Philosophy/Aims
The overall goals of our writing program are to engage students in academic discourse, to teach them how to do that successfully, and to invite them to see what is at stake for themselves as well as for the university and potential employers in that engagement. We define academic discourse as a form of symbolic action characterized by Kenneth Burke's metaphor of joining a conversation. One enters a room where a discussion is going on, listens until the issues and different positions make some sense, and then joins in. We want our students to participate in and feel part of such conversations right from the start; we do not see writing courses as merely preparatory for "real" work somewhere else.
How, then, do we define that "conversation"? What are the practices that we believe make it possible? What is at stake because of our assumptions and practices?
We take seriously the symbiotic relationship between reading and writing.
We are saying that writing is much more than simply a figure for reading and vice versa, and that acts of reading and writing are informed by prior experiences with texts. In most academic work, reading and writing are literally inseparable. Writers authorize themselves through the words of others, using pieces of the scholarly "conversation" represented by a given reading (or readings) not only to demonstrate that they understand what is being said, but to establish their own distinctive "voice" and work out their own ideas through taking a critical position on what they have read.
Because we believe that intellectual work in the academy gets done intertextually, we encourage instructors to give sequenced reading and writing assignments: in the First-Year Writing Program, either those provided in Ways of Reading or assignments they compose themselves; in the AWD Program, the sequence of assignments that either constitute a semester-long project or lead to a final paper. These assignments typically require students to take ideas from the essays they have read and use them to interpret and theorize other texts (other readings, visual "texts" such as films or photographs, and accounts of their own experiences) and to use those other texts to test and perhaps critique those theories. Our goal is to put students in a position to see for themselves how ideas get generated, tested, and revised by working at those processes themselves in their reading, writing, and class discussions, and doing so deliberately, self-consciously, and confidently.
There is no question that these goals and practices pose a greater challenge for our students and our instructors than do those pedagogies which call for a rhetorical analysis of or reader response to texts by means of individual, discrete assignments, without the requirement to engage with a theory in one text by using it to perform a reading of another. The intertextual nature of our assignments—as when a student, for instance, uses a passage from educational theorist Paulo Freire and her or his own experiences as a student to read a chapter from Richard Rodriguez's account of his own schooling—increases the number of interpretive lenses through which that student sees the subject at hand.
But no one is expected to meet these challenges all at once. All work on any given unit of the course takes place over several weeks, engaging students first in various in-class exercises and short homework assignments that send them back to reread assigned texts, then in drafting and redrafting their major papers with plenty of response from instructor and class members, and finally in formatting and editing the final draft to meet the expectations of their audience. In this way we not only teach our students sophisticated processes of reading and writing and how to manage complex tasks in both, but we also show them that we value academic work as re-vision: a process that can deepen thought in its expression and lead readers and writers to re-think what they know and what others have said.
We want to challenge our students to do a high level of critical thinking in their reading and writing.
As instructor Greg Zuch observes, the readings we assign are typically "complex, scholarly, dense; they demand much from their readers." They cannot be read quickly; they do not allow students to move away from issues of interpretation to a general discussion of their own opinions. Moreover, students must develop their ideas in their papers by working within and against the discursive frames that these readings provide. We want to resist and reverse, in other words, that model of instruction which first places some topic or issue on the table and then asks students to come up with something to say, only turning to some other texts to support their ideas after they have formulated a thesis and paper plan.
We also encourage students to read "against the grain," a kind of critical thinking that is typical of academic discourse and often the source of new ideas. It begins with the recognition that there are tensions and even contradictions within texts and between texts, including the "texts" of the reader's own thinking and writing. We feel that we are teaching critical thinking successfully when students engage contradiction rather than dismiss it for something comfortable and familiar, so that it becomes something they can work with as writers without their papers falling apart. To put this in terms of what is sometimes called the politics of teaching reading and writing: we want students to be able to engage thoughtfully in controversial issues; but again, we want them to see how in academic discourse, controversy is something that emerges from scholarly conversations, through close work with texts. Our students typically do get to controversy, but often in a more complex way than they might otherwise, as they must acknowledge what other writers are trying to do and why, instead of moving directly to accept or condemn other writers' arguments.
