Reading and Field Log #1
What strikes me most from reading Towards a Rhetoric of Everday Life (REL) is that there are some slightly nuanced differences in how Rhetoric is defined and taught. The shift away from traditional composition instruction also coincides with Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed in 1968. While one would be hard pressed to make the argument that the book’s publication, in Portuguese no less, prompted a radical change in how people are taught to write, it does suggest that this idea was sort of in the air for Freire, Emig, Hymes, etc. to pluck and use. The author’s do postulate that, “…the climate in the cognitive sciences…was receptive to ideas about invention as it affected cognitive plans…” (Nystrand and Duffy, xix). Thus, while these ideas were not particularly new, the soil for them to grow was. The field of education, writing instruction, and cultural studies was sufficiently cultivated in which they could flower. Part of their answer suggests that it was the rapid expansion of community colleges catering to the demands of the market, the GI Bill, and other trends that meant that college education became open to more students than ever before. Thus, rhetoric instruction intersected with cultural studies in that it can’t be separated from the culture in which it was embedded. With that, many of the new students while expected to master the compositional skills of the more traditional student, were simply not prepared. Yet, there was also a rethinking of what a college education entailed.
In a larger cultural context, we also see the rise of feminism, anti-war activism, queer studies, ethnic studies on college campuses. Thus the assumptions that college rested upon were being questioned and re-visioned. While Freire’s work continues to ripple through the field of education, it does suggest that the main difference in composition is by degree. For example, “traditional” composition instruction relies upon students learning a set of rhetorical moves so that they can function in academy. So, traditional instruction seems to be guided by academic language and genre construction(comparison/contrast, process papers, literary analysis, etc.). Composition instruction then expects the student to adapt to the demands of the academy. What that method fails to realize is that it only prepares students for writing within the academy and it is sort of understood that their knowledge of “good” writing will transfer to the writing they actually do (even though most will not actually become a part of the academy). With the shift, as evidenced by Emig’s The Composing Process of Twelfth Graders, it suggests that the onus is now on the instructor to meet the students where they are at. The instructor, the composition expert, is expected to transfer their knowledge to meet the students where they are. This makes sense. If I’m the most versatile in the skill of composition, shouldn’t it be easier for me to transfer that knowledge to how I best teach my students than to expect them, at a variety of skill levels and backgrounds, to meet me? Thus, the students that become a part of the academy become versatile at transference when they need to, on their timeline, not mine.
This also makes sense and factors in cultural studies into it because it suggests that composition instruction doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Students come into the classroom with a variety of backgrounds and cultural skills or baggage. The onus is once again on the instructor to understand their student rather than expect their student to master the culture of the academy. While this makes sense on a pedagogical level, it also suggests moving the instructor (and the academy) away from an authoritarian model and towards a democratic model. The idea that the instructor is an extension of the state is a very troubling one indeed. While we certainly need some sort of authority, isn’t democracy premised on the idea that we govern ourselves? And part of that governance should, by extension, also include control over what we learn and why? This shift, however, in no way diminishes the importance of composition instruction (rhetoric) but does suggest that teaching it becomes a much harder prospect.
While it is true that most students will not seek employment in academia, if they continue on to become juniors and seniors somewhere, they most likely will have to produce so-called academic or scholarly writing in humanities courses, and therefore teaching its conventions and providing practice in it will be quite valuable to them. The way things are now, students do not have the luxury of not learning the conventions of academic writing or, what is another name for the same thing, writing from sources.
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