After a nice five days in the mountains, I am returning to this electronic space to revise a draft of some of my reading. While it is true that the bulk of my time in the mountains was spent doing mountainy things, part of relaxing is having the time to read more of what I want to read. The last several weeks of any semester always take a toll on reading. Or should I say, reading anything other than student papers.

I read the bulk of Coming of Age: The Advanced Writing Curriculum. I say “the bulk of” because I have yet to read Sections III and IV which can only be found on the included CD-ROM. But, given that the concept of “the book” is still wedded to the printed page, I am willing to say I “read the book” while still quite aware that I have still have two sections of the book to read. In any case, the part of the book that I read has given me a whole lot to think about. As it turns out, I was in the mood for thinking about building, constructing, or, in that lovely neo-capitalist turn of phrase, “growing” our composition program.

snippets:

• On Lynn Bloom’s essay, “Advancing Composition” [in Coming of Age]

I thought it was telling that over the 50 years of discussions seeking to define “advanced composition,” she found that there was a consistent inability to come to a consensus concerning what “advanced composition” or the advanced composition curriculum is or should do. But what I found more interesting is that she notes that “The conventional academic faculty–not TAs and part-timers who teach freshman composition–with an academic orientation are the usual teachers of advanced composition” (Bloom 16); while at the same time, many of the courses and textbooks she surveyed were difficult to distinguish from the first year composition courses. Hogan’s survey of 311 American colleges and universities in 1980 and Shumaker, Dennis, and Green’s 1990 survey revealed at best little connection between “advanced” composition and the first year course (6, 12).

On the one hand, it makes sense why there would be little consensus among composition faculty at different institutions about what advanced composition is given the lack of an established “discipline” until fairly recently. However, what is more puzzling is the lack of connections between the first year course and the advanced course at each institution. That is, it seems puzzling that faculty would not thinking about the relationship between composition and advanced composition when they were creating the course.

That brings me back to the question: who is teaching composition? Bloom’s recognition that “conventional faculty” teach advanced composition, is also a recognition that “non-conventional faculty”–i.e. TAs and contingent faculty–are the one’s teaching composition at most colleges and universities. While certainly not a new observation, this fact only returns us to the unavoidable need of making labor issues an integral part of the construction of any undergraduate composition concentration/major. That is, I think one of the key reasons that there is a persistent disconnect between advanced composition and the first year course is because the same people are not teaching both courses.

And, frankly, the necessity to integrate labor issues into curricular development becomes even more so today. As Marc Bousquet so nicely lays out in How the University Works,

Thirty-five years ago, nearly 75 percent of all college teachers were tenurable; only a quarter worked on an adjunct, part-time, or non-tenurable basis. Today, those proportions are reversed. If you’re enrolled in four college classes right now, you have a pretty good chance that one of the four will be taught by someone who has earned a doctorate and whose teaching, scholarship, and service to the profession has undergone the intensive peer scrutiny associated with the tenure system. (Bousquet 2)

In this world, one can see those calls to “abolish” first year composition courses as an attempt to (as I have argued in another context) out-source service courses.

• Thomas Miller’s essay, “Rhetoric Within and Without Composition” [in Coming of Age]

Reading Miller’s essay felt, at times, like talking to a kindred spirit. I can’t count the number of times I’ve argued along similar lines. At the heart of his essay is a call for civic literacy: “This civic domain is the field of study that I hope rhetoric will reclaim as it expands its frame of reference beyond first-year composition courses” (39). Given that I want to leave campus and go home soon, I’m going to just post this longish passage from his essay that seems integral to developing our CRLS concentration:

A critical awareness of the process of constructing shared beliefs is essential to a civic philosophy of rhetoric that makes sense of what we value. The contradictions contained within this process mark the sites of controversy that can evoke a dialectical awareness of the negotiation of morals and mores. As students examine what is up for debate, how it was called into question, and why it is useful to view the debate from multiple standpoints, they can learn to value critical reflection as a means to practical action, rather than an end in itself. Students can develop this rhetorical stance by reflecting on their expectations about a text and its expectations about them, the experiences that validate and challenge those expectations, and the codifications of those experiences in discursive, moral, and social conventions. In other words, students can learn to question what is assumed, where those assumptions come from, and what gives them authority. If these are to be rhetorical questions, their answers must include action. Critical judgment is generally understood to be the end of inquiry within English departments, as elsewhere in the academy–which is, after all, a product of the Enlightenment–but our own tradition treats critical thinking as a prelude to practical action. (Miller 40, italics mine)

I’m checking out for the day.

