digital digs

what first-year writing can do for you...

The meta-conversation of the WPA listserv is disciplinary identity. It is not surprising that the expanding field of rhetoric/composition-cum-writing studies (or whatever) struggles with identity. 30 years ago or more, it was maybe understandable that rhet/comp functioned as analogous to other specializations in English (e.g. Victorian literature), even if was maybe not as well-regarded. Today, one might either view rhet/comp as a field separate from English (which would now be literary studies) or as a general field of study with its own specializations (comparable to the field of American literature or British literature). I won't get into that today, but either way, this changes the relationship of the first-year writing course to the broader field.

On the one had, you could look at first-year composition and say that it is the cornerstone of our discipline. FYC programs are what give many of us jobs. It is by far the most commonly taught writing course in higher education. It is argubaly where we came from (unless you want to say we came from Aristotle or something as rhetoricians).

On the other hand, you could say FYC is the weakest link in our discipline. It is the course/problem that was handed to us, predefined. If you look at the growing number of professional or technical undergraduate majors or masters programs or at doctoral programs in our field, I think you get a far better sense of how our discipline understands its paradigms, its methods, and its objects of study. One thing that is immediately implicit in all these programs is the obvious fact that one cannot learn "to write" by completing an FYC program. And yet, that's what FYC was constructed to do in the 19th-century: to teach students to write. And that's the continual complaint we get from colleagues, adminstrators, and the rest: students who have taken FYC still don't know how to write.

But that doesn't mean that FYC should be abolished! It means that appropriate expectations need to be established. Think of it this way...

Teaching composition in a new economic era

Most people I meet like to say that their industry is recession-proof. I hope they are right. This would seem to make sense in higher education, or at least some sectors of higher education. When people lose their jobs or the job market is bad, they return to college or stay in college. I know this was a factor in my own decision to go to graduate school in the early 90s. At the local community college where my wife teaches FYC, the student population is exploding. Of course this assumes that students can get loans to go to school, and at some point one imagines the affordability issue tips the scales away from college or at least away from certain colleges.

One thing we can say about FYC I believe is that it is relatively cheap. The main cost has to do with class size. In better economic times the small FYC classes lower the overall class sizes at a college, and it's probably the cheapest, effective way to do so. That always looks good in a US News and World Report ranking kind of way. Also, if a college staffs these classes with graduate students and/or contingent faculty, then the delivery costs are also pretty low per student. Given that humanities faculty come comparatively cheap, even on the tenure-track, even having full professors in English teaching composition is not an unreasonable expense in comparison to business or engineering faculty for example. Students have to be sitting somewhere earning credits; from a strictly fiscal viewpoint, it would make sense to reduce the per credit costs as much as you can. In fact FYC is so inexpensive, that everyone seems to want to get in on the business with AP credit, online courses, and so on. Of course things aren't that simple. It's easier to cut contingent faculty than tenure track faculty. A college invests less in contingent faculty, and they are, at least in the institution's eyes, easier to replace if the need arises in the future.

2012 composition

So I'm tapping away on my iPhone to see if I can have the will to publish something substantive this way. I suppose it's like any interface. It requires practice. And yet there would seem to be physical constraints as well: fat thumbs.

But I digress. Perhaps this is the compositional mode of the future (or at least one mode). Arguably it is the dominant mode of textual communication already with trillions of text messages sent each year, to say nothing of IM, tweets, etc. Perhaps we might say there's little of substance here, but if that's the case then it's a whole lotta nuthin'! Intimate relationships are born, maintained, and ended this way. Business deals are made everyday. And political movements operate through these little keyboards and handheld devices. The bottom line is that there are billions of these machines lying around, and as William Gibson said, the street finds its uses for these things.

the local nature of fyc reform

As I think I mentioned a while back, we are in the midst of reforming the FYC program at Cortland, a program that has been tweaked many times but is essentially 20 years old. While many things have obviously changed in 20 years of rhet/comp theory, in practice much remains the same. Our impetus was more from a recognition of the way the program had calcified and bureaucratized and institutionalized over the years.

In any case, working on this project with FYC instructors and our comp program director, Mary Kennedy, has been a worthwhile experience so far. In particular, it has really helped me to see how local conditions tend to overdetermine the shape of writing curriculum. I don't see this as a necessarily good or bad thing. It's just the way it works. For instance, Cortland's teacher-preparation focus and the desires of the Education school certainly shape the courses we offer, as does the history of integration of service learning into FYC here. Obviously part of best practices for FYC is adapting national best practices to meet local conditions.

