Lloyd-Jones, Who We Were, Who We Should Become

Lloyd-Jones, Richard. “Who We Were, Who We Should Become.” College Composition and Communication 43.4 (Dec 1992): 486-496.

Lloyd-Jones discusses the tensions in the field’s identity and how the field is implicated in current problems in higher education, and emphasizes that those in composition need to take more leadership in their institutions and insist on better treatment of its teachers, expand connections with K-12 schools through NCTE and the Writing Project, expand its research, and avoid over-specialization. He warns that the increased dependence on contingent faculty is a huge problem for both the field and higher education, as the labor structure has used band-aid solutions to account for a massive change in student population and the purpose of college education in the 20th century. He uses the history of CCCC and a survey in the contents of CCC to explain the 20th century history of the field, how those in the discipline progressed from problem-solving teachers and administrators to beginning to study and theorize language and writing, moving into the academic culture and expectations of the academy. The shifting profile of American college students from post-WWII (the veteran) to the 1960s and 1970s (huge increase in community college students as the high school degree was no longer enough to get a job) constantly challenged the theories and ideas of those in the field, pushing the field to be more progressive, more ethically, socially, and practically oriented than other traditional departments like literature.

Notes and Quotes

College enrollments doubled in 1946 (GI Bill). The first CCCC in 1948 was a practical matter, English college professors and administrators trying to deal with the practical problems of the huge influx of students – placing them, teaching them, assessing them.

The discipline has just as much to do with national, international politics, economics, and demographics as it does with the creation and production of theory. Our focus on social justice and ethics in concern of our students naturally leads to a concern for our teachers (me)

The rapidly growing two-year colleges turned to cheap adjunct labor to teach composition.

The teaching of composition is a profit-generating enterprise. Why don’t we argue this point to increase working conditions for the teachers of writing?

The two-tiered college system, with tenured managers and untenured workers, “offer dark images for the future” (491). “I worry that we may ease toward a situation in composiiton where most of the people who do the actual teaching are disenfranchised. Or worse, a situation in which decisions are given over to people who have relatively little training in an extremely complex field” (491).

“I am not calling to separate composition from English; that question is passe…Literature is a form of rhetoric” (493).

Gilmore, Plagiarism

Gilmore, Barry. Plagiarism: Why It Happens, How to Prevent It. Portsmouth, Heinemann, 2008.

Gilmore, a high school English and social studies teacher writing to other high school and middle school teachers, argues that plagiarism is best prevented by turning to education and prevention: teaching students how to avoid plagiarism and changing school culture to dissuade students from plagiarizing. His book contains many “Top 10″ charts for teachers to turn to, such as a top 10 signs a student text is plagiarized, reasons why students plagiarize, and reasons why teachers don’t address plagiarism. Gimore argues that the tools teachers need to teach students in order to prevent plagiarism from happening include teaching them how and why to cite, how to take notes, and how to search on the internet. He does not advocate making every assignment a highly personal “plagiarism-proof assignment,” arguing that those types of assignments don’t always address a teacher’s pedagogical goals. Instead, he suggests spending a large amount of time on the writing process. He also believes that schools should model behavior that prevents plagiarism: having known, followed honor codes, encouraging intellectual risk taking and revision, and expecting good things out fo boys, athletes, and traditionally underachiveing students.

Quotable Quotes

“The culture of learning…is the key to combating plagiarism, whether it happens as a mistake or a crime” (138).

“What you can do to prevent plagiarism is teach the right skills, design the right assignments, and create the right atmosphere. Neglect these areas, and you resign yourself to either ignoring plagiarism or to spending your time angrily rooting out and punishing offenders” (74).

“Once a teacher is reduced to the role of source dectector, he has already lost an educational battle” (5).

Notable Notes

don’t focus on catching students and criminalizing them – but not addressing what’s really the problem with researched assignments – the work involved in using sources

Dewey, Democracy and Education

Dewey, John. Democracy and Education. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1961.

