What Should Be Taught?

What exactly should be taught in composition, in your opinion, how should it be taught, and what should you do in order to know if what was taught was learned?

These are the central questions behind each class of Freshman Composition that I teach, and what I write here will only be a sketch. Up front, I want to voice my strong belief that Freshman Composition should have writing as its "subject"--not literature, not making students better people, not social consciousness. Pardoxically, if writing is only considered as a "subject" (i.e. some definable content of knowledge), a writing class becomes too narrow and prescriptive because writing is predominantly an activity or as Aristotle and other classical rhetoricians called a "faculty"--not just a subject.

I want to open with two curious quotes that get to the heart of this question--what do/can we teach?

"...the degree to which any kind of knowledge or any given skill in writing is generalizable--that is, transferable from one context to another--will always be problematic, in fact, that beyond a few general principles, there may be little we can say about how novices develop the broad knowledge and skills it takes to write" (Smit 133)

Lee Ann Kastman Bruech also says, "I suggest that there is no identifiable post-process theory pedagogy that we can concretely apply to the writing classrooms" (98), and later advises teachers to "let go the curriculum."

Each of these authors seems to throw up their hands and say writing is too complex, so it is unteachable. As composition scholars like James Moffett and Linda Flower have demonstrated, "literacy" involves a whole lot more than just grammatical or even formal proficiency. Linda Flower in her book The Construction of Negotiated Meaning: A Social Cognitive Theory of Writing charts out this more complex view of literacy (that others like Smit and Bruech say is unteachable). She labels three parts to this literacy: literacy as identity, literacy as practice, and literacy as negotiation. The first literacy involves membership within a Discourse community. She goes on to describe literacy as practice as literate action: "literate action is a socially situated problem-solving process shaped not only by available language, practices, partners, and texts, but by the ways people interpret the rhetorical situation they find themselves in, the goals they set, and the strategies they control" (2). This literate action, she says, can mean the conventions of discourse, but also that it centrally involves the "making of meaning": "Literate actions emerge out of a constructive cognitive process that transforms knowledge in purposeful ways. And at critical moments, this constructive literate act may also become a process of negotiation in which individual readers and writers must juggle conflicting demands and chart a path among alternative goals, constraints, and possibilities" (2). Smit calls this kind of literacy "rhetorical maturity," and I would say my biggest goal in Fresh Comp is to develop this expanded view of literacy, this rhetorical maturity (123). Coming out of my own experience in Freshman Composition and my own development as a writer, I am keenly aware that I cannot get all my students to a high level of literacy and writing skill in Fresh Comp. Instead, I can develop the awareness and ingrain some of the habits of writing that they can use in the future to found their continued development as writers.

What I find curious about some post-process scholars is that they basically throw up their hands and say writing is so situated, so complex, so founded upon interpretation, that it is unteachable. Hah! What is a writing teacher supposed to do with that? Expressivist teachers had this view, advocating the notion that writing can't be taught but it can be learned and the best way to learn to write is by writing. I definitely come from expressivist roots, and this argument against prescriptive, explicit instruction in "rules" of writing certainly agrees with me, yet their is much guidance and support that we can do as teachers and there are skills and strategies we can try to impart. I can't recall which reading from my Contemp Rhetoric class this came from(I.A Richards I think), but I recall a discussion about the trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric), and how you can see in the history of rhetoric how these three have been separated from each other. But this discussion talked about how these three interanimate and depend upon each other. I think I try to teach how all these three aspects of communication together (the technical features of the text used to communicate, the thinking behind what is said, and manner in which it is presented). It can be hard to do, especially if a student has problems in a particular area like comma splices.

Briefly, let me chart out the general trajectory of my composition class as I have done it (though I have not always done it this way).

I tend to follow Britton and Moffett's sequence of moving from narrative/descriptive writing to analytical writing. I start from students writing about their experience as the "text" to base their writing about to begin negotiating their interior views with the world (writing, then, founded upon exterior "texts"). Start IN; then move OUT and back IN. Fresh Comp I is a gradual movement from this interior to exterior. Along the way, I try to inculcate the ability to include specific illustrations or examples for general statements whether this be in descriptive writing or using stories to exemplify some idea. Later in Fresh Comp II, this principle of elaboration (or support or making specific) is the skill of using support from the text. I also begin in Fresh Comp I to teach them researching. If Fresh Comp I (for me) is about a writer gaining more control and proficiency with negotiating their own language (without too much interference from the outside as in excessive readings), Fresh Comp II is where I have students work more diligently with handling outside sources and views in their own writing. I attempt to push my students off center in their thinking by working on topics that have no clear cut answer (that is, move them beyond the stage of dualistic thinking stated by Perry). How will they form their belief with the understanding that it is not THE answer, but AN answer (that is hopefully well reasoned and well founded).

I'm more and more questioning my learning sequence in Fresh Comp, but it seems to have a logical movement that matches well with where Freshman are in their development. The problem with the sequence is that it serves academic writing predominantly, especially Fresh Comp II. I have become more and more enchanted with teaching rhetorical proficiency--not just academic writing proficiency. Those things are not necessarily the same thing. I'm wondering now if there may be a sequence in that academic proficiency is a necessary stepping stone to more higher level rhetorical proficiency. I don't know.

I think my video on Porfolios is a pretty good description of how I teach writing--at least in Freshman Comp I.