Reflection: Language of Exclusion and Critical Pedagogy

I've taken a class before with a teacher who loved the Paulo Freire view, and he used the Pedagogy of the Oppressed book. I think I still own it. It was nice to see that book placed in context with other views and, down the line, it will be nice to be able to hold that view up against radically different views. I wrote the word view five times in this paragraph.

I am still fairly set in some of the ideas I've latched onto from the beginning such as using grammar as a means to an end (editing is important but it is not the goal) and writing essays in cycles. The cycles approach entails having students redraft essays as much as they need to, focusing on revision of ideas in early cycles and focusing on editing in late cycles (when the ideas have been developed). One interesting idea I've come up with is making word counts higher in early cycles and lower in later cycles to see if that pushes students to revise ideas through cutting and narrowing.

Reading Response: Language of Exclusion and Critical Pedagogy

We are coming into these readings at the same time that we are beginning to think about our teaching philosophies. A big choice these readings suggested I make was whether to see English as a quantifiable skill or as an essential underpinning of knowledge. As a quantifiable skill, English can be measured in terms of grammar and structure, taught as a set of tools, and improved to the point of definite mastery. As something more fundamental, English becomes attuned to the subject it interacts with, and mastery becomes a fluid combination of how and why. It becomes important not only how something is structured and written but why something is structured and written specifically in that way. A third factor is also introduced, what. The many discourse communities that exist each have their own how and why and what. Can English be taught in a way that accommodates such wide-reaching arenas?

The critical pedagogy approach has several variations from Freire to Burke, and many good notions come from it. Freire's critique of the banking model of teaching is something I agree with completely; students need to be more than receivers. A student treated as a receiver of knowledge for too long may develop habits of receiving that make them LESS PRODUCTIVE members of a democracy if those habits replace critical thinking with blind following. One part I am less fond of, however, is bringing any form of politics into the classroom as a basis for assignments. That said, I don't think politics can be completely removed; the act of teaching is political in itself. Still, bringing traditional political views of republican/democrat, liberal/conservative, etc. may also bring with a form of separation among students (and yourself as the teacher) that isn't beneficial to the course. I'd rather teach composition as a way of giving your own voice shape and influence SO THAT you can go into the world arena equipped to make the changes you want. If that is the goal, it is best that my own voice does not oppress the very voices I seek to empower.

Reflection: Composition and What We Need To Know

The running trend in my growth on the subject of composition seems to be consider all the arguments and sit somewhere in the middle. At some point, it all starts to feel like semantics and point of view; I believe that a heuristic is closer to scientific than humanistic, but how can I argue against someone who points out a heuristic that isn't applicable to every situation? Doesn't that necessarily undermine the universal nature of the heuristic and therefore the scientific nature of it? Does that even matter in the end?

Part of me feels a comfort in the idea that there are concrete structures and conventions that a student can be taught that will outright make them better at composition. It is simple and straightforward; I teach you this and now you can do that. That comfort is eroded, however, by the looming shadow of variability, that little devil on the shoulder that constantly chirps "but what about...?"

• But what about the student who doesn't write expressively?
• But what about the different social origins of even one class of students?
• But what about the heuristic that has variable success among students?
• But what about the never-ending "but what about" comments you can come up with?

It is apparent that teaching is a malleable ball of good intentions that needs to be general enough to not exclude any students but somehow specific enough to push the students to the next level of writing. It is the general, outer-directed, humanistic side that points out the social variance and community aspects of writing while it is the specific, inner-directed, scientific side that prays for something universal to teach all students a useful skill regardless of the social context they bring.

Reading Response: Composition and What We Need To Know

Composition was born out of rhetoric and draws life from a diverse set of sources including Cognitive Psychology, Discourse Theory, and Text Linguistics (among several others). With a diverse set of sources comes a diverse set of theories on how to best approach the subject of composition. Is it closer to scientific or closer to humanistic? Is knowledge about composition universal and verifiable or is composition entirely dialectic, requiring multiple views for any one view to gain life? As has become a trend in my responses, the answer likely lies somewhere in the middle of these dichotomies.

