Wallace and Ewald - Mutuality

 

Wallace, David L. and Helen Rothschild Ewald. “Toward Mutuality in the Classroom: Classroom

Speech Genres, Course Architecture, and Interpretive Agency.” Mutuality in the Rhetoric

and Composition Classroom. Southern Illinois University Press: Carbondale, IL. 2000. Print.

Wallace and Ewald begin from the standpoint that it is common to underestimate the power of classroom language to both construct and reflect knowledge as well as the social roles of the classroom (2). They problematize the mode of discussion in which a teacher poses questions seeking “right” answers and mediates discussion by affirming correct statements, arguing that this style brings “together an ideological stance in which teachers control knowledge with a discourse strategy that attempts to reduce” (8)—and not expand—possibilities. The downside to this approach is that it “focuses instruction on ‘correct’ answers and on mastering received ways of thinking and knowing. Knowledge making becomes a matter … of assimilating the constructions of others” (9). As a counterbalance to this dynamic, Wallace and Ewald argue for mutuality, both in a class’ discourse and in its architectural design.

By architecture, Wallace and Ewald mean the management of assignments as well as of class activities. Course architecture that seeks mutuality requires ongoing negotiation between procedures and reconstructions of knowledge subsequently worked out in specific classroom settings. In other words, Wallace and Ewald advocate that teachers share authority over the basic structure of a course and the assignments and daily activities that make it up. The three issues that such an effort bring up are (1) shifting student/teacher roles, in which teachers relinquish a degree of control and students assume it, (2) recognition that both students and teachers will have a range of idiosyncratic responses to shifting roles, and (3) disagreement and resistance must be expected not only because of the destabilizing nature of the effort, but because such pedagogy encourages expression of different perspectives in the first place, and is more conducive to disagreement and conflict than top-down management models are. But it is essential to remember that responding to conflict is, in a classroom geared toward mutuality, not only the teacher’s responsibility, but also the students’.

Concretely, Wallace and Ewald suggest mutuality be enacted in the following categories: use of classtime (how much time devoted to teacher-led discussion? to peer review? to student presentations?); textbooks and reading assignments; kinds and topics of writing assignments; and grading criteria.

Conversation - Writing Poetry in a Composition Class

 

            Raymond was telling me about the ethnographic poems that his students are going to have to write soon for the methods in- / introduction to- ethnography class he’s teaching this semester, and I thought ethnography poems sounded intriguing, but in continuing the conversation I discovered that Raymond has had his composition students write poetry as well—and that he’s done this every time he’s taught comp. Because I am working on this blog, his mention of poetry in composition raised the stakes of the conversation for me (albeit imperceptibly to him, I hope). Why does Raymond have students write poetry in comp? When in the semester do they compose poetry? What prompting or guidelines does he supply? How does he introduce this project, and how extensive a project is it? Here’s the upshot.

            Raymond emphasized that we as instructors never know which of our students are fantastic poets. He was less oriented toward making the case that composition should teach poetry than he was toward underscoring the hiddenness of talent. For Raymond, the fact that he doesn’t ever know which students are going to produce knock-out poems is reason enough to prod them into it. I’m not sure this reasoning suffices—should I give my comp students the opportunity to butcher a moose? So that unknown meatcutter extraordinaires will discover themselves?—but Raymond’s idea here is connected to a basic pedagogical perspective of his, too, which is that research accumulates into knowledge that has an emotional dimension.

In practice, Raymond has assigned introductory poems at the start of the semester, the form of which are already set out (line beginnings/topics, etc.). But it gets more involved with artistry later in the semester: part of his students’ research papers involve a poetic component, partly to revitalize their investment in their topics, and partly to give life to an aspect of their developing knowledge that might not find expression in academic writing. To prep for this, Raymond assigns his students an article by Art Young, “Writing Across and Against the Curriculum.” He then gives no guidelines regarding length or form (although when I pressed him on this he said that yes, free verse is what he exposes them to and expects them to produce, but also that he emphasizes to students that “the form the poem wants to be is the form that [he] want[s] it to take”). Raymond has found further guidelines to be unnecessary: students produce “serious poems” he says, “consistently.” They also have to read their poetry in front of the class, about which Raymond is all smiles—many students slam, or adopt a performance element in some respect, and the class is always stunned by a few of the poems, as well as by which of their classmates produced the truly moving pieces.

