COMPOSITION POLITICS: BEHIND THE WRITING PROBLEM
AT CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY NORTHRIDGE
by
HOWARD STANLEY RYAN
Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of
The University of Texas at Arlington in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements
for the Degree of
MASTER OF ARTS IN ENGLISH
THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON
June 1990
Copyright © by Howard Stanley Ryan 1990 All Rights Reserved Contact the author at [email protected].
2
COMPOSITION POLITICS: BEHIND THE WRITING PROBLEM
AT CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY NORTHRIDGE
The members of the Committee approve the masters thesis of Howard Stanley Ryan Victor J. Vitanza ____________________________________ Supervising Professor Michael Feehan ____________________________________ Kenneth M. Roemer ____________________________________
3
CONTENTS
ABSTRACT . . . . . . . . . 4
PREFACE . . . . . . . . . 5
PART I: THE CSUN STUDY
1. IS THERE A WRITING PROBLEM AT CSUN? . . . 8
2. WHY AREN'T CSUN STUDENTS WRITING BETTER? . . 15
3. HOW TYPICAL IS CSUN? A NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE . . 59
4. SOLVING THE WRITING PROBLEM: EDUCATING, ORGANIZING 64
PART II: CRITIQUE OF THE CSUN STUDY
5. MODERN COMPOSITION AND POLITICAL VISIONS . . 74
NOTES . . . . . . . . . 133
WORKS CITED . . . . . . . . 135
LIST OF TABLES
Table 1. CSUN Faculty Opinion of Student Writing . . . . 133
Table 2. Required Writing Preparation of Future Teachers . . . 134
Table 3. WPE Failure Rates . . . . . . . 134
4
ABSTRACT
COMPOSITION POLITICS: BEHIND THE WRITING PROBLEM
AT CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY NORTHRIDGE
Publication No. _______
Howard Stanley Ryan, M.A.
The University of Texas at Arlington, 1990
Supervising Professor: Victor J. Vitanza
Outmoded "current-traditional" teaching methodologies, and the second-class status of
composition faculty and programs, may be contributing to students' writing problems at CSUN, my
1988 study found. Proposed reforms include the wider introduction of contemporary "process"
pedagogies, better conditions for composition faculty and administrators, and replacement of the
Upper Division Writing Proficiency Examination with a required discipline-specific writing course.
A 1990 follow-up chapter critiques the technocratic view of pedagogy that informed my CSUN
study, and which also informs the modern composition field generally. The search for better
instructional methods must begin with an articulation of larger educational and social purposes. In
modern composition, five general models of social purpose are observable: utility, individual growth,
individual mobility, collaborative growth, collective empowerment. Composition theorists and
practitioners should strive to be aware of our social goals and assumptions, and seek consistency
between our values and our pedagogies.
5
PREFACE
I worked as a writing consultant/tutor in spring 1988 for a fledgling writing-across-the-
disciplines program at California State University Northridge (CSUN), a 29,000-student campus in
the north of Los Angeles. The pilot program was initiated in response to a widely perceived problem
of student writing performance. In particular, many departments are worried about the numbers of
their students failing the Upper Division Writing Proficiency Examination (WPE) , a one-hour essay
test required for graduation. The WPE failure rate has risen steadily each year, reaching an
enormous 32.5 percent in 1986-87. In view of the apparent size of the writing problem, the writing-
across-the-disciplines program seemed paltry, even as a pilot endeavor. It involved only five
teachers, who attended workshops on teaching writing led by freshman composition director Thia
Wolf; in addition, four of us "consultants" met individually with the participants' students, helping
them with their writing assignments.
Thia Wolf told me she had asked for a much more comprehensive program, modeled after
one she had observed at the University of California, Santa Barbara. UCSB had created a separate
department offering writing courses across a range of disciplines--legal writing, business writing,
technical writing. The program also runs writing-intensive components attached to existing courses
in various departments. The cost of that program is $4-500,000 a year. Wolf's more modest version
would have cost $250,000. She received only $30,000, with projected incremental increases.
"What I got," says Wolf, "was a model we had discussed over the summer and thrown out as almost
completely useless. [The administration] felt it was what they could afford."* * All quoted comments from CSUN faculty, students, and administrators are taken from personal interviews listed in the works cited section.
6
The broad gap between what was requested and what the university felt it could provide to
expand writing instruction led me to a series of questions: How committed is the university to
teaching students to write? What exactly would be needed for a quality writing program? What are
the obstacles to getting those needs met? Pursuing these questions led me to many more
questions. I came to see the complexities of a university writing program, and how the requirements
for writing reform were not only pedagogical, but economic and political. In summer 1988, I wrote
up my findings as an independent study: students were being cheated, teachers exploited, and
CSUN's writing situation was but a manifestation of national school and college trends. Writing
programs needed to be geared to the new understandings of writing and learning processes
growing from modern composition research. Composition teachers needed a democratic voice in
their departments, salaries and conditions conducive to quality instruction, and support for in-service
training and professional involvement. The use of proficiency tests as a guarantor of student writing
achievement needed to be replaced by more and better writing instruction across the disciplines.
These and other reforms required strong funding, and called for the political mobilization of
composition teachers--initially at the campus level, finally at state and national levels, in concert with
other teachers and other social movements, demanding a shift in spending priorities away from the
military and toward education and social needs.
Since the time of my CSUN study, my more critical exposure to the composition field at The
University of Texas at Arlington has supported many of my proposals, but helped me see how my
view of writing pedagogy reflected a technocratic perspective that was not in keeping with the
otherwise radical politics of my study. My purpose here is to present the CSUN study as a critique
of a "current-traditional" writing program that is quite typical of American college writing programs.
An additional fifth chapter will critique this critique by placing under scrutiny the leading modern
composition trends that guided the technocratic shortcomings of my CSUN study. I will argue that
any approach to the teaching of writing implies politics and ideology, that writing teachers should
be aware of their ideologies and develop pedagogies consistent with their philosophical-social
beliefs.
7
My concluding chapter, then, is a self-correcting one that embraces a liberatory pedagogy
consistent with my own politics and vision of social change.
I wish to express my appreciation to the many staff and faculty members and students at
CSUN who made my study possible by sharing with me their frustrations with and hopes for the
university's writing programs. I am particularly indebted to Thia Wolf for fueling my interest in
composition, for teaching me about compassionate writing instruction through her own example, and
for meeting with honesty, clarity, and endurance my endless stream of questions about campus
writing politics. In UT Arlington's rhetoric program, I encountered a questioning, theoretically
"sub/versive" environment that helped me achieve a critical distance toward the composition field. I
would like to thank Victor Vitanza, Michael Feehan, and Kenneth Roemer for helping to create that
critical environment, and for guiding my thesis to fruition. In Dr. Vitanza, I enjoyed the aid of a
consummate adviser who, even while disagreeing with me on various fundamentals, confirmed the
value of my project and insisted on my very best work. I thank the University of Chicago Press for
permission to use illustrations from Critical Teaching and Everyday Life, copyright © 1980 by Ira
Shor.
8
CHAPTER 1
IS THERE A WRITING PROBLEM AT CSUN?
Identifying a "writing problem" is itself problematic, since any standard we apply is to some degree
arbitrary: absolute standards for good writing do not exist. Nevertheless, for the present discussion, we
will define a writing problem along lines suggested by the National Assessment of Education Progress,
i.e., that a piece of writing is problematic or deficient insofar as it fails to achieve the purpose intended
by the writer (Applebee, Langer, and Mullis). In a college context, students bring many and varied
purposes to their writing, but certainly one universal purpose is to produce what the students believe is
academic writing. Students want to produce papers that their professors will certify as college-
appropriate; students want to get A's.
At CSUN, the student's ability to produce academic writing is officially measured and
certified during their junior or senior year by the Upper Division Writing Proficiency Examination. The
exam's annual pass/fail rate has become the campus index of the student population's overall writing
performance. Unfortunately, the WPE has major flaws as a test of writing ability. While the 32.5
percent failure rate may indicate a large writing deficiency, this figure has questionable correspondence
to students' writing performance in classrooms or other contexts. In fact, the WPE's model of writing
may actually be contributing to the university's writing problems. The exam is "a throwback to the kind
of writing we used to do in English classes before we knew anything about the composing process,"
says Thia Wolf, who heads the writing lab responsible for counseling students preparing for, or who
have failed, the WPE. "One hour leaves no time for revision, or really even any prewriting. There's no
chance to make a topic your own." One of the key advances of modern composition over traditional
conceptions is its view of writing as a process--planning, writing, rethinking, rewriting. The WPE does
not reflect this understanding. I interviewed six students who had failed the WPE three or more
times. The exam's time limit was a major complaint. A finance major, who had attempted his
seventh WPE on the day of our interview, describes his normal routine for writing school papers:
I would write out all my thoughts in the first draft. Second draft I go over and try to put it into
more of a sentence structure that's understandable. Third draft I'm going in and correcting all
9
the run-on sentences and phrases. Fourth draft I'm correcting punctuation. That's my standard
way of writing for all business courses, all the papers I've ever had to turn in.
I asked if he didn't also have to write in-class essay tests under time pressure, as with the WPE. He
replied: "It's not the same, because you're going in prepared. You know the topic, you've been
studying it for hopefully the last month, and you know what's going to be on the test."
In the short time provided, the WPE expects students to write on subjects they may know nothing
about, or to produce a type of writing to which they are unaccustomed, such as personal description or
philosophical-cultural reflection. The exam is coordinated by the chair of the English department, and
its bias toward students of the humanities is quite clear. Two interviewees reported understandable
difficulty with the following essay topic:
"America is a great country because it has assimilated all cultures through one
central language, English." --Theodore Roosevelt
"America in the 1980's is a multi-lingual country, and all of its teachers should be
at least bilingual--if not trilingual." --Alfred Toffler
Write an essay in which you:
--examine the validity of each quotation;
--present your opinion on this matter. (Larson 1987)
Literature or philosophy students may be prepared to tackle this kind of question; many are used to
responding to ideas or texts with pages of social speculation. Not so for students of science or
business. A nutrition major, three-time loser on the WPE, describes his dilemma: "They want a certain
way of English. I haven't been taught this way--I don't know what they want. I have to guess and try to
give them what they want. I'm from a scientific background." Before returning to college to study
nutrition, this student had worked internationally as an agronomist. He showed me samples of his
writing in the field, including an article of fine quality published in a scientific journal. The WPE is
clearly not an accurate measure of his writing ability.
WPE essay topics also reflect a cultural bias that is unfair to foreign-born students. Nearly one-
fourth of the 7,309 students sitting for the exam in the 1986-87 academic year were identified as non-
10
native speakers of English by exam readers; 58.9 percent of the non-native speakers failed the exam.
The failure rate of students less familiar with English will naturally be higher than for native speakers.
But the WPE regularly asks students to address issues of American culture--advertising, freeways, the
melting pot, the state lottery--which are bound to pose problems for the foreign-born student. One
student attending a special WPE preparatory class put it simply: "Why don't they ask us questions
about Japanese culture?"1 Although the WPE's annual report claims that "accessibility of the topic for
all students is the major criterion for the use of any topic for the WPE," this is evidently not borne out in
practice (Larson 1987: 4).
Since the WPE could not provide reliable information about student writing performance, I
decided to consult the students themselves. Through a fourteen-item questionnaire distributed to a
broad sampling of majors and class levels in selected general education courses, I sought students'
opinion of their own writing and their assessment of the quantity and quality of writing instruction the
university provides them. Two key questions elicited interesting, and somewhat jarring, results. When
asked, "As a result of your education, do you consider yourself a skilled and competent writer of
English?" 210 students responded as follows:
Definitely not: 1.0%
Improving, but not quite competent: 11.4
Reasonably competent: 56.7
Very competent: 29.5
Not sure: 1.4
To the question, "Overall, do you believe this university provides satisfactory writing instruction?" 195
students responded:
Probably not: 3.1% Probably yes: 74.4%
Definitely not: 12.3 Definitely yes: 10.3
We find that 86.2 percent of the respondents consider their writing "reasonably competent" or "very
competent." Further, a strong 84.7 percent believe the university "probably" or "definitely" provides
satisfactory writing instruction. These results certainly do not support the continuing gripes one hears
11
from instructors about the sorry state of student writing, nor the periodic official calls made for more and
better writing instruction. From the students' point of view, the writing situation at CSUN is basically
fine. We should temper this by pointing out that 42 students added comments at the end of the
questionnaire criticizing various aspects of the school's writing program, and 30 of these critical
commenters had judged the writing instruction as satisfactory overall. The most common criticism was
that more writing should be assigned or more writing courses required: "We do not do enough writing
to prepare us for the WPE. I also think we should have more essay exams." Several complained about
their freshman composition course: "All freshman comp did for me was show me how to write a
formula essay, such as will help me pass the WPE. It in no way challenged or stimulated my creativity
or intellect." One may question why so many of the students who commented critically still gave the
university's writing offerings an overall satisfactory mark. But the survey's thrust is unavoidable: CSUN
students believe they are writing competently and receiving satisfactory writing instruction. My survey's
results are partly confirmed by a student survey reported in CSUN's Daily Sundial, 11 May 1988: 100
of 113 students, or 88.5 percent, said they were satisfied with the teaching in general at CSUN (Cole).
The results of my student survey were unsettling. I had set out to discover why CSUN suffered a
writing problem, and now the students were telling me there was no problem. What could we
conclude? Either the students were right, and many people on campus are sounding a false alarm on
the writing question; or the students were wrong and need better information about the quality of their
writing and the quality of their education. Suspecting the latter was true, I undertook a faculty survey. I
obtained statistics on the number of students in each major and proportioned my faculty respondents in
rough accordance; so, for example, there were 23 respondents from the huge school of business, but
only 1 from the small geology department. Warned that a mailing survey would get a low response, I
knocked on office doors instead. I kept the survey simple by limiting my questions to one: "How many
of your students are writing as college students should be writing?" Responses ranged from 5 percent
by a biology professor to 100 percent by a history professor; 81 responses produced an average of
42.8 percent. The faculty see a big writing problem: they believe that less than half their students are
meeting college standards. I should add that I asked faculty to restrict their estimates to undergraduate
12
courses--all but two in my student survey were undergraduates, and I wanted my faculty survey to
address a similar group for comparison. Also, to maintain my proportionate sampling across the
majors, I asked the faculty who teach general education courses to address their response to classes
attended primarily by majors in the teacher's department.
The faculty had a lot to say about student writing, most not complimentary. My visits were at the
end of the semester. Many teachers were working through stacks of final exams and term papers, and
were obviously pleased for a chance to air their frustrations. Here are some sample comments, along
with each teacher's department or school, and survey reponse:
The writing quality and analytic ability are disintegrating before my eyes. It's really scary.
(Sociology, 50%)
Only 20 percent can write up to standards I would apply if I were hiring them as engineers.
(Engineering, 20%)
When I suggest they go to the Learning Resource Center, they'll say, "I'm a graduating
senior--I'll never have to write again." (Psychology, 10%)
The papers I receive are messy, poorly organized. Most of my students can't develop an
idea or thesis. (Radio-Television-Film, 35%)
They can't write complete sentences. The spelling is atrocious. I've always tried to teach
good writing, but I'm not sure I made a dent. Maybe you can. (Business professor preparing to
retire, 25%)
I did receive a few positive comments, of which the following was most notable:
The quality of writing has improved in the last five-ten years. This applies to my general
education courses also. There's more awareness of the need to write well, and I think the WPE
has influenced this. (History, 100%)
There were also several faculty who gave estimates in the 75 to 85 percent range but who added
little comment, though a few of these explained, "Most of my students are seniors." But a clear faculty
consensus holds that a majority of students are not writing as college students should write. While
faculty notions of what constitutes good writing may certainly be called into question, the faculty are a
13
highly literate group who read and evaluate volumes of student papers, and their concern about the
quality of student writing must be taken seriously. If we define the college writing problem in terms of
whether students are meeting generally accepted academic conventions, my survey is a significant
indicator of a widespread writing problem at CSUN.2
14
CHAPTER 2
WHY AREN'T CSUN STUDENTS WRITING BETTER?
Behind the student writing problem at CSUN lies an instructional problem that is shared by
schools and colleges nationally, and which is attributable in large part to a traditional conception of
composition that still prevails in most writing classrooms. Traditional composition instruction attends to
the clarity and correctness of writing products, rather than to idea-generating writing processes.
Influenced by a positivist epistomology that sees the writer as an oberver and recorder of "objective
knowledge" that pre-exists outside the writer, traditional composition leaves little room for discovery and
the making of new knowledge within the writing process itself (Knoblauch and Brannon). Good
editorship and adherence to pre-assigned structures is given more importance than the development of
meaningful content. Students learn to avoid errors in grammar and usage; the less advanced the class,
the greater the emphasis on basic writing mechanics. Students follow the writing patterns and formulas
prescribed by the teacher or textbook. Paragraphs must include topic sentences and move from the
general to the specific. Essays must adhere to a given mode--description, argument,
compare/contrast, cause-effect; the writer should state a thesis, support the thesis, then restate the
thesis. Good writing practices are encouraged by the reading and analysis of professionally authored
essays.
Traditional writing instruction has been challenged by a modern process-based conception that
has been in rapid development since the 1960s. The modern approach puts first priority on fluent
writing and fluent thinking instead of correctness. The focus is on learning to generate ideas and order
them in different ways, using writing as a tool for thinking. Grammar lectures and workbook drills are
rarely or never used. Students are encouraged to set aside grammatical concerns during the
composing-revising process; only at the final editing stage is grammar attended to. The less
fluent the writer, the less emphasis is placed on mechanical matters--the assumption being that
students' technical prowess will follow as they gain greater confidence with the written word. Modern
composition also rejects most structural rules and formulas, such as topic sentences, thesis
15
statements, and the traditional modes. Emphasis is on the content of the writing, the ideas students
are trying to communicate; students will shape structures to suit their ideas. The classroom spends
little or no time studying professional essays; students learn writing best by actually writing, getting
reader feedback, and writing more.
An additional distinction between traditional and modern composition concerns the teacher's
conceived role in the classroom and her relationship to student papers. The traditional approach is
teacher-centered. Class time is dominated by teacher lectures or teacher-led discussions about
mechanics and style. The goal of writing assignments, and the purpose of teacher responses and any
student revisions, are directed toward what the teacher wants or expects or prefers. The modern
approach, on the other hand, is student-centered. The dominant classroom activities are writing, and
teacher and peer readings of and responses to student drafts. A workshop atmosphere is the preferred
mode, with the teacher as writing coach. The goal of assignments, and the aims of responses and
revisions, are directed toward what the student wants to say. The teacher's primary goal is to stimulate
students toward more thinking and more writing, and to help students achieve their intended purpose
as communicators.
Researchers and practitioners of modern composition disagree widely on issues of theory and
practice beyond the basics presented here. But there is almost complete consensus that traditional
methods stultify students' writing processes, leading neither to correct nor imaginative writing products.
Modern perspectives are represented in a rich selection of books and journals, and in regular
conferences and teacher institutes around the country.3 Composition has grown into a substantial field
over the past twenty-five years, with interests that include rhetorical theory, analysis of writing problems
and strategies for teacher intervention, studies of the cognitive processes involved in composing and
revision, studies of the relationships between reading and writing and between writing and speaking,
evaluations of classroom and writing program designs, and much more.
Unfortunately, while traditional writing instruction has been overwhelmingly discredited by modern
composition studies, most college English departments and schools of education still cling to the
traditional understanding. And because that traditional method consists primarily of teaching grammar
16
rules and essay modes, and then tediously correcting papers for errors, few colleges attach real
importance to either writing instruction or the training of writing teachers. The prevailing traditionalist
view has implications not only for the quantity and quality of writing instruction at the college level, but
heavily shapes how writing is taught in elementary-secondary schools. If college composition is taught
through traditional methods, then college-trained schoolteachers will tend to adopt these same
methods. If colleges do not require significant writing instruction, then schoolteachers will have little
writing know-how to pass on to students. In a 1983 study of 263 college catalogs, Clinton Burhans
found that most preparing teachers, even most preparing English teachers, were not required to study
writing beyond the freshman level; and only 10 percent of English education majors were required to
take a course in the teaching of composition.4
Writing Instruction in the Schools
We will consider briefly the impact of traditional composition at the elementary-secondary level,
then turn to its college manifestation at CSUN, and then in chapter 3 to its impact on college writing
instruction nationally. The kind of writing preparation American students bring with them to college is
suggested in Arthur Applebee's 1984 report of a national study sponsored by the National Institute of
Education. Applebee's portrait reflects well my own student experiences in the Los Angeles schools
during the 1960s, and schoolteacher friends advise me that the back-to-basics trends of the 1980s
have strengthened the routine nature of English instruction in many L.A. schools. Hence, there is good
reason to believe that Applebee's description of national trends reflects also the general school
experiences of CSUN students. The NIE study, which examined secondary school writing
experiences in all subject areas, found that students were seldom asked to produce writing of any
reasonable length. "Students were spending only about 3% of their school time--in class or for
homework--on writing of paragraph length or longer." On the other hand, students were frequently
engaged in mechanical tasks that involved slotting in missing information: "fill-in-the-blank exercises,
multiple-choice responses, direct translation from one language to another [in foreign language
courses], and the like." The emphasis on filling in the blanks, rather than on more creative and
17
intellectually challenging kinds of writing, was supported by the composition/grammar textbooks used
by English classrooms in the national study. "Only 12% of the exercises required writing of even
paragraph length--though all of these textbooks claimed that their primary purpose was to teach writing"
(Applebee 2, 3, 184).
Even when more extended writing was required of students, it tended to be limited in scope.
"The typical assignment is a first-and-final draft, completed in class, and requiring a page or less of
writing. Topics for these assignments are usually constructed to test previous learning of information or
skills; hence the students' task is to get the answer 'right,' rather than to convince, inform, or entertain a
naive audience." Again, the composition/grammar textbooks highlighted the problem: "95% of the
extended writing tasks they suggested were designed to test previous learning." Because assigned
essays were treated primarily as tests of previous learning, the essays became similar to the more
restricted slotting tasks, and students were denied opportunities to use writing for developing ideas and
higher-order thinking skills. "The task for the students was one of repeating information that had
already been organized by the teacher or textbook, rather than of extending and integrating new
learning for themselves." The study found that "writing is more likely to be assessed than to be taught."
That is, the instruction most students receive comes after their writing tasks are complete, in detailed
comments and corrections of their work. Help is rarely offered during the actual writing process.
"When they need [help], most students have to turn to friends or family members, rather than finding it
in instructional contexts" (Applebee 3, 184).
The results of this limited writing instruction are suggested in a 1984 assessment of writing
achievement conducted by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The assessment
involved 55,000 participants from grades four, eight, and eleven in a nationally representative selection
of schools. The students performed a range of writing tasks, such as job applications, descriptions,
reports, analyses, letters, and stories. Papers were judged to be unsatisfactory, minimal, adequate, or
elaborated, and scoring allowances were made for the restraints of testing conditions, such as the time
limit and artificiality of the tasks. The findings, reported by Applebee, Langer, and Mullis, were "not
flattering":
18
Most students, majority and minority alike, are unable to write adequately except in response to
the simplest of tasks. . . . Even at grade 11, fewer than one-fourth of the students performed
adequately on writing tasks involving skills required for success in academic studies, business,
or the professions. In general, American students can write at a minimal level, but cannot
express themselves well enough to ensure that their writing will accomplish the intended
purpose. (9)
A particular concern was the lack of analytic writing ability and higher-order thinking skills among the
older students:
One of the most distressing findings is the continuing difficulty older students have explaining
and defending their ideas. Even at grade 11, relatively few students were able to provide
adequate responses to the analytic writing tasks, and fewer still were able to muster arguments
to persuade others to accept their points of view. . . . Some of these problems may reflect a
pervasive lack of instructional emphasis on developing higher-order skills in all areas of the
curriculum. Because writing and thinking are so deeply intertwined, appropriate writing
assignments provide an ideal way to increase students' experiences with such type of thinking.
(11)
The assessment also polled student attitudes toward writing, and discovered that enthusiasm for
writing, which is low in general, decreases as students progress through the grades. Only 57 percent
of the fourth graders reported that they like to write, which dropped to 39 percent by grade eleven.
When asked if people like what they write, 53 percent in grade four and only 37 percent in grade eleven
responded in the affirmative (60).
Writing education at CSUN, and at many other colleges, may work to reinforce rather than
remedy the trends observed in the schools. Again, we find a paucity of actual writing instruction;
moreover, those providing this small amount of writing instruction must work in unprofessional
circumstances, often with no specific composition training. As our point of reference, let us begin with
what a quality writing program at CSUN might require, and then consider how the present program
19
measures up. The following broad requirements are drawn largely from my discussions with writing
program administrators and faculty interested in writing program reform at CSUN.
1) The university should require several courses that include writing instruction: two semesters of
freshman composition, writing-intensive courses in students' majors, and writing-intensive
general education courses. Instructors teaching writing-intensive courses in the various
disciplines will need smaller classes and an introduction to the teaching of writing.
2) Writing instructors should have strong training in modern composition theory and methods.
3) Composition faculty should have full-time tenurable positions, full voice in their departments,
reasonable student loads and course loads, and professional respect and support.
4) Writing program administrators need adequate staff, office space, and project funds, and the
general support of their departments and university.
5) At least a two-course sequence in English conversation, reading, and writing, as well as
support services, are needed for students not fluent in English. Also, all composition
instructors should have introductory training in English as a second language (ESL)
concerns.
Certainly, the above represent rather ideal conditions that few, if any, American college writing
programs would satisfy. But when we consider how strikingly far is CSUN from meeting such
standards, then the poor student writing performance suggested in my faculty survey is
understandable. We will examine each point in turn.
Writing Course Requirements
The learning of writing, and learning of the critical thinking associated with writing, is a lifelong
project, to which college can and should have much to contribute. But the fact that many students
come to college under-prepared as writers, and that many have also learned to dislike school writing,
makes the college responsibility greater than it might be were progressive composition practices
instituted in the elementary-secondary schools. This is not to heap blame upon the schools which, after
all, draw their instructional models from the university. Nevertheless, given present circumstances, if
20
we hope to produce ably literate college graduates, then we must redress students' past writing
neglect. CSUN's current writing requirements simply cannot accomplish such redressing. The general
education requirement consists of only one semester of freshman composition. Roughly 30 percent of
students (majors in business, journalism, education, liberal studies, and some English options) must
also take one or more writing courses beyond freshman composition; and perhaps 10-15 percent of
incoming freshmen score low on the English Placement Test and must complete one or two
developmental writing courses prior to freshman composition. This leaves 55-60 percent of CSUN
students who can complete four years of college with only one writing course, and 70 percent who can
graduate with no writing course beyond freshman composition. Of course, a number of students will
take an additional writing course voluntarily to better their skills. Also, teachers in a wide range of "non-
writing" courses regularly assign writing in the form of term papers, lab reports, essay exams--though
such teachers do not necessarily become involved in helping students write better, and almost none
have been trained in the teaching of writing. But many of the students who need writing help the most
do not volunteer for more writing courses, and they learn to avoid teachers with reputations for
assigning writing. Religious studies chair Pat Nicholson believes this kind of writing avoidance is
widespread:
I have run into so many students in traditional liberal arts majors who don't have to write. I was
recently talking with a history major, a graduating senior, who for the first time had to write a
term paper. And he told me that most students talk to other students and just figure out a way
to get through the whole program with teachers who don't make you write.
