Conference on College Composition and Communication
Chicago, April 1998

I'd like to thank Marilyn for giving me the chance to respond to Nancy Grimm's chapter of her book-in-progress. I'd also like to thank Nancy--first, for doing the hard work of writing this long and complex piece; second, for making me try to do what she advocates in the paper--some authentic listening. I had to listen to a post-modern view of teaching that I'd previously found various ways to tune out--doing what Nancy says tutors do when they don't listen to students, prematurely imposing their own classifications on students' ideas, instead of being open, stretching, making psychic room for students on their own terms. So I tried to listen to Nancy on her own terms, not my own terms which I came to realize in the process of responding, have been influenced by expressivist, modernist, middle class, and Christian ideas of voice, individuality, and the soul. I'm identifying my limits, my situatedness, as Nancy asks us to.

Nancy's chapter is a multi-dimensional tour-de-force. It is interdisciplinary, employing, among others, Linda Brodkey, Judith Butler, Jane Flax, Gemma Fiumara, and Mary Louise Pratt to argue for a literacy of the contact zone. It's multi-media; Nancy gives us a 60-second cut from a haunting song by Irish singer Sinead O'Connor. It's autobiographical and personal--my favorite strand, also the favorite of Chris, one of the four internet respondents, along with Gloria, Julie, and Beverly. We learn wonderful details about Nancy's working class upbringing and lifestyle, for example, that her mom made her outfits, including her poodle skirt, and put cotton in the toes of her one size too large shoes so she could wear them longer. The chapter is psychoanalytic, employing Jane Flax's "process of justice" which I realized is similar to the process of autobiographical fiction writing and reflecting that Nancy Welch describes in her paper. The chapter is historical--tracing the invisibility of class as a factor in American history writing, using James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me. It's interpretive, two thirds of it a sophisticated, helpful reading of Anne DiPardo's "Whispers of Coming and Going"--about missed opportunities for communication because of the tutor's inauthentic listening and adoption of the institutional gaze. Nancy weaves all these strands together coherently into an intricate braid.

I'll summarize one of her main points, the one I respond to most here. Composition (with a capital C) as a white, middle-class endeavor or "regulatory discursive practice" puts social pressures on working class students to conform to and espouse white middle class values of the sort that Lynn Z. Bloom traces to Benjamin Franklin: thrift, delayed gratification, punctuality, decorum, and cleanliness, although as Nancy adroitly demonstrates through her own family history--for example, the thriftiness alluded to above--these are working class values, too. Part of Nancy's evidence for the claim that working class students have to distort their writing and themselves is her own personal testimony and that of her students (Kari, Rebecca, Haj, Joe, Nancy) and James Berlin. Using the analogy of rainy day activity kits such as paint-by-numbers, cross-stitch, and model airplanes, Nancy demonstrates that writing teachers have an agenda of finished pictures on the activity box that they want students to match.

As a case in point, I never thought I would ever hear myself speak the kind of term I just uttered--"regulatory discursive practice"--because it doesn't sound like me--somewhat similar to students' feeling that their writing is not them. A good example is a new writing teacher I work with found it uncomfortable at first to say "pedagogy;" it wasn't part of her identity kit and she wasn't quite sure she wanted it to be. So there she'd be sitting in the writing center practicing: "Pedagogy, Pedagogy." In the academy everyone tries on new voices and languages--either to expand their horizons, because they are coerced, or both--but with varying degrees of discomfort and suffering.

My immediate reaction to Nancy's argument about Composition with a capital C was "Oh, so students write for the teachers--hey, that's life, that's school." (That's Normal, especially from my own past and present middle class vantage point.) What's the big fuss? What else is new? That's the way it's been across time and across cultures. Composition is certainly not the first occasion in which students feel they have to distort themselves; chances are they felt the same the previous twelve years, not only in their language arts and English classes, but at their communion, confirmation, and bar-mitzvah classes, not to mention at family dinners and family reunions (here I've got home, school, church, temple are covered) In fact, I reacted not only with "Hey, that's life, that's school," but also "Hey, that's rhetoric." Of course, (and whenever we say of course, it's a sign of the Normal coming on) we adapt and adjust what we say and what we write to an audience and its characteristics and values. In this case, younger people are writing up to older people of higher status with the power of the grade.

Sometimes, however, we should not be so disturbed when a student has to perform according to these values and views; that performance may actually be in keeping with that same post-modern view of teaching, helping students stretch to accommodate other and others' views, part of authentic listening--as long as the discomfort or suffering from having to modify one's views, voice, or language is only temporary--an extremely important condition. Of the students Nancy mentions, I'm sure some suffered longer and more severely than others--although the problem is how does one measure, quantify, and compare kinds and degrees of discomfort and suffering due to the violence of literacy?

Temporary discomfort of expediency in completing assignments is common, Nancy says, and I'll elaborate. Not that we shouldn't take our jobs seriously, but sometimes I think we flatter ourselves that in just one semester we have much more impact on students' lives than we actually do; and we harbor a certain breast-beating angst, fear, and guilt that that impact is negative, even destructive. But from the same post-modern point of view of ambiguity and multiple positions, and also according to the way rhetoric works--finding available means of persuasion both for and against and all of the qualified positions in between, we could argue that for a student who hates Holden Caulfield, it is actually beneficial to have to write a pro-Holden Caulfield essay in order to see and feel another point of view, just as Nancy advocates, also the benefits of writing autobiographical fiction from the point of view of a person with whom you have had a conflict, as Nancy Welch points out. (I'm aware that the Holden Caulfield case may involve the least suffering of Nancy's examples.)

