SHARE a specific SRR on the two issues of CCC responding to this question: According to the articles in these issues, what is composition? Do remember that if others have posted before you, you'll want to connect to their insights as your reading warrants.
The two issues of CCC I read/looked at were 34.2 (May 1983 – the first issue published during my life) and 19.2 (Oct. 1968 – approx. 25 years before the former and the first after RFK’s death, during a time of American social upheaval). The ’68 issue includes articles from John A. Wiegel (“Confession of a Verbal Behaviorist,” which is quite funny and also a little unnerving, with it’s just-short-of-explicit comparisons of English professors to rats in boxes pushing levers for pellets of food, but it does little in the way of defining composition aside from asserting that fiction and poetry are noble enterprises), E. M. Jennings (who contributes a rambling piece on the importance of discovery, context, and association in the invention process), Cannon and Ives (“Some Generalizations About Language,” which, in sticking with an emerging theme in the issue, grounds composition in the use of words and goes a way to define “linguistics” and to eliminate some misconceptions about language while forming some new – or at least more straight-forward – conceptions), Curtis W. Hayes (further solidifying the idea of composition as textual in his article entitled “Edward Gibbon: Linguistics, Syntax, and Style”), and Herman A. Estrin (“Teachers of English Can Create Prize-Winning Authors”). Also included in the ’68 issue are some short pieces in the back (in the “Staffroom Interchange” section) about specific teaching methods or topics. One of the pieces, for instance, is a dramatic interpretation of an interchange between a publisher rep and an instructor who is using The New Yorker as the only text in his advanced composition class. Which I thought was really interesting and almost has me convinced that the 1145 course I’m designing for pedagogy workshop this term should be Writing About The New Yorker. There is also an interesting piece about teaching Joyce’s “the Dead.” Side note: I was drawn to this particular issue to see what, if anything, the journal’s then-editors would have to say about the RFK assassination – out of curiosity more for whether it would be acknowledged at all than what specifically would be said. Nothing of RFK was mentioned, but there was an open letter to Coretta Scott King from the Rhetoric dept at the University of Iowa. Which I thought was interesting given the timing of the finding. Anyway…
ReplyDeleteThe May ’83 issue had quite a different thematic approach to its published articles. Three of the articles addressed this new-fangled device whose impact on the act of composing was just then beginning to be confronted: the word processor. Which put “composition” as something in a state of flux from the solid grounding in words that it seems to have had in 1968. Aside from that, not only do the authors of these articles explain and theorize on the differences between composing digitally and doing so by means otherwise, they also have to begin by explaining what the heck a word processor even is. Helpfully, they say that it has a keyboard like a typewriter, but instead of typing on paper with ink, the words appear on a television-like screen wherever the “cursor” is located when the keys are struck. And get this: if you want to revise a draft, you don’t have to type out entire pages all over again just to change one sentence. The stuff is all digital, saving you a bunch of time and energy. I could talk about this for hours. But something else that interested me about this issue was its inclusion of an article about the “composing process of an engineer.” Which article presents a very different picture of the nature of composition and also the nature of what kinds of composition are worthy of study in the journal. All the articles in the ’68 issue are about composing in school or for academic purposes. The writing “Process” is the topic of another article. Oddly enough, an article in the ’83 issue (by Donald Murray) also goes back to the theme of lab rats. Which is unsettling. The main idea, though, is that “composition” seems to mean different things in 83 than it did in 68.
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ReplyDeleteWhat is composition in CCC 48.1/February 1997?
In this issue from the year I started high school, composition is discussed, in the professional discourse, through essays. The “Guidelines for Writers” very specifically states that “CCC does not often publish articles written in the form of a research study or report. Most pieces take a more *essayistic* form that allows the writer to argue for a point as well as to present the results of research” (133).
Reading through the text of this issue gave me lots of guidance as to what composition is not, in essence and in exclusion. Geoffrey Sirc’s “Never Mind the Tagmemics, Where’s the Sex Pistols?” argues that composition is not limited to what is included in the discipline of composition studies—he examines the late seventies Punk movement’s approach to composition as both *Re-mix* (15) and privileging *prewriting*: “Punk didn’t discard pre-writes, jotted notes, general ideas—it lived off them” (13). From reading this article, I also learned that composition is *not prudish*—it was the first time I read the word f*cked in CCC (15).
This issue also printed a revised version of Faigley’s CCCC chair address, in which composition is argued to be not just an essay. “If we come back to our annual convention a decade from now and find that the essay is no longer on center stage, it will not mean the end of our discipline” (40). Here, Faigley is joining others in opening up the field of composition to include digital, *multi-media literacy*.
Patricia Bizzell’s article, “The 4th of July” sees the current situation of the composition classroom as not having content focus, and calls for compositionists to adapt roles in public discourse, returning the field to position of analyzing and creating rhetoric within the sphere of *public discourse*, contemporary and historical. Other writing in this issue shapes the idea of composition as including *argument*—a piece of composition that needs to be better honed and taught (62), *democratic instinct* (102), and requiring *variety*—of perspectives and methods.
So, to try to tidy up, here’s a definition of Composition compiled by my reading of Cs 48.1: an essayistic, non-prudish variety of multi-media literacy, public discourse, and argument guided by democratic instinct and taken through pre-writes and Re-mix.
(2 of 2) Sorry for posting so ridiculously verbosely—yikes!
ReplyDeleteWhat is composition in CCC 60.4/June 2009?
I pulled this issue off myself because it looked well-worn, and I wanted to relive what I must have found so interesting in it a year and a half ago. Through the writing of this issue, composition seems to be understood much like it was in 48.1. For instance, composition is seen as still struggling to position itself in terms of the *digital*, a process that Stephen notes goes back at least to May ’83. Deborah Holdstein’s “From the Editor” calls attention to the idea that work appearing in “The Extended CCC,” the online segment of the journal, is quality work, valued as much as the print compositions of the journal.
Cynthia L. Selfe’s article “The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning” argues that composition must be considered as multimodal. Understanding *multimodality* in composition is valuable to meaning-making and also necessary for ensuring a voice for individuals, cultures, and communities invested in multi-modal (or other-than-writing modal) composition. Composition, through different modes, plays roles in “human *expression*, the formation of individual and group *identity*, and *meaning making*” (626). Like Sirc in 1997, Selfe understands composition as more than academic voices. More abstractly, composition, according to Stenberg and Whealy in “Chaos is the Poetry,” includes *chaos*, which leads to rethinking with a goal of *reflection* and *movement*.
As I try to define what composition means from reading this recent issue of CCC, I am left thinking about composition as a *social practice*. Composition is positioned in relationship to its role in the university, in service-learning, in the classroom. Although the issues I looked at are twelve years apart, they share some similar concepts of composition. There is still a focus on composition classrooms as facilitating *exchange of ideas* (730). Lois Agnew’s article “Teaching Propriety” seems to extend from Bizzell’s “4th of July”: Having brought public discourse into the classroom (or maybe, brought the classroom into public discourse) Agnew claims “we can restore a vital component of rhetorical instruction through helping students determine the extent to which each communicative act succeeds or fails in creating an effective rhetorical response to the complex array of interests, identities, and cultural and historical backgrounds that any notion of ‘the public’ must take into account” (761).
Here’s another attempt of summing up a composition definition, this time for 60.4: Composition is a chaotic, multimodal social practice of expression, identity, and meaning making, facilitating the exchange of ideas, reflection, and movement. Thus, composition is malleable and evolutionary, while remaining constantly in dialogue with its own history (although these issues were missing the history of composition lab rats that I would have enjoyed).
