Composition Politics - Behind The Writing Problem At California State University Northridge

COMPOSITION POLITICS: BEHIND THE WRITING PROBLEM AT CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY NORTHRIDGE

by HOWARD STANLEY RYAN

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Arlington in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

MASTER OF ARTS IN ENGLISH

THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON June 1990

Copyright © by Howard Stanley Ryan 1990 All Rights Reserved Contact the author at [email protected].

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COMPOSITION POLITICS: BEHIND THE WRITING PROBLEM AT CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY NORTHRIDGE

The members of the Committee approve the masters thesis of Howard Stanley Ryan

Victor J. Vitanza Supervising Professor

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Michael Feehan

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Kenneth M. Roemer

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CONTENTS

ABSTRACT

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PREFACE

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PART I:

THE CSUN STUDY

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IS THERE A WRITING PROBLEM AT CSUN?

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WHY AREN'T CSUN STUDENTS WRITING BETTER?

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HOW TYPICAL IS CSUN? A NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE .

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SOLVING THE WRITING PROBLEM: EDUCATING, ORGANIZING

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PART II: 5. NOTES

CRITIQUE OF THE CSUN STUDY MODERN COMPOSITION AND POLITICAL VISIONS

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WORKS CITED

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LIST OF TABLES Table 1. CSUN Faculty Opinion of Student Writing

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Table 2. Required Writing Preparation of Future Teachers Table 3. WPE Failure Rates

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ABSTRACT

COMPOSITION POLITICS: BEHIND THE WRITING PROBLEM AT CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY NORTHRIDGE Publication No. _______ Howard Stanley Ryan, M.A. The University of Texas at Arlington, 1990 Supervising Professor:

Victor J. Vitanza

Outmoded "current-traditional" teaching methodologies, and the second-class status of composition faculty and programs, may be contributing to students' writing problems at CSUN, my 1988 study found.

Proposed reforms include the wider introduction of contemporary "process"

pedagogies, better conditions for composition faculty and administrators, and replacement of the Upper Division Writing Proficiency Examination with a required discipline-specific writing course. A 1990 follow-up chapter critiques the technocratic view of pedagogy that informed my CSUN study, and which also informs the modern composition field generally.

The search for better

instructional methods must begin with an articulation of larger educational and social purposes. In modern composition, five general models of social purpose are observable: utility, individual growth, individual mobility, collaborative growth, collective empowerment.

Composition theorists and

practitioners should strive to be aware of our social goals and assumptions, and seek consistency between our values and our pedagogies.

5 PREFACE I worked as a writing consultant/tutor in spring 1988 for a fledgling writing-across-thedisciplines program at California State University Northridge (CSUN), a 29,000-student campus in the north of Los Angeles. The pilot program was initiated in response to a widely perceived problem of student writing performance. In particular, many departments are worried about the numbers of their students failing the Upper Division Writing Proficiency Examination (WPE) , a one-hour essay test required for graduation.

The WPE failure rate has risen steadily each year, reaching an

enormous 32.5 percent in 1986-87. In view of the apparent size of the writing problem, the writingacross-the-disciplines program seemed paltry, even as a pilot endeavor.

It involved only five

teachers, who attended workshops on teaching writing led by freshman composition director Thia Wolf; in addition, four of us "consultants" met individually with the participants' students, helping them with their writing assignments. Thia Wolf told me she had asked for a much more comprehensive program, modeled after one she had observed at the University of California, Santa Barbara. UCSB had created a separate department offering writing courses across a range of disciplines--legal writing, business writing, technical writing. The program also runs writing-intensive components attached to existing courses in various departments. The cost of that program is $4-500,000 a year. Wolf's more modest version would have cost $250,000.

She received only $30,000, with projected incremental increases.

"What I got," says Wolf, "was a model we had discussed over the summer and thrown out as almost completely useless. [The administration] felt it was what they could afford."*

* All quoted comments from CSUN faculty, students, and administrators are taken from personal interviews listed in the works cited section.

6 The broad gap between what was requested and what the university felt it could provide to expand writing instruction led me to a series of questions: How committed is the university to teaching students to write? What exactly would be needed for a quality writing program? What are the obstacles to getting those needs met?

Pursuing these questions led me to many more

questions. I came to see the complexities of a university writing program, and how the requirements for writing reform were not only pedagogical, but economic and political. In summer 1988, I wrote up my findings as an independent study: students were being cheated, teachers exploited, and CSUN's writing situation was but a manifestation of national school and college trends. Writing programs needed to be geared to the new understandings of writing and learning processes growing from modern composition research. Composition teachers needed a democratic voice in their departments, salaries and conditions conducive to quality instruction, and support for in-service training and professional involvement. The use of proficiency tests as a guarantor of student writing achievement needed to be replaced by more and better writing instruction across the disciplines. These and other reforms required strong funding, and called for the political mobilization of composition teachers--initially at the campus level, finally at state and national levels, in concert with other teachers and other social movements, demanding a shift in spending priorities away from the military and toward education and social needs. Since the time of my CSUN study, my more critical exposure to the composition field at The University of Texas at Arlington has supported many of my proposals, but helped me see how my view of writing pedagogy reflected a technocratic perspective that was not in keeping with the otherwise radical politics of my study. My purpose here is to present the CSUN study as a critique of a "current-traditional" writing program that is quite typical of American college writing programs. An additional fifth chapter will critique this critique by placing under scrutiny the leading modern composition trends that guided the technocratic shortcomings of my CSUN study. I will argue that any approach to the teaching of writing implies politics and ideology, that writing teachers should be aware of their ideologies and develop pedagogies consistent with their philosophical-social beliefs.

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My concluding chapter, then, is a self-correcting one that embraces a liberatory pedagogy consistent with my own politics and vision of social change. I wish to express my appreciation to the many staff and faculty members and students at CSUN who made my study possible by sharing with me their frustrations with and hopes for the university's writing programs.

I am particularly indebted to Thia Wolf for fueling my interest in

composition, for teaching me about compassionate writing instruction through her own example, and for meeting with honesty, clarity, and endurance my endless stream of questions about campus writing politics.

In UT Arlington's rhetoric program, I encountered a questioning, theoretically

"sub/versive" environment that helped me achieve a critical distance toward the composition field. I would like to thank Victor Vitanza, Michael Feehan, and Kenneth Roemer for helping to create that critical environment, and for guiding my thesis to fruition. In Dr. Vitanza, I enjoyed the aid of a consummate adviser who, even while disagreeing with me on various fundamentals, confirmed the value of my project and insisted on my very best work. I thank the University of Chicago Press for permission to use illustrations from Critical Teaching and Everyday Life, copyright © 1980 by Ira Shor.

8 CHAPTER 1 IS THERE A WRITING PROBLEM AT CSUN?

Identifying a "writing problem" is itself problematic, since any standard we apply is to some degree arbitrary: absolute standards for good writing do not exist. Nevertheless, for the present discussion, we will define a writing problem along lines suggested by the National Assessment of Education Progress, i.e., that a piece of writing is problematic or deficient insofar as it fails to achieve the purpose intended by the writer (Applebee, Langer, and Mullis). In a college context, students bring many and varied purposes to their writing, but certainly one universal purpose is to produce what the students believe is academic writing.

Students want to produce papers that their professors will certify as college-

appropriate; students want to get A's. At CSUN, the student's ability to produce academic writing is officially measured and certified during their junior or senior year by the Upper Division Writing Proficiency Examination. The exam's annual pass/fail rate has become the campus index of the student population's overall writing performance. Unfortunately, the WPE has major flaws as a test of writing ability. While the 32.5 percent failure rate may indicate a large writing deficiency, this figure has questionable correspondence to students' writing performance in classrooms or other contexts. In fact, the WPE's model of writing may actually be contributing to the university's writing problems. The exam is "a throwback to the kind of writing we used to do in English classes before we knew anything about the composing process," says Thia Wolf, who heads the writing lab responsible for counseling students preparing for, or who have failed, the WPE. "One hour leaves no time for revision, or really even any prewriting. There's no chance to make a topic your own." One of the key advances of modern composition over traditional conceptions is its view of writing as a process--planning, writing, rethinking, rewriting. The WPE does not reflect this understanding. I interviewed six students who had failed the WPE three or more times. The exam's time limit was a major complaint. A finance major, who had attempted his seventh WPE on the day of our interview, describes his normal routine for writing school papers:

I would write out all my thoughts in the first draft. Second draft I go over and try to put it into more of a sentence structure that's understandable. Third draft I'm going in and correcting all

9 the run-on sentences and phrases. Fourth draft I'm correcting punctuation. That's my standard way of writing for all business courses, all the papers I've ever had to turn in. I asked if he didn't also have to write in-class essay tests under time pressure, as with the WPE. He replied: "It's not the same, because you're going in prepared. You know the topic, you've been studying it for hopefully the last month, and you know what's going to be on the test." In the short time provided, the WPE expects students to write on subjects they may know nothing about, or to produce a type of writing to which they are unaccustomed, such as personal description or philosophical-cultural reflection. The exam is coordinated by the chair of the English department, and its bias toward students of the humanities is quite clear. Two interviewees reported understandable difficulty with the following essay topic: "America is a great country because it has assimilated all cultures through one central language, English." --Theodore Roosevelt "America in the 1980's is a multi-lingual country, and all of its teachers should be at least bilingual--if not trilingual." --Alfred Toffler Write an essay in which you: --examine the validity of each quotation; --present your opinion on this matter. (Larson 1987) Literature or philosophy students may be prepared to tackle this kind of question; many are used to responding to ideas or texts with pages of social speculation.

Not so for students of science or

business. A nutrition major, three-time loser on the WPE, describes his dilemma: "They want a certain way of English. I haven't been taught this way--I don't know what they want. I have to guess and try to give them what they want. I'm from a scientific background." Before returning to college to study nutrition, this student had worked internationally as an agronomist. He showed me samples of his writing in the field, including an article of fine quality published in a scientific journal. The WPE is clearly not an accurate measure of his writing ability. WPE essay topics also reflect a cultural bias that is unfair to foreign-born students. Nearly onefourth of the 7,309 students sitting for the exam in the 1986-87 academic year were identified as non-

10 native speakers of English by exam readers; 58.9 percent of the non-native speakers failed the exam. The failure rate of students less familiar with English will naturally be higher than for native speakers. But the WPE regularly asks students to address issues of American culture--advertising, freeways, the melting pot, the state lottery--which are bound to pose problems for the foreign-born student. One student attending a special WPE preparatory class put it simply: "Why don't they ask us questions about Japanese culture?"1 Although the WPE's annual report claims that "accessibility of the topic for all students is the major criterion for the use of any topic for the WPE," this is evidently not borne out in practice (Larson 1987: 4). Since the WPE could not provide reliable information about student writing performance, I decided to consult the students themselves. Through a fourteen-item questionnaire distributed to a broad sampling of majors and class levels in selected general education courses, I sought students' opinion of their own writing and their assessment of the quantity and quality of writing instruction the university provides them. Two key questions elicited interesting, and somewhat jarring, results. When asked, "As a result of your education, do you consider yourself a skilled and competent writer of English?" 210 students responded as follows: Definitely not:

1.0%

Improving, but not quite competent:

11.4

Reasonably competent:

56.7

Very competent:

29.5

Not sure:

1.4

To the question, "Overall, do you believe this university provides satisfactory writing instruction?" 195 students responded: Probably not:

3.1%

Definitely not: 12.3

Probably yes:

74.4%

Definitely yes: 10.3

We find that 86.2 percent of the respondents consider their writing "reasonably competent" or "very competent." Further, a strong 84.7 percent believe the university "probably" or "definitely" provides satisfactory writing instruction. These results certainly do not support the continuing gripes one hears

11 from instructors about the sorry state of student writing, nor the periodic official calls made for more and better writing instruction. From the students' point of view, the writing situation at CSUN is basically fine. We should temper this by pointing out that 42 students added comments at the end of the questionnaire criticizing various aspects of the school's writing program, and 30 of these critical commenters had judged the writing instruction as satisfactory overall. The most common criticism was that more writing should be assigned or more writing courses required: "We do not do enough writing to prepare us for the WPE. I also think we should have more essay exams." Several complained about their freshman composition course: "All freshman comp did for me was show me how to write a formula essay, such as will help me pass the WPE. It in no way challenged or stimulated my creativity or intellect." One may question why so many of the students who commented critically still gave the university's writing offerings an overall satisfactory mark. But the survey's thrust is unavoidable: CSUN students believe they are writing competently and receiving satisfactory writing instruction. My survey's results are partly confirmed by a student survey reported in CSUN's Daily Sundial, 11 May 1988: 100 of 113 students, or 88.5 percent, said they were satisfied with the teaching in general at CSUN (Cole). The results of my student survey were unsettling. I had set out to discover why CSUN suffered a writing problem, and now the students were telling me there was no problem.

What could we

conclude? Either the students were right, and many people on campus are sounding a false alarm on the writing question; or the students were wrong and need better information about the quality of their writing and the quality of their education. Suspecting the latter was true, I undertook a faculty survey. I obtained statistics on the number of students in each major and proportioned my faculty respondents in rough accordance; so, for example, there were 23 respondents from the huge school of business, but only 1 from the small geology department. Warned that a mailing survey would get a low response, I knocked on office doors instead. I kept the survey simple by limiting my questions to one: "How many of your students are writing as college students should be writing?" Responses ranged from 5 percent by a biology professor to 100 percent by a history professor; 81 responses produced an average of 42.8 percent. The faculty see a big writing problem: they believe that less than half their students are meeting college standards. I should add that I asked faculty to restrict their estimates to undergraduate

12 courses--all but two in my student survey were undergraduates, and I wanted my faculty survey to address a similar group for comparison.

Also, to maintain my proportionate sampling across the

majors, I asked the faculty who teach general education courses to address their response to classes attended primarily by majors in the teacher's department. The faculty had a lot to say about student writing, most not complimentary. My visits were at the end of the semester. Many teachers were working through stacks of final exams and term papers, and were obviously pleased for a chance to air their frustrations. Here are some sample comments, along with each teacher's department or school, and survey reponse: The writing quality and analytic ability are disintegrating before my eyes. It's really scary. (Sociology, 50%) Only 20 percent can write up to standards I would apply if I were hiring them as engineers. (Engineering, 20%) When I suggest they go to the Learning Resource Center, they'll say, "I'm a graduating senior--I'll never have to write again." (Psychology, 10%) The papers I receive are messy, poorly organized. Most of my students can't develop an idea or thesis. (Radio-Television-Film, 35%) They can't write complete sentences. The spelling is atrocious. I've always tried to teach good writing, but I'm not sure I made a dent. Maybe you can. (Business professor preparing to retire, 25%) I did receive a few positive comments, of which the following was most notable: The quality of writing has improved in the last five-ten years. This applies to my general education courses also. There's more awareness of the need to write well, and I think the WPE has influenced this. (History, 100%) There were also several faculty who gave estimates in the 75 to 85 percent range but who added little comment, though a few of these explained, "Most of my students are seniors." But a clear faculty consensus holds that a majority of students are not writing as college students should write. While faculty notions of what constitutes good writing may certainly be called into question, the faculty are a

13 highly literate group who read and evaluate volumes of student papers, and their concern about the quality of student writing must be taken seriously. If we define the college writing problem in terms of whether students are meeting generally accepted academic conventions, my survey is a significant indicator of a widespread writing problem at CSUN.2

14 CHAPTER 2 WHY AREN'T CSUN STUDENTS WRITING BETTER?

Behind the student writing problem at CSUN lies an instructional problem that is shared by schools and colleges nationally, and which is attributable in large part to a traditional conception of composition that still prevails in most writing classrooms. Traditional composition instruction attends to the clarity and correctness of writing products, rather than to idea-generating writing processes. Influenced by a positivist epistomology that sees the writer as an oberver and recorder of "objective knowledge" that pre-exists outside the writer, traditional composition leaves little room for discovery and the making of new knowledge within the writing process itself (Knoblauch and Brannon).

Good

editorship and adherence to pre-assigned structures is given more importance than the development of meaningful content. Students learn to avoid errors in grammar and usage; the less advanced the class, the greater the emphasis on basic writing mechanics. Students follow the writing patterns and formulas prescribed by the teacher or textbook. Paragraphs must include topic sentences and move from the general to the specific.

Essays must adhere to a given mode--description, argument,

compare/contrast, cause-effect; the writer should state a thesis, support the thesis, then restate the thesis. Good writing practices are encouraged by the reading and analysis of professionally authored essays. Traditional writing instruction has been challenged by a modern process-based conception that has been in rapid development since the 1960s. The modern approach puts first priority on fluent writing and fluent thinking instead of correctness. The focus is on learning to generate ideas and order them in different ways, using writing as a tool for thinking. Grammar lectures and workbook drills are rarely or never used.

Students are encouraged to set aside grammatical concerns during the

composing-revising process; only at the final editing stage is grammar attended to. The less fluent the writer, the less emphasis is placed on mechanical matters--the assumption being that students' technical prowess will follow as they gain greater confidence with the written word. Modern composition also rejects most structural rules and formulas, such as topic sentences, thesis

15 statements, and the traditional modes. Emphasis is on the content of the writing, the ideas students are trying to communicate; students will shape structures to suit their ideas. The classroom spends little or no time studying professional essays; students learn writing best by actually writing, getting reader feedback, and writing more. An additional distinction between traditional and modern composition concerns the teacher's conceived role in the classroom and her relationship to student papers. The traditional approach is teacher-centered.

Class time is dominated by teacher lectures or teacher-led discussions about

mechanics and style. The goal of writing assignments, and the purpose of teacher responses and any student revisions, are directed toward what the teacher wants or expects or prefers. The modern approach, on the other hand, is student-centered. The dominant classroom activities are writing, and teacher and peer readings of and responses to student drafts. A workshop atmosphere is the preferred mode, with the teacher as writing coach. The goal of assignments, and the aims of responses and revisions, are directed toward what the student wants to say. The teacher's primary goal is to stimulate students toward more thinking and more writing, and to help students achieve their intended purpose as communicators. Researchers and practitioners of modern composition disagree widely on issues of theory and practice beyond the basics presented here. But there is almost complete consensus that traditional methods stultify students' writing processes, leading neither to correct nor imaginative writing products. Modern perspectives are represented in a rich selection of books and journals, and in regular conferences and teacher institutes around the country.3 Composition has grown into a substantial field over the past twenty-five years, with interests that include rhetorical theory, analysis of writing problems and strategies for teacher intervention, studies of the cognitive processes involved in composing and revision, studies of the relationships between reading and writing and between writing and speaking, evaluations of classroom and writing program designs, and much more. Unfortunately, while traditional writing instruction has been overwhelmingly discredited by modern composition studies, most college English departments and schools of education still cling to the traditional understanding. And because that traditional method consists primarily of teaching grammar

16 rules and essay modes, and then tediously correcting papers for errors, few colleges attach real importance to either writing instruction or the training of writing teachers. The prevailing traditionalist view has implications not only for the quantity and quality of writing instruction at the college level, but heavily shapes how writing is taught in elementary-secondary schools. If college composition is taught through traditional methods, then college-trained schoolteachers will tend to adopt these same methods. If colleges do not require significant writing instruction, then schoolteachers will have little writing know-how to pass on to students. In a 1983 study of 263 college catalogs, Clinton Burhans found that most preparing teachers, even most preparing English teachers, were not required to study writing beyond the freshman level; and only 10 percent of English education majors were required to take a course in the teaching of composition.4

Writing Instruction in the Schools We will consider briefly the impact of traditional composition at the elementary-secondary level, then turn to its college manifestation at CSUN, and then in chapter 3 to its impact on college writing instruction nationally. The kind of writing preparation American students bring with them to college is suggested in Arthur Applebee's 1984 report of a national study sponsored by the National Institute of Education. Applebee's portrait reflects well my own student experiences in the Los Angeles schools during the 1960s, and schoolteacher friends advise me that the back-to-basics trends of the 1980s have strengthened the routine nature of English instruction in many L.A. schools. Hence, there is good reason to believe that Applebee's description of national trends reflects also the general school experiences of CSUN students.

The NIE

study,

which

examined secondary

school writing

experiences in all subject areas, found that students were seldom asked to produce writing of any reasonable length.

"Students were spending only about 3% of their school time--in class or for

homework--on writing of paragraph length or longer." On the other hand, students were frequently engaged in mechanical tasks that involved slotting in missing information: "fill-in-the-blank exercises, multiple-choice responses, direct translation from one language to another [in foreign language courses], and the like."

The emphasis on filling in the blanks, rather than on more creative and

17 intellectually challenging kinds of writing, was supported by the composition/grammar textbooks used by English classrooms in the national study. "Only 12% of the exercises required writing of even paragraph length--though all of these textbooks claimed that their primary purpose was to teach writing" (Applebee 2, 3, 184). Even when more extended writing was required of students, it tended to be limited in scope. "The typical assignment is a first-and-final draft, completed in class, and requiring a page or less of writing. Topics for these assignments are usually constructed to test previous learning of information or skills; hence the students' task is to get the answer 'right,' rather than to convince, inform, or entertain a naive audience." Again, the composition/grammar textbooks highlighted the problem: "95% of the extended writing tasks they suggested were designed to test previous learning." Because assigned essays were treated primarily as tests of previous learning, the essays became similar to the more restricted slotting tasks, and students were denied opportunities to use writing for developing ideas and higher-order thinking skills. "The task for the students was one of repeating information that had already been organized by the teacher or textbook, rather than of extending and integrating new learning for themselves." The study found that "writing is more likely to be assessed than to be taught." That is, the instruction most students receive comes after their writing tasks are complete, in detailed comments and corrections of their work.

Help is rarely offered during the actual writing process.

"When they need [help], most students have to turn to friends or family members, rather than finding it in instructional contexts" (Applebee 3, 184). The results of this limited writing instruction are suggested in a 1984 assessment of writing achievement conducted by the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

The assessment

involved 55,000 participants from grades four, eight, and eleven in a nationally representative selection of schools. The students performed a range of writing tasks, such as job applications, descriptions, reports, analyses, letters, and stories. Papers were judged to be unsatisfactory, minimal, adequate, or elaborated, and scoring allowances were made for the restraints of testing conditions, such as the time limit and artificiality of the tasks. The findings, reported by Applebee, Langer, and Mullis, were "not flattering":

18 Most students, majority and minority alike, are unable to write adequately except in response to the simplest of tasks. . . . Even at grade 11, fewer than one-fourth of the students performed adequately on writing tasks involving skills required for success in academic studies, business, or the professions. In general, American students can write at a minimal level, but cannot express themselves well enough to ensure that their writing will accomplish the intended purpose. (9) A particular concern was the lack of analytic writing ability and higher-order thinking skills among the older students: One of the most distressing findings is the continuing difficulty older students have explaining and defending their ideas. Even at grade 11, relatively few students were able to provide adequate responses to the analytic writing tasks, and fewer still were able to muster arguments to persuade others to accept their points of view. . . . Some of these problems may reflect a pervasive lack of instructional emphasis on developing higher-order skills in all areas of the curriculum.

