Proliferation

Just had the first meeting of a departmental "technology" ad hoc committee. It's exciting to think that we might get some conversations going, across the department, of the ways that technology can change what we do in teaching both writing and literature. Today was just a starter meeting, and so we won't really get going until the fall, but I think we're likely to bring someone to campus next year to help jump start the conversation, and just the likelihood of that small step excites me.

Talking to R. afterwards about trying to also get such conversations going in the class we teach for new composition teachers, I started thinking, dejectedly, about my own largely failed efforts last year when I taught the course. The objection seemed to be that technology gets in the way. And I know there are a whole host of ways of responding to that objection, but what really cheered me up was reading Alex Reid's most recent entry just now, which I'm quoting from so that I can remember to use it next time I teach the Theory and Practice of Composition:

In truth, for me, the fundamental error in composition is its founding institutional raison d'etre: students cannot write (well). That is, composition is founded upon the identification of a "problem." The problem, however, is built into the institutional hailing of the college student; i.e., a college student can be defined, in part, as one who does not write well (or at least as well as professionals or college faculty). A related part of the definition is that a college student is one who does not know (much) (or as much as faculty).

Who can deny such definitions? Any individual exceptions only serve to prove the general rule, eh?

This lack (of discipline, ability, knowledge, experience) serves the Nietzschean mechanism of ressentiment and bad conscience that leads to the ascetic ideal upheld by the pedagogue: learn this habit of thought, develop this disciplinary practice, master this body of knowledge, and your lack may be mitigated.

So I would begin any approach to composition with setting aside this notion of lack. Instead of mitigating some absence, writing might be understood as the proliferation of thought. I think this is generally recognized, and instruction often seeks to limit the potential for proliferation by sequestering it within "brainstorming" or invention. Writing instruction quickly turns to controlling this proliferation and targeting writing toward a purpose: completion of an assignment, approximation of the simulacrum of "good" academic writing, and achievement of pre-established course goals.

And, certainly, what Alex is saying here reinforces what many others say: Geoffrey Sirc comes to mind. And as Victor Vitanza says in that movie the Audio Archives folks showed at RNF: I was always told what I couldn't do in my writing. What I wanted to know is what I could do.

I was astounded, actually, at the number of new instructors from my class who decided to use the age old text Writing with a Purpose. I mean, sure, there's a place for that. But how tragic to limit writing to developing thesis statements. How tragic and how sad.

I mean, even George Bush can write a thesis statement. That doesn't make the world a better place.

I do understand the attraction of teaching a very constrained curriculum in the first-year composition class: for new teachers, it seems to offer solid place to stand. What I hope to do the next time I teach the course for new teachers is to involve them in more kinds of writing, to make the course itself one of proliferation of writing, which then opens up the possibilities of proliferating pedagogy.