Exploring Composition Studies: Sites, Issues, Perspectives

© 2012 by the University Press of Colorado

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ISBN: 978-0-87421-882-4 (paper)

ISBN: 978-0-87421-883-1 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ritter, Kelly.

Exploring composition studies : sites, issues, and perspectives / Kelly Ritter and Paul Kei Matsuda.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-87421-882-4 (pbk.) -- ISBN 978-0-87421-883-1 (e-book)

1. English language--Rhetoric--Study and teaching. I. Matsuda, Paul Kei. II. Title.

PE1404.R524 2012

808’.042071--dc23

2011048144

Some fifteen years ago, Lynn Bloom, Don Daiker, and Ed White published Composition in the Twenty-first Century: Crisis and Change, a collection of essays from a conference by the same name that had been, according to the editors’ preface, three years in the making and that had a strong impact on the field. Their volume still makes for instructive reading, perhaps especially with fifteen years’ hindsight. Hoping to chart a new geography of composition (2), the editors and writers of this volume (including Stephen North, Shirley Brice Heath, David Bartholomae, Linda Flower, James Berlin, Anne Gere, James Slevin, and Peter Elbow) took on a number of then-pressing questions, as indicated by a selection of section titles:

•   What Is Composition and Why Do We Teach It?

•   What Have We Learned from the Past and How Can It Shape the Future of Composition?

•   Who Will Assess Composition in the 21st Century and How Will They Assess It?

•   What Issues Will Writing Program Administration Confront in the 21st Century?

•   Who Should Teach Composition and What Should They Know?

•   What Direction Will Research in Composition Take and How Will Research Affect Teaching?

•   What Political and Social Issues Will Shape Composition in the Future?

•   What Will Be the Meaning of Literate Action and Intellectual Property?

In closing the volume, Lynn Bloom notes that conference attendees approached the new century far from complacent about the past, uncomfortable with the present, uneasy about the future. Taken together, she says, the essays in the volume recognized this state of mind and, in addressing the questions above, demonstrated the need for a new map to provide direction through territory that superficially looks like familiar terrain but that is, in some important ways, still terra incognita (273). Bloom signs off with a haunting image of the map of the universe of composition at the emergence of the 21st century as an echo of Escher’s engraving of one hand drawing another hand. At first glance, the hands look like mirror images of one another; they are not. Nor is either image finished, though initially it appears to be. The process of conceiving, constructing, changing any field is ongoing, dynamic; it represents a world of hope, a world without end (277).

As the Bloom, Daiker, and White volume demonstrates, composition or writing studies has been working on maps of its territory for a long time, often in ongoing and dynamic ways. In fact, a search of the literature will turn up dozens of attempts to map the field along with its theories, objects of study, methods, and pedagogies, at least from the 1960s through the end of the twentieth century. We have been, and perhaps continue to be, much like that one hand attempting to draw another.

In Exploring Composition Studies: Sites, Issues, and Perspectives, editors Ritter and Matsuda are in intertextual conversation with these earlier mapping expeditions and particularly with Bloom, Daiker, and White’s 1996 volume. Certainly they continue the search for definitions—of the nature of first-year writing (Downs and Wardle), of basic writing (Adler-Kassner and Harrington), and of writing across the curriculum (Malenczyk). And this collection also addresses methodological issues (Chiseri-Strater; L’Epplantenier and Mastrangelo; and Hawisher and Selfe) as well as concerns related to support for and assessment of writing and learning (Donahue; Fitzgerald; Estrem and Reid; Gunner; Yancey; Matsuda; Peeples and Hart-Davidson). Yet while this volume explores a number of the same issues and asks some of the same questions as those posed by Bloom, Daiker, and White a decade and a half ago, Ritter and Matsuda’s volume focuses much more specifically on the role of research in responding to such questions. As a result, Exploring Composition Studies aims to map a scholarly agenda for writing studies in the coming years. While all the essays here provide nutritious food for thought, to my mind several offer particularly compelling challenges to long-held assumptions. In Teaching Composition in a Multilingual World: Second Language Writing in Composition Studies, Paul Matsuda points toward the global linguistic and cultural turn that composition must make—and is indeed slowly beginning to make, with his leadership. A second essay highlighting the challenges of literacy and globalization is Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe’s Studying Literacy in Digital Contexts: Computers and Composition Studies, which outlines how multimodal digital research … allows for the increasingly rich representation of language and literacy and in doing so not only troubles traditional assumptions but sketches in the outlines of a whole new country in the map of writing studies. And in Reimagining the Nature of FYC: Trends in Writing-about-Writing Pedagogies, Doug Downs and Elizabeth Wardle continue to push against traditional definitions of first-year writing, showing how that service course can and should be reconceived with a strong disciplinary focus.