Because writing and thinking are so deeply intertwined, appropriate writing

assignments provide an ideal way to increase students' experiences with such type of thinking. (11) The assessment also polled student attitudes toward writing, and discovered that enthusiasm for writing, which is low in general, decreases as students progress through the grades. Only 57 percent of the fourth graders reported that they like to write, which dropped to 39 percent by grade eleven. When asked if people like what they write, 53 percent in grade four and only 37 percent in grade eleven responded in the affirmative (60). Writing education at CSUN, and at many other colleges, may work to reinforce rather than remedy the trends observed in the schools. Again, we find a paucity of actual writing instruction; moreover, those providing this small amount of writing instruction must work in unprofessional circumstances, often with no specific composition training. As our point of reference, let us begin with what a quality writing program at CSUN might require, and then consider how the present program

19 measures up. The following broad requirements are drawn largely from my discussions with writing program administrators and faculty interested in writing program reform at CSUN. 1) The university should require several courses that include writing instruction: two semesters of freshman composition, writing-intensive courses in students' majors, and writing-intensive general education courses.

Instructors teaching writing-intensive courses in the various

disciplines will need smaller classes and an introduction to the teaching of writing. 2) Writing instructors should have strong training in modern composition theory and methods. 3) Composition faculty should have full-time tenurable positions, full voice in their departments, reasonable student loads and course loads, and professional respect and support. 4) Writing program administrators need adequate staff, office space, and project funds, and the general support of their departments and university. 5) At least a two-course sequence in English conversation, reading, and writing, as well as support services, are needed for students not fluent in English.

Also, all composition

instructors should have introductory training in English as a second language (ESL) concerns. Certainly, the above represent rather ideal conditions that few, if any, American college writing programs would satisfy.

But when we consider how strikingly far is CSUN from meeting such

standards, then the poor student writing performance suggested in my faculty survey is understandable. We will examine each point in turn.

Writing Course Requirements The learning of writing, and learning of the critical thinking associated with writing, is a lifelong project, to which college can and should have much to contribute. But the fact that many students come to college under-prepared as writers, and that many have also learned to dislike school writing, makes the college responsibility greater than it might be were progressive composition practices instituted in the elementary-secondary schools. This is not to heap blame upon the schools which, after all, draw their instructional models from the university. Nevertheless, given present circumstances, if

20 we hope to produce ably literate college graduates, then we must redress students' past writing neglect. CSUN's current writing requirements simply cannot accomplish such redressing. The general education requirement consists of only one semester of freshman composition. Roughly 30 percent of students (majors in business, journalism, education, liberal studies, and some English options) must also take one or more writing courses beyond freshman composition; and perhaps 10-15 percent of incoming freshmen score low on the English Placement Test and must complete one or two developmental writing courses prior to freshman composition. This leaves 55-60 percent of CSUN students who can complete four years of college with only one writing course, and 70 percent who can graduate with no writing course beyond freshman composition. Of course, a number of students will take an additional writing course voluntarily to better their skills. Also, teachers in a wide range of "nonwriting" courses regularly assign writing in the form of term papers, lab reports, essay exams--though such teachers do not necessarily become involved in helping students write better, and almost none have been trained in the teaching of writing. But many of the students who need writing help the most do not volunteer for more writing courses, and they learn to avoid teachers with reputations for assigning writing. Religious studies chair Pat Nicholson believes this kind of writing avoidance is widespread: I have run into so many students in traditional liberal arts majors who don't have to write. I was recently talking with a history major, a graduating senior, who for the first time had to write a term paper. And he told me that most students talk to other students and just figure out a way to get through the whole program with teachers who don't make you write. While students in general have learned an antipathy for writing, the more troubled writers particularly avoid dealing with their problem. Many have been battered with loads of well-intended but ill-conceived criticism by English teachers schooled in the traditional pedagogy, and students do not want more of the same. Large numbers do not believe they have even the potential to be good writers. But simply requiring more students to take one additional course beyond freshman composition, as is now required of 30 percent of students, would not suffice. The additional course required of business majors, for example, apparently does not bring the majority of enrollees up to widely accepted

21 college writing standards. Three of my faculty survey respondents teach the writing-intensive business communications course, OSBE 305, and estimated that 60, 10, and 33 percent--a paltry average of 34 percent--of their students were writing as college students should write. And my poll was taken at the end of the semester. Writing and writing instruction must be integrated into a significant number and range of required courses, and taught by teachers given appropriate composition training.

Training of Composition Teachers The CSUN English department, like most college English departments, has long assumed that anyone with an advanced degree in literature is qualified to teach writing. Only about one-third of some sixty instructors teaching developmental and freshman writing within the English department have significant training in composition, according to Thia Wolf's estimate. Most of the trained minority are or were CSUN graduate teaching assistants and have taken a two-semester seminar in the teaching of writing; hence, all teach in the modern mode.

But the untrained majority teach with a traditional

emphasis, though employing some modern techniques. Wolf discusses the latter group: I think a lot of them teach the modes; maybe half of them teach grammar. I mean, information has seeped in to these people--some have been to a conference or two. Most of them use peer groups. Most use revision. And in those respects they are not old-school at all. In terms of their having a real vision of the writing process and what it can do for the individual student, I'm not so clear about that. When I go in to evaluate classes, it seems to me they're doing fairly traditional stuff. The major thing I object to--and in a sense it's not at all their fault, because it's partly the way the department set the course up--is how much time they spend discussing professional writing, rather than writing. It makes me crazy to walk into a writing classroom and leave an hour and fifteen minutes later and the students haven't put pen to paper. That really bothers me. I think that goes on a lot. The trend toward combining the modern (prewriting, revisions, peer groups) with traditional (grammar lessons, modes and formulas) is widespread in school and college writing classrooms, and composition researchers have challenged this kind of "eclecticism." Using a "process" approach in order to produce

22 a teacher-prescribed compare/contrast essay gives students mixed messages, and the student is not really the master of his/her paper (Knoblauch and Brannon; Applebee 187-88).

CSUN's English

department has long encouraged a traditional approach by ordering traditionally oriented textbooks, including an anthology of professional essays, and mandating their use.

Most of the teachers

cooperate with this, although a few quietly ignore department policy and choose alternative texts. In fall 1988, under a pilot policy developed by Wolf and co-composition director Cherryl Armstrong, teachers may select their own materials for courses; the new policy will later require departmental approval, however. The traditional model of writing instruction also predominates in the Pan-African studies writing program. Pan-African studies shares with the Chicano studies department some 20 percent of CSUN's freshman composition courses and 45 percent of the developmental writing courses (1987-88 school year); the two programs serve heavily to black and Chicano students, but include Asians, whites, and others as well. Professor Johnnie Scott, who helps colleague Tom Spencer-Walters coordinate the Pan-African studies writing program, showed me the syllabi he designed, and which almost all the department's writing instructors follow. The syllabi cover the traditional essay formulas, modes, and grammatical concerns with unusual rigor, including an objective final exam that asks such questions as, "What are the six types of fragment sentences?" As in many of the English department courses, the Pan-African writing instructors combine traditional methods and assumptions with modern techniques such as journal writing, peer groups, and revisions. While the Pan-African writing program holds a workshop for its faculty before each fall semester, probably few instructors have strong composition training.

As for the program coordinators Walters and Scott, both are dedicated, veteran writing

teachers who have undoubtedly attended their share of composition conferences and workshops, and I am not sure why their orientation remains so heavily traditional. Perhaps they have not been exposed to the full modern theory and its critique of the traditional; or perhaps they do know the modern view but have disagreements with it. Be that as it may, the Pan-African writing program is nevertheless nontraditional in terms of its emphasis on black authors for course readings and its infusing the writing classroom with a perspective

23 that affirms minority cultures. The program is also nontraditional in that it enjoys the support and respect of the department as a whole. When Pan-African chair Verne Bryant refers proudly to the writing program as "the lifeblood of the department," his sincerity is demonstrated concretely by, among other things, a well-staffed and well-equipped Pan-African writing center. Similar words from the chair of the English department, where composition is viewed condescendingly and where support is minimal, would ring hollow. Johnnie Scott's particular enthusiasm for teaching developmental writing-since "that's where the action is"--would also be less typical in the English department, as would Scott's commitment to working with students' larger personal/academic needs: In one [developmental writing] class, I had nineteen students, and not one of then had an academic counselor.

So when I conference I make sure that each and every one of my

students is placed with a counselor. I also make certain that they're placed with tutors--and not just in the writing center. I take them over to EOP [Educational Opportunity Program] for tutors in psych, sociology, geography, whatever it is. Cos', as I say, this is the Superbowl. It's not about passing my course and then you're flunking everything else. Students in the Pan-African writing courses undoubtedly benefit from the rigor and commitment of Scott, his colleagues, and the Pan-African department.

Still, as a proponent of the modern in

composition, I would argue that those benefits could be extended much further were the department to break cleanly from traditional composition assumptions. I was unable to interview the Chicano studies writing program director as the spring semester busily closed, and I cannot address the content of the Chicano courses. I did, however, speak with Chicano studies writing instructor Francine Hallcom, mostly about campus-wide writing issues. It is probable that the Chicano writing program shares with English and Pan-African studies a predominant traditional methodology and training gap, combined with the positive nontraditional aspects that apply to Pan-African studies. The English department's hiring of Thia Wolf and Cherryl Armstrong, and their fall 1987 appointments as directors of freshman composition and developmental writing, respectively, has meant new possibilities for faculty development. Wolf notes: "The introduction of writing research into this

24 program has not been done until now. Cherryl and I are the first people who are trying to acquaint the teachers with what's out there, with what we know about writing." Wolf and Armstrong, who have Ph.Ds in composition and rhetoric, have obtained a grant to lead a workshop series planned for fall 1988. Four eight-hour meetings will involve sixteen faculty participants--eight from English, four from Pan-African studies, four from Chicano studies. Says Wolf: My faculty's really interested, and if I can pay them, they're even more interested because they're used to being abused. They want to be taken seriously, like professionals. What I'm hoping is that the workshop will be successful and we will get twice or three times as much money the following year so that we can reach a lot more people or extend the time. Wolf points out, however, that funding for the workshop was not obtained through the support of the English department. "John Hartzog [of CSUN's Learning Resource Center] got us that money from the academic vice-president. The only support we really have is from the academic vice-president, and Hartzog's our liaison. Without him we'd be nowhere." In a later interview with Armstrong, I learned that the workshop depended on "soft money" from the state lottery, and that the money was in question. "We had money and now we may not have it unless we can spend it tomorrow. It's soft money; it's money that doesn't really exist. That's one of the problems--there isn't any hard money going into staff development." Hopefully, the funding snags will be worked out and the workshop plans realized. But if composition faculty are to receive the training they need, there must clearly be stronger support from the English department and from the university.

Composition Teacher Conditions Teachers' working conditions are certainly crucial to the quality of instruction. CSUN, and the nineteen-campus California State University system (CSU), demonstrate a questionable commitment to quality writing instruction through the conditions imposed upon CSU writing teachers. At the center of these conditions is an unrealistically low salary classification for composition courses. classification provides only for "assistant professor, step 1."

The

And even though the CSU faculty's

collective bargaining contract provides that instructors graduate a salary step roughly every two years,

25 the CSU still only allocates its campuses a step 1 salary. "The problem is we get money for step 1, and it costs us more than step 1," explains Pat Boles, budget manager for the School of Humanities, in which the English and Chicano studies departments are housed. "This year our school will run a deficit in our salaries of about $50,000." The CSU classification also makes no provision for the promotion of composition instructors. Campuses manage to get by with the low salary provision by hiring parttimers. While full-time faculty are assigned a twelve-unit teaching load, they get paid for an additional three units to provide office hours and participate in department committees. Part-time faculty do not receive those additional three units of pay, which alone means a 20 percent departmental savings for each course taught. Part-timers are also denied many of the fringe benefits enjoyed by full-timers, and are not promoted up the professorial ranks.

Reliance on part-timers is a growing trend in all

departments across the CSU system, but is especially strong in composition programs.* In CSUN's English department, nearly 100 percent of the composition courses are taught by part-timers. PanAfrican and Chicano studies, by contrast, have several full-timers committed to teaching composition, and full-timers teach perhaps a majority of the writing courses in those departments. Through low salary and denial of other rights and benefits, the university communicates to its predominantly part-time composition faculty that they are not considered professionals, are not considered full citizens in their departments, are not expected to provide more than minimal instruction. Unlike regular full-time faculty, part-timers are not paid for office hours and departmental participation; are not paid for release time to do research or write books or articles related to their profession; are not offered travel or conference pay in order to take part in professional meetings and conferences; do not have access to tenure and the job security that tenure provides; do not enjoy the full package of fringe benefits such as health plans, retirement plans, full vacation and sick pay.

* At CSUN, and at most colleges, the terms composition program and composition course generally refer to freshman and remedial writing classes, and I use the terms this way here. Creative and narrative writing, and intermediate/advanced expository writing, enjoy higher status than composition courses, are regularly taught by full-timers, and are not administered by the English composition program.

26 Graduate teaching assistants are materially worse off than the regular part-time faculty. One writer has aptly called regular composition faculty "serfs," and the TAs "slaves" (Kytle). TAs, who teach either one or two courses, are paid at bare subsistence level, with no health benefits or sick leave. Their lowly status is reflected in the office space afforded them. While full-timers are placed two to an office, and regular part-timers typically share an office with four or five others, most of the twenty TAs share a single office space that is reached through a forbidding, difficult-to-find stairway on the fifth floor of the CSUN South Library. The TAs probably suffer less psychological stress than

27

regular part-timers, however. Since most are resigned to the unspoken vow of poverty that our society demands of college students, TAs' expectations are not high. Also, the TAs are typcally excited about their new teacher roles and the exquisite composition theories they are learning. Still, TAs perform the same service as other instructors, their students generate just as much income for the university (CSU campuses are allocated funds based on the number of students enrolled in each course), and their underpay is a blatant form of exploitation. Because of the CSU budgeting structure, most salary-related policies affecting part-timers and TAs are beyond the capacity of a single department or campus to alter. But it is not beyond the capacity of the CSUN English department to invite part-timers to the department's faculty meetings and grant them the right to vote in those meetings. A majority of the English department faculty, roughly sixty of one hundred, are disenfranchised part-timers. That is, sixty composition faculty have only two voices, Wolf and Armstrong, to represent them in the faculty meetings that approve or disapprove any major policies related to the composition program and the content of courses. The department's policy toward full-timers recognizes that the role of a teaching professional includes participating in discussions of departmental goals and how the job will get done. By denying this voice to its parttimers, the department tells them they are not professionals and do not really belong. Composition instructor Kim Gillespie adds, "I think it makes people feel like victims, powerless and uncaring, like they can't do anything about it." Indeed, it's difficult to feel powerful or to imagine effecting changes when you haven't a vote. Part-timers also cannot vote in Pan-African studies; part-timers do vote in Chicano studies. How do these conditions affect instruction?

The low pay leads many part-timers--in all

disciplines--to hop across town between two or three campuses, some teaching five or six courses, in order to secure a full salary. The workload is particularly great for writing instructors, who teach what may be the most labor-intensive of any school subject. The most valuable instructional activities in composition are also the most time-consuming: one-on-one conferences and sensitive responses to student drafts. Even a four-course load is too heavy if they are all writing courses. Instructors must by

28 necessity devote less time to each writing student than they might with a more manageable load of, say, two writing courses and two literature courses; but literature courses are generally reserved for the full-timers. A general picture of part-time instruction is provided by Jack Friedlander in a review of national studies comparing the practices of full-time and part-time instructors in two-year colleges. Friedlander reports that part-timers had less say in choosing course materials, made less use of instructional media and instructional support services, were less available for student conferences, were less likely to base their grades on activities that required out-of-class time to grade (objective tests, essay exams, reports), were less involved in professional activities (reading scholarly journals, attending professional meetings and conferences), and had less contact with their teaching colleagues. Kim Gillespie suggests further that the conditions of part-timers leads to less classroom innovation and more traditional methods: "The low pay results in classes that look very much the same from year to year, and that sameness is based on an unexamined pedagogy because teachers aren't going to conferences and they're not reading journals. So you'll find modes and grammar exercises and some lecturing, and then essays out of the Dolphin reader." When we examine the conditions of composition teachers, we begin to see that the reform of writing instruction must be tied to reforming a system that overuses and abuses part-time instructors generally.

Commitment and change are required at many levels.

Departments must extend full

citizenship to their part-time faculty by granting them a voice and by actively seeking their participation in departmental affairs. Full-time faculty can further contribute to the professional standing of their parttime colleagues by granting them full membership in campus faculty senates; part-timers presently cannot vote in the faculty senate at CSUN.

English departments in particular must affirm the

importance of their composition faculty and the work they are doing by providing professional and moral support; English full-time faculty, for example, can become involved in issues of college literacy and writing program development. Finally, the CSU system and the state of California must provide the funding necessary to convert the majority of part-time positions into full-time positions.

Writing Program Administration

29 CSUN and the CSU system show again their low regard for writing instruction through the little support offered writing program administrators. My principal focus here will remain with the English department, which accounts for 70 percent of CSUN's developmental and freshman writing courses combined. While I have not a complete picture of Pan-African or Chicano studies, it is a safe guess that the writing program administrators of those departments work under more benign conditions than the English department's two writing directors. The latter not only have many more course sections, faculty, and students to provide for, but they must operate within a traditional English department that treats composition as "this bastard child." The English composition program is equivalent to a department, but without the staff or office space that departments are typically provided, according to Cherryl Armstrong: We have an office because we're professors. But we really need an office for the writing program--the same sort of setup they have in the English department office. We're running ninety sections of writing courses in the fall. We're in fact a department inside a department. We need a place for texts to be kept. We need a place for people to meet. We need a full-time secretary who does scheduling, who meets with people.

We do all the secretarial work

ourselves. Armstrong's duties include hiring, training, and scheduling faculty; hiring and scheduling tutors; supervising, evaluating, consulting, record-keeping. "The other thing I do is my teaching--I teach two courses." I ask if she's tired. "Yeah. It's two full-time jobs." Office mate Thia Wolf's workload is desperately unmanageable. Six of her fifteen assigned units are allocated to running freshman English--hiring, supervising, making policy decisions, keeping track of paperwork. "I lose maybe the first three weeks of each semester doing nothing but getting students slotted into comp classes after CAR Repair Day" (for students who did not receive all the classes they wanted through computer registration).

She gets three units for teaching the TA seminar on the

teaching of writing, which includes visiting TAs' classes, writing evaluations, consulting and mentoring. "It's exhausting because people teaching their first semester are often in a state of crisis." Three units are devoted to running the department's composition committee. "That's a relatively difficult committee.

30 It meets a lot, with a lot of paperwork, a lot of decision making." Finally, Wolf gets 1.5 units each for coordinating the writing-across-the-disciplines program and the writing lab. "Those, of course, are fulltime jobs at other universities." Wolf estimates that she is doing three or four full-time jobs, "which is why I can work sixty or eighty hours a week and not get the work done." One of the biggest frustrations for both Wolf and Armstrong is that the composition faculty do not have meetings. The directors have little way of knowing what actually goes on in the classrooms. "There's no calibration of that program," says Wolf, "no agreement about what should go on in any of the courses. If we could just meet with these people a couple times a month, it would make an enormous difference in the quality of the program." Since the program has no budget, it cannot pay faculty to attend meetings, and Wolf refuses to hold faculty meetings unless faculty can be paid for their time--as are the full-time faculty. Wolf and Armstrong do hold monthly potluck/rap groups that address various teaching topics; but, while the rap groups have helped build community among some of the faculty, attendance has dropped down, according to Armstrong. Another frustration is the difficulty of changing policies.

For example, Wolf describes the

unwieldy process for hiring new composition teachers. We sent out this job description that just says if you've had experience teaching writing, come over and talk with us. And we wind up interviewing maybe eighty people for two jobs. And most of those people don't know anything about teaching writing. That and a number of other things that create a lot of work and a lot of paperwork are what wears down the people who run the program. It turns out that the hiring process is extremely resistant to change. Often, composition faculty will come to the program office with bright ideas about grading policies or course descriptions, but then drop the ideas when they learn of the cumbersome processes for obtaining departmental approval. As with teacher conditions, many of the largest reforms needed in writing program administration are beyond reach of the slim-budgeted English department and will require action at higher levels. But again, the department could take a more supportive posture by, for example, insisting that the university provide its writing program with proper staff.

The CSUN administration would likely be

31 responsive because of continuing concern over the WPE failure rate. More immediately, the English department could give composition priority in its personnel allocations, at least until the composition workload approaches earthly levels. What keeps the department from taking such measures are the competing interests within the department, and composition's low status among those interests. Illustrative is the department's recent hiring of an ESL specialist. Wolf, Armstrong, and the new hire herself had understood she would be working with the writing program to begin designing an ESL program and ESL teacher training.

But they later learned the department had assigned the new

professor four linguistics courses (for which there is big demand) and was listing her as a linguist. In another instance, Wolf recounts that she had asked department chair Gale Larson for a desperately needed office assistant but was told that the creative writing program had priority as they had asked for an assistant earlier. "He was applying a first-come, first-serve principle," Wolf explains, "but he wasn't thinking of size or need."

(Ultimately, due to a state hiring freeze, neither program received an

assistant.) Wolf observes: "Actually, they're not totally opposed to hiring people in this field, but it's always an afterthought. You go through the literature and linguistics hires first, and then there's a discussion about whether composition will need anybody else." Perhaps more fundamental than a shift in priorities is the needed shift in attitude. The CSU's underfunding of composition programs draws justification from the traditional denigrating view of composition that is perpetuated by college English departments (Howard; Szilak; Staples; Nash; Robinson; Kytle). Freshman composition is defined as a "service course," Wolf explains. It teaches "skills." The way that basic mathematics is a skill or learning to write your name is a skill. That's what it's equated with, as opposed to a content course that has its place as a discipline alongside other disciplines. It's not considered a discipline, and therefore the people in charge of it are not--we don't count. And that's why people in our department say stuff to us like, "When are you going to get tired of this and teach some real classes?" Modern composition has challenged the narrow definition of writing instruction as the passing on of mechanical grammar skills and avoidance of errors. It has opened up rich areas of inquiry, such as in the relationships between writing, the learning process, and the development of critical thinking.

32 Insights from this growing field might hold the potential to transform teaching as we know it, and could certainly offer broad applications in literature classrooms. information and new understandings.

But people must be open to the new

For the present, composition remains what Wolf calls "this

bastard child" of English departments. "People make fun of it, they don't want to involve themselves in it, they don't want to teach the classes." It is unfortunate that the English department will soon be losing its freshman composition director, who has given notice she will be leaving next year (after spring semester 1989). "The job is really interesting, but there's too much of it for me. I feel so disillusioned that if I don't get a job at another university next year, I'm moving out of academics." It appears the department had wanted someone to run composition in the traditional and minimal way it had always been run; they did not want someone who would advocate changes or try to create a truly meaningful writing program.

With Wolf's

departure, the campus loses a particularly dedicated and gifted teacher/administrator, one whom I and many others have treasured as a model and mentor. No doubt she will be replaced with someone who is more accepting of the program status quo.

English as a Second Language (ESL) Needs CSUN keeps no statistics on the number of its students who are non-native English speakers, nor on the number of students who are less than fluent in English and might need assistance. When I asked a worker at the CSUN Office for Institutional Research why such statistics weren't kept, he gave the self-evident but interesting reply, "If we don't have the statistics, it means the university hasn't had a reason to keep them." Certainly, there should be a reason. We do know that 24.6 percent of students taking the WPE in the 1986-87 school year were identified as ESL students. But this cannot tell us the percentage of ESL students in the general CSUN population, since ESL students have a higher WPE failure rate than non-ESL students (58.9 versus 23.9 percent) and therefore take the exam more frequently. Probably the best indication is offered by the Office of International Programs: the campus has 512 foreign students living in the U.S. on student visas, and about 3,600 students who are permanent U.S. residents but not U.S. citizens. These do not directly translate into ESL numbers.