Maybe not so much in composition, but in rhetoric or public debate, we always ask students to write an essay or give a speech on the same issue from both points of view. (If the speech is anti-gun control, the essay is pro.) The rationale is in the process of writing on a position with which you disagree, you discover something new about the issue, the readings, or yourself, you write yourself out of a thought pattern or rut, engage in some authentic listening, incorporate others' views, as Nancy advocates. Having to write or speak on both sides of an issue or writing autobiographical fiction from the point of view of a character with whom you have a conflict, Nancy Welch's assignment, might be classroom practices of a redesigned identity kit--to respond to Chris and Julie on the net who recommended that Nancy specify more classroom and writing center practices of the redesigned identity kit for the "theory weary," as Chris calls them. Writing for each rhetorical situation, like interacting in each of our social roles and relationships, is a performance of a persona, not the expression or the equivalent of student's true essence, personality, or soul. Students do tell us that they think of writing and school as a performance; yet instead of praising them for this sophisticated post-modern view, we often criticize them for their "It's just a game" cynicism. Assigning a reflection on each writing experience, as Nancy Welch suggests we do after autobiographical fiction writing, might emphasize the performative persona-constructing aspects--another specific classroom or writing center practice.

Nancy's metaphor of the academic identity kit, the picture on the box, and the notion of redesigning the kit so that students can arrive at a number of pictures, like all metaphors when extended, tends to break down. The idea that each teacher has only one picture in mind--the one on the box that the student's writing has to match--goes contrary to my view of the state of teaching writing. What Nancy uses the metaphor to claim teachers do, in my mind they would have little reason, purpose, or motivation to do unless they wanted to make themselves miserable. Here I have a problem not with her analysis but with the extended metaphor that tends to confuse rather than illuminate. Certainly, we don't want each student to come up with the same picture, the same essay--the same as one another or the same as ours. We don't want each student to match our picture with his or her picture; we want to learn something new each time we read a piece of student writing, the reason for assigning narratives and personal writing in the first place. We warn new teachers designing their first assignments that unless the assignment includes the students' personal experiences, there's a chance that all the essays in a set will be similar, thus providing a monotonous, arhetorical reading experience for teachers, that is, one in which we learn very little about our students and the sources of their knowledge and perceptions, a reading experience with little or no "surprise value," to use Kinneavy's term, for either students or teacher.

A paint by number picture, cross-stitched pillowcase, or model airplane either matches the picture on the box or it doesn't; not so with an argument, a narrative, or a set of values. For one thing, not all middle class or working class teachers or students subscribe to the same extent to the same set of values. For example, Grimm and Brodkey would call patriotism a middle class value; informed by my own experience in which my own middle class family criticized flag-waving and flag-wavers (even on the Fourth of July), I would disagree. And often, these values conflict--for example, the value of sustaining community might clash with the an individual's morals, an occasion for a narrative (about say, pledging for a fraternity) from which students and teachers would learn.

My last response to subtle messages teachers give to students in class and on assignments to affirm certain values is to offer an explanation and apology for this practice. Consider what happens when teachers don't subtly indicate in class or on the assignment sheet they want values of, say, responsibility and tolerance affirmed, or if they do hint as much, and students don't get it; if instead, students demonstrate an interest in the ethically controversial or the simply sordid. How do teachers and tutors respond to the resulting problematic products--papers that instead of celebrating socially responsible behavior as Nancy describes, revel in anti-social behavior--stories about getting drunk and going around smashing rural mailboxes, about cutting classes to smoke marijuana, about female conquest, about gang-fighting, about stealing from stores--and without codas that express remorse, regret, and lessons learned. Just as problematic as the subtle elicitation of middle class experiences and values is the essay that has not so much surprise value as shock value. My explanation and apology is that we design and manipulate courses, assignments, and thus identities to avoid these situations.

Here is my coda or reflection. Looking back on my responses to the situation Nancy describes of students distorting themselves and their values to fulfill assignments, I labeled them. There was 1) the "that's life" response; 2) the "that's school" response; 3) the "that's rhetoric" response; 4) the "but that's post-modern, too" response; 4) "the kit's a confusing extended metaphor because matching pictures goes against our own rhetorical self-interest" response, and the "that's to avoid our own shock and discomfort" response. I noticed that many of these are defensive, in part, because of my middle class background, my limits, especially when I compare my responses to those of the professedly working class respondents Gloria and Beverly who applaud Nancy for talking back feistily a la bell hooks to the middle class, for giving voice to working class experience-- 7) the "you go, girl" response.

Some questions for further responses on the net: 1) Go you see composition as a discourse, a set of middle class values, a regulatory discursive practices? Why or why not? Does that characterization, for example, assume that all of us (in this room or at this conference or) on this web-site are all of one mind? 2) Is the kind of teacher and tutor training in authentic listening that Nancy and Anne DiPardo recommend for tutors like Morgan realistic and possible? Why or why not? 3) What are the advantages and disadvantages of discussing teaching from a post-modern point of view? 4) Did anyone else have that's life, that's school, that's rhetoric responses? Why or why not? 5) What would papers written in the contact zone look and sound like--the papers that incorporate conflict and multiple points of view and discourses?

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