The first issue I looked at was volume 56, number 1, September 2004. Min-Zhan Lu's article "An Essay on the Work of Composition: Composing English Against the Order of Fast Capitalism" defines her own composition as an essay that "break[s] up" the idea that valued written English must be from native speakers only. She attempts to use her essay as a way to compose a new conception of English against the grain, that resists injustice, and makes room for these other voices that have been and continue to be marginalized. I like the joint meaning of composition here. Composition is her formal essay published in CCC, and composition is the idea she creates with her words that puts together a new theory of what it means to be a user of English, making what we do with how we speak English a composition as well.
ReplyDeleteThe other piece that really caught my eye was Judith Goleman's "An 'immensely Simplified Task': Form in Modern Composition-Rhetoric." He defines his own composition as an article. He seeks to explore the way that novice and experienced writers struggle with adhering to conventional forms while still trying to facilitate dialogic writing in their own classrooms. His composition, interestingly, includes others' compositions, both historical and contemporary (student writing and professor prompts). I took away from this the idea that composition is about working within and against conventional systems of writing; in other words, then, composition involves merging the old with the new.
The next issue I looked at is volume 59, number 2, December 2007. Dale Jacobs' "Marveling at The Man Called Nova: Comics as Sponsors of Multimodal Literacy" theorizes the ways that reading comics, especially Marvel Comics, allow the reader to develop multimodal literacy, or multiple literacies. Comics are a marriage of words and images. His piece encourages educators to view comics as a way of moving from print only pedagogy to a pedagogy that embraces multiple modalities. This will allow students to read and produce multimodal texts of their own. Here, then, we see composition as multimodal, something that is not print only (even though I would have liked his text to be more multimodal).
The other piece that caught my attention was Hui Wu's "Writing and Teaching behind Barbed Wire: An Exiled Composition Class in a Japanese-American Internment Camp." This piece exams writing assignments assigned in a camp composition classroom. By looking at the way the English teachers respond to student writings shows how marginalized students and their white teachers (in a power position) were able to come to terms with what civil rights and freedom means. I like the idea here that composition is a dialogue and that the composition is the constructed knowledge that results from that dialogue; of course, the teacher's comments and the students' writings are compositions as well, but I think that the more abstract ideas of what a composition can be are a valuable addition to our conversation.
I know there are, of course, other articles in both issues but these pieces really caught my attention and I liked the less traditional definitions of composition they offer.
Part One:
ReplyDeleteThe first issue I looked at was Vol. 43, No. 3, Oct. 1992. This issue focused on collaboration and composition and feminism and composition. Marian M. Sciachitano’s article “Introduction: Feminist Sophistics Pedagogy Group” is the result of a collaboration that began at the University of Miami-Ohio. Sciachitano describes the function of the group, which was primarily to talk about and to negotiate authority and difference within the composition classroom and describes the identity of the members of the group—the first and apparently most important label being “heterosexual women.” Several of the essays included in this issue of CCC’s are from the women in this group.
In “Creating Space for Difference in the College Composition Classroom,” Karen Hayes offers a narrative of her experiences teaching and her students responses to feminism and diversity. She argues that much of the progress in the class was accomplished through responses to a particularly vocal and bigoted student and that once students could explore practical differences they were better able to see theoretical differences. In “What’s in it for Me? Two Students’ Reponses to a Feminist Pedagogy,” Sara Farris examines responses to her feminist teaching practices, focusing on the positive response of an older female student and the defensive opposition of a younger male student. Jill Eichhorn in “Women’s Bodies in the College Writing Classroom: The Threat of Feeling Exposed” describes her experience of teaching while pregnant and says that paradoxically being pregnant caused her students to expect her to be less maternal to them. She decides to write her students a letter about being a feminist teacher and being pregnant and is pleasantly surprised by their responses. Karen Stubbs-Powers in “Watching Ourselves: Feminist Teachers and Authority” describes resistant responses to her feminist teaching and argues that the dissent she encounter highlights both the difficulty of disrupting expectations for female authority figures and students’ willingness to become engaged (if angry) by feminist issues. Susan Jarrett’s “Teaching Across and Within Differences” also describes student responses to an overtly feminist classroom and concludes that discussing words like “feminism” helps to bridge the gap between student and teacher. Adriana Hernandez, though also a member of the sophistic feminist pedagogy group, was not a composition teacher and instead of telling her own stories about teaching, she tried to provide an overview of feminist pedagogy, which she concludes legitimizes struggle and resistance. This issue contains three more articles about gender in the classroom written by people outside of the pedagogy group: Don J. Kraemer compares male and female students’ autobiographies; Karen L. Hollis proposes methods for encouraging female students to gain authority in writing workshops; Lillian Bridwell-Bowles argues that encouraging experimental writing is a feminist activity.
Three of the four articles about collaboration discuss responses to student drafts (Mara Holt’s “The Value of Written Peer Criticism,” Muriel Harris’s “Collaboration is Not Collaboration is Not Collaboration: Writing Center Tutorials vs. Peer-Response Group” and Anne M. Greenhalgh’s “Voices in Response: A Post-modern Reading of Teacher Response”). The fourth article, Felicia Mitchell’s “Balancing Individual Projects and Collaborative Learning in an Advanced Writing Class” argues that writing instruction should grant students authority and empower them to find voices outside of the classroom.
This particular issue, much more than seems to be the case for the issues that Elizabeth and Stephan examines, largely assumes a common definition for composition, which is limited to what takes place in a writing classroom. Composition is the process of discovering and asserting identity through writing. Composition research is primarily defined in this issue as an elaborate form of story-telling. Authority comes from personal experience.
The two issues of CCC that I looked at were Vol. 51, No. 1, Sep., 1999, and Vol. 39, No. 1, Feb., 1988. I chose the ’99 issue because of the focus on Creative Writing.
ReplyDeleteIssue 1 ('99):
In the editor’s note, Joseph Harris, argues for a breach of the “institutionalized divide” between composition studies and creative writing, calling for more cohesion between the two fields. I’m curious to learn more about the history of this divide and how the two fields came to occupy separate spaces within academia. There is a strong emphasis in the issue on reconnecting with the personal side of writing, urging compositionists to employ some of the techniques and methodologies of creative writing and vice versa. Harris notes that academics who wear both hats, as it were, are often torn between devoting their limited time to one field or another; rarely are the two synthesized. One presumption the editor makes is equating the personal with creative writing. In fact, he begins to use the words synonymously, and I’m not sure those terms are equatable. Certainly not all personal writing is fictional, nor is all fiction writing personal. Nonetheless, I agree with the editor’s call for the demotion of overarching truth claims in academic writing, the ones which remove any sense of the author’s subjectivity.
In the same issue, FSU’s own Wendy Bishop writes in, “Places to Stand: The Reflective Writer-Teacher-Writer in Composition,” for the end of the antagonisms between the expressivist and social constructionist schools. By expressivist, I believe she means a theory which focuses on the self, the personal, the author’s own feelings and emotions. This connects to the larger overarching goal of the issue: bringing the personal back into composition studies. Bishop calls for more “writing about writing,” more transparency in the processes of writing, and sharing of drafts.