In this book, originally published in 1915, Dewey forwards his philosophy of education in a democratic society. Dewey, known as a pragmatist, believes that the purpose of education is growth, and that growth happens as a child interacts with a social environment and continuously reconstructs his or her knowledge through purposeful activities and experiences. He dismisses the binary between the pursuit of pure knowledge and vocational education, arguing that vocations and occupations do not limit a child but rather give them a direction, and organizing principle through which to experience education. Education forms fundamental intellectual and emotional dispositions, which are learned through the social community of school, but no one state should enforce a standard disposition – the strength of democratic societies is intellectual freedom and individual choice. Dewey believes that education within the school should reflect the experiences and learning that takes place outside of school.

Quotable Quotes

“Learning is the accompaniment of continuous activities or occupations which have a social aim and utilize the materials of typical social situations” (360). – continuous readjustment and growth

education = “the continuous reconstruction of experience” (80) and “that reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience” (76).

Notable Notes

classroom as a social learning community

connection to norms (Green)…acquisition of habits (Newman)

Royster and Williams, History in the Spaces Left

Royster, Jacqueline Jones and Jean C. Williams. “History in the Spaces Left: African American Presence and Narratives of Composition Studies.” CCC 50:4 (June 1999) 563-584.

Any history that is written has important political consequences. Royster and Williams argue that African American contributions to the history of composition and rhetoric, beginning in the 19th century, have been largely ignored by the dominant historical narratives written in the field, which has resulted in a continued representation of African Americans as a marginalized Other, characterized by Open Admissions and basic writing. The research base for understanding the history of the field needs to be broadened, and Royster and Williams showcase this by presenting three cases of African Americans – Alain Locke, Hallie Quinn Brown, and Hugh M. Gloster – who contributed to the theory and practice of rhetoric and composition in the 19th and early 20th century. Royster and Williams also briefly trace the history of African American higher education, highlighting the importance of HBCUs in educating African Americans before the Open Admissions push of the 1960s.

Quotable Quotes

Questions to ask to recover marginalized histories: “For whom is this claim true? For whom is it not true? What else is happening? What are the operating conditions?” (581)

effect of dominant histories: “the other viewpoints are inevitably positioned in non-universal space and peripheralized, and the exclusion of suppressed groups, whether they intend it or not, is silently, systematically reaffirmed.” (565)

Notable Notes

resist primacy

conflation of basic writers with students of color

Morrill Act, HBCUs

students in histories are seen as generic, apolitical, without race or gender or sexuality

review of many of the histories of the field

Enoch, Refiguring Rhetorical Education

Enoch, Jessica. Refiguring Rhetorical Education: Women Teaching African American, Native American, and Chicano/a Students, 1865-1911. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2008.

Enoch offers an alternative understanding to what rhetorical education is and is for through her analysis of the pedagogical and rhetorical practices of white and minority women teachers teaching marginalized American students from 1865-1911. Her case studies include Lydia Maria Child, who wrote The Freedman’s Book, a post-Civil War textbook for freed slaves, a book that offered freed slaves multiple perspectives and rhetorical models from black and white authors; Zitkala-Sa, a Sioux teacher who wrote autobiographical essays in the Atlantic Monthly that questioned the aims of Indian education; and Jovita Idar, Marta Pena, and Leonor Villegas de Magnon, three Chicana teachers in Laredo, Texas, who wrote articles in the Spanish-language newspaper La Cronica that argued for bicultural rhetorical education that places Anglican and Mexican heritages in conversation with each other, into a new kind of cultural citizenship. Enoch’s purpose is to complicate the field’s understandings of what rhetorical education meant in the late 19th-early 20th century (the field relies on accounts of what was happening in American universities) and where that education was taking place. Enoch elevates the female teacher from a passive transmitter of the dominant culture to a potential advocate, shaping pedagogies and rhetorical strategies to better teach and empower her students. Enoch also points out that rhetorical education does not have to be about full participation and engagement in the dominant political and cultural sphere: rather, it can be quieter and more personal, forming communal and civic identites and teaching rhetorical strategies that marginalized members of society can use to begin to disrupt the dominant hegemonic space.