The largest concern has to do with hiring and staffing practices related to contingent faculty. Our proposal includes moving to a sophomore writing course as opposed to two first-year courses. This will create a one-year reduction in the need for FYC instruction. So there is some concern over this issue. We have developed a proposal that addresses this issue, but we'll have to see what the administration says. Of course no one in our department wants to put forward a proposal that costs jobs, even exploitative adjunct jobs.

In some ways this is a microcosm of our disciplinary challenge. I remember Vitanza writing, years back, about how we could never have a CCCC where the theme was "Should writing be taught?". It's just not a question we can seem to consider. I think we have similar issues with the foundational practices of our pedagogy. I don't know if we can give up things like small classes, commenting on drafts, student conferences, etc. I'm not saying that we should. I'm just saying that I don't know that we can even really ask the question.

Anyway, I'm sure all composition programs have similar or related challenges. However, it seems to me that the local, institutional, embedded nature of curriculum should indicate that composition as a discipline is better off seeing itself as researching the teaching of writing rather than seeking to manage it nationally.

rhet/comp ink

Smart Mobs reports on a new chip development that will boost Internet access speeds to 640 gb/s. That's more than 30 times my current download speed through fiber and something like 100 times the typical high speed connection. The article suggests this will be available in about five years and that this speed is roughly equivalent to 17 DVDs per second.

I realize that's an odd way to start a post that would seem to be about rhetoric and composition, but I'm thinking that maybe it should seem so odd. Five years is a long time for technology and markets but for PhD programs, that's tomorrow. Students starting in doctoral programs in the fall will be looking for jobs in five years. If we're going to train new faculty for that reality, we have to start next month.

Of course, this story is just one example of many such stories. We have know for a while (I would hope) of these impending changes. On the other hand, it's a little bit like the frog in the slowly-heated pot of water who never realizes he's about to be cooked. We may think we are in "it" right now, that we are already being overwhelmed by technological churn. And perhaps we are. But we are not in "it." That is to say that we are approaching a kind of symmetry-breaking, intensive mutation.

When we talk about branding rhetoric and composition, it's interesting. It is maybe like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. If we are to talk seriously about the future of the discipline it will lie in a near future for which few of us have even the most modest preparation. We comfort ourselves with the thought that colleges and universities are far too incompetent and conservative to change that quickly. It's like the joke where you don't need to outrun the bear, just your friends. Well, we can likely outrun our disciplinary "friends." But maybe that won't be sufficient.

Imagine the interactive, rich media experience I can send to you at 17 DVDs per second. Well not me, but someone. Or more likely a whole production company of someones. These technologies point to a world where course materials will have serious production values as well as extensive real time interactive possibilities. And of course it will be many-to-many where students could upload hours of high-definition raw video footage (as well as other storage-intensive data). Students will be able to collaborate in real time over the web to edit information on a global scale for any number of rhetorical purposes.

And yet, in a few weeks, tens of thousands of FYC instructors will be assigning 500-word, individually-authored, text-only compositions. Those students, btw, will be graduating into this world I'm describing. We have already failed them.

If you really want to brand rhet/comp, it can't be "ink" any more. We know that. We've said it a thousand times. The rhet/comp brand needs to be something completely different from the gulag of FYC resentiment. It can be "we'll improve your students' assessment scores by 20%" or whatever. It needs to be a completely different vision. It needs to be a future that people might desire so that we can offer something that people actually want.

And it needs to emerge from our sense of discipline by building on a valuation of ethos, of community, of political/social engagement, as well as our emphasis on rhetoric and the cultivation of a practice of composition. Not just writing now though, of course. No doubt there will be some disciplinary scuffles there over media and information. I say, join the party. You want to teach every incoming student to make a video, take a photograph, design a graphic. construct effective metadata, build a usable interface? Welcome to our world.

The task of preparing students to participate in this emerging information-dense world will not be a one or two course proposition. It will re-write the organizational patterns of the university. It will be somewhat like Howard Rheingold suggested in Smart Mobs: a divide between those who can participate in this new realm and those who do not. Some faculty will participate; others will choose to stay behind. But those who do participate will forge new institutional relations.

I already see this happening on my own campus where faculty committed to these issues come together across disciplinary boundaries, reconstructing CP Snow's two cultures.