In the essay entitled, “The Ambivalence of Reflection: Critical Pedagogies, Identity, and the Writing Teacher,” Robert Yagelski calls out the 800-pound gorilla in the middle of the room: a teacher’s own self-doubt. If, Yagelski argues, we are going to encourage reflective practices from our students, we as teachers must also be reflective. The paradox that Yagelski outlines is essentially that a teacher often feels part of the very economic, cultural, political system he or she is trying to reform or critique. Yagekski argues that a teacher should dispense with the notion of teacher-as-hero, stop trying to impose agendas, and begin to understand students on their own terms. Doubt is good, he argues; an honest assessment of one’s teaching practices can offer profound insight and help to better address students’ needs. I liked how Yagelski gave several personal examples from his own teaching experience and did not hesitate to show his own vulnerability and ambivalence toward his teaching identity.
There are also several shorter articles in this issue addressing the nexus between creative writing and composition. Ted Lardner argues that the notion of a non-unified, non-coherent author-subject is very familiar to composition scholars but largely ignored in creative writing studies. Lardner believes that certain theoretical perspectives in Composition studies (Formalism, Mimeticism, Expressivism, etc.) allow Composition teachers to assess “good writing,” and a similar value system should be applied to assessing creative writing. George Kalamaras argues for a creative writing class grounded in “social-epistemic rhetoric,” one that deemphasizes individual expression and foregrounds “social responsibility.” I enjoyed Kalamaras’ article, and I’m interested in the ways creative writing workshops can evolve past the “master-apprentice” model and the rigid emphasis on final product.
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ReplyDeleteIssue 2:
ReplyDeleteThe other issue I reviewed had a very different focus. Many of the articles focus on how to address diversity in the classroom and similar exigencies in a rapidly changing academic world. Unlike Marian's findings, this issue really seems to extend composition outside of the classroom and into the realms of politics and social activism. Miriam Chaplain, for one, argues that the traditional skill proficiency model of education is anti-diversity and leads to homogeneity. Chaplain advocates instead for an experiential background model. Chaplain encourages teachers to see themselves not merely as scholars but as “political activists as well.” This is partly a response to what seems like sweeping educational reforms affecting the country in the late 80’s.
Jeffrey Sommers argues on behalf of the student-teach memo. It was interesting to read this article because, to my understanding, the notion of a process memo (encouraging students to think about how they write: pre-writing, organization, drafting, etc.) is essentially codified now in composition studies.
True to the 80’s, Richard C. Raymond writes an article about a successful class he developed to address the nuclear predicament. Having grown up in the 80’s, it was interesting to see how he directly addressed the subject, as opposed to my education, which largely ignored any political/social backdrop in favor of canonical works.
Myron C. Tuman argues in “Class, Codes, and Composition: Basil Bernstein and the Critique of Pedagogy,” that process-oriented composition does not help disadvantaged students. He argues instead for a more traditional, product oriented pedagogy. This was the first article I’ve read that really argues against process. In short, he seems to say that not all change is progress, and what many people consider reform does not significantly “alter the relative disadvantage of different groups within the overall class structure of society.” He cites product orientated pedagogy and “teacher as authority” as two models of learning that might “awaken” students to a social and political awareness.
Robert Brooke’s article, “Modeling a Writer’s Identity: Reading and Imitation in the Writing Classroom” argues that the identity of a student-writer is developed through imitation of an author and not by imitating the forms and processes of that author’s writing. Brooke uses student writing from his freshman composition class to argue that students learn by “imitating another person, and not a text or a process.” For Brooke, finished product is less important than “the stance towards writing the student develops.”
In the article, “Accommodation, Resistance and the Politics of Student Writing,” Geoffrey Chase determines through case-study that established academic discourse conventions are often opposed and resisted. Chase challenges the criteria teachers use to assess “good” or “important” writing in light of a diverse classroom. He asserts that writing should reflect a broader social purpose and reflect the student’s own discourse community. Students should be encouraged to challenge the “traditional” conventions in productive ways.
The next issue I examined was Vol. 43, No. 4, Dec., 1992, published just two months later. Two articles in this issue look at Harvard and Radcliffe’s influencing on writing instruction in the early 1900’s. Donald C. Stewart explores the assumptions that this influence was negative and widespread, encouraged students to divorce writing from social context and to focus on mechanical rules and divided English from writing. Though Stewart never fully proves that Harvard had a profound influence on American writing instruction, he does provide evidence that many important figures (particularly MLA presidents) perceived and resented Harvard’s influence on writing instruction. JoAnn Campbell argues that writing instruction at Harvard was damaging to women because professors asked them to share personal experiences in their writing and then responding by ignoring what was shared and simply critiquing surface errors. Christopher C. Burnham argues that heart and mind can both be developed through structured journal assignments, which he repeatedly, almost amusingly, demands are structured and rigorous forms of training. He seems to want to produce a theory to combine all writing theories.
ReplyDeleteRichard Lloyd-Jones provides a history of the field of composition that begins with the first CCCC’s and outlines what he sees as a negative trend away from a community of scholars and towards a dislocated money-making effort for universities. His vision of what composition should be centers on moving students beyond mechanics so that they can make connections between themselves and the world in which they live.
“For twenty years at least we have been told to get back to basics, but the great gains in our field have probably come from defining "basics" in ways different
from what is meant by most of the people telling us to go back to them. They
want a tidy world of neat rules and simple statements, but we know that writers
and readers come in many forms, and complex systems of meaning are impor-
tant even to the least of us and require more than formulas, although on
occasion formulas may provide a point of departure. It is probably cheaper to
teach courses devoid of intellectual content, but is doing so worth it? Can we
really accept a role that favors the mass production of prose? Do we insist that
writing requires exploration both of the self and the shared world?”
This view of composition seems to address similar issues that Leigh notes in Judith Goleman’s article about working within and against conventional modes of writing and teaching. His article also highlights the ways in which composition, perhaps even more so than other disciplines, is being defined by its ability to be useful, practical and cheap.
Finally, through many of the articles in its large collection of responses to previous articles, this issue proposes that the field of composition is a conversation between research and personal teaching experience.
I chose to read an earlier issue of CCC that focuses on rhetoric, a particular favorite topic of mine. The February 1965 issue includes articles focusing on rhetoric as "the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols" (attributed to Kenneth Burke in Nichols, p. 13). I love the tidy logic of symbols and corresponding meanings, and Albert Upton's article, "Logic, Semantics, and Composition," gives a precise discussion of the three forms of analysis-- which Upton identifies as classification, structural, and operational—and interpretation and formation of analogies as methods to improve students' thinking, creativity, motivation, and performance (p. 31). The issue also includes juicy rhetorical analyses of texts such as Thoreau's major works and scientist Julian Huxley's articles, as well as a very amusing partial dictionary of Non-Rhetorical Devices such as "Autistogram: any paper whose style is characterized by writing 'just as you think'" (Monk, p. 19). Despite the apparent expectation for rigid adherence to the ancient rules of rhetoric expressed in these articles, there is a definite focus on changing the moldy oldies of rhetoric to suit and support the needs of modern students, and instructors. Articles on writing for real audiences and making journalism respectable compliment pieces on elevating expectations in two-year college composition classes and making Honors programs truly worthy of the title. In the lead-off piece, Virginia M. Burke discusses the need for restoring "rhetoric as the informing discipline in the practice of composition at all levels" (p. 4) not because we should follow the rules, but rather because we must reinterpret and reconstruct rhetorical terminology, theory, and practice to suit contemporary writers' needs. Burke argues that (re)constructing a flexible rhetorical theory would provide a disciplinary structure for the teaching and practice of composition, providing a stable basis for the work and moving away from what she calls "chaos in the teaching and evaluation of composition," a focus on "idiosyncratic private mystiques" and a "deadly obsession with mechanics and grammar" (p. 5). Rhetoric, in its reconstructed guise, would create a "reasonable sequence" of study in composition to alleviate the chaos of literature-for-its-own-sake and grammar-rules-uber-alles. So even in 1965, before process theory and error analysis really took hold, composition instructors were looking for a way to frame the discipline, to give it shape and structure without strangling it theoretically or pedagogically.
