CCCC 2005: ReviewReview: N.10 Redefining Success via/and Affirming the Discipline: FYC as Intro to Writing Studies Presenters: Elizabeth Wardle, “Contradiction and Constraint within the FYC Activity System: Why a Course about Writing Would Better Help Students and Teachers Succeed” Douglas Downs, “‘I Never Knew There Was So Much to Study about Writing’: FYC Curricula that Change Public Discourse about Writing Instruction” Debra Frank Dew, “The Wind under Our Wings: Rhetoric and Writing Studies as Disciplinary Affirmation” Fiona Glade, “Affirming Writing as Learning: Where Do We (All) Go from Here” To me this panel was the sleeper hit of the conference -- The best reason to stick around that Saturday. It was extraordinarily unified without being repetitive and each speaker was practiced. Elizabeth Wardle began by calling our attention to the WPA First-Year Outcome Statements. She noted that the outcomes represented an “ideology of access to writing across the curriculum.” It is a preparatory class for WID. However, as many others have noted, this is an impossible charge. Writing instructors cannot make all writing work in any situation and trying to claim academic writing as a singular entity is a categorical mistake. The FYC teacher could teach what they know, which tends to be literary or rhetorical analysis but in that case it’s unlikely that biology or business would come up. Because of the reality of time constraints it’s not like teachers could hit on each genre one at a time and even if they could, they can’t teach a discourse with which they are unfamiliar. So, Elizabeth poses, we could continue to believe that writing instruction is an inoculate for other good writing and will transfer to other contexts. But far transfer, transfer to an activity that is only marginally related to the activity in which the writing was learned, is unrealistic. So what to do with FYC? We could abolish it (but why give up the territory?) or we could revise it as the likes of Russell, Johanek, and Goggin have suggested by replacing FYC with a course about writing. The course content would be what has been learned about writing, an intro to writing studies that asks students to do research on writing. Next, Doug Downs walked us through his curriculum for an intro to writing studies class. Along with the rationales given by Elizabeth he suggested that “Changing one understands of the game, changes the game.” After guiding us through his syllabus Doug introduced the curricular elements that guide the arch of the class. The students would do readings in composition research, reflective self study in reading and writing, comparison of readings and experience, library research instruction, primary research and reflective and presentational writing. The first part of the proposed course was primarily a reflective sequence on literacy that culminates in a literacy autobiography and challenges student conceptions of writing through a number of readings from composition scholarship. These texts bring up open questions in Composition which for the next six weeks students may do primary and secondary research on. The students aren’t limited to existing issues in writing. Doug suggested that the reasons to write that he encountered were as varied as whether first-year writing should be required to how lighting and other environmental factors influence writing. Then as the students begin to write they are introduced to various process research such as those by Murray, Berkenkotter, Flower & Hayes, Berkenkotter and Huckin, and Sommers. In the last four weeks students revise their work, present their research panel style, and submit a course portfolio. The outcomes form this curriculum Doug noted was that students did learn about writing as an area of inquiry, their own writing tendencies, how writing is embedded in personal and social history. He did point to one unanimous outcome that students did successfully recognize sources as people speaking. Deb Dew gave a rousing battle cry that we are neglecting our professional selves, especially in our first year of disciplinarity. She argued that we are still living in Batholomae’s vision and that diminishes our public identity. This comes, she argued, along with being able to CLEP out of our classes. Since Composition lacks full-fledged disciplinarity everyone else on campus from student success initiatives, community building projects, and various campus functionalists try to define composition for their own purposes. Debra points out that they don’t do this to other disciplines that are content and methods-based. And if we don’t take this material’s risks to become content and methods-based then we will continue to receive punitive mandates from various stakeholders. Deb called for a relentless advance into disciplinarity. She suggested that Composition will become a disciplinary enterprise when FYC becomes an intro course to the discipline, followed by other upper-division courses and the best way to get that to happen is to push students to ask for it, but they will ask for it only if we make the idea available in FYC. Fiona Glade closed this outstanding panel with a discussion about WACs place in disciplinarity for Composition. A tough call to say the least because WAC alone can serve assimilationists ends but given its ability to connect to other projects in the academy there is no real reason it cannot connect to FYC. Unfortunately, this audience member was desperately trying to remember her address as she was filling out a form that had been sent around to start a special interest group on disciplinarity and I missed the important theoretical justification in her talk, which was no doubt brilliant, given the beginning and the end. |
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