33 Some permanent residents have been in the U.S. since young children, were never naturalized, but are essentially native English speakers.

Other students may be naturalized citizens but still learning

English; and still others may be U.S.-born citizens but raised in families and communities where English was not much spoken. Still, the combined figure of 4,112 (14 percent of the students) is perhaps the closest indication we have regarding the number of ESL students at CSUN. In any case, the large presence of foreign-born students, particularly Asians and Mideasterners, becomes evident to anyone who strolls across campus. And as a writing tutor here for two years, I know that many of these students need concerted help with English literacy. The university has essentially no ESL program for its considerable number of non-native speakers.

There is an intensive, twenty-hour-per-week ESL program offered separately through

university extension, but its students are not enrolled at CSUN. Also, the English taught through extension is too elementary for most ESL students enrolled at CSUN, according to program director Michael Steadman. The university needs to offer a bridge for students who have passed the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) but are not yet fluent with the language. What CSUN does offer, under the English department, are seven sections of developmental writing and two sections of freshman composition that are designated as ESL. However, while these are popular courses that fill up quickly, the instructors have no training in teaching ESL. Neither Wolf nor Armstrong are sure what takes place in these courses. Quite likely, the teachers--who have been unfairly burdened with courses they are not prepared to teach--simply put greater emphasis on English grammar and mechanics. And an emphasis on grammar is the practice most discouraged by modern ESL and language acquisition theorists. Some ESL proposals are being developed by English professor George Uba, whom the English department is supporting for a year study of the subject. Uba recommends the model employed at CSU's Long Beach State. "They require every foreign-born student who has not resided in this country for at least ten years to take a separate placement test. Depending on how they score, they may be sent into a pre-developmental language acquisition course." Long Beach offers a four-rung sequence: two semesters of language acquisition (conversation, reading, writing), and two semesters of

34 developmental writing. Uba cautions, however, against the assumption that the ESL writing course would be quite different from the non-ESL writing course. "In fact, most theorists would argue just the opposite. The emphasis on process and on rhetoric that we get in a non-ESL developmental course is also the primary emphasis we should get in an ESL course. Our primary emphasis should not be on workbook exercises like grammar and things like that." Uba assumes, of course, that the teachers of ESL developmental writing courses will have training both in modern composition's process orientation and in ESL. At the level of freshman composition, Uba points out, there are legitimate arguments for sending ESL students either to ESL classes or to non-ESL classes. The ESL composition class can address directly the problems of developing literacy in a second language; the non-ESL class can provide opportunities for interacting with native speakers. Uba suggests we can have it both ways through paired classes--one ESL, one non-ESL--taught by separate teachers. Once or twice a week, the pair would meet in one large class. As we know from our classroom experiences, simply mixing ESL and non-ESL students in the same class does not assure the kind of networking we would like. Hence, Uba's proposal provides for monitored peer activities. They'll conduct peer editing sessions in which the teachers purposely mix two ESL students and two non-ESL students, or they'll assign them joint library work. Again, the interaction that we hope for outside of class really does occur because we monitor it. At the same time, because the integrity of the ESL classroom is maintained, if there are specific needs that have to be addressed, that ESL teacher--who is going to be more familiar with ESL writing needs--is going to be able to address those needs. Uba believes we also need more social networking outside of class between ESL and non-ESL students.

The best way the university can encourage this is through the initiative of individual

departments. For example, the business department might hold a colloquium on Japanese business management, or Asian business management, and then invite Asians to talk about their experiences as children of businessmen or, in some cases, as businessmen and

35 businesswomen themselves. In other words, each department can figure out a way to get this networking into place. But it really depends on each department to do that, because they know best what will serve a broad range of students. While his proposals appear excellent, Uba has "no sense" of whether there exists the political support to actually institute such measures at CSUN. For a political perspective, I spoke with professor Francine Hallcom, an eighteen-year veteran of the Chicano studies department specializing in writing instruction. Hallcom believes the university victimizes and exploits ESL students. Since the majority of students in developmental writing classes are native speakers, she explains, "you teach to the majority. And the ESL speakers just simply do the best they can. They take the class once, maybe twice, three times; they're usually diligent. So they pass the class with a credit. Then they eventually do the same thing in freshman comp, and then they fail the Writing Proficiency Exam." She acknowledges that some ESL students contribute to the problem by putting off their writing requirements until the end of college. But I don't want to blame them for it anymore. It's more the fault of the university because we accept them. If we're going to accept them with this kind of writing skill, I think it's our duty to bring them up to par--rather than let them sit here, generate a lot of FTE for us and keep all of our professors employed, and then tell them when they've accumulated 150 or 200 units [that they cannot graduate because they've failed the WPE].* I saw a kid's transcript one time: 289 units and had failed the WPE five times or something--incredible! That's real dishonest. That's really morbid.

* FTE, or full-time equivalency, refers to a formula the university system uses for generating teacher salaries based on the number of students enrolled in classes.

36 Yet, Hallcom is decidedly skeptical about the prospects for change. She has served on several ESL committees during her years at CSUN, and invariably found the administration unwilling to take real action on the issue. I remember one time we had a very fancy committee. We had people from foreign languages, special ed., English, admissions and records. Oh, God, there must have been ten or twelve people. And we met, we were very diligent, we did our research. And we turned in this 5-6 page report.

The bottom line was that we need to teach these people from a different

approach. But the committee's report never led to a program. "I don't think the university's interest is sincere, because after all of these years, I don't see that money coming forward." Underlying the ESL problem is institutional racism, Hallcom argues, and the committees are a mechanism to divert those seeking change. As a white male caucasian, it is not fashionable for you to just come out and tell me you don't really give a damn about me or--that would not be a healthy thing to do if you were an administrator on this campus.

So you would put a person like me, who might be a

troublemaker or who might struggle or something like that, on a committee. And as long as I'm spinning my wheels on a committee and turning in reports, you've got me happy. I don't serve on committees like that anymore. The needs of ESL and minority students are simply not a CSUN priority. "The figures on minority students, if you look at it eighteen years ago and now: worse. The figures on minority faculty hiring are worse. . . . Basically, this is a school for white kids, and let's not kid ourselves." From Uba and Hallcom, we can derive that CSUN's failure to develop ESL programs is not due to a lack of university awareness or lack of proposed solutions. Nor is it wholly attributable to budget limitations:

Long Beach State has budget troubles like all CSU campuses, but has nonetheless

established a substantial ESL program. The bottom line is priorities and attitudes. We learn from Hallcom that relying on the committee process does not produce ESL programs, since it leaves white-

37 biased institutional priorities intact.

Perhaps more active forms of pressure and protest will be

necessary to meet the needs of ESL students. We have suggested that a majority of CSUN students may not be meeting the university's writing expectations, and we have attributed this deficiency to inadequate and ill-conceived writing instruction at school and college.

The university could potentially redress the problem through rigorous,

pedagogically sound writing programs, and by offering better instructional models to future schoolteachers and curriculum designers. writing problem.

But we find instead that the university perpetuates the

The English department trivializes the composition profession and keeps its

practitioners disenfranchised; perhaps influenced by this trivialization, the university system allocates meager composition salaries and meager program budgets. If the slighting of composition has its source in a narrow, mechanistic conception of writing instruction, or in an epistomology that reduces writers to mere recorders of pre-existent knowledge, it is not at all clear that the situation will be remedied simply by making better epistomologies and pedagogies available. Wolf and Armstrong have offered better models, but the English department may not really want to listen, especially not if the better models cost money. So long as literaturists, linguists, and others are committed to a strategy of sectional competition, each group guarding its precious slice of a too-small budget, the department may have a political interest in continuing to see composition as a "service course."

38 CHAPTER 3 HOW TYPICAL IS CSUN? A NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

I could find no national studies of college writing performance.

However, college writing

instruction and programs have been nationally studied. The studies, along with numerous journal articles on "the state of composition," reveal a consistent pattern among college composition programs, one which broadly mirrors the writing situation at CSUN. If we take into account the "minimal" writing achievement of eleventh graders in the NAEP's 1984 national assessment, and the pattern of college writing instruction indicated by surveys and journal commentaries, we can reasonably conclude that the student writing problem at CSUN is a national college problem. One ready indicator that U.S. college students may not be getting the most helpful writing instruction is the continuing predominance of the traditional classroom methods which composition research has widely shown to impede the learning of writing.

Although the modern composition

following is growing, and some observers are quite optimistic about its growth (Penfield), even the optimists would probably agree with Maxine Hairston's 1982 assessment: The overwhelming majority of college writing teachers in the United States are not professional writing teachers. They do not do research or publish on rhetoric or composition, and they do not know the scholarship in the field; they do not read the professional jounals and they do not attend professional meetings. . . . They are trained as literary critics first and as teachers of literature second, yet out of necessity most of them are doing half or more of their teaching in composition. And they teach it by the traditional paradigm, just as they did when they were untrained teaching assistants ten or twenty or forty years ago. (78-79) Persistence of the traditional mode in composition courses is suggested by Burhans' study of writing course descriptions in 263 college catalogs. Burhans set forth criteria for a "contemporary" teaching model and a "current-traditional" model, along the the same lines I have outlined in this paper, and measured the course descriptions accordingly. He found that only 3 percent of the "basic writing" courses (i.e., freshman composition) and 1 percent of the remedial courses reflected “any influence

39 whatever from contemporary knowledge about writing and the teaching of writing." The traditional view, on the other hand, was reflected in 89 percent of the basic and 83 percent of the remedial courses; the remainder were "indefinable." Burhans acknowledges that catalog course descriptions do not always coincide with actual classroom practice, and that recent program changes are often not reflected in the catalogs. But he argues that his methods are reliable enough. Most college departments take their course descriptions very seriously, according to Burhans, and usually develop them from carefully revised multiple drafts to best reflect the department's goals for the course. Also, Burhans did not choose his colleges randomly, but instead weighted his sample toward schools "from which we expect the highest levels of professionalism in theory, research, and application" (641, 645, 646). Staying power of the traditional mode is further evidenced by surveys of college composition textbooks. Donald Stewart in 1978 found that only seven of thirty-four widely used textbooks, or 21 percent, contained "any appreciable awareness" of the modern composition field. "The other 27, and some are the products of people with enormous reputations as literary scholars, were strictly currenttraditional in their discussions of invention, arrangement, and style" (174). Burhans' review of a writing textbook bibliography compiled in 1982 found that only 31 of 121 texts, or 26 percent, reflected any influence of the modern concepts. Burhans says his assessment is generous, that many texts will devote minor sections to the writing process "and then concentrate on primarily current-traditional concerns" (652). A very clear indicator of substandard writing instruction in the nation's colleges is the conditions of composition teachers. As at CSUN, composition teachers nationally are underpaid, overworked, second-class citizens of the academic community. The conditions are regularly cited and denounced in the composition journals and conferences.

The following account by a community college writing

instructor is representative: I went to graduate school in pursuit of the contemplative life. I found it in graduate courses, in textual study, in literary translation. I also found it in teaching the composition and technical writing courses which paid my way. . . .

40 I was much less happy when, Ph.D. in hand, I found that I was qualified to fill a role as a writing instructor that shattered my illusions about academic life. Most of the jobs I found were for part-time employment, that is, less salary for a heavy teaching load, few or no benefits, and no departmental voice in policy or decision-making. . . . As a part-time and non-tenure track teacher, I was shocked to find how little the departments in which I taught cared about the quality of my work and how little supervision or administrative support I received, and how reluctant department members were to have anything to do with me. I was, after all, not a colleague. (Staples 3-4) The universality of these conditions is strongly suggested in a 1987 resolution adopted by the Conference on College Composition and Communication, the major professional organization for those involved in college composition: WHEREAS, the salaries and working conditions of post-secondary teachers with primary responsibility for the teaching of writing are fundamentally unfair as judged by any reasonable professional standards (e.g., unfair in excessive teaching loads, unreasonably large class sizes, salary inequities, lack of benefits and professional status, and barriers to professional advancement). . . . (Robertson et al., Slevin) The resolution calls for establishing grievance procedures and public censure of institutions not complying with professional standards for post-secondary teachers of writing. Wide reliance on part-time faculty and TAs, or nontenurable (and hence usually temporary) fulltime faculty, for teaching composition courses is indicated in a 1981 national survey of college and university writing program directors conducted by Stephen Witte et al.

Among 127 responding

institutions, Witte et al. found that introductory writing courses were taught by faculty in the following proportions:5 Full-time tenure track:

30%

Full-time nontenurable: 12%

Part time:

21%

Graduate TAs: 37%

Of 15,252 course sections, 58 percent were taught by faculty whose positions were part time, and 70 percent by faculty whose positions were probably temporary. (As at CSUN, tenure-track faculty were

41 more apt to teach non-introductory writing courses; they taught 51 percent of such courses.) Noting the predominance of temporary faculty teaching writing classes, Witte et al. observe that "while many schools pay lip service to the teaching of writing, they have obviously not worked this 'commitment' into their rewards system" (57, 58). Witte et al.'s point about rewards is corroborated by Jeriel Howard's two-year study of job ads listed in the Chronicle of Higher Education. "Less than 15 percent of all BW [basic writing] positions offered tenure track appointments. When possible salary was mentioned, BW positions averaged approximately $6000 less than appointments at the same rank for literature teachers" (5). One figure in the Witte survey that provides an interesting contrast to CSUN is the number of introductory writing courses that are taught by tenure-track faculty--30 percent. It appears that the almost exclusive reliance on part-time faculty by the CSUN English department's writing program is not the norm among colleges nationally. Still, while a significant minority of writing courses nationally are taught by tenure-track faculty, students in those courses do not necessarily benefit from their teacher's higher status. Firstly, many English departments require tenured faculty to teach a minimum number of freshman writing courses. Such policies are well-intended but of questionable value: the vast majority of tenured English faculty have no interest or commitment to teaching introductory writing.

Their

freshman composition duties are an unwanted distraction from literary pursuits, and the courses are often taught perfunctorily. Commitment among tenured faculty was the most frequently cited "least successful aspect" of the programs surveyed by Witte et al. "They really don't give a damn about teaching freshmen to write," complained one program director (109). Secondly, the few tenured faculty actually committed to teaching composition--whose students undoubtedly do benefit from their teacher's full-time tenured status--may still find that their departments consider their work less important than that of literature or linguistics professors. Howard notes that full-time faculty seriously interested in basic writing are often denied tenure appointments or are restricted in rank: I could relate stories, now all too familiar, of tenure and promotion committees which have refused to recognize work done in the area of BW as valid criteria for either retention or promotion. I know highly competent teachers, some with names you would recognize should I

42 use them, who have been denied tenure and/or promotion because they work rather exclusively in BW. These people speak at our conferences, publish in our journals, and, in some instances, consult nationwide. nominalization in Chaucer.

But they do not research bird imagery in Keats or

They are not quite real members of the fraternity of English

teachers. (6) American college English departments are increasingly characterized by a caste system in which a male gerontocracy of senior tenured literature professors lord over a younger, predominantly female group of part-time composition instructors. (At CSUN, for example, English part-timers are 77 percent female; full-timers are 67 percent male.) However, the size of the ruling group is shrinking, while the ruled are multiplying. A 1982 Association of Departments of English survey showed 62 percent of instructional effort in English departments devoted to writing and only 30 percent devoted to literature. Moreover, enrollment in writing courses was growing fast, while literature enrollment slowly declined (Young, Gorman, and Gorman 56, 57). In these times of lean college budgets and especially small budgets for liberal arts and humanities, it is perhaps understandable that the tenured literati would guard their narrowing turf by keeping the composition majority disenfranchised, demoralized, transient. But does this not undermine the educational ideals of literaturists and compositionists alike? And would not a cooperative effort to develop critically thinking minds through the joint teaching of literature and writing be preferable to division and oneupmanship? And could we not collectively challenge the heads of state who, through wrong priorities, dole out ever smaller slices of the tax pie to education? And how long will writing teachers continue to be abused before we pull ourselves together and fight back?

43 CHAPTER 4 SOLVING THE WRITING PROBLEM: EDUCATING, ORGANIZING

Achieving quality writing programs and quality conditions for writing teachers will require action at all levels--classroom, department, campus, state, federal. The plight of writing teachers is ultimately bound to that of all educators and to the country's spending priorities. But let us begin with what individual writing teachers and others can do today, and then proceed to larger goals and more ambitious tasks.

First, composition instructors should get active in the composition profession, and those already involved professionally should invite colleagues to join them. True, the time and cost of attending conferences, workshops, or meetings is prohibitive for many, particularly when the university is not sponsoring participation. But professional involvement can be a source of emotional sustenance, as well as classroom method and theory. Modern composition is inspired by visions of what education could be; for some, the vision is suggested in Donald Graves' descriptions of first- and second-grade classrooms turned into buzzy, productive, child-centered writers' workshops. We can't effectively challenge the abuses of academe without a vision to guide us, and professional activity can help us shape visions with our peers. It can also help us find ways to make our job more satisfying, less exhausting. Maxine Hairston reminds us that many traditional composition teachers work harder than they need to. "They devote far more time than they can professionally afford to working with their students. . . ." But because they haven't read the modern theorists, "they don't know that an hour spent meticulously marking every error in a paper is probably doing more harm than good.

They are

exhausting themselves trying to teach writing from an outmoded model, and they come to despise the job more and more because many of their students improve so little despite their time and effort" (7980). Activities might range from informal rap/study sessions with co-workers to five-week summer institutes offered by National Writing Project affiliates in many states.6 As composition staff develop cohesion, they can collectively insist that the department and university take more responsibility for faculty training.

44 Another important step for writing teachers is to make the critique of education a topic for the writing classroom. Teachers can encourage students to talk and write about their school experiences, to imagine what education could and should be, to ask critical questions about American schooling. I think the reason students in my questionnaire and in the Sundial survey reported a general satisfaction with school is that they have so little exposure to alternatives. Students need opportunities to build a critique of their school experience, and they need models and direct experiences with student-centered, egalitarian classrooms.7 At the same time, teachers need student allies in the struggle for educational reform. Thirdly, writing teachers can join the faculty union, where one exists, and get active in it. Parttime lecturers are a growing voice within the California Faculty Association (CFA), the union representing CSU faculty. Part-timers have organized a statewide committee that is fighting for such proposals as the conversion of part-time positions to full-time positions. The union has recently won small but significant reforms for the lecturers, who now have built-in salary advances and, after twentyfour units taught, at least reasonable certainty of being rehired each year. "Different faculty groups get their voice represented at the bargaining table by being union activists," says Pat Nicholson, who presides over the CFA chapter at CSUN. "There's no magic about this. If you want to be on the agenda, come and get in."

Broad changes in the conditions of composition faculty are barely

conceivable without large numbers of composition teachers working in the union. Unions not only unite the strengths of part-time and full-time faculty, but can wield that power on a statewide basis--which must be done when taking on a statewide university apparatus. The union can be a source of support for campus-level changes as well, such as in advocating for a part-timer voice in the faculty senate and within departments. Use of the union structure as a tool for writing program reform is a potentiality that has still to be explored, and could only be explored in the context of strong composition participation in the union. Faculty in disciplines other than composition can support writing reform by asking their departments to participate in writing-across-the-disciplines programs. In fall 1988, CSUN's "WRAD" program is expanding to involve ten faculty from the School of Engineering and ten from the School of

45 Communication and Professional Studies. Departments in which several faculty are calling for WRAD participation can in turn lobby the university to help with funding. My teacher survey suggests that large numbers of faculty are disappointed with the quality of student writing. Those faculty should insist that their departments and universities make writing instruction a priority.

Program Modernization A larger objective for writing reformers would consist in modernization of university writing programs and removing institutional barriers to that modernization. The CSUN English department has made an historic move toward the modern by hiring the campus's first composition specialists to run its writing program. But the department contradicts that move by making the program answerable to, and dependent upon, a literary faculty largely unsympathetic to composition and unfamiliar with the modern field. Writing specialists need real authority over their writing programs in order to apply what they know. As constituted, the English department drags modernization, and the writing program could benefit tremendously by separating off and forming its own department. Composition instructors could immediately be enfranchised. Those involved in composition could discuss and decide on the content of courses and the goals of the writing program without having to negotiate with literature professors. Composition would no longer be the departmental underdog competing with more "respectable" disciplines for funds and staffing (though it must still compete with other departments for finite university funds). "I don't think it's healthy for English departments and writing departments to be split," says Wolf. "But so many universities are run like this one where people who teach writing are treated badly. It would be so much easier and the program could get so much more done if it didn't have to answer to the English department." Wolf describes the experience of a colleague who tried to run a writingacross-the-disciplines program under the English department at UCLA. "It nearly drove her out of her mind, because they have all kinds of strange priorities that have nothing to do with the priorities of a writing program." A literature department could influence a writing program in healthy ways, Wolf believes, but this is not happening at CSUN.

"The department forbids us to teach literature in

46 composition classes. And I think, especially for developmental writing, that's extremely damaging. These students are going to be most helped by reading for pleasure." Wolf explains that reading fiction tends to be more pleasurable than reading essays, and language acquisition theorists believe that reading for pleasure supports our syntactic development as writers. Barring a major shift in faculty attitudes toward composition, the English department will continue to be a fetter upon the writing program.

A chief obstacle to "liberating" the program from the

department is that it would require an approving vote from the English faculty.

Only two faculty

members, Wolf and Armstrong, represent composition among some forty voters. Although the question has yet to be raised in departmental meetings, knowledgeable observers have advised me that the faculty would resist the writing program's secession. Composition may be viewed condescendingly, but it does give the English department authority over campus literacy.

With composition gone and

literature in a steady national decline, English faculty might begin to feel inconsequential. Campus sources have also suggested that the department has an economic interest in keeping composition. It is apparently not uncommon for English departments to subsidize small graduate seminars and the comforts of senior literary faculty by packing composition programs with underpaid part-timers and TAs (Szilak; Nash). English department chair Gale Larson denies this goes on at CSUN or anywhere else, and he holds that the department's composition courses actually produce a net loss. My discussion with School of Humanities budget manager Pat Boles seemed to confirm Larson's contention with respect to CSUN. Admittedly, the complicated budget formulas remain a bit mysterious to me. But it is certainly clear that separating the writing program from the English department may be a necessary step toward putting composition under the control of composition people. A second key institutional barrier to a modern writing program is the writing tests required for college graduation, or for passing lower-division writing courses, at CSUN and many other colleges. We have already observed how CSUN's Upper Division Writing Proficiency Examination is a poor measure of writing ability. But the role of such tests in keeping university writing instruction within traditional bounds, and in upholding the political status quo, deserves consideration as well. CSUN instituted the WPE in 1980 in fulfillment of a CSU mandate that all CSU students, during their junior or

47 senior year, demonstrate writing proficiency before graduating. The CSU mandate, known as the Graduate Writing Assessment Requirement (GWAR), came in response to the so-called literacy crisis of the 1970s.

The literacy crisis was actually a deliberate fiction based on misinterpretations of

declining SAT scores (Shor 1986: 59-103; Howe; Steelman and Powell; Brodinsky).

