Activist WPA: Changing Stories About Writing & Writers: Changing Stories About Writing and Writers - Softcover

Adler-Kassner, Linda

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0874216990 ISBN 13: 9780874216998

Publisher: Utah State University Press, 2008

Synopsis

One wonders if there is any academic field that doesn’t suffer from the way it is portrayed by the media, by politicians, by pundits and other publics. How well scholars in a discipline articulate their own definition can influence not only issues of image but the very success of the discipline in serving students and its other constituencies. The Activist WPA is an effort to address this range of issues for the field of English composition in the age of the Spellings Commission and the No Child Left Behind Act.

Drawing on recent developments in framing theory and the resurgent traditions of progressive organizers, Linda Adler-Kassner calls upon composition teachers and administrators to develop strategic programs of collective action that do justice to composition’s best principles. Adler-Kassner argues that the “story” of college composition can be changed only when writing scholars bring the wonders down, to articulate a theory framework that is pragmatic and intelligible to those outside the field--and then create messages that reference that framework. In The Activist WPA, she makes a case for developing a more integrated vision of outreach, English education, and writing program administration.

About this title

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

THE ACTIVIST WPA

Changing Stories about Writing and WritersBy LINDA ADLER-KASSNER

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2008 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-699-8

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments..........................................................................................................vii1 Working from a Point of Principle..................................................................................................12 Looking Backward...................................................................................................................364 Changing Conversations about Writing and Writers: Working through a Process........................................................855 Taking Action to Change Stories....................................................................................................1286 Working from My Own Points of Principle: Tikkun Olam, Prophetic Pragmatism, and Writing Program Administration.....................164Appendix: Contact Information for Community Organizations/Media Strategists..........................................................186Notes................................................................................................................................187References...........................................................................................................................190Index................................................................................................................................204

Chapter One

WORKING FROM A POINT OF PRINCIPLE

STORIES TOLD ABOUT SCHOOL: WRITERS AND WRITING

Alarmist stories about student writers or college-level writing that run counter to the ones that circulate among writing teachers on disciplinary listservs or in discussions in professional research are easy to find. Using the search terms "writing skills and college students" in a database like Lexis Nexis Academic reveals news items headed by such titles as "Grammar Is Making a Comeback; Poor Writing Skills Among Teens and a New Section of SAT Fuel Return to Language Basics" (DeVise 2006) and "Students Fall Short on 'Information Literacy,' Educational Testing Service's Study Finds" (Foster 2006). Ask people on the street about student writing, and one typically hears a dazzling array of stories attesting to problems with (college) students' writing as well.

What don't come up as often in news media or in conversation are stories suggesting something else-that everyone can write; that students are astoundingly knowledgeable about composing in contexts that some teachers know relatively little about; that schools are being put in virtually untenable situations with regard to literacy instruction; or that it might be worth questioning the criteria by which "quality" is being determined. That's because these stories do not fall within the rather tight frame currently surrounding discussions of education more generally. Instead, typical are stories like those that follow the headlines above, or one from the December 3, 2006, suburban Chicago Daily Herald that begins, "The majority of freshmen attending area community colleges left high school unprepared to take college-level classes, statistics from local community colleges show." The next paragraph continues: "More than half of recent high school graduates attending these two-year colleges required remedial help-in courses that don't count toward a degree-because they lacked fundamental skills in math, reading, or writing" (Krone 2006).

For as long as I have taught composition-going on 20 years-I have listened to some people outside of the field (faculty colleagues, professionals outside of the field, people I meet on airplanes, administrators on the campuses where I have worked) tell stories like the one in the Chicago Daily Herald. Students can't write; they read the wrong things or not at all; they aren't prepared or they have to take "remedial" courses; teachers (college, high school, middle school, grade school, presumably preschool) aren't teaching them "what they need to know." I would venture to guess that nearly anyone teaching writing (or English) has heard this lament. These claims form the core of a story about writers and writing classes that seem to resonate particularly strongly now.

I have also long thought about how to tell other tales about students, writing, and the work of teaching writing. This desire to work from different stories-in fact to change the dominant story about the work of writing instruction-comes out of my own experience as a student, a person living and working in the community, and as a composition instructor and program administrator. As a field, composition and rhetoric seems to be turning its attention to thinking strategically about how to shape stories about students and writing. As I listened to and talked with colleagues about going about this work I realized that it might be useful-certainly for me, but perhaps for others as well-to think about it as systematically and strategically as we do, say, the research that we conduct or the courses that we design. To pursue this interest, I've immersed myself in textual research about how we might go about this work of telling other stories, and I've spent time with and listened to community organizers and media activists who engage in this work on a daily basis. The result is this book, The Activist WPA: Changing Stories about Writing and Writers.