While students in general have learned an antipathy for writing, the more troubled writers particularly
avoid dealing with their problem. Many have been battered with loads of well-intended but ill-conceived
criticism by English teachers schooled in the traditional pedagogy, and students do not want more of
the same. Large numbers do not believe they have even the potential to be good writers.
But simply requiring more students to take one additional course beyond freshman composition,
as is now required of 30 percent of students, would not suffice. The additional course required of
business majors, for example, apparently does not bring the majority of enrollees up to widely accepted
21
college writing standards. Three of my faculty survey respondents teach the writing-intensive business
communications course, OSBE 305, and estimated that 60, 10, and 33 percent--a paltry average of 34
percent--of their students were writing as college students should write. And my poll was taken at the
end of the semester. Writing and writing instruction must be integrated into a significant number and
range of required courses, and taught by teachers given appropriate composition training.
Training of Composition Teachers
The CSUN English department, like most college English departments, has long assumed that
anyone with an advanced degree in literature is qualified to teach writing. Only about one-third of some
sixty instructors teaching developmental and freshman writing within the English department have
significant training in composition, according to Thia Wolf's estimate. Most of the trained minority are or
were CSUN graduate teaching assistants and have taken a two-semester seminar in the teaching of
writing; hence, all teach in the modern mode. But the untrained majority teach with a traditional
emphasis, though employing some modern techniques. Wolf discusses the latter group:
I think a lot of them teach the modes; maybe half of them teach grammar. I mean, information
has seeped in to these people--some have been to a conference or two. Most of them use
peer groups. Most use revision. And in those respects they are not old-school at all. In terms
of their having a real vision of the writing process and what it can do for the individual student,
I'm not so clear about that. When I go in to evaluate classes, it seems to me they're doing fairly
traditional stuff. The major thing I object to--and in a sense it's not at all their fault, because it's
partly the way the department set the course up--is how much time they spend discussing
professional writing, rather than writing. It makes me crazy to walk into a writing classroom and
leave an hour and fifteen minutes later and the students haven't put pen to paper. That really
bothers me. I think that goes on a lot.
The trend toward combining the modern (prewriting, revisions, peer groups) with traditional (grammar
lessons, modes and formulas) is widespread in school and college writing classrooms, and composition
researchers have challenged this kind of "eclecticism." Using a "process" approach in order to produce
22
a teacher-prescribed compare/contrast essay gives students mixed messages, and the student is not
really the master of his/her paper (Knoblauch and Brannon; Applebee 187-88). CSUN's English
department has long encouraged a traditional approach by ordering traditionally oriented textbooks,
including an anthology of professional essays, and mandating their use. Most of the teachers
cooperate with this, although a few quietly ignore department policy and choose alternative texts. In fall
1988, under a pilot policy developed by Wolf and co-composition director Cherryl Armstrong, teachers
may select their own materials for courses; the new policy will later require departmental approval,
however.
The traditional model of writing instruction also predominates in the Pan-African studies writing
program. Pan-African studies shares with the Chicano studies department some 20 percent of CSUN's
freshman composition courses and 45 percent of the developmental writing courses (1987-88 school
year); the two programs serve heavily to black and Chicano students, but include Asians, whites, and
others as well. Professor Johnnie Scott, who helps colleague Tom Spencer-Walters coordinate the
Pan-African studies writing program, showed me the syllabi he designed, and which almost all the
department's writing instructors follow. The syllabi cover the traditional essay formulas, modes, and
grammatical concerns with unusual rigor, including an objective final exam that asks such questions as,
"What are the six types of fragment sentences?" As in many of the English department courses, the
Pan-African writing instructors combine traditional methods and assumptions with modern techniques
such as journal writing, peer groups, and revisions. While the Pan-African writing program holds a
workshop for its faculty before each fall semester, probably few instructors have strong composition
training. As for the program coordinators Walters and Scott, both are dedicated, veteran writing
teachers who have undoubtedly attended their share of composition conferences and workshops, and I
am not sure why their orientation remains so heavily traditional. Perhaps they have not been exposed
to the full modern theory and its critique of the traditional; or perhaps they do know the modern view but
have disagreements with it.
Be that as it may, the Pan-African writing program is nevertheless nontraditional in terms of its
emphasis on black authors for course readings and its infusing the writing classroom with a perspective
23
that affirms minority cultures. The program is also nontraditional in that it enjoys the support and
respect of the department as a whole. When Pan-African chair Verne Bryant refers proudly to the
writing program as "the lifeblood of the department," his sincerity is demonstrated concretely by, among
other things, a well-staffed and well-equipped Pan-African writing center. Similar words from the chair
of the English department, where composition is viewed condescendingly and where support is
minimal, would ring hollow. Johnnie Scott's particular enthusiasm for teaching developmental writing--
since "that's where the action is"--would also be less typical in the English department, as would Scott's
commitment to working with students' larger personal/academic needs:
In one [developmental writing] class, I had nineteen students, and not one of then had an
academic counselor. So when I conference I make sure that each and every one of my
students is placed with a counselor. I also make certain that they're placed with tutors--and not
just in the writing center. I take them over to EOP [Educational Opportunity Program] for tutors
in psych, sociology, geography, whatever it is. Cos', as I say, this is the Superbowl. It's not
about passing my course and then you're flunking everything else.
Students in the Pan-African writing courses undoubtedly benefit from the rigor and commitment of
Scott, his colleagues, and the Pan-African department. Still, as a proponent of the modern in
composition, I would argue that those benefits could be extended much further were the department to
break cleanly from traditional composition assumptions.
I was unable to interview the Chicano studies writing program director as the spring semester
busily closed, and I cannot address the content of the Chicano courses. I did, however, speak with
Chicano studies writing instructor Francine Hallcom, mostly about campus-wide writing issues. It is
probable that the Chicano writing program shares with English and Pan-African studies a predominant
traditional methodology and training gap, combined with the positive nontraditional aspects that apply to
Pan-African studies.
The English department's hiring of Thia Wolf and Cherryl Armstrong, and their fall 1987
appointments as directors of freshman composition and developmental writing, respectively, has meant
new possibilities for faculty development. Wolf notes: "The introduction of writing research into this
24
program has not been done until now. Cherryl and I are the first people who are trying to acquaint the
teachers with what's out there, with what we know about writing." Wolf and Armstrong, who have
Ph.Ds in composition and rhetoric, have obtained a grant to lead a workshop series planned for fall
1988. Four eight-hour meetings will involve sixteen faculty participants--eight from English, four from
Pan-African studies, four from Chicano studies. Says Wolf:
My faculty's really interested, and if I can pay them, they're even more interested because
they're used to being abused. They want to be taken seriously, like professionals. What I'm
hoping is that the workshop will be successful and we will get twice or three times as much
money the following year so that we can reach a lot more people or extend the time.
Wolf points out, however, that funding for the workshop was not obtained through the support of the
English department. "John Hartzog [of CSUN's Learning Resource Center] got us that money from the
academic vice-president. The only support we really have is from the academic vice-president, and
Hartzog's our liaison. Without him we'd be nowhere." In a later interview with Armstrong, I learned that
the workshop depended on "soft money" from the state lottery, and that the money was in question.
"We had money and now we may not have it unless we can spend it tomorrow. It's soft money; it's
money that doesn't really exist. That's one of the problems--there isn't any hard money going into staff
development." Hopefully, the funding snags will be worked out and the workshop plans realized. But if
composition faculty are to receive the training they need, there must clearly be stronger support from
the English department and from the university.
Composition Teacher Conditions
Teachers' working conditions are certainly crucial to the quality of instruction. CSUN, and the
nineteen-campus California State University system (CSU), demonstrate a questionable commitment to
quality writing instruction through the conditions imposed upon CSU writing teachers. At the center of
these conditions is an unrealistically low salary classification for composition courses. The
classification provides only for "assistant professor, step 1." And even though the CSU faculty's
collective bargaining contract provides that instructors graduate a salary step roughly every two years,
25
the CSU still only allocates its campuses a step 1 salary. "The problem is we get money for step 1, and
it costs us more than step 1," explains Pat Boles, budget manager for the School of Humanities, in
which the English and Chicano studies departments are housed. "This year our school will run a deficit
in our salaries of about $50,000." The CSU classification also makes no provision for the promotion of
composition instructors. Campuses manage to get by with the low salary provision by hiring part-
timers. While full-time faculty are assigned a twelve-unit teaching load, they get paid for an additional
three units to provide office hours and participate in department committees. Part-time faculty do not
receive those additional three units of pay, which alone means a 20 percent departmental savings for
each course taught. Part-timers are also denied many of the fringe benefits enjoyed by full-timers, and
are not promoted up the professorial ranks. Reliance on part-timers is a growing trend in all
departments across the CSU system, but is especially strong in composition programs.* In CSUN's
English department, nearly 100 percent of the composition courses are taught by part-timers. Pan-
African and Chicano studies, by contrast, have several full-timers committed to teaching composition,
and full-timers teach perhaps a majority of the writing courses in those departments.
Through low salary and denial of other rights and benefits, the university communicates to its
predominantly part-time composition faculty that they are not considered professionals, are not
considered full citizens in their departments, are not expected to provide more than minimal instruction.
Unlike regular full-time faculty, part-timers are not paid for office hours and departmental participation;
are not paid for release time to do research or write books or articles related to their profession; are not
offered travel or conference pay in order to take part in professional meetings and conferences; do not
have access to tenure and the job security that tenure provides; do not enjoy the full package of fringe
benefits such as health plans, retirement plans, full vacation and sick pay.
* At CSUN, and at most colleges, the terms composition program and composition course generally refer to freshman and remedial writing classes, and I use the terms this way here. Creative and narrative writing, and intermediate/advanced expository writing, enjoy higher status than composition courses, are regularly taught by full-timers, and are not administered by the English composition program.
26
Graduate teaching assistants are materially worse off than the regular part-time faculty. One
writer has aptly called regular composition faculty "serfs," and the TAs "slaves" (Kytle). TAs, who teach
either one or two courses, are paid at bare subsistence level, with no health benefits or sick leave.
Their lowly status is reflected in the office space afforded them. While full-timers are placed two to an
office, and regular part-timers typically share an office with four or five others, most of the twenty TAs
share a single office space that is reached through a forbidding, difficult-to-find stairway on the fifth floor
of the CSUN South Library. The TAs probably suffer less psychological stress than
27
regular part-timers, however. Since most are resigned to the unspoken vow of poverty that our society
demands of college students, TAs' expectations are not high. Also, the TAs are typcally excited about
their new teacher roles and the exquisite composition theories they are learning. Still, TAs perform the
same service as other instructors, their students generate just as much income for the university (CSU
campuses are allocated funds based on the number of students enrolled in each course), and their
underpay is a blatant form of exploitation.
Because of the CSU budgeting structure, most salary-related policies affecting part-timers and
TAs are beyond the capacity of a single department or campus to alter. But it is not beyond the
capacity of the CSUN English department to invite part-timers to the department's faculty meetings and
grant them the right to vote in those meetings. A majority of the English department faculty, roughly
sixty of one hundred, are disenfranchised part-timers. That is, sixty composition faculty have only two
voices, Wolf and Armstrong, to represent them in the faculty meetings that approve or disapprove any
major policies related to the composition program and the content of courses. The department's policy
toward full-timers recognizes that the role of a teaching professional includes participating in
discussions of departmental goals and how the job will get done. By denying this voice to its part-
timers, the department tells them they are not professionals and do not really belong. Composition
instructor Kim Gillespie adds, "I think it makes people feel like victims, powerless and uncaring, like
they can't do anything about it." Indeed, it's difficult to feel powerful or to imagine effecting changes
when you haven't a vote. Part-timers also cannot vote in Pan-African studies; part-timers do vote in
Chicano studies.
How do these conditions affect instruction? The low pay leads many part-timers--in all
disciplines--to hop across town between two or three campuses, some teaching five or six courses, in
order to secure a full salary. The workload is particularly great for writing instructors, who teach what
may be the most labor-intensive of any school subject. The most valuable instructional activities in
composition are also the most time-consuming: one-on-one conferences and sensitive responses to
student drafts. Even a four-course load is too heavy if they are all writing courses. Instructors must by
28
necessity devote less time to each writing student than they might with a more manageable load of,
say, two writing courses and two literature courses; but literature courses are generally reserved for the
full-timers. A general picture of part-time instruction is provided by Jack Friedlander in a review of
national studies comparing the practices of full-time and part-time instructors in two-year colleges.
Friedlander reports that part-timers had less say in choosing course materials, made less use of
instructional media and instructional support services, were less available for student conferences,
were less likely to base their grades on activities that required out-of-class time to grade (objective
tests, essay exams, reports), were less involved in professional activities (reading scholarly journals,
attending professional meetings and conferences), and had less contact with their teaching colleagues.
Kim Gillespie suggests further that the conditions of part-timers leads to less classroom innovation and
more traditional methods: "The low pay results in classes that look very much the same from year to
year, and that sameness is based on an unexamined pedagogy because teachers aren't going to
conferences and they're not reading journals. So you'll find modes and grammar exercises and some
lecturing, and then essays out of the Dolphin reader."
When we examine the conditions of composition teachers, we begin to see that the reform of
writing instruction must be tied to reforming a system that overuses and abuses part-time instructors
generally. Commitment and change are required at many levels. Departments must extend full
citizenship to their part-time faculty by granting them a voice and by actively seeking their participation
in departmental affairs. Full-time faculty can further contribute to the professional standing of their part-
time colleagues by granting them full membership in campus faculty senates; part-timers presently
cannot vote in the faculty senate at CSUN. English departments in particular must affirm the
importance of their composition faculty and the work they are doing by providing professional and moral
support; English full-time faculty, for example, can become involved in issues of college literacy and
writing program development. Finally, the CSU system and the state of California must provide the
funding necessary to convert the majority of part-time positions into full-time positions.
Writing Program Administration
29
CSUN and the CSU system show again their low regard for writing instruction through the little
support offered writing program administrators. My principal focus here will remain with the English
department, which accounts for 70 percent of CSUN's developmental and freshman writing courses
combined. While I have not a complete picture of Pan-African or Chicano studies, it is a safe guess
that the writing program administrators of those departments work under more benign conditions than
the English department's two writing directors. The latter not only have many more course sections,
faculty, and students to provide for, but they must operate within a traditional English department that
treats composition as "this bastard child."
The English composition program is equivalent to a department, but without the staff or office
space that departments are typically provided, according to Cherryl Armstrong:
We have an office because we're professors. But we really need an office for the writing
program--the same sort of setup they have in the English department office. We're running
ninety sections of writing courses in the fall. We're in fact a department inside a department.
We need a place for texts to be kept. We need a place for people to meet. We need a full-time
secretary who does scheduling, who meets with people. We do all the secretarial work
ourselves.
Armstrong's duties include hiring, training, and scheduling faculty; hiring and scheduling tutors;
supervising, evaluating, consulting, record-keeping. "The other thing I do is my teaching--I teach two
courses." I ask if she's tired. "Yeah. It's two full-time jobs."
Office mate Thia Wolf's workload is desperately unmanageable. Six of her fifteen assigned units
are allocated to running freshman English--hiring, supervising, making policy decisions, keeping track
of paperwork. "I lose maybe the first three weeks of each semester doing nothing but getting students
slotted into comp classes after CAR Repair Day" (for students who did not receive all the classes they
wanted through computer registration). She gets three units for teaching the TA seminar on the
teaching of writing, which includes visiting TAs' classes, writing evaluations, consulting and mentoring.
"It's exhausting because people teaching their first semester are often in a state of crisis." Three units
are devoted to running the department's composition committee. "That's a relatively difficult committee.
30
It meets a lot, with a lot of paperwork, a lot of decision making." Finally, Wolf gets 1.5 units each for
coordinating the writing-across-the-disciplines program and the writing lab. "Those, of course, are full-
time jobs at other universities." Wolf estimates that she is doing three or four full-time jobs, "which is
why I can work sixty or eighty hours a week and not get the work done."
One of the biggest frustrations for both Wolf and Armstrong is that the composition faculty do not
have meetings. The directors have little way of knowing what actually goes on in the classrooms.
"There's no calibration of that program," says Wolf, "no agreement about what should go on in any of
the courses. If we could just meet with these people a couple times a month, it would make an
enormous difference in the quality of the program." Since the program has no budget, it cannot pay
faculty to attend meetings, and Wolf refuses to hold faculty meetings unless faculty can be paid for their
time--as are the full-time faculty. Wolf and Armstrong do hold monthly potluck/rap groups that address
various teaching topics; but, while the rap groups have helped build community among some of the
faculty, attendance has dropped down, according to Armstrong.
Another frustration is the difficulty of changing policies. For example, Wolf describes the
unwieldy process for hiring new composition teachers.
We sent out this job description that just says if you've had experience teaching writing, come
over and talk with us. And we wind up interviewing maybe eighty people for two jobs. And
most of those people don't know anything about teaching writing. That and a number of other
things that create a lot of work and a lot of paperwork are what wears down the people who run
the program. It turns out that the hiring process is extremely resistant to change.
Often, composition faculty will come to the program office with bright ideas about grading policies or
course descriptions, but then drop the ideas when they learn of the cumbersome processes for
obtaining departmental approval.
As with teacher conditions, many of the largest reforms needed in writing program administration
are beyond reach of the slim-budgeted English department and will require action at higher levels. But
again, the department could take a more supportive posture by, for example, insisting that the
university provide its writing program with proper staff. The CSUN administration would likely be
31
responsive because of continuing concern over the WPE failure rate. More immediately, the English
department could give composition priority in its personnel allocations, at least until the composition
workload approaches earthly levels. What keeps the department from taking such measures are the
competing interests within the department, and composition's low status among those interests.
Illustrative is the department's recent hiring of an ESL specialist. Wolf, Armstrong, and the new hire
herself had understood she would be working with the writing program to begin designing an ESL
program and ESL teacher training. But they later learned the department had assigned the new
professor four linguistics courses (for which there is big demand) and was listing her as a linguist. In
another instance, Wolf recounts that she had asked department chair Gale Larson for a desperately
needed office assistant but was told that the creative writing program had priority as they had asked for
an assistant earlier. "He was applying a first-come, first-serve principle," Wolf explains, "but he wasn't
thinking of size or need." (Ultimately, due to a state hiring freeze, neither program received an
assistant.) Wolf observes: "Actually, they're not totally opposed to hiring people in this field, but it's
always an afterthought. You go through the literature and linguistics hires first, and then there's a
discussion about whether composition will need anybody else."
Perhaps more fundamental than a shift in priorities is the needed shift in attitude. The CSU's
underfunding of composition programs draws justification from the traditional denigrating view of
composition that is perpetuated by college English departments (Howard; Szilak; Staples; Nash;
Robinson; Kytle). Freshman composition is defined as a "service course," Wolf explains.
It teaches "skills." The way that basic mathematics is a skill or learning to write your name is a
skill. That's what it's equated with, as opposed to a content course that has its place as a
discipline alongside other disciplines. It's not considered a discipline, and therefore the people
in charge of it are not--we don't count. And that's why people in our department say stuff to us
like, "When are you going to get tired of this and teach some real classes?"
Modern composition has challenged the narrow definition of writing instruction as the passing on of
mechanical grammar skills and avoidance of errors. It has opened up rich areas of inquiry, such as in
the relationships between writing, the learning process, and the development of critical thinking.
32
Insights from this growing field might hold the potential to transform teaching as we know it, and could
certainly offer broad applications in literature classrooms. But people must be open to the new
information and new understandings. For the present, composition remains what Wolf calls "this
bastard child" of English departments. "People make fun of it, they don't want to involve themselves in
it, they don't want to teach the classes."
It is unfortunate that the English department will soon be losing its freshman composition director,
who has given notice she will be leaving next year (after spring semester 1989). "The job is really
interesting, but there's too much of it for me. I feel so disillusioned that if I don't get a job at another
university next year, I'm moving out of academics." It appears the department had wanted someone to
run composition in the traditional and minimal way it had always been run; they did not want someone
who would advocate changes or try to create a truly meaningful writing program. With Wolf's
departure, the campus loses a particularly dedicated and gifted teacher/administrator, one whom I and
many others have treasured as a model and mentor. No doubt she will be replaced with someone who
is more accepting of the program status quo.
English as a Second Language (ESL) Needs
CSUN keeps no statistics on the number of its students who are non-native English speakers,
nor on the number of students who are less than fluent in English and might need assistance. When I
asked a worker at the CSUN Office for Institutional Research why such statistics weren't kept, he gave
the self-evident but interesting reply, "If we don't have the statistics, it means the university hasn't had a
reason to keep them." Certainly, there should be a reason. We do know that 24.6 percent of students
taking the WPE in the 1986-87 school year were identified as ESL students. But this cannot tell us the
percentage of ESL students in the general CSUN population, since ESL students have a higher WPE
failure rate than non-ESL students (58.9 versus 23.9 percent) and therefore take the exam more
frequently. Probably the best indication is offered by the Office of International Programs: the campus
has 512 foreign students living in the U.S. on student visas, and about 3,600 students who are
permanent U.S. residents but not U.S. citizens. These do not directly translate into ESL numbers.
33
Some permanent residents have been in the U.S. since young children, were never naturalized, but are
essentially native English speakers. Other students may be naturalized citizens but still learning
English; and still others may be U.S.-born citizens but raised in families and communities where English
was not much spoken. Still, the combined figure of 4,112 (14 percent of the students) is perhaps the
closest indication we have regarding the number of ESL students at CSUN. In any case, the large
presence of foreign-born students, particularly Asians and Mideasterners, becomes evident to anyone
who strolls across campus. And as a writing tutor here for two years, I know that many of these
students need concerted help with English literacy.
The university has essentially no ESL program for its considerable number of non-native
speakers. There is an intensive, twenty-hour-per-week ESL program offered separately through
university extension, but its students are not enrolled at CSUN. Also, the English taught through
extension is too elementary for most ESL students enrolled at CSUN, according to program director
Michael Steadman. The university needs to offer a bridge for students who have passed the TOEFL
(Test of English as a Foreign Language) but are not yet fluent with the language. What CSUN does
offer, under the English department, are seven sections of developmental writing and two sections of
freshman composition that are designated as ESL. However, while these are popular courses that fill
up quickly, the instructors have no training in teaching ESL. Neither Wolf nor Armstrong are sure what
takes place in these courses. Quite likely, the teachers--who have been unfairly burdened with courses
they are not prepared to teach--simply put greater emphasis on English grammar and mechanics. And
an emphasis on grammar is the practice most discouraged by modern ESL and language acquisition
theorists.
Some ESL proposals are being developed by English professor George Uba, whom the English
department is supporting for a year study of the subject. Uba recommends the model employed at
CSU's Long Beach State. "They require every foreign-born student who has not resided in this country
for at least ten years to take a separate placement test. Depending on how they score, they may be
sent into a pre-developmental language acquisition course." Long Beach offers a four-rung sequence:
two semesters of language acquisition (conversation, reading, writing), and two semesters of
34
developmental writing. Uba cautions, however, against the assumption that the ESL writing course
would be quite different from the non-ESL writing course. "In fact, most theorists would argue just the
opposite. The emphasis on process and on rhetoric that we get in a non-ESL developmental course is
also the primary emphasis we should get in an ESL course. Our primary emphasis should not be on
workbook exercises like grammar and things like that." Uba assumes, of course, that the teachers of
ESL developmental writing courses will have training both in modern composition's process orientation
and in ESL.
At the level of freshman composition, Uba points out, there are legitimate arguments for sending
ESL students either to ESL classes or to non-ESL classes. The ESL composition class can address
directly the problems of developing literacy in a second language; the non-ESL class can provide
opportunities for interacting with native speakers. Uba suggests we can have it both ways through
paired classes--one ESL, one non-ESL--taught by separate teachers. Once or twice a week, the pair
would meet in one large class. As we know from our classroom experiences, simply mixing ESL and
non-ESL students in the same class does not assure the kind of networking we would like. Hence,
Uba's proposal provides for monitored peer activities.
They'll conduct peer editing sessions in which the teachers purposely mix two ESL students
and two non-ESL students, or they'll assign them joint library work. Again, the interaction that
we hope for outside of class really does occur because we monitor it. At the same time,
because the integrity of the ESL classroom is maintained, if there are specific needs that have
to be addressed, that ESL teacher--who is going to be more familiar with ESL writing needs--is
going to be able to address those needs.
Uba believes we also need more social networking outside of class between ESL and non-ESL
students. The best way the university can encourage this is through the initiative of individual
departments.
For example, the business department might hold a colloquium on Japanese business
management, or Asian business management, and then invite Asians to talk about their
experiences as children of businessmen or, in some cases, as businessmen and
35
businesswomen themselves. In other words, each department can figure out a way to get this
networking into place. But it really depends on each department to do that, because they know
best what will serve a broad range of students.
While his proposals appear excellent, Uba has "no sense" of whether there exists the political
support to actually institute such measures at CSUN. For a political perspective, I spoke with professor
Francine Hallcom, an eighteen-year veteran of the Chicano studies department specializing in writing
instruction. Hallcom believes the university victimizes and exploits ESL students. Since the majority of
students in developmental writing classes are native speakers, she explains, "you teach to the majority.
And the ESL speakers just simply do the best they can. They take the class once, maybe twice, three
times; they're usually diligent. So they pass the class with a credit. Then they eventually do the same
thing in freshman comp, and then they fail the Writing Proficiency Exam." She acknowledges that
some ESL students contribute to the problem by putting off their writing requirements until the end of
college.
But I don't want to blame them for it anymore. It's more the fault of the university because we
accept them. If we're going to accept them with this kind of writing skill, I think it's our duty to
bring them up to par--rather than let them sit here, generate a lot of FTE for us and keep all of
our professors employed, and then tell them when they've accumulated 150 or 200 units [that
they cannot graduate because they've failed the WPE].* I saw a kid's transcript one time: 289
units and had failed the WPE five times or something--incredible! That's real dishonest. That's
really morbid.
* FTE, or full-time equivalency, refers to a formula the university system uses for generating teacher salaries based on the number of students enrolled in classes.
36
Yet, Hallcom is decidedly skeptical about the prospects for change. She has served on several
ESL committees during her years at CSUN, and invariably found the administration unwilling to take
real action on the issue.
I remember one time we had a very fancy committee. We had people from foreign languages,
special ed., English, admissions and records. Oh, God, there must have been ten or twelve
people. And we met, we were very diligent, we did our research. And we turned in this 5-6
page report. The bottom line was that we need to teach these people from a different
approach.
But the committee's report never led to a program. "I don't think the university's interest is sincere,
because after all of these years, I don't see that money coming forward." Underlying the ESL problem
is institutional racism, Hallcom argues, and the committees are a mechanism to divert those seeking
change.
