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Overview
In Process This, Nancy DeJoy argues that even recent revisions to composition studies, cultural studies, service learning, and social process movements--continue to repress the subjects and methodologies that should be central, especially at the level of classroom practice. Designed to move student discourses beyond the classroom, these approaches nonetheless continue to position composition students (and teachers) as mere consumers of the discipline. This means that the subjects, methodologies, and theory/practice relationships that define the field are often absent in composition classrooms.
Arguing that the world inside and outside of the academy cannot be any different if the profession stays the same, DeJoy creates a pedagogy and a plan for faculty development that revisions the prewrite/write/rewrite triad to open spaces for participation and contribution to all members of first-year writing classrooms.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780874215038 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Utah State University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2004 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 183 |
| File size: | 381 KB |
Read an Excerpt
PROCESS THIS
Undergraduate Writing in Composition StudiesBy Nancy C. DeJoy
UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2004 Utah State University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-595-3
Chapter One
REVISING PROCESS
For the past 15 years-since early in my graduate school career-I have been struggling to create theoretical, pedagogical, and practical ways to improve the status of undergraduate voices and undergraduate writing in English studies. But in a very real sense, the idea that I could engage in this struggle in ways that mattered grew out of my undergraduate education. It was through undergraduate courses in rhetoric, writing, women's studies, and modern theories of grammar and composition that I became aware that a person could, in fact, pursue goals that were rich and complex in nature, goals that included improving the conditions of life for oneself and others in inter-related ways.
When Dr. Monica Weis, the professor of my undergraduate course in "Modern Theories of Grammar and Composition" invited me to attend the Conference on College Composition and Communication, I was both shocked and deeply honored. After all, I had been less than accepting of some of the theories we studied in that course, especially those that I thought talked down to "non-traditional" students like myself. I was particularly skeptical about expressivist theories like the one I had been subjected to years before when I was a traditional-age student, theories that were quite popular in the late 1980s when I took that theory course. Still, here I was invited by my professor to attend the major conference of the field-with financial support to do so from the college and department that I had clearly thrived in, but which I had never simply identified with. I remember clearly the power of the invitation and the ways in which it made me stretch beyond any kind of thinking I had ever done while trying to figure out what something meant. I also remember the ways in which the invitation made me begin to consider the possibility that there might be a place for me in the world that would continue to stretch my thinking in this way, one where I would not be required to be happy with the way things are in order to belong. It was the first time that I considered the possibility that there might be a way for me to give back as much as I got from my study of writing. It was a rush. I was never very cool before that, but the idea of this possibility squelched any chance I had of being cool-I was on fire. And I have been on fire ever since.
That fire comes from and fuels the desire to participate in and contribute to something rather than merely gain from it. The form it takes in this study is to suggest that revising the prewrite-write-rewrite notion of process that has driven first-year composition in this country in our recent past can enhance structural, curricular, and disciplinary opportunities for participation and contribution. These revisions are theoretical and pedagogical and practical; they are meant to open spaces for a wider range of people to participate in and contribute to composition studies. What happens once these spaces are open will be so informed by the opportunities they will afford us that the arguments I am making here should not be thought of as transformational; they should be understood as transitional. To open the possibilities for transition I am discussing here, I will illustrate and argue for a continuation of recent trends that position analysis rather than mastery as critical to and in composition studies. I will, however, extend the recent focus on analysis in ways that challenge a more general tendency to favor adaptation over contribution and to valorize consumption (especially consumption of first-phase process models) over participation in our configurations of writing in first-year composition classes. In the end, I will suggest that using the concepts of participation and contribution to revise our views of and approaches to composition studies allows us to live up to the promise of the process movement without being bound by its limitations.