This is where R/C Inc ought to situate itself, as an Ulmer-esque emer-agency, poised to address problems that you can barely recognize and yet are looming.

Branding first-year composition?

So there's an ongoing conversation in the WPA list about branding first-year composition. In part it's the Rodney Dangerfield thing, but it's also about protecting ourselves from external forces trying to take over our work and/or dictate to us. The problem, in some ways, as I wrote earlier, is that we've got around 75,000 people teaching FYC and only the tiniest fraction of those people are engaged in disciplinary practices of rhetoric and composition.

So we're in a difficult position. Colleges and other faculty hold rhet/comp accountable for FYC but we really have little or no control over who teaches these courses or how these courses are taught. The idea of a brand is that the WPA or a similar body could establish best practices for running a program and then look to establish it at various institutions. If well-marketed then ideally the brand could grow.

I see the fundamental problem here as our attachment to the twin notions that a)student writing is poor and b)a good FYC program can make student writing better. The problem with the first statement is that it is relative and entire subject to perception. If I said college faculty writing is poor, could anyone refute that? Hand out faculty publications to your neighbors and see if they can understand them. It's relative. Futhermore, as we know, student writing has always been perceived as poor. I don't see that changing. I think it is a structural requirement of the teacher-student relationship that students are perceived as poor writers, regardless of what they write.

However the idea that a course (or two) can make students better writers makes even less sense. The vast majority of students don't even want to be writers in the first place, so how can they become better writers? That's like me taking a class that's going to make me a better golfer. Well I don't golf. I've got not interest in it. I'm not going to do it in the future. So what's the point? And yes I know that students will be asked to write a couple of things in college (probably less than you imagine). But completing a few written assignments is not the same thing as becoming a writer. And there's no golf seminar in the world that's going to make me a better golfer when I happen to find myself on the course three years later for one round.

But then I got to thinking...

more thoughts on rhet/comp disciplinary futures

More riffing on Kopelson's CCC article. She notes from her study that "graduate student responses seem to suggest that it is what Janice Lauer has called the 'spaciousness of rhetoric' that can provide an ideal designation for all of what we (could) do, an appellation around which an array of disciplinary inquires and pursuits might best coalesce, and not because it best contains those inquires, but because it permits them to disseminate and disperse. As Brenda [one of the grad students] asked earlier, 'what's not rhetoric?'" Kopelson endorses this familiar notion of thinking of rhetoric as a broadly conceived field and encourages the idea of exploring the many possible spaces out there, as opposed to our continuing penchant for self examination. She writes that she is not arguing that self-exmaination "is an unimportant activity, but only that the costs of are indeed high when self-scrutiny comes at the expense of taking up other critical concerns and of making other, more innovative and far-reaching forms of knowledge."

I am intrigued by this notion of "far-reaching" and will come back to that in a moment. But first let me say that I get the whole resistance to the insistence that rhet/comp research be pedagogical and/or applicable to the classroom. I understand the desire to be recognized as a discipline and valued by other sectors of the university. I get all that. I also recognize the arguments made by folks like Kurt Spellmeyer that we need to make ourselves relevant to the culture and not become increasingly esoteric and irrelevant like some of the other humanities. We don't need to go in that direction.

But I also see the following. FYC is a big business. 3000 4-year institutions, 2500 2-year institutions in the U.S. I figure there could be as many as 100,000 people teaching FYC in the fall (tenure-line, lecturers, grad students, adjuncts, etc.). I don't know. That would be an average of a little under 20 faculty per institution. Maybe it's 75,000. It's a lot of people.

According to Ellen Cushman in her piece in Composition Studies in the New Millenium, there were 135 Phd's in rhet/comp granted in 1997. For my informal purpose, let's assume that is a good average for the last 20 years. That would be 2700 Phds. Given that number, I think it's safe to assume there are fewer than 4000 rhet/comp Phd's currently teaching in higher education.

pedagogy of rhet/comp job market imperatives

Following on Derek's call for a carnival discussion of "Sp(l)itting Images; or, Back to the Future of (Rhetoric and?) Composition" by Karen Kopelson in the latest CCC. The article extends the conversation over the pressures in the field to bend research toward pedagogic applications, particularly in relation to dissertation projects.