The key word here is story. Robert Coles, the psychiatrist and student of documentary production, provides an especially useful way to think about stories. Coles explains that as a child, he found the stories that his parents read to him helped them put his experiences in a broader perspective. When Coles began to think about relationships, for example, his mother suggested he read War and Peace. In college, Coles took a course with noted literary scholar Perry Miller; reading William Carlos Williams's poetry during that course, he decided to contact the physician and poet. Williams invited Coles to shadow him as he worked with patients in Patterson, New Jersey. Following Williams and hearing his stories, Coles implies, led him to choose a career in medicine rather then teaching English. Coles goes on, in the early stages of The Call of Stories, to describe other personal stories that shaped his experiences as a professional.

Coles' discussion of his own stories telescopes out from personal significance to broader, social significance. During psychiatric training, for instance, Coles heard patients differently if he asked them for and listened to their stories. They became not lists of symptoms to be addressed or behaviors to be modified, but whole people whose existences were comprised of these tales. As a result, Coles became interested in "the many stories we have and the different ways we can find to give those stories expression" (Coles 1989, 15). Coles also realized that he understood patients' experiences through his own, that his personal story extended to the ways in which he used others' stories to construct a broader experience. And studying school desegregation in the south during the early 1960s, he realized that the ways in which these stories were constructed had consequences far beyond himself or his patients. Coles writes that:

[The children whom he was observing in southern schools] were going through an enormous ordeal-mobs, threats, ostracism-and I wanted to know how they managed emotionally. It did not take me long to examine their psychological "defenses." It also did not take me long to see how hard it was for many of those children to spend time with me.... I attributed their reserve to social and racial factors-to the inevitable barriers that would set a white Yankee physician apart from black children and (mostly) working-class white children who lived deep in the segregationist Dixie of the early 1960s. That explanation was not incorrect, but perhaps it was irrelevant. Those Southern children were in trouble, but they were not patients in search of a doctor; rather, their pain was part of a nation's historical crisis, in which they had become combatants. Maybe a talk or two with me might turn out to be beneficial. But the issue for me was not only whether a doctor trained in pediatrics and child psychiatry might help a child going through a great deal of social and racial stress, but what the nature of my attention ought to be. (25)

The power of this portion of Coles's book, which for me culminates in this excerpt, is the ways in which he moves between explanations of the power of personally grounded stories for individuals (himself, his patients) and the ways in which those stories, when seen as a collective body, testified and gave witness to a larger one that had gone relatively unexplored.

Using the concept of framing-that is, the idea that stories are always set within and reinforce particular boundaries (described more thoroughly later in this chapter)-it is possible both to examine how the same telescoping phenomenon of storytelling is occurring around writers and writing instruction today. That is, there are different stories circulating about writing and writers that build cumulatively to form larger narratives, all with "messages omitted, yarns gone untold, details brushed aside altogether ..." (Coles 1989, 21). In this book, I am especially concerned with the stories that are perpetuated through news items like the ones quoted at the beginning of this chapter, because I do not believe that they reflect what we know, as a field, about writers' abilities or about the best ways to help students develop their writing abilities. However, the concept of framing also is useful for considering strategies to create other kinds of stories. This book, then, addresses these three issues: examining some of the stories currently surrounding writing instruction (chapters 1, 2, and 3); considering what frame surrounds those stories (chapters 2 and 3); and considering how we might use strategies developed by community organizers and media strategists to shift those frames (chapters 4 and 5). This chapter introduces this work by discussing concepts of stories, frame, and ideals and strategies.

IDEALS WITH STRATEGIES

The "arguments" in this book, such as they are, are closely related to a quote (from Karl Llewellyn, the leading "legal realist" of the twentieth century) that I'll invoke throughout: "Strategies without ideals is a menace, but ideals without strategies is a mess [sic]." I discovered this mantra on the back chalkboard in a classroom at the University of Michigan Law School where I was attending a talk by Bill Lofy, author of a biography of Paul Wellstone. Wellstone, a two-term Democratic Farmer-Labor (DFL) senator from Minnesota from 1990-2002, was killed in a plane crash during the 2002 campaign season. As a former Minnesotan, I had volunteered for several of Wellstone's campaigns and knew that I wanted to use Wellstone Action, the organization founded after his death, as a research site for this project because of the smart and successful ways that the organization was training activists and political candidates around the country. But while Wellstone Action is now well-known for this kind of strategy training, when Wellstone himself arrived in the Senate he positively oozed ideals, but he sorely lacked strategy. Lofy (and others) point to many moments where Wellstone was abrupt with or alienated Republican congressional leaders (and members of the executive branch) to illustrate this lack of "strategic" thinking. But as Wellstone developed into a smart and savvy politician, he developed strategies that enabled him to make alliances across the aisle and, as a result, to both take principled stands and achieve bipartisan support for his goals.