As a white male caucasian, it is not fashionable for you to just come out and tell me you don't
really give a damn about me or--that would not be a healthy thing to do if you were an
administrator on this campus. So you would put a person like me, who might be a
troublemaker or who might struggle or something like that, on a committee. And as long as I'm
spinning my wheels on a committee and turning in reports, you've got me happy. I don't serve
on committees like that anymore.
The needs of ESL and minority students are simply not a CSUN priority. "The figures on minority
students, if you look at it eighteen years ago and now: worse. The figures on minority faculty hiring are
worse. . . . Basically, this is a school for white kids, and let's not kid ourselves."
From Uba and Hallcom, we can derive that CSUN's failure to develop ESL programs is not due to
a lack of university awareness or lack of proposed solutions. Nor is it wholly attributable to budget
limitations: Long Beach State has budget troubles like all CSU campuses, but has nonetheless
established a substantial ESL program. The bottom line is priorities and attitudes. We learn from
Hallcom that relying on the committee process does not produce ESL programs, since it leaves white-
37
biased institutional priorities intact. Perhaps more active forms of pressure and protest will be
necessary to meet the needs of ESL students.
We have suggested that a majority of CSUN students may not be meeting the university's writing
expectations, and we have attributed this deficiency to inadequate and ill-conceived writing instruction
at school and college. The university could potentially redress the problem through rigorous,
pedagogically sound writing programs, and by offering better instructional models to future
schoolteachers and curriculum designers. But we find instead that the university perpetuates the
writing problem. The English department trivializes the composition profession and keeps its
practitioners disenfranchised; perhaps influenced by this trivialization, the university system allocates
meager composition salaries and meager program budgets. If the slighting of composition has its
source in a narrow, mechanistic conception of writing instruction, or in an epistomology that reduces
writers to mere recorders of pre-existent knowledge, it is not at all clear that the situation will be
remedied simply by making better epistomologies and pedagogies available. Wolf and Armstrong have
offered better models, but the English department may not really want to listen, especially not if the
better models cost money. So long as literaturists, linguists, and others are committed to a strategy of
sectional competition, each group guarding its precious slice of a too-small budget, the department may
have a political interest in continuing to see composition as a "service course."
38
CHAPTER 3
HOW TYPICAL IS CSUN? A NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE
I could find no national studies of college writing performance. However, college writing
instruction and programs have been nationally studied. The studies, along with numerous journal
articles on "the state of composition," reveal a consistent pattern among college composition programs,
one which broadly mirrors the writing situation at CSUN. If we take into account the "minimal" writing
achievement of eleventh graders in the NAEP's 1984 national assessment, and the pattern of college
writing instruction indicated by surveys and journal commentaries, we can reasonably conclude that the
student writing problem at CSUN is a national college problem.
One ready indicator that U.S. college students may not be getting the most helpful writing
instruction is the continuing predominance of the traditional classroom methods which composition
research has widely shown to impede the learning of writing. Although the modern composition
following is growing, and some observers are quite optimistic about its growth (Penfield), even the
optimists would probably agree with Maxine Hairston's 1982 assessment:
The overwhelming majority of college writing teachers in the United States are not professional
writing teachers. They do not do research or publish on rhetoric or composition, and they do
not know the scholarship in the field; they do not read the professional jounals and they do not
attend professional meetings. . . . They are trained as literary critics first and as teachers of
literature second, yet out of necessity most of them are doing half or more of their teaching in
composition. And they teach it by the traditional paradigm, just as they did when they were
untrained teaching assistants ten or twenty or forty years ago. (78-79)
Persistence of the traditional mode in composition courses is suggested by Burhans' study of
writing course descriptions in 263 college catalogs. Burhans set forth criteria for a "contemporary"
teaching model and a "current-traditional" model, along the the same lines I have outlined in this paper,
and measured the course descriptions accordingly. He found that only 3 percent of the "basic writing"
courses (i.e., freshman composition) and 1 percent of the remedial courses reflected “any influence
39
whatever from contemporary knowledge about writing and the teaching of writing." The traditional view,
on the other hand, was reflected in 89 percent of the basic and 83 percent of the remedial courses; the
remainder were "indefinable." Burhans acknowledges that catalog course descriptions do not always
coincide with actual classroom practice, and that recent program changes are often not reflected in the
catalogs. But he argues that his methods are reliable enough. Most college departments take their
course descriptions very seriously, according to Burhans, and usually develop them from carefully
revised multiple drafts to best reflect the department's goals for the course. Also, Burhans did not
choose his colleges randomly, but instead weighted his sample toward schools "from which we expect
the highest levels of professionalism in theory, research, and application" (641, 645, 646).
Staying power of the traditional mode is further evidenced by surveys of college composition
textbooks. Donald Stewart in 1978 found that only seven of thirty-four widely used textbooks, or 21
percent, contained "any appreciable awareness" of the modern composition field. "The other 27, and
some are the products of people with enormous reputations as literary scholars, were strictly current-
traditional in their discussions of invention, arrangement, and style" (174). Burhans' review of a writing
textbook bibliography compiled in 1982 found that only 31 of 121 texts, or 26 percent, reflected any
influence of the modern concepts. Burhans says his assessment is generous, that many texts will
devote minor sections to the writing process "and then concentrate on primarily current-traditional
concerns" (652).
A very clear indicator of substandard writing instruction in the nation's colleges is the conditions
of composition teachers. As at CSUN, composition teachers nationally are underpaid, overworked,
second-class citizens of the academic community. The conditions are regularly cited and denounced in
the composition journals and conferences. The following account by a community college writing
instructor is representative:
I went to graduate school in pursuit of the contemplative life. I found it in graduate courses, in
textual study, in literary translation. I also found it in teaching the composition and technical
writing courses which paid my way. . . .
40
I was much less happy when, Ph.D. in hand, I found that I was qualified to fill a role as a
writing instructor that shattered my illusions about academic life. Most of the jobs I found were
for part-time employment, that is, less salary for a heavy teaching load, few or no benefits, and
no departmental voice in policy or decision-making. . . . As a part-time and non-tenure track
teacher, I was shocked to find how little the departments in which I taught cared about the
quality of my work and how little supervision or administrative support I received, and how
reluctant department members were to have anything to do with me. I was, after all, not a
colleague. (Staples 3-4)
The universality of these conditions is strongly suggested in a 1987 resolution adopted by the
Conference on College Composition and Communication, the major professional organization for those
involved in college composition:
WHEREAS, the salaries and working conditions of post-secondary teachers with primary
responsibility for the teaching of writing are fundamentally unfair as judged by any reasonable
professional standards (e.g., unfair in excessive teaching loads, unreasonably large class
sizes, salary inequities, lack of benefits and professional status, and barriers to professional
advancement). . . . (Robertson et al., Slevin)
The resolution calls for establishing grievance procedures and public censure of institutions not
complying with professional standards for post-secondary teachers of writing.
Wide reliance on part-time faculty and TAs, or nontenurable (and hence usually temporary) full-
time faculty, for teaching composition courses is indicated in a 1981 national survey of college and
university writing program directors conducted by Stephen Witte et al. Among 127 responding
institutions, Witte et al. found that introductory writing courses were taught by faculty in the following
proportions:5
Full-time tenure track: 30% Part time: 21%
Full-time nontenurable: 12% Graduate TAs: 37%
Of 15,252 course sections, 58 percent were taught by faculty whose positions were part time, and 70
percent by faculty whose positions were probably temporary. (As at CSUN, tenure-track faculty were
41
more apt to teach non-introductory writing courses; they taught 51 percent of such courses.) Noting the
predominance of temporary faculty teaching writing classes, Witte et al. observe that "while many
schools pay lip service to the teaching of writing, they have obviously not worked this 'commitment' into
their rewards system" (57, 58). Witte et al.'s point about rewards is corroborated by Jeriel Howard's
two-year study of job ads listed in the Chronicle of Higher Education. "Less than 15 percent of all BW
[basic writing] positions offered tenure track appointments. When possible salary was mentioned, BW
positions averaged approximately $6000 less than appointments at the same rank for literature
teachers" (5).
One figure in the Witte survey that provides an interesting contrast to CSUN is the number of
introductory writing courses that are taught by tenure-track faculty--30 percent. It appears that the
almost exclusive reliance on part-time faculty by the CSUN English department's writing program is not
the norm among colleges nationally. Still, while a significant minority of writing courses nationally are
taught by tenure-track faculty, students in those courses do not necessarily benefit from their teacher's
higher status. Firstly, many English departments require tenured faculty to teach a minimum number of
freshman writing courses. Such policies are well-intended but of questionable value: the vast majority
of tenured English faculty have no interest or commitment to teaching introductory writing. Their
freshman composition duties are an unwanted distraction from literary pursuits, and the courses are
often taught perfunctorily. Commitment among tenured faculty was the most frequently cited "least
successful aspect" of the programs surveyed by Witte et al. "They really don't give a damn about
teaching freshmen to write," complained one program director (109). Secondly, the few tenured faculty
actually committed to teaching composition--whose students undoubtedly do benefit from their
teacher's full-time tenured status--may still find that their departments consider their work less important
than that of literature or linguistics professors. Howard notes that full-time faculty seriously interested in
basic writing are often denied tenure appointments or are restricted in rank:
I could relate stories, now all too familiar, of tenure and promotion committees which have
refused to recognize work done in the area of BW as valid criteria for either retention or
promotion. I know highly competent teachers, some with names you would recognize should I
42
use them, who have been denied tenure and/or promotion because they work rather
exclusively in BW. These people speak at our conferences, publish in our journals, and, in
some instances, consult nationwide. But they do not research bird imagery in Keats or
nominalization in Chaucer. They are not quite real members of the fraternity of English
teachers. (6)
American college English departments are increasingly characterized by a caste system in which
a male gerontocracy of senior tenured literature professors lord over a younger, predominantly female
group of part-time composition instructors. (At CSUN, for example, English part-timers are 77 percent
female; full-timers are 67 percent male.) However, the size of the ruling group is shrinking, while the
ruled are multiplying. A 1982 Association of Departments of English survey showed 62 percent of
instructional effort in English departments devoted to writing and only 30 percent devoted to literature.
Moreover, enrollment in writing courses was growing fast, while literature enrollment slowly declined
(Young, Gorman, and Gorman 56, 57). In these times of lean college budgets and especially small
budgets for liberal arts and humanities, it is perhaps understandable that the tenured literati would
guard their narrowing turf by keeping the composition majority disenfranchised, demoralized, transient.
But does this not undermine the educational ideals of literaturists and compositionists alike? And would
not a cooperative effort to develop critically thinking minds through the joint teaching of literature and
writing be preferable to division and oneupmanship? And could we not collectively challenge the heads
of state who, through wrong priorities, dole out ever smaller slices of the tax pie to education? And how
long will writing teachers continue to be abused before we pull ourselves together and fight back?
43
CHAPTER 4
SOLVING THE WRITING PROBLEM: EDUCATING, ORGANIZING
Achieving quality writing programs and quality conditions for writing teachers will require action at
all levels--classroom, department, campus, state, federal. The plight of writing teachers is ultimately
bound to that of all educators and to the country's spending priorities. But let us begin with what
individual writing teachers and others can do today, and then proceed to larger goals and more
ambitious tasks.
First, composition instructors should get active in the composition profession, and those already
involved professionally should invite colleagues to join them. True, the time and cost of attending
conferences, workshops, or meetings is prohibitive for many, particularly when the university is not
sponsoring participation. But professional involvement can be a source of emotional sustenance, as
well as classroom method and theory. Modern composition is inspired by visions of what education
could be; for some, the vision is suggested in Donald Graves' descriptions of first- and second-grade
classrooms turned into buzzy, productive, child-centered writers' workshops. We can't effectively
challenge the abuses of academe without a vision to guide us, and professional activity can help us
shape visions with our peers. It can also help us find ways to make our job more satisfying, less
exhausting. Maxine Hairston reminds us that many traditional composition teachers work harder than
they need to. "They devote far more time than they can professionally afford to working with their
students. . . ." But because they haven't read the modern theorists, "they don't know that an hour spent
meticulously marking every error in a paper is probably doing more harm than good. They are
exhausting themselves trying to teach writing from an outmoded model, and they come to despise the
job more and more because many of their students improve so little despite their time and effort" (79-
80). Activities might range from informal rap/study sessions with co-workers to five-week summer
institutes offered by National Writing Project affiliates in many states.6 As composition staff develop
cohesion, they can collectively insist that the department and university take more responsibility for
faculty training.
44
Another important step for writing teachers is to make the critique of education a topic for the
writing classroom. Teachers can encourage students to talk and write about their school experiences,
to imagine what education could and should be, to ask critical questions about American schooling. I
think the reason students in my questionnaire and in the Sundial survey reported a general satisfaction
with school is that they have so little exposure to alternatives. Students need opportunities to build a
critique of their school experience, and they need models and direct experiences with student-centered,
egalitarian classrooms.7 At the same time, teachers need student allies in the struggle for educational
reform.
Thirdly, writing teachers can join the faculty union, where one exists, and get active in it. Part-
time lecturers are a growing voice within the California Faculty Association (CFA), the union
representing CSU faculty. Part-timers have organized a statewide committee that is fighting for such
proposals as the conversion of part-time positions to full-time positions. The union has recently won
small but significant reforms for the lecturers, who now have built-in salary advances and, after twenty-
four units taught, at least reasonable certainty of being rehired each year. "Different faculty groups get
their voice represented at the bargaining table by being union activists," says Pat Nicholson, who
presides over the CFA chapter at CSUN. "There's no magic about this. If you want to be on the
agenda, come and get in." Broad changes in the conditions of composition faculty are barely
conceivable without large numbers of composition teachers working in the union. Unions not only unite
the strengths of part-time and full-time faculty, but can wield that power on a statewide basis--which
must be done when taking on a statewide university apparatus. The union can be a source of support
for campus-level changes as well, such as in advocating for a part-timer voice in the faculty senate and
within departments. Use of the union structure as a tool for writing program reform is a potentiality that
has still to be explored, and could only be explored in the context of strong composition participation in
the union.
Faculty in disciplines other than composition can support writing reform by asking their
departments to participate in writing-across-the-disciplines programs. In fall 1988, CSUN's "WRAD"
program is expanding to involve ten faculty from the School of Engineering and ten from the School of
45
Communication and Professional Studies. Departments in which several faculty are calling for WRAD
participation can in turn lobby the university to help with funding. My teacher survey suggests that large
numbers of faculty are disappointed with the quality of student writing. Those faculty should insist that
their departments and universities make writing instruction a priority.
Program Modernization
A larger objective for writing reformers would consist in modernization of university writing
programs and removing institutional barriers to that modernization. The CSUN English department has
made an historic move toward the modern by hiring the campus's first composition specialists to run its
writing program. But the department contradicts that move by making the program answerable to, and
dependent upon, a literary faculty largely unsympathetic to composition and unfamiliar with the modern
field. Writing specialists need real authority over their writing programs in order to apply what they
know. As constituted, the English department drags modernization, and the writing program could
benefit tremendously by separating off and forming its own department. Composition instructors could
immediately be enfranchised. Those involved in composition could discuss and decide on the content
of courses and the goals of the writing program without having to negotiate with literature professors.
Composition would no longer be the departmental underdog competing with more "respectable"
disciplines for funds and staffing (though it must still compete with other departments for finite university
funds).
"I don't think it's healthy for English departments and writing departments to be split," says Wolf.
"But so many universities are run like this one where people who teach writing are treated badly. It
would be so much easier and the program could get so much more done if it didn't have to answer to
the English department." Wolf describes the experience of a colleague who tried to run a writing-
across-the-disciplines program under the English department at UCLA. "It nearly drove her out of her
mind, because they have all kinds of strange priorities that have nothing to do with the priorities of a
writing program." A literature department could influence a writing program in healthy ways, Wolf
believes, but this is not happening at CSUN. "The department forbids us to teach literature in
46
composition classes. And I think, especially for developmental writing, that's extremely damaging.
These students are going to be most helped by reading for pleasure." Wolf explains that reading fiction
tends to be more pleasurable than reading essays, and language acquisition theorists believe that
reading for pleasure supports our syntactic development as writers.
Barring a major shift in faculty attitudes toward composition, the English department will continue
to be a fetter upon the writing program. A chief obstacle to "liberating" the program from the
department is that it would require an approving vote from the English faculty. Only two faculty
members, Wolf and Armstrong, represent composition among some forty voters. Although the question
has yet to be raised in departmental meetings, knowledgeable observers have advised me that the
faculty would resist the writing program's secession. Composition may be viewed condescendingly, but
it does give the English department authority over campus literacy. With composition gone and
literature in a steady national decline, English faculty might begin to feel inconsequential. Campus
sources have also suggested that the department has an economic interest in keeping composition. It
is apparently not uncommon for English departments to subsidize small graduate seminars and the
comforts of senior literary faculty by packing composition programs with underpaid part-timers and TAs
(Szilak; Nash). English department chair Gale Larson denies this goes on at CSUN or anywhere else,
and he holds that the department's composition courses actually produce a net loss. My discussion
with School of Humanities budget manager Pat Boles seemed to confirm Larson's contention with
respect to CSUN. Admittedly, the complicated budget formulas remain a bit mysterious to me. But it is
certainly clear that separating the writing program from the English department may be a necessary
step toward putting composition under the control of composition people.
A second key institutional barrier to a modern writing program is the writing tests required for
college graduation, or for passing lower-division writing courses, at CSUN and many other colleges.
We have already observed how CSUN's Upper Division Writing Proficiency Examination is a poor
measure of writing ability. But the role of such tests in keeping university writing instruction within
traditional bounds, and in upholding the political status quo, deserves consideration as well. CSUN
instituted the WPE in 1980 in fulfillment of a CSU mandate that all CSU students, during their junior or
47
senior year, demonstrate writing proficiency before graduating. The CSU mandate, known as the
Graduate Writing Assessment Requirement (GWAR), came in response to the so-called literacy crisis
of the 1970s. The literacy crisis was actually a deliberate fiction based on misinterpretations of
declining SAT scores (Shor 1986: 59-103; Howe; Steelman and Powell; Brodinsky). It served to
accelerate a new conservative political agenda in education, including the now unprecedented use of
proficiency tests in the nation's schools--tests to graduate high school, tests to pass from grade to
grade. Instead of the expanding education budgets and broadening curricula of the 1960s, we would
have smaller budgets and narrow "back-to-basics" curricula emphasizing rote drills to prepare us for
the tests. The proficiency tests pleased conservatives because testing focuses attention and blame on
the individual, rather than the institution or society, for the inadequacies of education. Ira Shor in
Culture Wars says it succinctly: "In the 1960s, masses of people confronted the system together.
Now, the system was confronting you, alone" (89).
Some positive measures did accompany the CSU's GWAR. Pre-freshman composition
developmental writing programs were introduced on CSU campuses (remedial courses had formerly
not been allowed). Also, a few CSUs added an upper division writing course requirement, instead of an
exam, to fulfill the GWAR. Yet, the majority of campuses, like CSUN, opted for an exam. And the
broad conditions that undermine quality writing education in the CSUs--too little writing and too few
writing courses required, inadequately trained writing faculty, overuse and abuse of part-timers,
understaffed and undersupported writing programs--went unaddressed. Now students take WPEs
which the universities have not prepared them to pass, and the universities can blame the students. In
1986-87, 32 percent of CSUN's test-takers received notices in the mail saying not that the university
had failed them, but that the students were failures. One group of students known to WPE counselors
are particularly hurt by the CSU priorities. These students have completed their coursework, have
devoted four or more years of study and possibly gone into debt, but are denied degrees because they
cannot pass the WPE. The tests and the university have dealt them serious defeats. "They are the
human beings who have been destroyed by a vicious, vicious institution," says one CSUN observer.
48
Tests like the WPE serve hidden political purposes: they deflect criticism of the university by
assuring legislators and taxpayers that higher education is enforcing "rigorous" literacy standards; and
they provide a cheap substitute for the quality types of writing programs that would make relics of
writing proficiency tests. Their official purpose, on the other hand, is to prompt students to take more
writing courses or seek tutorial aid to upgrade their writing skills. Perhaps, some may argue, the WPE
is still beneficial because it does encourage some students to work seriously on writing improvement.
Undoubtedly, this is true for some students. But it is common knowledge at CSUN that large numbers
of students complete freshman composition and then avoid further writing involvement. Their reasons?
Some may not need more writing instruction or not believe they need it. Others know their writing does
need work; but with heavy class loads and the knowledge that more writing courses are not required,
they let the writing go. Probably many have fears about writing or have had bad experiences in writing
classrooms. I asked a marketing major, four-time WPE failer, why he had not taken English 305
(intermediate expository writing) to prepare for the exam. "It's psychological," he said. "If you're not
good at something, most individuals are apt to shy away from it, instead of attack it. And basically
that's my attitude with writing." If the official goal of the WPE is to prompt more students to better their
writing skills, the failure rates certainly do not suggest this is happening. The percent of failures has
climbed every year since the test's inception.8
The WPE's net effect on university writing may actually be negative, particularly in terms of its
traditionalist assumptions. Wolf warns, "It's a very dangerous test philosophically, because the
message it gives to the university is that this is what writing is all about." The exam is based on the
traditional five-paragraph theme that modern composition theorists have widely discredited as a model
for writing. By assigning the topic and directing how the student must address that topic, the WPE
subverts the rhetorical understanding of writing as meaningful communication. The exam's message is
that it doesn't matter what students want to say or how they want to say it; what matters is what
teachers or test administrators want said and how they want it said. The preordained topic and sub-
questions also discourage viewing writing as a discovery process. Writing instead becomes a rigid,
49
mechanical activity that fails to engage the confidence and fluency with language which students bring
to their daily speaking.
We have not studied or measured the extent to which the WPE affects teacher and student views
of writing, or affects writing instruction practices, but there must be considerable impact. The test very
likely reinforces the traditional writing beliefs and classroom methods prevailing in the university.
Teachers and departments are rightfully concerned that their students be prepared to pass the WPE.
One student told me his business communications course gave WPE practice exams, and this likely
goes on in other writing courses. The university writing center gets frequent teacher requests for
classroom presentations on the WPE. Until recently, the center sent WPE counselors who would give
talks and then have the students take sample tests; the counselors would mark the tests and later
return them to students. Wolf abolished that policy after she discovered that a video presentation
would serve the purpose. Wolf resents the use of the writing center to support the WPE, believing that
the six counselor-tutors--who are part-time faculty or TAs--should devote their time to genuine writing
instruction, rather than to test-taking strategies. "These people are capable of conducting excellent
writing instruction. They're highly trained, highly competent. What they wind up doing is saying over
and over things like, 'Eat a good breakfast before you go take the test. Be sure all of your points are
well-developed.' It reduces them to machines." But there is a big demand for WPE assistance: two-
thirds of lab tutoring time is spent in WPE counseling. The center also runs WPE prep sessions,
workshops, and classes, which Wolf describes as helpful for students who haven't serious writing
problems but need strategies for taking the test. The WPE has become an axis around which much of
the university's writing attention seems to revolve.
The CSUs also use writing proficiency tests in the developmental writing programs. The
developmental courses are required for students whose low scores on the English Placement Test
(EPT) prevent their direct admission to freshman composition. At CSUN, students must pass two
developmental courses (097 and 098) or only one course (098), depending on how low their EPT
scores are. Fifty-minute essay tests that are exactly like the WPE are administered at the end of each
course. Until spring 1988, the written exit exams were the sole determiner of whether students passed
50
the English department's developmental courses. As an 097-098 tutor from 1986 to '88, it was obvious
to me that the exit exams were accentuating the traditional orientation of the courses, with preordained
topics, and formulaic modes and structures. Moreover, the late part of semesters inevitably turned
toward taking practice exams. One instructor administered practice exams every Monday for the
second half of the semester. My tutoring time during those weeks was devoted almost wholly to
scoring these exams on a six-point scale, and showing students how they could improve their scores.
We did cover many healthy, substantive writing concerns in these sessions--clarity, development, and
so forth. But the students were also imbibing a narrow and decidedly unhealthy conception of writing,
void of discovery, process, experimenting with ideas and structures and topics. This is not to criticize
the instructors, who understandably wanted to ensure that students passed the exams. The problem
lies with the use of proficiency tests at the end of writing courses. Fortunately, Armstrong has now
introduced a pilot program in which students are graded on portfolios of essays produced over the
semester; the exit exam is only one entry in the portfolio, reducing its significance in the class. Rough
drafts are attached to the essays to verify that the essays were written by the students. The portfolio
grading method still needs to be evaluated and given the English faculty's approval, but it is clearly a
modernizing measure for the program. The Pan-African studies developmental program has been
grading portfolios--which include an exit exam--for years, according to program director Tom Spencer-
Walters. Perhaps one day the programs will wean themselves completely from these traditional exams.
Writing proficiency tests are widely used among colleges nationally. CSUN professor Rosentene
Purnell observed a "proliferation of testing" in the wake of the "perceived literacy crisis." Her 1979 and
1981 surveys revealed, respectively, that 45 and 47 percent of responding institutions were using such
tests (407). Most required them for passing beyond the freshman year; others, for passing into upper
division or for graduating. The tests undoubtedly play an important role in other universities as they do
at CSUN, and they are probably influencing instruction in similar traditionalist ways. Many of the
respondents in Purnell's surveys also used writing proficiency tests as a diagnostic or placement tool.
A placement test--to determine, for example, the appropriate writing course for incoming freshmen--
seems a legitimate practice, depending on the test's design. But the use of writing proficiency tests for
51
passing courses, advancing through college, or for graduating, creates unhealthy pressures on writing
instructors and can limit a school's concept of writing.
Wolf proposes that CSUN eliminate the WPE and instead fulfill the GWAR through an upper
division writing course within students' disciplines; that is, we would meet the CSU requirement while,
at the same time, encouraging the growth of writing across the disciplines. Passage of the GWAR
could be determined by committees of portfolio readers in order to avoid inconsistencies of instructor
grading across the courses. Supporters of the WPE will no doubt argue that such a method allows too
much variance: student papers would not address the same topics; students might cheat by getting
others to write their papers, even their attached drafts. But the WPE itself has plenty of variance. One
test asks students a fairly accessible question about their experiences with shoddy products (80
percent passed), while another asks about the relative roles of technology and human behavior in
major world problems (59 percent passed) (Larson 1987). The bottom issue is not consistency, or
protection from cheating, or other reliability concerns. It's dollars and priorities. The WPE is cheap and
calls for little in the way of writing instruction; Wolf's proposal would cost more, and would require a
significant university commitment to writing instruction. While proponents of writing reform are
educating and advocating to win that commitment, we can also expose the hidden political agendas
behind the WPEs and GWARs, and their counterproductive role in writing education.
