Composition Pedagogies

Kevin (Kyoo Sang) Jo

Professor Ellen Quandahl

RWS 602 Weekly Paper 5

February 26, 2014

1. Author: Peter Elbow and David Bartholomae

2. Title: 

 Being a Writer vs. Being an Academic: A conflict in Goals (Peter)

 Writing With Teachers: A Conversation with Peter Elbow (David)

 Interchages (David and Peter)

3. Publication info: College Composition and Communication 46.1 (1995)

4. Project: Debate about composition pedagogies

5. Keywords (not just a list, but also how you’re coming to understand them/think about them/come to terms with them)

 A writer: a person who express what s/he thinks, how  s/he feels, and what s/he tries to tell in written text without any restriction (Peter’s perspective)

 An academic: a person who reads, analyzes, and understands the existing books and theories or discusses research questions with fellows (Peter’s perspective)

 Ownership: a writer’s confidence that what s/he writes express her/his own words (Peter’s perspective)

 Freewriting: to write one’s own words and thoughts without any worry about what good writing is 

6. Notable passages in the text, pieces about which you have questions, pieces that you see as notable claims:

“Sometimes I've felt a conflict about what we should read in the first year writing course. It would seem as though in order to help students see themselves as academics I should get them to read "key texts": good published writing, important works of cultural or literary significance; strong and important works. However if I want them to see themselves as writers, we should primarily publish and read their own writing” (Peter 73).

-> This shows that Peter pays attention to a writer’s role of the first year writing course.

“To be blunt, I must be sure not to "teach" these texts (in the common sense of that term), but rather to "have them around" to wrestle with, to bounce off of, to talk about and talk from, to write about and write from. Again: not feel we must be polite or do them justice. In taking this approach I think we would be treating texts the way academics and writers treat them: using them rather than serving them. (I take this as one of the lessons of David's Facts, Artifacts, and Counterfacts.)” (Peter 74).

-> This seems to be understood that Peter argues that reading key texts is used as a mean to write well. It is confusing and ambiguous to me.

“Writers also have interest in ownership of the text-and, as with "killing," I want to take this metaphor seriously: Writers have a concrete interest in monetary payment for their labor. But of course the metaphorical meaning is important too. Writers usually want some "ownership," some say, some control over what a text means. . . . Some writers say, "I don't care what meaning readers see in my words," but more often it is writers who celebrate presence and readers absence” (Peter 75-76).

-> Ownership that Peter tries to explain is confusing to me.

“If my goal is to get them to take on the role of academic, I should get them to distrust language. . . . But in my desire to help my students experience themselves as writers I find myself in fact trying to help them trust language . . . Striking benefits usually result when people learn that decidedly unacademic capacity to turn off distrust or worry about language and learn instead to forget about it, not see it, look through it as through a clear window, and focus all attention on one's experience of what one is trying to say” (Peter 78).

-> Peter maintains that leaving students alone to trust language is beneficial for them to write creative pieces.

“Have you ever noticed that when we write articles or books as academics, we often have the same feeling that students have when they turn in papers: ‘Is this okay? Will you accept this?’ But damn it, I want my first year students to be saying in their writing, ‘Listen to me, I have something to tell you’ not ‘Is this okay? Will you accept this?’” (Peter 82).

-> This shows that the structure of the academy tends to bring about self-inspection.

“So does freewriting pretend to be free? Yes and no. It is not free from the teacher's authority (until a person takes it over by choice), nor from the forces of culture and language. But it does create freedom in certain crucial ways. It frees the writer from planning, from meeting the needs of readers, and from any requirements as to what she should write about or how her writing should end up-for instance, as to topic, meaningfulness, significance, or correctness of convention. Freewriting then is a paradigm of the real and the utopian: an example of how we can use our authority as teachers in our institutional settings to create artificial spaces that can heighten discovery and learning. It is a way to take ten minutes of a classroom and make certain things happen that don't usually happen given the institutional and cultural forces at work. Students discover that they can write words and thoughts and not worry about what good writing is or what the teacher wants, they discover that their heads are full of language and ideas (sometimes language and ideas they had no idea were there), and they discover they can get pleasure from writing” (Peter’s response 89).

7. Unfolding sense of the overall argument or arguments

It is very interesting that two scholars debated hotly through journal papers. Both two scholars admitted that there is a conflict between the role of the writer and that of the academic. The problem is that each person had a different view on the same subject. For example, Peter paid attention to the side of credulity in the role of the academic. He pointed out that the academic side asked students to consider topic, meaningfulness, significance, or correctness of convention. Those concerns played a role of restrictions on students’ freewriting, he thought.  So, he wanted students to write their words and thoughts without any constraint and discover that they can get pleasure from writing. 

