I think many adults (and I am among them) are trying, in our work, to keep faith with vividly remembered promises made to ourselves in childhood: promises to make invisible possibilities and desires visible; to make the tacit things explicit; to smuggle queer representation in where it must be smuggled and, with the relative freedom of adulthood, to challenge queer-eradicating impulses frontally where they are to be so challenged. (Eve Sedgwick, 1994)
Summary
Grounded in the educational theories of liberation and rhetorical studies, my teaching advocates transforming educational practices so that they do not replicate the oppressive structures of society; instead, I encourage students to join me in interrogating such practices through critical, reflective reading and writing. Such practices can help students and teachers come to a greater understanding of their individual and collective roles in the social (dis)order, as well as help them both to recognize ways in which to change existing structures which serve to prevent individuals and groups from recognizing their human potential.
From There to Here: Evolution in Teaching
After teaching composition for four years under the current-traditional rhetoric that I had myself been a student of, I came across a comment by Steven North that made me seriously re-consider what I was doing in my classes: “Our job is to make better writers, not better writing.” The simplicity of his comment struck me: “What am I doing in the classroom?” I began to ask myself. Am I only polishing prose that will ultimately serve little use beyond the confines of the classroom, or am I helping students develop habits of mind that will benefit them after our class is over? I was certainly doing much more of the former than the latter.
North’s comment came along as I was beginning to challenge my pedagogy. I had just finished an intensive Summer Institute for a new site of the National Writing Project: the Georgia Southern Writing Project of Statesboro, GA. I ran across composition-rhetoric/language scholars for the first time. Janet Emig, Kenneth Bruffee, Lev Vygotsky, Peter Elbow, Muriel Harris, Robert Conners, Mike Rose – their writings jumped from the page for me; they rang true for me. In fact, these writers put into words the experiences I had had in class, but I had been unable to theorize about what was going on, what I was seeing everyday in class. As I became a student again for the Summer Institute, I realized a greater empathy for students generally, and certainly for the individuals I was teaching. When the Institute director asked me to write, I felt the pressure of peer response, the fear that I wouldn’t measure up, the concern that I wouldn’t get the assignment right.
After the Summer Institute, I returned to the classroom with a great deal of energy. Although everything has not been smooth – failures seem to come as often as successes, and as my recent scholarly work suggests, failures are often more important than anything we might call “success” – I have realized that my role in the classroom is not to criticize students and revel in what they do not know. It is not my mission to empower myself at the expense of these students. It is not my mission to point out everything they do “wrong” in the writing. Learning theory (and personal experience) points again and again to the reality that people do not learn effectively or meaningfully in such a deficit model.
Instead, it is my responsibility to respond to students’ writings and to respect them as human beings who are writers, to engage them as thinkers and to do what I can to foster careful and critical engagement with ideas. It is my joy to show them different strategies that professional writers use. It is my joy to demonstrate an ethic of care and a pedagogy of liberation to students, regardless of their backgrounds. In short, it is my joy to help students become better writers (and perhaps thinkers and students, too, along the way). I hope that students and I can work toward that goal collaboratively by considering ourselves as writers and thinkers, as people who are curious and who need language to fully engage in the world. We concern ourselves with the concept of audience and write within a context that is sometimes self-imposed and sometimes imposed by the demands of the university curriculum, but in both, we work together to understand our own situated positions in the discourse of the classroom and the discourses of the audiences we interrogate and write for. And we explore ways to subvert those impositions by systems and institutions that often work against individuals and the public good. By focusing on the roles that different audiences play in writing, I believe that the courses I teach offer students valuable experiences that they can take with them into other writing situations, while offering them experiences that may lead them to make their own critiques of situations, relationships, and ideas.
What I have realized is that underpinning my scholarly and classroom work is a notion of the “student” that differs from many popular notions of “student,” by which I mean that when I think of the people that I get to work with each semester – regardless of the course – I see people who have as much to bring to class as I do. Although I’m not naive enough to believe that I can ever fully democratize the classroom, I do believe that my pedagogy calls into question the different influences working on the classroom and encourages participants in the classroom to work through interpellated identities and situations to greater personal and political understandings of our shared work in the world.