College Composition Weekly: Summaries of research for college writing professionals

Read, Comment On, and Share News of the Latest from the Rhetoric and Composition Journals

Category Archives: RTE


by 2 Comments

DeStigter, Todd. Critique of Argumentative Writing as Dominant Academic Mode. RTE, August 2015. Posted 09/02/2015.

DeStigter, Todd. “On the Ascendance of Argument: A Critique of the Assumptions of Academe’s Dominant Form.” Research in the Teaching of English 50.1 (2015): 11-34. Print.

Todd DeStigter raises concerns about the predominant focus on argumentative writing in college and increasingly in high school, as the authors of the Common Core State Standards join composition scholars in declaring argumentation an essential skill.

DeStigter’s response to the emphasis on argument grew out of his experiences at a high school in a Mexican/Mexican-American area in Chicago. An English teacher/assistant principal there enlisted DeStigter’s help in an initiative to require all students to take AP English and Composition; in the teacher’s view, this curriculum revision would address the inequity faced by students who historically had not had adequate preparation for college. DeStigter’s involvement developed into “three semesters of ethnographic research,” including observations and tutoring in two AP classes (12).

DeStigter recounts that the high school’s effort to better prepare the students for college and careers reflected national trends in emphasizing argumentative writing. He quotes the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers, authors of the Common Core State Standards, as they urge attention to “students’ ability to write sound arguments on substantive topics and issues” (qtd. in DeStigter 12). Research by James Warren supports DeStigter’s claim that argument is becoming “the dominant mode” in both high school and college (qtd. in DeStigter 12). DeStigter argues for a shift from asking how to teach argument more effectively to asking why argument is given such prominence and what follows from this emphasis (13).

Although agreeing that compositionists recognize the diverse forms argument can take, that argumentative writing is not per se “harmful,” and that no “either/or choice” is called for (13; emphasis original), he reports detecting three assumptions about such writing: that it “promotes clear and critical thinking,” that it develops skill in the “rational deliberation . . . essential for a democratic citizenry,” and that it provides “a form of cultural capital that facilitates [students’] upward academic and socioeconomic mobility” (13). Though noting the “irony” that he is using the conventions of argument to challenge the “overemphasis on argumentative writing” (31n3), he critiques these assumptions.

In his view, the idea that reasoned argument reflects the clearest thinking derives from Descartes and Kant and their contentions that it is possible to arrive at knowable truth outside of context and contingency via evidence and logical connections. DeStigter links this belief in the efficacy of formally structured argument to lead to best decisions to the “coherence theory of truth,” which valorizes discourse that meets agreed-upon standards of self-consistency and integration, and to the “correspondence theory of truth,” in which a well-formed discursive product is assumed to mirror an autonomous entity out in the world. DeStigter argues that decisions as to what counts as reason and effective structure are themselves discursive products, Foucauldian “regimes of truth” (18) created and valorized by people “who are in a position to make and enforce such designations” (19).

He again cites Kant as a source for the view that “rational deliberation” is the ideal process to further democracy. He reviews philosophers and critics like Hannah Arendt, John Rawls, and Jurgen Habermas (22) who posit that a society in which individual interests can be bracketed and all stakeholders can participate as equals results in the “egalitarian reciprocity” necessary for democracy (Seyla Benhabib, qtd. in DeStigter 22). DeStigter responds that people do not have equal access to the public sphere and that even “overwhelming evidence” routinely surrenders to the “values and prejudices” through which people filter claims (22).

Moreover, DeStigter maintains, true change seldom follows from deliberative discussions but from activism and solidarity. He introduces the concept of “democracy’s edges“ proposed by Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordón (23): This concept attempts to identify those forced to the margins of the democratic process, but for DeStigter, it also refers to what kinds of action and speech get defined out of the process. He gives examples of actions that approach “a line” that, if rational deliberation is the standard, renders them “irrational, and therefore illegitimate,” like refusing to move to the back of the bus or occupying government buildings. “[M]ore agonistic or even revolutionary models” of interaction, he contends, may be necessary to bring about changes that will truly foster democracy.