On the other hand, David focused on importance of the role of the academic. Unlike Peter’s viewpoint, he came down on the side of skepticism as the governing idea in the undergraduate writing course. He regarded academic writing as a form of critical writing. So, he argued that the role of the academic helped students criticize their own pieces and create good writing. He wanted to show students how to work with difficult material and to be able to negotiate the ways they are figured in relationship to the official forms of knowledge valued in the academy. 

Two scholar’s opinion makes sense to me. However, I am in the position of Peter. Frankly speaking, I doubt that the role of the academic works in improving writing skills. Of course, I don’t mean that it is useless for writing education. I don’t think that the role of the academic closely correlated with writing skill. There are many distinguished writers who were not educated about academic writing in the world. In my opinion, the role of the academic would be good enough to be provided as a separate class like rhetorical criticism, academic writing, or theory of writing. I think that it would be better to focus on writing itself in the first year writing course.

8. Note places where you see countering moves—ways of dissenting or uncovering values, ways of suggesting stance or attitude, degree of civility.

“I have the feeling that the role of academic as we see it suffers narrowness for not containing more of what I have linked to the role of writer. . . . If academics were more like writers-wrote more, turned to writing more, enjoyed writing more-I think the academic world would be better. David, on the other hand, probably believes that the role of writer suffers narrowness for not containing more of what I have associated with the role of academic. So the conflict plays itself out” (Peter 82).

-> Peter points out that David interpret the role of academic differently from Peter.  According to Peter, David thinks that the role of academic should extend more to relieve the role of writer suffering narrowness.

“As Peter phrases the issue, the question he faces as a teacher is ‘whether I should invite my first year students to be self-absorbed and see themselves at the center of the discourse-in a sense, credulous; or whether I should invite them to be personally modest and intellectually scrupulous and to see themselves as at the periphery-in a sense, skeptical and distrustful.’ This comes very close to the way I would define the issues. Peter comes down on the side of credulity as the governing idea in the undergraduate writing course; I come down on the side of skepticism. Peter wants his students to ‘trust’ language and implies, rightly, that I would teach a from of mistrust. The word I would use for mistrust is criticism, and in my article I called academic writing a form of critical writing. Peter argues that he too has tried to unmask the ‘subtle and sometimes insidious powers of teachers.’ I think of the problem of the teacher as only a minor version of the larger problem of the forms of knowledge that are presented to students as naturally or inevitably or unquestionably ‘there’ in the academy” (David’s response 84-85).

-> In David’s countering, he illustrates his different perspective on the undergraduate writing course.

“Peter says, ‘I agree with you in wanting to understand and acknowledge the cultural forces and voices that enter into her paper; but I wouldn't be so dismissive of her role: I'd still grant her what we grant to the literary figures we study, namely that her writing is hers-even if it is over-determined by countless cultural and psychological forces.’ In the course that I teach, I begin by not granting the writer her ‘own’ presence in that paper, by denying the paper's status as a record of or a route to her own thoughts and feelings. I begin instead by asking her to read her paper as a text already written by the culture, representing a certain predictable version of the family, the daughter, and the writer. I ask her to look at who speaks in the essay and who doesn't. I ask her to look at the organization of the essay to see what it excludes. And I ask her to revise in such a way that the order of the essay is broken-to write against the grain of the discourse that has determined her account of her family. I begin by being dismissive” (David’s response 85).

-> David counters Peter’s claim by describing the opposite questions repeatedly about the same example that Peter gave.

“You say that the classroom is ‘real space, not an idealized utopian space.’ You seem to be insisting on two things here: that a classroom cannot be utopian, and that utopian spaces are not real spaces. This highlights what may be our most important difference. Let's look at a micro-utopian space that I love: freewriting. This is an activity that permits a classroom space to be at once utopian and real. (Were not Fruitlands and Summerhill real spaces?) Note that freewriting does not involve trying to hide the teacher or her authority. Indeed using it tends to make our authority more naked. Why else would students do something so odd and unnatural as to write for ten minutes-without stopping, no matter what-trying not to worry about the conventions of writing and also assuming that the teacher who orders it won't see it and is urging them not to show it to anyone else?” (Peter’s response 88-89)

-> Peter identifies important difference between David and himself by giving an example of “freewriting.”