ReplyDelete**Apologies for the length of these posts. I promise to do better!**
ReplyDeleteThe second issue I read is the December 2006 issue, which includes articles that question prevailing assumptions about composition theory and practice, raising issues about diversity, multiplicity of discourses, relevance, and student-teacher interactions and identities. Melanie Kill's article about negotiating identities in the first-year composition classroom presents a compellingly simple definition of composition: "strategic application of literacies" (p. 214). This definition appeals to me because it includes multiple modalities of composition, the intentionality and purposefulness of composition, and the idea of literacy—reading and writing and using language—inherent in composition. Kill argues that the changes in composition theory and pedagogy require changes in the ways in which instructors and students interact in the composition classroom. Kill's discussion of identity roles is echoed in the Re-Visions discussion of Nancy Sommers's 1982 "Responding to Student Writing," in which Sommers revisits her original ideas about the encroachment on students' ideas and ownership of their writing inherent in instructors' comments. As a teacher of writing, I've read and reread Sommers's original piece to try to figure out how I can guide my own students to be better writers without stepping on their compositional toes, so this series of articles holds a special fascination for me. Therefore, I was surprised that the piece that held my attention most in this very interesting issue is the written version of Judith A. (Jay) Wootten's 2006 CCCC Chair's Address, "Riding a One-Eyed Horse: Reining in and Fencing Out" (pp. 236-245). Wootten extends the metaphor of a one-eyed horse to the discipline of composition, using the image to examine the difficulties of defining and redefining the discipline. Ultimately, says Wootten, "rhetoric is everything in the universe" (p. 236), and it is the job of composition instructors to give students access to and tools for the universe of discourse. In this article, I found a definition of composition that speaks more to the human side than to the theoretical side of literacy, but I think both sides should be addressed: composition, then, is "the way we reveal the relationship with the natural world and the man-made world in language and images" (p. 236). It is the revelation and the relationships that make this my new definition of composition.
What is Composition?
ReplyDeleteFor my SSR, I have chosen to go back to the first issue of College Composition and Communication (Mar. 1950), not because it was one of the shortest issues (although that was appealing) but because it could provide a glimpse at what the field considered composition to be at this important time in the history of modern composition. In the remarks of the CCCC Chairman John C. Gerber on page twelve of the magazine, Gerber expressed that the nine-thousand plus teachers of college composition in the country needed a way to share ideas and research in a time-efficient method. With that statement in mind, editor Chas W. Roberts chose to include one article entitled “College Publications of Freshman Writing” written by Edith Wells. This article analyzed the use of freshmen composition magazines published across the country in freshmen composition classes. The title of the article, as well as the body of the article itself, suggests that composition is writing. This, of course, is the expected response to the question, “What is composition?” However, if one looks closely he/she can see that Wells does not limit her definition of composition to writing. Wells makes it a point on several occasions to mention that some magazines include illustrations in their publications, and on page four, she writes, “In addition to the usual sections—short stories, feature articles, poetry, humorous and serious essays, and book reviews—several magazines feature special pages for radio scripts, one-act plays, music and art criticism, and prize award contributions [ . . .] Photography supplements literary efforts in one magazine thus giving the publication a broader artistic scope.” The inclusion of these supplementary materials in a composition magazine, and the mention of them by Wells in her article concerning composition, makes the argument that these products are forms of compositions.
For the second issue that I read, I decided to fast forward to the recent past and look at the September 2005 issue of College Composition and Communication. In this issue there were two articles that I found of particular interest when attempting to define composition. The first article that caught my eye was “Infrastructure and Composing: The When of New-Media Writing” (DeVoss, Cushman, & Grabill). In this article, the authors discuss not just how and why students compose using “new media” (a.k.a., digital—this would probably go hand-in-hand with Elizabeth’s article about composition finding its place in a digital medium) but at when they decide to use software to compose. Some of the digital technologies that DeVoss, Cushman, and Grabill mention are digital videos, texts, blogs, e-mails, and wikis. While most of the digital technologies that are mentioned still rely heavily on writing—the digital video described combined photography, music, and writing—it is clear that the view on the construction of composition has widened since the explosion of digital technologies and Web 2.0 tools. Furthermore, most of the compositions that were discussed in the article were largely social in nature.
The second article that I found of interest in this issue was “Transgender Rhetorics: (Re)Composing Narratives of the Gendered Body” (Alexander). This article, like the articles read by Elizabeth and Leigh, focuses on composition and identity. One line in the introduction really touches on what composition is, “I have asked myself and my students to think critically about how we compose ourselves as men, women, masculine, feminine, and even gay, straight, or bi” (p. 45). This takes composition out of the realm of writing and even out of the realm of the arts, which had all been mentioned in other articles. This forces one to truly broaden how he/she views composition, as Alexander suggests that we “ourselves” are compositions.
So, what is composition based on these issues of CCC? Compositions are products often used to communicate with others.
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ReplyDeleteI consulted issues 40:3 (October 1989) and 54:1 (September 2002). I chose these because I, narcissistically, thought it would be interesting to see how composition has changed over the course of my educational life. The first issue was published the year I started kindergarten, and the second the year I started college.
ReplyDeleteIssue 40:3
The 1989 issue seems to define composition mostly in terms of writing. It contains four main articles including the “CCCC Executive Committee. ‘Statement of Principles and Standards for the Postsecondary Teaching of Writing.’” The statement identifies “critical writing and reading” as the goal for composition students, which is obviously a text-based paradigm. “Cognition, Context, and Theory Building” also identifies writing as the specific goal of composition. One article focused on the job search and dealt with the importance of presenting at conferences and completing dissertations on time, which might say something about the professional field at the time, but not much about the definition of composition itself. Additionally, much of the advice seemed applicable to the contemporary academic context as well, so apparently not much has changed in that regard. Only one article seemed to suggest that composition might encompass something other than writing. “Process Paradigms in Design and Composition” focused on the process movement (This seems to relate to Stephen’s findings in the ’83 issue in which process is in a somewhat earlier stage of development.), and made comparisons between composition pedagogy and design pedagogy (such as in architecture). This article also suggests that process has existed long enough to have a definable history. Although design is clearly considered something that is “not composition” in this article, the suggestion that pedagogical methods for the visual and the written might be comparable and could inform each other regarding process allows for the idea that the visual might be considered a kind of composition.
Issue 54:1
The 2002 issue addresses a much broader range of topics. In fact, the first article of the issue addresses the visual as a part of composition specifically, an idea that was only hinted at in the 1989 issue. However, even this article still references “writing instruction” as a seemingly assumed synonym for composition pedagogy. Two other articles that caught my eye in this issue addressed plagiarism and feminist action in online spaces. Both these articles are based on textual analysis and “’Substantive and Feminist Girlie Action:’ Women Online” compares feminism of today with feminists texts of the 1960s. Marian and Angie also found articles relating to gender and composition, which suggests that gender is an ongoing interest in the field. Although this issue is definitely broader in subject matter, it seems that composition still comes back to text and writing.
