CCCC 2005: ReviewReview: Chair's Address--Who Owns Writing What does the College Conference on Composition and Communication look like in 2005? Doug Hesse, present CCCC chair, situates our work in relation to the public wrangling over writing and writing instruction represented by No Child Left Behind, the essay portion of the SAT, essay generators and auto-graders, and emerging “democratic” technologies such as wikis and blogs. Claiming that everyone seems to own writing but the writing teachers, Hesse suggests that we need to continually find our way back to being influential in defining how writing should be taught and represented in the public sphere. Simultaneously, he seemed to suggest that new technologies and new genres might make it possible for students to become more fully owners of their writing. The presentation began with Hesse’s warm baritone singing a Negro spiritual, was punctuated in the middle with singing, and concluded again with a chorus from the opening song. The result of this recurrent spiritual refrain was an impressionistic pattern painting a sense of ownership with strokes of paint on a literacy canvas that might be seen best when stepping back and taking in the impression of the whole. Could Hesse, as a teenager, own a Negro spiritual to such an extent that he could perform it, though he was a white boy from Iowa? How can governmental bodies claim so much ownership over school standards for literacy that they cease to listen to the teachers who work with this body of knowledge and learning on a daily basis? Would essay generators and mechanized graders be the future of composition? The present examples Hesse generated on essay generator online were so ridiculous that this particular dystopia seems far off, though assessing samples of writing mechanically looms a bit larger as a threat. Is it possible for students to “self-sponsor” writing rather than always completing “obliged” writing for academic and professional spheres? It is this last of Hesse’s question that left me thinking most after the talk. Hesse defined “obliged” writing as that writing done for academic and professional purposes and audiences while “self-sponsored” writing is personal, civic, and belletristic. While he didn’t seem to argue that one was superior to the other, the challenge to teachers seemed to be to innovate in terms of helping students to position themselves in the civic or public sphere, working on blogs and wikis, and perhaps other, working on less web-based public and private settings for writing, and helping students to self-sponsor. While I am sympathetic to increasing students’ investment in their writing and increasing their awareness that writing does not have to always be obliged or coerced, I question the possibility of ever achieving true self-sponsorship when teachers and classrooms are involved. We can certainly expose students to these types of writing that seem freer, more democratic perhaps, and we can help them to see how many people are writing on blogs for no pay to counteract the mainstream media, but our presence and the presence of grades and credit preclude the possibility of self-sponsorship, it seems to me. |
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