1/21/10 Reading Blog

With at least three of the assigned articles for this week (Brereton’s, Hill’s, and Nystrand, Green and Wiemelt’s), we get a good overview of the development of the field of Composition Studies and how that field came to be differentiated from the discipline of English proper. Brereton informs us that Composition Studies as we know it today is the product of the rapid development or creation of the university system that developed in America at the end of the 19th century; a thing that happened within the space of a single generation. Significantly, the new American universities were modeled after German examples which included lectures, wide-ranging inquiry, specialization, and exploitation of the link between teaching and research. American universities grew during this time because of changes in ideas about what constituted knowledge from recitation of what was known to creation of new knowledge, as well as a huge increase in the sheer numbers of students attending universities. It was particularly interesting to me to discover that, in response to the explosion of the university system in America that the first composition program here was developed at Harvard as an attempt to “raise writing and English literature to the level of more hallowed studies like mathematics and classics” (9). Indeed, English “was to be the modern up-to-date equivalent of the ancient subjects, a preparation for citizenship and productive work in the modern American democracy” (9). The last quote in particular makes me wonder, especially when I consider my experiences teaching composition here at UNLV in the first decade of the 21st century. Do we, with the assignments our students are required to produce in our composition sequence (which include narrative essay, definition, evaluation, problem/solution, and a researched argument), teach our students how to be effective and/or productive citizens of the United States? Or are we teaching them how to write in an artificially academic manner that they will never be able to use in the real world? Two other items struck me in reading Brereton’s article and, as short while later, Hill’s reprinted article from 1879, that I would like to mention in this blog: 1) that composition, or more simply, writing in the university environment (and in particular at Harvard) was linked from the get-go to literature, and 2) that—as we learn from Hill—as composition studies were emerging in the late 19th century at Harvard (of all colleges), the field did so because the complaint was the both entering and graduating students could not write. As regards the latter point, it was something of a vindication to read/discover that even at Harvard 120-130 years ago, it was thought that the elite students of the US were no or little better at writing than people complain UNLV students are in the 21st century. At the same time, it seems rather frightening to come up against the notion that things have not changed that much in all of that time as far as teaching students how to be competent writers no matter the writing task(s) they encounter in their lives.

In the context of the history of Composition Studies, I think it is important to note that Nystrand, Green, and Wiemelt’s article—in contrast to Brereton’s (and, to a lesser extent, Hill’s)—limits the history of the field to developments that took place in the last 40 years (30 years according to the publication date of their article) and, mostly, in the US. These scholars point to the “literacy crisis” of the 1970s that was engendered by open-admissions policies on the CUNY campuses which opened the college/university experience to huge numbers of students who were not, technically, ready to do college/university level work, at least in writing. This crisis, led to reflexivity (or, perhaps I should say self-reflexivity) on the part of instructors/teachers/professors of writing designed to figure out why in the world Johnny could not read. It is interesting, now that I think about it a bit further in this blog response, as Brereton and Hill point out in their respective ways, that Composition Studies emerged at Harvard because of a similar crisis, students could not write (or the perception was that they could not write) and, the presumption at Harvard was, these students needed more instruction in writing. I realize that studies like that of Nystrand, Green, and Wiemelt’s, as comprehensive as it is, needed to focus on a limited period, but I guess I would have liked to see them acknowledge that the history of the discipline goes back further than they seem to allow and that the problems identified at both time periods (the 1970s in the US and the late 1800s in the US) as far as students’ inability to write are similar historically across that time. Even so, Nystrand, Green, and Wiemelt’s article does highlight things that have become important in Composition Studies since the 1970s that I have seen and dealt with in my own composition classes. For example, the whole idea that meaning is created socially, which is tied to the idea that writing does not occur in a vacuum; that writers and readers are necessary parts of the meaning-creation equation or sequence. In teaching composition myself here at UNLV, I tried to stress to my students that I, as their professor, am not the only audience, or the only possible audience of their individual and collective writing. But, outside of pointing that out to them as often as I could, I did not ever have the chance, or perhaps I should say I have not yet figured out, how to make the idea that professor-as-the-only-one-who is-ever-going-to-read-our-essays go away, or to make it concrete that other audiences to exist. Peer reviewing was one way this problem was addressed, but I never felt like my students got as involved and/or excited about peer reviewing as I would have liked. Perhaps, with all of the technology that is available to students and professors alike today, the whole idea of audience and writing being a profoundly social activity can be dealt with more effectively and, realistically, by using blogs like this in the undergraduate classroom, or message boards, or other media. This is why I liked Yancey’s article as much as I did, because it seems far more in touch with what is really going on in the world of the 21st century. For example, she writes that today, writers “self-organize into what seem to be overlapping technologically driven writing circles, what we might call a series of newly imagined communities, communities that cross borders of all kinds . . . Composers gather in Internet chat rooms; they participate on listservs dedicated to both the ridiculous and the sublime; they mobilize for health concerns, for political causes, for research, and for travel advice” (301). And all of the writing these endeavors call for is being done outside of the realm of the classroom, a point I find extraordinary. How can we harness the power of that kind of writing and transform it into learning opportunities for our students? Having taken Dr. Staggers’s course on Visual Rhetoric last semester, Yancey’s emphasis on writing—expansively meant and inclusive of all kinds of media known to us now and still to come—to be exciting and spot on. My main project in that class involved a visual/rhetorical study of one of my favorite film adaptations: director Michael Hoffman’s William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1999). This was a project that I had an absolute ball incorporating still pictures from the film into in order to make my argument and its individual points as clearly and as forcefully as possible. I would like to be able to teach my students how to do the same thing. At the same time, with this project, I knew I was still “writing” something primarily for a medium that was going to be read rather than experienced—if I can term it that way. In a more “visual” type of essay, or perhaps a more electronic version of the same essay, I might have included hyperlinks to film reviews, to Shakespeare’s original text, and so forth. And learning how to do that, I suspect, will be just as challenging as writing a strictly prose-filled argumentative essay. This is one of the ways that, I think, we can start to challenge—as Phelps encouraged us to do with her article from 20 years or so back—the domain or the parameters that encase Composition Studies so that those studies will take us even further into the future; an project that would extend the ongoing research in Composition Studies Juzwick, et al detail in “Writing Into the 21st Century.”