The two articles had much in common in terms of baseline ideas of what comprises composition. All articles made some reference, usually substantive, to pedagogical applications or issues, and writing seems to be considered the main subject of composition studies. Most everyone else seems to have found pedagogy to be a main concern for composition in their issues. This is unsurprising, given the title of the journal. Both of my issues reference the visual somewhat inconclusively. Both articles include an article overtly devoted to educational policy. In general, based on these two articles, it seems that there are more similarities than differences in the definition of composition between 1989 and 2002.
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ReplyDelete***PART 1***
ReplyDeleteFor this assignment, I chose two issues of CCC that I thought would give me two radically different definitions or perceptions of composition. One issue was 15.1 from February 1964 (“Composition as Art”) and the other was from the fiftieth anniversary issue from June 1999, entitled “A Usable Past: CCC at 50.” The first provided a context for the position of composition within English departments and a disciplinary boundary for composition studies as a field of academia; the second was an examination of the histories of the field and theorized a trajectory for future definitions.
I must admit that I was both surprised and disappointed by the definition of composition proposed within issue 15.1 of CCC. Three articles in the issue examine film as both a form of composition and a pedagogical tool with which composition can be taught. “Film as Sharpener of Perception” by William D. Baker proposes that film is both art and composition because of its use of symbols and form. This allows for the analysis of visual texts and the (visual) grammar of narrative film. Also, it becomes a pedagogical tool as students are encouraged to look at the details of the images, details that will (hopefully) strengthen their own compositions. Another article by Sanford Radner suggests that the medium of film has irrevocably changed the form of the novel. Essentially, Radner’s argument focuses on newer media influencing previous art forms. For me, this seemed to be an excellent precursor to McLuhan’s hypotheses in “The Medium is the Message,” while also allowing for study of the effect of media on composition. However, the remaining articles in the issue constructed a much narrower definition of composition: good writing about Literature. Select titles from the rest of the issue include “Poetry and Freshman Composition,” “Cummings in the Classroom,” and “Good Writing from Great Books.” All of these seem to purport that the teaching of composition necessitates presenting “good composition” to students and having them write about why it’s good. It also constructs composition as something that needs to desperately cling to a Literature program and the English department.
***PART 2***
ReplyDelete“A Usable Past,” issue 50.2 of CCC, renegotiates the definition constructed in 15.1. The articles in 50.2 address the issues of the marginalization of Others in composition studies and in the composition classroom. The letter from the editor asserts that the compiled essays “speak for a broader vision of the field, and how we can become a different field altogether.” Three of these essays deal with race and representation in the history of composition studies. One looks at the presence/absence of feminism throughout the history of the field and yet another examines the marginalized position of graduate students within a composition faculty. All of these, however, work to examine issues of sex, gender, race, class, and general Otherness – how they have affected the histories of composition and how they have affected composers (mostly writers in this issue). This framework, I believe (and Elizabeth touches on this point in her blog as well), establishes composition as social practice, as an inevitably representation of the negotiation of identity between and individual and his/her community. I saw this specifically in the articles concerning the presence of African American voices in composition studies as they all discusses issues of code-switching (adapting a particular voice for a particular community). Gilyard’s article even traces how this code-switching appeared in the curriculum of HBCUs as a way of granting access to a discourse dominated by whiteness, which Kat terms in her blog as composition instructors giving their students access to and the tools for the universe of [dominant, Ill add] discourse. The definitions of composition (in the fifty years between the issues, there has definitely been an acceptance of plurality) is more encompassing, allowing for more voices and thus more ideas to contribute to the field of composition studies.
Article 1
ReplyDeleteBarry Kroll's article entitled "Arguing with Adversaries: Aikido, Rhetoric, and the Art of Peace" in CCC 59.3 (February 2008), is one of the most interesting assertions I have read in quite awhile. What attracted me to this article was its reference to aikido, a a form of budo that works to harmonize the confrontation rather than respond harshly and violently. Moreover, how could this martial art connect with rhetoric? Prof. Kroll of Leigh Univeristy, PA, does so with such simplicity and thorough examples that anyone, even a layperson, could walk away peacefully knowing the art of argument can be more harmonizing and not confrontational as many of our students, particular Freshmen, think it has to be to win the argument. Let me take you through a few concepts here. Budo and rhetoric are responses to conflict or disagreement (451). We have this contemporary concept of being argumentative is to attack, defeat, and offer no choice but to surrender. It is much like war. Here, with a war with words, we learn thate we can through two aikido movements or stances, tenkan and irimi,achieve the art of peaceful resolution. A meeting of the minds, so to speak. Prof. Kroll gets his students to understand how these movements translate into a rhetorical stance by taking some hot-button issues such as capital punishment, abortion, and gun control, and uses these and other opinion pieces from the newspaper, to help them "to 'think' about patterns of argument with thier muscles and sinews and joints" (464). He gets them to move through tenkan and irimi literally and then shows them the parts to a written argument and how the aikido stances transfer to a better developed argumentative essay. There are multiple ways of responding wit the most extreme being "fighting back" (465). As Kroll uses the term rhetocial situation, I immediately thought of Bitzer's essay on the meaning of a situation equaling an experience (simply put); not so with Kroll as it means beliefs or values and not what rhetoric is rooted in. Moving on, students learn to protect their argument while learning to understand and empathize or see it from their opponent's position how the following can occur and make for a stronger alliance:look at the problem and see what can be solved together; find common ground; or develop other approaches that not already considered in the dispute (454). You take the incoming energy and direct it away from you by pivoting back around so you and your opponent are side by side looking in the same direction (tenkan stance). For this, the writer looks at the opposing viewpoints and finds merit in it in a non-critical manner. There, the student writer can look at this opponent's counterargument through his eyes and seek to understand (a Covey concept). Solutions are offered with both sides influencing and contributing to them. Your writing is a shared concern (458). Thus, you focus on common ground (tenkan).
Part 2 of Article 1 (originally too many characters)
ReplyDeleteFor irimi, or entering in, you close with the "attacker to counter a strike as it is developing" (459). It is preemptive and is more assertive. the rhetorical equivalent is direct engagement with your opponent's argument without rebuttal or criticism (459). So, the two basic movements of aikido allow for the student writer to adopt a receptive stance, turn and stand with his opponent, acknowledge the good intentions of the argument, and assert the writer's good points while validating the opponent's. Kroll wants to urge for a change in direction in how rhetoric is taught since much of what is in our culture seems to show violent responses to otherwise innocuous or important issues. Harmonization is the key; changing our stance in creating an argument can bring more peaceful resolutions to our current problems. Think of our super charged political rhetoric and the uneasy political climate and this become very inviting. Morihei Ueshiba, the Japanese martial arts prodigy, would be enlighted and amused perhaps with how his defense system becomes a method for win-win arguments.To be soft is to be flexible. Open hands and open heart. Kroll has something unique and quite honestly, realistically possible. He shows us it can be done by using his students' paper and reflective examples as witness.
Does this change our definition of composing or rhetoric when it applies a philosphical school of thought (aikido, a martial arts form that harmonized the opponent's move) and how we grew up defining argument? How would Sommers responde to how we should respond to our students' writing?
