Your "ism" is Worse Than My "ism," Hairston
“‘You see what happens when we allow writing programs to be run by English departments?’ I'm convinced that the push to change freshman composition into a political platform for the teacher has come about primarily because the course is housed in English departments. As the linguistics scholar John Searle pointed out in a detailed and informative article in The New York Review of Books, the recent surge of the cultural left on major American campuses has centered almost entirely in English departments. He says,
The most congenial home left for Marxism, now that it has been largely discredited as a theory of economics and politics, is in departments of literary criticism. And [because] many professors of literature no longer care about literature in ways that seemed satisfactory to earlier generations ... they teach it as a means of achieving left-wing political goals or as an occasion for exercises in deconstruction, etc. (38).
I theorize that the critical literary theories of deconstruction, post-structuralism (both declining by now), and Marxist critical theory have trickled down to the lower floors of English departments where freshman English dwells. Just as they have been losing their impact with faculty above stairs, they have taken fresh root with those dwelling below” (Hairston, 1992, p. 183).
Maxine Hairston, where do I begin? The vengeful tone of your article ironically screams “political agenda.” There is a fear in your voice… a fear of independent, critical thinkers. The very agenda that you are after, the departure from public discourse entering private spaces, is not only impossible, but improbable. If anyone has shown this, you have. In fact, you have illustrated that expressionism, perhaps just as much as any civically-minded-ism, is political.
As I have read this article previously, what I find surprises me most every time is the passion that Hairston has for thought in isolation, for thought restricted by discipline, and for thought deadened by egocentrism. The sheltering of ideas does not promote learning or transferability, but instead impedes these very concepts and advocates for recitation and automaticity. Even for ’92, this thinking unveils Hairston’s multiple oversights (to which the responses to Hairston highlight).
I fear those who tread too closely to Hairston’s posited ideas and loathe those who took her seriously, who still take her seriously. (I know you exist out there!) We do NOT teach disciplines, we teach students… or do we? This question is meant to be reflexive, while the answer is meant to be “not do we, but should we?... yes.”
If we are to avoid political conversation (not to be confused with “discussing politics”), then we are ill-preparing our students in their pursuit of becoming (and further developing) their ability to independently think and to use their learned knowledge as transferable tools. The agenda is not to mold our students into the partisan, but to break them of this linearity. As always, I have more, but I rest my case for now.
Kelli,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your insightful post. It has made me think more about how to achieve transferability in the classroom. As I think about my own teaching philosophy and how much of it revolves around the idea of cultivating skills and habits of mind that will be useful to students after they leave the classroom, I sometimes get overwhelmed by the thought that our profession, whatever our methods, is partly responsible for helping to mold students into educated citizens of the world. Whether we accept it or not, this awesome and scary implication is part of our job.
I appreciated your clarification of “political conversation (not to be confused with ‘discussing politics’)” since the word “political” itself is loaded with presumption. As a student, thankfully, my thoughts were challenged and enlightened by teachers who had the courage to bring race, culture, gender, sexuality, etc. to the forefront and frame those conversations with history, literature, satire, etc. that related to the modern world, the world I would enter as a professional citizen someday.
The reality is that our classrooms, writing classrooms specifically, might be the only place students will have the opportunities to discuss these issues depending on their major discipline of study. So, to think that we could (or should) teach writing without introducing them to political conversations for fear of swaying them to one side or another reduces them to mere information silos who are not capable of critical or independent thought. This method, in my estimation, rests in opposition to the type of far transfer our students benefit from the most.
Thanks for your thoughts.
Mary
Hello Mary!
DeleteI absolutely love your point that, for many of our students, this is the only place that they will have the opportunity to discuss these sorts of topics (at least in an academic setting). Wouldn’t we be doing our students a disservice if we didn’t give them the safe (though this could bring in a whole other line of debate) environment to share and test their thoughts on these topics? Isn’t that what writing’s all about after all: Expressing ideas? (Of course, that’s just communication writ large.) Bottom line: Our students are also people. They can either reject or deny the information we present to them. AGREED.
I’m also thinking now about your comment concerning your teachers who had the courage to bring these political conversations into the classroom, contextualizing them with history, literature, satire, et cetera and relating them to the modern world that our students are a part of and will be thrust into before they may care to be or are prepared for it. I would argue that it’s the job of any instructor (no matter the discipline) to prepare their students to take the ideas discussed in the classroom out of it. Really what it all comes back to for me is the fact that it’s all connected. We can’t have literature without history. We can’t talk about race or class or gender without both of these things. We can’t talk about writing without linking it back to power. And we (insert emphatic curse word) sure can’t talk about ANY OF THIS without anthropology––without linking it all back to culture!!!
I am interested by the scenario you gave about whether or not we (should) teach disciplines. Of course, your answer there seems to be that, yes, we should––and I agree. I think that first year composition is such an interesting realm because the instructors themselves are often diverse and come form wide academic backgrounds. Just thinking about everyone in our cohort, we all have different undergrad degrees (classics, history, creative writing, literature, psychology, anthropology, just to name the few I know). We can’t help (even if just on an unconscious level) to teach to our strengths. A lot of us have even structured our classes around a theme that promotes these strengths. Why not use the knowledge and background we have acquired in order to promote the best learning outcomes that we as individuals can?
ReplyDeleteAnd this is all bound up with the political (not capital P) conversations that we promote in our classrooms. A lot of this I think is dependent on our backgrounds and whatever it is that we feel we have the qualifications to speak to and address in a way that will do justice to the topic. I think that this ties in with the Kopelson reading we did for this week. Perhaps, in that piece, Kopelson was arguing for a way to create (the appearance of) a depoliticized classroom? Our students are often hostile to this idea of discussing such politicized topics in the composition classroom because, to them, the answer to your question is “NO!”