It served to

accelerate a new conservative political agenda in education, including the now unprecedented use of proficiency tests in the nation's schools--tests to graduate high school, tests to pass from grade to grade. Instead of the expanding education budgets and broadening curricula of the 1960s, we would have smaller budgets and narrow "back-to-basics" curricula emphasizing rote drills to prepare us for the tests. The proficiency tests pleased conservatives because testing focuses attention and blame on the individual, rather than the institution or society, for the inadequacies of education. Ira Shor in Culture Wars says it succinctly: "In the 1960s, masses of people confronted the system together. Now, the system was confronting you, alone" (89). Some positive measures did accompany the CSU's GWAR.

Pre-freshman composition

developmental writing programs were introduced on CSU campuses (remedial courses had formerly not been allowed). Also, a few CSUs added an upper division writing course requirement, instead of an exam, to fulfill the GWAR. Yet, the majority of campuses, like CSUN, opted for an exam. And the broad conditions that undermine quality writing education in the CSUs--too little writing and too few writing courses required, inadequately trained writing faculty, overuse and abuse of part-timers, understaffed and undersupported writing programs--went unaddressed.

Now students take WPEs

which the universities have not prepared them to pass, and the universities can blame the students. In 1986-87, 32 percent of CSUN's test-takers received notices in the mail saying not that the university had failed them, but that the students were failures. One group of students known to WPE counselors are particularly hurt by the CSU priorities. These students have completed their coursework, have devoted four or more years of study and possibly gone into debt, but are denied degrees because they cannot pass the WPE. The tests and the university have dealt them serious defeats. "They are the human beings who have been destroyed by a vicious, vicious institution," says one CSUN observer.

48 Tests like the WPE serve hidden political purposes: they deflect criticism of the university by assuring legislators and taxpayers that higher education is enforcing "rigorous" literacy standards; and they provide a cheap substitute for the quality types of writing programs that would make relics of writing proficiency tests. Their official purpose, on the other hand, is to prompt students to take more writing courses or seek tutorial aid to upgrade their writing skills. Perhaps, some may argue, the WPE is still beneficial because it does encourage some students to work seriously on writing improvement. Undoubtedly, this is true for some students. But it is common knowledge at CSUN that large numbers of students complete freshman composition and then avoid further writing involvement. Their reasons? Some may not need more writing instruction or not believe they need it. Others know their writing does need work; but with heavy class loads and the knowledge that more writing courses are not required, they let the writing go. Probably many have fears about writing or have had bad experiences in writing classrooms. I asked a marketing major, four-time WPE failer, why he had not taken English 305 (intermediate expository writing) to prepare for the exam. "It's psychological," he said. "If you're not good at something, most individuals are apt to shy away from it, instead of attack it. And basically that's my attitude with writing." If the official goal of the WPE is to prompt more students to better their writing skills, the failure rates certainly do not suggest this is happening. The percent of failures has climbed every year since the test's inception.8 The WPE's net effect on university writing may actually be negative, particularly in terms of its traditionalist assumptions.

Wolf warns, "It's a very dangerous test philosophically, because the

message it gives to the university is that this is what writing is all about." The exam is based on the traditional five-paragraph theme that modern composition theorists have widely discredited as a model for writing. By assigning the topic and directing how the student must address that topic, the WPE subverts the rhetorical understanding of writing as meaningful communication. The exam's message is that it doesn't matter what students want to say or how they want to say it; what matters is what teachers or test administrators want said and how they want it said. The preordained topic and subquestions also discourage viewing writing as a discovery process. Writing instead becomes a rigid,

49 mechanical activity that fails to engage the confidence and fluency with language which students bring to their daily speaking. We have not studied or measured the extent to which the WPE affects teacher and student views of writing, or affects writing instruction practices, but there must be considerable impact. The test very likely reinforces the traditional writing beliefs and classroom methods prevailing in the university. Teachers and departments are rightfully concerned that their students be prepared to pass the WPE. One student told me his business communications course gave WPE practice exams, and this likely goes on in other writing courses. The university writing center gets frequent teacher requests for classroom presentations on the WPE. Until recently, the center sent WPE counselors who would give talks and then have the students take sample tests; the counselors would mark the tests and later return them to students. Wolf abolished that policy after she discovered that a video presentation would serve the purpose. Wolf resents the use of the writing center to support the WPE, believing that the six counselor-tutors--who are part-time faculty or TAs--should devote their time to genuine writing instruction, rather than to test-taking strategies. "These people are capable of conducting excellent writing instruction. They're highly trained, highly competent. What they wind up doing is saying over and over things like, 'Eat a good breakfast before you go take the test. Be sure all of your points are well-developed.' It reduces them to machines." But there is a big demand for WPE assistance: twothirds of lab tutoring time is spent in WPE counseling. The center also runs WPE prep sessions, workshops, and classes, which Wolf describes as helpful for students who haven't serious writing problems but need strategies for taking the test. The WPE has become an axis around which much of the university's writing attention seems to revolve. The CSUs also use writing proficiency tests in the developmental writing programs.

The

developmental courses are required for students whose low scores on the English Placement Test (EPT) prevent their direct admission to freshman composition. At CSUN, students must pass two developmental courses (097 and 098) or only one course (098), depending on how low their EPT scores are. Fifty-minute essay tests that are exactly like the WPE are administered at the end of each course. Until spring 1988, the written exit exams were the sole determiner of whether students passed

50 the English department's developmental courses. As an 097-098 tutor from 1986 to '88, it was obvious to me that the exit exams were accentuating the traditional orientation of the courses, with preordained topics, and formulaic modes and structures. Moreover, the late part of semesters inevitably turned toward taking practice exams.

One instructor administered practice exams every Monday for the

second half of the semester. My tutoring time during those weeks was devoted almost wholly to scoring these exams on a six-point scale, and showing students how they could improve their scores. We did cover many healthy, substantive writing concerns in these sessions--clarity, development, and so forth. But the students were also imbibing a narrow and decidedly unhealthy conception of writing, void of discovery, process, experimenting with ideas and structures and topics. This is not to criticize the instructors, who understandably wanted to ensure that students passed the exams. The problem lies with the use of proficiency tests at the end of writing courses. Fortunately, Armstrong has now introduced a pilot program in which students are graded on portfolios of essays produced over the semester; the exit exam is only one entry in the portfolio, reducing its significance in the class. Rough drafts are attached to the essays to verify that the essays were written by the students. The portfolio grading method still needs to be evaluated and given the English faculty's approval, but it is clearly a modernizing measure for the program. The Pan-African studies developmental program has been grading portfolios--which include an exit exam--for years, according to program director Tom SpencerWalters. Perhaps one day the programs will wean themselves completely from these traditional exams. Writing proficiency tests are widely used among colleges nationally. CSUN professor Rosentene Purnell observed a "proliferation of testing" in the wake of the "perceived literacy crisis." Her 1979 and 1981 surveys revealed, respectively, that 45 and 47 percent of responding institutions were using such tests (407). Most required them for passing beyond the freshman year; others, for passing into upper division or for graduating. The tests undoubtedly play an important role in other universities as they do at CSUN, and they are probably influencing instruction in similar traditionalist ways. Many of the respondents in Purnell's surveys also used writing proficiency tests as a diagnostic or placement tool. A placement test--to determine, for example, the appropriate writing course for incoming freshmen-seems a legitimate practice, depending on the test's design. But the use of writing proficiency tests for

51 passing courses, advancing through college, or for graduating, creates unhealthy pressures on writing instructors and can limit a school's concept of writing. Wolf proposes that CSUN eliminate the WPE and instead fulfill the GWAR through an upper division writing course within students' disciplines; that is, we would meet the CSU requirement while, at the same time, encouraging the growth of writing across the disciplines. Passage of the GWAR could be determined by committees of portfolio readers in order to avoid inconsistencies of instructor grading across the courses. Supporters of the WPE will no doubt argue that such a method allows too much variance: student papers would not address the same topics; students might cheat by getting others to write their papers, even their attached drafts. But the WPE itself has plenty of variance. One test asks students a fairly accessible question about their experiences with shoddy products (80 percent passed), while another asks about the relative roles of technology and human behavior in major world problems (59 percent passed) (Larson 1987). The bottom issue is not consistency, or protection from cheating, or other reliability concerns. It's dollars and priorities. The WPE is cheap and calls for little in the way of writing instruction; Wolf's proposal would cost more, and would require a significant university commitment to writing instruction.

While proponents of writing reform are

educating and advocating to win that commitment, we can also expose the hidden political agendas behind the WPEs and GWARs, and their counterproductive role in writing education.

Long-Term Requirements: Coalitions, New Priorities Many important writing reforms can be accomplished at the campus level--provided, of course, that proponents of change can organize. But the big economic items on our list--professional salaries and benefits, conversion of part-timers to full-timers, smaller teaching loads, a substantial writing curriculum and well-funded programs--will take action at state and national levels. Here, college writing teachers will need plenty of allies to wield influence. We will need to work with other college faculty and with schoolteachers; with other unions; with advocates for health care, child care, the elderly, the homeless.

52 In California, one of the tasks of such a coalition is defeating the "tax revolt" led by real estate and corporate interests. The tax revolt laws, notably Proposition 13 in 1978 and the Gann Initiative which followed, have reduced property taxes while putting a strong cap on state spending, reducing the moneys available for education, health, and other public services.

In 1988, a coalition of groups

including the California Faculty Association placed Proposition 71--a measure to moderate the Gann Initiative and release more state funds--on the June ballot. Tax revolters, on the other hand, put forward Proposition 72 to strengthen Gann. California voters heavily rejected Prop. 72 (38% yes, 62% no), but they also turned down Prop. 71 by a narrow margin (49% yes, 51% no). While the Prop. 71 coalition was not successful in June, the undoing of the tax revolt laws and the directing of state funds toward social needs will ultimately depend on the strength of such "human needs" coalitions. Because state coffers are finite, our broad human needs coalition must finally target Washington, which collects most of our tax billions. There we find the military thriving at $300 billion a year, while the ax continues to fall upon education, health, and welfare. We also find the general tax burden shifting away from wealthy corporate owners to bear more heavily upon middle- and lower-income groups. Our country certainly has the money to hire full-time composition teachers. But again, it's priorities. Our coalition will need to muster the strength to introduce our priorities.

53 CHAPTER 5 MODERN COMPOSITION AND POLITICAL VISIONS

Two years after my CSUN study, I see its reform and action proposals as broadly legitimate and worth supporting. Yes, writing programs need stronger funding, modernization, and administrative autonomy from the English department literati. Yes, composition teachers need to get professionally and politically active, and must join hands with allies to demand a shift in government spending priorities toward education and the meeting of human needs. But I have come to a more critical view of the "modernization" proposed in the study.

My call for the introduction of "modern" composition

instruction as against "traditional" instruction reflected a dualism that I had imbibed from composition modernists at Northridge and from the composition literature generally.

Richard Young, Maxine

Hairston, C. H. Knoblauch and Lil Brannon, and many others had taught me of a "paradigm shift" from "current-traditional rhetoric" to "contemporary rhetoric," from product-oriented, teacher-centered writing instruction to process-oriented, student-centered instruction.

While I was aware that there were

differences and debates among the moderns themselves, these debates seemed less important to me than that there was an "old" way of teaching and a "new" way. Composition teachers and others needed to study the new paradigm and help move our writing programs toward the humanistic pedagogies of the modern field. Today, while I continue to regard modern composition as constituting a broad pedagogical advance over current-traditional approaches, I also see the modern field as fraught with problems whose significance does not pale beside the great divide between process and product pedagogy. In particular, this chapter will suggest that the modern field is as lacking in a well-examined sense of pedagogical and social purpose as the current-traditional model we have come to reject. My CSUN study speaks of how composition should be taught, and of the need for modern methodologies. But it does not ask why composition should be taught in the first place, i.e., toward what end are we educating. Even as my study brought a radical activist edge to writing program reform, I did not apply that same radicalism to the teaching project itself.

I saw the unions and human needs coalitions as

54 vehicles for political resistance, but I did not yet see the classroom itself as a terrain for resistance. Chapter 4 does discuss briefly the need for engaging students in a critique of education, but I myself had not yet embarked on a broad critique. I had not yet made the link between my own political values and my conception of writing instruction. The technocratic narrowness that informed my work likewise informs the widest sectors of the composition profession, whose discussions, proposals, and theories overwhelmingly gear to how writing can better be taught, while rarely stepping back to ask why we do what we do. My proposal here is that the composition profession cannot adequately address student writing problems, such as those we observe at CSUN, without a wider sense of our own purposes. In fact, theoretically speaking, I think it a mistake to even to attempt to define what constitutes a writing problem--much less propose classroom strategies to solve what we consider the problem--without first establishing why we are teaching writing. Our "whys" provide--or should provide--the basis for the "hows" that follow; our goals for the writing classroom define what constitutes a writing problem.

Furthermore, the goals and

methods we do choose for the classroom imply certain goals for the world, imply values.

Such

commentators as James Berlin, Patricia Bizzell, Victor Vitanza, and Greg Myers have been suggesting how debates on pedagogy, composing process, or rhetorical theory involve often-covert debates about values, ideology, politics. This chapter is informed by, and hopes to contribute to, the efforts of such writers to make the covert overt, to locate and assess the ideologies that guide modern composition. My particular focus will be toward questions of purpose and ultimate ends. I will explore and critique the prevailing purposes of modern composition, with special concern for the social visions implied by those purposes. Though I will argue on behalf of the purposes and visions that I favor, I more generally hope to encourage writing teachers to more fully explore and articulate their own purposes. By clarifying our larger world aims, we may not only have more appropriately directed debates in the composition profession, but we will set firmer ground for making pedagogical choices, and for judging different models and theories. Our larger social why can also provide our students a clearer basis for participating in the writing class. As Philip Brady observes, in a valuable and under-distributed little collection entitled The "Why's" of Teaching Composition, "many students are no longer willing to

55 simply take our word that writing 'is part of a basic education' or that writing 'will be good for you in the future….' " (v-vi). Sharing our broader why with students can, ideally, open up the kind of discussion that will help students determine their own whys and why-nots with regard to writing and to education.

Classroom Purposes and Better-World Visions This chapter assumes that the purposes we establish for the teaching of composition will be in accord, or should be in accord, with our better-world vision--our notion of how the world can be made a better place, and of what that "better place" should look like. Most of us do not carry explicit world visions in our mind; rather, we carry implicit visions, or a set of values which may or may not be strongly articulated. When we make our implicit vision explicit, we also draw the contours of our ideology. Göran Therborn in The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology offers that an ideology addresses three questions: What exists? What is good? What is possible? (Berlin 1988). To create a vision, we would first ask ourselves what our values are, and then imagine how a society would be arranged that put our values into practice (what is good?). Next, we would ask whether our ideal society is realistic (what is possible?). For example, do certain aspects of human nature pose insurmountable obstacles? (what exists?) Finally, we would determine what is the best we consider possible for humanity, and what steps might be necessary to move us from our present global mess toward our (realistically) ideal society. We will call this our better-world vision. Most of us describe our values through a common set of words--democracy, equality, justice, compassion--but we mean different things by the words. When we link our values to a vision of how society should be arranged, our values take on more definite meaning. The proposal that we shape our pedagogies according to our social goals may run against the grain of many teachers who believe our job is to teach writing in a relatively neutral manner, leaving our personal political agendas outside the classroom. At the same time, the notion that education should serve the welfare and betterment of society has been a constant in American public discourse since the country's founding.

Thomas Jefferson argued that an educated citizenry would be an essential

safeguard against governmental tyranny and, in Jefferson's elitist terms, would produce "a national

56 aristocracy of talent" to assume the nation's leadership.

The Jacksonian democrats would later

propound a more egalitarian conception wherein universal free schooling would be "an equalizer rather than a selector." For Jacksonians, the school had the task of "eliminating all privilege and destroying all elites by giving to all men the same good common education" (Perkinson 11-12). Andrew Carnegie saw the "true panacea for all the ills of the body politic" bubbling forth through "education, education, education," and Lyndon B. Johnson agreed that "the answer for all our national problems comes down to one single word: education" (qtd. in Perkinson, front matter). Education's social-cure potential has been often exaggerated, and radical critics argue that education's makers and shapers have actually been more interested in social control than social solutions (Bowles and Gintis; Apple; Apple and Weis; Sharp and Green; Giroux and Purpel). But if we only see in education, as Henry Giroux proposes (1983), one "contested terrain" among many terrains, it is certainly one major institution where ideological power is wielded and social purposes pursued. The widespread objection to teachers bringing their social-political goals to the classroom derives in part from the positivist belief that educators are passing along objective, neutral knowledge--a belief that has been widely challenged by proponents of knowledge as a social construct (Kuhn; Bizzell 1979; LeFevre; Popkewitz 1978, 1980), and also challenged by critics who see the "reification of knowledge" as a means by which knowledge that serves elite social control is protected from criticism (Popkewitz 1987b; Giroux 1980; Apple). Yet, the objection to teachers introducing social goals may also reflect schooling's division of labor between the few top administrators who retain the right to determine larger goals and purposes, and the mass of teacher-workers who are expected to carry out the agenda set by administrators. Most teachers--especially, though not exclusively, at the elementary-secondary level-have internalized the roles assigned them within this undemocratic framework: they do not see themselves as having the right or the expertise to determine, with others, the social purposes of education (Densmore). Whatever neutrality teachers may claim, I believe that people who work in education are very much motivated by social visions, or by sets of values that imply visions. Peter Elbow calls writing teachers "closet preachers" who "feign modest goals" but "deep down, want the moon." "People who

57 end up as writing teachers were often most compelled, when going to school, by questions like 'what is good and bad?' and 'why do people do what they do?' and 'how can

I make

the world

better?' " (1978: 57). For teachers to take their visions out of the closet may constitute not only a challenge to administrators, but a challenge to teachers' defined social role as neutral conveyers of official knowledge (Althusser). If, at the same time, students are invited and given the confidence to criticize teacherly visions and to develop and promote their own visions in the classroom and beyond, traditional education is undermined further. Restrictive institutional contexts may allow us to pursue such visionary education in only piecemeal fashion, or may require collective teacher endeavors to alter the institutional context. But our notions of how the world should be deserve sharing. By submitting them to the critical scrutiny of our community of colleagues and students, we allow our visions to become more coherent and mature. And we are more apt to find fellow travelers with whom to work to achieve the visions. The profession of composition provides the open forum we need for sharing and arguing out our social proposals. Our journals and conferences should help us to clarify visions, and help us to work out strategies for putting our social purposes into teaching practice in local contexts. Many composition teachers do design pedagogies to accord with their social aims--though the process tends to be a covert one that does not allow the larger aims to be questioned or scrutinized by students or colleagues. On the other hand, even when we attempt to keep our social agenda separate from our teaching--or believe we have no social agenda--what we do in the classroom unavoidably has social-political implications (on the value-laden nature of any teaching, see Kohlberg and Mayer, and Boehm; as applied to educational research, see Popkewitz 1978).

I believe that the composition

profession could benefit enormously by becoming more aware of the social purposes implicit in our work. An exposition and critique of those purposes constitutes an essential starting point in planning how to educate for a better world. I have culled from the composition literature various purposes given for the learning and/or teaching of writing. I have also looked for indications of social vision that the teaching goals are intended to serve. Since social aims are rarely made very clear, however, I have often looked instead for the social purposes that the teaching goals seem to imply. I will represent the teaching goals and social visions current in the field through five models: utility, individual growth,

58 individual mobility, collaborative growth, and collective empowerment.

I will critique the first four

models, and call for further development of the fifth model.

Model I: Utility The goal of this book is to help you gain more control of your own composing process: to become more efficient as a writer and more effective with your readers. --Linda Flower, Problem-Solving Strategies for Writing (2) In this book we propose to introduce you to the many types of writing assignments that you may confront in college and to prepare you to do these assignments successfully. --Elaine Maimon et al., Writing in the Arts and Sciences (7)

The utility model represents the narrowest and predominant conception of the purposes for teaching composition. The aim is to help students "write effectively" or "write well" for school, careers, life in general. As defined in current-traditional instruction, effective writing is clear, editorially correct, and in conformity with the five-paragraph model or other formulaic demands. In the contemporary view, however, effective writing is more adequately defined as achieving the writer's communicative purpose in the specific rhetorical situation, and this writing ability is integrally linked to critical thinking ability. But toward what social ends shall we teach students to write better? In the utility model, larger social ends are not at issue: our job is simply to teach good writing. Linda Flower implies that the larger purposes be left up to the students: "Whatever your goals are, you are interested in discovering better ways to achieve them" (1). This sounds fair, doesn't it? Yet, in the context of an unfair society, such apparently neutral pedagogies may not be neutral and may not be fair. If our purpose is only to help students better achieve their goals, whatever their goals are, without our attempting to challenge, influence, or prompt reflection upon those goals, then we are practicing a pedagogy of the status quo. The utility model implies a social reform strategy which seeks to help society do better whatever it is now doing. Unfortunately, some of the things our society now does leaves many people hungry and homeless, and renders our planet decreasingly habitable.

Do we want our colleges to produce effective

59 communicators who help employers become "better" at busting unions? "better" at designing the means for nuclear annihilation? If our teaching purposes do not extend beyond the utilitarian, we have no pressing reason for raising such questions. In fact, some utility-oriented writing teachers seem bent on turning students away from larger issues. This is most notable among those who see writing as problem solving, where the requirement for a specific, "operational" solution tends to keep in line students interested in social criticism.

If a student writer asks, "What can be done about our oppressive administration?" the

question would be too vague and emotion-laden, according to Young, Becker, and Pike's Rhetoric: Discovery and Change.

The writer should instead focus on specific acts: how can we induce the

administration to extend library hours, or eliminate student driving restrictions, or abolish its requirement that all freshmen live in dormitories (96). The authors' alternatives may be easier to solve, but what if the student wants to do something about the administration's general oppressiveness? The authors consider oppression too "vague" a problem for a writing assignment. But there are plenty of writers in the world who purport to discuss oppression in quite definite terms as, for example, Simone De Beauvoir discussed the oppression of women, and Martin Luther King the oppression of blacks. The Rhetoric authors secondly object that discussing oppression would be too emotional, but they offer no reason why emotional terms or topics should be avoided. The desire to avoid emotionality could lead to the exclusion of any number of important issues from the writing classroom. Young, Becker, and Pike offer that a well-asked question "defines what is sought and guides but does not constrict inquiry" (96).

Their claim is ironic, since turning students away from the large problem of administrative

oppressiveness and to a smaller problem of extending library hours is certainly to constrict inquiry. Flower also prefers that her students stay "specific." When students fail to establish realistic goals for their writing assignments, Flower warns, "they often produce essays on enormous topics such as the problem of nuclear disarmament--problems on which they have limited inside information and limited reason to write. . . . In two pages what can you say on such topics that anyone would really want to read?" (19) Yet, students may have very good reason to write on such topics as nuclear disarmament, and if we allow such topics to be discussed only by authorities with the "inside information," we limit the

60 capacity of students and the general public to intervene in global issues. Reductionist problem solving often does not encourage democratic modes of thought (see Berthoff and Ohmann for further critique of problem solving).

Constraints on Utility: Social Inequalities The key unfairness of utilitarian pedagogy, however, lies not in its failure to address the big issues "out there," but in its general neglect of the histories and socially imposed inequalities that affect students' own fortunes in the writing classroom, in college, in their career pursuits. Shirley Brice Heath's pioneering ethnography Ways with Words shows how children from their day of birth begin to acquire different endowments of "cultural capital" (Bordieu's term) that weigh heavily upon their success in school.