Read together, this collection of essays issues a set of challenges to the field in terms of the research questions we ask (or sometimes fail to ask), the methods we use to pursue them, the material sites they occupy, and—at least in a few cases—the ideological baggage they entail. Behind all these essays, however, lie several meta-questions that need our undivided attention now that the rhetorical triangle of text, writer, and reader has exploded or splintered into additional elements and the three key terms have blurred significantly: What is writing in the twenty-first century, and why does it matter? What is reading in a time when texts are verbal, vocal, and visual, and how can we expand reading repertoires and theories to accommodate and account for these practices? The essays in this provocative collection offer some tantalizing hints in response to these questions: my hope is that our ongoing project of mapping will increasingly turn toward these last two meta-questions, for how we approach them will have lasting implications for our theory, practice, and pedagogy.

Composition studies—an important subset of the larger field of rhetoric and composition—is an intellectual formation that draws insights from various related fields in order to address issues in the teaching of writing. Due to its inherently interdisciplinary nature, composition studies draws its students and prospective scholars from many areas inside and outside English studies. These new members of the composition studies community are often trained to varying degrees in the pedagogy of composition through teaching practica or proseminars. While many of them have been exposed to some of the major theories of the field in addition to other specialized topics in which they or their faculty mentors happen to have interests, others may not have been introduced to the discipline through a broader articulation of how (and why) its members undertake research that is not only pedagogical but also historical, theoretical, and social scientific in nature. Relative newcomers to composition studies who are not familiar with the broad scope of the field—including its allied sites of research such as professional and technical writing, writing-across-the-curriculum programs, writing centers, and writing program administration—may struggle as they try to understand its diverse and growing constituencies and enduring questions in various subareas of composition studies. This collection aims to provide that understanding, through a detailed exploration of the field.

As editors, and as teachers, we recognize that such an exploration requires first the presence of a road map. As such, we feel it is helpful here to briefly sketch a modern history of composition studies that might then put the concerns of this book’s thirteen essays in a larger context. While origin stories of composition studies abound, historians of the field seem to agree that there are two branches to the beginning of composition as a subject of interest in the university. The first branch would be the study of the cultural history and practice of rhetoric, which has existed in various permutations from antiquity through the present; rhetoric as a field and a practice is critical for many of the undergraduate and graduate programs in composition studies (or composition and rhetoric or rhetoric and composition, depending upon local nomenclature) today. The second branch, arriving in force in the nineteenth century, would be the institutional imperative to inculcate in students the principles of composing—specifically, to create in students the proper markers of taste and, arguably, class, as exhibited in written compositions, usually based on the analysis of literary works. The intertwined beginnings of this field have been articulated, and debated, by a variety of scholars (see, for example, Gage; Andrea Lunsford; Crowley; Connors; Berlin; Susan Miller; and Thomas Miller); we recognize the complex politics and interests surrounding the intermingling of rhetoric with composition, and composition with rhetoric. But for the purpose of this book, we will focus specifically on the scholarship of writing and composing—and, as such, limit our history to a brief discussion of research and inquiry that focuses on composition studies per se. We have, however, included a brief list of recommended comprehensive field histories of rhetoric and composition at the conclusion of this introduction for those who would like to learn more about the ongoing debates over the field’s trajectory and mission.

