Canned Goods

NOTE: As with all these summary-posts, any readings/interpretations/interrogations of these texts (and suggestions for other readings) are welcomed! Me? I’m just note-taking.

From Doug Hesse’s Foreword:
—”is the nature of writing such that the course in composition can be justified at all?” (ix).
—he outlines competing aims for composition (all in Berlin’s Rhetoric and Reality; see previous post on that)
—summarizes the argument to abolish the required composition course (example used, Sharon Crowley): (1) it’s unethical to support an exploitave labor situation; (2) “acting as if the course can teach academic discourse defies current theory and research; and (3) all the time spent on the courses takes time and energy away from “the broader possibilities of writing pedagogy and scholarship” (xi). Counterargument: the course can still do good for students “as a space that has democratizing potential.”
—Hesse’s major concern: that the field will become one focused on the “management of teaching.”
—2 prospects for the field: (1) Writing: “focusing . . . on students as writers learning to write for extra-disciplinary, extra-academic situations, in genres practiced there . . . [and] civic rhetoric” (xi-xii). (2)Composition: “As digital technologies mix word, image, sound, and “the visual” becomes an important counterpart/constituent of “the verbal,” composition has an invitiation to transform itself in a fashion that would gain status along with currency” (xii).

Smit’s Introduction:

What is Writing: (1) “Some scholars . . . conceive writing as a body of knowledge and a fairly narrow set of skills that people use to communicate with one another”; (2) “Other scholars think of writing as a form of personal liberation”; (3) “Still other scholars think writing as part of a larger set of social or cultural practice”; (4) “there are scholars who think of writing as a way of participating in a civic culture, local, national, or even world culture, as part of a literate citizenry . . .” (1-2).

—The field “has lost touch with its primary reason for being–the teaching of writing” and it needs to go back to these concerns: “What is writing?” How is writing learned? Can writing be taught, and if so, in what sense? And if writing can be taught, how should it be taught?” (2). However, the field need “viable alternatives to current concepts . . . we do not even know how to think about the nature of writing differently than we do now.”
—”the recommended pedagogical techniques for doing so [the teaching of writing/exposition] were articulated in the first year of the organization’s existence [CCC], if they were not broadly accepted in practice: an emphasis on student writing, the discussion of students’ work in class, and teacher-student conferences” (5). Yet, it’s professionalization that is counted as one of the field’s major accomplishments, one other being “the promotion of a particular approach to writing instruction that was not current at the beginning of CCCC”–the process approach, both of which Smit says are being called into question (for example, professionalization by Bartholomae; and the process approach by Crowley and Joseph Harris: the process model often reifies current traditional rheotric (”a new sort of formalism” (Harris))–”Even Lad Tobin . . . admits . . . its proponents have oversimiplified both the premises and the pedagogies associated with the writing process” (8).

—”A number of fields and disciplines . . . have reached a remarkable consensus about how language works . . . the fundamental assumption that the way we understand one another through language is primarily interpretive, a matter of hermeneutics; that understanding is based on a kind of socially influenced psycholinguistic guessing game . . . [and] we often end up meaning what our language allows us” (9). —The importance of context in the “social turn” of the 90s.

The key tenets:
1. Human beings learn language by actively constructing their own individual mental representation of the world. As a result, instruction in writing will always be constrained by the background and experience, the interest and motivation, that novice writers bring to the classroom.
2. Human beings learn language primarily by acquisition, by subconscious internalizing what they hear and read they do not learn language primarily through formal instruction. As a result, formal instruction will never be able to supply most of what novice writers need to know in order to write well, and the content of writing classes will always be problematic.
3. Language is always a system of tokens on which human beings project their own meanings; meaning does not “inhere” in language; hence, the meaning or value of any piece of writing will be subject to a range of interpretations, depending on what readers bring from their own knowledge and experience to their understanding of the writing.
4. Language users rely on context a great deal in order to interpret the tokens of the language system; hence, the meaning or value of any piece of writing will be constrained by the social context in which it is read and the immediate circumstances and concerns of its readers.

According to Smits, “the field of composition studies has only tentatively begun to take the implications of these tenets seriously” (10), and what the field does know about writing “suggests some broad principles that the field has yet to act on“:
1. For writing instruction to be effective, students already need to know and be able to do most of what they are supposed to learn in writing classes.
2. Writing teachers get only what they teach for, which is only a very small part of what novice writers have to know and be able to do.
3. The primary benefits of formal instruction for novice writers are “tips” from those who already know how to do what the novice writers want to learn how to do.
4. The best way to promote a broad-based ability to write is to arrange for novice writers to learn the genres of the discourse communities they wish to join as they become members of that community.

As a result, Smit calls for moving the responsibilty of the teaching of writing to all the disciplines–”we must put an ‘end’ to the hegemony of writing instruction by composition studies as a field” and an “‘end’ to composition studies as a distinctive discipline” by “training scholars . . . to live in two worlds of discourse: one world of composition theory and padagogy and another world of the discourse practices of particular communities” (12-13).