Finding the Disciplinary Divide

I took a gamble in a Department Meeting last week, firing a bit of a warning shot across the bow of some who will be teaching first-year composition next year. 

I did this while presenting revised learning outcomes for first-year composition. I was walking everyone through the revision process and sharing the draft outcomes. Pretty standard stuff.

But then I admitted my presentation served the secondary purpose of reminding everyone in the English Department that our composition courses have contemporary learning outcomes that will require contemporary syllabi and lesson planning. 

And I did not veil the suggestion much. I said, "If we have faculty that last learned to teach composition in, like, the 90s or earlier, this new curriculum will require people to significantly update their approach."  

I was talking mostly to the Literature people, and that can be a little dicey in an English Department. 

The shot I took highlights the disciplinary divide between the study of literature and composition, and I was making it clear that expertise in the study of literature is not sufficient to teach composition.  

For those who are not familiar with the evolution of the discipline of Composition Studies, in the 80s and 90s, scholars in the field spent a lot of time and energy demonstrating that studying the acquisition of advanced writing skills is a discipline of its own that is distinct from the study of English literature. 

Since most writing programs were in English Departments, highlighting this disciplinary divide back then came with plenty of fighting over shared resources. This was not, however, a scholarly turf fight. Literature scholars do not see themselves as Composition scholars. What happened was a lengthy process of defining methods and clarifying goals in Composition Studies. 

In the time since, Composition Studies has spent a few decades refining our research methods and applying those to test new approaches to teaching writing. It's been great. I got to go to grad school during that era. My peers and I learned about our field's identity and goals as we simultaneously learned about its methods and theories. 

But outside of grad school, there are writing programs that have to run as parts of colleges and universities where the acceptance of new methods and theories is unevenly distributed across faculty and administrators.

In our program, we have faculty members with MAs in English Literature who have been teaching composition for decades. They have gotten very good at teaching the syllabi they developed twenty years ago. They do not always welcome disciplinary advancements. For example, before I arrived at Sac State, the Writing Program introduced a portfolio assessment requirement for first-year writing. It was a timely reform, maybe even a little ahead of its time back then, but it should not be considered radical today. It's pretty standard stuff. But I am aware of a number of faculty members who have refused to implement the portfolio assessment policy, and we have others who adopted a half-measure that complies with the rule but misses out on all of the teaching benefits. And this is just one example of the kinds of challenges a WPA faces. 

It's an exciting, if somewhat daunting job that I'm just beginning to wrap my head around as I finish the first year.

I'm filling some impressive shoes in this new role. Before I stepped up as program coordinator, Dr. Angela Clark-Oates made antiracist assessment a priority well ahead of the national curve. She also brought in external reviewers from CWPA and made ambitious strides toward a systematic approach to programmatic assessment. Before that, Mona Dobson steadied the ship after some turbulent years that led to major changes in personnel. And prior to that, Dr. Amy Heckathorn modernized the program, managed to get a WAC Coordinator hired, and established a culture of writing that extends well beyond the composition classroom. 

I recognize that continuing their work means not only recognizing all they've done but also establishing a vision of my own that propels the program forward.

And that returns me to the warning shot. 

Yesterday, two of my colleagues stopped me on campus and confronted me about my comments from the Department meeting. They told me they were listening to what I had to say and realized, "Hey, we learned to teach composition in the 90s!"

I was very happy to see these colleagues of mine laughing as they told me this. Dr. Jason Gieger, a Film Studies scholar, and Dr. David Toise, a British Literature scholar, are more than colleagues. They both served as mentors as I've grown into my career here at Sac State, helping me understand how the university works and also how it doesn't work. They've done that with kindness and good humor. So, to see them laughing about my remarks was a relief. They told me a story about a former Sac State professor who, after being assigned a Composition course, sat and listened to the WPA explaining all of the recent advances in the field of Composition. After the reasoning was laid out before him, he said, "Ahh, no thank you. I think I'll do it the old-fashioned way." 

It was a very funny story. By telling me that, my colleagues showed that they understood what I was getting at and that they did not take offense (at least not enough to tell me about it). 

My reminder at the Department meeting that contemporary learning outcomes require a contemporary approach to teaching was not intended as a slight to Literary scholars. It was a nod to all the work done to establish Composition Studies as a discipline in its own right. It was also an acknowledgment that there remains work to do in that area. 

I spent the last several years gathering evidence that there are still many who need to better understand the divide between disciplines. I was serving as the large-scale writing assessment coordinator, and our team assessed writing portfolios. Students selected assignments they've completed for various courses and described those assignments for the portfolio readers. One flawed composition assignment that I saw far too often was "a rhetorical analysis of a work of literature." 

Students are being asked to perform rhetorical analyses of short stories, poems, or novels. The result is almost always a literary analysis that includes a handful of terms from the study of rhetoric. These kinds of assignments are developed by faculty members (likely well-versed in the study of literature) conflating rhetorical analysis and literary analysis. That is the result of someone not fully understanding the disciplinary practices of Rhetoric & Composition. And for the students, unfortunately, these kinds of assignments often further blur the line between the disciplines, making it more difficult to think about writing across different contexts. 

To be clear, you can perform a rhetorical analysis of literature. Some literature clearly has a rhetorical purpose. I had a nice chat today with a grad student about the rhetorical goals Milton had when composing Paradise Lost. And at the grad level, a paper about that would be cool.

Trying to assign a rhetorical purpose to most works of literature, however, is often troublesome. I mean, "How did Yeats work to change the beliefs or behaviors of readers of The Stolen Child" is a deliciously messy question. But that poem is better understood through literary analysis, a practice that does not worry itself with exigence or arguments. 

It is also possible, although rare, to perform a literary analysis of a rhetorical artifact. Yesterday, A.O. Scott did just that with the text message at the center of Tucker Carlson's dismissal from Fox News. It's worth noting that Scott warned against using literary analysis for such purposes in the opening of his piece, but by treating Carlson as a tragic character, his work does demonstrate how a text can inform readers about complex human issues such as internal conflict and the denial of one's own shortcomings. It was pretty neat. 

Such efforts, however, are exceptions performed by people who are being intentional with their cross-disciplinary efforts. They are not appropriate assignments for students who are still trying to understand how scholarly and professional disciplines work. 

This is not a dismissal of such exceptions. They have the potential if used correctly, to help teachers better define the disciplinary divide. I am interested in working with my colleagues to develop lessons or writing prompts to do just that.    

With that in mind, I have started writing grant proposals to seek funding for professional development and mentoring programs aimed at facilitating an in-program effort to define and support best practices at Sac State. I learned a lot this academic year, and I look forward to implementing what I learned as I grow into this WPA role.