Under Construction

Working at the Intersections of Composition Theory, Research, and Practice

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1998 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-256-3

Contents

INTRODUCTION: Complicating Composition Christine Farris and Chris M. Anson........................................................................................................1ONE Theory, Research, Practice, Work Christopher Ferry....................................................................................................................11TWO Composing Composition Studies: Scholarly Publication and the Practice of Discipline Peter Vandenberg..................................................................19THREE Toward a Theory of Theory for Composition Studies James Zebroski......................................................................................................30FOUR The Dialogic Function of Composition Pedagogy: Negotiating Between Critical Theory and Public Values Rebecca Moore Howard.............................................51FIVE Keeping Honest: Working Class Students, Difference, and Rethinking the Critical Agenda in Composition David Seitz.....................................................65SIX Rethinking the Personal Narrative: Life-Writing and Composition Pedagogy Deborah Mutnick..............................................................................79SEVEN What Difference the Differences Make: Theoretical and Epistemological Differences in Writing Assessment Practice Brian Huot and Michael Williamson.....................93EIGHT Voices of Research: Methodological Choices of a Disciplinary Community Susan Peck MacDonald...........................................................................111NINE Grounded Theory: A Critical Research Methodology Joyce Magnotto Neff..................................................................................................124TEN Feminist Methodology: Dilemmas for Graduate Researchers Shirley Rose and Janice Lauer.................................................................................136ELEVEN Insider/Outsider/Other?: Confronting the Centeredness of Race, Class, Color and Ethnicity in Composition Research Yuet-Sim Chiang.....................................150TWELVE Re-centering Authority: Social Reflexivity and Re-Positioning in Composition Research Ellen Cushman and Terese Guinsatao Monberg......................................166THIRTEEN Tracking Composition Research on the World Wide Web Susan Romano......................................................................................................181FOURTEEN Farther Afield: Rethinking the Contributions of Research Ruth Ray and Ellen Barton....................................................................................196FIFTEEN A Rhetoric of Teacher-Talk-Or How to Make More Out of Lore Wendy Bishop...............................................................................................217SIXTEEN Theory, Practice, and the Bridge Between: The Methods Course and Reflective Rhetoric Kathleen Blake Yancey............................................................234SEVENTEEN Rewriting Praxis (and Redefining Texts) in Composition Research Nancy Maloney Grimm, Anne Frances Wysocki and Marilyn M. Cooper.......................................250EIGHTEEN Coming (in)to Consciousness: One Asian American Teacher's Journey into Activist Teaching and Research Gail Okawa......................................................282WORKS CITED........................................................................................................................................................................302CONTRIBUTORS.......................................................................................................................................................................324INDEX..............................................................................................................................................................................329

Chapter One

Theory, Research, Practice, Work

Christopher Ferry

Well, I'm thwarted by a metaphysic Puzzle And I'm sick of grading papers-that I Know. Jonathan Larson, "Rent"

Paulo Freire, long an important influence on composition studies, argues that education must be a process by which students and teachers help each other become "more fully human" and, at the same time, "transform reality." Central to this process is the phenomenon he calls "praxis," the interaction between reflection and action that results in the transformation of the world. For Freire, praxis can be authentic-that is, can accomplish its transforming work-only when it includes both components. Without action, for example, reflection becomes mere "verbalism," shooting off one's mouth, while action without thought becomes "activism," "action for action's sake." In either case praxis, the work of changing the world's material conditions, of eradicating oppression, injustice, illiteracy, for example, the labor of helping each other become more fully human, cannot occur (1993, 68-69).

I want to use Freire's concept of praxis as a starting point to examine the relationship among theory, research, practice, and work in composition studies. Specifically, I want to explore the position of work in our field: what is the nature of our "work" within institutions of higher learning? Compositionist has entered the professional lexicon, a neologism that signifies what people in rhetoric and composition "do." Just the same, the question of what we "do" remains open. On one hand if one peruses the professional literature, our work seems to be researching and making knowledge in a "scientific" way, a method supported by the American academy. Certainly, this situation seems to be what Richard Braddock, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer had in mind when they compared research in composition to that in chemistry and, by extension, all (hard) scientific research:

[S]ome terms are being defined usefully, a number of procedures are being refined, but the field as a whole is laced with dreams, prejudices, and makeshift operations. Not enough investigators are really informing themselves about the procedures and results of previous research before embarking on their own. Too few of them conduct pilot experiments and validate their measuring instruments before undertaking an investigation. (1963, 5)

Compositionists might be said to research and construct a meta-discourse, a totalizing narrative that explains "writing"; in other words, we create a "theory" of composition. On the other hand, discussions of work-by which I mean the material conditions of the "labor" of teaching composition-are not always welcome at professional sites removed from those material conditions. Consider, for example, the editorial policy of The Journal of Advanced Composition: "JAC does not accept articles describing classroom techniques unless the author clearly demonstrates how such practices derive from current theory and research and how they can be applied to the advanced composition classroom in general" (1996, n.p.).