Our goals for teaching critical thinking and reading, then, place strong demands on students' writing. We discourage their attempts merely to summarize texts or reduce them to a simple point; they are expected to quote, explain, and appropriate for their own purposes substantial passages from what they have read. Nor can they so easily employ familiar reductive approaches such as the comparison/contrast essay, the thesis statement/three examples format, or the "poem as puzzle to be solved" approach to interpretation. And while, as instructor Laurie Novick observes, a paper may represent "an-eighteen-year-old's first confident and self-owned opinion" in academic writing, being asked to get to that opinion by having to "talk back" to powerful arguments is something that many students find daunting.
But again, students are not expected to meet these challenges immediately. We show them how they can, by working individually and in groups, develop critical strategies by which to interpret difficult passages in the texts they read. In this way they learn, as David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky put it, that the academy regards such difficulty not as a sign of the reader's failure but as "the gift that makes reading possible." And again, because major paper projects take place over several weeks (in the first-year program) or the whole term (in the AWD), students have the time and support to use writing as a way to work through uncertainty or confusion to clarification and understanding.
In short, we are serious about a curriculum that defines all students, even those in basic writing or ESOL courses, as deserving of engagement with some of the most important intellectual issues of our age, and as capable of performing readings and writings that, while hardly expert, are nevertheless real versions of the work that is done in the academy. We do not want to treat our students as novices, nor offer them a "dumbed down" curriculum. This stance, we recognize, is not shared by everyone. Not all believe that our students are capable of the challenges they are asked to meet. Some would prefer that we assign easier readings and ask for shorter and more readily managed papers.
In theorizing what we do and why we do it, we are increasingly aware that we value the "literary" nature of all texts, whether classified as literature (poetry, drama, fiction and non-fiction prose) or as something else (for example, the essay, the report, the proposal).
We are aware, that is, that all texts in the second category are composed by the same textual and rhetorical strategies employed by the literary author (tone, "voice," conventional structures, figures of speech, intertextual connections, punctuation, visual arrangement, and so on), and that they too present gaps, contradictions, ambiguities, and silences that demand interpretation. And we believe that developing a conscious awareness of these features of written texts will enable the interpretive work that our students do, both as readers and as writers performing readings. Our goal is for students to learn to ask themselves, "How am I being prompted to read by this text?" and, "How does this text model strategies I can use as a writer?" and then to transfer this learning to their own drafts and those of their classmates. Ideally, they will also ask the same questions when they read and write in other courses in the university and in their careers.
We might say, then, that much of what we try to do with academic readings is to make them more "opaque" for our students, presenting them so that students become consciously aware of their textual features. We want to resist, in other words, that version of reading that treats the words on the page as, in Orwell's metaphor, a "transparent window pane" through which one looks to unmediated content. This is one of the reasons why we choose readings that are dense and complex, for they are more likely to require that readers attend to their experiences with a text and to the kinds of interpretive strategies that it seems to call for. And here too is one more reason why we spend so much time on major assignments: students are most likely to learn such conscious ways of reading when we slow down the speed of discussions and writing, moving students more closely into rather than away from the text, making the language opaque.
We usually include literary texts as we teach academic writing. One helpful way to think about the uses of literature in the writing class is through James Britton's idea of the "poetic" function of language. We might think of literature, his theory suggests, as that kind of discourse which, rather than hiding its textual and rhetorical strategies, foregrounds them. It is language that heightens our consciousness of how language works, and allows reading and writing, then, to be more deliberately composed.
Literary texts also provide ways that students can work the theories represented by essays such as those in Ways of Reading by applying them to texts that they may find more personally accessible (if not necessarily easier to read). Many instructors in ENG 111 already supplement the anthology with literary works such as poems, plays, or short stories, as well as visual "texts" such as films or photographs. Working across genres is one way that we hope students can become more aware of the features that literary texts share with the academic essays they are reading and writing and, perhaps, begin as well to theorize some of their differences. It is possible as well that they may come to this understanding by working with texts that call genre boundaries into question, as we increasingly see in both Ways of Reading and in the literature instructors use to supplement it. Such texts demonstrate, as Clifford Geertz argues, that contemporary intellectual work often produces hybrid or "blurred" genres as older categories of knowledge are called into question.
One last point, the most important of all: in asking students to address in their reading and writing contemporary issues of knowledge, representation, interpretation, and rhetorical power, we are saying that their participation in the intellectual dialogues of our time ought to be substantive and historically relevant, not, in Susan Miller's term, an "intransitive" version of composing. We recognize, however, that putting this principle into practice calls for teaching that requires more than time, patience and effective strategies; it requires faith that students can learn to participate in these dialogues without heavy dependence on a specialized vocabulary or other forms of teachers' expertise standing between them and the written page.
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