A recent Army commercial shows American soldiers entering a Middle East village, taking up positions while under fire and carefully covering each other as they maneuver from place to place. Another one shows tech-savvy soldiers setting up a base on a rocky outcrop somewhere and their busy counterparts in helicopters covering them. For most of us, when we think of soldiers, these are the images that come to mind: people who are wearing stuff, carrying stuff, running somewhere, jumping out of helicopters, shooting guns, and driving tanks.
In short, we think of soldiers as doing things. We rarely think of them as writing things, or consider that a number of soldiers sit at desks, reading and writing, in order to make all the commercial-worthy action happen. The idea that writing produces action can sometimes seem theoretical, but one of the interesting things about the Army context is the height of the action— it’s war—and the indispensable role that writing plays in it.
When I first conceived of my project, I wondered if ROTC instructors would have given much thought to writing in an Army environment, and what they would think about the “theoretical” connection between writing and action. For my participants, was writing really essential to the work of the Army? Or was it incidental, helpful, but not essential? Pedagogy reveals fundamental assumptions on the part of instructors about what their discipline’s values really are and what a practitioner needs in order to be successful in the field. What would this mean in an ROTC context, where the “discipline” is “the Army,” with instructors who have been in the Army and have a precise notion of the work place that their students will enter and what it means to be a “practitioner”? Heidi Estrem has written that approaching disciplinary writing as an “act of identity and affiliation” illuminates how writing is not only about abstract social conventions (the “culture” that can be understood from the text) but it is “also about learning how to be within a group with social conventions, norms, and expectations” (56, italics in the original). Considering “disciplinary writing” in the military conflates the notion of “cultural being” and “social action” with the real-world action of Army commercials. I wondered if that conflation was real to Army writers and teachers, and what kind of pedagogical principles emerge from a writing workplace where social action is the real-world action of war.
My background includes studying writing and working in multiple writing workplaces; from those experiences I know that writing is a fundamental social activity, and that even if workplaces do not identify themselves as “writing heavy” environments, the individuals who can write always enjoy an extra measure of success, thanks to its communicative value. No matter what kind of changes occur in technology or culture, human beings function by communicating with each other, and writing has always served to enhance communication between people and to improve the communication capability of the writer. Because of this, it didn’t surprise me to
discover that the Army is also a writing heavy workplace, and that writing is situated within a complex matrix of communication practices.
Writing had a central place in the pedagogy and teaching of ROTC instructors, though most of them said they wished they had more time for writing and they wished it wasn’t marginalized by time constraints. The role of writing in personal development of their cadets and its role in creating a functioning work place was central to their pedagogy, even when they would not have identified an assignment as a “writing assignment.” To my participants, an effective soldier was one who could communicate effectively, especially through writing: “In the Army there is a practical application [to all communication] and the term we throw around is war-fighting; we are war-fighters, right? So the more efficiently that I can communicate…the better” (LTC Armstrong).
The goal of my project was to understand and describe ROTC instructors’ writing pedagogy. Fundamentally, this project reminds us that context alters both the function and the meaning of writing, and that pedagogy reflects those differences. As a discipline that touches every other discipline yet encompasses none of them, writing is unique in its persistent presence as an integral and vital communication skill, and its pedagogical fluidity. In this Chapter, I consider what my interview data tells us about the rhetorical world of writing instruction for Army ROTC instructors.
In the interest of narrowing down my list of insights into a description of Army writing pedagogy that would map well onto our fields known frameworks for describing pedagogy, I have followed Richard J. Fulkerson’s example of addressing process, pedagogy, axiology and epistemology. My participants favored classroom processes that focused on learning Army writing genres, and developing audience awareness in an Army context, both in terms of
subordinates and in terms of commanders. Their pedagogy favored group work, and a distinguishing feature of their practice was an emphasis on their own experience as Army writers. Their axiology emphasized clear and concise communication through Army genres, and strong analytical skills. Important epistemological assumptions in their pedagogy were that the realities of war were stable, but that Army values were dialectical, and that collaboration is important to knowledge-making. The interconnectedness of these elements reflects the unique community of the ROTC classroom. Instructors and students share an investment in the same professional context and in the same domain of knowledge: war-fighting. Other forms of knowledge—like writing and effective communication—are integrated in fluid and negotiable ways that support the primary domain.