Stephen M. North calls Braddock's Research in Written Composition composition's "charter" as a field of study (1987, 17). North's argument turns on Braddock's assumption that composition's domain should be research and knowledge-making in a "scientific" way. I support the importance of this task; I also believe, however, that we pursue it at the expense of seeing composition as an intellectual endeavor located in classrooms with students. In other words, what we have in composition now is an unbalanced praxis, one that seems focused on reflection at the expense of action (or to put in more appropriate terms for this essay, a praxis focused on theory at the expense of work). It may indeed be true that we are, as Kurt Spellmeyer has argued, "knowledge workers" (1996, 961), that the "product" of our work is knowledge, or the way we construct composition as a discipline is through the knowledge we make. Certainly this model seems to be the one approved by the academy which, as we all know, bases professional advancement on scholarship. The prominence of scholarship, David Damrosch notes, leads to "a real decrease in the diversity of forms of academic work" (1995, 42, his emphasis). I want to make a case that in composition our focus on theory leads us to overlook the teaching of writing-the material conditions of our work as teachers-an endeavor for students and with students.

When we map the shape of composition, one thing seems plain: theory and practice are separate. North foregrounds this idea and makes it a central argument in The Making of Knowledge. As composition coalesced into a discipline or field of study, theorists (knowledge-makers) staked claims that ignored and ridiculed the work of "Practitioners," writing teachers and writers, "so that, despite their overwhelming majority, they [Practitioners] have been effectively disenfranchised as knowledge-makers in their own field" (1987, 3). Indeed, North's representation of "lore" as "practitioner knowledge" divides composition into those who do and those who think about, make knowledge about, theorize about doing. Patricia Harkin revisits North's claim in "The Post-Disciplinary Politics of Lore," in which she tries to recuperate lore as a means of knowledge production. Her map not only separates theory and practice but depicts theory hierarchically, as a foundational "top" that informs research and practice below it. One can think about theory, she argues, as a "metadiscourse, a generalized account of a practice [in this case, teaching writing] to which all instances of that practice can be referred" (1991, 134). Her mechanism to recover lore is a "series of conferences that asks us [Compositionists] to work up from the practice of lore, not down from a theory of writing" (136, emphasis added). Instead of seeing theory and practice as either separate or hierarchical, I want to examine them as points on a "discontinuous continuum": theory informs and is informed by research which informs and is informed by practice. Even so, as in a hierarchical relationship, practice is not just a genteel way to say work; instead, practice elides discussions about actual work by abstracting it from its material conditions. For this reason, then, the continuum is discontinuous.

THOSE WHO CAN, DO. THOSE WHO CAN'T, ...

James Sosnoski argues that the division between theory and practice, at least in English departments, developed recently (1994, 162). This may be true inasmuch as "theorists" gained professional cachet and began to be hired during the 1960s; but the gap between "scientific" knowledge-makers and teachers has far deeper roots. Laurence R. Vesey's The Emergence of the American University documents the evolution of higher education in the United States from 1865 to the early twentieth century. Whereas colleges had focused on preparing (mostly) young men for careers in law or the ministry, emergent universities focused on scientific research. Colleges gave way to universities for various historical and socioeconomic reasons, including industrialization (and concomitant need for "research"), newly acquired national wealth, and American envy of European intellectual achievement (1965, 1-18). As universities and the knowledge created therein grew in importance, however, there occurred a change in the psychology of the faculty, a paradigm shift if you will from teaching to research. Vesey describes this change as an "emotional absorption" of the "spirit of inquiry":

One had to believe that the unknown was worthier of attention than the known, perhaps even that once an area became a part of the widely agreed upon body of knowledge research in it would lack a certain glamour. More fundamentally, the researcher had to believe that he was making contact with 'reality' itself-in other words, that gold as well as dross existed in the universe and that his special training made him capable of knowing the difference. The gold of reality lay in particular phenomena which could be isolated and then systematically investigated.... Research thus demanded a close respect for the unique, nugget-like fact-especially when such a fact violated a previous theory. (135-136)

One implication here is the appearance of disciplinary knowledge, "sheltered," as Vesey says, in "specialized departments of knowledge." Another is the displacement of teaching as the primary act of work by the pursuit of these nuggets of fact: "The most pronounced effect of the increasing emphasis upon specialized research was a tendency among scientifically minded professors to ignore the undergraduate college and to place a low value upon their function as teachers" (143-144).

