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.