system, and ultimately transform it. [...] I object to regarding as vocational education any training which does not have as its supreme regard the development of such intelligent initiative, ingenuity, and executive capacity as shall make workers, as far as they may be, the masters of their own industrial fate” (MW 8:412, my emphasis).
And yet…this is the question that I fear we often forget to ask. Every time an administration makes a claim on retention rates or job placement, this question lurks in the background. Every time a department revises curriculum to “fit the needs” of students, this question serves as the unspoken (and even unrecognized) backdrop. Every time we claim to uphold “quality” and “rigor” at the unstated expense at access, it is this question we are failing to answer.
Disembodied Discourse and the Failure of Internet Discussion
Disclaimer: I rarely if ever post things to this blog in “rough” form, but I’ve been stewing over this for a few weeks now and finally want to eject it out into the world. If anyone out there in academia would like to collaborate to further aspects of this, I am completely game. These thoughts are admittedly rough, but I feel have potential somewhere.
Even though the phenomena is nothing new, recently there has been a spate of commentary concerning…well…commentary on the internet. The problem is that it isn’t working. Any look at the comments section of nearly any online publication will reveal that actual discussion is not taking place. Instead, it is mostly a pit of name calling, racism, shouting, and worse. This puts a damper on many of the hopes we had for the internet. It was supposed to be democratic. It was supposed to provide space for more voices to be heard. It was supposed to increase our awareness of issues. It was supposed to, in short, make the world better. And, in some small isolated ways, these things have occurred. But on a large scale, these hopes have largely proven to be a mirage of an oasis. Increasingly, we have begun to reach the oasis promised to us only to find more sand in a desolate environment.
Where educators, journalists, web advocates, technologists, bloggers, and nearly everyone else have erred is a misunderstanding of the role of the body in discourse. In short, the body matters. To remove the body from the equation removes the possibility of communication. The body is its own powerful and absolutely necessary rhetoric. Without the body, it is not discussion or communication that occurs, but rather pure routinized performance of big “D” Discourse.
We can explain this phenomena in even simpler terms. Any look over the un-moderated comments of a newspaper online will reveal little to no listening. In place of that, we have pure replication of “talking-points” that are often appropriated wholesale from other sources from media outlets to community values to racist, sexist, and classist convictions. Additionally, these comments are not employed in order to interact. Instead, these comments are employed and exist simply to be seen, hence their monologic character. The danger of this is extreme. Instead of discussion and hence public opinion rapidly modifying itself to adapt to current situations, we have static opinions and beliefs that prevent adaptation to new situations. Instead of entering into conversation and discussion so that we may change our own ideas as well as those of others, we simply seek to shut out all competing ideas. We become trapped by the past in a radically different present.
Thoughts to think about at the end of one semester and the beginning of another
Our civilization is taking on the structure and properties of a machine…This machine will not tolerate less than world-wide rule; it will not allow a single human being to survive outside its control, uninvolved in its functioning. Furthermore, it cannot put up with ill-defined lives within its sphere of operation. Its precision, which is its essence, cannot endure vagueness or social caprice; irregular situations are incompatible with good running order. It cannot put up with anyone whose duties and circumstances are not precisely specified. It tends to eliminate those individuals who from its own point of view do not exactly fit, and to reclassify the rest without regard to the past or even the future of the species…It has already begun to attack the ill-organized populations of the earth…decreeing that the highly organized must invariably take the offensive against the poorly organized…The machine–that is, the Western World–could not help turning, one day, against those ill-defined and sometimes incommensurable men inside it…So we are witnessing an attack on indefinable mass by the will or the necessity for definition. Fiscal laws, economic laws, the regulation of labor, and, above all, the profound changes in general technology…everything is used for counting, assimilating, leveling, bracketing, and arranging that group of indefinables, those natural solitaries who constitute a part of the intellectual population…It was never more than indirectly that society could afford the life of a poet, a thinker, an artist, whose works were unhurried and profound.
–Paul Valery, 1925.
Poor Professor Higgins Indeed
(A few thoughts on assessment inspired by Henry Higgins)
In its best formulation, “assessment” represents a genre of communication. It communicates the effects of pedagogic practice to interested parties. In the most common scenario, assessment is a channel of communication between instructor and student, informing the student of how they are “living up to” the expectations of the instructor. But assessment also communicates in other, very interesting ways. For instance, instructors often rely on technologies of assessment to understand themselves as educators, using data generated by assessment (whether it be numbers, narratives, grades, or even moods and emotions) to construct an identity or notion of self (for example, an effective instructor, a challenging instructor, or perhaps even, a bad instructor.)
