Dobrin, Introduction: Finding Space for the Composition Practicum

Dobrin, Sidney. “Introduction: Finding Space for the Composition Practicum.” In Don’t Call It That: The Composition Practicum. Ed. Dobrin. Urbana: NCTE, 2005. 1-34.

This introduction sets out the scope of the author’s edited collection, which explores the debates surrounding the graduate (sometimes undergraduate) composition practicum: the place of theory in the course, its curriculum, its aims, its ramifications for institutional politics, and its place in disciplinary research, scholarship, and identity.

Dobrin claims that the composition practicum is not merely about training teachers to teach composition or professionalizing those teachers; rather, what the composition practicum course does is enculturate those students “into the cultural ideologies of composition.” This fact, Dobrin claims, makes “the practicum one of the most powerful and important spaces of occupation in composition studies.” (21). He argues that composition studies should be more aware of the power the practicum has on the field as a whole.

Dobrin argues that the debates about the composition practicum are political in nature and centered on the perpetual divide and debate of theory/practice, and therefore the questions raised by the composition practicum are shared with the questions inherent in composition studies and writing program administration scholarship. Dobrin argues that the composition practicum is a particularly important site for the field to study, as it is where the identity of the discipline is often defined for the next generation of scholars; thus, the composition practicum is where the field’s “cultural capital” is created and perpetuated.

Dobrin surveys the history of the composition practicum at American universities since the turn of the 20th century, noting that not much has changed in regards to the incorporation of both theory and practice in the course and the political arguments that surround the course.

Quotes

“The practicum functions as a primary purveyor of composition’s cultural capital.” (6)

“Let’s face it, as a device through which ideologies are reinforced and programmatic cultures are created and maintained, the practicum course is a powerful tool not only for guiding the ways new teachers learn to think about their teaching, but also for controlling how and in what ways the very discipline of composition studies is perpetuated. The cultural capital of composition studies is maintained and immortalized by way of the practicum.” (4)

“Practica give shape and formula to the identity of programs. This notion of program identity is important because it carries cultural capital through to first-year students and what it means “to write.”” (26)

Notes

focuses on the graduate (TA) composition practicum course, which is often more than day-to-day advice and “how-to” practical help, serving instead as an introduction to composition theories and histories

central issue: legitimization (is the practicum course rigorous enough? Is practice critical enough? should the practicum course be given for credit?)

a challenge of the course: it is often the only course graduate student take in composition theory, history, or practice. It has a lot of ground to cover.

Some problems Dobrin addresses:

Much of the literature about teacher preparation and the practicum is grounded in the local – both because, perhaps, there is little other context, and also because the theory of what we do is so grounded in the relationships and experiences we have – it is practical (30)

1. the composition practicum is seen as an introduction to the field, but the field is not all about teaching and also not all about FYC (22)

2. requiring all English grad students to take a practicum reinforces the subordinate position of composition (as something students must do and be “trained” to do instead of what they want to do) (22)

3. A WPA’s approach in her program can often be traced back to the single composition practicum course that she took as a graduate student (27) – exponential influence

4. confusion of teacher/student identity: are those in the practicum teachers or students?

3. the composition practicum is an argument, forwarding a particular vision of professionalization and the field (through theories, methods, vocabulary) and is also a mechanism for “policing,” control and enculturation (24-25)

Guerra/Bawarshi’s essay in this collection looks at shifts between different WPAs in the same program: “cult of personality”

Anson and Jewell, Shadows of the Mountain

Anson, Chris M. and Richard Jewell. “Shadows of the Mountain.” In Moving a Mountain. Eds. Stock and Schell. Urbana: NCTE, 2000. 47-75.

The authors, recognizing the complexity of the contingent labor issue in composition teaching, give their own labor narratives in their work of composition and then comment on each other’s stories, representing both the attention to individual voices and necessary dialogue that they believe must occur when trying to solve some of the deep labor problems in higher ed teaching. Though Anson argues that most of the reform must start small and locally, he points out that many of these grass-roots changes can too easily be squashed by more powerful forces in higher university administration, and he contends that labor reform in composition and higher education can only succeed through visible, national-level lobbying through major national organizations using tactics like censure.