Different historians of the field will position the start of composition studies at different points. Some will argue that U.S. college composition was born at Harvard in the 1890s; others will argue that it was not truly born until the beginning of the 1970s. Still others will position the birth of the field at various points in between, including 1911, when the National Council of Teachers of English was formed, or 1949, when the first Conference on College Composition and Communication took place, or 1950, when the journal College Composition and Communication debuted. The date one chooses has much to do with what one insists is being born. Is it the first-year course that one sees as the origin of things? If so, then the 1890s sounds about right—though some forms of writing at the introductory level were offered in colleges several years before this, and extra-institutional writing collectives existed even earlier in the nineteenth century as well. Is it the emergence of a collective recognition that writing is an important aspect of education, and thus an organization needs to be formed to unite its teachers? Then 1911 would be the best date to choose, and is in fact the date we feel is the best start for a modern origins story of composition studies. Or is the issue the birth of composition studies as an academic field? If so, then the 1970s sounds about right, since this decade gave us the first doctoral programs in rhetoric and composition, and a series of prominent studies about writers and writing, significantly using cognitive scientific approaches and arguing for the field as a site of research. But readers can see how even in retelling its history, composition studies becomes a tricky entity to narrate in any agreed-upon way.

So, we must choose one way to provide a series of snapshots, that road map we mentioned earlier. A tangible way to do this, especially for readers new to the field and also perhaps new to the teaching of writing, is through that first-year course—its history and its pedagogies. While recent pedagogies have called for a revival of rhetoric and rhetorical studies in the first-year composition course, at the critical era in which composition as a course became relatively standardized in American colleges and universities (circa 1880–1910), the division between the study of rhetoric as an art and composition as a skill was acute, both in pedagogical design and in pedagogical labor. As an all-male enterprise, the first-year composition course was primarily a course taught by men for men. It is true that composition also existed at both elite and public women’s colleges (and in those settings women instructors did teach). Yet, from a socioeconomic point of view, the larger, broader imperative in the composition course nationwide, one might argue, was to produce learned men for deployment into professional roles in society. Women, in contrast, were taught the principles of composition in order to grow as teachers, or as mother-teachers, to borrow a term from Eileen Schell—those who would educate their children and grow a literate family. Only since the post–World War II era have we been able to argue that coeducational writing spaces have existed as the norm rather than the exception in American colleges and universities.

Two factors led to a shift in this pedagogical landscape for composition (and other subjects). First, the successful enterprise of land-grant universities, following the Morrill Act of 1862, meant that young men no longer had to travel to the eastern seaboard for a quality college education. Many large public universities began to siphon away enrollments from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and other elites typically seen as inevitable schools of choice for men with the money and ability to enroll. They also admitted women, in contrast to the practices of the Ivy League. As a result, the applicant pool for eastern colleges in particular was dropping dramatically from a near-guaranteed group of educated, wealthy (or at least upper-middle class) men. Second, after World War I, there was a sizeable loss of young men (due to death as well as serious injury) who would have otherwise been target students in colleges and universities. Simply put, the casualties of the war left many seats unfilled; this was also a glaring problem in post–World War II classrooms. To collapse some of the finer details of this shift into a summary point here, elite colleges began facing economic realities in the early twentieth century that would lead them to admit students who were less in both educational preparedness and social class. No longer were colleges such as Harvard and Yale able to limit their admissions to men of taste; as a result, these colleges lost some of their territorial control, if not cultural capital, over higher education, and the way in which courses that exemplified taste and breeding were taught changed—by necessity, not by choice—in response.

Each time our nation has witnessed a significant cultural event—a world war, a baby boom, a civil rights movement—higher education responds to that event in kind. As well-educated, upper-class men began to choose public universities in equal numbers to private ones, and as the number of eligible male students dramatically diminished due to wartime casualties, admission standards were altered to allow for an economic reality of vacated seats; as some of these students were not prepared in ways that were expected of traditional college students, the discourse of remedial English emerged in our field journals and in our writing program discourse on all types of campuses. The conclusion of World War II brought a large number of nontraditional students on G.I. Bill. The conclusion of the war also brought an influx of international students (then called foreign students), and the United States replaced Germany as the leading destination for international students.