ReplyDeleteArticle 2
ReplyDeleteHaswell, Haswell, and Blalock’s article “Hospitality in College Composition Courses” in CCC’s June 2009 edition (60.4) is the other “h” word I chose to read and reflect – the first being harmony in aikido movements aligned with argument here. As I read Elizabeth’s post and her reference to Askew, I think we have articles in common: social practices in the rhetoric class. Bringing together the communicative responses our students make and how they achieve a balanced response to the classroom’s diversity is, I guess, one aspect of hospitality. Let’s look here at what our authors state. Using the Homeric, Judeo-Christian, and nomadic concepts of hospitality, we can lead our students to see change that is good in the class and writing encounter and that it is fine to take risks. The host and the guest is the teacher and the student. I went into reading this article as if it was a bit bizarre. I came away with more questions than I originally had. It is writing process meets class management. Their thesis is this: “genuine hospitality, as a cultural narrative, social practice (Elizabeth, there it is…), and ethical goal, has the potential to enhance learning and perhaps radically alter the interchange between composition teacher and writing student” (708). How do they treat this abstract concept in relation to a comp class? It is a messy, complex, risky, and sometimes treacherous social or cultural praxis (708). What they also hope will happen is a change in student-centered classroom structure. This perked my interest even more. Think on how you open a class – the very first class. You are hospitable and upbeat; you are welcoming. After that, our authors contend, you shift focus and gears and end up more or less, inhospitable (I can relate if you are handing out low grades!). Some change to an attitude of “purchase and service following Freire’s “banking model” or an IRE method of instructional delivery” must occur(709). In other words, we are politely professional and shut off all rapport with our students and thus, squelch the openness needed for a composition class to flourish. Where’s the dignity, privilege, and value in seeking truth through writing? Where’s the good will? Yes, we can kindly and hospitably welcome our students that first day, but actually what happens as it does in history or psychology, we start to assimilate them or “devour” them – cannibalize them and thus, gain more power over the students. Hospitality is complex and as our authors contend, like wielding a double-edged knife (711). On pages 718-19, the authors use a chart to navigate the three “hospitality ideals” and how they relate to practices in the classroom, with the students, the assignments, and assessments used. Very useful – I preferred focusing on this and pages 712-715 which look at the Homeric, Judeo-Christian, and nomadic views of hospitality. Simply, Homeric (think Iliad) gives gifts and thanks to warriors or gods or both (as some can be quite ego-centric fighters); Judeo-Christian, gift-giving is bilateral, food, water, fellowship, and community all refresh the spirit – the ultimate dignity is bestowed on the lowliest party as he could be Christ incarnate; lastly, the nomadic focuses on offering a tent and food and offers extreme deference to the other nomad. No questions are asked; information about the region is presented. The latter is the oldest form of hospitality and still exists among the Bedouin and Uzbeki tribes today. Here, the guest regales the host with gossip and news from his travels.
How can this exist in our classrooms? It cannot or if it does, it is highly complex and our instructional methods sabotage it: we have increases in class size and program size, for one; digital technologies interfere, secondly; and WAC complicates it even more with more people (hosts) added to the mix. We do not isolate or assimilate others – we embrace differences and use these to deepen our understanding of our world and peoples.
Part 1
ReplyDeleteI wanted to pick issues that were of personal meaning to me, like Stephen and Marian and many others did. So the two issues of CCCs I chose were 20.5 from December 1969 and issue 53.3 from February 2002. I chose 20.5 because it is the first issue after Woodstock, which was the first time my father visited the United States. The event would paint his view of the entire nation afterwards and became a large influence in my upbringing. February 2002 would be the first Black History Month after 9/11, and I was interested in how the understanding of race after the rhetorical upheaval of 9/11 would look.
As to be expected, many of the articles in the 1969 issue deal with heavy-handed issues of social revolution, race policies, and politics in the Academic sphere. Some notable standouts are Edward P.J. Corbett's "The Rhetoric of the Open Hand and the Rhetoric of the Closed Fist" and Robert H. Swennes' "Can White Liberals Teach Black English in Negro Colleges in the South?". Corbett's article goes into an interesting analysis of the rhetoric of the societal changes going on in American during these turbulent years. He insists that the rhetoric of the open hand signifies persuasive discourse whose aim is to use reason to overcome base emotional appeals. The closed fist rhetoric is also a persuasive activity, but one whose non-rational and often confrontation rhetoric seeks more often to provoke physical reactions than intellectual ones. Interestingly, Corbett feels the black power fist symbol (and consequently the militant black power movement) accurately summarizes closed fist rhetoric. Swennes' article takes a very practical looks at the state of racial politics in the University system at the time. Nation-wide interest in Black studies and Black academics stimulates a newfound fervor for integrating African-American centric work into the English classroom. When hiring professors to teach these courses, Universities wooed away prominent African-American professors teaching in Black Universities to teach in facilities with more money, better resources, and more Academic clout. The resulting vacuum meant that newly-christened White professors were being placed in positions where they had to teach English classes to primarily Black students. Swennes' goes rather deeply into the problems many of these professors faced due to the enormous Academic gap in the racially segregated Universities. What surprises me most about the articles in this issue is how sensitive the CCCs authors were to many of the issues they were discussing. In the Swennes article, he goes into a two paragraph long explanation of why he uses the word Negro and what connotations come with it. He is very careful not offend. I can't say I know what the Academic world was like back then, but I find it remarkable that at least in the humanities, at least in the Rhet/Comp world, tolerance and sensitivity were at the forefront of their work. Granted, the articles still have a racial tinge to it that I find a bit distasteful--like how Swennes automatically assumes the biggest problem some of the White professors faced when teaching Black students is that they're simply not as intelligent as the students the professors are used to. But considering the time, I found the sensitivity remarkable.
Part 2
ReplyDeleteThe 53.3 article also delves into racial issues, but in a way similar to the 1969 issue and in a way differently. There aren't any articles explicitly about social revolution, but all of the articles on race seem to suggest there is a larger societal issue that applies to these subjects more directly. Malea Powell's "Rhetorics of Survivance: How American Indians Use Writing" illustrates some of the frustrations inherent to American-Indian students in composition classrooms, especially due to stereotypes many Americans aren't aware are still placed on American-Indians today. At the time, all talk was about the Muslim world or people of Middle Eastern descent, but American-Indians have their own silent struggle in the Academic world. Lisa M. Gonsalves' "Making Connections: Addressing the Pitfalls of White Faculty/Black Male Student Communication" is an interesting juxtaposition of the 1969 article that addresses many of the same issues. The tone, however, is much more critical of the White teachers who teach Black male students. Gonsalves talked to many Black students who felt slighted by their Caucasian teachers and found that, often times, the teachers don't make the effort to understand where these students are coming from or are being unconsciously insensitive. I find it particularly interesting that the same racial issues seem to apply in the 21st century English Composition classroom that it did in 1969--there is still a gap between understanding, though not necessarily in sensitivity or intelligence. Lastly, Gwendolyn Pough's "Empowering Rhetoric: Black Students Writing Black Panthers" ties very interestingly into the "Open Hand Closed Fist" article from 1969. Unlike the earlier article, which seems to discourage the type of rhetoric found in Black militant circles, Pough's article shows how many modern-day Black students found that same rhetoric empowering. One of the key differences is the idea of activism. One article feels the activities spawned by "Closed Fist" rhetoric aren't intellectually sound, whereas the other one feels that activism is one of the best intellectual gifts a Composition class can give its students. I'm again very impressed with how the CCCs authors approach some of these tough subjects. Like the 1969 issue, the 2002 issue makes the assessments that can be made at the time with remarkable sensitivity and fervor. In the 2002 issue, considering the volatile nature of many "militant" activities going on at the time, to find an article that seeks to encourage intellectual activism is very impressive.