The first argument here extends from the second part of the Llewellyn quote. If we take Wellstone's experiences as a model, WPAs and writing instructors have been all over the map: filled with ideals but without any kind of core or shared strategies. In her 1986 study of writing programs, Carol Hartzog noted that she did not find "any unanimity about the form and ultimate value of work in this field" (1986, 68). She went on to ask a question about how to connect ideals (such as belief in the value of writing for "critical inquiry" at the core of "academic processes and structures") with strategies: "Who holds and can exercise authority in this field" (69)? The power, she explained, "still resides in English-and other-departments.... As long as there is uncertainty about what composition is, the question of what place it holds on campus-and in the academy-will remain central" (70). Without a clear sense of institutional or disciplinary identity, the implication here is that writing programs have no clear base from which to work strategically. Instead, writing "disappear[s]"-"it absorbs the strategies, wisdom, and language of other departments, and it serves them in turn" (70).

What Hartzog identified as a vexing issue related to positioning becomes, 16 years later, a sense of frustration for Peggy O'Neill, Ellen Schendel, and Brian Huot. Writing about what they saw as a need for WPAs to acknowledge "writing assessment [as] a form of social action," they noted, for example, that missing from discussions of assessment (e.g., on the WPA-L listserv) was an understanding of assessment (as a strategy) that must be situated in the complex contexts of our field and our institutions. "Although we may help each other satisfying our immediate needs in responding to calls for help [when providing information about systems and/or prompts that "work," for instance]" they write, "we are also promoting an uncomplicated, practical approach to the assessment of writing that cannot only belie the complexity of assessment but also make ourselves, our programs, and our field vulnerable to the whims of administrators and politics because issue of power, values, and knowledge-making converge on assessment sites, with very real consequences to all stakeholders" (O'Neill, Schendel, and Huot 2002, 13). This sense of disconnection between strategy and ideals can still be heard regularly on the WPA list when, for instance, subscribers send (regular and necessary) pleas for fast solutions to immediate problems.

At the same time, there is a growing body of WPA research that attests to WPAs' desires to blend ideals and strategies, to engage in WPA work as strategic action. In his preface to Joseph Janangelo and Kristine Hansen's Resituating Writing, Charles Schuster (quoting Susan McLeod) identified WPAs as "change agents," stressing "the importance of WPAs possessing the vision, knowledge, and ethos to alter institutional philosophies and practices" (Schuster 1995, x). Other essays in that collection address questions of how to balance ideals and strategies in WPA work, from the construction of writing programs (Janangelo) to the role of computers in composition instruction (Romano and Faigley 1995) to writing across the curriculum (WAC) work (McLeod 1995). Two specific areas of WPA research, especially, have provoked the subfield toward more focused attention on the balance between strategies and ideals: assessment and labor issues. This is perhaps because both deal explicitly with questions of ethics, specifically the treatment of human beings. A few examples of scholarship focusing on each subject illustrate the ways that authors have blended strategies and ideals as they address these questions. Kristine Hansen asks, "How can [the WPA] in good conscience lead a program that is built on exploitation" (24)? Eileen Schell argues that "as we hasten to professionalize writing instruction and make broad claims for its importance as a democratizing force, we must make parallel efforts to address one of the most pressing political problems in composition studies.... the gendered politics of contingent labor" (Schell 4). In what are less response-focused pieces, essays in the co-edited Tenured Bosses and Disposable Teachers assert and address a pointed argument leveled in Marc Bosquet's essay: "The lower-managerial lifeway of fighting for personal 'control' [by the WPA] over instructional 'resources' [including program instructors] and disciplinary status recognition is very different from the ethos of struggle usually associated with social and workplace transformation: the raising of consciousness, the formation of solidarities, coalition building, and so on" (Bosquet 2004, 15). Joseph Harris has called for a "new class consciousness" in composition that is rooted in shared commitment: to first of all address to improve working conditions for instructors (including part-time and graduate instructors); to have instructors at all ranks teach first-year writing; and to improve the working conditions of instructors, including the salaries and benefits that they receive (Harris 2000, 58-64).

Assessment researchers like O'Neill, Schendel, and Huot, have challenged WPAs and writing instructors to use notions of validity developed by assessment researcher Pamela Moss and others that necessarily engage questions of ideals (goals, aims, ultimate objectives-as well as whose interests are represented in those ends) and strategies (the means by which those objectives are measured and achieved). As Peggy O'Neill explains,

Validity research involves a dynamic process that requires an examination of procedures and results, use of this information to revise and improve assessment practices, and an examination of revised practices in a never-ending feedback loop. In short, validity inquiry should be embedded in the process itself, ongoing and useful, responsive to local needs, contexts or changes, something that is never really completed. (2003, 51)

(Continues...)

Excerpted from THE ACTIVIST WPAby LINDA ADLER-KASSNER Copyright © 2008 by Utah State University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0874216990
• ISBN 13: 9780874216998
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208