Mostly cloudy with breaks of sun, 56 degrees.

The end of the semester is for the most part here. Students are finishing project, papers, and exams. And faculty are knee deep in grading. And as I sit at my desk reading and responding to student papers, I am having my android dreams of the robot army to come.

In particular, I am thinking about hybrids…cyborgs to be more precise. Cyborgs that cross disciplinary boundaries and who neither respect, nor desire, disciplinary fortifications. That does not mean that cyborgs are wishy-washy about their agenda or intellectual commitments. No, cyborgs just start from a different place.

In fact, the whole “literacies” family of CURLS robots is a little underdeveloped in the whole scheme of things. The more I think about it, the more I think that cyborgs are more fitting than robots when it comes to literacies. Take digital rhetorics/literacies, for example. On the one hand, we could develop a robot that would approach its task from the rhetoric angle–and do it quite well. However, digital writing/design bleeds into several other areas–even in the immediate family: desktop pub, info design, and media studies, for example. So, when thinking about designing a “digital rhetoric” robot, it would make more sense to turn to a cyborg.

Such a proposal will be tricky, though. After all, cyborgs do not exactly have a glowing reputation–think Blade Runner, Terminator, and, of course, the Borg–Donna Haraway notwithstanding. But an interesting way of approaching the task at hand, methinks. Diversify the robot army.

Yes, it’s the end of the semester.

Yes, I’m punchy.

Sunny skies, low humidity, 78 degrees.

We just got word yesterday that Democracies to Come is in press! Woo Hoo!! It’s been a long road for sure. Word has it that we will have copies in about a month. Major props go to the production crew at Lexington/Rowman & Littlefield for moving our book to production so quickly once we finished all the final editing.

If you’re interested, here’s a excerpt from the Lexington page for our book:

Democracies to Come: Rhetorical Action, Neoliberalism, and Communities of Resistance draws upon a variety of contemporary sites and moments (e.g. IMF/World Bank protests, writing emerging from social movements in struggle against neoliberalism, classroom praxis, postcolonial literature, student activism) to explore new relationships—pedagogical, emotional, affective, and social—that can be the basis of political and social organizing. Approaching pedagogy as a space of learning, Democracies to Come argues that pedagogy becomes a cultural force for democracy in its own right, a cultural literacy, which intervenes in a multiplicity of systems, institutions, cultural formations, and constituencies.

I’m just so excited. Now I can move on to finishing my paper for RSA next month in Seattle…and I promised Seth to have a book chapter description to him by the end of the weekend. This is just the little push I needed to jump into writing…er, after planting flowers, going to a birthday party for my friend’s kid, and soaking in this wonderful day.

Now, this is enough to start the week off right. If you didn’t click “this,” then you should definitely click here to check out the “pre-pub discount” for Democracies to Come!!!! It’s been a long road, but Rachel and I are finally hitting the bookstores.

After my post in response to Tony Scott’s article I decided to go back and take a look at Kathleen Blake Yancey’s article, “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key.” To be honest, I don’t think I read her article when it came out in CCCs in 2004 in part because I saw most of her Keynote Address at CCCCs in San Antonio–and that was what was published in CCCs. So, I made the mistake of not reading her article back then…but I am glad I did now.

Before I get ahead of myself, I want to say that I fully agree with Scott’s concern that Yancey’s proposal for “Composition in a New Key,”

doesn’t mention the circumstances under which first-year composition is typically taught: it doesn’t mention contingent teaching labor, or the fact that professional scholars with Ph.D.s in rhetoric and composition don’t actually teach the overwhelming majority of first-year composition classes. If professionals in rhetoric and composition who are in a position to do so “carry forward” from first-year composition, will it be as managers and theorizers of a project that further expands the de-professionalization of teaching in academia? (83).