Finally, he challenges the contention that learning to write arguments will promote students’ social mobility. He details two students at the high school who, although excellent argumentative writers, find college costs daunting and the job market unresponsive (25). These examples and others illustrate DeStigter’s resistance to the long-lived idea that more and better education will spur a stronger economy (25-26). While acknowledging that individual students may escape poverty through education, he argues that for most students like those he studied, “being prepared for higher education is not the same as having a realistic opportunity to attend college” (26). But even if cost were no issue, he maintains, the possibility that a college education will provide the “cultural capital” necessary for socioeconomic mobility is based on “educators’ widespread misappropriation” of the work of Pierre Bourdieu (26).

According to DeStigter, Bourdieu recognized three kinds of “capital”: cultural (knowing how to behave), social (having access to opportunities for advancement), and economic (having money) (26-27). Central to DeStigter’s critique is Bourdieu’s clear assertion that “economic capital is at the root of all other types of capital” (qtd. in DeStigter 27), and thus that possession of economic capital determines people’s ability to acquire the other kinds. In contrast to the idea that providing students with literacy will open the door to the “culture of power” (Lisa Delpit, qtd. in DeStigter 28), DeStigter cites Bourdieu’s claim that hope for a more egalitarian society depends on subverting dominant power structures rather than emulating them (28).

Accepting the view that schools can influence “systemic” economic dysfunction, DeStigter contends, feeds a tendency to “blame schools” during downturns and invites privatization (29). Further, assigning such power to education encourages the meritocratic view that economic hardship results from a lack of individual intelligence or effort in school (29).

Finally, DeStigter concludes that

the ascendance of argument limits our understandings of who we humans are and what we are capable of because it attends to only a tiny part of the communicative spectrum we occupy. . . . [W]e writing teachers must safeguard opportunities in our curricula and pedagogy to gather ourselves and our students into conversations in which we seek not just to scrutinize, critique, and refute, but to share and be receptively present with others. (30-31)


by 2 Comments

Walters, Shannon. Valuing ASD Students. RTE, May 2015. Posted 06/23/15.

Walters, Shannon. “Toward a Critical ASD Pedagogy of Insight: Teaching, Researching, and Valuing the Social Literacies of Neurodiverse Students.” Research in the Teaching of English 49.4 (2015): 340-60. Print.

Shannon Walters examines the experiences of students with Asperger’s Syndrome (AS students) and students on the Autism Spectrum (ASD students) in college writing classes. (She notes that many autistic people prefer the “identity-first rather than person-first language” [357n4] and uses this nomenclature throughout her article.) Walters argues that many of the difficulties these students face derive from the failure of educators to listen to them and incorporate their insights about themselves into classroom practice. A more productive learning environment for these students, Walters contends, will involve rejecting stereotypes, not least by redefining what is accepted as “social.”

Walters sees current research on the effects of autism on college students’ experiences as sparse, with what does exist seldom including the points of view of the AS and ASD individuals being studied (340-41). Problematic approaches in the education literature include a tendency for teachers who believe they have encountered autistic students to engage in diagnosis and discussion of the students without engaging the students themselves in exploring their needs and perceptions (341):

Discussions about ASD become stories about how teachers heroically accommodate students perceived as on the spectrum, rather than about how self-identified ASD students navigate largely neurotypical writing classrooms in the face of unacknowledged challenges. (341)

To address the lack of research that takes into account the actual voices of these students, Walters conducted a case study of two self-identified AS students enrolled in first-year writing classes in the program in which Walters taught. Walters provides a detailed account of her study design, including semi-structured interviews and coding, and her role as a researcher guided by the tenets of critical disability studies, which recognizes disability as a source of possibility and requires the recognition of people with disabilities as crucial agents in policies and conversations about them (342, 345). Such an approach, Walters argues, can lead teachers to “value writing practices and pedagogies that encourage socially neurodiverse ways of writing” (342). Valuing neurodiversity, in turn, leads to a recognition of disability as a source of “insight” (342). In service of this goal, the case studies asked how the students “characterized themselves as writers inside and outside of the classroom,” how they perceived their first-year courses, and what the decision to foreground their insights could tell educators about pedagogical best practices (343).