Quotable Quotes

Enoch invites other scholars at the end of the book to find other historical and contemporary sites of rhetorical education by asking questions like “How have people learned to participate in civic, communal, and cultural discussions? How have teachers and students responded to models and skills for participation designated for them? How have they invented different strategies for participation? WHat did these strategies (dis)enable?” (173).

“A rhetorical education aimed at change and disruption rather than acceptance and submission” (32) – Lydia Maria Child’s work

rhetorical education = “any educational program that develops in students a communal and civic identity and articulates for them the rhetorical strategies, language practices, and bodily and social behaviors that make possible their participation in communal and civic affairs” (7-8)

Notable Notes

calls for first-year, rhet/comp to go back to rhetorical education principles – a rhetorical education that is always cultural and political, situated, personal and cultural as well as civic and public, a range of behaviors, skills, and practices

draws on rhet/comp scholarship in African-American, Native America, Chicano/a rhetorical practices and pedagogies; critical pedagogy; history of composition and rhetoric

Green, Voices

Green, Thomas F. Voices: The Educational Formation of Conscience. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1999.

Green explains his philosophy of moral education, which is investigating how people acquire the norms and values that govern their individual conduct. His book does not forward a particular set of norms; rather, he is interested in the idea of how conscience – the “reflexive judgment about things that matter” (21) – is developed by acquiring norms from five different realms, or voices, of conscience: craft, membership, sacrifice, memory, and imagination. His purpose is to reveal the processes that are already occuring in education so that educators might be better educators. The formation of a public citizen (as a form of public office) is one of Green’s chief concerns; he applies his theory of moral education to it, claiming that education forms the norms of citizens who will be active in the democratic processes. Norms are not learned or recited like rules; rather, they are a way of being – an critical stance, perspective, and attitude.

Quotable Quotes

“Education is a weak instrument with which to undertake the moral reformation of the world” (1) – connection to Newman

“To refrain from comment or decline to offer any guidance that some choices are more worthy and some more foolish, and to do out of respect for such a liberty [choice], is to abdicate a large chunk of educational responsibility” (7).

Notable Notes

norms are learned in context, social situations, activities

health of commons lies in strong sectarian education – Dewey influences

Cooper and Odell, Research on Composing

Cooper, Charles R. and Lee Odell. Research on Composing: Points of Departure. Urbana: NCTE, 1978.

This collection, from the 1975 Buffalo Conference on Researching Composing, wants to expand the nature and scope of research on the writing process. The editors argue that to do so, scholars in composition need to question their basic assumptions about how writing happens and be open to changing and revising their theories. Writing researchers, they argue, need to look at writers, not written products of published writers, for models of composing, and should look beyond English for answers to research questions – to rhetorical theory, developmental and cognitive psychology, education, and discourse theory. The essays – including those written by Britton, Young, Emig, and Murray – are therefore speculative and broad in scope, trying out new theories and ideas to open the door for further research and questioning in the composing process.

Quotable Quotes

purpose: “redirecting and revitalizing research in written composition” (xiii)

Notable Notes

value of teacher-research

Newman, The Idea of a University

Newman, John Henry. The Idea of a University. New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1947.

First published in 1873, this is the collection of lectures and addresses Newman gave to an Irish Catholic audience in the early 1850s, when he was commissioned to argue for the establishment of an Irish Catholic university in Dublin, a modern, secular university that included theology as a course of study but not a universal frame of study, a university that would provide a Oxford- or Cambridge-level education. His campaign failed, but his articulation of an educational mission – one that would educate the entire person in a liberal tradition – has influenced educational thought since. Full, holistic, liberal education cultivates a habit of mind that lasts a lifetime, with the acquisition of knowledge, not professional training, as the ultimate end. The university’s mission, according to Newman, was not the creation of knowledge, but the dissemination and teaching of it.