I think Scott is dead on when he insists that any re-imagining of composition cannot be divorced from discussions of material resources. I would hope that compositionists–especially compositionists–take to heart the long and problematic history of staffing composition classes with adjuncts and temporary faculty members and the the work of compositionists such as Eileen Schell, Patricia Lambert Stock, Bruce Horner, Jim Zebroski, and Nancy Mack who have brought the struggle for equitable working conditions and labor organizing into the mainstream discussion of our field. However, in my mind Scott is right to continue to insist because in the absence of pressure, I’d put my money on a convenient “forgetting” of labor issues.

Having said that, however, I’ve got to say that Scott’s response underscores what I see as a persistent problem “we” on comp/rhet left (and the left in general, I think) have in terms of how we engage in critique. In particular, how begin re-thinking proposals/possibilities through a lens that refuses a separations between the curricular/scholarly proposals and the material conditions of labor. Let me see if I can tease this one out.

In Scott’s response to Yancey’s proposal he reads her proposal as “avoiding” institutional factors, in particular, the resources that would be necessary to staff her proposed curriculum. Scott is rightly concerned that without addressing the issue directly, the fall-back position will be to (re)create and reinforce a two-tiered labor system–where the first-year course is staffed by adjuncts. It’s the next step that bothers me.

Yes, Scott looks to getting rid of the first-year course as a possibility (I addressed my objections to this in my previous post). But that is only part of the issue. The issue is that there is a qualitative shift in Scott’s approach to “problem”–one that only reproduces the split between a “scholarly perspective” and a “labor perspective.” To overstate and simplify the issue, we could say that Scott uses “material conditions” as a way to eliminate the possibility of Yancey’s proposal. Further, Yancey is positioned as and “elite,” divorced from the “real” conditions of labor. She is in her ivory tower in, well, the ivory tower. Scott, thus, contributes to a gap–a dissonance-filled communication gap–that makes any synthesis of Scott’s argument and Yancey’s proposal all the more difficult. In that gap qualifications sound like corporate PR; attention to working conditions sounds like entrenched self-interest. In short, positing material working conditions against scholarship and curriculum reinforces the mental/manual, scholarship/teaching binary that defines our mental maps of academic (and all) work.

What I want to suggest is that there are other ways of responding that speak to other possibilities–not only in terms of responding to concrete proposals, but in terms of how we discursively and materially (re)construct political communities. Put another way, the way Scott responds to Yancey is also a text that we need to read unless we are fine with the way things are. Which brings me back to my recent reading of Yancey’s article.

Frankly, I think much of what she argues is right on the money–in particular, her framing of the proliferation of digital communication as the technological companion of an emerging (or an already emerged) writing public calling to mind the emergence of a reading public in the 19th Century. It’s worth remembering that Habermas’s careful study of the emergence of this public sphere was a study of the emergence of a bourgeois public sphere. Likewise, we need to keep in mind that the writing public that Yancey identifies might be better positioned as a new bourgeois writing public…or some such formulation…given that there is a high access bar when it comes to affording and becoming fluent in digital literacies. Nonetheless, I do think the attention Yancey is drawing to a fundamental shift in literacy practices is critical to engage as composition and rhetoric folks.

What I find critical is the fact that Yancey wants us to pay attention to (calling to mind Cindy Selfe and Gail Hawisher) the fact that emerging literacies and emerging writing publics did not need our ask for our (compositionists) advice. Like Habermas’s publics, they did not ask for permission (which reminds me once again how right Harry Cleaver is in his re-reading of Marx’s understanding of capital as a social relation). As Yancey argues,

like the members of the newly developed reading public, the members of the writing public have learned–in this case, to write, to think together, to organize, and to act withing these forums–largely without instruction and, more to the point here, largely without our instruction (301).

Yancey argues that if we are to recognize and take seriously the kind of seismic shift the emergence of these writing publics represent and the kind of composing they are doing, not only do we need to think differently about the kind of writing we do in the classroom, we also have to rethink what we mean by writing and composition. As as of this writing, for what it’s worth, I think she’s right.

Then the question: What is to be done?

And here is where we return to Scott’s concern with labor. Our current two-tiered (or three-tiered once you start making a distinction between “adjuncts” and “term appointment” faculty) system, after all, is the industrial model of literacy instruction, or better, how the previous “print revolution” was institutionalized. If we don’t listen to Scott, we will, for sure, repeat the pattern for our post-industrial institutionalization of these emerging writing publics. However, Scott’s response to Yancey could be read as a defense of the current system–or, worse, a desire to hold on to a nostalgic vision of the past. Anyone who works in the labor movement is all to familiar with this charge.