While many revised process-based approaches claim transformative power, as suggested above, I am more interested in creating a transitional approach, one that acknowledges first-phase process model assumptions as the starting point for many teachers and students, and that attempts to create ways for us to move together toward literacy practices that center participation and contribution as possibilities for all members of the writing classes. This is especially important in our first-year writing courses where students internalize assumptions about the relationship between language and reality. Making transitions toward practices that change reality in substantial ways is more difficult than identifying methodologies and pedagogies that we think and hope will change individual consciousnesses, but it is also more important. As James Slevin notes, our discipline is used to thinking of professionals as those who participate in and contribute to the field while amateurs/students are positioned as embodying our contributions. Slevin suggests beginning to move away from these assumptions and the realities they create. He states:
We could, for example, look to the model of the liberal arts college and find there an understanding of disciplinarity that saw teaching and intimate intellectual conversations with students and colleagues at the center of life in that discipline. It would be possible (though let me stress, too, very hard) to imagine this work as primary, with research and publication valuable as they nourish the education of students and extend the collegial conversation to a wider audience. Let me say again that it is hard to think these thoughts-they seem generically pastoral or idyllic, an escapism set against the harsh urbanity and metropolitanism of today's academy. They seem fond wishes rather than empowering conceptual frameworks. (43)
To some of us, those frameworks of and for teaching and learning seem less pastoral and idyllic than the result of commitment and hard work, silenced and undervalued though the work seems to be in the larger scheme of things. How many of us have an understanding of the model Slevin refers to here? How many of us have seen it in actual practice? How valued is that understanding and practice in the larger professional and discursive spaces that constitute the discipline? What takes the place of these absent possibilities in the field?
To say that composition studies should raise students' individual consciousnesses about advertising, or history, or literature, or about academic discourse is not necessarily a bad thing. It is possible, however, to understand consciousness-raising as one of the obstacles to participation and contribution, if consciousness-raising takes the place of participation and contribution, and/or if people are configured as unconscious when they are not, and/or if raised consciousness does nothing to alter the relationships to power made available to those whose consciousness has been raised. The ways these dilemmas about consciousness raising as an end of writing instruction become apparent in composition studies is clear, for example, in the ways that we talk about rather than with our undergraduate students. As Susan Miller notes in Textual Carnivals, empirical work about students' texts has long captured the imagination of compositionists (200). In her introduction to Landmark Essays on Process, Sondra Perl notes that empirical work about student texts defines one of the most important methodological moves behind the process movement itself. While this methodological approach is one method for increasing how student writing can come into the field, it also blocks student participation in significant ways. For example, student writing can be illustrative, teaching us things about how certain practices affect the process or products produced, but students are not included in the processes of analysis that construct such knowledge from their texts. Positioning students in relation to the discipline in such limiting ways is part of a larger related habit of excluding students from our discussions more generally. The idea that we can change the terms of this material reality by raising and/or empowering individual consciousnesses without challenging these limited notions of literacy in our disciplinary and professional spaces is misinformed. The deferral of the discipline (i.e., perpetuating the idea that thousands of students can take composition classes but can't tell you anything about the disciplinary knowledge of the field) becomes the repression of literate subjectivity (i.e., one can experience and act in the field without ever affecting or engaging in the practices of the discipline). As Kurt Spellmeyer reminds us in "Inventing the University Student," within this scene "nothing could be less helpful ... than to embrace once again an image of academic intellectuals as representative of 'the people,' 'the silenced,' and so on" (43). This is especially true as we struggle to revise composition studies in ways that open new spaces for student writing and student subjectivities.
This level of revision is never easy. However, exploring student assumptions about the concepts we use, and consider using, to ground our introductory writing courses is something we must do if we want to open new spaces for student subjectivity. Mina Shaughnessey and others took such an exploratory approach toward issues of grammatical correctness and standardization. But few people who are attempting to revise first-year writing courses take engaging students in this part of the endeavor very seriously. Perhaps that is because the work seems too much like drawing a composite or dishonoring the "individual" student writer so entrenched in first-phase process approaches to first-year writing. Or maybe, as Miller indicates, our first-year writing students are so over-constructed as "innocent" literacy vessels that this kind of research just doesn't fit with the program (196). In any case, exploring student assumptions about the concepts we propose making central to the teaching of writing is a fundamental step in finding ways to invite them into our field as participants. Invitations to these activities raise questions about ability, confidence, expectation, and, especially, self/other relationships that many people in the education system are not used to facing together. But this kind of work also indicates very real connections between our concerns with the limitations of first-phase process movement pedagogies and the limitations on literacy assumed by our students.