Quotable Quotes

liberal education will cultivate a habit of mind with attributes of “freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom” (90).

“A University is, according to the usual designation, an Alma Mater, knowing her children one by one, not a foundry, or a mint, or a treadmill” (128).

“If a practical end must be assigned to a University course, I say it is that of training good members of society. Its art is the art of social life, and its end is fitness for the world. It neither confines its views to particular professions on the one hand, nor creates heroes or inspires genius on the other. Works indeed of genius fall under no art; heroic minds come under no rule; a University is not a birthplace of poets or of immortal authors, of founders of schools, leaders of colonies, or conquerors of nations. It does not promise a generation of Aristotles or Newtons, of Napoleons or Washingtons, of Raphaels or Shakespeares, though such miracles of nature it has before now constrained within its precincts. Nor it is content on the other hand with forming the critic or the experimentalist, the economist or the engineer, though such too it includes within its scope. But a University training is the great ordinary means to a great but ordinary end…It is the education which gives a man a clear conscious view of his own opinions and judgments, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them. It teaches him to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought, to detect what is sophistical, and to discard what is irrelevant” (157)

Notable Notes

the importance of educated laity

connections to Freire, Shor, process

Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramus. New York: Herder and Herder, 1970.

Freire believes that only through liberatory education can the poor and oppressed begin to understand and reflect upon their social position and then take action towards permanent liberation and the restructuring of society. He distinguishes between the antidialogic banking model of education, whose passive, narrative education with content alien to students’ context mirrors oppressive society, and dialogic liberatory pedagogy, an active, praxis-oriented pedagogy that treats students and teachers as joint partners in critically investigating generative themes and problems in society. Dialogic liberatory pedagogy is subjective and humanist, founded in commitment to others through love, humility, faith, and hope.

Quotable Quotes

methodology of liberatory pedagogy: conscientizacao – “learning to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality” (19).

pedagogy of the oppressed – “makes oppression and its causes objects of reflection by the oppressed, and from that reflection will come their necessary engagement in the struggle for their liberation” (33).

“To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it” (76).

“Education as the practice of freedom – as opposed to education as the practice of domination – denies that man is abstract, isolated, independent, and unattached to the world; it also denies that the world exists as a reality apart from men” (69).

Notable Notes

don’t forget the context – 1960s, poor Catholic peasants in Brazil

even with the dialogical model, leadership is necessary and important – connection to administration (167).

Bourdieu, The Forms of Capital

Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Forms of Capital.” Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. Ed. John G. Richardson. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986. 241-258.

Society’s structures and unequal power distribution are systematically maintained and reproduced through educational institutions, which confer degrees and distinctions on members of the dominant class. This granting of what seems to be merit-based achievement actually authorizes the dominant class to maintain power. An educational degree is a form of cultural capital, and those who achieve it only could because of the cultural capital they had from birth, which gave them the opportunity to delay entrance into the workforce and continue their education. In this essay, Bourdieu shows the importance of cultural and social capital to maintaining power structure and explains the difference betweeen economic, cultural, and social capital, showing that the latter two, though less obvious, are how power is transferred and transmitted into economic capital.

Quotable Quotes

“the cultural capital academically sanctioned by legally guaranteed qualifications” – institutionalized cultural capital, education

“the transmission of cultural capital is no doubt the best hidden form of hereditary transmission of capital”

“it is what makes the games of society – not least, the economic game – something other than simple games of chance offering at every moment the possibility of a miracle.”

Notable Notes

social capital – the multiplier effect

3 forms of cultural capital: embodied (knowledge, values, cultivation from birth); objectified (books, paintings, machines, instruments); institutionalized (schools, degrees, education) It’s not transferrable

social capital – the group membership nad networks you get through family, school, social classes. These take time and effort to maintain. The group can choose to exclude or excommunicate members who don’t tow the line