Heath researched the ways of language and life in two small working-class

communities, one black and one white, in the Carolina Piedmont, and compared these with the cultural ways of the black and white middle-class residents of a nearby larger town.

She found that the

language and values, the concepts of time, space, and order, and the sense of self-importance learned in infancy and early childhood made the middle-class children (of both races) better equipped than the working-class children for the kinds of thinking, work, and literacy demanded at school. Rather than working to counter such class differentials--which, in the school projects developed by Heath, was sought by valuing and building upon the ways and resources that working-class children bring with them to school--most schools tend to reinforce and strengthen class and other differentials. One of the seminal studies on the class bias in school tracking was the 1970 work of Ray Rist, who found that a class of ghetto children was divided into ability groups during the second week of kindergarten, and that the teacher's decision to place children in "fast," "average," or "slow" groups appeared to be based primarily on students' socioeconomic status, rather than on any demonstrated ability differences. The teacher's differential academic expectations became self-fulfilling prophecies, and students were directed into relatively rigid learning tracks in subsequent years. In a 1980 study, Jean Anyon observed the occupational channeling in a comparison of five schools--two "working-class" schools, one "middle-class," one "affluent professional," and one

61 "executive elite" school. In each setting, the work patterns, school knowledge, and teacher-student roles helped prepare students to assume their expected places in the occupational/class hierarchy. Learning in the working class schools meant following the steps of a usually mechanical procedure, involving rote behavior and very little decision making or choice. In the middle-class school, students looked for the "right answer" by following directions, but the directions often called for some figuring and making of choices. The affluent professional school emphasized more creative, independent kinds of learning; students were continually asked to express and apply ideas and concepts. The executive elite school was even more geared to developing students' analytical powers. Students were expected to conceptualize rules by which elements may fit together in systems and then to apply these rules in solving problems. One example of the relative power enjoyed by the executive elite students was a series of language arts assignments where each student had to plan and present a lesson, including a worksheet or game and a homework assignment, for the whole class; afterwards, the class would critically appraise the presentation.

Such an assignment would be unthinkable within the narrow

obedience routines of the working-class schools. In general, the higher the students' social class, the more their learning shifted away from the memorization of facts and getting right answers, and moved toward the conceptualizing of science, math, and social frameworks. The executive elite students were explicitly taught to think not in terms of right or wrong answers, but in terms of whether they agreed or disagreed with given answers. Hence, in terms of William Perry's scheme for intellectual and ethical development during the college years, the elite children were advancing fruitfully along toward a position of committed relativism, while the working-class and middle-class children were being trained in dualistic absolutes. Processes of class channeling continue up through the college years. Donald Lazere describes California's three-tiered state college system--a model widely emulated throughout the U.S.--which consists of the elite Universities of California for the best academic achievers, the non-elite California State Universities for the middle achievers, and the bottom-track two-year community colleges, which have open admissions. Although, according to a 1960 Master Plan, the three tiers were supposed to serve their students equally well, different funding bases soon led to inequities. A 1969 study cited by

62 Lazere found that, of every $100 the state spent for higher education, an average of $60 was spent for each UC student, $30 for each CSU student, and $10 for each community college student. A later study held that the unequal funding per student takes place not only on the level of graduate education and research at UC, where it might be justified, but in undergraduate and especially lower-division programs, such as Freshman English, that are comparable in the three systems and are supposed to be the strong points of the CSU and community colleges relative to UC. (Lazere 383) The inequitable funding--which undoubtedly contributes to the budget shortages observed in my CSUN study--impacts not only on the instruction and services available to students but, Lazere points out, leads to differences in the physical environment.

Spacious grounds and expressive, imaginative

buildings at the UCs versus the no-frills landscapes at the community colleges translates into less selfesteem and less enthusiasm for studies at the latter institutions. Of course, the lower-income students, who are most often in need of the best instruction and services and motivating environment, are the least likely to have access to these. A 1982 state-commissioned report tabulated the numbers of dependent undergraduates in the three college systems who came from families with annual incomes of $30,000 or more: 64 percent of UC students, 55 percent of CSU students, and 31 percent of community college students fit this category (Lazere 383). The impact of educational channeling, combined with other institutional and historic inequities, upon minorities has been well-documented. Blacks and Hispanics, the two largest nonwhite minorities, are less likely to be graduated from high school than are whites.

Blacks and Hispanics who do

graduate high school are less likely than whites to enter college (Astin 51). Blacks and Hispanics who do enter college are overrepresented in the two-year institutions (i.e., the college low track), and are also overrepresented among those who leave college before completing their bachelor's degrees (Wilson 125, Astin 51). While women do enjoy parity with men in educational attainment, gender disparity in the job market is even greater than racial disparity. Among college graduates who worked

63 full-time year-round in 1987, black males earned 80 percent, black females earned 67 percent, and white females earned 68 percent of what white males earned (U.S. Bureau 137-44). A cherished American ideal, alive and well in the composition field, sees education as the key to eliminating such inequities. We have seen, however, that education widely supports and reinforces social inequalities. This is evidenced not only in the tracking systems, with their differential pedagogies and environments, but in textbooks that underrepresent and misrepresent the histories and present realities of minorities, women, workers, and other groups (Anyon 1979; Hahn and Blankenship; Ellington). The Council on Interracial Books for Children believes that textbooks' characterizations of U.S. society as a "true democracy," along with avoidance of our society's structural injustices, leaves students from less privileged groups with only themselves to blame for their failures. Students reading the widely used secondary level history texts assessed by the Council in 1977 "might well conclude that women and third world people are unsuccessful by nature, heredity, or inclination": Native Americans were dispossessed of their land because they "did not understand the concept of private land ownership"; Asian workers received low wages because they were "willing to work for very little"; Blacks could not find good urban jobs because they were "unskilled and uneducated"; Chicanos face problems because they are "not fluent in English"; Filipinos and Puerto Ricans were colonized because they were "not ready for self-government"; and women "lack sufficient strength" and are "too frequently pregnant" to be an important part of the workforce. (90, 91) That such messages may effectively shape young people's thinking is suggested in Michelle Fine's 1983 study of New York City youths, mostly black and Hispanic, who resided at or attended juvenile residential facilities because of academic, family, or other problems.

The surveyed youths widely

agreed with the statement, "My problems are my own fault," and were more likely to attribute their failures to their personality than to situational factors such as poverty, race, family, or neighborhood (228). Fine believes that the individualistic perspectives offered at school tend to reinforce students' sense of powerlessness when they fail academically. "Not that these adolescents have no role in creating their own problems, but the economic and social realities of their lives do create the conditions

64 in which these youths exist, get into trouble, and survive" (233). She argues that effective schooling must encourage social criticism and social advocacy:

"For schools not to reproduce self-blaming

youths, schools need to create contexts in which economic and social inequities are examined meaningfully and in which education itself is analyzed critically. Schools also need to be leaders in agitating for economic and social conditions in which human needs can be nurtured" (233).

The

Council on Interracial Books concurs: "Young people should learn of the societal roadblocks that must be surmounted before equity is achieved. They should learn why and how to create the social changes necessary to achieve equity" (29). Utilitarian writing classrooms that seek to help students "achieve their goals," without encouraging students to explore the social context in which they pursue their goals, leave students illequipped for their trials in academe and beyond.

As Patricia Bizzell points out, our pedagogical

choices affect a heterogenous student population unequally (1982a: 237).

Working-class college

students who flounder in their attempts at "academic discourse," when it seems to come so readily to their more affluent classmates, need more than prescriptions for individual success which lend themselves to rationales of self-doubt and self-blame. They need "the critical training to trace their victimage to social forces," including the channeling processes just described, and "hence to work toward control of their own destinies," such as through recognition of the non-fixed nature of existing social arrangements (Bizzell 1982b: 196). They also need pedagogies that affirm and make active use of working-class students' own knowledge, cultural resources, and histories (Heath; Shor 1987a, 1987b). In fact, all kinds of students--middle class and working class, majority and minority, men and women--need legitimated their sense of alienation with authoritarian classrooms and dull, life-irrelevant curricula that schools and colleges impose upon them. They need teachers who model alternative, egalitarian pedagogies, and who offer students frameworks not only for mastering the intellectual tools of academe, but for critiquing academe, critiquing society, and struggling for democratic power in our social institutions. In short, the writing classroom needs purposes and visions that are far broader than the teaching of "effective writing."

65 The better-world vision implied in the utility model is one in which individuals more effectively pursue their goals; that is, it represents the capitalist ideal. As Adam Smith proposed, "the natural effort of every individual to better his own condition" would carry capitalist society to wealth and prosperity (540). Smith recognized that this competitive system involves human costs: "Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality. For one very rich man, there must be at least five hundred poor. . . ." (709-10) But, regretfully, human nature makes such costs inevitable. "The violence and injustice of the rulers of mankind is an ancient evil, for which, I am afraid, the nature of human affairs can scarce admit of a remedy" (493). This is not to suggest that Flower, Maimon et al., and others who indicate narrowly utilitarian purposes for the writing classroom necessarily share the views of Adam Smith. I wish only to point out what their indicated purposes seem to socially imply. There may be legitimate reasons for describing our purposes more narrowly than we actually conceive them--e.g., keeping one's job, the constraints of publishing--and the purposes described here and in the pages ahead may tell as much about the institutional objectives with which we make compromises as about the views of the authors themselves.

Yet, I think that utilitarian notions of education and corporate-efficiency ideals are a

genuine influence, perhaps the most powerful influence, among theorists of composition; such certainly holds true for American educational thinkers historically (Callahan; Shannon; Popkewitz 1987a). I believe it important that we share our larger purposes in textbooks and professional articles, insofar as the context permits. In the classroom, sharing our purposes and visions demystifies education for our students. And, if we are open to students' challenges, to hearing their purposes, to negotiating among our differing agendas--the teacher's, the students', the institution's--the writing classroom becomes a more humane and democratic place.

Model II: Individual Growth Writing does not serve merely a utilitarian function. That is why we encourage students to appreciate writing that discovers meaning, form, and self. --Erika Lindemann, A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers (7)

66 I'm not saying people are wicked if they keep their real voice a secret, but they are neglecting a great source of power. --Peter Elbow, Writing with Power (294) We need to design a college writing curriculum that will systematically confront students with tasks to develop their discursive and cognitive maturity. --Janice Hays, "The Development of Discursive Maturity in College Writers" (1983: 141)

I will discuss four aims that seem to fall under the rubric of individual growth: self-awareness, honesty, intellectual growth, and power to influence others. Proponents of individual growth rarely indicate their larger visions, and each of the four aims might be read along utilitarian lines. example,

For

Anne Ruggles Gere in The "Why's" of Teaching Composition sees "integrity and self-

knowledge" as having "internal value" for writing students, but she also stresses how these qualities enhance students' "political power," meaning their ability to persuade an audience. "I use the word 'political' in its broadest sense--to push the world in a certain direction, to alter people's ideas and ideals" (28). Toward which direction does Gere wish students to push the world? Which ideas and ideals does she believe need altering? That students should push the world toward "integrity" can be read in Gere, but is not explicitly stated, and we can as readily construe a utilitarian call to help students push the world wherever they wish to push it. In fact, the pursuit of personal or intellectual growth toward unexamined social ends is an overwhelming trend in composition.

However, as we have

already addressed general problems in the utility model, we will now consider the literature as expressing social visions beyond mere utility.

Self-Awareness Self-discovery or self-awareness is a key project of the "expressionist" school of composition (see Berlin's typology, 1982). What students are supposed to discover about themselves, and toward what end, is not discussed much in the literature--assumably, expressionists wish their students to find these answers for themselves. Yet, expressionism does seem to favor certain kinds of discoveries

67 more than others. Writing teachers "must recognize and use as the psychologists do in therapy, a person's desire to actualize himself," says pioneering expressionist Gordon Rohman (1965: 108). Selfactualization is identified with an inner "sense of power, of self-fulfillment," and with becoming "more of the person we potentially can be" (Rohman 1965: 112; 1972: 374). Expressionists believe student writers self-actualize by approaching their subject with integrity, freshness, a growing sense of their uniqueness--by discovering what Ken Macrorie calls one's "authentic voice" (1970a: 149), and Peter Elbow, "what your inner self sounds like" (1981: 306). The self that the expressionists wish us to discover is thus characterized by its authenticity (discussed below under "honesty") and its uniqueness. Expressionist uniqueness, or individuality, is tempered somewhat with references to commonality--Rohman offers that when a writer reveals his/her unique experience, "we recognize the experience as our own too" (1965: 108)--and this individualityversus-commonality creates a theoretical tension that begs to be sorted through by proponents of expressionism. But, in general terms, expressionism regards the writer more as an individual than a social being. Donald Murray likens our students to "fingerprints and voiceprints, each different from the other," and advises the teacher, "If you are able to accept your loneliness, your individuality, then you are on the way to accepting theirs and helping them to accept it too" (132, 145). Expressionist students help each other in the search for their unique truth by responding to drafts. But, as Elbow explains, students are not to theorize or argue about responses, nor discuss or theorize about the subject matter addressed by the writer (1973: 85-106). Afterwards, the writer uses the peer responses "for his own private purposes" (1973: 140). Likewise, Murray's students have no discussion before writing since this "may get in the way of the students' writing the way they write" (75). If, while responding to drafts, students begin talking about the subject rather than what the writer has said about the subject, the teacher should "let that run for a short while, but then bring the discussion back to the treatment of the subject, not the subject itself" (201). and social ramifications.

This emphasis on uniqueness and individual truths has political

Murray observes in the writing classroom a range of experiences and

backgrounds, with "welfare mothers sitting beside children of the corporate rich" (133). For Murray, such differences of life fortune are part of a "diversity" to be "gloried in," but he does not discuss them

68 as opportunities for students to explore the impact of social inequalities in our lives, or as opportunities to make critical judgments or moral commitments. Whether the student is rich or poor, has higher or lower aspirations, is academically successful or unsuccessful, they are encouraged to see their condition as an individual matter, rather than a social and political matter. Hence, while the assumed goal is self-affirmation, expressionist individualism becomes a prescription for self-blame. The expressionist's better world is one in which we pursue our individual purposes, and it is not incompatible with Adam Smith's capitalist scheme. But the concern is less with economic structure than with internal life--a vision well attuned to Eastern philosophies, which are regularly cited in expressionist literature. Whatever we do in the world, it should be done with a clear sense of who we are inside. In the face of unjust authority or unjust institutions, this often means a preference for the bending-reed approach, for creatively adapting to--rather than collectively challenging--dislikeable conditions. Consider Elbow's advice to a student or worker who is unhappy with the writing assignment required by a teacher or boss:

Perhaps you must write an essay for a teacher who never seems to understand you; or a report for a supervisor who never seems able to see things the way you do; or a research report on a topic that has always scared and confused you. If you try to write in the most useful voice for this situation--perhaps cheerful politeness or down-to-business impersonality--the anger will probably show through anyway. . . . In a situation like this it helps to take a roundabout approach. First do lots of freewriting where you are angry and tell your reader all your feelings in whatever voices come. Then get back to the real topic. After doing lots more writing and exploration of the topic without worrying about the tone, the student will find it "relatively easy to revise and rewrite something powerful and effective for that reader" (1981: 3078). Elbow's advice is sound in the sense that we are often caught in circumstances that forbid open complaint or expression of anger, and that blowing off steam elsewhere is often necessary to perform well the work required of us. Yet, because Elbow does not even consider the possibility of turning anger

69 into positive resistance, nor consider the need for larger political strategies to undo the hierarchal structures that make us angry in the first place, he offers us only a vision of perpetual surrender to authority. The expressionist focus is less toward the transformation of oppressive social structures, and more toward techniques to help people feel better within alienating circumstances. Some interesting calls for self-actualizing pedagogy have been coming from observers of the labor market. Notably since the late 1960s, the number of high-skilled, high-paying jobs has not kept pace with our country's increasing population of college graduates. Russell Rumberger, whose 1981 book Overeducation in the U.S. Labor Market substantiated several earlier studies (Berg, Freeman, Carnegie), points to a "growing disparity between the higher expectations of young people and the lack of opportunity to satisfy them" (15). Rumberger estimates that 40 percent of all U.S. workers with some college education were overeducated for their jobs in 1976, that 56 percent of younger workers faced this circumstance, and that projections to 1985 indicate a deepening

overeducation (or under-utilization) trend (86-96). (National and state education commissions have widely claimed that technology is upgrading general skill requirements in the job market; this claim is challenged by Rumberger [1987] and by other contributors in Burke and Rumberger's The Future Impact of Technology on Work and Education.) James O'Toole, supervisor of the 1973 federallysponsored study Work in America, worries that the disjunction between education and employment is creating frustration and low morale among younger workers--"workers who, ironically, have the educational backgrounds to articulate their dissatisfactions": A situation in which taxi drivers have college degrees is not necessarily benign. . . . Collegeeducated taxi drivers in New York City have formed a radical socialist Taxi Rank and File Coalition and control fifteen of fifty garages in the city. The coalition garnered 20 percent of the vote in a 1974 union election. (1977: 59) O'Toole comforts non-socialist readers that this is not to alarm or forecast revolution. He believes, however, that the situation demands a new approach to education, instilling career expectations that are not "lower," but "realistic."

The approach would look to John Dewey's education for "human

70 growth," which is based on the notion that "most people find life rewarding and satisfying when it is experienced as a continuous course toward fulfilling one's individual potential--both on and off the job" (140). O'Toole explains: "Dewey wanted to equip youth to find educative experience even in the worst jobs. He felt that each worker should have 'the education which enables him to see within his daily work all there is in it of large and human significance' " (141). Apparently, a data entry clerk typing numbers into a computer for eight hours a day may find her work illuminating and enriching if she has "discovered herself." The key for O'Toole, though, is that the depressant conditions of the labor market require that we offer youth a broad, growth-oriented schooling that permits "adaptability and coping with change in an unpredictable environment. . . . Historically, the people most able to adapt to the vicissitudes of social life have been the liberally educated, for whom learning has always been a way of life" (145, 147). Similar advice is offered by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education. Their 1973 report on College Graduates and Jobs, significantly subtitled Adjusting to a New Labor Market Situation, suggests that "the prospects of grave political repercussions" can be diminished if college students learn to "adjust" to new circumstances by "developing realistic expectations about jobs," and by looking on higher education as personal growth. College should be seen as "much more than preparation for an occupation," but rather as an opportunity to "broaden interests that can enrich all of subsequent life": "Higher education was once most helpful in entering a higher class status; subsequently, in entering into a better job; and increasingly now, in entering into a better life" (10). So, students should not expect a better job, but they should expect a better life!

Expressionists and others who teach

composition for growth and self-discovery must develop a clear conception of their social goals. Do we want self-aware students who are forever adapting to the "vicissitudes of social life?"

Or do we

envision ourselves and our students democratically directing our social course?

Honesty Honesty, integrity, and authenticity are terms that hold mystery for expressionists, a mystery tied to their belief in a magical Truth to be discovered deep inside of us. This belief is often only put to us

71 implicitly, but Elbow is straightforward: the writer's agenda is to "put magic into words," "the entrance into magic is through the truth," and "the best advice is simply to believe in magic and find where your magic lies" (1981: 370). A magical Truth is linked to a magical Unity. Again, the linkage is often only hinted toward, as in Gere's "wholistic" view of integrity. Moral honesty is "only part, and a lesser part," of the full meaning of integrity, says Gere. "Derived from the Latin integritas--defined as wholeness, entireness, completeness--the word integrity means no element is missing, nothing is divided or broken" (19).

Hence, to write with integrity means to produce a composition that is whole and

complete. But the implications are more global: "Written composition exemplifies integrity to students who face a fragmented world. Writing provides a means of uniting, of making whole. Students who experience integrity in written composition may be able to extend that integrity to other areas of their lives" (27).

Gere seems to intend a wholeness in student writing that will promote wholeness in the

world. Were Gere looking only for wholeness, however, she would not use the word integrity, which connotes honesty as well as wholeness.

What may be informing Gere's notion of integrity is a

communion-like vision of humanity searching for the Truth that will unite us all--a notion that guides many of our religions. The Quakers, for example, regard God as "the source of unity among conflicting forces" (Brinton 166). "In withdrawing into the presence of God," say the Quakers, "man seeks to perceive the whole as it is seen by God. Adherence to the part--to a particular individual, nation, race or class--may be overcome by communion with the Father of all being" (Brinton 62). The vision finds its modern political expression among radical pacifists, for whom nonviolence "relies on the power of truth rather than force of arms and flows from a sense of the underlying unity of all human beings" (Cooney and Michalowski 11).

There are problems in this vision, which I will take up in my section on

collaborative growth.

But those advocating wholeness as a pedagogical aim should make their

wholeness vision clear, so we can frankly assess it. For now, let us consider the more ordinary idea of honesty in writing, as suggested by Erika Lindemann: "Because other media threaten to re-create us as plastic people, Disney delusions, and Madison Avenue stereotypes, we want students to write honestly, with a kind of tough sensitivity, about subjects that matter to them" (7). If we link this composition aim to a vision, it might propose that a

72 better world is one in which people conduct their lives and affairs honestly, without corruption, and that we begin to approach that better world by practicing honest writing and honest living ourselves, and encouraging the same in others. While I want to make clear that I do value honesty and openness, and I encourage this in the freshman writing classes that I teach, I want to point how honesty is insufficient as a non-utilitarian teaching or social goal. The achievement of an honest society must take into account the forces that lead people to dishonesty and, in particular, must conceive of social and economic structures that will favor honest conduct. A society that allocates inordinate power to small groups and individuals (such as corporate owners), and then asks those individuals to not abuse that power, is trusting the wolves with the chickens.

When the power holders establish dishonest or plastic or Madison Avenue institutional

priorities, those of us who, as a matter of survival, must work in those institutions are often forced to serve dishonest priorities. A plain case are workers in the news media. A 1983 study by Dan Hallin tells of New York Times' El Salvador correspondent Ray Bonner, whose reportage was seen by influential conservative critics as too sympathetic to the Salvadoran rebels. In what many observers believe was a response to political pressures, the Times pulled Bonner out of El Salvador and later assigned him to the financial pages (18-19). One reporter wrote to Hallin of the pressures against expressing a left-of-center perspective in the news: A reporter will often hold back on following the logic of his own opinion if other reporters . . . are beginning to jokingly refer to him as a "Com/symp." Not only is he afraid some right-wing informer lurking in the bar might overhear . . . he is even more afraid that his reputation might get back to his desk. (qtd. in Hallin 18) The quoted reporter's concerns are supported by case after case of firings, demotions, transfers, and suppressed stories described in Ben Bagdikian's authoritative critique The Media Monopoly. Any overt punishment of a reporter delivers a

lasting lesson to everyone in the news organization, until

avoidance of the prohibited news subject becomes unconscious, an "internalized bias," says Bagdikian (217-18). One of the most widely prohibited subjects is anti-corporate news. Of the 1,110 members of the professional organization, Investigative Reporters and Editors, only 6 have corporate life as their

73 beat (56). The problem is exacerbated by the rapidly centralizing corporate ownership of the media, and by the media's increasing obligations to corporate advertisers. The bulk of the output from our country's 25,000 media outlets was controlled, in 1981, by 46 corporations; in 1986, by 29 corporations; in the early nineties, media leaders predict, by a half-dozen corporations (21, 235).