Long-Term Requirements: Coalitions, New Priorities
Many important writing reforms can be accomplished at the campus level--provided, of course,
that proponents of change can organize. But the big economic items on our list--professional salaries
and benefits, conversion of part-timers to full-timers, smaller teaching loads, a substantial writing
curriculum and well-funded programs--will take action at state and national levels. Here, college writing
teachers will need plenty of allies to wield influence. We will need to work with other college faculty and
with schoolteachers; with other unions; with advocates for health care, child care, the elderly, the
homeless.
52
In California, one of the tasks of such a coalition is defeating the "tax revolt" led by real estate
and corporate interests. The tax revolt laws, notably Proposition 13 in 1978 and the Gann Initiative
which followed, have reduced property taxes while putting a strong cap on state spending, reducing the
moneys available for education, health, and other public services. In 1988, a coalition of groups
including the California Faculty Association placed Proposition 71--a measure to moderate the Gann
Initiative and release more state funds--on the June ballot. Tax revolters, on the other hand, put
forward Proposition 72 to strengthen Gann. California voters heavily rejected Prop. 72 (38% yes, 62%
no), but they also turned down Prop. 71 by a narrow margin (49% yes, 51% no). While the Prop. 71
coalition was not successful in June, the undoing of the tax revolt laws and the directing of state funds
toward social needs will ultimately depend on the strength of such "human needs" coalitions.
Because state coffers are finite, our broad human needs coalition must finally target Washington,
which collects most of our tax billions. There we find the military thriving at $300 billion a year, while
the ax continues to fall upon education, health, and welfare. We also find the general tax burden
shifting away from wealthy corporate owners to bear more heavily upon middle- and lower-income
groups. Our country certainly has the money to hire full-time composition teachers. But again, it's
priorities. Our coalition will need to muster the strength to introduce our priorities.
53
CHAPTER 5
MODERN COMPOSITION AND POLITICAL VISIONS
Two years after my CSUN study, I see its reform and action proposals as broadly legitimate and
worth supporting. Yes, writing programs need stronger funding, modernization, and administrative
autonomy from the English department literati. Yes, composition teachers need to get professionally
and politically active, and must join hands with allies to demand a shift in government spending
priorities toward education and the meeting of human needs. But I have come to a more critical view of
the "modernization" proposed in the study. My call for the introduction of "modern" composition
instruction as against "traditional" instruction reflected a dualism that I had imbibed from composition
modernists at Northridge and from the composition literature generally. Richard Young, Maxine
Hairston, C. H. Knoblauch and Lil Brannon, and many others had taught me of a "paradigm shift" from
"current-traditional rhetoric" to "contemporary rhetoric," from product-oriented, teacher-centered writing
instruction to process-oriented, student-centered instruction. While I was aware that there were
differences and debates among the moderns themselves, these debates seemed less important to me
than that there was an "old" way of teaching and a "new" way. Composition teachers and others
needed to study the new paradigm and help move our writing programs toward the humanistic
pedagogies of the modern field.
Today, while I continue to regard modern composition as constituting a broad pedagogical
advance over current-traditional approaches, I also see the modern field as fraught with problems
whose significance does not pale beside the great divide between process and product pedagogy. In
particular, this chapter will suggest that the modern field is as lacking in a well-examined sense of
pedagogical and social purpose as the current-traditional model we have come to reject. My CSUN
study speaks of how composition should be taught, and of the need for modern methodologies.
But it does not ask why composition should be taught in the first place, i.e., toward what end are we
educating. Even as my study brought a radical activist edge to writing program reform, I did not apply
that same radicalism to the teaching project itself. I saw the unions and human needs coalitions as
54
vehicles for political resistance, but I did not yet see the classroom itself as a terrain for resistance.
Chapter 4 does discuss briefly the need for engaging students in a critique of education, but I myself
had not yet embarked on a broad critique. I had not yet made the link between my own political values
and my conception of writing instruction.
The technocratic narrowness that informed my work likewise informs the widest sectors of the
composition profession, whose discussions, proposals, and theories overwhelmingly gear to how
writing can better be taught, while rarely stepping back to ask why we do what we do. My proposal
here is that the composition profession cannot adequately address student writing problems, such as
those we observe at CSUN, without a wider sense of our own purposes. In fact, theoretically speaking,
I think it a mistake to even to attempt to define what constitutes a writing problem--much less propose
classroom strategies to solve what we consider the problem--without first establishing why we are
teaching writing. Our "whys" provide--or should provide--the basis for the "hows" that follow; our goals
for the writing classroom define what constitutes a writing problem. Furthermore, the goals and
methods we do choose for the classroom imply certain goals for the world, imply values. Such
commentators as James Berlin, Patricia Bizzell, Victor Vitanza, and Greg Myers have been suggesting
how debates on pedagogy, composing process, or rhetorical theory involve often-covert debates about
values, ideology, politics. This chapter is informed by, and hopes to contribute to, the efforts of such
writers to make the covert overt, to locate and assess the ideologies that guide modern composition.
My particular focus will be toward questions of purpose and ultimate ends. I will explore and critique
the prevailing purposes of modern composition, with special concern for the social visions implied by
those purposes. Though I will argue on behalf of the purposes and visions that I favor, I more generally
hope to encourage writing teachers to more fully explore and articulate their own purposes.
By clarifying our larger world aims, we may not only have more appropriately directed debates in
the composition profession, but we will set firmer ground for making pedagogical choices, and for
judging different models and theories. Our larger social why can also provide our students a clearer
basis for participating in the writing class. As Philip Brady observes, in a valuable and under-distributed
little collection entitled The "Why's" of Teaching Composition, "many students are no longer willing to
55
simply take our word that writing 'is part of a basic education' or that writing 'will be good for you in the
future….' " (v-vi). Sharing our broader why with students can, ideally, open up the kind of discussion
that will help students determine their own whys and why-nots with regard to writing and to education.
Classroom Purposes and Better-World Visions
This chapter assumes that the purposes we establish for the teaching of composition will be in
accord, or should be in accord, with our better-world vision--our notion of how the world can be made a
better place, and of what that "better place" should look like. Most of us do not carry explicit world
visions in our mind; rather, we carry implicit visions, or a set of values which may or may not be strongly
articulated. When we make our implicit vision explicit, we also draw the contours of our ideology.
Göran Therborn in The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology offers that an ideology addresses
three questions: What exists? What is good? What is possible? (Berlin 1988). To create a vision, we
would first ask ourselves what our values are, and then imagine how a society would be arranged that
put our values into practice (what is good?). Next, we would ask whether our ideal society is realistic
(what is possible?). For example, do certain aspects of human nature pose insurmountable obstacles?
(what exists?) Finally, we would determine what is the best we consider possible for humanity, and
what steps might be necessary to move us from our present global mess toward our (realistically) ideal
society. We will call this our better-world vision. Most of us describe our values through a common set
of words--democracy, equality, justice, compassion--but we mean different things by the words. When
we link our values to a vision of how society should be arranged, our values take on more definite
meaning.
The proposal that we shape our pedagogies according to our social goals may run against the
grain of many teachers who believe our job is to teach writing in a relatively neutral manner, leaving our
personal political agendas outside the classroom. At the same time, the notion that education should
serve the welfare and betterment of society has been a constant in American public discourse since the
country's founding. Thomas Jefferson argued that an educated citizenry would be an essential
safeguard against governmental tyranny and, in Jefferson's elitist terms, would produce "a national
56
aristocracy of talent" to assume the nation's leadership. The Jacksonian democrats would later
propound a more egalitarian conception wherein universal free schooling would be "an equalizer rather
than a selector." For Jacksonians, the school had the task of "eliminating all privilege and destroying all
elites by giving to all men the same good common education" (Perkinson 11-12). Andrew Carnegie
saw the "true panacea for all the ills of the body politic" bubbling forth through "education, education,
education," and Lyndon B. Johnson agreed that "the answer for all our national problems comes down
to one single word: education" (qtd. in Perkinson, front matter). Education's social-cure potential has
been often exaggerated, and radical critics argue that education's makers and shapers have actually
been more interested in social control than social solutions (Bowles and Gintis; Apple; Apple and Weis;
Sharp and Green; Giroux and Purpel). But if we only see in education, as Henry Giroux proposes
(1983), one "contested terrain" among many terrains, it is certainly one major institution where
ideological power is wielded and social purposes pursued.
The widespread objection to teachers bringing their social-political goals to the classroom derives
in part from the positivist belief that educators are passing along objective, neutral knowledge--a belief
that has been widely challenged by proponents of knowledge as a social construct (Kuhn; Bizzell 1979;
LeFevre; Popkewitz 1978, 1980), and also challenged by critics who see the "reification of knowledge"
as a means by which knowledge that serves elite social control is protected from criticism (Popkewitz
1987b; Giroux 1980; Apple). Yet, the objection to teachers introducing social goals may also reflect
schooling's division of labor between the few top administrators who retain the right to determine larger
goals and purposes, and the mass of teacher-workers who are expected to carry out the agenda set by
administrators. Most teachers--especially, though not exclusively, at the elementary-secondary level--
have internalized the roles assigned them within this undemocratic framework: they do not see
themselves as having the right or the expertise to determine, with others, the social purposes of
education (Densmore).
Whatever neutrality teachers may claim, I believe that people who work in education are very
much motivated by social visions, or by sets of values that imply visions. Peter Elbow calls writing
teachers "closet preachers" who "feign modest goals" but "deep down, want the moon." "People who
57
end up as writing teachers were often most compelled, when going to school, by questions like 'what is
good and bad?' and 'why do people do what they do?' and 'how can I make the world
better?' " (1978: 57). For teachers to take their visions out of the closet may constitute not only a
challenge to administrators, but a challenge to teachers' defined social role as neutral conveyers of
official knowledge (Althusser). If, at the same time, students are invited and given the confidence to
criticize teacherly visions and to develop and promote their own visions in the classroom and beyond,
traditional education is undermined further. Restrictive institutional contexts may allow us to pursue
such visionary education in only piecemeal fashion, or may require collective teacher endeavors to alter
the institutional context. But our notions of how the world should be deserve sharing. By submitting
them to the critical scrutiny of our community of colleagues and students, we allow our visions to
become more coherent and mature. And we are more apt to find fellow travelers with whom to work to
achieve the visions. The profession of composition provides the open forum we need for sharing and
arguing out our social proposals. Our journals and conferences should help us to clarify visions, and
help us to work out strategies for putting our social purposes into teaching practice in local contexts.
Many composition teachers do design pedagogies to accord with their social aims--though the
process tends to be a covert one that does not allow the larger aims to be questioned or scrutinized by
students or colleagues. On the other hand, even when we attempt to keep our social agenda separate
from our teaching--or believe we have no social agenda--what we do in the classroom unavoidably has
social-political implications (on the value-laden nature of any teaching, see Kohlberg and Mayer, and
Boehm; as applied to educational research, see Popkewitz 1978). I believe that the composition
profession could benefit enormously by becoming more aware of the social purposes implicit in our
work. An exposition and critique of those purposes constitutes an essential starting point in planning
how to educate for a better world. I have culled from the composition literature various purposes given
for the learning and/or teaching of writing. I have also looked for indications of social vision that the
teaching goals are intended to serve. Since social aims are rarely made very clear, however, I have
often looked instead for the social purposes that the teaching goals seem to imply. I will represent the
teaching goals and social visions current in the field through five models: utility, individual growth,
58
individual mobility, collaborative growth, and collective empowerment. I will critique the first four
models, and call for further development of the fifth model.
Model I: Utility
The goal of this book is to help you gain more control of your own composing process: to
become more efficient as a writer and more effective with your readers.
--Linda Flower, Problem-Solving Strategies for Writing (2)
In this book we propose to introduce you to the many types of writing assignments that you
may confront in college and to prepare you to do these assignments successfully.
--Elaine Maimon et al., Writing in the Arts and Sciences (7)
The utility model represents the narrowest and predominant conception of the purposes for
teaching composition. The aim is to help students "write effectively" or "write well" for school, careers,
life in general. As defined in current-traditional instruction, effective writing is clear, editorially correct,
and in conformity with the five-paragraph model or other formulaic demands. In the contemporary view,
however, effective writing is more adequately defined as achieving the writer's communicative purpose
in the specific rhetorical situation, and this writing ability is integrally linked to critical thinking ability. But
toward what social ends shall we teach students to write better? In the utility model, larger social ends
are not at issue: our job is simply to teach good writing. Linda Flower implies that the larger purposes
be left up to the students: "Whatever your goals are, you are interested in discovering better ways to
achieve them" (1). This sounds fair, doesn't it? Yet, in the context of an unfair society, such apparently
neutral pedagogies may not be neutral and may not be fair. If our purpose is only to help students
better achieve their goals, whatever their goals are, without our attempting to challenge, influence, or
prompt reflection upon those goals, then we are practicing a pedagogy of the status quo. The utility
model implies a social reform strategy which seeks to help society do better whatever it is now doing.
Unfortunately, some of the things our society now does leaves many people hungry and homeless, and
renders our planet decreasingly habitable. Do we want our colleges to produce effective
59
communicators who help employers become "better" at busting unions? "better" at designing the
means for nuclear annihilation?
If our teaching purposes do not extend beyond the utilitarian, we have no pressing reason for
raising such questions. In fact, some utility-oriented writing teachers seem bent on turning students
away from larger issues. This is most notable among those who see writing as problem solving, where
the requirement for a specific, "operational" solution tends to keep in line students interested in social
criticism. If a student writer asks, "What can be done about our oppressive administration?" the
question would be too vague and emotion-laden, according to Young, Becker, and Pike's Rhetoric:
Discovery and Change. The writer should instead focus on specific acts: how can we induce the
administration to extend library hours, or eliminate student driving restrictions, or abolish its requirement
that all freshmen live in dormitories (96). The authors' alternatives may be easier to solve, but what if
the student wants to do something about the administration's general oppressiveness? The authors
consider oppression too "vague" a problem for a writing assignment. But there are plenty of writers in
the world who purport to discuss oppression in quite definite terms as, for example, Simone De
Beauvoir discussed the oppression of women, and Martin Luther King the oppression of blacks. The
Rhetoric authors secondly object that discussing oppression would be too emotional, but they offer no
reason why emotional terms or topics should be avoided. The desire to avoid emotionality could lead
to the exclusion of any number of important issues from the writing classroom. Young, Becker, and
Pike offer that a well-asked question "defines what is sought and guides but does not constrict inquiry"
(96). Their claim is ironic, since turning students away from the large problem of administrative
oppressiveness and to a smaller problem of extending library hours is certainly to constrict inquiry.
Flower also prefers that her students stay "specific." When students fail to establish realistic goals for
their writing assignments, Flower warns, "they often produce essays on enormous topics such as the
problem of nuclear disarmament--problems on which they have limited inside information and limited
reason to write. . . . In two pages what can you say on such topics that anyone would really want to
read?" (19) Yet, students may have very good reason to write on such topics as nuclear disarmament,
and if we allow such topics to be discussed only by authorities with the "inside information," we limit the
60
capacity of students and the general public to intervene in global issues. Reductionist problem solving
often does not encourage democratic modes of thought (see Berthoff and Ohmann for further critique of
problem solving).
Constraints on Utility: Social Inequalities
The key unfairness of utilitarian pedagogy, however, lies not in its failure to address the big
issues "out there," but in its general neglect of the histories and socially imposed inequalities that affect
students' own fortunes in the writing classroom, in college, in their career pursuits. Shirley Brice
Heath's pioneering ethnography Ways with Words shows how children from their day of birth begin to
acquire different endowments of "cultural capital" (Bordieu's term) that weigh heavily upon their
success in school. Heath researched the ways of language and life in two small working-class
communities, one black and one white, in the Carolina Piedmont, and compared these with the cultural
ways of the black and white middle-class residents of a nearby larger town. She found that the
language and values, the concepts of time, space, and order, and the sense of self-importance learned
in infancy and early childhood made the middle-class children (of both races) better equipped than the
working-class children for the kinds of thinking, work, and literacy demanded at school. Rather than
working to counter such class differentials--which, in the school projects developed by Heath, was
sought by valuing and building upon the ways and resources that working-class children bring with
them to school--most schools tend to reinforce and strengthen class and other differentials. One of the
seminal studies on the class bias in school tracking was the 1970 work of Ray Rist, who found that a
class of ghetto children was divided into ability groups during the second week of kindergarten, and that
the teacher's decision to place children in "fast," "average," or "slow" groups appeared to be based
primarily on students' socioeconomic status, rather than on any demonstrated ability differences. The
teacher's differential academic expectations became self-fulfilling prophecies, and students were
directed into relatively rigid learning tracks in subsequent years.
In a 1980 study, Jean Anyon observed the occupational channeling in a comparison of five
schools--two "working-class" schools, one "middle-class," one "affluent professional," and one
61
"executive elite" school. In each setting, the work patterns, school knowledge, and teacher-student
roles helped prepare students to assume their expected places in the occupational/class hierarchy.
Learning in the working class schools meant following the steps of a usually mechanical procedure,
involving rote behavior and very little decision making or choice. In the middle-class school, students
looked for the "right answer" by following directions, but the directions often called for some figuring and
making of choices. The affluent professional school emphasized more creative, independent kinds of
learning; students were continually asked to express and apply ideas and concepts. The executive
elite school was even more geared to developing students' analytical powers. Students were expected
to conceptualize rules by which elements may fit together in systems and then to apply these rules in
solving problems. One example of the relative power enjoyed by the executive elite students was a
series of language arts assignments where each student had to plan and present a lesson, including a
worksheet or game and a homework assignment, for the whole class; afterwards, the class would
critically appraise the presentation. Such an assignment would be unthinkable within the narrow
obedience routines of the working-class schools. In general, the higher the students' social class, the
more their learning shifted away from the memorization of facts and getting right answers, and moved
toward the conceptualizing of science, math, and social frameworks. The executive elite students were
explicitly taught to think not in terms of right or wrong answers, but in terms of whether they agreed or
disagreed with given answers. Hence, in terms of William Perry's scheme for intellectual and ethical
development during the college years, the elite children were advancing fruitfully along toward a
position of committed relativism, while the working-class and middle-class children were being trained
in dualistic absolutes.
Processes of class channeling continue up through the college years. Donald Lazere describes
California's three-tiered state college system--a model widely emulated throughout the U.S.--which
consists of the elite Universities of California for the best academic achievers, the non-elite California
State Universities for the middle achievers, and the bottom-track two-year community colleges, which
have open admissions. Although, according to a 1960 Master Plan, the three tiers were supposed to
serve their students equally well, different funding bases soon led to inequities. A 1969 study cited by
62
Lazere found that, of every $100 the state spent for higher education, an average of $60 was spent for
each UC student, $30 for each CSU student, and $10 for each community college student. A later
study held that
the unequal funding per student takes place not only on the level of graduate education and
research at UC, where it might be justified, but in undergraduate and especially lower-division
programs, such as Freshman English, that are comparable in the three systems and are
supposed to be the strong points of the CSU and community colleges relative to UC. (Lazere
383)
The inequitable funding--which undoubtedly contributes to the budget shortages observed in my CSUN
study--impacts not only on the instruction and services available to students but, Lazere points out,
leads to differences in the physical environment. Spacious grounds and expressive, imaginative
buildings at the UCs versus the no-frills landscapes at the community colleges translates into less self-
esteem and less enthusiasm for studies at the latter institutions. Of course, the lower-income students,
who are most often in need of the best instruction and services and motivating environment, are the
least likely to have access to these. A 1982 state-commissioned report tabulated the numbers of
dependent undergraduates in the three college systems who came from families with annual incomes
of $30,000 or more: 64 percent of UC students, 55 percent of CSU students, and 31 percent of
community college students fit this category (Lazere 383).
The impact of educational channeling, combined with other institutional and historic inequities,
upon minorities has been well-documented. Blacks and Hispanics, the two largest nonwhite minorities,
are less likely to be graduated from high school than are whites. Blacks and Hispanics who do
graduate high school are less likely than whites to enter college (Astin 51). Blacks and Hispanics who
do enter college are overrepresented in the two-year institutions (i.e., the college low track), and are
also overrepresented among those who leave college before completing their bachelor's degrees
(Wilson 125, Astin 51). While women do enjoy parity with men in educational attainment, gender
disparity in the job market is even greater than racial disparity. Among college graduates who worked
63
full-time year-round in 1987, black males earned 80 percent, black females earned 67 percent, and
white females earned 68 percent of what white males earned (U.S. Bureau 137-44).
A cherished American ideal, alive and well in the composition field, sees education as the key to
eliminating such inequities. We have seen, however, that education widely supports and reinforces
social inequalities. This is evidenced not only in the tracking systems, with their differential pedagogies
and environments, but in textbooks that underrepresent and misrepresent the histories and present
realities of minorities, women, workers, and other groups (Anyon 1979; Hahn and Blankenship;
Ellington). The Council on Interracial Books for Children believes that textbooks' characterizations of
U.S. society as a "true democracy," along with avoidance of our society's structural injustices, leaves
students from less privileged groups with only themselves to blame for their failures. Students reading
the widely used secondary level history texts assessed by the Council in 1977 "might well conclude that
women and third world people are unsuccessful by nature, heredity, or inclination":
Native Americans were dispossessed of their land because they "did not understand the
concept of private land ownership"; Asian workers received low wages because they were
"willing to work for very little"; Blacks could not find good urban jobs because they were
"unskilled and uneducated"; Chicanos face problems because they are "not fluent in English";
Filipinos and Puerto Ricans were colonized because they were "not ready for self-government";
and women "lack sufficient strength" and are "too frequently pregnant" to be an important part
of the workforce. (90, 91)
That such messages may effectively shape young people's thinking is suggested in Michelle Fine's
1983 study of New York City youths, mostly black and Hispanic, who resided at or attended juvenile
residential facilities because of academic, family, or other problems. The surveyed youths widely
agreed with the statement, "My problems are my own fault," and were more likely to attribute their
failures to their personality than to situational factors such as poverty, race, family, or neighborhood
(228). Fine believes that the individualistic perspectives offered at school tend to reinforce students'
sense of powerlessness when they fail academically. "Not that these adolescents have no role in
creating their own problems, but the economic and social realities of their lives do create the conditions
64
in which these youths exist, get into trouble, and survive" (233). She argues that effective schooling
must encourage social criticism and social advocacy: "For schools not to reproduce self-blaming
youths, schools need to create contexts in which economic and social inequities are examined
meaningfully and in which education itself is analyzed critically. Schools also need to be leaders in
agitating for economic and social conditions in which human needs can be nurtured" (233). The
Council on Interracial Books concurs: "Young people should learn of the societal roadblocks that must
be surmounted before equity is achieved. They should learn why and how to create the social changes
necessary to achieve equity" (29).
Utilitarian writing classrooms that seek to help students "achieve their goals," without
encouraging students to explore the social context in which they pursue their goals, leave students ill-
equipped for their trials in academe and beyond. As Patricia Bizzell points out, our pedagogical
choices affect a heterogenous student population unequally (1982a: 237). Working-class college
students who flounder in their attempts at "academic discourse," when it seems to come so readily to
their more affluent classmates, need more than prescriptions for individual success which lend
themselves to rationales of self-doubt and self-blame. They need "the critical training to trace their
victimage to social forces," including the channeling processes just described, and "hence to work
toward control of their own destinies," such as through recognition of the non-fixed nature of existing
social arrangements (Bizzell 1982b: 196). They also need pedagogies that affirm and make active use
of working-class students' own knowledge, cultural resources, and histories (Heath; Shor 1987a,
1987b). In fact, all kinds of students--middle class and working class, majority and minority, men and
women--need legitimated their sense of alienation with authoritarian classrooms and dull, life-irrelevant
curricula that schools and colleges impose upon them. They need teachers who model alternative,
egalitarian pedagogies, and who offer students frameworks not only for mastering the intellectual tools
of academe, but for critiquing academe, critiquing society, and struggling for democratic power in our
social institutions. In short, the writing classroom needs purposes and visions that are far broader than
the teaching of "effective writing."
65
The better-world vision implied in the utility model is one in which individuals more effectively
pursue their goals; that is, it represents the capitalist ideal. As Adam Smith proposed, "the natural effort
of every individual to better his own condition" would carry capitalist society to wealth and prosperity
(540). Smith recognized that this competitive system involves human costs: "Wherever there is great
property, there is great inequality. For one very rich man, there must be at least five hundred poor. . . ."
(709-10) But, regretfully, human nature makes such costs inevitable. "The violence and injustice of the
rulers of mankind is an ancient evil, for which, I am afraid, the nature of human affairs can scarce admit
of a remedy" (493). This is not to suggest that Flower, Maimon et al., and others who indicate narrowly
utilitarian purposes for the writing classroom necessarily share the views of Adam Smith. I wish only to
point out what their indicated purposes seem to socially imply. There may be legitimate reasons for
describing our purposes more narrowly than we actually conceive them--e.g., keeping one's job, the
constraints of publishing--and the purposes described here and in the pages ahead may tell as much
about the institutional objectives with which we make compromises as about the views of the authors
themselves. Yet, I think that utilitarian notions of education and corporate-efficiency ideals are a
genuine influence, perhaps the most powerful influence, among theorists of composition; such certainly
holds true for American educational thinkers historically (Callahan; Shannon; Popkewitz 1987a). I
believe it important that we share our larger purposes in textbooks and professional articles, insofar as
the context permits. In the classroom, sharing our purposes and visions demystifies education for our
students. And, if we are open to students' challenges, to hearing their purposes, to negotiating among
our differing agendas--the teacher's, the students', the institution's--the writing classroom becomes a
more humane and democratic place.
Model II: Individual Growth
Writing does not serve merely a utilitarian function. That is why we encourage students to
appreciate writing that discovers meaning, form, and self.
--Erika Lindemann, A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers (7)
66
I'm not saying people are wicked if they keep their real voice a secret, but they are neglecting a
great source of power.
--Peter Elbow, Writing with Power (294)
We need to design a college writing curriculum that will systematically confront students with
tasks to develop their discursive and cognitive maturity.
--Janice Hays, "The Development of Discursive Maturity in College Writers" (1983: 141)
I will discuss four aims that seem to fall under the rubric of individual growth: self-awareness,
honesty, intellectual growth, and power to influence others. Proponents of individual growth rarely
indicate their larger visions, and each of the four aims might be read along utilitarian lines. For
example, Anne Ruggles Gere in The "Why's" of Teaching Composition sees "integrity and self-
knowledge" as having "internal value" for writing students, but she also stresses how these qualities
enhance students' "political power," meaning their ability to persuade an audience. "I use the word
'political' in its broadest sense--to push the world in a certain direction, to alter people's ideas and
ideals" (28). Toward which direction does Gere wish students to push the world? Which ideas and
ideals does she believe need altering? That students should push the world toward "integrity" can be
read in Gere, but is not explicitly stated, and we can as readily construe a utilitarian call to help students
push the world wherever they wish to push it. In fact, the pursuit of personal or intellectual growth
toward unexamined social ends is an overwhelming trend in composition. However, as we have
already addressed general problems in the utility model, we will now consider the literature as
expressing social visions beyond mere utility.