Women began to fill seats alongside these other new student types, both as part of a social movement valuing a broader definition of women’s education and in response to the sudden welcome of colleges and universities that were now in competition for bodies—male or female—to stay afloat. As a result, writing instruction shifted yet again to address the coeducational student experience and, as Robert Connors would argue in Composition-Rhetoric, to diminish the previously confrontational basis of instruction in writing and rhetoric. And finally, as the civil rights protests of the 1960s led to the open admissions movement, colleges such as the City University of New York, among others, began to welcome a new group of students—which included adult, lower-income, and minority students, many of whom spoke the dominant variety of English as a second language or a second dialect. This shift revived the discourse surrounding basic writing, and also invigorated composition’s ongoing attention to the relationship between language and power, and the position of first-year writing as a gatekeeper, in Sharon Crowley’s terms (Composition in the University), limiting entrance to the university community to those able to pass its requirements.

Alongside these social movements that were affecting higher education in general and writing education in particular, composition studies has gone through various waves of pedagogical theory, each providing a view of the student, his or her audience, and the written product in different relation to one another. These waves, like the history of composition studies itself, are viewed differently by different scholars. In Rhetoric and Reality, James Berlin created a taxonomy based in epistemology as a means of organizing these waves historically, via differing theories of rhetoric (objective, subjective, and transactional). Robert Connors, in contrast, singled out social and material phenomena in cataloguing this pedagogical history—such as the entry of women into postsecondary classrooms, which shifted rhetoric from a space for heated debate and speaker challenges to an irenic rhetoric that de-emphasized conflict and privatized the space for study. Such a social shift, in Connors’s view, changed rhetoric (chiefly oratory) to composition-rhetoric (chiefly writing). Connors also cites the emergence of the writing textbook industry as a material condition for the standardization of writing instruction, a move created to fill the need for a freestanding vehicle of instruction to aid the growing number of frequently untrained, contingent faculty in the teaching of writing. Still others, such as Susan Miller (Textual Carnivals) and Sharon Crowley, would characterize the pedagogy of composition as having a normalizing, gatekeeping function in the university, secondary to the primacy of literary study and the need for students of nonelite social groups to be inculcated into the space of higher education. Both Miller and Crowley would also argue that composition as a course has been significantly feminized, by its predominantly women labor force and by its lower position on the institutional hierarchy of subjects of study.

Sitting behind all of these historians’ views are multiple questions related to the most appropriate way of teaching writing. Some of these questions are structural. For example: How should a teacher approach the balance between instruction in grammar and mechanics and instruction in content and rhetorical effectiveness? What strategies are best for addressing these two areas, particularly in classrooms consisting of students with diverse learning needs? Should students read published literary texts, expository texts, or localized student texts in the composition classroom? Should students be placed into writing courses based on levels of preparedness or on language backgrounds, or should such populations be mainstreamed? How does one assess what types of learning have taken place? Should writing instruction be the sole province of first-year composition, or should it be diffused across the curriculum?

Other questions pertain to the philosophy of instruction itself. For example: How much should a teacher emphasize a student or student group’s cultural and/or political conditions in the teaching of writing? Should the teacher teach his or her students that writing is a vehicle for self-awareness? Should the teacher go further, and promote writing as a means of social liberation? Or should writing be instead taught as an expressive and informative skill that always responds to existing community expectations that are further dependent upon local context? Still deeper questions pertain to the delivery and very nature of the course—and writing—itself: Who teaches writing, and under what labor conditions? How are teachers of writing trained, and within what institutional parameters? How do writing courses bridge the gap between academic literacy and other sites of literacy practices, such as professional writing? These are just a sampling of the questions and question types that continue to occupy scholars of composition studies’ research agendas, as readers will see in this collection.