Clinton - Surrealist Games and Knowledge Problems

 

Clinton, Alan Ramón. “Writing is Against Discipline: Three Courses.” Writing Against the

Curriculum: Anti-Disciplinarity in the Writing and Cultural Studies Classroom. Ed. Randi

Gray Kristensen and Ryan Claycomb. Lexington Books: Lanham, Maryland. 2010. Print.

The basic guiding principle of Clinton’s classes is that it is impossible to teach to the composition classroom’s range of majors and disciplines. The argument he makes to his class on the first day is that writing their way out of their disciplines is valuable because this is how one moves beyond repetition to the creation of knowledge. Students write not about topics, but about a “knowledge problem” of interest to them in their fields (this can be as simple as an unanswered question), and they approach this problem using the metaphors and an essential text of another discipline. Students are thus “encouraged to dip into a text that looks interesting to them and make what they can of it, to collide with it (montage) or rip an idea from its original context (collage)” (Clinton 77). Some of the questions asked in this paper assignment are, “how would [this] discipline approach your problem or, for that matter, ‘change the subject’? ” (Clinton 76). Much of Clinton’s preparation for this assignment involves using Surrealist games. His motivation here is that innovation is very often the result of playfulness. Accordingly, Clinton provides us with his adaptations of three of Alastair Brotchie’s Surrealist games: “to what are mutual attractions due?,” “Analogy Cards,” and “One into Another.”

While Clinton uses these games in his Advanced Writing in the Arts and Sciences course, I wonder if a similarly playful approach might be productive in a composition classroom. One of the primary frustrations I have toward the student body I interact with is their (seemingly) collective apathy. Although the exceptions are delightful, overall it is difficult for me to adopt a compassionate stance toward boredom. Perhaps a mindfully-incorporated surrealist game could be used in my class as a way of beginning to bust open assumptions and prejudices—the students’ and the texts’. I am thinking in these terms partly because many of my students don’t yet have majors, and are not very familiar with the research and inquiry norms of fields they have only just chosen. Ultimately, I’m interested in scaling down Clinton’s frame: e.g. instead of requiring students to identify and tackle a knowledge problem from within their own fields (which they may or may not have even chosen), perhaps the notion of a knowledge problem could be brought to bear on an individual reading. My idea here is that the basic conceptual relationship to things encountered in the world has the potential to translate into a critical and inventive stance in other areas as well.

Revision: Fostering Invasive Practices

Pickering, Kristen Walker. “Revising for Activity Purposes: Improving Document Design for

Reader-Oriented Activities.” Writing the Visual: A Practical Guide for Teachers of

Composition and Communication. Ed. Carol David and Anne R. Richards. Parlor Press

LLC: Lafayette, Indiana. 2008. Print.

This article takes activity theory as the foundation of graphic and/or visual examination. The document revision assignment focuses on improving student documents that either do not manage to incorporate both text and graphics or that do so ineffectively. The assignment Pickering outlines is that students must find a public document and revise its images and text. It may be a document that is already effective in general, but that can be revised to address another audience more effectively. Several things are emphasized to the students as they tackle this assignment: first, they are encouraged to analyze readers’ needs. Cultural knowledge is thus essential—the context of likely reading constitutes the matrix, here. From Pickering’s perspective, students don’t need to be trained in ethnographic research in order to understand the context of a particular readership; they do, however, need to inquire and observe enough to understand how to communicate effectively within that context. What I like best about this assignment is that it offers students the freedom to experiment with pretty invasive revisions. Since the original document is not their own and does not represent their own personal best (even if it would only have been their best up to that point), revision does not symbolize backtracking or failing and restarting when it is presented as first a mental exercise (they plan/propose revisions), second a practical exercise (they create and insert their revisions), and only third as a personal/self-reflective practice (this step is not even present in the assignment; presumably invasive creative ambitious revision practices would, however, carry over to students’ own documents).