David Damrosch notes a third implication, the paradoxical position of the academic professional vis-a-vis society at large. Knowledge-makers position themselves and their institutions as social resources, forums "for research and training in the growing complexities of the modern world" (1995, 31). Nevertheless, universities become tangential to the everyday world, even to the extent of providing refuge from it; departments become nations with fiercely defended frontiers, and disciplinary discourse, "self-enclosed and often self-confirming," becomes a professor's native tongue (37). Searching for nugget-facts attracts alienated people, Damrosch argues, people who detach from the world, see it through the lens of scientific objectivity. And while such a psychology may, in fact, be valuable, it also serves to construct the academic institution as a home for "perturbed souls, a place where they can work through their sense of unease with society as they find it" (78). Further, the training of academic professionals reifies social detachment and introversion. We write our dissertations, after all, the culminating experience of our professional formation, in isolation. The "publish or perish" mentality has become something of a clich as a way to describe contemporary academia. The work that garners recognition-publication, tenure, promotion-is the work of knowledge-making, theorizing. And the inherent isolation lies, I think, at the heart of the theory/practice division. I also think, however, that it helps explain the position of work-as-labor on the discontinuous continuum: We are talking, finally, about a gap between a knowledge-making "professional" class and a teaching working class.

The isolation inherent in academe may well keep professionals cloistered from the cares and concerns of everyday life. In this connection, Jerry Herron argues that professional academics have never worked in the usual sense of the term: "Fundamental to the discourse of academic professionals is the distinction between real work and our work, between the real world and the academy" (1988, 47). Moreover, when academics refer to their "work" they typically refer to their writing, their knowledge-making, rather than to teaching (or serving on committees or performing community service). Why should this be the case? To bring my argument back to the teaching of writing, why do compositionists seldom discuss work? Why is so little said or written about the labor of being with students and for students (to paraphrase Paulo Freire), or of reading student papers, and thinking of things to write in response? Herron argues that such topics are "unprofessional" and that writing instruction, moreover, is part of the academic "working class": "The important fact about writing, then, is that it is working class; and the important thing for the other members of the profession is that it should remain so. Otherwise, their own supervisory security might be in jeopardy" (1988, 56). In other words, the current professional structure configures work as dclass. Meanwhile, institutional spoils-prestige, advancement, power, private offices-go to knowledge-makers, the professional theory-class. An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, 13 February 1998, reinforces this point. In a feature entitled "Bad Blood in the English Department: the Rift Between Composition and Literature," Alison Schneider reports on the status of compostion within English departments and argues that, "Composition is a service course, and, in the hierarchical world of academe, service courses are the province of the proletariat." Schneider interviews David Bartholomae, who opines: "As a professor, you're not identified with something of great cultural value, like Shakespeare or the English novel.... You're identified with the minds and words of 18-year olds'" (1998, A15).

PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE

There have of course been attempts to reclaim the value of teaching. Unfortunately, these attempts originate in a hierarchical model; rather than breaking the hierarchy or making the continuum continuous, they marginalize work and workers further. Consider, for example, the focus on lore in composition studies. Stephen M. North identifies lore as the "accumulated body of traditions, practices, and beliefs in terms of which Practitioners understand how writing is done, learned, and taught" (1987, 22). "Practitioners" gather lore: anecdotes, bromides, in-class exercises, writing assignments, course syllabi-a chaotic collection of "what works." Nevertheless, lore cannot count as "theory" or "research"; it is neither unified nor replicable. Patricia Harkin calls for a critical recuperation of lore as "postdisciplinary," an antidote, so to speak, for the extant top-down theory-model: Lore "avoids[s] the unfortunate aspects of disciplinarity, particularly its tendency to simplify to the point of occulting its ideological implications and making us think that its narrowness is normal" (1991, 135). North and Harkin both seek to valorize lore as a legitimate way of knowing; yet neither admits the centrality of work (or workers)-of being in classrooms with students, of handling and reading reams of student papers-to lore's production. One way to make a place for work in composition studies, I think, is to consider it and theory in the context of Paulo Freire's liberatory praxis.

PRAXIS, PRAXIS, PRAXIS

Paulo Freire's liberatory pedagogy and liberation theology emerged simultaneously in late 1950s and 1960s Latin America in response to social, religious, and political upheaval. Freire worked closely with the theologians, and the tenets of liberatory pedagogy are often indistinguishable from those of liberation theology. Such is the case with praxis which, as it is most broadly conceived, denotes the practical application of a field of study.

Strictly speaking, theology is reflection upon a faith so as to deepen one's understanding of that faith. Theological work is typically insular and textual, performed by clergy (or sometimes learned lay people) and directed toward an audience of clergy (and/or learned lay people). Liberation theology, on the other hand, offers a radically new way to understand Christian faith, a way that grows from the lived experiences of dominated peoples. It rejects "traditional" European theology because the latter tends to address social problems abstractly, on a philosophical level, rather than with transformative action. Liberation theology is not, therefore, simple reflection on faith; instead, it is Christian action upon the world-Christian praxis to transform unjust and alienating social structures-followed by theological reflection upon that action. Faith generates the praxis.

(Continues...)

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