Teaching and Theory

What are the core movements in the history of composition (as summarized by Berlin and Fulkerson), and which elements of each can you relate to in your own teaching philosophy?

For me, I am a tangle of all these approaches. I have an intellectual theory (sort of like a philosophy) that totally favors New Rhetoric with its social epistemic beliefs in how language works and how we learn to write, but as I look at my own practice I find that these categories (formalist, expressivist, mimetic , rhetorical or classicist, current-traditional, expressivist, epistemic) are played out in my practice more as the exception that the rule. I can't say I have a practice that is purely one or the other--so, in the eyes of Knoblauch and Brannon, Fulkerson, and Berlin I am guilty of "modal confusion." For Fulkerson, I am guilty of "mindlessness" and must have "[failed] to have a consistent value theory or fail[ed] to let that philosophy shape [my] pedagogy" (554).

Perhaps some of this modal confusion comes from the mixed way I began teaching. I'll try to describe the three different classes I initially taught and their very different approaches. I began at Palo Alto College in 1989 with one section of Freshman Composition II taught at Kelly Air Force Base. It was Lit/Comp. We read Hamlet and poetry and short stories and The Great Gatsby. I sort of lectured and led class discussion and my students wrote critical analyses of the literature--that is, the "critical essay." This is formalist, current-traditional teaching of literature as I had been taught in college. Exigesis. The most important thing was to find sufficient evidence IN THE TEXT for your thesis. Perhaps this was a bit mimetic too (I don't find Fulkerson's distinctions between formalist and mimetic to be clear since often formalist teach in mimetic ways). The next semester I was hired as a full-time temporary instructor with six sections of English 1301 (I was talked into an overload). Searching for help in how to teach this class, I luckily stumbled into Ellen Shull who used portfolios and a writing workshop model for her class. I followed her practice as closely as I could. I also found Beat Not the Poor Desk which provided me with the essay assignments for how I taught 1301 for many years. It was almost in the purest form an expressivist classroom. The topics were personal in nature and the "text" students read was their own lives and the writings of their peers. We might read a novel or two, but these were complementary texts for inspiration and even as models. Students worked on their "writing skills" as they sought "to say what they truly meant to say" in as full and powerful a way as they could. It was great.

The next Fall, though, I for the first time was given a Developmental English class. And my text was John Langan's College Writing Skills. In the preface to the textbook, Langan recounts an incident that shapes his approach to writing. He had gotten a paper back from a college professor with a poor grade and it had some cryptic notes on it that said "log." He visited his professor and asked what this "log" means. The professor replied, "Logic my young man. Logic" (or something like that). His essay had flaws in logic. Since it was my first time teaching, I swallowed Langan's textbook whole and followed it closely. He has clear instructions and good models, so it was easy. It also rang true to what I had considered to be "the essay" from my college and graduate school experience. Thesis--Primary Supports--Secondary Supports--Details. Freshman Comp. II essays were the same things, but on steroids (that is, with more textual support).

So I began (and continued) my college teaching using different approaches or philosophies to teaching with different classes. Developmental Writing and Fresh Comp II very formalist and Fresh Comp I very expressivist. As I moved into teaching in the computer classroom, I became more enamored with "social constructivism" and the "negotiation of meaning" and have always in these environments facilitated the sharing of text. Every piece of writing (except journals) is public. My philosophical center of gravity moved more toward the social epistemic, and thanks to my belief in my own innovativeness by using computers and Knoblauch and Bannon's (I read their book in my second year of teaching and reread it a number of time) assertion of the philosophical and pedagogical superiority of epistemic beliefs, I saw myself as being better than some other teachers who might use other approaches (particularly formalist or current-traditional approaches). I was hypocritical, though, in this position.

I've come to see that these divisions and taxonomies are useful only to a point, and as I pointed out in my critique of Berlin, potentially damaging. I think it is truer to point out the ways in which these categories blend and mix that how they are different. I'll give one example: Let's say in my 1302 class I am having them write a researched argument on a contemporary issue (that you might find discussed in the show Justice Talking). We do a lot of drafting and peer response. We could say this is "expressivist" to an extent because the writer is searching for their "internal apprehension of truth" that is true for them--they are expressing their opinion. We do all this sharing of text and peer response, so it is epistemic in that their opinion is also socially negotiated and situated. Yet they are writing the essay as an academic argument/persuasion paper--a "critical essay" (see the link for my blueprint of this classic composition form). This essay form is very formalist and even current-traditional. But this doesn't follow the product-centered focus of c-t because we have developed this essay through a three draft process (which included invention activities and reflections). We might even add that a large challenge of the writer is the classical one of presenting their argument in a rhetorical way with a keen sense that they are not presenting absolute truths but approximations of truth within an uncertain situation. So we see how within this one assignment all four of Berlin's categories are mixed.

This same modal mixture can also happen between assignments. For instance, I typically have done my first assignment in English 1301 as a narrative (Ponsot and Dean's "Family Story"). Yet I follow that essay with the "Illustrative Essay" where they express a "truth" and illustrate it with stories. This second essay is highly rhetorical since I ask them to address an audience with a specific purpose in mind and I also ask them to use "essay form" (very formalist). All the while, I'm using what might be considered more expressivist approaches to the writing process with lots of drafting and peer response (I happen to be with Harris in saying the strict association of process pedagogy with expressivist practices is bunk).

So how useful are these categories afterall? Or better, how useful is it for us to attempt to be "pure" in our practice following one or the other of these models? Are these categories and dichotomies afterall more harmful than they are helpful--as Kay Halasek and Sherry Gradin ask?

These are some of the issues I dealt with in a paper I wrote last Fall ("Open Spaces: A Heuristic Toward a New Composition") and without belabouring the point I tend to agree with Halasek's alternative "architechtonics" of composition as performance and dialogue that occillates between what she calls "productivity" and "proficiency." I can't say, though, that my practice has reached this "New Composition" yet.