I haven't had an opportunity to read everyone else's responses, so apologies if this has been covered elsewhere, but there is clearly a job market imperative here. Clancy mentioned her journey toward rhet/comp. My journey was quite pragmatic. I had an MA in creative writing, a strong interest in postmodern theory, and was in an experimental PhD program at Albany. One day I thought to myself, "hmmm... I think if I want to get a job, I'd greatly improve my chances if I did a rhet/comp dissertation." In the end I don't think I did. I don't think anyone on my cmte knew what I rhet/com diss would look like. But I did talk about writing and pedagogy and I did claim to be in rhet/comp. And so far it seems to be working ok. In truth, the thing that ended up making me competitive on the market was my facility with technology, and that remains the case to date.

The point I want to make though is a little different, but related in that it is about job market imperatives. There are something like 3000 four-year institutions in the US? How many of them really give a damn what your research is? 10%? I consider Cortland a very average institution in this regard: a comprehensive, masters-granting, public college. Yes, you have to publish to get tenure. You probably need to publish at least one article in a peer-reviewed journal. And after tenure... well, you know. If I had decided to pursue creative nonfiction and write essays, I could have done that. I hardly think Cortland is alone in this regard.

Including that pedagogic turn in a dissertation may indeed be a response to the importance placed in rhet/comp research on pedagogic application, but it is also a pragmatic, job-market strategy in a field where, quite honestly, the people hiring you are concerned with you as a teacher first and researcher second (or even third, following their estimation of you as a potential colleague). At a Phd-granting institution the kind of research you do would make a difference, and your success as a researcher could have an impact on the program as a whole. But that's just not really the case elsewhere.

More on this later.

on demand composition instruction

Chronicle post on a new online, on-demand course service, StraigtherLine. Of course they offer Composition. Here's the syllabus. The question isn't whether you can offer something better. The question is whether your institution can offer something better programmatically. The course is your typical rhet/comp crap, the worst imaginable, and hence just what you'd generally find in a random FYC course. StraighterLine didn't lick it off the grass ya know!

In a way it's an old story. Plenty of first-years come in with credit for FYC achieved somehow. It's so common now, I wouldn't be surprised if a black market for these credits didn't start developing. But the academic marketplace is such that colleges can't afford to not recognize the credit (much like the guy checking IDs at the college dive bar downtown).The difference here is that the course is On Demand! You can start today if you like. That means there is no instructor per se, and there are no classmates. You follow the course, and if you need help there are tutors (i.e. customer service reps) to assist you. I think you get 10 hours free when you sign up. I'm guessing they've got another department that just grades the writing.

It's sweet! It's just what rhet/comp has earned. Our field has very smart people and very sophisticated ideas about writing and composition, but they generally cannot be found in the FYC classroom. The FYC classroom remains a place that

• focuses on mechanics and correctness
• views "the" writing process as a lock-step assembly line
• creates private writing tasks between student and teacher

None of these things are supportable in rhet/comp research, and yet we continue to produce textbooks that engender these activities, and we continue to oversee faculty in programs that engage in these practices. The result is a curriculum that is mechanized. We mechanized it so that we could deliver it 50-100 times a semester on our campuses. But now it will be mechanized on demand, online thousands of times each day.

Congratulations on that one.

CCCC in the blogosphere

CCCC has created a blog on blogspot. Victor Villneuva offered the first post on the "Rhetorics of Racism." I commented on that discussion there, but here I just wanted to say something about CCCC as a blogging entity.

My students have better designed blogs that this, even on the first day that they blog. This is strictly blogspot template land. Also hardly an image, no video, hardly any graphics (aside from a list of stickies in the sidebar). Clearly the conversation about diversity does not include diversity of media. Maybe the thought is that ignoring delivery is a hallmark of serious intellectual work. Yeah right, if that's the case then maybe they should just scrawl it out in crayon and post it on the fridge in the break room at NCTE (assuming they have one). If delivery doesn't matter that is.

Villanueva's post neatly articulates the problem between equity and diversity. Clearly what is sought after here is the development of communities and a society in which people with different gendered, racial, class, and sexual identities are treated equitably. Unfortunately equity and diversity are incompatible. Is it equitable to treat a white man and a black woman in exactly the same fashion? I would say not b/c that would mean ignoring the differences between them. But if we are asked to treat people differently, how do we know how to do it? How do the combinations work? And how do we measure equity between those differential identities?

That doesn't mean that we don't try to improve the material conditions and lived experiences of human existence. It just means this is a fundamentally flawed way of trying to think about that challenge.