Self-Awareness
Self-discovery or self-awareness is a key project of the "expressionist" school of composition
(see Berlin's typology, 1982). What students are supposed to discover about themselves, and toward
what end, is not discussed much in the literature--assumably, expressionists wish their students to find
these answers for themselves. Yet, expressionism does seem to favor certain kinds of discoveries
67
more than others. Writing teachers "must recognize and use as the psychologists do in therapy, a
person's desire to actualize himself," says pioneering expressionist Gordon Rohman (1965: 108). Self-
actualization is identified with an inner "sense of power, of self-fulfillment," and with becoming "more of
the person we potentially can be" (Rohman 1965: 112; 1972: 374). Expressionists believe student
writers self-actualize by approaching their subject with integrity, freshness, a growing sense of their
uniqueness--by discovering what Ken Macrorie calls one's "authentic voice" (1970a: 149), and Peter
Elbow, "what your inner self sounds like" (1981: 306).
The self that the expressionists wish us to discover is thus characterized by its authenticity
(discussed below under "honesty") and its uniqueness. Expressionist uniqueness, or individuality, is
tempered somewhat with references to commonality--Rohman offers that when a writer reveals his/her
unique experience, "we recognize the experience as our own too" (1965: 108)--and this individuality-
versus-commonality creates a theoretical tension that begs to be sorted through by proponents of
expressionism. But, in general terms, expressionism regards the writer more as an individual than a
social being. Donald Murray likens our students to "fingerprints and voiceprints, each different from the
other," and advises the teacher, "If you are able to accept your loneliness, your individuality, then you
are on the way to accepting theirs and helping them to accept it too" (132, 145). Expressionist students
help each other in the search for their unique truth by responding to drafts. But, as Elbow explains,
students are not to theorize or argue about responses, nor discuss or theorize about the subject matter
addressed by the writer (1973: 85-106). Afterwards, the writer uses the peer responses "for his own
private purposes" (1973: 140). Likewise, Murray's students have no discussion before writing since this
"may get in the way of the students' writing the way they write" (75). If, while responding to drafts,
students begin talking about the subject rather than what the writer has said about the subject, the
teacher should "let that run for a short while, but then bring the discussion back to the treatment of the
subject, not the subject itself" (201). This emphasis on uniqueness and individual truths has political
and social ramifications. Murray observes in the writing classroom a range of experiences and
backgrounds, with "welfare mothers sitting beside children of the corporate rich" (133). For Murray,
such differences of life fortune are part of a "diversity" to be "gloried in," but he does not discuss them
68
as opportunities for students to explore the impact of social inequalities in our lives, or as opportunities
to make critical judgments or moral commitments. Whether the student is rich or poor, has higher or
lower aspirations, is academically successful or unsuccessful, they are encouraged to see their
condition as an individual matter, rather than a social and political matter. Hence, while the assumed
goal is self-affirmation, expressionist individualism becomes a prescription for self-blame.
The expressionist's better world is one in which we pursue our individual purposes, and it is not
incompatible with Adam Smith's capitalist scheme. But the concern is less with economic structure
than with internal life--a vision well attuned to Eastern philosophies, which are regularly cited in
expressionist literature. Whatever we do in the world, it should be done with a clear sense of who we
are inside. In the face of unjust authority or unjust institutions, this often means a preference for the
bending-reed approach, for creatively adapting to--rather than collectively challenging--dislikeable
conditions. Consider Elbow's advice to a student or worker who is unhappy with the writing assignment
required by a teacher or boss:
Perhaps you must write an essay for a teacher who never seems to understand you; or a report
for a supervisor who never seems able to see things the way you do; or a research report on a
topic that has always scared and confused you. If you try to write in the most useful voice for
this situation--perhaps cheerful politeness or down-to-business impersonality--the anger will
probably show through anyway. . . .
In a situation like this it helps to take a roundabout approach. First do lots of freewriting
where you are angry and tell your reader all your feelings in whatever voices come. Then get
back to the real topic.
After doing lots more writing and exploration of the topic without worrying about the tone, the student will
find it "relatively easy to revise and rewrite something powerful and effective for that reader" (1981: 307-
8). Elbow's advice is sound in the sense that we are often caught in circumstances that forbid open
complaint or expression of anger, and that blowing off steam elsewhere is often necessary to perform
well the work required of us. Yet, because Elbow does not even consider the possibility of turning anger
69
into positive resistance, nor consider the need for larger political strategies to undo the hierarchal
structures that make us angry in the first place, he offers us only a vision of perpetual surrender to
authority. The expressionist focus is less toward the transformation of oppressive social structures, and
more toward techniques to help people feel better within alienating circumstances.
Some interesting calls for self-actualizing pedagogy have been coming from observers of the
labor market. Notably since the late 1960s, the number of high-skilled, high-paying jobs has not kept
pace with our country's increasing population of college graduates. Russell Rumberger, whose 1981
book Overeducation in the U.S. Labor Market substantiated several earlier studies (Berg, Freeman,
Carnegie), points to a "growing disparity between the higher expectations of young people and the lack
of opportunity to satisfy them" (15). Rumberger estimates that 40 percent of all U.S. workers with some
college education were overeducated for their jobs in 1976, that 56 percent of younger workers faced
this circumstance, and that projections to 1985 indicate a deepening
overeducation (or under-utilization) trend (86-96). (National and state education commissions have
widely claimed that technology is upgrading general skill requirements in the job market; this claim is
challenged by Rumberger [1987] and by other contributors in Burke and Rumberger's The Future
Impact of Technology on Work and Education.) James O'Toole, supervisor of the 1973 federally-
sponsored study Work in America, worries that the disjunction between education and employment is
creating frustration and low morale among younger workers--"workers who, ironically, have the
educational backgrounds to articulate their dissatisfactions":
A situation in which taxi drivers have college degrees is not necessarily benign. . . . College-
educated taxi drivers in New York City have formed a radical socialist Taxi Rank and File
Coalition and control fifteen of fifty garages in the city. The coalition garnered 20 percent of the
vote in a 1974 union election. (1977: 59)
O'Toole comforts non-socialist readers that this is not to alarm or forecast revolution. He believes,
however, that the situation demands a new approach to education, instilling career expectations that
are not "lower," but "realistic." The approach would look to John Dewey's education for "human
70
growth," which is based on the notion that "most people find life rewarding and satisfying when it is
experienced as a continuous course toward fulfilling one's individual potential--both on and off the job"
(140). O'Toole explains: "Dewey wanted to equip youth to find educative experience even in the worst
jobs. He felt that each worker should have 'the education which enables him to see within his daily
work all there is in it of large and human significance' " (141). Apparently, a data entry clerk typing
numbers into a computer for eight hours a day may find her work illuminating and enriching if she has
"discovered herself." The key for O'Toole, though, is that the depressant conditions of the labor market
require that we offer youth a broad, growth-oriented schooling that permits "adaptability and coping with
change in an unpredictable environment. . . . Historically, the people most able to adapt to the
vicissitudes of social life have been the liberally educated, for whom learning has always been a way of
life" (145, 147).
Similar advice is offered by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education. Their 1973 report on
College Graduates and Jobs, significantly subtitled Adjusting to a New Labor Market Situation,
suggests that "the prospects of grave political repercussions" can be diminished if college students
learn to "adjust" to new circumstances by "developing realistic expectations about jobs," and by looking
on higher education as personal growth. College should be seen as "much more than preparation for
an occupation," but rather as an opportunity to "broaden interests that can enrich all of subsequent life":
"Higher education was once most helpful in entering a higher class status; subsequently, in entering
into a better job; and increasingly now, in entering into a better life" (10). So, students should not
expect a better job, but they should expect a better life! Expressionists and others who teach
composition for growth and self-discovery must develop a clear conception of their social goals. Do we
want self-aware students who are forever adapting to the "vicissitudes of social life?" Or do we
envision ourselves and our students democratically directing our social course?
Honesty
Honesty, integrity, and authenticity are terms that hold mystery for expressionists, a mystery tied
to their belief in a magical Truth to be discovered deep inside of us. This belief is often only put to us
71
implicitly, but Elbow is straightforward: the writer's agenda is to "put magic into words," "the entrance
into magic is through the truth," and "the best advice is simply to believe in magic and find where your
magic lies" (1981: 370). A magical Truth is linked to a magical Unity. Again, the linkage is often only
hinted toward, as in Gere's "wholistic" view of integrity. Moral honesty is "only part, and a lesser part,"
of the full meaning of integrity, says Gere. "Derived from the Latin integritas--defined as wholeness,
entireness, completeness--the word integrity means no element is missing, nothing is divided or
broken" (19). Hence, to write with integrity means to produce a composition that is whole and
complete. But the implications are more global: "Written composition exemplifies integrity to students
who face a fragmented world. Writing provides a means of uniting, of making whole. Students who
experience integrity in written composition may be able to extend that integrity to other areas of their
lives" (27). Gere seems to intend a wholeness in student writing that will promote wholeness in the
world. Were Gere looking only for wholeness, however, she would not use the word integrity, which
connotes honesty as well as wholeness. What may be informing Gere's notion of integrity is a
communion-like vision of humanity searching for the Truth that will unite us all--a notion that guides
many of our religions. The Quakers, for example, regard God as "the source of unity among conflicting
forces" (Brinton 166). "In withdrawing into the presence of God," say the Quakers, "man seeks to
perceive the whole as it is seen by God. Adherence to the part--to a particular individual, nation, race
or class--may be overcome by communion with the Father of all being" (Brinton 62). The vision finds its
modern political expression among radical pacifists, for whom nonviolence "relies on the power of truth
rather than force of arms and flows from a sense of the underlying unity of all human beings" (Cooney
and Michalowski 11). There are problems in this vision, which I will take up in my section on
collaborative growth. But those advocating wholeness as a pedagogical aim should make their
wholeness vision clear, so we can frankly assess it.
For now, let us consider the more ordinary idea of honesty in writing, as suggested by Erika
Lindemann: "Because other media threaten to re-create us as plastic people, Disney delusions, and
Madison Avenue stereotypes, we want students to write honestly, with a kind of tough sensitivity, about
subjects that matter to them" (7). If we link this composition aim to a vision, it might propose that a
72
better world is one in which people conduct their lives and affairs honestly, without corruption, and that
we begin to approach that better world by practicing honest writing and honest living ourselves, and
encouraging the same in others. While I want to make clear that I do value honesty and openness, and
I encourage this in the freshman writing classes that I teach, I want to point how honesty is insufficient
as a non-utilitarian teaching or social goal.
The achievement of an honest society must take into account the forces that lead people to
dishonesty and, in particular, must conceive of social and economic structures that will favor honest
conduct. A society that allocates inordinate power to small groups and individuals (such as corporate
owners), and then asks those individuals to not abuse that power, is trusting the wolves with the
chickens. When the power holders establish dishonest or plastic or Madison Avenue institutional
priorities, those of us who, as a matter of survival, must work in those institutions are often forced to
serve dishonest priorities. A plain case are workers in the news media. A 1983 study by Dan Hallin
tells of New York Times' El Salvador correspondent Ray Bonner, whose reportage was seen by
influential conservative critics as too sympathetic to the Salvadoran rebels. In what many observers
believe was a response to political pressures, the Times pulled Bonner out of El Salvador and later
assigned him to the financial pages (18-19). One reporter wrote to Hallin of the pressures against
expressing a left-of-center perspective in the news:
A reporter will often hold back on following the logic of his own opinion if other reporters . . . are
beginning to jokingly refer to him as a "Com/symp." Not only is he afraid some right-wing
informer lurking in the bar might overhear . . . he is even more afraid that his reputation might
get back to his desk. (qtd. in Hallin 18)
The quoted reporter's concerns are supported by case after case of firings, demotions, transfers, and
suppressed stories described in Ben Bagdikian's authoritative critique The Media Monopoly. Any overt
punishment of a reporter delivers a lasting lesson to everyone in the news organization, until
avoidance of the prohibited news subject becomes unconscious, an "internalized bias," says Bagdikian
(217-18). One of the most widely prohibited subjects is anti-corporate news. Of the 1,110 members of
the professional organization, Investigative Reporters and Editors, only 6 have corporate life as their
73
beat (56). The problem is exacerbated by the rapidly centralizing corporate ownership of the media,
and by the media's increasing obligations to corporate advertisers. The bulk of the output from our
country's 25,000 media outlets was controlled, in 1981, by 46 corporations; in 1986, by 29 corporations;
in the early nineties, media leaders predict, by a half-dozen corporations (21, 235). Bagdikian
concludes that the heads of these corporations constitute a "new Private Ministry of Information and
Culture" (xx). The media problem may be seen as the tip of the iceberg as far as constraints on honest
expression in our society. Particularly when people are dissatisfied with institutional conditions, how
often can students be honest with teachers? teachers be honest with administrators? any subordinate
be honest with any superior? All dangerous undertakings. Writing teachers should certainly strive to
create a classroom environment where students feel safe to say what they really think. But teachers
interested in an honest world should not give favor to naiveté. Students need opportunities to explore
and make judgments about the stifling of free expression in our lives, and need opportunities to imagine
alternative worlds.
Intellectual Growth
Intellectual or cognitive growth--under such terms as critical thinking, problem solving, discursive
maturity, liberal education--represents one of the most cited objectives in modern composition. When
we scan the literature for the purposes of such growth, we primarily find the silence that seems to imply
utilitarian ends (see, for example, the collection gathered by Hays et al., The Writer's Mind). But, again,
for our discussion, let us assume non-utilitarian visions on the part of our writers. An intellectual
objective with growing currency in composition is that of initiating students into the "academic discourse
community" (see discussions in Bizzell 1982a, 1982b; Bruffee 1982a, 1984; Bartholomae; see
applications in Bartholomae and Petrosky; Mike Rose; Maimon et al.). As Kenneth Bruffee proposes,
"we would see ourselves as people appointed by the knowledge communities our students aspire to
join to induct students into the conversation of educated human beings" (1982a: 111). If viewed as
social vision, Bruffee's proposal offers that a better world is one populated by intellectuals. That some
intellectuals might oppress other intellectuals does not appear to be at issue in Bruffee's work (and the
74
issue is heavily ignored in the work of other academic discourse proponents). What is important is that
people will be able to reason together through a common code, weigh issues abstractly, entertain
multiple perspectives.
Let us accept, for present purposes, that helping students join the "educated conversation" of
academe is a desirable goal--or at least that the fostering of mass intellectuality is essential to any
democratic better world. Next we must ask whether that educated-conversation project is enough, and
what values and visions inform our approach to that project. Interesting answers are suggested in the
models of moral-cognitive growth taken up by a number of composition theorists. William Perry's
influential nine-stage scheme, presented in his Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the
College Years (1968), defines a simplistic position of right-wrong dualism, an intermediate position of
relativistic thinking, and an advanced position of commitment within relativism (discussed in Bizzell
1984, Hays 1987; applied in Hays 1983, and Rosenberg). Perry's goal is for students to take a moral
stand, but a stand that is based on thoughtful reflection rather than unexamined truths. We would look
for "considered conformity as against blind conformity, judicious revolt as against blindly reactive revolt"
(209). Perry acknowledges that his model implies particular moral preferences. "The values implied by
the word 'growth' in our scheme are inescapable" and suggest that "it is better to grow than to arrest
growth or to regress" (emphasis in original) (45, 44). He sees his model as contributing to the making
of better persons and making of a better world: "An advanced person showing a high rate of growth
becomes somehow a 'better' person. . . . We would argue . . . that the final structures of our scheme
express an optimally congruent and responsible address to the present state of man's predicament"
(44, 45). In Perry, the educated better world readable in Bruffee is more definitely asserted. Moral
betterment is defined not in terms of our specific positions on justice, equality, political systems, the Ten
Commandments, or other principled criteria, but becomes rather a question of intellectual
sophistication. Whether we favor conformity or revolt, dictatorship or democracy, our positions have
equal merit in Perry's moral scheme, provided they have been reflectively determined. Paradoxically,
Perry asks students to move beyond simple relativism to commitment, while his own model refuses to
75
make the same commitment: it is a relativist model (see Kohlberg and Turiel for a fine critique of
relativistic moral education).
Let us offer to Perry's model the example of Henry Kissinger who, like most members of our
country's corporate-political elite, is a highly educated shoo-in for Perry's ninth stage of moral
development. No public figure in our times has enjoyed wider praise for his intellect. Kissinger has
taught government at Harvard, diplomacy at Georgetown; the catalog at my local university library lists
sixty-four of his works. He served as national security advisor under Nixon and Ford, secretary of state
under Ford and Carter, and won the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the agreement that ended
the Vietnam War. During his most powerful years under Nixon, our peace prize winner used his
discursive talents to co-engineer the secret invasion of Cambodia (he personally selected targets for
the B-52 raids and "seemed to enjoy playing bombadier" [Hersh 122]); to help orchestrate the
overthrow of Allende's elected left-wing government in Chile and its replacement by a brutal military
regime that was friendlier to U.S. corporate interests; to order illegal wiretapping of the Nixon
administration's political critics, and FBI/CIA spying on anti-war activists and radicals or suspected
radicals. Chronicler William Shawcross adds that Kissinger's personal qualities were less than
exemplary--self-serving, self-centered, manipulative, anti-democratic (77-79). I do agree with Perry,
Bruffee, and others that intellectuality is better than non-intellectuality, reflectiveness better than non-
reflectiveness. But educators need pedagogical models and visions that help us make the link between
intellectuality and our commitments to a just and humane world; ethically relativistic models do not
address this need.
One attempt to join intellectual growth with an explicit commitment to justice can be found in the
moral-cognitive model of Lawrence Kohlberg (see Miller for an analysis of freshman papers that uses
Kohlberg). Like Perry and many other developmentalists, Kohlberg proposes a curriculum of moral
dilemmas that stimulate students' thinking and advancement to higher stages. But, where Perry
defines moral maturity as arriving at a well-considered commitment to (seemingly) any position,
Kohlberg's highest stage involves a well-considered commitment to "principles of justice."
Unfortunately, Kohlberg's justice principles are defined vaguely as "reciprocity and equality of the
76
human rights" and "respect for the dignity of human beings as individual persons," and there are
indications that what Kohlberg has in mind is capitalist justice. What is more, Kohlberg claims that his
moral stages and principles are "culturally universal" and, specifically, that they are free of any class
bias: "The moral stages do not represent an American middle-class value bias; they are universal"
(Kohlberg and Turiel 414). Kohlberg's purportedly universal, class-neutral system is reflected in the
U.S. Constitution--"The moral basis of the Constitution and the major moral values of our society are
the principles of justice which we say are the core principles of any mature morality" (Kohlberg and
Turiel 442)--and in the value postulates of "ethical liberalism" (Kohlberg and Mayer 472). On ethical
liberalism, Kohlberg and co-author Rochelle Mayer cite the works of Mill, Dewey, Locke, Kant, John
Rawls, and a "modern statement" by R.S. Peters that relates this liberal tradition to education. In
Peters, it is argued that a just society need not be an egalitarian one, since egalitarian logic would
finally force us to genetic breeding to ensure that all of us are born with similar assets; hence,
egalitarianism leads to infringements of liberty (57). In Rawls, whom Kohlberg frequently cites in his
works, we are advised that inequalities are justified if the entrepreneurial incentives afforded by the
inequalities lead to more efficient production, thereby raising the long-term prospects of society's least
advantaged members (Rawls 78, 302; Martin 66). Although Kohlberg does not speak directly to such
points, we do notice that his list of "universal values" includes "property," "economic and business
contracts," and "equality of opportunity," but does not include equal distribution of wealth (Kohlberg and
Turiel 433). We need not grapple here with the arguments about equality and justice in order to agree
that, in a world that includes millions of socialists and other egalitarians, Kohlberg's principles of justice
are far from universal.
Those who teach writing to promote intellectual growth--and perhaps all of us do share this aim--
need to define critically the growth we wish to encourage. Suppose we accept that values and visions
are implicated in any pedagogy we choose. Suppose also that we reject Perry's moral relativism, and
Kohlberg's capitalist universals. In fact, suppose we reject in general the search for universal values:
after all, the value of "justice" may be fairly universal, but the more definite our conception of justice, the
less universalist we become. We might then conclude that our responsibility as educators is to commit
77
to, and teach from within, a moral position that is not universally shared. That is, we would embrace
biased teaching, willfully shaping our pedagogies to accord with our non-universal values. The
readings, questions, and ways of thinking that we introduce and do not introduce to our students would
become, rather than half-conscious reflections of our social-political interests, fully conscious reflections
of those interests. And what shall those interests be? By what criteria ought we to select our values?
One answer is suggested by Leon Trotsky in his 1931 essay "Their Morals and Ours":
Whoever does not care to return to Moses, Christ, or Mohammed; whoever is not satisfied with
eclectic hodge-podges must acknowledge that morality is a product of social development; that
there is nothing invariable about it; that it serves social interests; that these interests are
contradictory; that morality more than any form of ideology has a class character. (377-78)
The values we choose should express the social interests we support in a struggling world.
Writing as Individual Power
We turn now to the pedagogical aim as suggested by Andrea Lunsford: "As always, the power to
write, to express clearly and truly, translates into political, economic, and social power." (1987: 253).
That effective writing wields power--i.e., the power to influence others, the power to change the world--
is a fairly universal assumption in composition. It must be pointed out, however, that this power is most
often conceived as an individual, rather than collective, pursuit. As Elbow urges, we should never
conclude "that individuals are helpless to change the world and that words cannot move mountains"
(1981: 370). Hence, we learn that individuals can move mountains, but we do not learn that individuals
must typically join collectives to move mountains.
While the authors who teach writing as individual power give little indication of how they hope
such power will be used--and we may therefore read them as utilitarians--we might also read them as
pursuing a democratic vision. They are perhaps proposing that we can democratize society by helping
more individuals become articulate writers and speakers. This vision is a seductive one since it is
certainly true that a participatory democracy requires an articulate citizenry. We should note, however,
that those who offer writing as individual power are not discussing the need for radical social
transformations as prerequisite to democracy. The assumption, rather, is that ours is already a
78
democratic society, structurally speaking, and that our task remains to provide every individual the
literate tools needed to assert their voice within our democratic framework. This seems clearly the view
of Elaine Maimon et al.:
Learning how to articulate ideas for oneself and then for others prepares students for public
discourse in the society at large. . . . Historically, in Europe, a university was intended to be a
training ground for the religious and secular ruling classes. In the United States, Jeffersonian
democracy makes all citizens members of the ruling classes. Each person in a democracy has
a vote; each person should have a voice. (1984: ix)
While few put it so stoutly, similar democratic assumptions widely inform the composition and English
fields. At the 1987 English Coalition Conference, representatives of the National Council of Teachers
of English, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, and other major English
associations held that language arts instruction "can and should make an indispensable contribution to
educating students for participation in democracy." Abilities to communicate, listen, think critically, and
to appreciate multiple perspectives and cultural diversity were seen as the essential requirements for
democratic participation (Lloyd-Jones and Lunsford 85). Since our social context is held to be
democratic, our educational task becomes simply a matter of preparing students to become effective
participants in the civic process. Also, since a democratic society does not deny power to its citizens,
the powerless ways that writing teachers often recognize in their students and strive to help students
overcome are seen primarily in psychological terms, or as internalized cultural messages--not as a
reflection of genuine social powerlessness. Says Elbow, "Many people are tricked into feeling more
powerless and helpless than they are because of ways in which they were brought up and because of
patterns in our culture" (1978: 63).
The goal of empowering students toward democracy deserves support, and writing can be an
essential tool in that empowerment. Also, writing teachers do need to address the psychological
dimension of powerlessness noted by Elbow: members of subordinate groups widely internalize their
social status, and this becomes a barrier to their political advancement (Sennett and Cobb).
Nevertheless, any strategy for student empowerment must begin by recognizing the realities of our
79
social status, the real powerlessness that most of us live with daily, and the fundamentally
undemocratic character of American society. From C. Wright Mills' 1956 classic The Power Elite to
more recent studies of the processes of governing circles, a substantial literature has documented the
existence of a socially cohesive American ruling class, estimated by William Domhoff at 0.5 percent of
the U.S. population. This class wields a dominant influence in both major political parties; their pro-
corporate, anti-labor, and anti-third world objectives are formulated in policy planning groups such as
the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Committee for Economic
Development, the Business Roundtable, and are consistently implemented by the world's leading
capitalist states (Domhoff; Dye; Shoup and Minter; Sklar 1980a; Parenti; Moody 127-46). The most
powerful policy planning group is the 1800-member Council on Foreign Relations. Founded in 1921,
the CFR has played a decisive role in U.S. foreign policy under every administration since at least
1940. In Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy,
Laurence Shoup and William Minter's historical case studies reveal the CFR's central role in setting the
terms for U.S. participation in World War II; in planning a post-war global-capitalist order under U.S.
economic, political, and military dominance; in inspiring the U.S.-Soviet cold war; in guiding U.S.
military intervention in Vietnam; and in prompting the renewal of U.S.-China relations under the Nixon
administration. The capitalist class is well-represented in the CFR and especially predominant in the
CFR leadership. Shoup and Minter's background studies found that 55 percent of the general
members, 84 percent of the directors, and 93 percent of the officers were members of the capitalist elite
(91). Shoup and Minter note that the CFR represents primarily the largest corporations, who have the
most interest in protecting and expanding overseas investments. The top ten of Fortune's top five
hundred industrial corporations averaged four CFR members from each corporate board of directors
(97).
In 1973, under the initiative of CFR chairman and Chase Manhattan Bank chairman David
Rockefeller, the CFR established the Trilateral Commission, in which America's ruling elite could
develop cooperative global plans with their elite counterparts in Japan and Western Europe. In a 1980
anthology exploring this 300-member planning group, editor Holly Sklar calls trilateralism "the creed of
80
an international ruling class whose locus of power is the global corporation" and who "view the entire
world as their factory, farm, supermarket, and playground" (1980b: 8-9). According to the Trilateral
Commission, "history shows that every effective international system requires a custodian" (qtd. in
1980b: 8). A global custodian may well be required. But membership on the commission--and on the
CFR--is by invitation only, and these bodies are not held democratically responsible to the world over
which they aim to preside. As an indicator of these organizations' continuing power in government,
over ninety appointees in the Carter administration were present or former members of the CFR, the
Trilateral Commission (TC), or both. Jimmy Carter, Vice-President Walter Mondale, Secretary of State
Cyrus Vance, and Defense Secretary Harold Brown each belonged to both organizations. Reagan's
first administration included over eighty appointees with present or former CFR or TC affiliation,
including George Bush (who resigned from both organizations during the 1980 campaign), Secretary of
State Alexander Haig (CFR, TC) and his successor George Shultz (CFR), Defense Secretary Caspar
Weinberger (CFR, TC) and his successor Frank Carlucci (CFR) (Perloff 158, 168-69; Dye 250-51;
Domhoff 139-40; Sklar and Everdell 91-92).
While American democracy allows the common people some voice in government, such as the
right to choose between an affluent-white-male-pro-corporate Democrat or an affluent-white-male- pro-
corporate Republican, the system does not require democratic pretensions in the economic sphere.