I believe that, by looking at both issues, my idea of composition closely mirrors Elizabeth's, "Composition is a chaotic, multimodal social practice of expression, identity, and meaning making, facilitating the exchange of ideas, reflection, and movement." Both of these issues make the argument that a Composition classroom can be a place of great change and activism, but also a place to discuss the ramifications of those changes. Composition, based on these CCCs issues, is the language of identity, the intellectual tools necessary for individual or large-scale revolution. Through composition, and composition classrooms, students have a rare opportunity to synthesize their ideas with the issues swirling around them, to hopefully create a definitive idea of their thoughts, opinions, and values. In the Academic world, we are constantly seeking ways to improve our classrooms so that this synthesis can effectively continue each and every generation.
As I read across the June of 2006 (57.4) and December of 2008 (60.2) issues of CCCs as well as the more timely blog posts that have preceded this one, four characteristics of “composition” seem to emerge. First, composition is contextual. Secondly, composition crosses/negotiates/mediates the boundaries between public and private. Third, composition is a formative practice. And, finally, composition and chaos go hand-in-hand.
ReplyDelete1: Composition is contextual: I chose “contextual” instead of (multi)modal for this observation because in both of the issues that I read and the posts above, the modality of a composition seems to, in many ways, be a response to context. If we think back to “the medium is message” and then suggest that context determines medium – voila! Composition is contextual . . . well, maybe. The modality of a composition, even if we only address traditional print text, informs its meaning, etc. So, for example, 57.4 printed Peter Elbow’s piece “The Music of Form: Rethinking Organization in Writing.” Elbow opens this essay that he describes as his “longest and most roundabout defense of freewriting among the many I’ve made so far” with the metaphor of an ant crawling across Hopper’s Nighhawks. Then, he asks his readers to imagine themselves crawling across the painting . . . Reading a text, which is necessarily according to Elbow going to be linear, is much like being an ant and crawling across a painting – you can’t see the whole painting and you don’t know what’s coming next because of that. The model of organization that Elbow goes on to describe is informed by his contemplation of the passage of time when we listen to music – here, “Happy Birthday.” This contemplation of time leads him to ask: “where does the energy come from that binds written words together so as to pull us along from one part to the next and to make us feel that all the parts are held together into a magnetic or centripal whole?” Although his argument is fascinating, what it tells us about composition is, to my mind, that composition is an activity that is informed by the modalities through which we respond to an exigence – in this case freewriting. All modalities cannot be approached through the same framework. Instead, the organizational practices appropriate to this mode create or “bind the words together” in specific ways. Given a different context, a different exigence, a different modality – the composition would look much different. Thus, as ants on a painting we may never knw what the whole painting looks like. But, even as ants in a linear print text, we’ll eventually ‘get it.’ To me, this is the idea behind much of Jenny Rice’s piece, “Rhetoric’s Mechanics: Retooling the Equipment of Writing Production.” Here, Rice explores “the proximity among mechanics, rhetoric, and writing” to argue that “embracing the role of technology’s mechanics is necessary for those of us who want to serve as rhetorical producers and teacher of production in the 21st century.” This theme is also addressed by George and Salvatori’s piece, “Holy Cards/Immaginette: The Extraordinary Literacy of Vernacular Religion.” In this earlier context, a common modality of vernacular religion compositions often took the form of holy cards. Thus, while the articles that I’ve mentioned here may seem extremely disparate, they all gesture to the integral relationship between composition and context. They gesture to the ways in which compositions are integral parts of context, just as contexts are integral parts of compositions.
2: Composition actively crosses/mediates/negotiates boundaries between the public and private. A great example of this is in Suresh Canagarajah’s “The Place of World Englishes in Composition: Pluralization Continued” where he reminds readers of Almon, a Chinese American student, who was the subject of an ethnographic study done by Eva Lam. Canagarajah puts Almon within a larger frame through which he argues that, “We also learn from this example that taking ownership of English, or appropriating the language by confidently using it to serve one’s own interest according to one’s own values, helps develop fluency in English.” Other examples of composition crossing/mediating/negotiating boundaries between the public and private have been mentioned by Angie (Alexander’s article focusing on composition and identity) and both Elizabeth and Logan who mention the ways in which composition places individual writers as crossroads of democracy and social justice. Another example of this is in 60.2 where we find Ellen Cushman’s piece “Toward a Rhetoric of Self-Representation: Identity Politics in Indian Country and Rhetoric and Composition.” Cushman moves the conversation beyond a mere discussion about the political issues of identity and language and toward developing “an understanding of why the identity politics of Native scholars are so different from other scholars of color and whites.” As she looks at the cases of three Native scholars, Cushman explores markers of both authenticity and accountability in their writings. This segues to the third point in my response to “what is composition” . . .
ReplyDelete3: Composition is formative. Across the two issues that I read and this thread, there seem to be multiple illustrations of the ways in which composition engages the individual in forming a practice, an identity, or a social movement to some degree or another. Marian, for example, mentions the ways in which compositions form space. Higgins and Brush echo this in their piece “Personal Experience Narrative” in 57.4 when they refer to Susan Wells who argues that “the public sphere is not a fixed location or genre to be entered – rhetorics construct the public sphere in real time” (719). We could also look at Marian’s post about 43.3 and note that the articles she describes are themselves forming a collective identity for the women writing them. In 57.4 we also find David Coogan’s piece “Service Learning and Social Change: The Case for Materialist Rhetoric.” This piece is based on a premise that pushes us beyond the traditional claim (Aristotelian?) that a foundation in rhetoric can make someone a better citizen. Coogan writes: “The promise is not just to make good citizen but to enable student-citizens to write for social change.”
4: Finally, chaos/chaotic appears six times across the posts preceding this one. In Elizabeth’s summary of 60.4 she includes “chaotic” in her string of adjectives following “Composition is.” Reflected through both her and Kat’s post is the idea that, as Kat writes, the composition classroom is a place of “change and activism.” This feeling of chaos and change seems to underlie much of what we all appear to have encountered in CCC to some degree or another. This chaos is revisited by Fleckenstein, Spinuzzi, Rickly, and Papper in their piece, “The Importance of Harmony: An Ecological Metaphor for Writing Research.” Here, the chaos that we see reflected across this thread is reframed as an ecology in which the three main elements are interdependence, feedback, and diversity. “Writing,” they suggest, “consists of a complex web of ideas, purposes, interpersonal interactions, cultural norms, and textual forms.” I, for one, couldn’t agree more.
According to the articles in these issues, what is composition?
ReplyDelete• I chose issues 1.3 (Oct, 1950) and 1.4 (Dec, 1950) to get a feel for some of the earliest theories of composition preserved by CCC.
• In issue 1.3 of CCC, “The One-Legged, Wingless Bird of Freshman English” (3-6) discusses composition in the context of what a composition class should teach: “more effective use of language… communicating and receiving communication, or the four areas of reading, writing, speaking, and listening.” Part of where the author describes struggle is over context and media: is the teaching of composition to be limited to “socially immediate” forms like newspapers and speeches, or do we teach about composition in radio, film, and so forth? Furthermore, even across media, what does a composition course need to focus on: cultural uses, semantics, form and structure? The answer seems to be all of these and more. The other articles in this early issue of CCC follow similar veins, exploring just what college composition should look like. The answer is a tricky one and more often than not the authors end up describing what composition is as a means of contrasting it to everything it can be. What is composition? For the Oct 1950 issue of CCC composition is indistinct, but we know it is much larger than strict attention to form and structure. In fact, it is much more than strict attention to any one thing within composition.