Bagdikian

concludes that the heads of these corporations constitute a "new Private Ministry of Information and Culture" (xx). The media problem may be seen as the tip of the iceberg as far as constraints on honest expression in our society. Particularly when people are dissatisfied with institutional conditions, how often can students be honest with teachers? teachers be honest with administrators? any subordinate be honest with any superior? All dangerous undertakings. Writing teachers should certainly strive to create a classroom environment where students feel safe to say what they really think. But teachers interested in an honest world should not give favor to naiveté. Students need opportunities to explore and make judgments about the stifling of free expression in our lives, and need opportunities to imagine alternative worlds.

Intellectual Growth Intellectual or cognitive growth--under such terms as critical thinking, problem solving, discursive maturity, liberal education--represents one of the most cited objectives in modern composition. When we scan the literature for the purposes of such growth, we primarily find the silence that seems to imply utilitarian ends (see, for example, the collection gathered by Hays et al., The Writer's Mind). But, again, for our discussion, let us assume non-utilitarian visions on the part of our writers. An intellectual objective with growing currency in composition is that of initiating students into the "academic discourse community" (see discussions in Bizzell 1982a, 1982b; Bruffee 1982a, 1984; Bartholomae; see applications in Bartholomae and Petrosky; Mike Rose; Maimon et al.). As Kenneth Bruffee proposes, "we would see ourselves as people appointed by the knowledge communities our students aspire to join to induct students into the conversation of educated human beings" (1982a: 111). If viewed as social vision, Bruffee's proposal offers that a better world is one populated by intellectuals. That some intellectuals might oppress other intellectuals does not appear to be at issue in Bruffee's work (and the

74 issue is heavily ignored in the work of other academic discourse proponents). What is important is that people will be able to reason together through a common code, weigh issues abstractly, entertain multiple perspectives. Let us accept, for present purposes, that helping students join the "educated conversation" of academe is a desirable goal--or at least that the fostering of mass intellectuality is essential to any democratic better world. Next we must ask whether that educated-conversation project is enough, and what values and visions inform our approach to that project. Interesting answers are suggested in the models of moral-cognitive growth taken up by a number of composition theorists. William Perry's influential nine-stage scheme, presented in his Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years (1968), defines a simplistic position of right-wrong dualism, an intermediate position of relativistic thinking, and an advanced position of commitment within relativism (discussed in Bizzell 1984, Hays 1987; applied in Hays 1983, and Rosenberg). Perry's goal is for students to take a moral stand, but a stand that is based on thoughtful reflection rather than unexamined truths. We would look for "considered conformity as against blind conformity, judicious revolt as against blindly reactive revolt" (209). Perry acknowledges that his model implies particular moral preferences. "The values implied by the word 'growth' in our scheme are inescapable" and suggest that "it is better to grow than to arrest growth or to regress" (emphasis in original) (45, 44). He sees his model as contributing to the making of better persons and making of a better world: "An advanced person showing a high rate of growth becomes somehow a 'better' person. . . . We would argue . . . that the final structures of our scheme express an optimally congruent and responsible address to the present state of man's predicament" (44, 45). In Perry, the educated better world readable in Bruffee is more definitely asserted. Moral betterment is defined not in terms of our specific positions on justice, equality, political systems, the Ten Commandments, or other principled criteria,

but becomes rather a question of intellectual

sophistication. Whether we favor conformity or revolt, dictatorship or democracy, our positions have equal merit in Perry's moral scheme, provided they have been reflectively determined. Paradoxically, Perry asks students to move beyond simple relativism to commitment, while his own model refuses to

75 make the same commitment: it is a relativist model (see Kohlberg and Turiel for a fine critique of relativistic moral education). Let us offer to Perry's model the example of Henry Kissinger who, like most members of our country's corporate-political elite, is a highly educated shoo-in for Perry's ninth stage of moral development. No public figure in our times has enjoyed wider praise for his intellect. Kissinger has taught government at Harvard, diplomacy at Georgetown; the catalog at my local university library lists sixty-four of his works. He served as national security advisor under Nixon and Ford, secretary of state under Ford and Carter, and won the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the agreement that ended the Vietnam War. During his most powerful years under Nixon, our peace prize winner used his discursive talents to co-engineer the secret invasion of Cambodia (he personally selected targets for the B-52 raids and "seemed to enjoy playing bombadier" [Hersh 122]); to help orchestrate the overthrow of Allende's elected left-wing government in Chile and its replacement by a brutal military regime that was friendlier to U.S. corporate interests; to order illegal wiretapping of the Nixon administration's political critics, and FBI/CIA spying on anti-war activists and radicals or suspected radicals.

Chronicler William Shawcross adds that Kissinger's personal qualities were less than

exemplary--self-serving, self-centered, manipulative, anti-democratic (77-79). I do agree with Perry, Bruffee, and others that intellectuality is better than non-intellectuality, reflectiveness better than nonreflectiveness. But educators need pedagogical models and visions that help us make the link between intellectuality and our commitments to a just and humane world; ethically relativistic models do not address this need. One attempt to join intellectual growth with an explicit commitment to justice can be found in the moral-cognitive model of Lawrence Kohlberg (see Miller for an analysis of freshman papers that uses Kohlberg). Like Perry and many other developmentalists, Kohlberg proposes a curriculum of moral dilemmas that stimulate students' thinking and advancement to higher stages.

But, where Perry

defines moral maturity as arriving at a well-considered commitment to (seemingly) any position, Kohlberg's highest stage involves a well-considered commitment to "principles of justice." Unfortunately, Kohlberg's justice principles are defined vaguely as "reciprocity and equality of the

76 human rights" and "respect for the dignity of human beings as individual persons," and there are indications that what Kohlberg has in mind is capitalist justice. What is more, Kohlberg claims that his moral stages and principles are "culturally universal" and, specifically, that they are free of any class bias: "The moral stages do not represent an American middle-class value bias; they are universal" (Kohlberg and Turiel 414). Kohlberg's purportedly universal, class-neutral system is reflected in the U.S. Constitution--"The moral basis of the Constitution and the major moral values of our society are the principles of justice which we say are the core principles of any mature morality" (Kohlberg and Turiel 442)--and in the value postulates of "ethical liberalism" (Kohlberg and Mayer 472). On ethical liberalism, Kohlberg and co-author Rochelle Mayer cite the works of Mill, Dewey, Locke, Kant, John Rawls, and a "modern statement" by R.S. Peters that relates this liberal tradition to education. In Peters, it is argued that a just society need not be an egalitarian one, since egalitarian logic would finally force us to genetic breeding to ensure that all of us are born with similar assets; hence, egalitarianism leads to infringements of liberty (57). In Rawls, whom Kohlberg frequently cites in his works, we are advised that inequalities are justified if the entrepreneurial incentives afforded by the inequalities lead to more efficient production, thereby raising the long-term prospects of society's least advantaged members (Rawls 78, 302; Martin 66). Although Kohlberg does not speak directly to such points, we do notice that his list of "universal values" includes "property," "economic and business contracts," and "equality of opportunity," but does not include equal distribution of wealth (Kohlberg and Turiel 433). We need not grapple here with the arguments about equality and justice in order to agree that, in a world that includes millions of socialists and other egalitarians, Kohlberg's principles of justice are far from universal. Those who teach writing to promote intellectual growth--and perhaps all of us do share this aim-need to define critically the growth we wish to encourage. Suppose we accept that values and visions are implicated in any pedagogy we choose. Suppose also that we reject Perry's moral relativism, and Kohlberg's capitalist universals. In fact, suppose we reject in general the search for universal values: after all, the value of "justice" may be fairly universal, but the more definite our conception of justice, the less universalist we become. We might then conclude that our responsibility as educators is to commit

77 to, and teach from within, a moral position that is not universally shared. That is, we would embrace biased teaching, willfully shaping our pedagogies to accord with our non-universal values.

The

readings, questions, and ways of thinking that we introduce and do not introduce to our students would become, rather than half-conscious reflections of our social-political interests, fully conscious reflections of those interests. And what shall those interests be? By what criteria ought we to select our values? One answer is suggested by Leon Trotsky in his 1931 essay "Their Morals and Ours": Whoever does not care to return to Moses, Christ, or Mohammed; whoever is not satisfied with eclectic hodge-podges must acknowledge that morality is a product of social development; that there is nothing invariable about it; that it serves social interests; that these interests are contradictory; that morality more than any form of ideology has a class character. (377-78) The values we choose should express the social interests we support in a struggling world. Writing as Individual Power We turn now to the pedagogical aim as suggested by Andrea Lunsford: "As always, the power to write, to express clearly and truly, translates into political, economic, and social power." (1987: 253). That effective writing wields power--i.e., the power to influence others, the power to change the world-is a fairly universal assumption in composition. It must be pointed out, however, that this power is most often conceived as an individual, rather than collective, pursuit. As Elbow urges, we should never conclude "that individuals are helpless to change the world and that words cannot move mountains" (1981: 370). Hence, we learn that individuals can move mountains, but we do not learn that individuals must typically join collectives to move mountains. While the authors who teach writing as individual power give little indication of how they hope such power will be used--and we may therefore read them as utilitarians--we might also read them as pursuing a democratic vision. They are perhaps proposing that we can democratize society by helping more individuals become articulate writers and speakers. This vision is a seductive one since it is certainly true that a participatory democracy requires an articulate citizenry. We should note, however, that those who offer writing as individual power are not discussing the need for radical social transformations as prerequisite to democracy.

The assumption, rather, is that ours is already a

78 democratic society, structurally speaking, and that our task remains to provide every individual the literate tools needed to assert their voice within our democratic framework. This seems clearly the view of Elaine Maimon et al.: Learning how to articulate ideas for oneself and then for others prepares students for public discourse in the society at large. . . . Historically, in Europe, a university was intended to be a training ground for the religious and secular ruling classes. In the United States, Jeffersonian democracy makes all citizens members of the ruling classes. Each person in a democracy has a vote; each person should have a voice. (1984: ix) While few put it so stoutly, similar democratic assumptions widely inform the composition and English fields. At the 1987 English Coalition Conference, representatives of the National Council of Teachers of English, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, and other major English associations held that language arts instruction "can and should make an indispensable contribution to educating students for participation in democracy." Abilities to communicate, listen, think critically, and to appreciate multiple perspectives and cultural diversity were seen as the essential requirements for democratic participation (Lloyd-Jones and Lunsford 85).

Since our social context is held to be

democratic, our educational task becomes simply a matter of preparing students to become effective participants in the civic process. Also, since a democratic society does not deny power to its citizens, the powerless ways that writing teachers often recognize in their students and strive to help students overcome are seen primarily in psychological terms, or as internalized cultural messages--not as a reflection of genuine social powerlessness. Says Elbow, "Many people are tricked into feeling more powerless and helpless than they are because of ways in which they were brought up and because of patterns in our culture" (1978: 63). The goal of empowering students toward democracy deserves support, and writing can be an essential tool in that empowerment. Also, writing teachers do need to address the psychological dimension of powerlessness noted by Elbow: members of subordinate groups widely internalize their social status, and this becomes a barrier to their political advancement (Sennett and Cobb). Nevertheless, any strategy for student empowerment must begin by recognizing the realities of our

79 social status, the real powerlessness that most of us live with daily, and the fundamentally undemocratic character of American society. From C. Wright Mills' 1956 classic The Power Elite to more recent studies of the processes of governing circles, a substantial literature has documented the existence of a socially cohesive American ruling class, estimated by William Domhoff at 0.5 percent of the U.S. population. This class wields a dominant influence in both major political parties; their procorporate, anti-labor, and anti-third world objectives are formulated in policy planning groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Committee for Economic Development, the Business Roundtable, and are consistently implemented by the world's leading capitalist states (Domhoff; Dye; Shoup and Minter; Sklar 1980a; Parenti; Moody 127-46). The most powerful policy planning group is the 1800-member Council on Foreign Relations. Founded in 1921, the CFR has played a decisive role in U.S. foreign policy under every administration since at least 1940. In Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy, Laurence Shoup and William Minter's historical case studies reveal the CFR's central role in setting the terms for U.S. participation in World War II; in planning a post-war global-capitalist order under U.S. economic, political, and military dominance; in inspiring the U.S.-Soviet cold war; in guiding U.S. military intervention in Vietnam; and in prompting the renewal of U.S.-China relations under the Nixon administration. The capitalist class is well-represented in the CFR and especially predominant in the CFR leadership.

Shoup and Minter's background studies found that 55 percent of the general

members, 84 percent of the directors, and 93 percent of the officers were members of the capitalist elite (91). Shoup and Minter note that the CFR represents primarily the largest corporations, who have the most interest in protecting and expanding overseas investments. The top ten of Fortune's top five hundred industrial corporations averaged four CFR members from each corporate board of directors (97). In 1973, under the initiative of CFR chairman and Chase Manhattan Bank chairman David Rockefeller, the CFR established the Trilateral Commission, in which America's ruling elite could develop cooperative global plans with their elite counterparts in Japan and Western Europe. In a 1980 anthology exploring this 300-member planning group, editor Holly Sklar calls trilateralism "the creed of

80 an international ruling class whose locus of power is the global corporation" and who "view the entire world as their factory, farm, supermarket, and playground" (1980b: 8-9). According to the Trilateral Commission, "history shows that every effective international system requires a custodian" (qtd. in 1980b: 8). A global custodian may well be required. But membership on the commission--and on the CFR--is by invitation only, and these bodies are not held democratically responsible to the world over which they aim to preside. As an indicator of these organizations' continuing power in government, over ninety appointees in the Carter administration were present or former members of the CFR, the Trilateral Commission (TC), or both. Jimmy Carter, Vice-President Walter Mondale, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, and Defense Secretary Harold Brown each belonged to both organizations. Reagan's first administration included over eighty appointees with present or former CFR or TC affiliation, including George Bush (who resigned from both organizations during the 1980 campaign), Secretary of State Alexander Haig (CFR, TC) and his successor George Shultz (CFR), Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger (CFR, TC) and his successor Frank Carlucci (CFR) (Perloff 158, 168-69; Dye 250-51; Domhoff 139-40; Sklar and Everdell 91-92). While American democracy allows the common people some voice in government, such as the right to choose between an affluent-white-male-pro-corporate Democrat or an affluent-white-male- procorporate Republican, the system does not require democratic pretensions in the economic sphere. America's richest 1 percent can control 34 percent of all national wealth and 45 percent of financial assets without transgressing Jeffersonian democracy (Stephen Rose 9). General Motors can deprive 30,000 workers of their livelihood at Flint, Michigan, in order to seek out cheaper labor abroad, while democracy thrives (see Michael Moore's recent film Roger and Me).

In the daily life of the American

family, classroom, and workplace, we may uncover violence, fear, and the quiet normalcy of dictatorship, but the powerlessness of a silenced child is only a state of mind in our democratic society. If we define democracy as having a direct voice or accountable representation in all the decisions that affect us--most vitally, decisions regarding our social resources--it becomes clear that nondemocracy and non-power for the many are structural norms in our society. Democracy so defined allows not only a more adequate social critique, but a more adequate vision of empowerment, than

81 does democracy defined along Jeffersonian lines. It allows us to conceive of student empowerment as something more bold than helping students "discover their power" while they (and we) remain institutional subordinates all of our lives. The degree to which writing can empower students, or can be translated into social-political power, should neither be underestimated nor overestimated. The power of any particular piece of writing to effect change in readers or effect change in the world may be enhanced by "authentic voice" or other qualities of its content, but the social context of the communication is what is crucial. Bagdikian tells of two letters written in 1969 by Richard Berlin, president of the Hearst Corporation, to President Nixon and to Nixon's assistant attorney general, asking the administration to support the Newspaper Preservation Act. The act would exempt Hearst and other large media chains from antimonopoly laws that forbid price-fixing agreements between companies. After receiving Berlin's letters, the Nixon administration reversed its previous opposition to the newspaper bill, and the bill was passed. The media giants returned the favor in 1972. Watergate stories potentially damaging to Nixon were widely suppressed by major media in the months before the election, and Nixon, whose prior relationship with the media had been far from happy, received the highest percentage of newspaper endorsements of any candidate in modern times (90-101).

How many richly voiced letters from

average citizens would it have taken to persuade Nixon to maintain his original stand against the Newspaper Preservation Act? A thousand letters? Too few. A million? Perhaps. In an historical context where the major media outlets are controlled by a handful of giants, and where average citizens who would like to influence others through their writing have almost no alternative press, our most persuasive words have only limited power. Of course, we do have the capacity to create new contexts, to build vast social movements and popular presses from neighborhood to national levels that could allow overwhelming numbers of us to become truly influential writers. And our students today do need writing and other intellectual talents to help them begin such a project. But Elbow, Lunsford, and others who rightfully seek to help students find power with writing must also address directly, and involve students in exploring, the social problematics of that empowerment.

We need to envision and

strategize toward social contexts in which we can practice meaningful democratic power.

82

Model III: Individual Mobility They looked to education for the promises their parents had so often mouthed, and they reaffirmed a faith that schooling ought to make a difference in the job a man or woman could expect. --Shirley Brice Heath, Ways with Words (28) The men wanted to change their lives, and for all their earlier failures, they still held onto an American dream: Education held the power to equalize things. After Vietnam, they had little doubt about what their next step had to be: up and out of the pool of men society could call on so easily to shoot and be shot at. --Mike Rose, Lives on the Boundary (137)

Americans widely see education as door to the better jobs and the better life. In a 1989 national survey of college freshmen, the leading "very important" reason for going to college was "to be able to get a better job" (cited by 76 percent of respondents), and the leading important objective in life was to be "very well-off financially" (cited by 75 percent).

Students' goals are not narrowly materialistic,

however: opportunities for challenging, interesting work, and "to be helpful to others" were cited more often than "high anticipated earnings" as essential in career choice ("Fact File"). If there are such things as universal human pursuits, I would think that material well-being and satisfying labor ought to be among them. Composition teachers can widely agree that the instruction we offer should help students in their better-job quest. But our different assessments of the world, and different hopes, lead us to help students differently. The composition field's prevailing visionary model in terms of career and economic advancement is that of individual mobility. The mobility ideal is linked to a conscious or unconscious acceptance of the capitalist order. Capitalism works, or can be made to work, and those at the social bottom--for whom the system has not worked--can reach upwards through education. Some mobility proponents, such as Ross Winterowd, are optimistic about the upward road: "The challenge in our capitalist democracy is convincing the have-nots, who in general are the illiterate or

83 marginally literate, that the American dream is real, attainable, and worthwhile" (204). Others, such as Lindemann, think the lanes are closing: "The argument that writing opens doors to many satisfying, lucrative professions no longer holds up as well as it used to." But we are advised to edge into traffic and make the best of it. "Even though many entry-level jobs do not demand exceptional writing skills, students applying for these positions are instantly branded as illiterate if their resumes or letters contain misspelled words. . . . The ability to write well still creates economic power" (4). Some touters of mobility recognize that the obstacles to advancement are not only educational but political. In a 1981 symposium on Black English and education, Michigan's state employment commission director Martin Taylor cites three major barriers to minority success in the working world: lack of education, lack of skills, and discrimination. Regarding the last, Taylor observes that employer discrimination continues despite legislation and affirmative action programs.

He suggests not the need for more effective

political action, however, but argues that "the best protection against chronic unemployment is still education" (242). Discrimination is thus left as a social given; education will help minorities make do in a society that will be unfair to them in perpetuity. The mobility question has been central in the debates over school policies on Black English and other non-privileged dialects. After the 1979 King court case ordered the Ann Arbor, Michigan, school district to recognize the validity of Black English and to take students' home dialects into account in the teaching of Standard American English, some black leaders protested the case because, as Detroit columnist Carl Rowan asserted, the King approach would "consign millions of ghetto children to a linguistic separation which would guarantee that they will never make it in the larger U.S. society" (qtd. in Smitherman 1981: 53). Geneva Smitherman's reply to Rowan and other King critics takes on their mobility assumptions and places these in global context. "Note that it is not high unemployment, or the shifting balance in world economic power, or the crises caused by a highly advanced, technological capitalist society in the United States but 'linguistic separation,' mind you, that will keep black children and youth from making it in the United States." Smitherman argues that the policies proposed by black middle-class leadership "only ensure that a few blacks slide past the gatekeepers":

84 Limited by an analysis based solely on race, without considering issues of class, they are unable to propose solutions that address the broader structural crises that affect all groups in United States society, but affect poor blacks with disproportionate severity. While King reminds us that standard English is a sine qua non of survival in our complex society, the harsh reality is that if all blacks commanded the language of textbooks and technocracy, the system, as it is presently constructed, could not accommodate all of us. Further, if our society could solve the problem of black unemployment--and that's a big if--it would only shift the burden to some other group. It would do nothing to address the fundamental cause of unemployment. (53) Implied in Smitherman's response is a proposal not simply for multilingual/multicultural education, but for political multicultural education, and for broad analyses and political programs outside the classroom (see Smitherman 1987).

It is important to stress such political and systemic contexts

because, within a new composition trend toward linguistically and culturally sensitive pedagogy, there is not always a willingness to link insights about "cultural capital" with the implications of such insights regarding the need to eliminate race, class, and gender oppression. In Heath's Ways with Words we are treated to an exquisite ethnography of working-class life, and then to a very compelling pedagogical application in which working-class children study their own community's life and culture while making their transition into the abstract conceptual discourse of the school.

We look forward to what

conclusions Heath may draw for linking such pedagogy to struggles for transcending the working-class poverty and powerlessness her ethnography describes.

But we are offered only that the school-

acquired conceptual habits "may have . . . relevance to future vocational goals" (363), that workingclass parents should learn to help their children plan their futures as do middle-class parents in the larger town (364), and that allowing working-class ways of life to become a more integral part of school culture can work against the role of schools in legitimating middle-class power (369). These are valid designs and yet politically limited. Heath's conclusion looks toward the vocational advancement of individuals, not toward the political advancement of collectives. She rightfully challenges the school's role in reproducing unequal class relations, but what about the larger system that makes inevitable such class inequalities? Heath answers:

85 It is easy to claim that a radical restructuring of society or the system of education is needed for the kind of cultural bridging reported in this book to be large scale and continuous. I have chosen to focus on the information and bridging skills needed for teachers and students as individuals to make changes which were for them radical, and to point to ways these cultural brokers between communities and classrooms can perhaps be the beginning of larger changes. (369) What Heath doesn't say is that radical teachers (e.g., Freire and others) also work on small, local ventures as the modest "beginning of larger changes," but that their work seeks to prefigure the larger changes by opening up dialogues and critical studies on social-political transformation.

Culturally

sensitive curricula uninformed by transformative vision can become just another strategy for individual growth--reinforcing the very mobility myths and individualist ideologies that isolate, discourage, and often defeat working-class youth. The pedagogies Heath introduced into the Piedmont schools, while stirring enthusiasm and promise, were later phased out, and Heath cites as a contributing factor the movement toward back-to-basics curricula and pressures to teach to standardized tests (356). Such eventualities remind us that we cannot afford to put our larger political needs to the margins of education.

