I work full-time, and even when I am not at work, work takes up a lot of my psychic space. Most people I know in academia, especially in English departments, live this way. We think a lot about the work we do, and we talk about it a lot, even outside of work. I, like my colleagues, have a life outside of work that I try to maintain in spite of what my work demands of me. This struggle to balance work and life is common for most of the people I know who teach. If this is the case, why should those of us who teach composition, particularly those of us who specialize in rhetoric and composition, add more to our busy lives and become activists for our work? To me, the answer is simple. If we do not speak up for ourselves, no one else is going to. The people who write articles saying that we are not teaching what or how we should and that students cannot write are not going to suddenly give us the benefit of the doubt. Worse than all of that is that if we do not speak up, people like John Maguire and Stanley Fish, as well as people
commenting on their articles, are going to continue to demand CTR in writing courses. This sort of popular demand for CTR may also influence adoption of texts like the HHH because it is CTR-based. Thus, we need to speak up for the work we are doing and not just when articles come out and say that we are not doing it. We need to find ways to be proactive and share the good work we do before we are doing it only to defend ourselves. In an ideal world, we would
all have the time and opportunity to write articles for popular news outlets and explain what we do and why it matters. Unfortunately, that is not the case for many of us.
Fortunately, there are those among us, such as Doug Hesse, Linda Adler-Kassner, and especially John Warner, who are able to do that. John Warner, for example, has just published Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities, a book intended for teachers, students, and anyone who cares about writing and writing instruction. The book is thoughtful and accessible and defends the work we do in writing classrooms. He makes smart arguments such as, “In reality, every piece of writing is a custom job, not a modular home, and by steering students toward the five-paragraph essay, we are denying them the chance to practice real writing by confronting the choices writers must make” (29). We need people like Warner, but we can’t all be the ones to do that work. For those of us who cannot do this, for whatever reason, perhaps the best thing we can do—for our students and our communities—is make our classrooms sites that teach students how they can use writing to improve their lives and the lives of those around them. In doing so, we can offer students the kind of authentic writing for which Warner advocates; this is a way to approach composition contrary to the prescriptive approach offered by CTR and texts like the HHH.
6.5 Composition and Activism
One way to show students the power of writing is to have them do “real writing.” They can use this “real writing” to help themselves and others. Some might call this a form of activism, and there are some who argue that composition teachers are inherently (or should be) activists. Ellen Cushman, for example, argues that academics, or public intellectuals, need to contribute to the communities in which they teach. She says that she suspects that “academics have yet to realize their full potential in contributing to a more just social order” and that “The public
intellectuals I have in mind combine their research, teaching, and service efforts in order to address social issues important to community members in under-served neighborhoods” (Cushman 329). Cushman makes this argument in the context of a service-learning project she undertook with some of her students. The project involved her students volunteering at a local YMCA where they worked with children and helped promote literacy activities. She makes a compelling argument for how the classroom can become a site for community activism, and many other teachers across the country have enacted similar service-learning projects to the benefit of the students and the community.
