Crowley, Sharon

CompsCrowleyComposition
Crowley, Sharon. Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays. Pittsburg, PA: Pittsburg UP. 1998.

“This means that some one hundred sixty thousand sections of Freshman Composition were offered, if schools limited enrollments per section to twenty-five students—as they typically do [1994-95] (1).

“An academic field called “composition studies” has emerged during the last twenty-five years” (2).
“Composition scholarship typically focuses on the processes of learning rather than on the acquisition of knowledge, and composition pedagogy focuses on change and development in students rather than on transmission of a heritage” (3).
Is this true?
“The required introductory composition course was invented at Harvard in the late nineteenth century” (4).
“A fundamental assumption of this book is that the humanist approach to the first-year course is not the best approach to teaching composition” (13).
“The humanist claim upon composition is typically enacted through the practice of requiring studentsto read literary texts in the first-year composition course” (13).
“To assert, as I do, that the act of composing differs appreciably from the act of reading is to challenge two fundamental premises of modern humanist pedagogy, namely, that the point of composition is to express onself and that the point of writing is to represent or reflect upon the quality of one’s reading and experience” (13-14).
(about Gary Tate) “He insists, however, that writing teachers be permitted to use literary texts in composition instruction, given their primary interest in helping students to lead rewarding lives” (19). He resists what he sees as the increasing professionalization of undergraduate education.
“But as I try to demonstrate in this book, debate about the use of literary texts in composition instruction is a cover code for a much larger institutional issue: the status relation between composition and literature within English Departments” (21).
The curricular practice of using literary texts in composition instruction is implacted with the institutional issue in three ways: first, it affirms that literary study and composition have something in common; second, it affirms the universal importance of literary study; and third, it reinforces the dominance of literary study of composition (21).
So, the argument herein is not how best to teach, explain and explore composition, but who gets the bigger piece of the pie, composition or literary studies
“James A. Berlin argues that proponents of humanist composition “saw colleges as cultivating character by providing aesthetic and ethical experiences through the traditional humanistic studies (1987, 39)”.
“Jeannie C. Crain argues for the creation of “literature-based” courses on the ground that “human beings always have more at stake than simply becoming historians, mathematicians, and biologists” (679)”. (24).
“The point of required composition instruction, to Lindemann’s way of thinking, is to offer students practice in the specialized discourses used in every academic discipline” (25).
“By the end of the nineteenth century the pastoral college was well on the way toward becoming a modern university’ (46).
“Composition is one of the oldest college courses in America. It was practiced at Harvard (founded in 1636) and William and Mary (founded in 1693) during the seventeenth century, and at yale (founded in 1701) during the eighteenth” (49).
“English studies grew very rapidly during the final decades of the nineteenth century” (58). “Purity, also translated as “correctness,” was one of the four features of style delineated by ancient tradition (the others were clarity, appropriateness, and ornament). According to Cicero, the achievement of correctness came with children’s acquisition of their native Latin, providing that young people grew up in the right circles and were given a good education” (61).
The entrance of the “cultured” aspect—correct English correlates with being brought up in the finer places and rubbing elbows with those of good birth, families, etc.
“The earliest mention of written entrance examinations at Harvard appears in 1872-73, when students were warned that “correct spelling, punctuation, and expression, as well as legible hand-writing, are expected of all applicants for admission; and failure in any of these particulars will be taken into account at the examination (Hill et al. 55)” (66).
Are entrance exams only a way of “excluding” students, or are they a way of enhancing the education by knowing the extent of the students’ knowledge where writing is concerned. Is this part of the mechanics vs. critical thinking argument?
“Most important, they would have to be acquainted with the definition of “correct” English that circulated at Harvard in order to pass this examination” (67).
Rather than correct why do we not categorize writing styles AFTER freshman English. Formal business writing, formal academic writing, journalism, creative, etc. We have specialty librarians who’s job it is to understand the available research materials in particular fields, is there a reason that we cannot develop composition instructors in the same way, say by establishing a correlation between interests, minors, bachelor’s degrees, etc. and writing for a “comp II” style course?
“In other words, the ideological transformation of literature involved two steps: the suppression of the role of composition in the production of literature; and the redefinition of the completed literary text as an embodiment of “full, central, immediate human experience” (80).
How could one possibly “surpress the role of composition” in a field where composing is the most relevant and important factor. Whether creatively or not, writing is an act of composing and the idea that writing is not an important aspect is ludicrous.