America's richest 1 percent can control 34 percent of all national wealth and 45 percent of financial
assets without transgressing Jeffersonian democracy (Stephen Rose 9). General Motors can deprive
30,000 workers of their livelihood at Flint, Michigan, in order to seek out cheaper labor abroad, while
democracy thrives (see Michael Moore's recent film Roger and Me). In the daily life of the American
family, classroom, and workplace, we may uncover violence, fear, and the quiet normalcy of
dictatorship, but the powerlessness of a silenced child is only a state of mind in our democratic society.
If we define democracy as having a direct voice or accountable representation in all the decisions
that affect us--most vitally, decisions regarding our social resources--it becomes clear that non-
democracy and non-power for the many are structural norms in our society. Democracy so defined
allows not only a more adequate social critique, but a more adequate vision of empowerment, than
81
does democracy defined along Jeffersonian lines. It allows us to conceive of student empowerment as
something more bold than helping students "discover their power" while they (and we) remain
institutional subordinates all of our lives.
The degree to which writing can empower students, or can be translated into social-political
power, should neither be underestimated nor overestimated. The power of any particular piece of
writing to effect change in readers or effect change in the world may be enhanced by "authentic voice"
or other qualities of its content, but the social context of the communication is what is crucial.
Bagdikian tells of two letters written in 1969 by Richard Berlin, president of the Hearst Corporation, to
President Nixon and to Nixon's assistant attorney general, asking the administration to support the
Newspaper Preservation Act. The act would exempt Hearst and other large media chains from anti-
monopoly laws that forbid price-fixing agreements between companies. After receiving Berlin's letters,
the Nixon administration reversed its previous opposition to the newspaper bill, and the bill was passed.
The media giants returned the favor in 1972. Watergate stories potentially damaging to Nixon were
widely suppressed by major media in the months before the election, and Nixon, whose prior
relationship with the media had been far from happy, received the highest percentage of newspaper
endorsements of any candidate in modern times (90-101). How many richly voiced letters from
average citizens would it have taken to persuade Nixon to maintain his original stand against the
Newspaper Preservation Act? A thousand letters? Too few. A million? Perhaps. In an historical
context where the major media outlets are controlled by a handful of giants, and where average citizens
who would like to influence others through their writing have almost no alternative press, our most
persuasive words have only limited power. Of course, we do have the capacity to create new contexts,
to build vast social movements and popular presses from neighborhood to national levels that could
allow overwhelming numbers of us to become truly influential writers. And our students today do need
writing and other intellectual talents to help them begin such a project. But Elbow, Lunsford, and others
who rightfully seek to help students find power with writing must also address directly, and involve
students in exploring, the social problematics of that empowerment. We need to envision and
strategize toward social contexts in which we can practice meaningful democratic power.
82
Model III: Individual Mobility
They looked to education for the promises their parents had so often mouthed, and they
reaffirmed a faith that schooling ought to make a difference in the job a man or woman could
expect.
--Shirley Brice Heath, Ways with Words (28)
The men wanted to change their lives, and for all their earlier failures, they still held onto an
American dream: Education held the power to equalize things. After Vietnam, they had little
doubt about what their next step had to be: up and out of the pool of men society could call on
so easily to shoot and be shot at.
--Mike Rose, Lives on the Boundary (137)
Americans widely see education as door to the better jobs and the better life. In a 1989 national
survey of college freshmen, the leading "very important" reason for going to college was "to be able to
get a better job" (cited by 76 percent of respondents), and the leading important objective in life was to
be "very well-off financially" (cited by 75 percent). Students' goals are not narrowly materialistic,
however: opportunities for challenging, interesting work, and "to be helpful to others" were cited more
often than "high anticipated earnings" as essential in career choice ("Fact File"). If there are such
things as universal human pursuits, I would think that material well-being and satisfying labor ought to
be among them. Composition teachers can widely agree that the instruction we offer should help
students in their better-job quest. But our different assessments of the world, and different hopes, lead
us to help students differently. The composition field's prevailing visionary model in terms of career and
economic advancement is that of individual mobility. The mobility ideal is linked to a conscious or
unconscious acceptance of the capitalist order. Capitalism works, or can be made to work, and those
at the social bottom--for whom the system has not worked--can reach upwards through education.
Some mobility proponents, such as Ross Winterowd, are optimistic about the upward road: "The
challenge in our capitalist democracy is convincing the have-nots, who in general are the illiterate or
83
marginally literate, that the American dream is real, attainable, and worthwhile" (204). Others, such as
Lindemann, think the lanes are closing: "The argument that writing opens doors to many satisfying,
lucrative professions no longer holds up as well as it used to." But we are advised to edge into traffic
and make the best of it. "Even though many entry-level jobs do not demand exceptional writing skills,
students applying for these positions are instantly branded as illiterate if their resumes or letters contain
misspelled words. . . . The ability to write well still creates economic power" (4). Some touters of
mobility recognize that the obstacles to advancement are not only educational but political. In a 1981
symposium on Black English and education, Michigan's state employment commission director Martin
Taylor cites three major barriers to minority success in the working world: lack of education, lack of
skills, and discrimination. Regarding the last, Taylor observes that employer discrimination continues
despite legislation and affirmative action programs. He suggests not the need for more effective
political action, however, but argues that "the best protection against chronic unemployment is still
education" (242). Discrimination is thus left as a social given; education will help minorities make do in
a society that will be unfair to them in perpetuity.
The mobility question has been central in the debates over school policies on Black English and
other non-privileged dialects. After the 1979 King court case ordered the Ann Arbor, Michigan, school
district to recognize the validity of Black English and to take students' home dialects into account in the
teaching of Standard American English, some black leaders protested the case because, as Detroit
columnist Carl Rowan asserted, the King approach would "consign millions of ghetto children to a
linguistic separation which would guarantee that they will never make it in the larger U.S. society" (qtd.
in Smitherman 1981: 53). Geneva Smitherman's reply to Rowan and other King critics takes on their
mobility assumptions and places these in global context. "Note that it is not high unemployment, or the
shifting balance in world economic power, or the crises caused by a highly advanced, technological
capitalist society in the United States but 'linguistic separation,' mind you, that will keep black children
and youth from making it in the United States." Smitherman argues that the policies proposed by black
middle-class leadership "only ensure that a few blacks slide past the gatekeepers":
84
Limited by an analysis based solely on race, without considering issues of class, they are
unable to propose solutions that address the broader structural crises that affect all groups in
United States society, but affect poor blacks with disproportionate severity. While King reminds
us that standard English is a sine qua non of survival in our complex society, the harsh reality is
that if all blacks commanded the language of textbooks and technocracy, the system, as it is
presently constructed, could not accommodate all of us. Further, if our society could solve the
problem of black unemployment--and that's a big if--it would only shift the burden to some other
group. It would do nothing to address the fundamental cause of unemployment. (53)
Implied in Smitherman's response is a proposal not simply for multilingual/multicultural education,
but for political multicultural education, and for broad analyses and political programs outside the
classroom (see Smitherman 1987). It is important to stress such political and systemic contexts
because, within a new composition trend toward linguistically and culturally sensitive pedagogy, there is
not always a willingness to link insights about "cultural capital" with the implications of such insights
regarding the need to eliminate race, class, and gender oppression. In Heath's Ways with Words we
are treated to an exquisite ethnography of working-class life, and then to a very compelling pedagogical
application in which working-class children study their own community's life and culture while making
their transition into the abstract conceptual discourse of the school. We look forward to what
conclusions Heath may draw for linking such pedagogy to struggles for transcending the working-class
poverty and powerlessness her ethnography describes. But we are offered only that the school-
acquired conceptual habits "may have . . . relevance to future vocational goals" (363), that working-
class parents should learn to help their children plan their futures as do middle-class parents in the
larger town (364), and that allowing working-class ways of life to become a more integral part of school
culture can work against the role of schools in legitimating middle-class power (369). These are valid
designs and yet politically limited. Heath's conclusion looks toward the vocational advancement of
individuals, not toward the political advancement of collectives. She rightfully challenges the school's
role in reproducing unequal class relations, but what about the larger system that makes inevitable
such class inequalities? Heath answers:
85
It is easy to claim that a radical restructuring of society or the system of education is needed for
the kind of cultural bridging reported in this book to be large scale and continuous. I have
chosen to focus on the information and bridging skills needed for teachers and students as
individuals to make changes which were for them radical, and to point to ways these cultural
brokers between communities and classrooms can perhaps be the beginning of larger
changes. (369)
What Heath doesn't say is that radical teachers (e.g., Freire and others) also work on small, local
ventures as the modest "beginning of larger changes," but that their work seeks to prefigure the larger
changes by opening up dialogues and critical studies on social-political transformation. Culturally
sensitive curricula uninformed by transformative vision can become just another strategy for individual
growth--reinforcing the very mobility myths and individualist ideologies that isolate, discourage, and
often defeat working-class youth. The pedagogies Heath introduced into the Piedmont schools, while
stirring enthusiasm and promise, were later phased out, and Heath cites as a contributing factor the
movement toward back-to-basics curricula and pressures to teach to standardized tests (356). Such
eventualities remind us that we cannot afford to put our larger political needs to the margins of
education.
Redefining Career Preparation
In recent college composition trends, career preparation has meant teaching students to work in
collaborative groups, to recognize and master various kinds of discourse, and to think critically through
technocratic problem-solving models. Students, in other words, are to learn the writing and conceptual
modes, and the cooperative working habits, required on the job in technical, professional, and
administrative fields. The approach is based upon what we might call the American-dream model of
education, which encourages students to see themselves as autonomous individuals pursuing their
private career successes in an unproblematic workplace, an unproblematic labor market, and an
unproblematic world. Meanwhile, the world beyond academe is forcing workers--including college-
educated workers--to cut back upon their dreams, lower their expectations. The cutback demands--
86
e.g., Americans' average annual income in constant dollars has declined 14 percent since 1973 (U.S.
Census 110-12)--have their source in global economic trends. The profit rate on investments, the most
important indicator of economic health, took an international decline of 30-40 percent in 1965-75 and
has never recovered. At the same time, U.S. corporations, which enjoyed happy expansion and world
dominance from the early fifties to mid-sixties, have lost the competitive advantage to Japanese and, to
a lesser extent, Western European firms. According to labor journalist Kim Moody's An Injury to All:
The Decline of American Unionism, U.S. business leaders responded to the new circumstances by
getting better organized as a class in order to pursue mutual interests, such as in cutting labor costs (by
forcing union concessions, busting unions, transferring production to third world countries or to weakly
organized regions in the U.S.); shifting the tax burden away from the wealthy and toward middle- and
low-income groups; and weakening workers' bargaining power by cutting back the social net of
unemployment benefits and poverty programs. Employers' leading political lobby, the Business
Roundtable, has successfully won labor law reforms friendly to business, while detoothing the
regulatory agencies most favorable to labor, such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,
the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the National Labor Relations Board. One
manifestation of employers' aggressiveness against labor in recent decades is the growing number of
unfair labor practice charges against employers, from 3,655 in 1957 to 31,281 in 1980. Moody notes
that most unfair labor practice charges stem from the firing of workers who openly support unions (119)
(the joint employer offensive is detailed also in Slaughter and Goldfield).
College graduates entering today's labor force will encounter employer drives not only to lower
wages and reduce worker rights, but to routinize the work process itself, while placing effective control
into increasingly fewer hands. The historic efforts to rationalize labor in order to enhance profit have
traditionally been focused upon industrial workers (Braverman; Edwards; Noble). However, clerical and
service sector workers experienced similar processes as their ranks swelled during the 1950s, and
numerous studies have identified professional, technical, and administrative workers as the newest
target for labor rationalization, i.e., controlling the former controllers (Garson; Johnson; Zimbalist). Dale
87
Johnson and Christine O'Donnell observe tendencies toward "dequalification" and erosion of privilege
within many middle class occupations:
The conditions of work . . . begin to change from relative independence to dependence, from
varied, sometimes interesting, and creative activity to routine task, from superordination to
subordination, from job security to job insecurity, from employment as educated and skilled
labor to underemployment in terms of education and skill levels attained, and from economic
well-being to relatively reduced levels of income. (230)
Philip Kraft traces such changes in the field of computer programming. During the 1950s,
"programming remained very much an individual affair. Programs, including the largest and most
complex computer systems, were usually put together from start to finish by the same individual or
group that worked on every aspect of the job. . . ." The programs had distinct "personalities"--some
terse and elegant, others long and highly detailed, and some programmers "could make the machines
'do tricks' which were mysteries to the uninitiated" (56). But, in the early 1960s, idiosyncratic software
production gave way to "structured programming" and "modularization," which broke down software
systems into discrete units. Programmers found their options limited to a handful of logical procedures,
and they were expressly prohibited from asking for information not called for within the narrow tasks
allocated to them. The majority of programmers lost the independence and control they had once
enjoyed--and which had allowed them to demand high salaries--while a smaller number of systems
analysts now reserved the privilege of planning whole projects, parceling out smaller parts to the
programmers and coders under their supervision.
The routinization of teachers' labor is perhaps better known to us. According to Patrick
Shannon's Broken Promises: Reading Instruction in Twentieth-Century America, public schoolteachers
saw widespread loss of their once-held autonomy when, beginning in the late 1910s, Frederick Taylor's
industrial principles of scientific management became the leading model for designing curricula and
school operations. Over the decades, teachers' curricular planning roles would be increasingly
appropriated by administrators, local school boards or state commissions, and textbook publishers.
88
Shannon characterizes the current back-to-basics and standardizing trends in reading instruction as
scientific management gone modern:
The process of reading is segmented into discrete skills so that increments of progress can be
identified across the grades. . . . Objective tests replace teachers' judgement concerning
whether or not a student is to be considered literate because teachers' judgement is
unpredictable. . . . Next, a search is made for the most efficient instructional means to move
students through the levels of reading. . . . And finally because few teachers would originally
choose this organization for their instructional behavior, a formal hierarchy of authority is
established within reading programs. (57)
Our college graduates will face tremendous adversity in their pursuit of satisfying careers, and
the college classroom should gear students intellectually for their present and future challenges. Some
compositionists may argue that our field's growing orientation toward academic discourse and critical
thought provides the very tools students will most need in taking on their local and global problems.
Perhaps so. But there is good reason to believe that the discourses being taught at the university may
actually contribute to students' sense of political helplessness in the working world. What struck Kraft
in his interviews with computer programmers was how few of these mostly college-trained workers
understood the organizational relationships at their workplaces, or recognized the systematic nature of
the routinizing and deskilling processes to which management was subjecting them. "Relationships, for
example, between a programmer and a manager were almost always viewed as personal ones, rather
than as part of an overall structure which individuals were inserted into or removed from as the
requirements of the organization demanded" (6). Nearly all the programmers believed that their
salaries depended on individual negotiations with their managers, and were unaware that salaries and
raises were pre-plotted in narrow increments by personnel departments. The programmers' lack of
knowledge about salary derived, in part, from a professionalism promoted by their companies that
holds it "unprofessional" for programmers to discuss their salaries with one another. This same
ideology has kept unions out of virtually all programming workplaces, with management insisting that
"programmer professionalism" and unions do not mix. Programmers are thus left with deceptive
89
notions of individual advancement, Kraft observes, "while major decisions about the work they do, pay,
and about their career prospects are settled for them in an impersonal way by thoroughly organized
employers" (96). Joan Greenbaum, a veteran in the computer field, writes that many programmers did
try to fight the changing conditions of their labor during the 1960s, but "we lacked a conceptual base
from which to present our arguments" (40). As a result, she theorizes, many programmers feeling the
tide of job degradation "only too gladly clung to the belief that they were professional" (49). The
professionalism provided a modicum of self-esteem for workers who were losing their power and
control on the job but who saw no way of resisting the process. Professional ideology provides similar
solace to schoolteachers being deprived of the kind of autonomy traditionally associated with
professionals, as Kathleen Densmore found in her 1984 teacher case studies. "With its emphasis on
individualism . . . the ideology of professionalism prevents teachers from recognizing that their
problems are shared by other teachers, and other workers; consequently, they tend to view failures and
problems in personal terms, and do not seek social or institutional structural changes" (155).
Of course, teachers have been much more successful than have programmers at rising above
this debilitating professionalism, recognizing their worker status, and getting organized. At the same
time, the ideology remains perhaps the leading obstacle to teachers' further political advancement, as it
has also among college faculty (Meisenhelder). Teachers learn their "professionalism," just as they
learn to fatalistically accept existing educational systems and methods as "just the way things are," at
the university (Shannon 52-60; Popkewitz 1987a). Students need intellectual training that allows them
to move beyond a personal view of their problems in a fragmented world, and toward a social view of
our problems in a connected world. They need discourses that address existing conditions not as
reified givens to which we must unavoidably adapt, but as historically contingent phenomena waiting for
our collective intervention.
Model IV: Collaborative Growth
In business and industry . . . and in professions such as medicine, law, engineering, and
architecture . . . collaboration is the norm. All that is new in collaborative learning, it seems, is
90
the systematic application of collaborative principles to that last bastion of hierarchy and
individualism, the American college classroom.
--Kenneth Bruffee, "Collaborative Learning and the 'Conversation of Mankind' " (647)
Leaning to invent in communities will do more than enable success in classrooms and careers.
It is absolutely essential to achieving peace and, indeed, maintaining life on this planet in the
twentieth century and beyond.
--Karen Burke LeFevre, Invention as a Social Act (129)
In the growing composition trends toward collaborative learning and collaborative writing,
collaboration normally refers to more than simply having students meet in groups to respond to
individual papers; rather, it entails group decision making and group projects. As with other trends, the
collaborative literature emphasizes utilitarian ends--that working in groups leads to better ideas, that it
teaches the cooperative skills needed for academic and career success. Yet, we may also read the
literature as implying a particular social vision, and occasionally we find explicit references to such
larger aspirations. The collaborative better world is one in which people have learned to get along,
where we either accept our differences or strive to work them out through cooperative and peaceful
means. Oppressive gender, race, or class structures need not lead to divisive political battles in the
collaborative better world: cooperative conflict resolution is the key. This vision, which we will call
social harmonist, is not limited to advocates of collaborative learning; in fact, we may see it as implied
in any pedagogy that encourages a strategy of adjustment or accommodation, rather than challenge or
confrontation, with the existing world order. The harmonist ideal is strongly suggested in Elbow's non-
adversarial "believing game" (where we share perceptions and experiences), which Elbow says is more
likely than the "doubting game" (where we try to find holes in the other person's view) to "keep people
willing to talk to each other if the game breaks down" (1973: 175). The style of the doubting game is
"closing, clenching," "competitive," "aggressive: meeting threat by beating it down," while the believing
game is "opening, loosening," "cooperative," "nonaggressive: meeting threat by bending, incorporating;
nonviolent" (178-79). We also see the harmonist vision in Edward Corbett's "rhetoric of the open
91
hand," which Corbett favors over the "rhetoric of the closed fist." Writing in 1969, Corbett identifies
close-fisted rhetoric with the sixties' movements, whose angry mass demonstrations represent a
"retreat from reason," whereas open-handed rhetoric would emphasize logical persuasion through
"normal channels of communication." Corbett considers coercion and violence as expressions of
irrationality, and cites the modern father of nonviolence: "Mahatma Gandhi once said, 'Violence is
essentially wordless, and it can begin only where thought and rational communication have broken
down. Any society which is geared for violent action is by that fact systematically unreasonable' "
(293).
What kind of social harmony are Corbett and others proposing? Will our better world operate
peacefully because the gross inequities and expansionist economic systems that undergird war
between classes and between states have been replaced by egalitarian, cooperative systems? Or will
peace come because subordinates have learned to cooperate with subordinators, and superpower
elites have learned to rule the globe collaboratively through East-West détente and Trilateral
Commissions? Corbett acknowledges such concerns:
The younger generation may regard the open hand as bearing too much of a resemblance to
the glad hand; they may see the civility, decorum, and orderliness of the older mode of
discourse as a facade behind which the establishment in all ages has perpetrated injustices on
the have-nots. (296)
Corbett answers, however, that if there has been hypocrisy in the older rhetoric, it has been "the result
of human frailty, not of an inherent weakness" in the ancient art of civil persuasion (296). Corbett's
subtle defense seems to argue that promoting harmony in an unequal order is not necessarily
hypocritical, and that through peaceful, open-handed persuasion we might convince the elites to rule
more benignly, to rise above the "human frailty" that had led them to tyrannical action.
Gandhi's Social Harmony
Harmonist ideologies are traditional means by which ruling groups encourage acceptance of their
rule--or have been means for directing lower-class resistance into relatively safe channels that leave
92
intact ruling class power. Mahatma Gandhi's nonviolence represented one such safe channel; his
political thought and practice provide one of our richest sources for the study of harmonious social
theory. Behind the Indian leader's politics lay a social vision that is far from egalitarian, or far from what
most of us would consider egalitarian. Gandhi was a firm believer in the Hindu caste system, which
holds that each person's life occupation is determined by heredity. Critical of modern corruptions of the
system which have produced innumerable castes and subcastes, each associated with gradations of
superiority and inferiority, Gandhi called for a return to the four original caste divisions, called varnas:
"The law of Varna prescribes that a person should, for his living, follow the occupation of his
forefathers. I hold this to be a universal law governing the human family" (1965: 47). If all accepted
their heredity occupation--whether teacher, warrior, merchant, or laborer--with no sense of superiority
or inferiority, then social peace could be had, Gandhi proposed.
If [the four Varnas] are members of one body, how can one be superior or inferior to one
another? . . . It is this canker [of superiority and inferiority] that is at the root of the various ills of
our time, especially class wars and civil strife. . . . These wars and strife could not be ended
except by the observance of the law of Varna. For it ordains that every one shall fulfill the law
of one's being by doing in a spirit of duty and service that to which one is born. (1965: 8-9)
There was nothing unequal in allotting one group power and authority over other groups, in Gandhi's
caste conception. This same principle applied to class relationships as well as caste. His theory of
trusteeship forbade tenant farmers from seizing and distributing the rich landlords' property; rather, the
rich would administer their wealth for the benefit of all.
We may not forcibly dispossess the Zamindars [landlords]. . . . They only need a change of the
heart. When that is done, and when they learn to melt at their tenants' woe, they will hold their
lands in trust for them, will give them a major part of the produce, keeping only sufficient for
themselves. (1970: 23-24)
Again, the existence of rulers and ruled would imply no inequality, Gandhi imagined, and no
disharmony:
93
What is needed is not the extinction of landlords and capitalists, but a transformation of the
existing relationship between them and the masses into something healthier and purer. (1970:
41)
Everybody would regard all as equal with oneself and hold them together in the silken net
of love. . . . We would hold as equal the toiling labourer and the rich capitalist. (1962, vol 2:
335)
Relations between the sexes involved a similar standard.
I do not envisage the wife, as a rule, following an avocation independently of her husband. The
care of the children and the upkeep of the household are quite enough to fully engage all her
energy. . . . The man should look to the maintenance of the family, the woman to household
management; the two thus supplementing and complementing each other's labours. (1965:
32)
As with class and caste, the sexual division of labor implied no inequality: "Nor do I see in this any
invasion of woman's rights or suppression of her freedom. . . . The woman who knows and fulfills her
duty realizes her dignified status. She is the queen, not the slave, of the household over which she
presides" (1965: 33). It should be noted that such questions of equality were widely debated among
Indian activists and intellectuals during Gandhi's time (though more so on caste and class than gender
questions), and that Gandhi was making choices between available alternatives. Gandhi's
organization, the Indian National Congress, became notably split during the 1930s between left and
right political camps, with Gandhi the most influential conservative voice (Bose; Ambedkar; Rao;
Mukerjee; Namboodiripad; Sarkar).
Despite his elitist visions, Gandhi genuinely sympathized with oppressed people and devoted his
life to their uplift. But because he could never break his sense of loyalty to the Indian upper class,
Gandhi's politics were haunted by contradiction. On the one hand, his ability as a spiritual leader to
move the Indian masses into political action was unequaled; on the other hand, he carefully controlled
that action, narrowing its political scope, ensuring that the thrust of resistance would be directed against
British colonial interests, not against wealthy Indian interests. Thus, when Indian workers and
94
peasants repeatedly read Gandhi's anti-colonial non-cooperation campaigns as a signal to rise up
against all authority, Gandhi fought to restrain them. In a February 1921 response to spreading
industrial strikes that were partly inspired by the Gandhi-led nationalist protests, Gandhi warned:
"Strikes are the order of the day. They are a symptom of the existing unrest. . . . There are not wanting
labour leaders who consider that strikes may be engineered for political purposes. In my opinion it will
be a most serious mistake to make use of labour strikes for such a purpose. I don't deny that such
strikes can serve political ends. But they do not fall within the plan of non-violent non-co-operation"
(1958-82, vol. 19: 365-66). In May 1921, Gandhi delivered a similar message to tenant farmers who
had launched rent strikes and other protests in northern India's United Provinces: "The Kisan [tenant]
movement has received impetus from Non-co-operation but it is anterior to and independent of it.
Whilst we will not hesitate to advise the Kisans when the moment comes, to suspend payment of taxes
to the government, it is not contemplated that at any stage of Non-co-operation we would seek to
deprive the Zamindars [landlords] of their rent" (1958-82, vol. 20: 106).
Gandhi's nonviolent politics cannot be understood apart from his historic role in containing lower
class militancy, in ensuring that India's bourgeois leaders would retain firm control of both the
nationalist movement and a future independent India. Nonviolent civil disobedience was a means of
waging struggle that attempted to affirm the "underlying unity" between adversaries. Informing it,
however, was a moral code with a double standard. While Gandhi's spiritual ethics strictly forbade the
use of political violence by the lower classes, the same ethics allowed exceptions for state violence. In
1918, Gandhi led a recruiting campaign, marching from village to village, attempting to raise a volunteer
Indian army to help Britain's war effort; he believed such work would make British rulers more favorable
to Indian independence (Gandhi 1957: 444-49). In 1944, Gandhi again offered the Indian National
Congress's "full co-operation" in Britain's military struggle as a bargain for independence; the British
rejected the plan (Tendulkar, 6: 263). A 1938 episode demonstrates even more clearly Gandhi's class
loyalties and the class bias in his nonviolent philosophy. Under a temporary system of dual rule, the
British had allowed Indian leaders to hold limited power in the provinces during the late 1930s, and
Gandhi's Congress party had won elections in seven provinces. At the same time, a rising labor
95
movement had launched a wave of industrial strikes, and picketing workers (some supported by
Congress activists) were being met with police batons and sometimes bullets, in Congress provinces.
In his Harijan magazine, Gandhi criticized obstructionist picketers and endorsed police action. "To
prevent the workers from going to their work by standing in front of them is pure violence and must be
given up. The owners of mills or of other factories would be justified in invoking the assistance of the
police, and a Congress Government would be bound to provide it if the Congressmen concerned would
not desist" (qtd. in Tendulkar, 4: 269). Critics accused Gandhi of contradicting his nonviolent code.
"Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," was Gandhi's Emersonian reply. "I have deplored
the necessity for it. . . . But till the Congress has developed a peaceful method of dealing with violent
crimes, its ministers must use police and, I fear, even the military, if they are to undertake the
administration of the affairs of the country in the present stage of its career" (qtd. in Tendulkar, 4: 270).
