Surgimiento y definición de la teoría del abuso del derecho

Veterans studies has become a vibrant conversation in our field in the last five years, as college campuses cope with a tidal wave of veterans entering school. Research in this area establishes the relevance of my project by clarifying the presence of a formative and influential military writing culture that student veterans bring into the first year composition classroom.

Research on veterans and writing is assessing and describing how students with a military background experience the transition to academic writing, which does not address either the pedagogy of the military classroom or the ways that the military writing culture is developed in classrooms prior to a student actually being commissioned or practicing writing in a military context. This field also has a very specific practical application for practitioners: researchers in this field are looking for ways that composition teachers can make their classrooms more sensitive to war veterans, taking into account narrative experience and the kind of leadership structure that such students might be used to responding to.

As part of the recent development of Veterans Studies, several of our journals have made an effort to publish veteran-related research, including special issues of Teaching English in the

Two-Year College (2009), Kairos (2010), and Composition Forum (2017). These issues have

developed the conversation about the needs of a unique student population and have gone a long way toward identifying research questions that need to be addressed in order for writing teachers to understand veterans better.

One of the more pedagogy-focused collections is the 2009 special issue of Teaching

English in the Two-Year College, which features an important narrative piece by Galen

Leonhardy, a veteran Marine. This is one of the first and few pieces where a composition instructor speaks from their own military experience; Leonhardy argues that “composition instructors must first recognize that we have much to learn from veterans, just as we have much more to do for them” (340). He argues that “good pedagogy in the composition classroom is good pedagogy for all students,” and offers a description of “good pedagogy” that is largely focused on developing classroom community through things like healthy banter, openness to difficult questions, and effective use of narrative-style assignments to discover research topics

(344-345). Leonhardy does make several salient observations of military culture in general and its influence on how student veterans understand things like constructive criticism. His comments seem to have marked an opening for Veterans Studies, as they are some of the more frequently quoted by other writers.

The 2010 “dot mil” issue of Kairos has interesting work exploring authorial attribution in the Army, and an interesting piece that offers engaging analysis of rhetorical strategies in deployment music videos, among other articles, but does not contain material that relates to writing pedagogy in military classrooms and looking at linkages between military classrooms and composition classrooms. In some ways, this is a theme with rhetoric scholars: there is a tendency to theorize about the military from the outside, but there have not been many attempts to engage ethnographically with the military, and no attempts to engage with ROTC instructors. The Veteran’s Studies research that my project is most clearly connected to and indebted to is the qualitative work of Mark Blaauw-Hara and Corrine Hinton, both of whom originally published their work in the 2017 special Veteran’s Issue of Composition Forum.

Blaauw-Hara collected the perceptions of student veterans enrolled at North Michigan College in order to identify some pedagogical differences between military culture and the first year composition classroom. Blaauw-Hara uses Etienne Wegner’s concept of “communities of practice” to describe the military learning environment, where learning is contextualized and specialized, practitioners gain skill and knowledge from more experienced practitioners, and identity in the group corresponds to skill mastery. Group identity and cohesiveness are core values. On the other hand, “community of practice” theory does not actually describe the college writing class, where the kind of contextualized learning and personalized learning that takes place in the military is largely absent; as veterans try to become “college writers,” their role is far

less clear, goals less finely articulated and a shared community ethos is often absent. This reality about our writing classes—and Blaauw-Hara’s insightful use of Wegner to illustrate the differences between military and academic culture—became more important as I collected my interviews, and is a point I will come back to.

Blaauw-Hara points out that the ultimate goal of the military is to create problem solvers, and that those of us in composition know that writing is ideal for developing “individual thought and creative thinking, as well as for making sense of complex ideas. We also know that writing is a useful heuristic for problem-solving.” These shared values can help writing instructors to understand the needs of veterans and alter classroom practices to encourage veteran

participation. Research like Blaauw-Hara’s attempts to identify ways that the learning values of the military and the goals of the composition classroom may come closer together, and is helpful for grounding my own rationale and research questions, but still does not address the same questions that my work addresses.

Corrine Hinton’s work identifies how expectations of teaching, learning, and writing in the academy fail to accommodate and include the expertise of veteran students. Hinton’s research is important for the way that it describes a specific model of dichotomy present in university composition courses (the novice/expert dichotomy) that excludes other learning environments, such as the military. Hinton’s work is an interview-based qualitative study of veteran Marines, and was one of the earlier studies to include veterans’ voices in a discussion about the first-year composition model. Her work not only helps to model interview-based research with military students and further explores the experiences of veteran students, but it is also a valuable contribution to the discussion about context-based writing instruction versus generalizable writing instruction. My familiarity with the context-based writing approach used in

several service academies underscores the value that such an approach can have for students in developing them into confident practitioners. But even in schools that have relied heavily on such an approach, administrations have found it helpful to develop writing centers and tutoring programs that can help with the more “general” writing skills, such as the establishment in 2016 of a writing center at West Point. Interestingly, that writing center was established under the leadership of a writing director that was civilian, with a background in Rhetoric and Composition.

Blaauw-Hara and Hinton are illustrative of the move toward incorporating veteran perceptions of the academy. This kind of work is important for several reasons but not least of all because it demonstrates that the military does have its own writing culture that veterans bring with them to the university. The drawback is that these studies are based on the perceptions and recollections of the veterans and do not necessarily document an intentionality or specific writing pedagogy in the military. There have been some attempts to bring work with veterans a little closer to documenting their specific writing tasks, such as the work of Erin Hadlock and Sue Doe, who have asked veterans about specific genres that they recall from military service.

Hadlock and Doe’s study appears in the seminal (and sole) volume that has been published on veterans and composition, Generation Vet: Composition, Student Veterans, and the

Post-9/11 University. Much of the work represented in the volume is qualitative research (which

makes the volume a contribution in the area of qualitative research methods in the field of writing studies) and much of it examines issues of pedagogy, all related to veterans.

Hadlock and Doe also base their work on interviews, asking military veterans to reflect on their writing practice and experiences writing in the military. Their work focuses on the interaction between genre and agency, and the ways that military identity is formed through

writing practice. Their conclusions underscore how important writing is in the military, where “organizationally accepted” genres like assessments of team members, or subordinates, or even of one’s self, allow practitioners to be “recognized for their individual competence and

leadership authority” in some genres and also provide leaders with a “site of advocacy and action on behalf of others” (83). Furthermore, in military writing culture such recognition is not undercut by the strong team mentality of the military, but instead “the role of authorship in military discourse precisely demonstrates that the authority associated with authorship can prevail even in the absence of a particular, identifiable author” (76). Observations such as these—a more flexible notion of authority even with more structured genres than we see in other writing contexts—illustrates some of the ways that teaching writing to future soldiers

necessitates some different pedagogical choices and impulses. Differences in military writing culture and academic expectations indicate that the pedagogical models of military instructors are worth exploration. Understanding how “authority” and “expertise” work for instructors and students when writing Operations Orders (battle plans) is not something that we can understand without the input of ROTC instructors, unless we are content with exercises in speculation.