“The notion of literature as a sort of ideal repository of human experience made literary study seem quite different from an older, rhetorical, understanding of literature as a repository of nationalist culture and moral sentiment, as did the modern project of developing individual taste” (81).
It makes no sense to me to feel that literature is the only repository of human experience and that non-literary works are not included. Nationalist culture, ideas, and ideals is encompassed in speeches, news articles, essays, etc.
“As early as 1896, Williams Lyons Phelps of Yale rejected composition as a viable field of study, arguing that no one ever learned to write by working “tread-mill fashion in sentence and paragraph architecture” (Phelps 1896, 794). At a meeting of MLA in 1909, Lane Cooper of Cornell referred to freshman themes as “a mass of writing that has no intrinsic value” (1910, 423)” (85).
The act of composing cannot be done “tread-mill” fashion. Sentence and paragraph structure are a means to clarity in any kind of writing, and these things, although it is not popular to say so, are in and of themselves a part of a rhetorical act, of convincing the audience to read on. Whether freshman writing was or is a mass of writing that has no intrinsic value is ludicrous. Have we ever heard the math department deriding the teaching of students the inner workings of equations through repetitive practice? One cannot formulate theories and equations if one does not know how equations are put together—how they derive a single answer.
“This theory of discourse has since become known as “current-traditional rhetoric.” Current-traditional pedagogy discriminated four genres: exposition, description, narration, and argument (EDNA)” (94).
“What matters in current-traditional rhetoric is form. Current-traditional pedagogy forces students to repeatedly display their use of institutionally sanctioned forms” (95).
“Certainly, teachers who made humanist arguments in favor of substituting literary texts for mass media in composition instruction during the 1950s did not hesitate to extol the universal and uplifting qualities of literature (106).
“Once again we see the humanist insistence that reading great literature exposes students to universal values, as well as the argument that reading plays an important role in the formation of character” (107).
“In the humanist worldview, composition must be maintained in order to maintain the class distinction that is captured in the paired but unequal dichotomy literature-composition” (120).
This argument goes on and on. It appears to be seen as an either-or situation, and nothing could be further from the truth. Why is it necessary for literature studies to be better-than or lesser-than the study of composition? One could not exist without the other. While reading great literature does not create great writers, it certainly doesn’t hurt. A composition course should not be a literary studies course, but there is no reason literature should be absolutely excluded. Today there appear to be courses in composition which merge different ways and means of composing, and that is as it should be. Students can be introduced to literary writing styles along with rhetoric. The argument appears somewhat worn out to me.
“Taylor preferred that the freshman course be taught by experienced teachers” (126)”
There is no way any university could have freshman English taught only by experienced instructors, or for most, this would be a very difficult enterprise. Students learn to teach, for the most part by teaching, exploring the teaching process, by being exposed to the undergraduate population. However, it might be wise to, rather than simply placing students directly into the classroom to either sink or swim, to develop a mentoring/assisting process. In this format graduate students would spend one to two terms working the classroom side by side with another instructor. While it wouldn’t be a perfect situation, it would allow graduate students the opportunity to become more slowly immersed in the actual process, allowing thoughts and ideas placed by books and instruction to synthesize with actual classroom situations.

“Dewey insisted that the point of education was not the accumulation of knowledge but instillation of the desire to grow and become wise (James Campbell, 216-217)” (163).
Is that not still an idea we hope for, if not voice aloud?
“It is worthy of note that Freshman English was the only course that remained as a universal requirement throughout the fifty years (1880-1940) during which the American professoriate created a large number of specialized disciplines and expanded their curricula accordingly” (167).
The concept of the writing course as a basis of higher education is long standing for a reason. A student who can write well can incorporate new ideas into any subject matter
“In 1945 a symposium on communication skills was held at Northwestern University. It is perhaps worth noting that no literary scholars spoke at this meeting” (171).
“Mills was rather cynical about what he took to be administrative efforts to reduce costs by combining instruction in speech and English, and he doubted whether the two fields were so easily compatible as the sudden proliferation of communication skills programs seemed to imply. A speech, after all, was ‘not merely ‘an essay standing on its hind legs’ (41)” (171).
So here we see the beginnings of trying to incorporate the modern idea of communication with writing skills?
“Programs at many schools were given the administrative support necessary to develop an array of machinery and approaches aimed at individualizing instruction “ (173).
“Iowa, for example, published a magazine of student work and produced students’ radio shows” (173).