Most, if not all, teachers of writing have, at one time or another, found themselves in the position of employing bits and pieces of many different theories and approaches; it would be unnecessarily limiting for a writing teacher to feel that he or she must fit into one particular model, or seek to answer only one of the above questions in creating his or her writing course. New teachers in particular often take some time to find their pedagogical voice and may return to a particular theory sometime after studying it, only to find it offers new ideas.

The most important thing we might suggest that readers take away from this brief historical overview of writing students and writing pedagogies is that composition studies is a dynamic field that, perhaps more than any other area of academic study, mirrors the institutional and noninstitutional forces within which it operates. A longer history of this field would include writing outside the first-year classroom, including how writing in corporate, nonprofit, and other communal nonacademic settings has affected the ways in which we view literacy acquisition and the value of the written word in our culture at large. It would also include a greater attention to the subfields of composition that have made it such a force in the university, and the theoretical positions underpinning these subfields. In many ways, we hope that the essays in this collection will provide readers with those valuable, alternate looks at the history and practice of composition outside the trajectory of the first-year course we have just outlined, and thus provide a much-needed supplement to the narrative of this field, its slippery boundaries and layered stories included.

* * *

The twenty seasoned contributors who lend their expertise to Exploring Composition Studies: Sites, Issues, and Perspectives have designed their chapters with the above histories of, and questions about, writing and the teaching of writing in mind, and in doing so, have collectively created what we believe to be a comprehensive and thoughtful exploration of the enterprise of composition studies as it stands in the twenty-first century. Given the overwhelming growth of this field, and the changes to its research and, by extension, pedagogical agendas over just the past ten years, as we have just illustrated—especially noting composition studies’ basic endeavor that its theories should inform its practices—we believe this multivocal collection is long overdue.

The thirteen essays in Exploring Composition Studies concentrate on diverse yet specific areas of research and scholarship—such as writing assessment, ethnography, technologies of composing, basic writing, archival research, second language writing, writing centers, and writing assessment—in order to provide a succinct overview of the purpose and relevance of these areas of inquiry to composition studies as a multifaceted discipline. Each of the essays (1) defines a particular area or site of scholarship and inquiry within the field as it stands today; (2) discusses its specific importance to the field of composition studies; (3) examines its relation to other areas of research; and (4) reflects on its intellectual issues and controversies. As a final reflection on these individual investigations, Deborah Holdstein, former editor of CCC, offers an afterword. Exploring Composition Studies presents current perspectives of important scholarly voices in this field, speaking on the key accomplishments and central debates of composition studies research and scholarship today. The book provides the reader with a foundation for better understanding the various constituencies within this field—hopefully so as to someday stake one’s own scholarly place in it.

We bring these voices together to not only introduce and overview the current research and scholarship trends in composition studies, but also to put those areas in dialogue with one another in productive ways—dialogues that we hope will spark classroom conversations and lively debates. Readers will also see insightful profiles of contested sites within the field—such as basic writing and second language writing—put in important historical and theoretical perspective. In general, students and scholars who are new to the work of composition studies will gain a broader perspective on what lines of inquiry are possible, what research agendas inform others, and how the field has grown to include the study of various writing communities beyond the first year, and beyond the university itself.

Exploring Composition Studies is divided into two sections: The State of the Field(s) and Innovations, Advancements, and Methodologies. Grouping these essays by first, a sense of the locations of writing research and pedagogy and second, the methodologies employed in researching and explicating these various sites allows readers a grounding in both the specific spaces housing the work of the field and the broader theories and practices—and controversies—that inform it. Because the field has become highly interdisciplinary—as many of these essays note—these two sections of the book are, we believe, a way to fairly represent the diverse work that goes on in composition studies without privileging any one practice or approach.