Although Walters’s student participants, Jen and Jon, both enjoyed writing extensively outside of the classroom. they “struggled” in their first-year writing courses (347). Jen took her course in a summer session, while Jon, who had been homeschooled since third-grade, took his individually in a modified format with a university teacher (345). Walters records each student’s definitions of “language” and “normal,” as well as their definitions of AS, which they consciously chose in contrast to what Walters describes as the tendency of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) to “subsume AS into the broader category of ASD” (346). The definition of neurodiversity as “social acceptance of neurological difference as part of the broad landscape of human diversity,” from the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network (ASAN), highlights the view that adhering to rigid definitions of “normal” that define difference as deficit precludes valuing the possibilities inherent in difference (346).

In Walters’s view, the “process or stage writing model” accepted widely by composition teachers did not serve the two students well. Jen found the pace of the summer course troubling and fell behind, although she ultimately passed. Jon resisted writing about issues that did not interest him and “just filling in details” as required by mandated revision (347-49). Walters argues that the process model labels different ways that individual students work as abnormal (349). She posits that her participants’ difficulties “differed not necessarily in kind but in degree” from those most students face (349).

To emphasize the degree to which the process model affects neurodiverse students’ activities as writers, Walters contrasts their struggles in the courses with the writing they enthusiastically pursue outside of the classroom. In each case, Walters explores how the students’ preferred writing activities functioned as the kinds of critical and social literacies composition teachers hope to encourage. Jen hosted both a private and a public blog addressing different audiences, wrote extensive fan fiction, and had made considerable progress on a novel (351, 354). Jon, who planned to major in geography, developed diverse community contacts “on his own terms” in order to create a local history and branch into a piece of historical fiction (352). Walters finds that the kinds of writing in which these students chose to invest their efforts and at which they succeeded did not meet what she views as the limited definitions of “social” and “critical” that governed classroom assignments (353-54). For example, Jen did not feel as if topics like anime, science fiction, and fantasy in which she was interested qualified as suitable for a rhetorical analysis of popular culture (354). Jon’s “lists of dates and maps” inspired his more extensive writing but, in Walters’s view, would not have been accepted as valid activities in a first-year writing class (355).

Both students, she argues, lived in rich social worlds that simply differed from those built into a process-model classroom. Thus, the perception that ASD students are “unconnected and asocial” did not capture these students’ achievements or personas (354). Not only did the students’ activities define them as good writers and demonstrate that they could interact with a range of audiences, recognizing the different uses of writing in different situations, their work also revealed their critical engagement with the power relationships embedded in the public conversation about AS and ASD, the kind of engagement called for by writing pedagogy (354). Walters recommends supporting the diverse ways that neurodiverse students meet the expectations of college writing courses, for example by a range of adjustments to the typical curriculum and scheduling of process pedagogy. Writing communities like Jen’s fan-fiction communities can become topics of discussion and study for students for whom they offer a more receptive writing environment (356). Instead of assuming that ASD students are limited in their abilities to respond socially, teachers can develop their own social responsiveness through activities like “rhetorical listening” (Ratcliffe, cited in Walters 357), which will foster the “social acceptance of neurological difference” (ASAN, qtd. in Walters 351), valuing rather than reshaping the particular forms of interaction and creativity that such students bring to writing classes.


by

Gholnecsar E. Muhammad. Self-representation of African American Girls. RTE, Feb. 2015. Posted 04/29/15.

Muhammad, Gholnecsar E. “Searching for Full Vision: Writing Representations of African American Adolescent Girls.” Research in the Teaching of English 49.3 (2015): 224-47. Print.