“An impressive battery of tests was in use at some schools. Stephens, for example, subjected students to the Cooperative English Test, the Fowler Vocabulary Precision Test, The Chicago Test of Clerical Promise, the Stephens College Knowledge Locator Test, . . .”” (173).
There appears to be a tendency in our field to try and establish a cut and dried program and skills set. We are trying to take a subjective experience and create a clinically empirically evidenced field of study like that of mathematics or the sciences. Is this due to a desire to give more “weight” to the teaching of writing as being as important as other fields? If we consider it unimportant how has it survived to become an integral part of higher education?
“Around 1971: The Emergence of Process Pedagogy” (187).
“The process approach was always there waiting for us. It was what we should have been doing all along and would have had we not confused the basic human act of discoursing with the kind of knowledge you can store in vaults, just because they were both being taught in the same buildings. –James Moffett. ‘Coming Out Right’” (187).
“Teach the process, not the product” (187) [slogan]
“Advocates of process generally made one of two sorts of recommendations: that teachers pay attention to students’ composing before they had actually begun to write, and that teachers adopt a set of so-called ‘student-centered’ classroom practices” (187).
Donald Murray on the second set of recommendations: "Centered on student text, not the literary or rhetorical text used in class, students find own subjects, students write as many drafts as necessary, students write in any form that is appropriate, mechanics come last, students have enough time for the ‘process’ to occur, individual papers are not graded, since student writers as individuals differ the processes differ too and so are no rules, no absolutes, just alternatives. (188).
“Murray argued that such writing was itself a response to product-centered teaching: we teach writing as a product, focusing our critical attention on what our students have done,’ and yet our ‘concientious, doggedly responsible, repetitive autopsying doesn’t give birth to writing (89)” (189).
“If paradigm shifts can be said to mark changes in the ways in which a professional community views itself and its practices, then Hairston was quite right to proclaim the advent of process pedagogy as a paradigm shift” (195).
“Even though the pressure to professionalize has been constant in American universities since the late nineteenth century, composition resisted this pressure until relatively late in its history” (195).
I’m really unsure what to think of all of this. While I see the benefits that could be achieved through the process pedagogy, I’m also fairly certain it would be difficult to achieve. The shift to student centered teaching is of utmost importance, however. Therein, to me, lies the most important aspect of what is noted as the “paradigm shift”. I’m not sure why the ‘pressure to professionalize’ the teaching of writing has become such a focus. It still feels to me as though much of this is being done in order to negate feelings of being unimportant within the university setting because the subject matter is so difficult to create a strict “form” for. A form of grading, etc.
”Burner defined discovery as “a matter of rearranging or transforming evidence in such a way that one is enabled to go beyond the evidence so reassembled to new insights (1962, 82-83)” (196).
“Bruner was not opposed to the study of history or literature, but wanted instruction to focus not on the texts but on learners’ activation of what they found there” (197).
This is my idea of what writing is and can be. A way to process knowledge, experience, the conscious and unconscious in order to activate or actively participate in what is found during discovery, or reading of texts, observation of the world, etc.
“In this essay Emig wrote as though she believed that process pedagogy most often produced expressivist discourse, while the traditional approach most often produced expository discourse” (203).
Interesting, and I tend to agree.
On current-traditional rhetoric having disappeared.
“The universal requirement is, in Foucauldian terms, an ethical technology of subjectivity that creates in students a healthy respect for the authority of the academy. The requirement makes clear to students that they are not to write in their own voices, despite what their textbooks tell them. To the contrary: they must produce discourse that will satisfy their teachers in Freshman English and beyond” (217).
I think that we are “depowering” a situation that we can utilize to “empower” students. What students must learn is that THEY have MANY voices, and that, like actors, they can draw on different voices to accommodate different situations. Like clothing, the voices in which we write are suitable to specific situations. Wearing a bikini to class might be self-expression, but it is also unacceptable. Students, like all writers have multiple voices that can be used to their own advantage. That one has to write to an academic audience is only a chance for a student to learn to use one of many voices he or she is capable of learning and learning well!!!!!
It appears that composition began as a way to “enclulture” the student body. It appears that it continues to be to encourage socially acceptable cultural norms. Whether that norm be learning to speak in a voice that is so cultured as to be assumed to have money, or whether it is learning to be accepting of differing sexual orientations, it appears the composition classroom has been and continues to be the soapbox of the English department.