Before I move to the empirical data that illustrate this point, let me emphasize that breaking through such discursive restrictions is not a new thing for composition teachers and students. For example, many people spent the first phase of the process writing movement trying to create approaches to writing that challenged restrictions regarding what students could write about in our classrooms, and students have, in many cases, embodied this break. One major component of this first phase was the prewrite-write-rewrite model dominating that pedagogical scene of writing. The model centered approaches that allowed students to explore their own experiences, and, in some cases, use "their own voices," to create discourses about subjects that had been considered inappropriate in the past. As many scholars of the field have noted, decentering literary texts in favor of centering student texts, when combined with an emphasis on "authentic" voices and experience, led to the disciplinary construction of a decontextualized student subjectivity (Crowley, DeJoy, Ede, Miller). The primary assumption of the model was that prewriting, writing, and rewriting strategies were constructed, through adaptation of classical rhetoric, secondary and primary research activities, etc., by the scholar/researcher members of the writing class and presented, through textbooks and teachers, as instruction, advice, direction (sometimes heuristic) to the student members of that class. The students were, therefore, invited to talk about unlimited and innumerable subjects, to embody the radical potential of the model, as long as they did so in individualistic ways and as long as knowledge about the disciplinary matters addressed by the profession were not the subject of student discourse. So while at one level, teachers and students were collaborators in breaking the bounds of academic discourse, on another level they were also engaged in a process that maintained the gaps among and between student discourses, teacher discourses, and the professional discourses of composition studies. Students could (and sometimes had to) write about everything from their sex lives and drug use to their dreams and aspirations and everything in between; but they were not, in general, invited to write about the histories, theories, pedagogies, or practices informing their literacy educations or constructing their literacy experiences in writing classrooms. This deferral of disciplinary conversations constituted the major differences between professorial members and student members of the writing class. And it is this deferral that has informed many of the revisions to first phase process movement pedagogies. In "What Is Composition and (if you know what that is) Why Do We Teach It?" David Bartholomae makes this point when he says:
It is too convenient to say that students, because they are students, do not share in the general problems of writing ... like writing history or writing literary criticisms, like the problem of the writer's relationship to the discourse that enables his or her writing. (17)
I am not suggesting that revisionist approaches to first phase process movements have discussed this deferral of the discipline as important to their revision activities. What I am suggesting is that we must understand those revisionist critiques in relation to the disciplinary matters that constitute that deferral if we are to create a transitional moment in composition studies. These revisionist pedagogies point to a gap that we have all too often tried to step over as we have attempted to move forward from first phase process models to more social, critical, and/or community-based practices. We have, in some ways, leapt over the discipline in our attempts to put students in relation to the social, to the cultural, to the institutional, to the world. But we must address and be willing to step into this gap, to alter the relationships between and among members of the writing classes, before we can hope to have any effect on the world. Our world cannot be any different if our profession stays the same. The point here is not just that we are part of the world, although that is something to remember. The point is that if we can't do it, we certainly have no right to position students-or anybody else for that matter-as people who must embody such change for us.
This is why I think transition is a better metaphor than transformation as we attempt to deal with the possibilities opened up by revisions to first-phase process movement approaches to composition studies, particularly those theories, pedagogies, and practices aimed at first-year writing. People make transitions; they get transformed. It is, indeed, a particular kind of material error to think of first-year writing as transformational given the structural devaluation of the course, its students, its pedagogies, and its role in material matters like departmental budgets. These devaluations allow first-year writing's active role in the constitution of composition studies to be set aside in the same way that first-phase process model pedagogies allowed the professional and disciplinary matters of the field to be set aside in the classroom. In an odd, but symmetrical way, within this drama the teachers and students of the first-year writing class can be equally disconnected from the discipline. But, first-year writing is best thought of as a place where all members of the writing classes can make transitions that, ideally, are about participation and contribution, rather than a place where all members of the writing classes are transformed. The revisions to process writing that I will discuss here confront this devaluing of first-year writing and the members of its classes in a number of ways if we read them as challenges to these disconnections.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from PROCESS THIS by Nancy C. DeJoy Copyright © 2004 by Utah State University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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