Another Round of Revising Pedagogy...

The food metaphors won't make sense if you haven't read the "Grubbing" post...

When I wrote "Grubbing," two and a half years ago, I was trying to work out the tension between the curriculum I was stuck with as an adjunct, teaching at a couple community colleges who were highly directive with their adjuncts (one even mandated a class-by-class schedule), and the curriculum that I knew had fostered my own intellectual growth as both high schooler and undergraduate. The former was focused on what Abi, a classmate in my first (and still best) pedagogy course, liked to call "the skills to pay the bills." The latter was a hodge podge of canonical "Great Books" and canonical-within-the-field white feminists, with a tiny smattering of queer theory. (Though Denison was far ahead of the field in offering coursework on queer theory, I was still too closeted to take a course devoted to it.) I knew my students were in need of, in the terms of that earlier post, basic intellectual sustenance, but I also wanted to offer up the plate of fancy cheeses - because we should all get that kind of sustenance, too. In fact, I feared, the basics didn't mean much without the rest. (And all this before reading Michael Pollan!)

Abi was an African-American lesbian who was visibly annoyed at how all us white folks in the class took up her phrase as if we'd been introduced to the latest rap single. Most repeated it as though she'd ended her words with Zs: "skillzzz to pay the billzzz." I lost track of Abi pretty quickly at OSU; queer students were not encouraged to make alliances in OSU's highly competitive world - students in general weren't - and Abi & I both had personal demons to manage. I heard, though, that she didn't finish the M.A., a mix of lack of support and disgust with the way her challenges to received authority were met by our professors. I don't recall what little I know of Abi's history here to add another installment in the why-OSU-was-not-a-good-place-for-me saga, but because what I remember most about Abi was a commitment to theory which had an impact in the world, that actually changed lives, and that recognized that sometimes the most important thing a student has to do is pay the bills. That is something we are not taught to do in graduate school. Often we are actively discouraged. We are taught, instead, to assume our students have consciously rejected the reading room world of the academic. (At best, we let them off the hook and blame "society.") We are not taught to ask what have we done to discourage the student.

I was also haunted by Adrienne Rich's "Teaching Language in Open Admissions," and remain so. In a withering footnote in that essay, she discusses the weakness of the composition reader, comparing it to a film chopped up and edited for television consumption, robbed of its meaning, removed from any controversy. I sneered at the reader that I was using with even more distaste than it had inspired before. It was a good thousand pages, with two to four page spliced and diced works, many of which were little more than newspaper articles in the first place. It had been chosen, I was told, because it was priced well for students and allowed more flexibility for adjuncts. I found about five essays in there that I could work with, though to be fair, I only read about half of them before giving up in despair. I could teach them the major rhetorical modes, and the ins and out of citation by asking them to look at each other's work much more effectively. And so slowly, there was less and less reading in my composition classroom.

Instead, Rich's students grappled with the voices of the authors in their own terms, whether canonical or non-canonical. Though she mentions that, upon reflection, she should have taken advantage of the many black voices whose texts were available at the time, part of the power of the essay comes from the fact that students shut out from my posh library reading room were taking Plato to task just as - probably more - effectively as any Denisonian on the hill. And they were connecting it with their lived experience, too.

But I'd taught discussion-based classes with lots of reading at OSU, and over and over again, and at the end of every term, I'd found myself wondering if those students left with the skills they were supposed to get from First-Year Writing. Or if, by stressing questioning texts over topic sentences, I'd left them at a disadvantage for the next writing assignment for the professor who didn't value insight as much as correctness, who preferred order to innovation?

At community college, that fear was multiplied ten-fold. So many of the students are under-prepared. My colleagues worry sometimes that this forces us into "teaching high school." I agree that we must hold our students to a college-level standard, but if they didn't get those bare bones essentials before now, this is it. Ten weeks to undo years of systemic inequality in public education. Who has time for Plato?

And yet...

Last quarter was the nadir of reading assignments in my classes. We read two things as a class - a how-to out of Booth, Columb & Williams' excellent The Craft of Research, and, near the end of the quarter, Orwell's "Politics and the English Language." Otherwise, students were reading on their own research topics. I wanted, too, to encourage them to pursue their own interests, rather than mine individually or English studies questions more generally. David Bartholomae, in "Inventing the University," would've pointed up the problem with that right away, had I recalled him: They don't yet know how to frame questions in academic discourse. They couldn't pursue their interests without knowing what that kind of pursuit looks like. Overall, they finished with good understandings of when and how to cite appropriately. But, their final papers showed, they had very little idea how to locate the salient points in the reading, less still how to effectively question authors with whom they disagreed. Though we spoke often, in abstract and with examples, about how to assess the quality of a source, several students seemed unable to differentiate between a bit of magazine fluff and a scholarly article, except to say that the latter was "too hard." But they had the skills to pay the bills. And no reason to ever get excited about reading a challenging piece again.

But on Orwell day, for just a minute, they'd gotten into it. They'd pointed at passages to support their interpretations. Some who disliked his snarky tone pointed out particularly nasty examples while others defended that tone as consonant with the principle he was arguing in the essay. They came to life. So there was hope.

This quarter, research writing has involved a lot more reading and discussion. We're not tackling Plato, but - quite unintentionally - several of the readings we've done have referenced Aristotle, and I like to think they'd all pass muster with Rich, were she to walk into my classroom. We're asking what academic argument should look like, what academic integrity means in a large sense, we're asking whether the skills to pay the bills actually do. (Today was my favorite, bell hooks day, in which we read a piece that calls academics to task for writing only to other academics instead of to the general public.) The readings bounce off each other, though they ask different questions from different points of view, using different methods. As a class, we're deciding which questions to pursue. (In fact, today, they went somewhere I didn't anticipate at all - connecting hooks not with authors who've discussed argument as oppressive or violent but instead with authors who've discussed the need for robust community conversations about ethics.) We're modelling research thinking, which I hope will result in research writing that is more than technically competent. The second half of the quarter they'll take a stab at their own topics, and I'll downshift again into the how-tos, hopefully having instilled some idea of the wherefores.

But still, I worry. Ironically, they struggled a lot with hooks' essay, making her point about writing for a wide audience seem hypocritical. These students have not been prepared to read well, even to read work that strives to be accessible. Maybe I should spend more time on reading comprehension, give quizzes rather than free-form discussions that sometimes leave students more confused than when they arrived. I still don't know what the best way to bridge the gap between bare bones practicality and "high falutin'" philosophizing would be. Walking someone who's starving into a cheese shop and waving St. Agur under his nose seems like not the best strategy...but maybe if nothing else it lets them know what the inside of the cheese shop is like, should they choose to go in again on their own terms.