aggressive acts

There is a curious line that caught my attention in one of the supplemental readings, David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University.” On page 595, Bartholomae states that writing “is an act of aggression disguised as an act of charity.” I’ve never thought of writing in quite this manner. Sure, there can be writing that is aggressive, but can’t there also be charitable writing, or political writing, or romantic writing, or whatever? Doesn’t the author determine the function of a particular piece of writing? To make a blanket statement relegating all written communication to an act of aggression is an idea I couldn’t quite get my head around.

But then I thought of Bartholomae’s words in “Writing With Teachers:” “there is no writing without teachers.” So, drawing from this, if all writing is an act of aggression, then all writing instruction is instruction in aggression. Or, maybe, writing instruction is an inherently aggressive act. This idea, somewhat repellant to me as an English teacher who often looks at literacy instruction as liberation, made more sense upon reading Mina Shaughnessy’s “Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing.” Her point that academic writing is an elite, exclusionary discourse fits well with Bartholomae’s concept as writing as aggression. How much writing instruction is actually a chance for the teacher to point out the deficiencies in his or her students’ writing. To show, as Shaughnessy puts it, “what is wrong with students.”

It made me think about my own writing classes. How often have I made a student’s paper “bleed ink,” as Joyce so memorably put it, thinking that I was doing that student a favor? It would be very easy for this student to consider my interventions, as benevolent as they seemed to me, as aggressive and demeaning. This, it doesn’t need to be said, is the least of my goals as a writing instructor. Shaughnessy’s call to for the teacher to critically examine the hidden implications and power structures of writing instruction is essential.

Make prose, not war.

The teacher as tyrant

Having read the arguments and rebuttals of David Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, I can think of many threads that might be interesting to explore: the ability of writers to "own" their work, the ways in which social construction play into the writing process, how reading impacts the composition process, etc. In this post, however, I won't focus on these. Hopefully someone else will take up the discussion, or maybe it'll happen at the Union as we slap mosquitoes away from ourselves.

What I'd like to discuss, or rather start a discussion on, is the idea of authority in the teaching process. I'm choosing this topic partially because both Bartholomae and Elbow touch on it, albeit in different ways, but mainly because it dovetails nicely with an experience I had during the first day of my PEOPLE class. I started with an activity where students shared what their favorite piece of writing of all time was, and what made it so important to them. A student shared her experience writing a narrative about the last Christmas she spent with her grandparents. As a postscript to the discussion, she added that she got a bad grade on it. The class was outraged-- it was a story about her dead grandparents, after all-- and one student, in high dudgeon, said, "What gives teachers the right to say what writing is good and what isn't?" It's a somewhat obvious question to ask, in some ways, and one that I struggled with a lot in my first years of teaching as I tried to apply a grade to a student's essay or poem or story. But the question resonated with the class, and several of the students nodded in agreement, sharing the indignation over self-appointed experts deciding what counts as good writing.

It's a situation that both Elbow and Bartholomae touch on. It deals with writing as situated and author ownership, both illustrated by Bartholomae in his example of the student writing about divorce (p 66). But it also illuminates issues of power and authority in the classroom. The student in my example wrote her essay presumably because some teacher ordered her to write it, and received a grade because the school demanded that grades be given. Maybe it was supposed to be a research project, and the narrative about that memorable Christmas failed to meet the teacher's genre expectations. Maybe it was riddled with spelling and mechanical errors, and this particular teacher valued grammar and spelling above emotion and sentiment. In any event, the whole situation exists due to the teacher's authority to dictate the process of writing.

How would E & B respond to this? I think Bartholomae would say that what needs to be done is to acknowledge this authority: to deconstruct it, to examine its roots and limits, and to look at other forces-- gender, race, class-- that might be at play. This is the true work of academia, it would seem, at least according to Bartholomae.

Elbow, on the other hand, would advocate a surrender of the teacher's authority and power. He might recommend movement towards "non-instruction" (p 89), or maybe a form of instruction that frees up space for the student to explore language, memory, family, whatever, in the form the author finds suitable. Elbow says that he feels the need to "take out the grading pressure" (p 91). But, practically speaking, how can you do that in a typical public high school?

It's an interesting fragment of the larger debate between these two academics duking it out in very academic ways, and I'm not sure where exactly I stand on the issue. Perhaps I'll take ten minutes, but on some jazz music, light some incense, and do a nice, cathartic freewrite on the matter, see what comes out...

Opening salvo

Hey hey!

More intellectually stimulating blogs will be coming soon, but, in the meantime, please enjoy the following vintage clip of Reg Kehoe and His Marimba Queens. I play bass, and the bass player in this video is pretty much all I aspire to be.