What I want to suggest is that the question we need to be asking–proactively–is how to construct a curriculum that articulates curricular change with equitable labor conditions? Or better, how can we “see” through a lens that does not pit labor against curriculum, scholarship, and ideas? In my mind, Yancey poses a problem for us–in the Freirian sense. If we are to accept our creative capacities (again, Cleaver’s summary of the development of an autonomous marxist tradition in the introduction to Reading Capital Politically is floating through my brain), then it becomes important to enact those creative capacities in our critiques as a discursive practice of solidarity. That is, if I am compelled by Yancey’s argument enough to entertain the implications of her argument (and I believe Scott is), then I can join with her in generating possible ways of organizing our response. Instead of only drawing attention to the gaps and silences, I could be compelled to deepen the discussion.

Now, you might object that Scott does this through his suggestion that we consider dropping the first-year course. However, in my mind that suggestion only reproduces the labor problem that he draws attention to, as I argued earlier, by effectively outsourcing the labor of first-year composition to high schools or, more likely, private companies.

It would be more productive to say, “hey, I like what you have to say, but I have some concerns about reproducing a tiered labor system. Let’s see if we can strategies about how to both respond to these new developments and rectify labor inequities all at once. Not “both/and,” but rather “as one,” that is, as they actually exist–interconnected, inseparable, organically linked. That’s interesting.

So, that’s got me thinking about concrete, programmatic approaches to Yancey’s article. At some point I hope to share some of these ideas here…even as I know that my current idea buds will look very different as I work through this more. But, realizing that I am writing too much again, I’ll stop for the moment :-). I need to go and check out InkWork.

I just read Tony Scott’s, “The Cart, the Horse, and the Road They are Driving Down: Thinking Ecologically about a New Writing Major,” from the Spring 2007 issue of Composition Studies. On the forth page in, I actually wrote, “hmmm…you interest me, sir.” Whatever. I do that.

Anyway, my point of logging back on tonight and writing is because I found myself with Scott, then arguing with him (OK, with his article). Back and forth the whole way. Scott’s article takes issue with Kathleen Blake Yancey’s 2004 CCCCs chairs address–in particular the lack of a consideration of labor when thinking about developing new undergraduate writing majors. Scott recounts Yancey’s proposal for “new writing majors” as follows:

Yancey proposed a major that emphasizes the ability to adapt to new trends in technology, and rhetoric as situated action. Yancey’s proposal realizes that emerging digital technologies are dramatically changing literacy and that academic writing is increasingly disconnected from the shape that writing is taking virtually everywhere other than classrooms. Postmodern in content and form, the proposal blends visual rhetoric with a creative style of explication, and resists framing the major itself in terms of what one might call traditional disciplinary content (83).

Scott calls attention to Yancey’s focus on circulation–in particular, her desire to have a range of “approaches” to composition “all oriented to the circulation of texts, to genre, to media, and to ways that writing gets made, both individually and culturally” (Yancey, qtd in Scott, 83).

While Scott is sympathetic to Yancey’s interest in grounding a writing major around the concept of circulation (he raises questions–good ones–about how we should theorize circulation), he points out a serious gap in Yancey’s proposal: Labor.

While I certainly find aspects of Yancey’s proposal very engaging and reflective of current scholarly concerns, her avoidance of institutional factors–of the material terms of labor that frame everyday writing pedagogy and the production of students’ texts–is crucial. This avoidance becomes especially salient when Yancy asserts that “First-year composition is a place to begin carrying this [major] forward…” (315). The proposal doesn’t mention the circumstances under which first-year composition is typically taught: it doesn’t mention contingent teaching labor, or the fact that professional scholars with Ph.D.s in rhetoric and composition don’t actually teach the overwhelming majority of first-year composition classes. If professionals in rhetoric and composition who are in a position to do so “carry forward” from first-year composition, will it be as managers and theorizers of a project that further expands the de-professionalization of teaching in academia? (83).