Section 1 discusses seven key locations wherein composition studies happens. The first two of these discussed—basic writing, second language writing—are traditionally positioned by those outside the field as singularly classroom-based. Linda Adler-Kassner and Susanmarie Harrington in the first chapter and Paul Kei Matsuda in the second make clear, however, that each of these pedagogically defined groups also has roots in the community outside the university as well as within other areas of academia beyond English and the humanities. The next four sites discussed—professional and technical writing, the writing center, the writing-across-the-curriculum program, and writing pedagogy education programs—each point to the other physical locations wherein the work of composition studies takes place, and challenge the boundaries of composition studies as typically defined through its first-year pedagogies alone, or its historical service function within the university. Tim Peeples and Bill Hart-Davidson, Lauren Fitzgerald, Rita Malenczyk, and Jeanne Gunner call attention to the intellectual work of professional writing and technical writing, writing centers, WAC programs, and writing program administration Their essays debunk the commonplace view of composition studies as being limited to introductory coursework and rote classroom approaches. This first section of the book thus poses several key questions for new scholars of the field, including: What is composition and who is composing (and under what conditions)? What does composition tell us about writing and research in areas outside the traditional classroom (and vice versa)? How can we reenvision first-year composition as a study of writing, rather than a (pedestrian) requirement? Why and how are extra-institutional sites of writing—such as commonly employed in professional and technical writing as a practice—critical to the sustainability and growth of composition studies as a field?

Section 2 attempts to bring into focus select questions and methodologies that go toward characterizing current research and inquiry in the field. These seven chapters illustrate many questions that currently inform composition studies, particularly concerning the place of history, the role of the community, and the work of theory—both as pedagogical framework and program assessment tool. Doug Downs and Elizabeth Wardle contemplate a revision of the framework of first-year composition via their writing-about-writing approach; Christiane Donahue investigates whether composition carries by presenting an overview of transfer theory; Kathleen Blake Yancey recovers the recent history of writing assessment in our colleges and universities; Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater details the history and currency of ethnography; and Barbara L’Eplattenier and Lisa Mastrangelo illustrate the resurgence of archival histories in the research on composition and composing. In addition, Heidi Estrem and E. Shelley Reid detail the advances in teacher education in composition studies and writing pedagogy more generally. This second section therefore raises questions about methodologies in composition studies, such as: Do ethnographic and historical studies find their way often enough into practice-based research agendas? How do we define community in a field so clearly populated by a diversity of interests, identities, and agencies? What happens when students leave composition—does their knowledge transfer? How might we better define and extend the theories driving composition studies if they were no longer housed—or were responsible for—the first-year composition course?

This book is intended, ultimately, to serve as a conversation starter, a research primer, and a reference text for those who are on the verge of entering our field, who want to understand it from the inside out. We welcome these emerging voices, and look forward to seeing their own articulations of what composition studies, in all its many roots and branches, truly is.

RECOMMENDED FURTHER READINGS IN THE HISTORY OF COMPOSITION STUDIES

Berlin, James. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900–1985. Studies in Writing and Rhetoric Series. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987. Print.

———. Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges. Studies in Writing and Rhetoric Series. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1984. Print.

Brereton, John C., ed. The Origins of Composition Studies in the American College, 1875–1925: A Documentary History. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1995. Print.

Carr, Jean Ferguson, Stephen L. Carr, and Lucille Schultz, eds. Archives of Instruction: Nineteenth Century Rhetorics, Readers, and Composition Books in the United States. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2005. Print.

Connors, Robert. Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1997. Print.

Crowley, Sharon. Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1998. Print.

Hawk, Byron. A Counter-History of Composition: Toward Methodologies of Complexity. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2007. Print.

Miller, Susan. Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993. Print.

Miller, Thomas. The Evolution of College English: Literacy Studies from the Puritans to the Postmoderns. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2010. Print.

———. The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1997. Print.

North, Stephen M. The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1987. Print.

Phelps, Louise Weatherbee, and Janet Emig. Feminine Principles and Women’s Experience in Composition and Rhetoric. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1995. Print.

Tate, Gary, and Erika Lindemann. An Introduction to Composition Studies. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. Print.

I

The State of the Field(s)

By now there is a