Teaching Composition (Fall 08)

Steve Halle is leading class discussion today, and we’re talking about (wellm really writing about) critical pedagogies. In particular, he’s asked us to write in response to this prompt, and I’m excited about it because were actually using the blogs in class in a bloggyish way, which is something I’ve been wanting the students to do without adding even more work to their already full workload. So here goes my response to Steve’s initial question. (btw, he’s playing music and it;s totally making me laugh because it’s reminding me of Sirc’s opening line in English Composition as a Happening, which is perhaps my favorite opening line of any academic book ever, about how nobody burns incense in the composition classroom anymore because it might mess up the computers’ hard drives. lol. Ok, back to “business”:

Conceptualize, develop or revise a writing prompt, project or lesson plan that explicitly engages Critical Pedagogy.

We read Ann George’s overview article on Critical Pedagogy, in which she posits that “the aim of critical pedaogy [is] to enable students to envision alternatives, to inspire them to assume the responsiblity for collectively recreating society” (p. 97, GCP), but I like her earlier distinction between critical and cultural and feminist pedagogies which, she says, “can be distinguished… by its usually explicit commitment to education for citizenship” (p. 93, GCP). Now, we also read Selfe and Selfe’s “Politics of the Interface: Power and its Exercise in Electronic Contact Zones,” a collection of readings that I’d fashioned with Villaneuva’s description of designing “a course in which students read one canonical and one noncanonical text” (in George, p. 100) in mind. (Let it be known that the Interface article is, perhaps, NOT canonincal in a composition theory course but absolutely IS canonical–in terms of it being mandatory reading–in computers and composition courses. The purpose of them being separate courses is fodder for another blog post….

So, as a computers-and-compositionist who doesn’t often teach first-year writing, I am approaching Halle’s assignment in respect to this 402 class (or, for that matter, any of the classes I do teach). What if, for instance, I developed a project for students that explicitly engaged in critical pedagogy as it is espoused in Selfe and Selfe’s article? That is, that writing teachers need to teach that the technological tools we use to compose are not neutral entities, that they re-inscribe dominant political, socio-economic, and cultural discourses, and so by teaching students to confront these ideologies with everyday technologies, we serve to help them — in critical pedagogical fashion — “assume the responsibility for collectively recreating society,” or interfaces, or computer-writing spaces, as the case may be. What would such a project look like?

In fact, in my original conception of this course, the main project was for the 402 students to engage in just this kind of questioning. While I probbaly don’t have the time (maybe 10 minutes left?) to include an entire description of the project I had in mind — oh wait, it’s in my email. Two secs…. Aha. It’s long, fyi:

I am totally procrastinating on other things, and the 250 STV survey that Jim sent out
earlier got me thinking about a possible assignment for 402 in the fall–an analysis of
the local computer classrooms that students will be teaching in next year in relation to
the STV 250 suite and how composition pedagogies are impacted/modified based on room
configurations — my thoughts on this being that no matter where students end up
teaching, they are going to either teach with technology or need to figure out how to get
access to teaching with technology.

I foresee this project growing into a publishable webtext for the students that other
institutions could use as fodder for their own reconsiderations of technology in writing
instruction. It will also present excellent professional development and networking
opportunities for students. Just having them do video (or email or whatever media)
interviews of top technology director-scholars in our field would be a wonderful thing.
This project would require them to analyze the physical spaces in which they teach in
relation to writing pedagogies and to move for institutional change while also
understanding the theoretical reasons for such change. (Yes, I’m assuming change would be
needed based on the 250 survey results

I’m imagining that students would spend the last 1/2 or 1/3 of the semester on this
project (while also doing related readings). They may not get to the “integrated webtext”
part listed below (I could do that, if needed), but I want to leave room for that in case
they do.

The dept is in the midst of negotiating space and resources for the STV 250 suites, where all the writing classes are taught (except for this year, when, as those rooms are under asbestos abatement, all the writing classes have been shipped across campus to, ahem, better rooms So now I kinda wish we were doing this project, but it’s a little too computers-and-composition intensive, even for me (in regards to the purposes of this 402 class). So we aren’t doing it. Which is too bad. It would have fit pefectly with George’s discussion of Bizzell’s work, in which she/they say, “as in all aspects of education, so much depends on the instructor, the students, the physical classroom space and available resources, the curriculum, the school, the community (and the list goes on)…” For instance, I found out yesterday that we literally can’t argue for smaller 101 class sizes, even though the rooms won’t accommodate 24 computers (23+1) because the Eng 101 classes have to have the same enrollment as the Comm 101 classes, even tho those classes meet in (for good or ill, I don’t know) traditional, rowed classrooms with only an instructor’s station. Of course they can fit 23 students (and probably more). But we still can’t lower our 101 enrollment to suit effective pedagogy.