Redefining Career Preparation In recent college composition trends, career preparation has meant teaching students to work in collaborative groups, to recognize and master various kinds of discourse, and to think critically through technocratic problem-solving models. Students, in other words, are to learn the writing and conceptual modes, and the cooperative working habits, required on the job in technical, professional, and administrative fields. The approach is based upon what we might call the American-dream model of education, which encourages students to see themselves as autonomous individuals pursuing their private career successes in an unproblematic workplace, an unproblematic labor market, and an unproblematic world. Meanwhile, the world beyond academe is forcing workers--including collegeeducated workers--to cut back upon their dreams, lower their expectations. The cutback demands--

86 e.g., Americans' average annual income in constant dollars has declined 14 percent since 1973 (U.S. Census 110-12)--have their source in global economic trends. The profit rate on investments, the most important indicator of economic health, took an international decline of 30-40 percent in 1965-75 and has never recovered. At the same time, U.S. corporations, which enjoyed happy expansion and world dominance from the early fifties to mid-sixties, have lost the competitive advantage to Japanese and, to a lesser extent, Western European firms. According to labor journalist Kim Moody's An Injury to All: The Decline of American Unionism, U.S. business leaders responded to the new circumstances by getting better organized as a class in order to pursue mutual interests, such as in cutting labor costs (by forcing union concessions, busting unions, transferring production to third world countries or to weakly organized regions in the U.S.); shifting the tax burden away from the wealthy and toward middle- and low-income groups; and weakening workers' bargaining power by cutting back the social net of unemployment benefits and poverty programs.

Employers' leading political lobby, the Business

Roundtable, has successfully won labor law reforms friendly to business, while detoothing the regulatory agencies most favorable to labor, such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the National Labor Relations Board. One manifestation of employers' aggressiveness against labor in recent decades is the growing number of unfair labor practice charges against employers, from 3,655 in 1957 to 31,281 in 1980. Moody notes that most unfair labor practice charges stem from the firing of workers who openly support unions (119) (the joint employer offensive is detailed also in Slaughter and Goldfield). College graduates entering today's labor force will encounter employer drives not only to lower wages and reduce worker rights, but to routinize the work process itself, while placing effective control into increasingly fewer hands. The historic efforts to rationalize labor in order to enhance profit have traditionally been focused upon industrial workers (Braverman; Edwards; Noble). However, clerical and service sector workers experienced similar processes as their ranks swelled during the 1950s, and numerous studies have identified professional, technical, and administrative workers as the newest target for labor rationalization, i.e., controlling the former controllers (Garson; Johnson; Zimbalist). Dale

87 Johnson and Christine O'Donnell observe tendencies toward "dequalification" and erosion of privilege within many middle class occupations: The conditions of work . . . begin to change from relative independence to dependence, from varied, sometimes interesting, and creative activity to routine task, from superordination to subordination, from job security to job insecurity, from employment as educated and skilled labor to underemployment in terms of education and skill levels attained, and from economic well-being to relatively reduced levels of income. (230) Philip Kraft traces such changes in the field of computer programming.

During the 1950s,

"programming remained very much an individual affair. Programs, including the largest and most complex computer systems, were usually put together from start to finish by the same individual or group that worked on every aspect of the job. . . ." The programs had distinct "personalities"--some terse and elegant, others long and highly detailed, and some programmers "could make the machines 'do tricks' which were mysteries to the uninitiated" (56). But, in the early 1960s, idiosyncratic software production gave way to "structured programming" and "modularization," which broke down software systems into discrete units. Programmers found their options limited to a handful of logical procedures, and they were expressly prohibited from asking for information not called for within the narrow tasks allocated to them. The majority of programmers lost the independence and control they had once enjoyed--and which had allowed them to demand high salaries--while a smaller number of systems analysts now reserved the privilege of planning whole projects, parceling out smaller parts to the programmers and coders under their supervision. The routinization of teachers' labor is perhaps better known to us.

According to Patrick

Shannon's Broken Promises: Reading Instruction in Twentieth-Century America, public schoolteachers saw widespread loss of their once-held autonomy when, beginning in the late 1910s, Frederick Taylor's industrial principles of scientific management became the leading model for designing curricula and school operations.

Over the decades, teachers' curricular planning roles would be increasingly

appropriated by administrators, local school boards or state commissions, and textbook publishers.

88 Shannon characterizes the current back-to-basics and standardizing trends in reading instruction as scientific management gone modern: The process of reading is segmented into discrete skills so that increments of progress can be identified across the grades. . . . Objective tests replace teachers' judgement concerning whether or not a student is to be considered literate because teachers' judgement is unpredictable. . . . Next, a search is made for the most efficient instructional means to move students through the levels of reading. . . . And finally because few teachers would originally choose this organization for their instructional behavior, a formal hierarchy of authority is established within reading programs. (57) Our college graduates will face tremendous adversity in their pursuit of satisfying careers, and the college classroom should gear students intellectually for their present and future challenges. Some compositionists may argue that our field's growing orientation toward academic discourse and critical thought provides the very tools students will most need in taking on their local and global problems. Perhaps so. But there is good reason to believe that the discourses being taught at the university may actually contribute to students' sense of political helplessness in the working world. What struck Kraft in his interviews with computer programmers was how few of these mostly college-trained workers understood the organizational relationships at their workplaces, or recognized the systematic nature of the routinizing and deskilling processes to which management was subjecting them. "Relationships, for example, between a programmer and a manager were almost always viewed as personal ones, rather than as part of an overall structure which individuals were inserted into or removed from as the requirements of the organization demanded" (6).

Nearly all the programmers believed that their

salaries depended on individual negotiations with their managers, and were unaware that salaries and raises were pre-plotted in narrow increments by personnel departments. The programmers' lack of knowledge about salary derived, in part, from a professionalism promoted by their companies that holds it "unprofessional" for programmers to discuss their salaries with one another.

This same

ideology has kept unions out of virtually all programming workplaces, with management insisting that "programmer professionalism" and unions do not mix.

Programmers are thus left with deceptive

89 notions of individual advancement, Kraft observes, "while major decisions about the work they do, pay, and about their career prospects are settled for them in an impersonal way by thoroughly organized employers" (96). Joan Greenbaum, a veteran in the computer field, writes that many programmers did try to fight the changing conditions of their labor during the 1960s, but "we lacked a conceptual base from which to present our arguments" (40). As a result, she theorizes, many programmers feeling the tide of job degradation "only too gladly clung to the belief that they were professional" (49). The professionalism provided a modicum of self-esteem for workers who were losing their power and control on the job but who saw no way of resisting the process. Professional ideology provides similar solace to schoolteachers being deprived of the kind of autonomy traditionally associated with professionals, as Kathleen Densmore found in her 1984 teacher case studies. "With its emphasis on individualism . . . the ideology of professionalism prevents teachers from recognizing that their problems are shared by other teachers, and other workers; consequently, they tend to view failures and problems in personal terms, and do not seek social or institutional structural changes" (155). Of course, teachers have been much more successful than have programmers at rising above this debilitating professionalism, recognizing their worker status, and getting organized. At the same time, the ideology remains perhaps the leading obstacle to teachers' further political advancement, as it has also among college faculty (Meisenhelder). Teachers learn their "professionalism," just as they learn to fatalistically accept existing educational systems and methods as "just the way things are," at the university (Shannon 52-60; Popkewitz 1987a). Students need intellectual training that allows them to move beyond a personal view of their problems in a fragmented world, and toward a social view of our problems in a connected world. They need discourses that address existing conditions not as reified givens to which we must unavoidably adapt, but as historically contingent phenomena waiting for our collective intervention.

Model IV: Collaborative Growth In business and industry . . . and in professions such as medicine, law, engineering, and architecture . . . collaboration is the norm. All that is new in collaborative learning, it seems, is

90 the systematic application of collaborative principles to that last bastion of hierarchy and individualism, the American college classroom. --Kenneth Bruffee, "Collaborative Learning and the 'Conversation of Mankind' " (647) Leaning to invent in communities will do more than enable success in classrooms and careers. It is absolutely essential to achieving peace and, indeed, maintaining life on this planet in the twentieth century and beyond. --Karen Burke LeFevre, Invention as a Social Act (129)

In the growing composition trends toward collaborative learning and collaborative writing, collaboration normally refers to more than simply having students meet in groups to respond to individual papers; rather, it entails group decision making and group projects. As with other trends, the collaborative literature emphasizes utilitarian ends--that working in groups leads to better ideas, that it teaches the cooperative skills needed for academic and career success. Yet, we may also read the literature as implying a particular social vision, and occasionally we find explicit references to such larger aspirations. The collaborative better world is one in which people have learned to get along, where we either accept our differences or strive to work them out through cooperative and peaceful means. Oppressive gender, race, or class structures need not lead to divisive political battles in the collaborative better world: cooperative conflict resolution is the key. This vision, which we will call social harmonist, is not limited to advocates of collaborative learning; in fact, we may see it as implied in any pedagogy that encourages a strategy of adjustment or accommodation, rather than challenge or confrontation, with the existing world order. The harmonist ideal is strongly suggested in Elbow's nonadversarial "believing game" (where we share perceptions and experiences), which Elbow says is more likely than the "doubting game" (where we try to find holes in the other person's view) to "keep people willing to talk to each other if the game breaks down" (1973: 175). The style of the doubting game is "closing, clenching," "competitive," "aggressive: meeting threat by beating it down," while the believing game is "opening, loosening," "cooperative," "nonaggressive: meeting threat by bending, incorporating; nonviolent" (178-79). We also see the harmonist vision in Edward Corbett's "rhetoric of the open

91 hand," which Corbett favors over the "rhetoric of the closed fist." Writing in 1969, Corbett identifies close-fisted rhetoric with the sixties' movements, whose angry mass demonstrations represent a "retreat from reason," whereas open-handed rhetoric would emphasize logical persuasion through "normal channels of communication."

Corbett considers coercion and violence as expressions of

irrationality, and cites the modern father of nonviolence: "Mahatma Gandhi once said, 'Violence is essentially wordless, and it can begin only where thought and rational communication have broken down. Any society which is geared for violent action is by that fact systematically unreasonable' " (293). What kind of social harmony are Corbett and others proposing? Will our better world operate peacefully because the gross inequities and expansionist economic systems that undergird war between classes and between states have been replaced by egalitarian, cooperative systems? Or will peace come because subordinates have learned to cooperate with subordinators, and superpower elites have learned to rule the globe collaboratively through East-West détente and Trilateral Commissions? Corbett acknowledges such concerns: The younger generation may regard the open hand as bearing too much of a resemblance to the glad hand; they may see the civility, decorum, and orderliness of the older mode of discourse as a facade behind which the establishment in all ages has perpetrated injustices on the have-nots. (296) Corbett answers, however, that if there has been hypocrisy in the older rhetoric, it has been "the result of human frailty, not of an inherent weakness" in the ancient art of civil persuasion (296). Corbett's subtle defense seems to argue that promoting harmony in an unequal order is not necessarily hypocritical, and that through peaceful, open-handed persuasion we might convince the elites to rule more benignly, to rise above the "human frailty" that had led them to tyrannical action.

Gandhi's Social Harmony Harmonist ideologies are traditional means by which ruling groups encourage acceptance of their rule--or have been means for directing lower-class resistance into relatively safe channels that leave

92 intact ruling class power. Mahatma Gandhi's nonviolence represented one such safe channel; his political thought and practice provide one of our richest sources for the study of harmonious social theory. Behind the Indian leader's politics lay a social vision that is far from egalitarian, or far from what most of us would consider egalitarian. Gandhi was a firm believer in the Hindu caste system, which holds that each person's life occupation is determined by heredity. Critical of modern corruptions of the system which have produced innumerable castes and subcastes, each associated with gradations of superiority and inferiority, Gandhi called for a return to the four original caste divisions, called varnas: "The law of Varna prescribes that a person should, for his living, follow the occupation of his forefathers. I hold this to be a universal law governing the human family" (1965: 47). If all accepted their heredity occupation--whether teacher, warrior, merchant, or laborer--with no sense of superiority or inferiority, then social peace could be had, Gandhi proposed. If [the four Varnas] are members of one body, how can one be superior or inferior to one another? . . . It is this canker [of superiority and inferiority] that is at the root of the various ills of our time, especially class wars and civil strife. . . . These wars and strife could not be ended except by the observance of the law of Varna. For it ordains that every one shall fulfill the law of one's being by doing in a spirit of duty and service that to which one is born. (1965: 8-9) There was nothing unequal in allotting one group power and authority over other groups, in Gandhi's caste conception. This same principle applied to class relationships as well as caste. His theory of trusteeship forbade tenant farmers from seizing and distributing the rich landlords' property; rather, the rich would administer their wealth for the benefit of all. We may not forcibly dispossess the Zamindars [landlords]. . . . They only need a change of the heart. When that is done, and when they learn to melt at their tenants' woe, they will hold their lands in trust for them, will give them a major part of the produce, keeping only sufficient for themselves. (1970: 23-24) Again, the existence of rulers and ruled would imply no inequality, Gandhi imagined, and no disharmony:

93 What is needed is not the extinction of landlords and capitalists, but a transformation of the existing relationship between them and the masses into something healthier and purer. (1970: 41) Everybody would regard all as equal with oneself and hold them together in the silken net of love. . . . We would hold as equal the toiling labourer and the rich capitalist. (1962, vol 2: 335) Relations between the sexes involved a similar standard. I do not envisage the wife, as a rule, following an avocation independently of her husband. The care of the children and the upkeep of the household are quite enough to fully engage all her energy. . . . The man should look to the maintenance of the family, the woman to household management; the two thus supplementing and complementing each other's labours. (1965: 32) As with class and caste, the sexual division of labor implied no inequality: "Nor do I see in this any invasion of woman's rights or suppression of her freedom. . . . The woman who knows and fulfills her duty realizes her dignified status. She is the queen, not the slave, of the household over which she presides" (1965: 33). It should be noted that such questions of equality were widely debated among Indian activists and intellectuals during Gandhi's time (though more so on caste and class than gender questions), and that Gandhi was making choices between available alternatives.

Gandhi's

organization, the Indian National Congress, became notably split during the 1930s between left and right political camps, with Gandhi the most influential conservative voice (Bose; Ambedkar; Rao; Mukerjee; Namboodiripad; Sarkar). Despite his elitist visions, Gandhi genuinely sympathized with oppressed people and devoted his life to their uplift. But because he could never break his sense of loyalty to the Indian upper class, Gandhi's politics were haunted by contradiction. On the one hand, his ability as a spiritual leader to move the Indian masses into political action was unequaled; on the other hand, he carefully controlled that action, narrowing its political scope, ensuring that the thrust of resistance would be directed against British colonial interests, not against wealthy Indian interests.

Thus, when Indian workers and

94 peasants repeatedly read Gandhi's anti-colonial non-cooperation campaigns as a signal to rise up against all authority, Gandhi fought to restrain them.

In a February 1921 response to spreading

industrial strikes that were partly inspired by the Gandhi-led nationalist protests, Gandhi warned: "Strikes are the order of the day. They are a symptom of the existing unrest. . . . There are not wanting labour leaders who consider that strikes may be engineered for political purposes. In my opinion it will be a most serious mistake to make use of labour strikes for such a purpose. I don't deny that such strikes can serve political ends. But they do not fall within the plan of non-violent non-co-operation" (1958-82, vol. 19: 365-66). In May 1921, Gandhi delivered a similar message to tenant farmers who had launched rent strikes and other protests in northern India's United Provinces: "The Kisan [tenant] movement has received impetus from Non-co-operation but it is anterior to and independent of it. Whilst we will not hesitate to advise the Kisans when the moment comes, to suspend payment of taxes to the government, it is not contemplated that at any stage of Non-co-operation we would seek to deprive the Zamindars [landlords] of their rent" (1958-82, vol. 20: 106). Gandhi's nonviolent politics cannot be understood apart from his historic role in containing lower class militancy, in ensuring that India's bourgeois leaders would retain firm control of both the nationalist movement and a future independent India. Nonviolent civil disobedience was a means of waging struggle that attempted to affirm the "underlying unity" between adversaries.

Informing it,

however, was a moral code with a double standard. While Gandhi's spiritual ethics strictly forbade the use of political violence by the lower classes, the same ethics allowed exceptions for state violence. In 1918, Gandhi led a recruiting campaign, marching from village to village, attempting to raise a volunteer Indian army to help Britain's war effort; he believed such work would make British rulers more favorable to Indian independence (Gandhi 1957: 444-49). In 1944, Gandhi again offered the Indian National Congress's "full co-operation" in Britain's military struggle as a bargain for independence; the British rejected the plan (Tendulkar, 6: 263). A 1938 episode demonstrates even more clearly Gandhi's class loyalties and the class bias in his nonviolent philosophy. Under a temporary system of dual rule, the British had allowed Indian leaders to hold limited power in the provinces during the late 1930s, and Gandhi's Congress party had won elections in seven provinces. At the same time, a rising labor

95 movement had launched a wave of industrial strikes, and picketing workers (some supported by Congress activists) were being met with police batons and sometimes bullets, in Congress provinces. In his Harijan magazine, Gandhi criticized obstructionist picketers and endorsed police action. "To prevent the workers from going to their work by standing in front of them is pure violence and must be given up. The owners of mills or of other factories would be justified in invoking the assistance of the police, and a Congress Government would be bound to provide it if the Congressmen concerned would not desist" (qtd. in Tendulkar, 4: 269). Critics accused Gandhi of contradicting his nonviolent code. "Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," was Gandhi's Emersonian reply. "I have deplored the necessity for it. . . . But till the Congress has developed a peaceful method of dealing with violent crimes, its ministers must use police and, I fear, even the military, if they are to undertake the administration of the affairs of the country in the present stage of its career" (qtd. in Tendulkar, 4: 270). Corbett has argued that Gandhi saw "violence" as irrational. Actually, it was the violence of workers in revolt that Gandhi considered irrational; the violence of state repression or of inter-state warfare was "rational" or "necessary." Gandhi's dual morality meant that protesters must plead with the open hand, even while the state bludgeons them with the closed fist. A critique of Gandhi does not of itself disconfirm nonviolent philosophy or similar harmonious theories (on nonviolent theory in the U.S. antinuclear movement, see Ryan 1986). But I am hoping to raise questions, and also to suggest the value of studying the purposes that have historically been served by our theories.

Clarifying Our Collaborative Values Composition teachers whose work is inspired by visions of a cooperative world--and my own teaching is inspired by such--must conceive as clearly as possible the terms of that cooperation. This would involve not only identifying our basic scheme for the future society, but determining the kind of cooperative values we wish to promote in the here and now. Some collaborative advocates seem to propose cooperating indiscriminately, as if all humanity shared the same interests and can now join together. Bruffee, for example, describes academe and the workplace beyond as "communities of knowledgeable peers," where "status equals" engage in agreed-upon discourses.

He does

96 acknowledge that we sometimes write to please superiors in the corporate or department hierarchy, but he stresses that, "In most cases people write in business, government, and the professions mainly to inform and convince other people within the writer's own community, people whose status and assumptions approximate the writer's own" (1984: 642).

Hence, that which is egalitarian and

harmonious in our institutions seems to merit greater attention than that which is hierarchal and conflictive. Bruffee's conception of peership, whether in the classroom or workplace, urges us to forget our socioeconomic and other status differentials: Outside the learning group . . . people may have widely different positions in the management hierarchy of a union or corporation, in the professional or student hierarchy of an educational institution, or in a system of social or economic class. But as collaborative learners all these people are peers. With regard to a course in ethnography or in elementary Chinese, the vicepresident of a corporation, the janitor, the English professor, the freshman, the society matron, and the shoe salesman must leave their social differences behind. (1982b: 38) An alternative to Bruffee's version of collaborative learning would encourage students to bring their social differences into the classroom, and would make the study of our differences and commonalities integral to the curriculum (Trimbur, for example, has proposed that the classroom should look for "dissensus" as well as consensus). Rather than teach a value of blanket cooperativeness, our classroom would ask critical questions about collaboration: With whom must we collaborate to make our lives better and our world better? Are some collaborations unwise? Do our literary texts, or texts in various disciplines, or articles of mass media seem to suggest that we collaborate with some groups but not with others? If we consider how today's employers are widely using the cooperative ethic, the importance of such critical preparation for our students becomes apparent.

Since

the

1970s,

hundreds of companies have turned to what Business Week calls "The New Industrial Relations": "A fundamentally different way of managing people is taking shape in the U.S. Its goal is to end the adversarial relationship that has grown between management and labor. . . ." Based on "a more enlightened view of worker psychology," the new approach stresses "labor-management trust" and "a participatory process in which workers gain a voice in decision-making on the shop floor" ("New

97 Industrial" 85). In a 1987 series of ads in Business Week, General Motors declares: "The symbols of confrontation have been replaced by the symbols of cooperation.

Everyone eats together, parks

together, and works together" (qtd. in Parker and Slaughter 3). At the center of the new approach are the "quality circles," work teams, and problem-solving groups that have long been linked to the success of Japanese industries. But the glowing pictures offered us by business and media are challenged by Mike Parker and Jane Slaughter, both former auto workers, who name the new team concept management-by-stress: Management-by-stress uses stress of all kinds--physical, social, and psychological--to regulate and boost production. It combines a systematic speedup, "just-in-time" parts delivery, and strict control over how jobs are to be done, to create a production system which has no leeway for errors--and very little breathing room. (14) The sense of fear in MBS plants is striking. The power exercised by supervisors, combined with little sense of either union presence or individual rights, chills the desire to criticize a plant where company loyalty is a priority. (21) By appealing to workers' genuine desire for a democratic voice on the job, the team concept allows management unprecedented access to workers' knowledge.

Work teams strive toward kaizen, a

Japanese word meaning continuous improvement, and offer up their suggestions to management. But management, of course, prefers those suggestions that increase output. "Changes in a job can never result in more breathing space for team members.