Notes and Quotes

Argue that this issue must be approached with attention to individual stories, voices, histories. It can only be solved or approached in a spirit of dialogue, which they try to represent in this piece.

Jewell: professional development, conference attendance for part-timers without support is often limited to where you can go round-trip in one day.

It’s not just low pay that is the problem – it is no job security, no tenure, no intellectual freedom to design courses, no power or say in a department

Even people in the same department – tenured, part-time, etc – don’t know each other and don’t know what each other would want in a revised labor structure.

Anson initially opposed hiring full-time adjuncts, wanted to rely on TAs and a few part-timers.

“Work, any work, was better than nothing. Shut doors represented a more chilling fear than even the lousiest of teaching jobs” (66). Social Darwinism mentality.

“But more subtle inequities can be found in dozens of college and university literacy programs across the country – inequities of course assignments, scheduling, and sensitivity to personal situations; inequities of representation in decisions about class size or workload; pay inequities between people doing the same jobs with the same expectations; inequities in access to equipment, phones, office space, lounges, computer labs, and libraries; inequities in performance assessment; inequities in the advanced scheduling of course assignments; and inequities in curricular and pedagogical freedom. Any employer – in a warehouse, a manufacturing firm, a country club, or a composition program – has a responsibility to treat employees fairly and equally” (68).

“Good writing programs not only treat all their employees with fairness and respect but also create a climate in which people of all ranks and employmenet categories work together in a spirit of cooperation and collaboration, sensitive to each other’s needs and working for each other’s good, for the good of the program, and for the good of the students it serves” (71).

How do you treat those with the least amount of power – the untenured?

Howard, Power Revisited

Howard, Rebecca Moore. “Power Revisited; Or, How We Became a Department.” WPA: Writing Program Administration 16.3 (Spring 1993): 37-49. Print.

Howard explains that to create change at an institution, the agent of change must have power, and those who want change must propose the change as if they were equals to those they are proposing to (even if they are not equals.) She positions her non-adversarial approach to gaining power opposite Ed White’s more miltaristic view (in “Use It or Lose It”), characterizing the Colgate University Department of Interdisciplinary Writing as one that runs and teaches through collective, democratic power. She argues that this approach is a way for composition as a field to gain institutionally-changing power. She offers other WPAs advice for creating and cultivating power for their writing programs and departments based on her experience of creating the stand-alone department of writing at Colgate through the mid-1980s to early 1990s.

Notes and Quotes

Advice: 1. don’t rely only on written communications: talk to people face-to-face. 2. always write up and send follow-ups after meetings 3. write down what you do each day as an administratror 4. know that you must “hound” people (nicely) to do tasks for you 5. make sure your program is known for its scholarly work as well as its adminsitartive work on campus 6. get an external review of your program done

opportunism = method; collectivism = mode (46)

building political capital for things you want by doing things for others

everything is done by a vote, together, collaborative development and administration even in the midst of a hierarchal university structure.

department is made entirely of women.

Hjortshoj, The Marginality of the Left-Hand Castes

Hjortshoj, Keith. “The Marginality of the Left-Hand Castes (A Parable for Writing Teachers).” College Composition and Communication 46.4 (December 1995): 491-505. Print.

Hjortshoj, the director of the stand-alone Cornell Writing Program, uses an allegory of the left-hand castes in Indian society, the artisans and smiths whose services were necessary but who were shunned by the others, to explain how compositionists could define what they have in common with each other across institutional and hierarchal lines. He notes that teaching writing is seen as messy, dirty work (not unlike custodial work) because it is: it is unpredictable, it is often difficult, and it happens invisibly the margins. Many academics, he contends, do not want to pull open the veil and reveal to others the difficulties they face as writers, the same problems that students struggle with. He argues that writing teachers and compositionists should strive to form programs or move to programs (as opposed to traditional departments) that value the kind of work that they do.