A comprehensive abstract prefaces Gholnecsar E. Muhammad’s study of African-American adolescent girls working to define themselves against stereotypes and dominant discourses. She writes:

Currently, African American girls are being depicted as overly sexual, violent, or confrontational, are judged by physical features, or are invisible across mainstream media and within school classrooms. Few investigations have explored how they respond to and interpret such imposed representations. Nor, for the most part, have studies examined how girls represent themselves among a society of others pathologizing and defining who they are. , , , Findings show that the girls [in the study] wrote across platforms similar to those African American women have addressed historically, which included writing to represent self, writing to resist or counter ascribed representations, and writing toward social change. (224)

For her qualitative case study, Muhammad gathered eight African American girls, aged 12 to 17, to form a “literacy collaborative” in which they worked together in an “intensive” writing environment for nine hours a week for four weeks in the summer of 2012. The writers, from a variety of school settings, were designated “Sister Authors” and given the opportunity to write a number of different genres, including personal narratives, poems, short stories, “informational pieces,” and “open letters” (230, 232). Muhammad developed lesson plans, provided readings from African American women, and facilitated sharing and feedback sessions (231-32). Data included forty-eight pieces of writing, video-taped observations, and interviews (232-33). Muhammad and a second coder established six themes that appeared in the girls’ self-representations: “community, cultural [ethnicity and gender], individual, intellectual, kinship, and sexual representations” (233). Muhammad provides examples from the girls’ work to illustrate how these themes emerged in the ways the writers constructed themselves and their lives through writing.

Most frequently addressed were gender issues. Muhammad was interested to see kinship emerge spontaneously as a major topic in many of the writings, with intellectual concerns also appearing frequently (233). Thirty-seven of the 48 pieces demonstrated resistance to power structures that the girls encountered in their lives; Muhammad classified these structures as relating to “Physical beauty,” “Education,” “Abuse and violence,” “being portrayed as a monolithic group,” “Sexualizing and objectification,” “Racial stereotypes,” and “Personal self-hood (personal struggles, such as self-confidence)” (235). The girls responded to these power structures by often depicting the need for and possibility of “agency and social change” (239).

Specific examples include Jasmine’s broadside poem and her interview about the content of the poem, in both of which she questioned why Black girls are seen as a homogenous group while White people, who similarly look alike, are seen as individuals (233-37). Violet, writing about issues coded as “sexual representation,” explored the implications of the loss of Black men in the lives of Black women (240-41). Muhammad writes that such expressions of issues important to the girls in her study signal increased agency as the girls use representation of themselves through writing to “bring awareness” to topics that matter in their lives (241).

Muhammad recommends that language-arts educators become more alert to the importance for African-American girls of developing their identities through reflective self-representation, and that teachers refine prompts and assignments to encourage these explorations. Educators must also be aware of the power of dominant discourses to direct their own perceptions of students. More nuanced understanding of the lives and histories of their students will help teachers offer these girls opportunities to develop a sense of self and agency (233-34). Muhammad establishes four goals for students encouraged to participate in such literacy practices:

(1) to advance proficiencies in literacy; (2) to make sense of their identities; (3) to build and nurture intellectual development; and (4) to gain print authority. (229)

Muhammad captures the intent of her study with an image from Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South of an eye partly covered with a bandage so that vision is obscured. Ensuring that African-American women are heard restores the sight so that the eye “sees a circle where before it saw a segment” (qtd. in Muhammad 225). Muhammad’s work envisions similarly restoring such full sight in the lives and selves of African American girls.


by

Thein, Guise, and Sloan. Emotional Rules in Student Response. RTE, Feb. 2015. Posted 03/31/15

Thein, Amanda Haertling, Megan Guise, and DeAnn Long Sloan. “Examining Emotional Rules in the English Classroom: A Critical Discourse Analysis of One Student’s Literary Responses in Two Academic Contexts.” Research in the Teaching of English 49.3 (2015): 200-23. Print.