Any improvements become the impetus for

management to find even more ways to speed up the team" (Parker and Slaughter 19). The team concept relies heavily on worker peer pressure. The team leader--who is a member of the union, not management--comes to see himself as a supervisor and is essentially a straw boss for management. There is strong peer pressure against absenteeism because, rather than provide substitutes, the company expects the team to cover for their missing member. "Workers are expected to believe that personal illness or family needs must take second place to perfect attendance" (29). Most team programs have a strong ideological component. GM, for example, sends thousands of employees from its Hydra-matic Division to week-long "Family Awareness Training" sessions with

98 the stated aim of "establishing a family atmosphere within the division" (qtd. in Parker 19). The first ground rule at the training is that no one tells whether they are hourly or salary (union or management). Identities stripped away, conference participants spend an emotionally intense week in group sensitivity exercises, developing interpersonal skills, disclosing their joys and fears. The final stage, according to the training facilitators' handbook, "is one of unity, high spirits, mutual acceptance, and high cohesiveness. It is the esprit stage" (qtd. in Parker 20). Parker comments: A primary goal of most of these sophisticated exercises is to break down a person's psychological defenses and develop openness. . . . But defenses serve a purpose. In the unreal atmosphere of Family Awareness Week, it may be easy to let them down. But back home, some "family members" have the power to assign jobs, grant exceptions, and even destroy the livelihoods of others. Does naive openness in the work situation always make sense? (20) Parker believes that the trainings manipulate workers' needs for belonging and intimacy, in an attempt to redefine their identity not as union people but as company people. In the new industrial relations, collaboration means persuading workers to accept wage cuts, speedups, tighter managerial control, and other manifestations of the general employer offensive--all for the profitability of our family, the company. Workers urged to identify with the company are also urged to non-identify with fellow workers and, notably, to see themselves in competition with workers in other countries, in other firms, or even in other plants within the same company. As the chief negotiator for B.F. Goodrich Co. puts it, "Union leaders to one degree or another are realizing that it's not 'us against them' but 'we against the world' (qtd. in "Concessionary Bargaining" 68). In the composition literature, collaborative learning is heavily geared to preparing students for collaborative writing and working situations they will face "as professionals." No doubt many of our students will make good use of such cooperative training. But Kraft, Densmore, and others (Johnson; Popkewitz 1987a) suggest that the concept of professional is itself problematic and ideological, while Peter Meiksins argues that the deskilling in many middle class occupations indicates the lack of control over the labor process within--and hence the working class nature of--these occupations in the first

99 place. Composition teachers should be asking what kinds of collaborative skills and collaborative values our students will be needing as workers, in the context of widespread employer aggressiveness against workers. In their new book, Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing, Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford wonder what will be the result "when the professional work scene is populated much more by women and people of color," and they ask whether collaborative pedagogy can empower women and students of color "so they can function as full participating members of collaborative writing groups" in workplace settings (138, 122). While race and gender equality in writing groups should absolutely be sought, Ede and Lunsford are taking too much as given in terms of students' professional prospects, and they do not make sufficiently problematic the larger institutional context and labor-management struggles within which the writing group is situated. My fear is that, without such wider scope, we may end up sending into the work world students who, like the computer programmers described by Kraft, are unable to penetrate management's glossy ideologies and recognize the larger organizational relationships and structures that are geared to their exploitation. Ede and Lunsford discuss their "growing awareness of and sensitivity to" issues of "power and authority, of consensus and conflict, of gender, race, and class" (13), and they bring such concerns to bear upon the field of collaborative writing (more so with gender than with race and class). Yet, the authors seem reluctant to turn their sensitivity into concrete political commitments as educators. They ask appropriate and pointed questions: How does--and should--collaboration challenge or re-situate the attitudes, values, beliefs, and ideological assumptions students and teachers bring to the writing class? . . . To what extent can--or should--collaborative activities attempt to highlight or address inequities of gender, race, and class? (125) But these remain "unanswered questions" for Ede and Lunsford, and I am left wondering what keeps them from attempting at least initial answers. If nothing more, it would help to know what moves them to favor the radical pedagogy implied in their questions, and what holds them back from such pedagogy. As it stands, the authors offer the less risky assertion that collaborative pedagogy is worth our efforts because "it holds the potential for allowing, finally and fully, for the presence of others" (126)-

100 -here suggesting the very "sweeping and vague" notion of community which the authors later note has been challenged by Myers, Trimbur, and Harris (136). I think, still, that Ede and Lunsford's "polyphonic chorus of voices" (126) is not the same as Bruffee's "community of knowledgeable peers," and that the former's emphasis on gender, race, class, and other differences will positively confront collaborative teachers with questions of political commitment.

Model V: Collective Empowerment Many students are in college because they still believe in the American dream; they must learn to challenge it before they can write good history. --Richard Ohmann and Jack Weston, "A Guide to Marxist Teaching: Freshman English" (29) As an overall objective, I set for my curriculum the goal of jointly presenting literacy and life as a means of transcending the mental and ideological limits imposed by institutions and mass culture. For me, this meant that my worker-students would become literate, conceptual in habits of mind, confident in their approach to intellectual study, and more articulate and assertive in understanding why things are as they are. --Ira Shor, "Reinventing Daily Life" (502-3)

Proponents of what I have called the collective empowerment model--better known as radical, critical, emancipatory, or liberatory pedagogy--do share many goals in common with their non-radical composition colleagues. Any teacher versed in contemporary "process" pedagogy wants students to become "conceptual in habits of mind" and "confident in their approach to intellectual study," as does Ira Shor.

Any contemporary teacher hopes that students will develop penetrating analyses and

insights, as do Ohmann and Weston in their proposed course based on a family history project. The moderns will widely support Ohmann and Weston's injunctions favoring student-centered, collaborative learning over the teacher-lecture format: "[Assign] a project that can't get done unless the students write both individually and in groups. . . . Have students take control of their learning. Don't prepackage

101 all the assignments; get students to help frame them" (26). Moderns will likewise appreciate Shor's conception of the teacher "withering away," which he describes as "a metaphor for the teacher's balance between saying too much and saying too little; enough withdrawal to create a vacuum for student assertion, enough direction to structure a critical inquiry." Shor's withering teacher replaces authority-dependence with "a camaraderie not yet of equals but moving in that democratic direction." The teacher as organizer fades as the students emerge; the liberatory goal is for the teacher to become expendable (1987a: xii, 98). Yet, what distinguishes these radical teachers' objectives from that of many composition colleagues is an explicit view of the teacher as social change agent. Ohmann and Weston's version of freshman English seeks to help students "in unveiling capitalist social relations, and seeing their own place within these relations" (27). Shor's purposes include "preparing students for their history-making roles," and setting the foundations for "purging sexism and racism, evoking class solidarity, and initiating social reconstruction" (1987a: 269-70). Composition teachers whose pedagogy aims toward collective empowerment are primarily socialists and Marxists or neo-Marxists; the Progressive Composition Caucus that meets at the annual Conference on College Composition and Communication describes itself as "socialist-feminist" in its newsletter Progressive Composition. However, I have seen no explicit discussion of socialist vision or strategy in the composition literature, and an adequate rendering would run beyond the scope of this paper. Those interested in exploring socialist visions should be aware Marxist

umbrellas

encompass

widely

divergent

traditions.

that

the

socialist

and

Most importantly, the view of

socialism that has become world-dominant, and that has its sources in the Stalinist and socialdemocratic traditions, equates socialism with state ownership of production. An alternative tradition, stressing socialism as a system of democratic workers' control, finds Marx and Engels as its pioneering exponents (Marx's democratic conception of socialism is made lucid in his treatment of the 1871 Paris Commune in "The Civil War in France"; see helpful discussions by Draper 1986, 1987). One of the best short introductions to these differing traditions is Hal Draper's 1966 essay The Two Souls of Socialism which identifies two historic tendencies--a socialism-from-above and a socialism-from-below-and observes: "Socialism's crisis today is a crisis in the meaning of socialism. For the first time in the

102 history of the world, very likely a majority of its people label themselves 'socialist' in one sense or another; but there has never been a time when the label was less informative" (1). Of the existing socialist states, Draper writes: The socio-economic system which has replaced capitalism [in the Communist states] would not be recognizable to Karl Marx. The state owns the means of production--but who "owns" the state? Certainly not the mass of workers, who are exploited, unfree, and alienated from all levers of social and political control. A new class rules, the bureaucratic bosses; it rules over a collectivist system--a bureaucratic collectivism. Unless statification is mechanically equated with "socialism," in what sense are these societies "socialist?" (1) Socialism-from-above, for Draper, is "the conception that socialism . . . must be handed down to the grateful masses in one form or another, by a ruling elite which is not subject to their control in fact," while socialism-from-below "can be realized only through the self-emancipation of activized masses in motion, reaching out for freedom with their own hands. . . ." (2) Any assessment of the successes and failures of twentieth-century socialism, and of the prospects for a future socialism of a from-below variety, must begin first of all with some criteria for making judgments--a definition, a vision. In my own broad conception, a socialist society is based on a system of production for human needs, not private profit, and is characterized by a rigorous democracy that leaves no aspect of human relationships outside the realm of democratic scrutiny. For more specific proposals, I recommend a 1983 collection Socialist Visions, edited by Stephen Rosskam Shalom, which includes visionary debates on socialist political democracy, socialism and the environment, race and nationalism, division of labor, family and sex roles, economic planning, and concludes with a bibliography. I also recommend more pleasurable excursions through utopian fiction, including Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time and Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed. For historical considerations of why working-class and socialist movements have fared poorly in the U.S., see Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream; Stanley Aronowitz, False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness; and Kim Moody, An Injury to All.

103 The potential contribution of the writing classroom toward a socialist project--or toward encouraging the kind of political participation and movements for change that creates a basis for socialist departures--depends on historic circumstances and the level of general activity outside the classroom. Shor writes: "In a time of insurgent movements, the impact of critical classrooms is visible and immediate. In periods of diffused radicalism or conservative reaction, the influence of critical learning is low-profile and long-term" (1987a: 270). The classroom is not a place where the social structure is changed, according to Shor, but where "knowledge, perception, ideology, and socialization are challenged," and where people can be "mentally armed against domination" (1987a: xi, 99). In Critical Teaching and Everyday Life, Shor describes some of his more successful collaborative class projects--the rewriting of the U.S. Constitution, focusing on the practice of freedom in work and sexual life; the writing of non-sexist marriage contracts; the design of democratic by-laws for the operation of the classroom. The models for problem solving and conceptual thinking that Shor has developed contrast interestingly with conventional approaches. Consider first how one influential mainstream model tends to narrow student aspirations. John Chaffee's Thinking Critically grows out of a nationally recognized interdisciplinary program in critical thinking that Chaffee directs at LaGuardia Community College in New York City. Chaffee's approach emphasizes relevancy to students' lives, and his chapter on solving problems presents a situation that is undoubtedly real for many working-class students. We are asked to imagine ourselves a single parent with one four-year-old child, holding down a boring supermarket cashier job that barely pays the bills, and attending our first year of college which, we hope, will lead to a well-paying, satisfying career.

Although we enjoy school, we're physically

exhausted and depressed, due to the time demands of school, job, and child. What do we do? After stating the problem in "specific terms" rather than "general terms," and identifying the "specific results" we seek, we are asked to list our alternatives. Before listing alternatives, however, "it makes sense for us to determine which actions are possible and which are impossible. We can do this by exploring the boundaries of the problem situation" (emphasis in original). Boundaries, we are told, are "the limitations in the problem situation that we simply cannot change." Chaffee mentions two sample limitations--time constraints; vocational qualifications limiting how much we can earn at the

104 present time--and then asks us to think of others. "After we have established a general idea of the boundaries of the problem situation, we can then proceed to identify the possible courses of action that can take place within these boundaries." Chaffee suggests brainstorming and discussing the problem with others as potential means for looking at the problem afresh, then offers two sample courses of action--take fewer classes; find additional sources of income--and invites us to think of others (69-70). Chaffee's critical thinking program unambiguously favors the status quo: students do not question their social-political boundaries or the narrow courses of action that those boundaries impose upon us as individuals; they do not ask what kind of society would trap single parent worker-students in such depressing circumstances, nor picture new social possibilities. Shor's aim is precisely the opposite: "The critical study of themes from everyday life needs to be carried out in the broadest terms possible. . . ." (1987a: 114). Borrowing from Paulo Freire's method of codification-- abstracting familiar objects or issues away from their everyday contexts to allow for "unfamiliar" systematic scrutiny--Shor teaches a problem-solving method that encourages both conceptual habits of mind and utopian imagination. He represents the method through a series of visual forms, starting with this one:

Life Description

Step one Observation

A PROBLEM SOLVING METHOD Diagnosis Reconstruction

Step two Investigation

Step three Resolution

In the first "description" step, students observe and describe in careful detail a familiar object, such as a classroom desk-chair or a hamburger that Shor brings to class, and they also begin some value judgments-the chair is hard, uncomfortable, and all chairs face toward the teacher in front; the hamburger is greasy and rubbery. In "diagnosis," students place the object in its social context. The chair becomes part of students' larger experiences in alienating schools. The hamburger represents Americans' fixation with nonnutritious fast food; and one class recreates the entire production and distribution process that delivers us the burger. In the third step, students "reconstruct" or "negate" the problem with specific proposals for

105 humanized chairs, humanized schools, or systems that deliver healthy food. A second visual form teaches students further means of abstraction and generalizing of their experiences: NAME Junk Food

GENERAL DEFINITION Mass produced food that is cooked quickly in fast-food places, or bought, packaged and processed in supermarkets. Usually, it’s low in nutrition.

LIFE EXAMPLES burgers fries canned fruits/vegetables packaged cereals cookies, cake donuts candy

"Junk food," "lost cause," "racism," "democracy," "common sense," and any other number of concepts or life problems are systematically broken down; or, a series of life examples are grouped together, defined and named; afterwards, the negation of each concept is envisioned by the students and systematically described. As students' analytic facility grows, they can combine the first two visual forms into a more elaborate model through which they can diagnose school, work, or community problems and reconstruct social alternatives:

106

NAME

GENERAL DEFINITION

example: authoritarianism

LIFE EXAMPLES

1.

NEGATIONS 2. “peer discipline” or “peer democracy

NAME

GENERAL DEFINTION

3.

A final representation, that of concentric circles, is offered to represent developmental phases in a process of social change, where the inner circle represents the present society and the outer rim, utopia.

Rather than leave students with an either/or view of utopia that would likely only reinforce their sense that things can't really be changed, Shor encourages students to consider and discuss the personal or social changes that would be realistic, and yet carry us closer to the world we would like to see (1987a: 155-80).

Red Indoctrination? While teaching freshman English as a graduate assistant at The University of Texas at Arlington, I have experimented in small ways with radical pedagogy (programmatic constraints have not permitted

107 experimenting in large ways). I have been open with students about my radical intentions, and have also discussed my political classroom aims with fellow graduate teachers and with program directors. The response of my students to an openly radical teacher on this conservative Texas campus is plainly enthusiastic, i.e., "great, something different." But questions are posed: "Do you expect us to agree with you?" "How do you grade papers?" I assure students that they need not agree with me, and that I grade papers according to my sense of general college writing standards. I acknowledge, however, that I do have biases which affect my evaluation of a paper's argument. I point out that I am watchful of my biases as I grade, that I try to be as fair as I can--such as by giving papers whose positions are sharply opposed to mine slightly higher grades than I think they deserve. I then suggest that every teacher has biases of one kind or another which affect how we grade, and I ask if anyone has ever experienced such teacher biases. My question gets lots of nods and knowing smiles. I ask more: Has anyone had a teacher who claimed to be open to all points of view but really wasn't? Do you ever give teachers the bullshit you know they want to hear? Have you ever challenged a teacher and paid for it? Depending on the class's temperament and the level of rapport already established, the stories are shared and the question of freedom of expression in the classroom gains status as a permissible and important topic in the course. The ability of an openly biased teacher--or of a covertly biased teacher-to maintain free expression depends on the degree of trust we establish with our students. I have been able to establish what I consider relatively high trust in my classes through critical discussions of the teacher-student relationship; through a non-authoritarian teacherly posture and peer rapport with students; through a willingness and enjoyment of being challenged on all class issues, all class processes; and through being helpful as a writing teacher to students of all political persuasions. I am widely challenged by my students, and I rarely sense that students are mimicking my views in class or in their papers--though undoubtedly some of this goes on, as it will in all classes where teachers are allocated power over students. In sharing my radical-educator agenda with other teachers in my program, the common criticism I receive is that I am "indoctrinating" students, using my teacherly power to push my views upon them. My critics argue that openly biased teaching, regardless of fair intentions, will prompt students to bend

108 their views toward that of the teacher-grader, and that we can mitigate such coercion by keeping students second-guessing as to our own opinions on issues. My critics also emphasize, of course, the educator's responsibility to approximate a neutral stance as best we can, rather than attempt to propagate our personal beliefs. My experience does not support the view that a frank teacherly bias stifles free expression. At least where the discussive atmosphere is egalitarian and away from teacher dominance, I have found that my far-left opinions, when I choose to assert them, help stimulate open expression, including in graded papers. I should add, however, that my political educator strategy does not look toward persuading students of my specific positions per se; in fact, I feel I am most successful as a teacher when my mouth is shut and my students are talking. At the same time, I do introduce a political agenda, and this is done through the syllabus itself--through the kinds of critical inquiry encouraged, through the reading materials assigned, through the questions asked in the course. My struggle to democratize the classroom, to win students' assertive participation, also expresses my political agenda. I do concede that my open bias will give clearer direction to students who are bent on pleasing the teacher by echoing teacher opinions, and that such students might derive certain benefit from a teacher who leaves her opinions more in question. But I do not think such students are numerous; many more prefer saying what they believe, and want teachers who they can trust to listen caringly, respond honestly, grade fairly. I would propose, moreover, that teachers who do not make clear the biases they bring to the classroom, or who are unaware of those biases, pose much greater and subtler problems for students than any that might be posed by the teacher whose views are made candid. Students do not come to freshman English prepared to recognize the political implications of our pedagogies, of how we ask them to think, of the questions our course asks and does not ask. When we ask students to read a text through the lenses of New Criticism rather than critical Marxism, to solve problems Chaffee's way or Flower's way instead of Shor's way, to discover themselves as individuals rather than as members of an historically situated social group, and we do not indicate to students the non-universal values that inform these activities, they will tend to regard our concepts as neutral tools. Many will internalize, to varying degree, the supposedly impartial concepts of reading, writing, and

109 thinking taught in composition.

Our pedagogies unavoidably express biases, express ideologies.

Teachers who do not indicate their biases or the biases that inform their course are teaching ideology as though it were objective knowledge. Given the unfortunate power differentials that characterize our classrooms, when the teacher hands out the class syllabus he or she launches an ideological offensive. Teachers who sympathize with students, and who seek ways of giving up the power we hold over them, would do well to help students understand the nature of our offensive so they can mentally defend themselves.

In less military terms, we want to enable students to make critical judgments about

everything we do in the classroom, to make informed decisions about their participation in and/or challenge of the class process, and to make politically conscious choices about the concepts they do and do not embrace. In my view, our political honesty with students helps open the door to nonmanipulative, non-authoritarian teaching. I personally feel that my honesty increases my accessibility with students; by laying out my cards and letting students place me as they will, I step down from the teacher's false-neutral pedestal and move closer toward the peerhood that I prefer. Let us acknowledge, still, that however honest we are with students, a coerciveness is built into our jobs, and any democratic forms we establish in the classroom will remain skewed ones. Students do not decide if their teacher passes the course; students do not give us grades that may affect our access to scholarships, graduate programs, or gainful employment. Students do widely fill out teacher evaluation forms at the end of courses. But an individual student's negative evaluation of a teacher carries little weight, unless supported by many similar complaints from other students; and even then, sanctions against the teacher are relatively rare. On the other hand, the teacher-grader places an effective mark on the permanent record of each student. The sanctioning power of a dissatisfied student rarely matches that of a dissatisfied teacher-grader, and this differential provides a material basis for undemocratic classroom relations.

In the liberatory classroom, according to Shor,

"democratic relations . . . legitimize the critique of oppression; students experience freedom while examining the forces which impede freedom" (1987a: 96). If this is true, then the kind of liberatory pedagogy that Shor proposes is not really possible in our school institutions as constituted. This should not deter us from searching out the most democratic, humanizing, and politically progressive modes

110 that our institutional contexts allow. But it should remind us--and here I agree fully with Shor--that "political opposition on campus, in schools, and in society is needed to protect the right of teachers and students to invent the critical pedagogy we need" (1987a: viii-ix).

On Pursuing Liberatory Goals Chapter 4 proposed that composition teachers begin the project of writing program reform through professional involvement, informal rap/study sessions with co-workers, union participation, and then moving on to effect institutional changes as faculty develop cohesion and organizational strength. The present chapter makes our local organizing tasks more complex and even more ambitious. Now program reformers would be calling, not just for modern composition methods, but also for liberatory methods, not just for larger education and social budgets, but also for a new social-political order. In lieu of a fresh set of program proposals for the liberatory reformer--which I'm afraid is beyond my present means--I would like to close with some general thoughts. Certainly, our most challenging task is that of winning the majority of our colleagues to liberatory pedagogy and social visions. While such may not be realizable apart from a much wider political mobilization in the society, we may in our more immediate teaching and reform projects aspire to values consistent with the egalitarian world we envision (e.g., values that counter sexism, racism, and elitism with their democratic opposites). In addition, with particular respect to composition, liberatory reformers may pursue a number of theoretical points which, if not immediately radical in content, do open doors for rich discussion.

As the contemporary field increasingly emphasizes

writing as a

process of critical reflection, it may be pointed out that what is good for the student is good for the teacher. To begin reflecting on educational purpose and the values that inform our purposes is to begin breaking free of the prevailing technocratism that delimits and demeans our work as writing teachers. We become less the social functionary, more the self-conscious social actor. To recognize the valueladen nature of our work--that we are never teaching "effective writing" pure and simple--is to challenge the false-neutral scientism that quietly binds us to politically conservative institutional objectives. As teachers more willfully articulate their purposes and values, they may in turn be challenged by other

111 sets of values. Formerly covert political partisanships become overt and self-conscious partisanships. This does not mean that radical partisans will necessarily prevail in the ensuing discussions. But the existence of wider candid political discussion would itself represent tremendous advance for modern composition and, I think, hopeful prospects for liberatory writing teachers.

112 NOTES 1

This was passed to me by WPE counselor Marlene Pearson.

2

Table 1.--CSUN Faculty Opinion of Student Writinga dept. or school (no. of responses): average response

Art (3):

20.0%

Home Ecomomics (2):

47.5%

Biology (5):

15.6

Journalism (2):

65.0

Business, School ofb (20):

49.5

Liberal Studiesd (2):

40.5

Child Development (2):

50.0

Music (2):

40.0

Computer Science (4):

41.3

Physics (1):

45.0

Economics (3):

13.3

Political Science (3):

41.0

Engineering, School ofc (8):

43.0

Psychology (6):

42.3

English (3):

68.7

Radio-TV-Film (3):

36.0

Geology (1):

60.0

Sociology (1):

50.0

Health Science (5):

29.6

Speech Communication (3):

49.3

Theater (1):

60.0

History (1):

100.0

Total responses: 81 Average response: 42.8% a Survey taken in May 1988: "How many of your students are writing as college students should be writing? Restrict your estimate to undergraduate courses, and exclude general education courses with primary enrollment from students outside your department." b Except economics, which is listed separately. c Except computer science, which is listed separately. d Liberal studies does not have its own department courses. However, I polled two instructors of specific courses--one in humanities, one in music--in which liberal studies majors are heavily enrolled.

3

Influential works on modern composition classroom methods include those of Elbow, Graves,

Macrorie, Murray. For theoretical perspectives, see Cooper and Odell, Knoblauch and Brannon, North. Major journals include College Composition and Communication, College English, Research in the Teaching of English. Major annual conferences are held by the National Council of Teachers of English, and the Conference on College Composition and Communication.

One of the leading

113 organizations training teachers in modern composition methods is the National Writing Project, 5635 Tolman Hall, School of Education, University of California, Berkeley CA 94720. 4

Table 2.--Required Writing Preparation of Future Teachersa

% required to take intermediate or advanced writing course

% required to take a course in teaching composition

English majors

15

0

English education majors

29

10

6

0

Other education majors

a Based on 263 college catalogs. Source: Burhans, p. 647.

5 The 127 respondents consisted of 14 from 2-year colleges, 67 from "four-year institutions," and 46 from "universities." The "universities" are distinguished from "4-year institutions" in that the former have professional schools--law, medical, dental--or substantial graduate programs. CSUN, with its small graduate offerings, would be considered a 4-year institution. 6 See note 3 for National Writing Project address. 7 A fine anthology on bringing critical awareness into the classroom is Shor, 1987b. 8

Table 3.--WPE Failure Rates 1980-1

22.0%

1981-2

22.9

1982-3

24.5

1983-4

26.5

1984-5

27.1

1985-6

30.1

1986-7

32.5

Source: Larson, 1987.

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