Corbett has argued that Gandhi saw "violence" as irrational. Actually, it was the violence of workers in
revolt that Gandhi considered irrational; the violence of state repression or of inter-state warfare was
"rational" or "necessary." Gandhi's dual morality meant that protesters must plead with the open hand,
even while the state bludgeons them with the closed fist. A critique of Gandhi does not of itself
disconfirm nonviolent philosophy or similar harmonious theories (on nonviolent theory in the U.S. anti-
nuclear movement, see Ryan 1986). But I am hoping to raise questions, and also to suggest the value
of studying the purposes that have historically been served by our theories.
Clarifying Our Collaborative Values
Composition teachers whose work is inspired by visions of a cooperative world--and my own
teaching is inspired by such--must conceive as clearly as possible the terms of that cooperation. This
would involve not only identifying our basic scheme for the future society, but determining the kind of
cooperative values we wish to promote in the here and now. Some collaborative advocates seem to
propose cooperating indiscriminately, as if all humanity shared the same interests and can now join
together. Bruffee, for example, describes academe and the workplace beyond as "communities of
knowledgeable peers," where "status equals" engage in agreed-upon discourses. He does
96
acknowledge that we sometimes write to please superiors in the corporate or department hierarchy, but
he stresses that, "In most cases people write in business, government, and the professions mainly to
inform and convince other people within the writer's own community, people whose status and
assumptions approximate the writer's own" (1984: 642). Hence, that which is egalitarian and
harmonious in our institutions seems to merit greater attention than that which is hierarchal and
conflictive. Bruffee's conception of peership, whether in the classroom or workplace, urges us to forget
our socioeconomic and other status differentials:
Outside the learning group . . . people may have widely different positions in the management
hierarchy of a union or corporation, in the professional or student hierarchy of an educational
institution, or in a system of social or economic class. But as collaborative learners all these
people are peers. With regard to a course in ethnography or in elementary Chinese, the vice-
president of a corporation, the janitor, the English professor, the freshman, the society matron,
and the shoe salesman must leave their social differences behind. (1982b: 38)
An alternative to Bruffee's version of collaborative learning would encourage students to bring
their social differences into the classroom, and would make the study of our differences and
commonalities integral to the curriculum (Trimbur, for example, has proposed that the classroom should
look for "dissensus" as well as consensus). Rather than teach a value of blanket cooperativeness, our
classroom would ask critical questions about collaboration: With whom must we collaborate to make
our lives better and our world better? Are some collaborations unwise? Do our literary texts, or texts in
various disciplines, or articles of mass media seem to suggest that we collaborate with some groups
but not with others? If we consider how today's employers are widely using the cooperative ethic, the
importance of such critical preparation for our students becomes apparent. Since the 1970s,
hundreds of companies have turned to what Business Week calls "The New Industrial Relations":
"A fundamentally different way of managing people is taking shape in the U.S. Its goal is to end the
adversarial relationship that has grown between management and labor. . . ." Based on "a more
enlightened view of worker psychology," the new approach stresses "labor-management trust" and "a
participatory process in which workers gain a voice in decision-making on the shop floor" ("New
97
Industrial" 85). In a 1987 series of ads in Business Week, General Motors declares: "The symbols of
confrontation have been replaced by the symbols of cooperation. Everyone eats together, parks
together, and works together" (qtd. in Parker and Slaughter 3).
At the center of the new approach are the "quality circles," work teams, and problem-solving
groups that have long been linked to the success of Japanese industries. But the glowing pictures
offered us by business and media are challenged by Mike Parker and Jane Slaughter, both former auto
workers, who name the new team concept management-by-stress:
Management-by-stress uses stress of all kinds--physical, social, and psychological--to regulate
and boost production. It combines a systematic speedup, "just-in-time" parts delivery, and
strict control over how jobs are to be done, to create a production system which has no leeway
for errors--and very little breathing room. (14)
The sense of fear in MBS plants is striking. The power exercised by supervisors, combined
with little sense of either union presence or individual rights, chills the desire to criticize a plant
where company loyalty is a priority. (21)
By appealing to workers' genuine desire for a democratic voice on the job, the team concept allows
management unprecedented access to workers' knowledge. Work teams strive toward kaizen, a
Japanese word meaning continuous improvement, and offer up their suggestions to management. But
management, of course, prefers those suggestions that increase output. "Changes in a job can never
result in more breathing space for team members. Any improvements become the impetus for
management to find even more ways to speed up the team" (Parker and Slaughter 19). The team
concept relies heavily on worker peer pressure. The team leader--who is a member of the union, not
management--comes to see himself as a supervisor and is essentially a straw boss for management.
There is strong peer pressure against absenteeism because, rather than provide substitutes, the
company expects the team to cover for their missing member. "Workers are expected to believe that
personal illness or family needs must take second place to perfect attendance" (29).
Most team programs have a strong ideological component. GM, for example, sends thousands
of employees from its Hydra-matic Division to week-long "Family Awareness Training" sessions with
98
the stated aim of "establishing a family atmosphere within the division" (qtd. in Parker 19). The first
ground rule at the training is that no one tells whether they are hourly or salary (union or management).
Identities stripped away, conference participants spend an emotionally intense week in group sensitivity
exercises, developing interpersonal skills, disclosing their joys and fears. The final stage, according to
the training facilitators' handbook, "is one of unity, high spirits, mutual acceptance, and high
cohesiveness. It is the esprit stage" (qtd. in Parker 20). Parker comments:
A primary goal of most of these sophisticated exercises is to break down a person's
psychological defenses and develop openness. . . . But defenses serve a purpose. In the
unreal atmosphere of Family Awareness Week, it may be easy to let them down. But back
home, some "family members" have the power to assign jobs, grant exceptions, and even
destroy the livelihoods of others. Does naive openness in the work situation always make
sense? (20)
Parker believes that the trainings manipulate workers' needs for belonging and intimacy, in an attempt
to redefine their identity not as union people but as company people.
In the new industrial relations, collaboration means persuading workers to accept wage cuts,
speedups, tighter managerial control, and other manifestations of the general employer offensive--all
for the profitability of our family, the company. Workers urged to identify with the company are also
urged to non-identify with fellow workers and, notably, to see themselves in competition with workers in
other countries, in other firms, or even in other plants within the same company. As the chief negotiator
for B.F. Goodrich Co. puts it, "Union leaders to one degree or another are realizing that it's not 'us
against them' but 'we against the world' (qtd. in "Concessionary Bargaining" 68).
In the composition literature, collaborative learning is heavily geared to preparing students for
collaborative writing and working situations they will face "as professionals." No doubt many of our
students will make good use of such cooperative training. But Kraft, Densmore, and others (Johnson;
Popkewitz 1987a) suggest that the concept of professional is itself problematic and ideological, while
Peter Meiksins argues that the deskilling in many middle class occupations indicates the lack of control
over the labor process within--and hence the working class nature of--these occupations in the first
99
place. Composition teachers should be asking what kinds of collaborative skills and collaborative
values our students will be needing as workers, in the context of widespread employer aggressiveness
against workers. In their new book, Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative
Writing, Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford wonder what will be the result "when the professional work
scene is populated much more by women and people of color," and they ask whether collaborative
pedagogy can empower women and students of color "so they can function as full participating
members of collaborative writing groups" in workplace settings (138, 122). While race and gender
equality in writing groups should absolutely be sought, Ede and Lunsford are taking too much as given
in terms of students' professional prospects, and they do not make sufficiently problematic the larger
institutional context and labor-management struggles within which the writing group is situated. My fear
is that, without such wider scope, we may end up sending into the work world students who, like the
computer programmers described by Kraft, are unable to penetrate management's glossy ideologies
and recognize the larger organizational relationships and structures that are geared to their
exploitation. Ede and Lunsford discuss their "growing awareness of and sensitivity to" issues of "power
and authority, of consensus and conflict, of gender, race, and class" (13), and they bring such concerns
to bear upon the field of collaborative writing (more so with gender than with race and class). Yet, the
authors seem reluctant to turn their sensitivity into concrete political commitments as educators. They
ask appropriate and pointed questions:
How does--and should--collaboration challenge or re-situate the attitudes, values, beliefs, and
ideological assumptions students and teachers bring to the writing class? . . .
To what extent can--or should--collaborative activities attempt to highlight or address
inequities of gender, race, and class? (125)
But these remain "unanswered questions" for Ede and Lunsford, and I am left wondering what keeps
them from attempting at least initial answers. If nothing more, it would help to know what moves them
to favor the radical pedagogy implied in their questions, and what holds them back from such
pedagogy. As it stands, the authors offer the less risky assertion that collaborative pedagogy is worth
our efforts because "it holds the potential for allowing, finally and fully, for the presence of others" (126)-
100
-here suggesting the very "sweeping and vague" notion of community which the authors later note has
been challenged by Myers, Trimbur, and Harris (136). I think, still, that Ede and Lunsford's "polyphonic
chorus of voices" (126) is not the same as Bruffee's "community of knowledgeable peers," and that the
former's emphasis on gender, race, class, and other differences will positively confront collaborative
teachers with questions of political commitment.
Model V: Collective Empowerment
Many students are in college because they still believe in the American dream; they must learn
to challenge it before they can write good history.
--Richard Ohmann and Jack Weston, "A Guide to Marxist Teaching: Freshman English"
(29)
As an overall objective, I set for my curriculum the goal of jointly presenting literacy and life as a
means of transcending the mental and ideological limits imposed by institutions and mass
culture. For me, this meant that my worker-students would become literate, conceptual in
habits of mind, confident in their approach to intellectual study, and more articulate and
assertive in understanding why things are as they are.
--Ira Shor, "Reinventing Daily Life" (502-3)
Proponents of what I have called the collective empowerment model--better known as radical,
critical, emancipatory, or liberatory pedagogy--do share many goals in common with their non-radical
composition colleagues. Any teacher versed in contemporary "process" pedagogy wants students to
become "conceptual in habits of mind" and "confident in their approach to intellectual study," as does
Ira Shor. Any contemporary teacher hopes that students will develop penetrating analyses and
insights, as do Ohmann and Weston in their proposed course based on a family history project. The
moderns will widely support Ohmann and Weston's injunctions favoring student-centered, collaborative
learning over the teacher-lecture format: "[Assign] a project that can't get done unless the students
write both individually and in groups. . . . Have students take control of their learning. Don't prepackage
101
all the assignments; get students to help frame them" (26). Moderns will likewise appreciate Shor's
conception of the teacher "withering away," which he describes as "a metaphor for the teacher's
balance between saying too much and saying too little; enough withdrawal to create a vacuum for
student assertion, enough direction to structure a critical inquiry." Shor's withering teacher replaces
authority-dependence with "a camaraderie not yet of equals but moving in that democratic direction."
The teacher as organizer fades as the students emerge; the liberatory goal is for the teacher to become
expendable (1987a: xii, 98). Yet, what distinguishes these radical teachers' objectives from that of
many composition colleagues is an explicit view of the teacher as social change agent. Ohmann and
Weston's version of freshman English seeks to help students "in unveiling capitalist social relations,
and seeing their own place within these relations" (27). Shor's purposes include "preparing students for
their history-making roles," and setting the foundations for "purging sexism and racism, evoking class
solidarity, and initiating social reconstruction" (1987a: 269-70).
Composition teachers whose pedagogy aims toward collective empowerment are primarily socialists
and Marxists or neo-Marxists; the Progressive Composition Caucus that meets at the annual
Conference on College Composition and Communication describes itself as "socialist-feminist" in its
newsletter Progressive Composition. However, I have seen no explicit discussion of socialist vision or
strategy in the composition literature, and an adequate rendering would run beyond the scope of this
paper. Those interested in exploring socialist visions should be aware that the socialist and
Marxist umbrellas encompass widely divergent traditions. Most importantly, the view of
socialism that has become world-dominant, and that has its sources in the Stalinist and social-
democratic traditions, equates socialism with state ownership of production. An alternative tradition,
stressing socialism as a system of democratic workers' control, finds Marx and Engels as its pioneering
exponents (Marx's democratic conception of socialism is made lucid in his treatment of the 1871 Paris
Commune in "The Civil War in France"; see helpful discussions by Draper 1986, 1987). One of the
best short introductions to these differing traditions is Hal Draper's 1966 essay The Two Souls of
Socialism which identifies two historic tendencies--a socialism-from-above and a socialism-from-below-
-and observes: "Socialism's crisis today is a crisis in the meaning of socialism. For the first time in the
102
history of the world, very likely a majority of its people label themselves 'socialist' in one sense or
another; but there has never been a time when the label was less informative" (1). Of the existing
socialist states, Draper writes:
The socio-economic system which has replaced capitalism [in the Communist states] would not
be recognizable to Karl Marx. The state owns the means of production--but who "owns" the
state? Certainly not the mass of workers, who are exploited, unfree, and alienated from all
levers of social and political control. A new class rules, the bureaucratic bosses; it rules over a
collectivist system--a bureaucratic collectivism. Unless statification is mechanically equated
with "socialism," in what sense are these societies "socialist?" (1)
Socialism-from-above, for Draper, is "the conception that socialism . . . must be handed down to the
grateful masses in one form or another, by a ruling elite which is not subject to their control in fact,"
while socialism-from-below "can be realized only through the self-emancipation of activized masses in
motion, reaching out for freedom with their own hands. . . ." (2)
Any assessment of the successes and failures of twentieth-century socialism, and of the
prospects for a future socialism of a from-below variety, must begin first of all with some criteria for
making judgments--a definition, a vision. In my own broad conception, a socialist society is based on a
system of production for human needs, not private profit, and is characterized by a rigorous democracy
that leaves no aspect of human relationships outside the realm of democratic scrutiny. For more
specific proposals, I recommend a 1983 collection Socialist Visions, edited by Stephen Rosskam
Shalom, which includes visionary debates on socialist political democracy, socialism and the
environment, race and nationalism, division of labor, family and sex roles, economic planning, and
concludes with a bibliography. I also recommend more pleasurable excursions through utopian fiction,
including Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time and Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed. For
historical considerations of why working-class and socialist movements have fared poorly in the U.S.,
see Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream; Stanley Aronowitz, False Promises: The Shaping of
American Working Class Consciousness; and Kim Moody, An Injury to All.
103
The potential contribution of the writing classroom toward a socialist project--or toward
encouraging the kind of political participation and movements for change that creates a basis for
socialist departures--depends on historic circumstances and the level of general activity outside the
classroom. Shor writes: "In a time of insurgent movements, the impact of critical classrooms is visible
and immediate. In periods of diffused radicalism or conservative reaction, the influence of critical
learning is low-profile and long-term" (1987a: 270). The classroom is not a place where the social
structure is changed, according to Shor, but where "knowledge, perception, ideology, and socialization
are challenged," and where people can be "mentally armed against domination" (1987a: xi, 99). In
Critical Teaching and Everyday Life, Shor describes some of his more successful collaborative class
projects--the rewriting of the U.S. Constitution, focusing on the practice of freedom in work and sexual
life; the writing of non-sexist marriage contracts; the design of democratic by-laws for the operation of
the classroom. The models for problem solving and conceptual thinking that Shor has developed
contrast interestingly with conventional approaches. Consider first how one influential mainstream
model tends to narrow student aspirations. John Chaffee's Thinking Critically grows out of a nationally
recognized interdisciplinary program in critical thinking that Chaffee directs at LaGuardia Community
College in New York City. Chaffee's approach emphasizes relevancy to students' lives, and his chapter
on solving problems presents a situation that is undoubtedly real for many working-class students. We
are asked to imagine ourselves a single parent with one four-year-old child, holding down a boring
supermarket cashier job that barely pays the bills, and attending our first year of college which, we
hope, will lead to a well-paying, satisfying career. Although we enjoy school, we're physically
exhausted and depressed, due to the time demands of school, job, and child. What do we do?
After stating the problem in "specific terms" rather than "general terms," and identifying the
"specific results" we seek, we are asked to list our alternatives. Before listing alternatives, however, "it
makes sense for us to determine which actions are possible and which are impossible. We can do this
by exploring the boundaries of the problem situation" (emphasis in original). Boundaries, we are told,
are "the limitations in the problem situation that we simply cannot change." Chaffee mentions two
sample limitations--time constraints; vocational qualifications limiting how much we can earn at the
104
present time--and then asks us to think of others. "After we have established a general idea of the
boundaries of the problem situation, we can then proceed to identify the possible courses of action that
can take place within these boundaries." Chaffee suggests brainstorming and discussing the problem
with others as potential means for looking at the problem afresh, then offers two sample courses of
action--take fewer classes; find additional sources of income--and invites us to think of others (69-70).
Chaffee's critical thinking program unambiguously favors the status quo: students do not question their
social-political boundaries or the narrow courses of action that those boundaries impose upon us as
individuals; they do not ask what kind of society would trap single parent worker-students in such
depressing circumstances, nor picture new social possibilities.
Shor's aim is precisely the opposite: "The critical study of themes from everyday life needs to be
carried out in the broadest terms possible. . . ." (1987a: 114). Borrowing from Paulo Freire's method of
codification-- abstracting familiar objects or issues away from their everyday contexts to allow for
"unfamiliar" systematic scrutiny--Shor teaches a problem-solving method that encourages both
conceptual habits of mind and utopian imagination. He represents the method through a series of
visual forms, starting with this one:
A PROBLEM SOLVING METHOD Life Description Step one Observation
Diagnosis Step two Investigation
Reconstruction Step three Resolution
In the first "description" step, students observe and describe in careful detail a familiar object, such as a
classroom desk-chair or a hamburger that Shor brings to class, and they also begin some value judgments-
-the chair is hard, uncomfortable, and all chairs face toward the teacher in front; the hamburger is greasy
and rubbery. In "diagnosis," students place the object in its social context. The chair becomes part of
students' larger experiences in alienating schools. The hamburger represents Americans' fixation with non-
nutritious fast food; and one class recreates the entire production and distribution process that delivers us
the burger. In the third step, students "reconstruct" or "negate" the problem with specific proposals for
105
humanized chairs, humanized schools, or systems that deliver healthy food. A second visual form teaches
students further means of abstraction and generalizing of their experiences:
NAME GENERAL DEFINITION LIFE EXAMPLES Junk Food Mass produced food that
is cooked quickly in fast-food places, or bought, packaged and processed in supermarkets.Usually, it’s low in nutrition.
burgers fries canned fruits/vegetables packaged cereals cookies, cake donuts candy
"Junk food," "lost cause," "racism," "democracy," "common sense," and any other number of concepts
or life problems are systematically broken down; or, a series of life examples are grouped together,
defined and named; afterwards, the negation of each concept is envisioned by the students and
systematically described. As students' analytic facility grows, they can combine the first two visual
forms into a more elaborate model through which they can diagnose school, work, or community
problems and reconstruct social alternatives:
106
NAME
example: authoritarianism
GENERAL DEFINITION
LIFE EXAMPLES
1.
NEGATIONS
2. “peer discipline”
or “peer democracy
NAME
GENERAL
DEFINTION
3.
A final representation, that of concentric circles, is offered to represent developmental phases in a
process of social change, where the inner circle represents the present society and the outer rim,
utopia.
Rather than leave students with an either/or view of utopia that would likely only reinforce their sense
that things can't really be changed, Shor encourages students to consider and discuss the personal or
social changes that would be realistic, and yet carry us closer to the world we would like to see (1987a:
155-80).
Red Indoctrination?
While teaching freshman English as a graduate assistant at The University of Texas at Arlington,
I have experimented in small ways with radical pedagogy (programmatic constraints have not permitted
107
experimenting in large ways). I have been open with students about my radical intentions, and have
also discussed my political classroom aims with fellow graduate teachers and with program directors.
The response of my students to an openly radical teacher on this conservative Texas campus is plainly
enthusiastic, i.e., "great, something different." But questions are posed: "Do you expect us to agree
with you?" "How do you grade papers?" I assure students that they need not agree with me, and that I
grade papers according to my sense of general college writing standards. I acknowledge, however,
that I do have biases which affect my evaluation of a paper's argument. I point out that I am watchful of
my biases as I grade, that I try to be as fair as I can--such as by giving papers whose positions are
sharply opposed to mine slightly higher grades than I think they deserve. I then suggest that every
teacher has biases of one kind or another which affect how we grade, and I ask if anyone has ever
experienced such teacher biases. My question gets lots of nods and knowing smiles. I ask more: Has
anyone had a teacher who claimed to be open to all points of view but really wasn't? Do you ever give
teachers the bullshit you know they want to hear? Have you ever challenged a teacher and paid for it?
Depending on the class's temperament and the level of rapport already established, the stories are
shared and the question of freedom of expression in the classroom gains status as a permissible and
important topic in the course. The ability of an openly biased teacher--or of a covertly biased teacher--
to maintain free expression depends on the degree of trust we establish with our students. I have been
able to establish what I consider relatively high trust in my classes through critical discussions of the
teacher-student relationship; through a non-authoritarian teacherly posture and peer rapport with
students; through a willingness and enjoyment of being challenged on all class issues, all class
processes; and through being helpful as a writing teacher to students of all political persuasions. I am
widely challenged by my students, and I rarely sense that students are mimicking my views in class or
in their papers--though undoubtedly some of this goes on, as it will in all classes where teachers are
allocated power over students.
In sharing my radical-educator agenda with other teachers in my program, the common criticism I
receive is that I am "indoctrinating" students, using my teacherly power to push my views upon them.
My critics argue that openly biased teaching, regardless of fair intentions, will prompt students to bend
108
their views toward that of the teacher-grader, and that we can mitigate such coercion by keeping
students second-guessing as to our own opinions on issues. My critics also emphasize, of course, the
educator's responsibility to approximate a neutral stance as best we can, rather than attempt to
propagate our personal beliefs. My experience does not support the view that a frank teacherly bias
stifles free expression. At least where the discussive atmosphere is egalitarian and away from teacher
dominance, I have found that my far-left opinions, when I choose to assert them, help stimulate open
expression, including in graded papers. I should add, however, that my political educator strategy does
not look toward persuading students of my specific positions per se; in fact, I feel I am most successful
as a teacher when my mouth is shut and my students are talking. At the same time, I do introduce a
political agenda, and this is done through the syllabus itself--through the kinds of critical inquiry
encouraged, through the reading materials assigned, through the questions asked in the course. My
struggle to democratize the classroom, to win students' assertive participation, also expresses my
political agenda.
I do concede that my open bias will give clearer direction to students who are bent on pleasing
the teacher by echoing teacher opinions, and that such students might derive certain benefit from a
teacher who leaves her opinions more in question. But I do not think such students are numerous;
many more prefer saying what they believe, and want teachers who they can trust to listen caringly,
respond honestly, grade fairly. I would propose, moreover, that teachers who do not make clear the
biases they bring to the classroom, or who are unaware of those biases, pose much greater and subtler
problems for students than any that might be posed by the teacher whose views are made candid.
Students do not come to freshman English prepared to recognize the political implications of our
pedagogies, of how we ask them to think, of the questions our course asks and does not ask. When
we ask students to read a text through the lenses of New Criticism rather than critical Marxism, to solve
problems Chaffee's way or Flower's way instead of Shor's way, to discover themselves as individuals
rather than as members of an historically situated social group, and we do not indicate to students the
non-universal values that inform these activities, they will tend to regard our concepts as neutral tools.
Many will internalize, to varying degree, the supposedly impartial concepts of reading, writing, and
109
thinking taught in composition. Our pedagogies unavoidably express biases, express ideologies.
Teachers who do not indicate their biases or the biases that inform their course are teaching ideology
as though it were objective knowledge. Given the unfortunate power differentials that characterize our
classrooms, when the teacher hands out the class syllabus he or she launches an ideological offensive.
Teachers who sympathize with students, and who seek ways of giving up the power we hold over them,
would do well to help students understand the nature of our offensive so they can mentally defend
themselves. In less military terms, we want to enable students to make critical judgments about
everything we do in the classroom, to make informed decisions about their participation in and/or
challenge of the class process, and to make politically conscious choices about the concepts they do
and do not embrace. In my view, our political honesty with students helps open the door to non-
manipulative, non-authoritarian teaching. I personally feel that my honesty increases my accessibility
with students; by laying out my cards and letting students place me as they will, I step down from the
teacher's false-neutral pedestal and move closer toward the peerhood that I prefer.
Let us acknowledge, still, that however honest we are with students, a coerciveness is built into
our jobs, and any democratic forms we establish in the classroom will remain skewed ones. Students
do not decide if their teacher passes the course; students do not give us grades that may affect our
access to scholarships, graduate programs, or gainful employment. Students do widely fill out teacher
evaluation forms at the end of courses. But an individual student's negative evaluation of a teacher
carries little weight, unless supported by many similar complaints from other students; and even then,
sanctions against the teacher are relatively rare. On the other hand, the teacher-grader places an
effective mark on the permanent record of each student. The sanctioning power of a dissatisfied
student rarely matches that of a dissatisfied teacher-grader, and this differential provides a material
basis for undemocratic classroom relations. In the liberatory classroom, according to Shor,
"democratic relations . . . legitimize the critique of oppression; students experience freedom while
examining the forces which impede freedom" (1987a: 96). If this is true, then the kind of liberatory
pedagogy that Shor proposes is not really possible in our school institutions as constituted. This should
not deter us from searching out the most democratic, humanizing, and politically progressive modes
110
that our institutional contexts allow. But it should remind us--and here I agree fully with Shor--that
"political opposition on campus, in schools, and in society is needed to protect the right of teachers and
students to invent the critical pedagogy we need" (1987a: viii-ix).
On Pursuing Liberatory Goals
Chapter 4 proposed that composition teachers begin the project of writing program reform
through professional involvement, informal rap/study sessions with co-workers, union participation, and
then moving on to effect institutional changes as faculty develop cohesion and organizational strength.
The present chapter makes our local organizing tasks more complex and even more ambitious. Now
program reformers would be calling, not just for modern composition methods, but also for liberatory
methods, not just for larger education and social budgets, but also for a new social-political order. In
lieu of a fresh set of program proposals for the liberatory reformer--which I'm afraid is beyond my
present means--I would like to close with some general thoughts.
Certainly, our most challenging task is that of winning the majority of our colleagues to liberatory
pedagogy and social visions. While such may not be realizable apart from a much wider political
mobilization in the society, we may in our more immediate teaching and reform projects aspire to
values consistent with the egalitarian world we envision (e.g., values that counter sexism, racism, and
elitism with their democratic opposites). In addition, with particular respect to composition, liberatory
reformers may pursue a number of theoretical points which, if not immediately radical in content, do
open doors for rich discussion. As the contemporary field increasingly emphasizes writing as a
process of critical reflection, it may be pointed out that what is good for the student is good for the
teacher. To begin reflecting on educational purpose and the values that inform our purposes is to begin
breaking free of the prevailing technocratism that delimits and demeans our work as writing teachers.