Amanda Haertling Thein, Megan Guise, and DeAnn Long Sloan explore the ways in which emotion inevitably pervades classroom environments and argue for more attention to how students understand the “emotional rules” of different learning situations. They focus on pedagogy in literature with a call for similar research in writing, drama, or other language-arts coursework (219).

The authors draw from a broader qualitative project a case study of a “focal” student, Nina, enrolled in Sloan’s 10th-grade course. They chose such students as examples of a diverse range of “reading interests, abilities, and levels of engagement” (205). Nina, an able student who reads widely, is studied as she engages in two learning contexts, a whole-class seminar circle discussing Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, and a three-student “literature circle” focusing on Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina in which the students can interact without the direct oversight of a teacher (206). The researchers supplemented transcripts of discussion in each context with interviews with Nina. Thein, Guise, and Sloan examine Nina’s very different rhetorical choices as she responds to literature in the two different environments (205).

The authors’ focus emanates from their contention that emotion has often been theorized as an individual response that should be bracketed because it interferes with the analytical mindset necessary for true critical engagement. On the contrary, they maintain that emotion always underlies students’ construction of the proper way to respond in any given learning environment and, if ignored, can constrain the kinds of learning possible (205). They characterize the rules for incorporating emotion into academic environments and for displaying emotion as “circulating and sticking” through sociocultural processes in which people learn what is expected in each situation (203). Unless such “emotional rules” are “unstuck,” they close off certain interpretive options and allow important issues to be elided (213, 217-18).

The authors’ observations and interviews lead them to characterize Nina’s in-class responses as largely directed to Sloan as the teacher and structured to accord with the attitudes and ideologies Nina believes Sloan values. These include emotionally restrained expressions of tolerance and analytical contextualization of characters’ behavior. In contrast, in the relatively unsupervised literature-circle setting, Nina and her classmates reveal immediate, even visceral, emotional reactions to events in Bastard Out of Carolina. Drawing on the model of critical discourse analysis presented by N. Fairclough, the authors contrast these two sets of responses through examination of “genre,” “style,” and “discourse.” Genre relates to the socially transmitted emotional rules that determine appropriate emotional expression in different contexts; style allows analysis of modes of expression such as tone, voice level, use of metaphor, and phrasing. Discourse involves an account of the “themes” and “ideologies” that appear in the different environments (207-08).

Thein et al. illustrate with coded examples from transcripts and from interviews that Nina intuited “neutral” comments as acceptable within the seminar circle (212), whereas in the small-group student-led literature circle, all three students felt free to judge characters harshly, to address them by name, and even to advocate violent solutions to issues raised in the book (215). Where in the seminar circle, Nina offered her responses in a quiet “academic register,” in the literature circle she raised her voice and risked profane and politically incorrect language in a “street-smart” register that cast her as “someone powerfully able to cope with the fear and violence depicted in the novel” (215). Additionally, in their small group, the students responded to each other rather than to the teacher, as was Nina’s habit in the larger seminar circle (215).

Thein et al. note that Nina may have been drawing on emotional rules from experiences in earlier literature classes rather than accurately interpreting Sloan’s intentions (218). They consider teachers’ attention to students’ reading of such rules as crucial because of the tendency of analytical, academic registers and genres to drive such emotions underground where their implications cannot be part of the discussion. The authors contend that while emotions such as anger and a desire for violent solutions may not be “better” responses (217), they open up new interpretive opportunities that allow students a fuller exploration of their relationship to texts. For example, they argue that for Nina, the examination of varying perspectives she felt was appropriate in Sloan’s class meant trying out only certain approved perspectives; others that she expressed in the less constrained environment were inconsistent with the academic registers and discourses she saw as invited by the class (218). Teachers can help students recognize the existence of these rule sets in order to help them better investigate their responses to a range of emotionally laden situations (218).