Brenda Grau
LAE6392
7 November 2008
Response to Articles
Fulkerson’s article “Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century” seems more like an angry ranting that stems from a personal frustration with a field that is going through an unstable period. As a graduate student, I’ve been told several times that jobs in English are scarce, that English is hardly relevant, and that even what we do as English majors is becoming more and more unfamiliar to those inside as well as outside academia. Moreover, the continuing decline of writing, reading, and interpretive skills seems to insinuate that we are not doing our job as teachers and researchers in order to cultivate the field and help students of English build these skills. To dramatize the issue, we cower like an endangered species in the rapid evolution of academia. Miller and Jackson’s article “What Are English Majors For?” suggests that the only way to revive English is to stop blaming outside factors and instead ask ourselves what we can do to help English. First of all, however, I think we need a reality check about what it is we’re supposed to be doing as English teachers. I’ve heard some colleagues proclaim rather presumptuously that their job is to teach students “how to think”--and this is often followed by a complaint of how futile such a task is. It is exactly this kind of elitist thinking that creates a barrier between teacher and student even before the first class meeting. But there are other colleagues who insist that academic discourse itself is unfairly elitist and therefore an injustice to force onto students; I find this opinion to be equally elitist.
Fulkerson echoes a pervasive and problematic view of how to establish the kind of equality that is meant to transcend gender, race, social status and so on:
Doesn’t the idea of ‘academic’ discourse, with its concern for critical thinking, definition of terms, citation of evidence, and preferred reasoning patters give unfair advantage to students from middle and upper classes (especially whites), who are likely to have a greater familiarity with such texts prior to college? (678)
The most disturbing part of this statement is the implication that academic discourse is not even a desire for those who have never participated in it. Academic discourse is knowledge and learning. To believe that the discontinuation of critical thinking, for example, is a move to incorporate those who have less “advantage” is actually to perpetuate elitism by continuing to deny certain groups of people the right to participate in academic discourse. Fulkerson is also woefully inaccurate in assuming that middle and upper class whites are likely to have read more traditional texts. Even a cursory examination of today’s younger generation reveals that traditional texts are a thing of the past for mostly everyone.
As Miller and Jackson suggest, we need to examine not our outcomes and goals, nor our vain hopes for changing outsiders’ perceptions of what English actually is; these are merely ends for which we have not yet established the means. Each of us needs to hold ourselves accountable for the direction that English takes, even if it is easier to throw our hands up in frustration and blame everything else around us. If we want students to find writing relevant and important, to see the knowledge that can be found in interpreting literature and in engaging in creative writing, then we need to decide to teach students, rather than try to befriend them by avoid ‘boring’ grammar lessons, or engaging in the kinds of group or collaborative classroom activities that either silence the teacher altogether or else patronize the young adults who occupy our classroom. So while Fulkerson makes a good point that pedagogy in English is rather muddy at the moment, Miller and Jackson’s call for the various branches of English to work together rather than against each other is a more productive solution than Fulkerson’s twenty-some page sigh of frustration . If we cannot even connect within our own discipline, then it is only natural that our discipline will fail to connect to today’s world.