February 23, 2014
By Mary Grabar
"Real
learning takes place outside the classroom," the late communist history
professor Howard Zinn famously said. Zinn practiced what he preached and
led his students at Spelman College and Boston University on marches and
protests.
The 1960s
saw plenty of teach-ins and marches by students and some radical
professors. But even then it would have been hard to imagine how the
staple of first-year coursework, Freshman Composition, would be used to turn
students into activists, subverting the idea of "composition" itself
and leaving some students free of any ability to write.
Little
Writing, But Plenty of Activism
Indeed,
as I learned from reading an article in the journal Hybrid Pedagogy, freshman
composition provides an opportunity to display "bravery." In
"Social Action and the Status Quo:
Bravery in First Year Composition," Susan Gail Taylor refers to the Rhetoric in Action project at the University of
South Florida where she was then teaching as a graduate student. The
project asks students to engage in activism and then offer their "personal
narrative of social action experience." Although the website states
that students should use the "writing process" and "academic
conventions," much of what they do seems to go far beyond
"composition" as traditionally known. Students, instead,
are asked to share first-person experiences in "multiple genres,"
such as "letter, website, video, artwork, flyer, pamphlet, panel,
demonstration."
Taylor
has given her students assignments at "Take Back the Night" and
"Slut Walk" events. She has had them videotape themselves
discussing how they have overcome personal challenges. Some students
appear to resist, but Taylor tells colleagues, "I've developed a few ways
to counteract possible hesitation and prepare my students to inspire others with
their actions. For instance, I typically choose a social issue and have
students organize and lead flash mobs in efforts to raise awareness."
In
"brief moments," of flash mobs—90 seconds to 3 minutes—"students
are faced with the power of their own voices (both literally and
figuratively)." (One wonders about the "power of the
voice" of the student who disagrees with such causes.) Students,
Taylor claims, "are challenged to step outside of a traditional essay
that discusses action and instead are tasked with becoming the action, thus
inciting them to discover their own capacity for bravery and resistance."
Bravery?
In her YouTube video of the SlutWalk on
September 16, 2011, her mostly female students chant, "what I wear does
not mean yes." The male voices make an odd counterpoint towards the
end, as does the image of a couple guys reluctantly tagging behind a few paces.
Taylor writes under the link: "They made awesome choices in their posters,
they were loud and they were proud. Rhetoric was definitely in action!
:)"
She
explains her pedagogical purpose: "I want to show students how the power
of language and the power of action can intersect: they select our chants and
the information we use, they design the posters (which I provide), and they
choose the locations—all in an effort to have even one person be affected by
their work."
Well,
yes, this is a form of persuasion, but certainly outside the bounds of
legitimate rhetorical persuasion. Such an assignment seems to verge on
illegality or coercion, and certainly has little to do with the "art of
persuasion," as
described in Aristotle's Rhetoric--the foundational text.
Taylor,
however, does not seem to be outside the current academic mainstream. The
35,000-member National Council of Teachers of English publishes, among
other books, Writing Partnerships
by Thomas Deans, which tells composition teachers how to combine
"writing instruction with community action."
Deans
traces the recent evolution of composition: "As a discipline, rhetoric and composition
has adopted the broadly defined 'social perspective' on writing," having
"evolved from studies of the lone writer to more contextual understandings
of composing; from a narrow, functional definition of literacy, focused on
correctness, to a broader definition; from an exclusive focus on academic
discourse to the study of both school and nonacademic contexts for writing;
from presuming white middle-class culture as normative to analyzing and
inviting cultural difference; and from gatekeeping at the university to
facilitating the advancement of all students."
Betraying
the Original Purpose
Freshman
Composition was intended to provide remedial help to students as campuses
opened up to a broader mass of students—to the chagrin of traditionalists who
wanted to maintain standards. It has been a service course, intended to equip
college students with basic writing skills, to be transferred to other classes
and then into the workplace. Advanced
students could opt out by demonstrating their ability in writing tests, usually
some variation of the standard five-paragraph essay. Increasingly, though, students
have required remedial help for a course intended to be remedial. I know
from teaching such courses that the remediation goes back to sentence-level
grammar.
At the
same time, I've seen the changes Deans notes: the emphasis on group work and
peer review, the politically contentious topics almost exclusively from a
leftist perspective, the addition of "visual literacy" as a category
of literacy, and the multicultural sensitivities, not only in topics, but in
language use.
The shift
away from composition instruction to activism is evidenced in articles
published in the organization's journal, the College Composition and Communication and
in the journal Pedagogy.
Similar books, such as Composition and Sustainability:
Teaching for a Threatened Generation, Rhetoric of Respect, about
"academic-community writing partnerships" and S.U.N.Y. Press's Making Writing Matter:
Composition in the Engaged University, offer strategies for transforming
classrooms into activist sites. A professor writes in the foreword to Affirming Students' Rights to Their
Own Language, "For many of us, the assertion of
student language was inextricable from our national and international quest for
social justice." Major textbook publishers, like Bedford, are
responding to market demand with single-themed readers on Sustainability,
Money Changes Everything, Food Matters, and Composing Gender
(the last with a cover photo of a female ballerina holding up a male ballet
dancer). The upcoming annual meeting of the Conference on College
Composition and Communication is filled with panel discussions on activism; a
featured speaker is Black Panther-turned professor, Angela Davis. Her biography notes her
"activism," from when she was a "youngster" to her work
today as an advocate of "prison abolition."
The
radicalization is finessed by statements like Deans'—that the field is
expanding beyond a "narrow, functional definition" and shifting from
"gatekeeping" to "facilitating the advancement of all students"
(emphasis added). In plain English, this means that standards for writing
are being eliminated. Furthermore, writing itself is being replaced by
visual and auditory forms of persuasion, often in mobs. These are called
"brave" actions.
Deans
attempts to spread a patina of academic legitimacy over such activism by claiming
there is a "coherent and substantial theoretical framework" for it.
He cites the progressive education theorist and philosopher John Dewey and
Marxist theorist Paulo Freire.
Deans
also ludicrously claims that such activism goes back to the ancients. He
states that Aristotle's Rhetoric was intended to "intervene in the
public sphere," (maybe), and not necessarily be used in today's
"school settings," but he ignores the fact that freshman
composition is being to taught to young people who should be acquiring
knowledge and skills. That is why they are in college in the
first place. He also misleadingly refers to Isocrates, Cicero, and
Quintilian in the same way of needing "to connect rhetorical practice to
civic responsibility." He even uses the "sweep of U.S.
history—from Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin to Jane Addams and John
Dewey"—to support "experiential learning."
Indeed,
if we did go back to Jefferson and Franklin, two men who did have a sense of
civic responsibility, we would find an opposite approach, one that values
study, introspection, imitation, and debate before taking on the adult
duties of "civic responsibility." Franklin in his autobiography describes
how he educated himself by imitating the master stylists in the Spectator,
by reading widely, and by debating his peers in the Junto club. In
such education, the effort is made to gain a perspective outside one's own
limited circle. Shouting in mobs is the opposite of what Aristotle,
Jefferson, and Franklin had in mind.
We have
radical professors promoting the idea that students' own language is good
enough, that there are no models for them to read and emulate, that they are to
be change agents, participating in mob actions and demonstrating their
"bravery" for credit. The end results are sure to be confused,
narcissistic, indoctrinated illiterates.
Mary Grabar is an instructor in
English living in Atlanta.