Bread and roses, brother. Seriously. I got my union up. This is exactly the kind of critique that needs to be made of any proposal for a new writing major. As a matter of fact, that is the critique I made of the proposal for a new General Education curriculum not to long ago here. The idea of a new General Education curriculum like a new writing major is great in the abstract. But what happens when you consider issues of labor? The question I raised to then-provost Rinker was “how will we staff an additional 95 sections of a new General Education course?” No answer. In fact, as it turns out, several key articles in the General Education Restructuring Team’s toolbox argued that any attempts to reform General Education curriculum should avoid discussing any issues of resources. Why? Well, you know, that would lead to “turf wars.” My question was aimed at dealing with the question of content and resources as inextricably linked. But I digress (and will do so again later). [note: this is the importance of “having the fight.” That is, not of “giving up” FYC, but staking a claim around issues of labor]

After a very useful discussion of activity theory and marxist theories of circulation, Scott returns to his focus on labor: composition programs–even those programs that have become well established, Ph.D. granting departments–still rely heavily upon contingent labor. Despite the fact that comp/rhet argues furiously for the importance of writing, we still staff the majority of our first-year courses with contingent faculty.

So, the $64,000 question: what is to be done?

And here is where I end up arguing out-loud with the pages in my hands. Here’s where Scott leads us:

Institutional transformation is necessarily local and varied, so eroding the numbers of courses taught by people who don’t hold full professional status will involve a number of measures, perhaps including abandoning the first-year requirement. The issues of “abolition” and situated administrative pragmatism are well-covered and beyond the scope of this essay, but with the development of a variety of classes staffed by fully-vested professional teachers, we might see letting go of first-year composition programs in their present incarnations as liberating. Rhetoric and composition might be able to move into a post-writing program era. Professionals in rhetoric and composition can then get out of the business of teacher management, and postsecondary writing pedagogy can be less constrained by technocratic mechanisms, such as mandatory syllabi and textbooks, and coercive assessments of teachers and student texts. More writing classes can be taught under conditions that enable professionally informed divergence and experimentation in pedagogy (90).

What’s my beef? Well, it’s what’s bypassed by giving up on first-year composition. First, there’s the issue about the purpose of the course and the reason why it is supposed to exist–”supposed to” in the pedagogically sound version, not as the “gatekeeper.” But, more to the point of Scott’s argument, the issue of labor does not go away. Instead of an organizing campaign to unionize contingent faculty, we get downsizing and lay-offs. And, I would argue, we get further de-professionalization insofar as the needs of our students do not go away with the “abolition” of the first-year course. More likely than not the work of tutoring–both through colleges and universities and new on-line writing labs–will be contracted out. When Nike rose as one of the “super brands” it hired the best and the brightest to “build the brand” and engage in “quasi-spiritual marketing,” to use Naomi Klein’s term. But those folks did not make the shoes. Production was contracted out. Out of sight, out of mind.

I get concerned about these kind of moves insofar as the alternative of organizing contingent faculty and/or organizing to take back higher education from the logic of the market fades away. Perhaps I will see this differently in the morning when I am not so tired and my fingers and wrists are not burning with carpal tunnel. I just didn’t want to lose these thoughts in my sleep.

OK, this is a quick one…a little discursive bit harvested from a facebook site “Kutztown University Needs to Change.” This site was created by a couple of students who decided it was better to organize than just sit around and complain.  A noble idea, no?  One might even call it active citizenship.  As of this post, that facebook group has 1,118 members.  Not bad for a week old…ahh, digital activism.

Anyway, a couple of days ago a Kutztown University administrator joined the group and has been responding pretty regularly to the students…mostly in the form of “you need to understand how the university works.”  One of his posts from earlier today is my nugget for today:

Just some suggestions. Before you go asking for changes on your main points, you need to make sure that you understand where the University is now, that you are being reasonable and rational in your approach, and that you aren’t asking for wants and desires rather than just needs. Wants and desires are the things you’d like to have if possible, needs are those things that are required out of necessity. For example, I want and desire a new Harley, but I don’t need it to get to work (and my wife won’t let me have one anyway). So, if I base my whole outlook on getting that Harley, I will be disappointed, even though I can still get to work. It is similar with this University. We aren’t Harvard or Yale. We don’t have a gigantic endowment. Our tuition and fees are low compared to Penn Sate and surrounding State public schools. Therefore, sometimes we are only going to be able to give what is needed, not what is wanted or desired.

