Re-negotiating the borders and boundaries of composition

Editor's Notes

• #2 [Ron] I have a clear memory of attending a panel at Cs in 2006 with Amy Devitt, Anis Bawarshi and others on “Mediating Genres…” The Cs organizers hadn’t calculated the fervor because the presentation was in a small room overfilled to capacity. Even arriving early I found myself alternating between sitting on the floor and standing as I scribbled notes. For a few years genre theory was the lens by which I experienced teaching writing: Trimbur’s A Call to Write AND a course from Tom Huckin at the U of U in Discourse analysis. I knew there were other important theories of writing and ensuing critiques, but as a young community college faculty member it was invigorating and comforting to be squarely planted in genre theory land. Justin: Genre Theory Land . . . Genre, Genre Studies, Different Kinds of Texts. That do things in the world.
• #4 [Ron] For about four years, no longer a young faculty member, I’ve been engaged in our department’s discussions about Threshold Concepts. As many in the field, I’ve been particularly intrigued by Myer and Land’s notion of troublesome knowledge. And I wanted to tap into this moment, to use Yancey’s phrase this moment of “philosophical exchange [about] what we know.” Justin, a relatively new faculty member consolidated these discussions into a programmatic proposal; it was a welcome opportunity for me to support and follow because I’d had my time in the sun. I’d coordinated introductory composition through various textbook adoptions. Our current round of curricular innovation has given us a new lens by which to think about entrenched debates in our composition sequence. It’s been refreshing to recognize this TC moment and follow. But some department members have been concerned that the TCs identified in Naming… do not fully represent the diversity of the field nor address skill development and therefore are suspect. While I believe these concerns are worth conversation, I’m concerned when we become obsessed with finding the perfect pedagogy before we proceed. As Lynch indicates in After Pedagogy, “Our pedagogical conversation has been plagued by worries that the wrong pedagogy might inflict crippling habits of thought: Expressivism might render students unfit for rhetorical and social cooperation, social construction might disequip students from thinking for themselves…This anxiety….assumes we can draw a straight line from an approach to a result” (xix). After 25yrs of teaching I do not have these anxieties.
• #5 [Ron] So…have we at SLCC been able, as our title indicates, renegotiate the boundaries and borders of composition? Absolutely. One quick example: Clint Johnson, an adjunct faculty member, who through these renegotiations contributed various OER pieces on narrative writing--a rare opportunity for an adjunct faculty member. Most importantly, a creative writer himself, he was able to make an argument for narrative writing to the new breed of writing teacher with an undergraduate degree not in literature but in rhet comp. Consolidating our shared values in a set of TCs to guide curriculum development opened up this space. Our pedagogical experiment has been healthy for the dept. Even so, I find myself in tension with our recently minted TC framework. While I appreciate this new lens, I get anxious when any one pedagogical innovation is viewed as paradigm shift. Yet, simultaneously, I have no desire to make an argument about the ultimate validity of TCs or our particular iteration at SLCC. Rather I want to focus on how we negotiate the shifting terrain of ALL pedagogical frameworks and innovations, the boundaries and borders through the historical trajectory of a department and its members. I want a middle way. Returning to Lynch, “Process cannot reliably result in product; the revelations of critical pedagogy do not bring about revolution. The stable self is not there to be expressed, and the construction of the social does not sufficiently account for struggle. There is, in short, no pedagogical solution to composition’s troubled evolution” (preface xv). We would all agree in a boilerplate kind of way that there is no one solution. And, in this case, the very nature of TCs engages this complexity: troublesome knowledge and the recognition of the liminal, a push back on institutionally appropriated and over-simplified outcome goals, and a focus on metacognition.
• #6 [Ron] But, I must confess some of the rhetoric around TC theory…..troubles me. The discursive pressures, I presume, make some arguments for TC theory sound a bit grandiose, an unintended condescension and an occasional dismissal of past pedagogical frameworks such as the WPA outcomes.
• #7 [Ron] In 2017 I offered feedback on an article written at SLCC about TCs and assessment on what I saw was an unintentional exaggeration of the lack of cohesion in our comp sequence.
• #8 [Ron] And I find traces of this type of overstatement in Naming what we know, for example, where Downs and Robertson discuss the problematic nature of process and in doing so insist that they are “not referring simply to drafting, writing, revising, and editing, but instead to a more complicated question: how do…students believe texts come into being.”
• #9 [Ron] While I love the notion of “texts coming into being” I do not see this as insight unique to TC theory and I’d suggest a decade ago when we were sitting around a large conference table in a building (since now torn down) hashing out our SLCC version of the WPA outcome goals we too were not simply referring to drafting, revising, and editing. Still, even with these concerns, I see the TC wave as necessary, productive, and helpful in teaching students. But we can learn from the past. In Goldblatt’s “Don’t Call it Expressivism” he illustrates how expressivism has been oversimplified, arguing we should “[Recognize] that expressivism is not gone but woven into our present ways of understanding writers and writing, [adding] to our core strength as a discipline” (442). This meta-point is vital in thinking about the process of curricular innovation: something came before which is still woven into the present.
• #10 [Ron] I want a middle way where we are not threatened by new pedagogical frameworks simply because they are complex or we have questions, but also where we are not asked to pass a litmus test of belief. I will never have the fervor I experienced at that Cs presentation on genre theory in 2006. Tomorrow if I arrive at a packed session on TCs, I will probably quietly close the door and move onto another session. But come Monday morning I will be fully engaged with our current TC/OER moment at SLCC.