Before explaining my position on the scale, it is important to consider what the extremes of the scale are suggesting. Between scientific and humanistic approaches, one is considering the difference between composition practices which are either verified to exist in every situation and which can be taught as universal, or composition practices which are immortal due to their dialectic nature such that a view is never disproved but only disputed. Positioning oneself on this scale requires a few questions to be answered: is the accumulation of "best practices" scientific due to the verifiable benefit they are providing? Is teaching a universal heuristic for engaging discourse communities scientific due to its limitless application? I suppose my conclusion on this scale would have to be that the heuristic structures a teacher instills in a student can be scientific (here is how you engage a discourse community, here is how you discover discourse conventions, etc.), but those structures have to be flexible enough to accommodate a perpetually distinct rhetoric and community of readers and writers.

In a sense, the same argument is being had when you view writing as either inner-directed or outer-directed. The inner-directed theoretical camp seeks the writing processes which are so fundamental they can be universally applied, and lexical differences based on your location all stem from innate mental structures. The outer-directed theoretical camp places all language, thought, and writing within a social context. Therefore universal structures cannot exist because the communication structures are based on the ever-changing social structures within which one finds oneself. True to form, I will suggest that something in the middle is the best approach. Along the same lines as the scientific versus humanistic argument, it is all about the heuristics being taught. The end goal has to be that a student can move on without his teacher and engage any discourse community using the heuristics he was taught as long as he is given enough time. The heuristics themselves should be malleable enough to be universally applicable since the content one is approaching is always framed in the social structures and conventions native to it, but the processes one goes through are likely to look very similar regardless of the discourse community being approached.

Reflection: Errors and Expectations

The article by Shaughnessy compounded the view I took from Sommers; editing is NOT revision and can be a trap for beginning writers. Students who spend a lot of time editing their first idea (instead of revising) feel a false sense of progress; they are improving their paper in the same way that one might improve a flat tire by cleaning the rim. When I begin teaching any course that involves writing, I'll make it a point to differentiate editing and revising. It is becoming more and more apparent that proper revision early on can make a world of difference in the quality of a paper.

I am a proponent of the approach that DOES NOT grade any draft or cycle early on. I feel that marking grammatical errors early will cause the student to focus on the wrong things. Instead, I believe it will be more beneficial to poke and prod the IDEA so that students are focusing on the argument, support, detraction, etc. that make the paper worth reading (and writing!)

Reading Response: Errors and Expectations

A majority of the Shaughnessy article was historically informative, and it put into perspective both the path composition has taken and the direction composition needs to go. From a crash course in grammar and syntax to a complete consideration of both form and idea, composition is moving away from mere editing and into a comprehensive package of lexical and conceptual revision.

It is interesting that Shaughnessy describes a basic writing student as one who "resents and resists his vulnerability as a writer" (391). She suggests that the basic writer is more comfortable in spoken communication because one can grope or back up, pitch and pause, use body language, and hide within the dialog. However, as we have considered previously, writing offers something that speaking cannot; an opportunity to revise. While body language isn't a factor in writing, the ability to push or pull, pitch or pause, hide what you don't know and show what you do know is enhanced greatly by the revision process.

Properly demonstrating the positive impact that revision can have on writing may be the key to helping students improve. Within revision, one can infinitely change their writing and, while that may seem daunting, guiding the students through that process and helping them understand its purpose is vital. It is important to differentiate editing (grammatical fixes) and revising (conceptual changes), and to move away from a linear model of writing (brainstorm > rough draft > final draft) to a cycles approach (cycle one > cycle two > cycle three > etc.). Earlier cycles focus on revising while later cycles focus on editing. Within the cycles, a student can go through as many cycles as they need, and graduate away from revising and toward editing when the ideas and support becomes clear to them. This way, students aren't confining their revision process to a specific set of drafts, but can cater their cycle count to what is on the paper.