Notes and Quotes

“At research universities, especially, marginalized teachers (including teaching assistants) are most directly engaged with the interactive, exploratory, “hands-on,” transformative learning processes that university brochures advertise as the foundations of the undergraduate experience. By contrast, official ranking systems in these institutions, from undergraduate grading schemes to tenure reviews, privilege what is already known and already written, along with theory over practice, products over processes, individual achievements over col-laborative endeavors: being over becoming.” (503)

“paradoxal, unstable interdependence” (497).

written communication is fundamental to all academic discourse.

“What we teach, therefore, is fundamentally powerful and important, even if we are not. Within our institutions, writing teachers and their courses might be subordinated to all other kinds of instruction, but written language is not subordinate to anything.” (499)

“Like fire, language is essential, transformative, and potentially destructive. Most of the people I know, especially in academic institutions, are to some extent afraid of writing-daunted by the challenge of controlling language for their own purposes, and afraid that they might be controlled by language for the purposes of others. Writing teachers do not really control language. But the idea that we can or should control language makes us objects of fear or discomfort by association. Keeping us in our place-in a marginal, parenthetical relation to the rest of academic life-is a way of keeping the potentially disruptive power of language contained and disguised, though not altogether denied.” (501).

 He points out that the discoruse surrouding composition – that teachers of writing value their work but believe they are marginalized at the institution – comes into conflict with the fact that some compositionists are not in marginalized positions (deans, chairs, directors) and that a university-wide writing program is almost universally seen as a necessary and valuable enterprise in all US colleges and universities.

Anson, Who Wants Composition

Anson, Chris. “Who Wants Composition: Reflections on the Rise and Fall of an Independent Program.” In A Field of Dreams: Independent Writing Programs and the Future of Composition Studies. Ed. Peggy O’Neill, Angela Crow, and Larry W. Burton. Logan: Utah State UP, 2002. 153-169. Print.

Anson describes the history of the stand-alone Program in Composition and Communication at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, which was created in the early 1980s, and explains how, because of struggles and moves for power and money within the English Department and university structure, that program was suddenly re-absorbed by the English Department in the summer of 1996 (who then removed Anson from the director’s position.) The Program had no major and had no tenure lines; the faculty and director of the Program had tenure lines in other departments. Anson argues that the implementation of a Responsibility Center Management (RCM) budget system at the university gave the English Department incentive to take back the Program in Composition because the Program’s large number of student tuition dollars and low teaching costs gave them a favorable budget, while the English Department’s low number of students and high teaching costs put them in a precarious situation.

Notes and Quotes

A WPA’s job can no longer be seen as “a hobby, to be set aside whenever the stacks of nineteenth-century literary criticism or the latest PMLA beckon. Composition is embracing new, burgeoning areas strongly connected to learning and literacy: innovations in technology, service learning, and multifaceted forms of assessment; advances in faculty development, such as reflective practice and the scholarship of teaching; analyses of increasingly diverse writing communities; college/high school articulation. To be a WPA means to be passionate and devote time to these connected areas” (166-167).

“In spite of the politics nad hierarchies in which we work as administrators of writing programs, it is the human moments, the connections we make and the lives we touch and improve, the ways we live and work in and through our places in higher education, that really matter.” People, not programs (168).

Knoblauch and Brannon, Critical Teaching and the Idea of Literacy

Knoblauch, C.H. and Lil Brannon. Critical Teaching and the Idea of Literacy. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook, 1993.

Knoblauch and Brannon use stories of critical literacy debates and teaching to illustrate what critical teaching of literacy at the high school and college level entails. The aim of critical teaching is transformation, of teaching students to be self-reflexive about the relationship between language and power, and of foregrounding the politics of representation: how things are named; who names them; the ignored alternatives; and the consequences of the naming act. Critical literacy draws on the theories of postmodernism, feminism, and Marxism and is interested in conscious rasing, in seeing education as part of the larger sociopolitcal world. They argue for critical teachers to unite together and to expand knowledge about the teaching of critical literarcy through a validation of teacher knowledge, inquiry, and research.