• In issue 1.4, the last issue of the first volume of CCC, “Developmental Writing” talks about composition as, no surprise here, a writing process. The author outlines a strategy for teachers in a writing classroom to handle the large volume of students while still effectively teaching them to handle composing effective writing (the answer being, as we teaching FYC well know, to outsource the tedium of editing and peer review to the students themselves). The next article provides an outline for another system for teaching writing, this time specifically for technical students with attention paid to the kinds of formal needs of tech students. Finally, the last article discussed the effect that students have on teachers in the use of language: about how while we teach “correct” language, we are actually absorbing and deploying “incorrect” language in everyday speech. The question then becomes, how do we teach writing “correctly” if the language in actual use is different than what amounts to the prestige language of “correct English”?
• For most of the authors at this early stage of CCC, “composition” seems to be almost entirely written language, which is understandable considering the context of CCC. The struggle over what composition is for these two issues is more about what constitutes “correct” composition, and the answer seems to be “effective” composition. For the purposes of the composition teacher in 1950, that of course means effective writing. What goes unremarked, except for a brief nod in issue 1.3, are non-writing forms of composition and how that might inform an understanding of composition even for a writing classroom. As other people reveal, these kinds of cross-media issues become more visible in the discourse as the journal matures and evolves, but at the very beginning – as we might well expect – writing eclipses other forms.
The first issue I chose to look at was from September 2010. In this issue, the articles center on the theme of “the future of rhetoric and composition.” In Colomb’s article, “Franchising the Future,” he discusses how the label of “service” shapes the identity of composition. Instead of service, he suggests another characterizing term: franchise—“a public trust that gives us a license to operate the largest block of classes in most universities but also the responsibility for the nation’s ability to write” (12). In “The Place of Creative Writing in Composition Studies,” Hesse looks at the identity of Composition Studies and argues for a more interactive role for creative writing by providing some practical applications. Ianetta follows this piece with a similar argument but from a different viewpoint: literary studies. She believes that “[c]ombining the histories of composition and literature more fully […] will help us understand the inadequacy of narrow discipline-based thinking to solve the problems of either field” (56). In “Composition 2.0,” Fraiberg aims to “reimagine writing studies within national and global contexts” (101). He discusses multimodal and multilingual literacy practices in order to exemplify the need for a more comprehensive understanding of composition that is more fitting for the 21st century. Following, Williams consider the influence of composing practices that occur off-campus because of the crucial necessity to include broader interests of other “literacy-related fields” when formulating a characterization for writing studies. Addison and McGee look at past studies of writing in order to document “what it is we already know about writing” in order to gain insight into the available opportunities in the future. They call for diversity in the types of writing taught in both high school and college. Lastly, Phelps and Ackerman talk about “attaining ‘visibility’ as a field” in order to attain “external validation.”
ReplyDeleteIn sum, these articles each project one possible route (or sub-route) for the future of the field. More importantly, the range and number of trajectories illustrate that the future is contingent on multiple perspectives—it is unbounded and, therefore, unpredictable. Our field’s development and progress, as these writers attest, are directly influenced by shifting social factors. So, as most of them suggest, by expanding our definition of “composition,” we will have the opportunity to venture into new terrain.
The second issue I looked at was from June 2002. I chose this issue because this would have been published when I was taking my first, first-year composition course at my undergraduate institution. In “English Only and U.S. College Composition,” Horner and Trimbur bring attention to college composition and its “tacit policy of English monolingualism” in order to inquire about the effects of this practice on basic writers. In the following article, “Critical Pedagogy’s ‘Other’: Constructions of Whiteness in Education for Social Change,” Trainor looks at the connection between critical pedagogy and “the literature on whiteness” and how this influences white students’ conceptions of “race and racial identity” (631). Next, Bruch and Marback identify the problems of rights rhetoric in connection to racial equality. They discuss the theory of language rights in relation to race, literacy, and the value of rights rhetoric in composition studies. In “‘To Protect and Serve’: African American Female Literacies,” Elaine Richardson asks for a broader definition of literacy, one that encompasses the literacy practices of African American females specifically. She argues “that mother tongue literacy is central to literacy education” (675). Finally, Linda Feldmeier White in “Learning Disability, Pedagogies, and Public Discourse” argues “that medical models of literacy misdirect teaching by narrowing its focus on remediation” (705). She claims, “Teaching that attempts to ‘remediate’ by focusing on what is wrong with the way students are reading and writing only emphasizes their disability (728).
ReplyDeleteThese articles’ main focus is literacy, specifically in terms of race, and in the final article, learning disabilities. It seems as though these articles attempt to highlight the deficiency of the current understanding of the term “literacy,” and they ask for a broader sense of the definition of literacy in order to account for marginalized literacy practices. Interestingly, this effort somewhat echoes the calls for an expanded view of composition in the September 2010 issue. Composition, for the writers of the June 2002, is a practice that should include multiple literacies, and those literacies that are marginalized should be recognized as valuable and crucial in order to gain a fuller understanding of “what composition is.”
I wanted to choose to issues that were somewhat meaningful, if not to everyone, then to me at least. The first one I chose is from the year I graduated high school, 1998. I had a phenomenal English teacher who really shaped my writing, and I’m interested in what the journal was saying at that time. The other issue I chose was from 2000 with the thought of the new century perhaps informing people’s opinion, or instigating some change. The first article, from 1998, deals with “textual ownership in peer writing groups”. She starts with a history of authorship, which from the Classical age to Renaissance, authors were usually one of many who participated and published works. This suggests that composition is a social/group activity, at least during that time. Even today with the Internet, individual authorship lines are very blurry, and this notion of composition being social and group holds true. At the beginning of her study, Spiegelman found that some of the students she was working with in the writing groups expected to share and pool ideas for writing with one another, raise questions about each other’s writing, and help each other generate ideas for independent writing. However, even though they were working together in this group, each person saw their own individual “creative efforts” and claimed ownership over their own papers. One question she does raise is whether or not a text can be both “private and communal property”. I think this is a good question in relation to the “what is composition” question as well. I think, this article shows that composition can be both and a lot of the times it is, for example, Wikipedia has entries made by private individuals, but those individual entries make up the communal site. While that example is a little different than working in writing groups, the idea is the same – people working together socially to come up with a product. The second article, from 2000, deals with college writing remediation. There is a lot of controversy surrounding this topic – some wanting to do away with remediation courses and others not wanting to allow remedial students in classes. The author, Gleason, did a project to mainstream students from diverse backgrounds. She worked with students who scored low on their writing placement exam. The writing project was to take place as a class over the course of two semesters, and the entire program lasted for three years. Their student base was incredibly diverse including 50% bilingual students. In their course, they designed a curriculum that allowed students to be “self reflective about past literacy and language experiences through the writing of autobiographies” (pg. 563). They also encouraged teachers to design projects that would allow students to learn about language from a “sociolinguistic perspective by collecting samples of actual language and by examining and analyzing language” (pg. 563). From this basic description of the course, it seems that the authors here see composition as language used in social and personal settings – with the autobiography and the analysis of hands on language. Some of the projects that worked well and seemed to have an impact were a “literacy/language autobiography”, an “analysis of students’ own written and oral stories”, and an “ethnographic research report”. Their writing principle for this class is that “language consciousness underlies literacy development”. These writing assignments along with their principle suggests that their idea of composition is heavily reliant upon language, which makes sense, but that students have an understanding of the broader use and importance of language and how it affects societies and cultures, specifically, the students’ own cultures. This goes back to Dewey’s thoughts that good learning and writing take place when students can use their own experiences to drive their learning.
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