Unfortunately, some of us may not be at an institution or in an ideological space to take on a project like this as a means of showing the positive work that comes from our students and our classrooms. I admit that I was a bit overwhelmed when I first read what Cushman proposed. My biggest concern was thinking about how my students might respond to being in a situation like volunteering at the YMCA or somewhere like a local food bank. My institution is a commuter campus, and over 90% of the students receive financial aid. Given that my students are almost all local, and given how many of them receive some form of government aid, what would happen if I took them to a food bank, and their own families were there to receive assistance? It could easily happen, and what if my students were embarrassed by working in places where they receive assistance? Though an uncomfortable situation for my students was my main concern, I had others. How would I find the time to revamp (or create a class) to take such an approach? Would my institution support this work? How would my students respond? What ties do I have to the community that would help me develop a similar project? And these were just some of the questions I had. I bring this up to say that I can see how someone could be fascinated by
For me, what I am learning is that the best way to deal with this is to put the power in the students’ hands. Instead of requiring them to volunteer or participate in an initiative of my choosing, I have begun letting them find their own problems to solve. There are two major assignments in my ENGL 1101 classes that I created to help students solve their own problems, and ideally, see how writing can help them do that. The first assignment asks students to write an essay applying for one of the school’s Foundation scholarships. We are lucky to have a
Foundation with generous donors who want to help our students succeed, but for years, I heard that few students applied for the scholarships. At the same time, in my own classes, I regularly heard stories of students trying to juggle work and school, and in some cases, students were just trying to manage the stress their families faced in paying for their education. One day it hit me that I could help my students by making the hardest part of the scholarship application process— writing an essay—part of our coursework. The responses from students have been
overwhelming. For the first time in my 15 years of teaching, I have had students ask me
questions about revising their essays, even when they were not required to do so. Students have also told me that it makes them feel differently about the institution knowing that it wants to help students pay for college. Others have relayed stories of the stress facing them and their families as they navigate how to pay for college, so they are grateful to work on the scholarship essays. Though I can only report on the assignment’s results anecdotally, I can say that students’ responses to the assignment were far different than what I have seen from students when they were writing something that was only for class. They took the assignment seriously, and many wanted to use their work to apply for the scholarship.
Another assignment I have created is essentially a problem/solution paper. However, it requires students to make some significant choices about themselves and their communities. For
the assignment, students must identify a problem facing a community (their school, their neighborhood, their jobs, etc.) to which they belong. After writing to prove that their chosen topic is a problem for the community, they must then identify the audience who can help them address the problem. They must also decide what form—essay, blog, or letter, for example— their writing should take based on their chosen audience. It is, of course, up to the student whether he/she follows through and mails or shares the proposal, but this assignment has the power to improve life for the student and the community. The most powerful letter I have received for this assignment was from a dual enrollment student who plays football at his high school. He realized that some of his teammates (and their siblings) do not have enough food to eat at home. Seeing this problem and wanting to help, the student wrote a moving letter to his principal asking for his help in solving the problem. Though the student’s argument was strong overall, maybe the most surprising part of his proposal was how practical it was. He did not ask for large amounts of money or resources; he identified resources that were already available and created a plan for how to connect students with those resources. Even more compelling was that he proposed a way to do all of this that would not embarrass students who need food.
My point in detailing these assignments and how one student responded is to say that there are ways to have students become activists in their own lives without my having to worry about the political or social implications involved in my choosing a place for them to volunteer or my choosing a topic for the students to research. In my approach, students are responsible for their own choices, and as a result, most of them are more invested in their work. What is more
important to me, however, is that my students leave my class with their own writing that they can use improve their lives. Also important is that I am not prescribing grammar or form to them; I am, as Warner advocates for, having them “practice real writing by confronting the choices
writers must make” (29). They must decide how to approach their writing based on their
purpose, audience, and context. I am not asking them, as some writing instructors do64, to write
an essay on why they do or do not enjoy picnics. Such assignments waste students’ time by forcing them to write about things they do not know or care about. Instead of seeing English class as an artificial practice in writing they will never use, the goal is for my students to see the power of writing. I often quote Lloyd Bitzer and tell my students, “The world presents
imperfections to be modified by means of discourse – hence the practical need for rhetorical investigation and discourse.” I cannot think of a better way to teach writing than to give students the opportunity to see how writing can change their lives.
6.6 An Alternative to CTR
Most simply, the problem with CTR is that it does not provide students with exigence, a situation or problem that encourages or forces someone to write. It also removes invention by not allowing them the opportunity to make decisions about how to write. With the kinds of artificial forms and concerns that CTR promotes, students are asked to see writing as something they have to do in a classroom, but it often has no real impact on their lives. It is certainly possible that having my students write scholarship essays or propose solutions to problems in their
communities may not impact their lives either, but it is up to each student to decide whether or not he/she wants to influence change through writing. The student has to decide that what he/she has written is worth sharing, but even if students decide not to share their work from 1101, maybe they will learn from the experience and use it another time they are facing a problem. This is important to consider in light of articles like Maguire’s because having students take their work to their communities provides an opportunity to show others what they are learning and