Quotable Quotes

“Critical teaching is about the willingness of people to inquire and change and make changes, to accomodate themselves to difference, to read the social world, in its complexity” (49)

Critical teaching “recongizes the political nature of education” (49).

Notable Notes

four different ways literacy is valued over time:

1. functional literacy
2. cultural literacy
3. literacy for personal growth (expressivism)
4. critical literacy (empowerment and social change)

critical education legitimizes differences in a community, is tolerant of cultural pluralism, rejects the melting pot, characterized by dialogue and negotiation, puts students as critics, not passive consumers

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

Pratt, Arts of the Contact Zone

Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” In Ways of Reading. 5th ed. Eds. Bartholomae and Petroksky. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999.

This essay, originally published in 1991, problematizes the notion of the homogenous, coherent, utopian, and limited community (especially as imagined in and of the classroom) by introducing the idea of the contact zone, the places where cultures meet and engage. Pratt explains what she terms as the literate arts of the contact zone – things like authethnography, transculturation, critique, collaboration, bilingualism, parody, and vernacular expression – which are ways people throughout history have used language to express the clash of cultures to both a dominant and an oppressed culture. Pratt calls for the creation of “pedagogical arts of the contact zone,” strategies and techniques teachers can use to teach about diversity, culture, and power,  and how writing and literacy play a part in creating communities and contact zones.

Quotable Quotes

Contact zones: “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today”

Autoethnographic text: “text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them.”

Notable Notes

uses the autoethnographic text written by Andean Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala in 1613 (not widely circulated or taken up til the 1970s) to King Philip II of Spain, written and illustrated, both Spanish and Quechua languages

her course – Cultures, Ideas, Values – that took up the concept of the contact zone. Lectures were impossible, everyone had a stake, a different viewpoint: “No one eas excluded, and no one was safe”

Trimbur, Composition and the Circulation of Writing

Trimbur, John. “Composition and the Circulation of Writing.” CCC (Dec 2000) 188-219.

Trimbur argues that compositionists need to focus on and teach about the materiality of production, delivery, and circulation. Without an understanding of how writing circulates, composition courses and their students stay isolated from society, either in a strange father-child in loco parentis relationship with their teacher or investigating cultural artifacts in a cultural studies classroom, but remaining a reader, reporter, and consumer of culture rather than a producer or active participant. Trimbur uses Marx’s Grundrisse to explain Marx’s term circulation (which Trimbur uses interchangably with rhetorical canon of delivery after he explains the terms), which understands the circulation as a dialectic hierarchal power move, a deliberate distribution of knowledge and information, a relationship between labor and those in charge. Trimbur shows how he teaches about the circulation of writing in his “Writing about Disease and Public Health,” when he asks students to transform medical journal information to public news stories, which shows them how information gets changed and presented (in specific, political ways) in circulation.

Quotable Quotes

“Marx wanted to explian the various moments in the circulation of commodities – the cycle of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption – not as a series of separate events taking place in a predetermined order over time but dialectically, as mediation in mutual and coterminous relations that constitute the capitalist mode of production as a total system” (206).

“The process of production determines – and distributes – a hierarchy of knowledge and information that is tied to the cultural authorization of expertise, professionalism, and respectability.” (210)

“We cannot understand what is entailed when people encounter written texts without taking into account how the labor power embodied in the commodity form articulates a mode of production and its prevailing social relations” (210).

“Negating delivery has led to writing teachers to equate the activity of composing with writing itself and to miss altogether the complex delivery systems through which writing circulates” (190).

Notable Notes

delivery isn’t just technical (document design, Trimbur says) – it is political and ethical, can be used to democratize and circulate ideas, expand public forums (190).

exchange value v. use value – academic work in public channels

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