We become less the social functionary, more the self-conscious social actor. To recognize the value-
laden nature of our work--that we are never teaching "effective writing" pure and simple--is to challenge
the false-neutral scientism that quietly binds us to politically conservative institutional objectives. As
teachers more willfully articulate their purposes and values, they may in turn be challenged by other
111
sets of values. Formerly covert political partisanships become overt and self-conscious partisanships.
This does not mean that radical partisans will necessarily prevail in the ensuing discussions. But the
existence of wider candid political discussion would itself represent tremendous advance for modern
composition and, I think, hopeful prospects for liberatory writing teachers.
112
NOTES 1 This was passed to me by WPE counselor Marlene Pearson.
2 Table 1.--CSUN Faculty Opinion of Student Writinga
dept. or school (no. of responses): average response
Art (3): 20.0% Home Ecomomics (2): 47.5%
Biology (5): 15.6 Journalism (2): 65.0
Business, School ofb (20): 49.5 Liberal Studiesd (2): 40.5
Child Development (2): 50.0 Music (2): 40.0
Computer Science (4): 41.3 Physics (1): 45.0
Economics (3): 13.3 Political Science (3): 41.0
Engineering, School ofc (8): 43.0 Psychology (6): 42.3
English (3): 68.7 Radio-TV-Film (3): 36.0
Geology (1): 60.0 Sociology (1): 50.0
Health Science (5): 29.6 Speech Communication (3): 49.3
History (1): 100.0 Theater (1): 60.0
Total responses: 81 Average response: 42.8%
a Survey taken in May 1988: "How many of your students are writing as college students should be writing? Restrict your estimate to undergraduate courses, and exclude general education courses with primary enrollment from students outside your department." b Except economics, which is listed separately. c Except computer science, which is listed separately. d Liberal studies does not have its own department courses. However, I polled two instructors of specific courses--one in humanities, one in music--in which liberal studies majors are heavily enrolled.
3 Influential works on modern composition classroom methods include those of Elbow, Graves,
Macrorie, Murray. For theoretical perspectives, see Cooper and Odell, Knoblauch and Brannon,
North. Major journals include College Composition and Communication, College English, Research in
the Teaching of English. Major annual conferences are held by the National Council of Teachers of
English, and the Conference on College Composition and Communication. One of the leading
113
organizations training teachers in modern composition methods is the National Writing Project, 5635
Tolman Hall, School of Education, University of California, Berkeley CA 94720.
4 Table 2.--Required Writing Preparation of Future Teachersa
% required to take % required to take intermediate or advanced a course in teaching writing course composition English majors 15 0 English education majors 29 10 Other education majors 6 0
a Based on 263 college catalogs. Source: Burhans, p. 647.
5 The 127 respondents consisted of 14 from 2-year colleges, 67 from "four-year institutions," and
46 from "universities." The "universities" are distinguished from "4-year institutions" in that the former
have professional schools--law, medical, dental--or substantial graduate programs. CSUN, with its
small graduate offerings, would be considered a 4-year institution.
6 See note 3 for National Writing Project address.
7 A fine anthology on bringing critical awareness into the classroom is Shor, 1987b.
8 Table 3.--WPE Failure Rates
1980-1 22.0%
1981-2 22.9
1982-3 24.5
1983-4 26.5
1984-5 27.1
1985-6 30.1
1986-7 32.5
Source: Larson, 1987.
114
WORKS CITED
Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." Lenin and Philosophy and Other
Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review, 1971. 127-86.
Ambedkar, B.R. What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables. Lahore, Pakistan:
Classic, 1977.
Anyon, Jean. "Workers, Labor and Economic History, and Textbook Content." Harvard Educational
Review 49 (Aug 1979) 361-86.
---. "Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work." Journal of Education 162 (win 1980) 67-92.
Apple, Michael W. Ideology and Curriculum. London: Routledge, 1979.
Apple, Michael W., and Lois Weis, eds. Ideology and Practice in Schooling. Philadelphia: Temple
Press, 1983.
Applebee, Arthur N. Contexts for Learning to Write: Studies of Secondary School Instruction.
Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1984.
Applebee, Arthur N., Judith A. Langer, and Ina V.S. Mullis. The Writing Report Card: Writing
Achievement in American Schools. Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service, 1986.
Armstrong, Cherryl. Personal interview, May 1988.
Aronowitz, Stanley. False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness. New
York: McGraw, 1973.
Astin, Alexander W. Minorities in American Higher Education. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1982.
Bagdikian, Ben H. The Media Monopoly. 2nd ed. Boston: Beacon, 1987.
Bartholomae, David. "Inventing the University." When a Writer Can't Write: Studies in Writer's Block
and Other Composing Process Problems. Ed. Mike Rose. New York: Guilford, 1985. 134-65.
Bartholomae, David, and Anthony Petrosky. Facts, Artifacts, and Counterfacts: Theory and Method for
a Reading and Writing Course. Upper Montclair, NJ: Boynton, 1986.
Berg, Ivar. Education and Jobs: The Great Training Robbery. New York: Praeger, 1970.
Berlin, James A. "Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories." College English 44
(Dec 1982) 765-77.
115
---. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985. Carbondale, IL:
Southern llinois UP, 1987.
---. "Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class." College English 50 (Sep 1988) 477-94.
Berthoff, Ann E. "From Problem-Solving to a Theory of Imagination." College English 33 (Mar 1972)
636-49.
Bizzell, Patricia. "Thomas Kuhn, Scientism, and English Studies." College English 40 (Mar 1979)
764-71.
---. "Cognition, Convention, and Certainty: What We Need to Know About Writing." PRE/TEXT 3 (fall
1982a) 213-43.
---. "College Composition: Initiation into the Academic Discourse Community." Curriculum Inquiry 12
(1982b) 191-207.
---. "William Perry and Liberal Education." College English 46 (Sep 1984) 447-54.
Boehm, Lorenz. "Human Values and the Basics: Is There Any Choice?" College English 40 (Jan
1979) 505-11.
Boles, Pat. Personal interview, May 1988.
Bose, Subhas Chandra. The Indian Struggle, 1920-1942. Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1967.
Bowles, Samuel, and Herbert Gintis. Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the
Contradictions of Economic Life. New York: Basic, 1976.
Brady, Philip L. Introduction. The "Why's" of Teaching Composition. Ed. by Brady. N.p.: Washington
State Council of Teachers of English, 1978, 1978. v-viii.
Braverman, Harry. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century.
New York: Monthly Review, 1974.
Brinton, Howard H. Friends for 300 Years: The History and Beliefs of the Society of Friends since
George Fox Started the Quaker Movement. Wallington, PA: Pendle Hill, 1976.
Brodinsky, Ben. "Back to the Basics: The Movement and Its Meaning." Phi Delta Kappan 58 (Mar
1977) 522-27.
116
Bruffee, Kenneth A. "Liberal Education and the Social Justification of Belief." Liberal Education 68
(sum 1982a) 95-114.
---. "CLTV: Collaborative Learning Television." Educational Communication and Technology Journal
30 (Spr 1982b) 26-40.
---. "Collaborative Learning and the 'Conversation of Mankind.' " College English 46 (Nov 1984) 635-
52.
Bryant, Verne. Personal interview, May 1988.
Burhans, Clinton S., Jr. "The Teaching of Writing and the Knowledge Gap." College English 45 (Nov
1983) 639-56.
Burke, Gerald, and Russell W. Rumberger, eds. The Future Impact of Technology on Work and
Education. London: Falmer Press, 1987.
Callahan, Raymond E. Education and the Cult of Efficiency. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1962.
Carnegie Commission on Higher Education. College Graduates and Jobs: Adjusting to a New Labor
Market Situation. New York: McGraw, 1973.
Chaffee, John. Thinking Critically. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton, 1988.
Cole, Charlene R. "Students Grade Educational Quality at CSUN." Daily Sundial. California State
University Northridge (11 May 1988): 11-12.
"Concessionary Bargaining: Will the New Cooperation Last?" Business Week 14 Jun 1982: 66+.
Cooney, Robert, and Helen Michalowski, eds. The Power of the People: Active Nonviolence in the
United States. Culver City, CA: Peace Press, 1977.
Cooper, Charles R., and Lee Odell, eds. Research on Composing: Points of Departure. Urbana, IL:
NCTE, 1978.
Corbett, Edward P.J. "The Rhetoric of the Open Hand and the Rhetoric of the Closed Fist." College
Composition and Communication 20 (Dec 1969) 288-96.
Council on Interracial Books for Children. Guidelines for Selecting Bias-Free Textbooks and
Storybooks. New York: Council on Interracial Books, 1980.
117
Davis, Mike. Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working
Class. London: Verso, 1986.
De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Trans. and ed. H.M. Parshley. New York: Knopf, 1952.
Densmore, Kathleen. "Professionalism, Proletarianization and Teacher Work."Critical Studies in
Teacher Education: Its Folklore, Theory and Practice. Ed. Thomas S. Popkewitz. London: Falmer
Press, 1987. 130-60.
Domhoff, G. William. Who Rules America Now? A View for the '80s. New York: Touchstone-Simon,
1986.
Draper, Hal. The Two Souls of Socialism. 1966. Reprints of the 1968 pamphlet edition, published by
the Independent Socialist Clubs of America, are available from Solidarity, 7012 Michigan Av, Detroit
MI 48210.
---. Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution, Vol. 3: The "Dictatorship of the Proletariat." New York: Monthly
Review, 1986.
---. The "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" from Marx to Lenin. New York: Monthly Review, 1987.
Dye, Thomas R. Who's Running America? The Conservative Years. 4th ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice, 1986.
Ede, Lisa, and Andrea Lunsford. Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing.
Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1990.
Edwards, Richard. Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century.
New York: Basic, 1979.
Elbow, Peter. Writing Without Teachers. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.
---. "Why Teach Writing?" The "Why's" of Teaching Composition. Ed. Philip L. Brady. N.p.:
Washington State Council of Teachers of English, 1978. 57-69.
---. Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process. New York: Oxford UP, 1981.
Ellington, Lucien. "Blacks and Hispanics in High School Economics Texts." Social Education 50 (Jan
1986) 64-67.
118
"Fact File: Attitudes and Characteristics of This Year's Freshmen." Chronicle of Higher Education 14
Jan 1990: A33-34.
Fine, Michelle. "Perspectives on Inequity: Voices from Urban Schools." Applied Social Psychology
Annual. vol. 4. Ed. Leonard Bickman. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1983.
Flower, Linda. Problem-Solving Strategies for Writing. 2nd ed. New York: Harcourt, 1985.
Freeman, Richard B. The Overeducated American. New York: Academic Pr., 1976.
Friedlander, Jack. "Instructional Practices of Part-Time Faculty." New Directions for Community
Colleges 30 (1980) 27-36.
Gandhi, M.K. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. 86 vols. Delhi: Ministry of Information and
Broadcasting, Govt. of India, 1958-82.
---. Non-Violence in Peace and War. 2 vols. Ahmedabad, India: Navijan Press, 1962.
---. My Varnashrama Dharma. Bombay: Bhartiya Vidya Bhavan, 1965.
---. My Theory of Trusteeship. Bombay: Bhartiya Vidya Bhavan, 1970.
Gandhi, Mohandas K. An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Boston: Beacon,
1957.
Garson, Barbara. The Electronic Sweatshop: How Computers are Transforming the Office of the
Future into the Factory of the Past. New York: Simon, 1988.
Gere, Anne Ruggles. "Writing: Why and What?" The "Why's" of Teaching Composition. Ed. Philip L.
Brady. N.p.: Washington State Council of Teachers of English, 1978. 17-32.
Gillespie, Kim. Personal interview on three occasions, April 1988.
Giroux, Henry A. "Teacher Education and the Ideology of Social Control." Journal of Education 162
(win 1980) 5-27.
---. Theory and Resistance in Education. South Hadley, MA: Bergin, 1983.
Giroux, Henry A., and David Purpel, eds. The Hidden Curriculum and Moral Education: Deception or
Discovery? Berkeley, CA: McCutchan, 1983.
Goldfield, Michael. The Decline of Organized Labor in the United States. Chicago: U of Chicago P,
1987.
119
Graves, Donald H. Writing: Teachers and Children at Work. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1983.
Greenbaum, Joan. "Division of Labor in the Computer Field." Monthly Review 28: 3 (Jul/Aug 1976) 40-
55.
Hahn, Carole L., and Glen Blankenship. "Women and Economics Textbooks." Theory and Research
in Social Education 11 (fall 1983) 67-76.
Hairston, Maxine. "The Winds of Change: Thomas Kuhn and the Revolution in the Teaching of
Writing." College Composition and Communication 33 (Feb 1982) 76-86.
Hallcom, Francine. Personal interview, April 1988.
Hallin, Dan. "White Paper, Red Scare." NACLA Report on the Americas 17: 4 (Jul/Aug 1983) 2-35.
Harris, Joseph. "The Idea of Community in the Study of Writing." College Composition and
Communication 40 (Feb 1989) 11-22.
Hays, Janice N. "The Development of Discursive Maturity in College Writers." The Writer's Mind:
Writing as a Mode of Thinking. Ed. by Hays et al. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1983. 127-44.
---. "Models of Intellectual Development and Writing: A Response to Myra Kogen, et al." Journal of
Basic Writing 6: 1 (spr 1987) 11-27.
Hays, Janice N., et al., eds. The Writer's Mind: Writing as a Mode of Thinking. Urbana, IL: NCTE,
1983.
Heath, Shirley Brice. Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms.
Cambridge, MA: Cambridge UP, 1983.
Hersh, Seymour M. The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House. New York: Summit,
1983.
Howard, C. Jeriel. The Politics of Basic Writing: Program Administration. Paper presented at the
Annual Meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, March 1983.
ERIC ED 229 784.
Howe, Harold III. "Let's Have Another SAT Score Decline." Phi Delta Kappan 66 (May 1985) 522-27.
Johnson, Dale, L. ed. Class and Social Development: A New Theory of the Middle Class. Beverly
Hills, CA: Sage, 1982.
120
Johnson, Dale L., and Christine O'Donnell. "The Dequalification of Technical, Administrative, and
Professional Labor." Class and Social Development: A New Theory of the Middle Class. Ed. by
Johnson. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1982. 225-44.
King, Martin Luther, Jr. Why We Can't Wait. New York: Harper, 1964.
Kohlberg, Lawrence, and Rochelle Mayer. "Development as the Aim of Education." Harvard
Educational Review 42 (Nov 1972) 449-96.
Kohlberg, Lawrence, and Elliot Turiel. "Moral Development and Moral Education." Psychology and
Educational Practice. Ed. Gerald S. Lesser. Glenview, IL: Foresman, 1971. 410-65.
Kraft, Philip. Programmers and Managers: The Routinization of Computer Programming in the United
States. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1977.
Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1970.
Kytle, Ray. "Slaves, Serfs, or Colleagues--Who Shall Teach College Composition?" College
Composition and Communication 22 (Dec 1971) 339-41.
Larson, Gale K. "1986-87 Annual Report of the Upper Division Writing Proficiency Examination."
California State University Northridge, 14 Sep 1987.
---. Personal interview, April 1988.
Lazere, Donald. "Stratification in the Academic Profession and in the Teaching of Composition."
Humanities in Society 4 (fall 1981) 379-94.
LeFevre, Karen Burke. Invention as a Social Act. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illionois UP, 1987.
LeGuin, Ursula. The Dispossessed. New York: Harper, 1974.
Lindemann, Erika. A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.
Lloyd-Jones, Richard, and Andrea A. Lunsford, eds. The English Coalition Conference: Democracy
through Language. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1989.
Lunsford, Andrea A. "Politics and Practices in Basic Writing." A Sourcebook for Basic Writing
Teachers. Ed. Theresa Enos. New York: Random, 1987. 246-58.
Macrorie, Ken. Telling Writing. Rochelle Park, NJ: Hayden, 1970a.
---. Uptaught. New York: Hayden, 1970b.
121
Maimon, Elaine P., et al. Writing in the Arts and Sciences. Cambridge, MA: Winthrop, 1981.
---. Readings in the Arts and Sciences. Boston: Little, 1984.
Martin, Rex. Rawls and Rights. Lawrence, KS: UP of Kansas, 1985.
Marx, Karl. "The Civil War in France." The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. Robert C. Tucker. 2nd ed. New
York: Norton, 1978. 618-52.
Meiksins, Peter. "New Middle Class or Working Class?" Against the Current 2: 4 (win 1984) 42-48.
Meisenhelder, Tom. "The Ideology of Professionalism in Higher Education." Journal of Education 165
(sum 1983) 295-307.
Miller, Susan. "Rhetorical Maturity: Definition and Development." Reinventing the Rhetorical Tradition.
Ed. Aviva Freedman and Ian Pringle. Conway, AR: L and S Books, 1980. 119-27.
Mills, C. Wright. The Power Elite. New York: Oxford UP, 1956.
Moody, Kim. An Injury to All: The Decline of American Unionism. London: Verso, 1988.
Mukerjee, Hirendranath. Gandhiji: A Study. 2nd ed. New Delhi: People's Publishing House, 1960.
Murray, Donald M. A Writer Teaches Writing. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton, 1985.
Myers, Greg. "Reality, Consensus, and Reform in the Rhetoric of Composition Teaching." College
English 48 (Feb 1986) 154-74.
Namboodiripad, E.M.S. The Mahatma and the Ism. New Delhi: People's Publishing House, 1958.
Nash, George. "Who's Minding Freshman English at U.T. Austin?" College English 38 (Oct 1976) 125-
31.
"The New Industrial Relations." Business Week 11 May 1981: 84+.
Nicholson, Pat. Personal interviews on two occasions, April and May 1988.
Noble, David F. America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism. New
York: Knopf, 1977.
North, Stephen M. The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field. Upper
Montclair, NJ: Boynton, 1987.
Ohmann, Richard. English in America: A Radical View of the Profession. New York: Oxford UP, 1976.
122
Ohmann, Richard, and Jack Weston. "A Guide to Marxist Teaching: Freshman English." Radical
Teacher 9 (Sep 1978) 26-29.
O'Toole, James. Work, Learning, and the American Future. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1977.
Parenti, Michael. Democracy for the Few. 5th ed. New York: St. Martin's, 1988.
Parker, Mike. Inside the Circle: A Union Guide to QWL. Boston: South End, 1985.
Parker, Mike, and Jane Slaughter. Choosing Sides: Unions and the Team Concept. Boston: South
End, 1988.
Pearson, Marlene. Personal interview, April 1988.
Penfield, Elizabeth F. "Process, Product, and the Administration of the English Department." ADE
Bulletin 84 (fall 1986) 11-15.
Perkinson, Henry J. The Imperfect Panacea: American Faith in Education, 1865-1976. 2nd ed. New
York: Random, 1977.
Perloff, James. The Shadows of Power: The Council on Foreign Relations and the American Decline.
Appleton, WI: Western Islands, 1988.
Perry, William G., Jr. Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years: A Scheme.
New York: Holt, 1968.
Peters, R.S. Ethics and Education. Atlanta: Foresman, 1967.
Piercy, Marge. Woman on the Edge of Time. New York: Fawcett, 1978.
Popkewitz, Thomas S. "Educational Research: Values and Visions of Social Order." Theory and
Research in Social Education 6 (Dec 1978) 20-39.
---. "Paradigms in Educational Science: Different Meanings and Purpose to Theory." Journal of
Education 162 (win 1980) 28-46.
---, ed. Critical Studies in Teacher Education: Its Folklore, Theory and Practice. London: Falmer Press,
1987a.
---. "Ideology and Social Formation in Teacher Education." Critical Studies in Teacher Education: Its
Folklore, Theory and Practice. Ed. by Popkewitz. London: Falmer Press, 1987b. 2-33.
123
Progressive Composition. Newsletter of the Progressive Composition Caucus. Address: Progressive
Composition, Dept. of English, Univ. of Houston, Houston TX 77204-3012.
Purnell, Rosentene B. "A Survey of the Tesing of Writing Proficiency in College: A Progress Report."
College Composition and Communication 33 (Dec 1982) 407-10.
Rao, M.B., ed. The Mahatma: A Marxist Symposium. New Delhi: People's Publishing House, 1969.
Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard UP, 1971.
Rist, Ray C. "Student Social Class and Teacher Expectations: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy in Ghetto
Education." Harvard Educational Review 40 (Aug 1970) 411-51.
Robertson, Linda R., Sharon Crowley, and Frank Lentricchia. "The Wyoming Conference Resolution
Opposing Unfair Salaries and Working Conditions for Post-Secondary Teachers of Writing."
College English 49 (Mar 1987) 274-80.
Robinson, Jay L. "Literacy in the Department of English." College English 47 (Sep 1985) 482-98.
Rohman, D. Gordan. "Pre-Writing: The Stage of Discovery in the Writing Process." College
Composition and Communication. 16 (May 1965) 106-12.
---. "My Friend Henry." College Composition and Communication 23 (Dec 1972) 373-77.
Rose, Mike. Lives on the Boundary: The Struggles and Achievements of America's Underprepared.
New York: Free Press-Macmillan, 1989.
Rose, Stephen J. The American Economy Poster and Fact Book. New York: Pantheon, 1987.
Rosenberg, Vivian M. Reading, Writing, and Thinking: Critical Connections. New York: McGraw,
1990.
Rumberger, Russell W. Overeducation in the U.S. Labor Market. New York: Praeger, 1981.
---. "The Potential Impact of Technology on Work and Education." The Future Impact of Technology
on Work and Education. Ed. Gerald Burke and Russell W. Rumberger. London: Falmer Press,
1987. 74-95.
Ryan, Howard. "Nonviolent Theory and Anti-Nuclear Politics." Deadly Connections: An Against the
Current Anti-Militarist Pamphlet. 1986. Available from Against the Current, 7012 Michigan Av,
Detroit MI 48210.
124
Sarkar, Sumit. Modern India 1885-1947. Delhi: Macmillan, 1983.
Scott, Johnnie. Personal interview, May 1988.
Sennett, Richard, and Jonathan Cobb. The Hidden Injuries of Class. New York: Vintage, 1972.
Shalom, Stephen Rosskam,ed. Socialist Visions. Boston: South End, 1983.
Shannon, Patrick. Broken Promises: Reading Instruction in Twentieth-Century America. Granby, MA:
Bergin, 1989.
Sharp, Rachel, and Anthony Green. Education and Social Control: A Study in Progressive Primary
Education. London: Routledge, 1975.
Shawcross, William. Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia. Rev. ed. New
York: Simon, 1987.
Shor, Ira. "Reinventing Daily Life: Self-Study and the Theme of 'Work.' " College English 39 (Dec
1977) 502-6.
---. Culture Wars: School and Society in the Conservative Restoration 1969-1984. Boston:
Routledge, 1986.
---. Critical Teaching and Everyday Life. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987a.
---, ed. Freire for the Classroom: A Sourcebook for Liberatory Teaching. Portsmouth, NH:
Heinemann, 1987b.
Shoup, Laurence H., and William Minter. Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and
United States Foreign Policy. New York: Monthly Review, 1977.
Sklar, Holly, ed. Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management.
Boston: South End, 1980a.
---. "Trilateralism: Managing Dependence and Democracy." Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission
and Elite Planning for World Management. Ed. by Sklar. Boston: South End, 1980b. 1-57.
Sklar, Holly, and Ros Everdell. "Who's Who on the Trilateral Commission." Trilateralism: The
Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management. Ed. by Sklar. Boston: South
End, 1980. 90-131.
Slaughter, Jane. Concessions and How to Beat Them. Detroit: Labor Notes, 1983.
125
Slevin, James F. "A Note on the Wyoming Resolution and ADE." ADE Bulletin 87 (fall 1987) 50.
Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Eds. R.H. Campbell,
A.S. Skinner, and W.B. Todd. 2 vols. New York: Oxford UP, 1976.
Smitherman, Geneva. " 'What Go Round Come Round': King in Perspective." Harvard Educational
Review 51 (Feb 1981) 40-56.
Smitherman-Donaldson, Geneva. "Toward a National Public Policy on Language." College English 49
(Jan 1987) 29-36.
Staples, Katherine. Money, Status, and Composition: Assumptions Underlying the Crisis of Part-Time
Instruction. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Conference on College Composition and
Communication, March 1984. ERIC ED 243 118.
Steadman, Michael. Personal interview, April 1988.
Steelman, Lala Carr, and Brian Powell. "Appraising the Implications of the SAT for Educational Policy."
Phi Delta Kappan 66 (Mar 1985) 603-7.
Stewart, Donald C. "Composition Textbooks and the Assault on Tradition." College Composition and
Communication 29 (May 1978) 171-76.
Szilak, Dennis. "Teachers of Composition: A Re-Niggering." College English 39 (Sep 1977) 25-32.
Taylor, S. Martin. "Education and Employment." Black English and the Education of Black Children
and Youth: Proceedings of the National Invitational Symposium on the King Decision. Ed. Geneva
Smitherman. Detroit: Center for Black Studies, 1981. 241-58.
Tendulkar, D.G. Mahatma: Life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. rev. ed. 8 vols. Delhi: Ministry of
Information and Broadcasting, Govt. of India, 1960-63.
Therborn, Göran. The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology. London: Verso, 1980.
Trimbur, John. "Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning." College English 51 (Oct 1989)
602-16.
Trotsky, Leon. "Their Morals and Ours." The Basic Writings of Trotsky. Ed. Irving Howe. New York:
Random, 1963. 370-99.
126
U.S. Bureau of the Census. Money Income of Households, Families, and Persons in the United States:
1987. Current Population Reports, Series P-60, No. 162. Wash DC: GPO, 1989.
Uba, George. Personal interview, May 1988.
Vitanza, Victor J. " 'Notes' Towards Historiographies of Rhetorics; or, Rhetorics of the Histories of
Rhetorics: Traditional, Revisionary, and Sub/Versive." PRE/TEXT 8 (spr/sum 1987) 63-125.
Walters, Tom Spencer. Personal interviews on two occasions, April and May 1988.
Wilson, Reginald. "The State of Black Higher Education: Crisis and Promise." The State of Black
America 1989. Ed. Janet Dewart. New York: National Urban League, 1989. 121-35.
Winterowd, W. Ross. The Culture and Politics of Literacy. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.
Witte, Stephen P., et al. A National survey of College and University Writing Program Directors.
Technical Report No. 2. Texas Univ., Austin. August 1981. ERIC ED 210 709.
Wolf, Thia. Personal interviews on four occasions, March through May 1988.
Work in America: Report of a Special Task Force to the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973.
WPE test-takers, names withheld. Personal interviews on six occasions, April 1988.
Young, Art, Mike Gorman, and Margaret Gorman. "The 1982-83 Writing and Literature Survey:
Courses and Programs." ADE Bulletin 76 (win 1983) 52-59.
Young, Richard E. "Paradigms and Problems: Needed Research in Rhetorical Invention." Research
on Composing: Points of Departure. Eds. Charles R. Cooper and Lee Odell. Urbana, IL: NCTE,
1978. 29-47.
Young, Richard E., Alton L. Becker, and Kenneth L. Pike. Rhetoric: Discovery and Change. New
York: Harcourt, 1970.
Zimbalist, Andrew, ed. Case Studies on the Labor Process. New York: Monthly Review, 1979.