“We are only going to be able to give what is needed, not what is wanted or desired.”  Nice move.  Notice the movement in this argument…the movement suggests that the space of needs is narrow.   And, I would argue, the administration is best positioned to determine what are needs and what are desires.  KU is positioned next to Harvard and Yale to frame “endowments” and to Penn State and “surrounding state public schools” to frame “tuition.”  Interesting.  One could wonder, justly I think, what can actually be changed?  That is, we are both NOT privileged ivy league schools.  And, “we” are GENEROUS with our tuition.

I am too tired at the moment to really work this though…but this is another piece to the argument that is being worked out locally.  One of the little pieces I am working on right now is called “Shut up and Teach!”  Perhaps, the nugget above is a piece of reasonable neoliberal discipline?  Echoes of the World Bank at moments.  More, so much more to write.

One of my colleagues forwarded an article to the faculty listserv today that talks about the creeping of management discourse into discussions of education. The BBC article, “Lesson One: No Orwellian Language,” references a new report, “Issues Paper 6: Aims and Values,” published by the British Nuffield Review of 14-19 Education and Training. Quite interesting in terms of drawing attention to the connection between language and practice.

After I posted here last night, I wandered over to the No Confidence blog to poke around in the comments. I found some interesting comments…most notably this one:

Dr. Mahoney, you ARE a liar. Regardless of your protestations otherwise and the philosophical dribble you use as a smoke screen to your true self, the raw, true facts are that you are a prevericator to the nth degree. You exaggerate, overstate, mistate, and lie. Your perceptions are skewed and it would appear that you have not visited any other institution of higher education (and especially not any other PASSHE campus)in the last ten years to see the state of affairs at those campuses, else you would not whine, yes WHINE to the level that you do. You are out of touch with reality, happily cocooned in your web of deceit and protected by the long outdated concept of “tenure”, which allows you not just “academic freedom”, but freedom to participate in the wanton desruction of the very institution which affords you these priveleges. You and your elitist academic “brothers and sisters” of APSCUF gave up your rights to governance by joining a collective bargaining unit. Governance is the act of shared management of an institution of higher education; by its very definition, a union is not management, thus, how can you claim the right to participate in the management of it? You have no responsiblity or accountability, your union mentality makes you merely destructive parasites with nothing but entitlement as your moniker. One can only hope that if nothing else results from this APSCUF created crisis, that you and your ilk are exposed for what you truly are.

February 18, 2008 9:03 PM

Funny…that was right after I was writing about my lack of funding for conferences. I guess I’m just a whiner after all.

The whole discussion on the No Confidence blog has been interesting for the kind of arguments that are made…overtly and by implication as well. Frankly, I expect these kind of personal attacks…I think anyone with any activist experience learns to expect that when you work for any kind of change, the first line of attack is generally personal. If you are thin-skinned or take offense easily, activism and advocacy will take a heavy toll.

As I may have mentioned before, I am working on writing a class called “Rhetoric, Democracy, Advocacy.” The kind of exchange I am having with “Harry Potter” and “anonymous” may very well make it onto the syllabus. I think these kind of everyday moments are absolutely critical to work on. After all, these are the kind of exchanges that affect activists and advocates on a direct, often personal level. But, even more so, they point to the “micro-negotiations of hegemony” and how specific discursive formations are policed and disciplined. In a very real sense, these exchanges offer a chance to understand how hegemony is maintained.

Here is part of my exchange with “anonymous”:

What you seem to be arguing is that the only people who have any right to work for positive change are those living/working in the most destitute conditions. Only the poorest of the poor, mistreated of the mistreated, have any right to call for change. Everyone else in your argument seems to lose their right to work for a better world. And by “better world” I do not mean utopia. I just mean leaving the world a better place.

We might be able to group “anonymous’s” response more broadly under the category of “love-it-or-leave-it.” But, it becomes important, I think, to make the assumptions of the argument explicit so it is possible to respond to the core of the argument. I think too many times the temptation is to respond to the personal attack with a counter attack. In my mind, that is one of the things the first attack is supposed to do.

Anyway, just a few thoughts before work. That’s right…I still go to work, even when I do not have to teach, despite my whining.