 | Response to articles The debate in these articles seems to be less about how to teach than what, precisely, a student should take from a FYC course. In dissecting pedagogy into discrete structures, such as "Cultural Studies" or "Expressivism" or "Rhetorical," the articles (Fulkerson's in particular) seem to be implying that there exist deeper divides in the composition community than the superficial issues of "how do we teach" or "what do we teach" can address. Indeed, these articles delve into far darker, more tempestuous pedagogical waters - they float just above the WHY in our teaching.
While the ultimate goal FYC is to instruct students in the finer points of crafting academic discourse, they can only write as well as they can think. Sinking hollow ideas into technically proficient sentence structures or beautifully crafted paragraphs means nothing - an academic paper written by even William Shakespeare is useless if its analysis has no more depth than to assert that "culture is good because it means we're all different."
This, I believe, is critical to understanding the debate in Fulkerson's article. Cultural Studies and Expressivist approaches seem to stray away from "conventional" composition pedagogy because they are more focused on teaching students how to think critically than how to mold thoughts into boilerplate academic structures. Academic discourse begins in the mind, not on the page - if the student can successfully break down a complex issue into its basic components and analyze those components for their veracity and logical soundness, then their writing will, at very least, contain the kernel of scholarship.
This is precisely the goal of Cultural Studies approaches: to force students to THINK critically, to question the structures of society and culture and, thereby, to foster the mental reasoning abilities necessary to craft academic discourse.
Expressivist approaches should do the same, but with personal and individual issues and experiences. Expressivism should not be a granola-loving, hemp-wearing, hookah-toking free write fest, but, instead, a means to take a student's personal experiences and turn them upside down so that the forces which created those experiences can be exposed in their most basic ideological forms.
Rhetorical approaches, on the other hand, seem to favor the nuts and bolts of academic writing. My analogy is this: think of academic writing as a computer. Cultural studies and expressivism are concerned with the computer's programming - how it generates results and what sort of information it can and cannot understand or tabulate. Rhetorical approaches are more centered on the hardware - issues such as "is the computer compatible with this peripheral?" (in our case, academic writing) and "can it print cohesive results?" Certainly these are important qualities for good scholarly communication, as well. However, they are a decidedly different skill set than those reinforced by Cultural studies and expressivism.
The crux of the debate, then, is clear; composition is torn as to whether it needs to instruct students in the art of critical thinking or academic writing. Good academic writing can, of course, not exist without critical thinking - they are part and parcel of the same techne. Yet, within composition classes, an instructor's time must be somehow divided between the two. To teach critical thinking without the mechanics of writing is, using another metaphor, to teach a student to fish but leave him or her without the pole to do so. To teach the mechanics of writing without critical thinking is to give a student a fishing pole while they are standing in a vast desert.
Thus, cultural studies/expressivism/and rhetoric must all be melded into one pedagogical bricolage. The divide between these approaches is vast, certainly, but embracing any one of them too heavily will lead to the incomplete instruction of the student and will leave a composition course lacking.
Wow...this was a lot longer than I intended it to be. |