Composition: History & Theory: 1990 - 1999
Harris, Joseph. A Teaching Subject: Composition Since 1966 (1997)
Description
Joseph Harris’ work traces how the teaching of college writing has been “theorized and imagined since 1966” following the Dartmouth Seminar. Harris maps out the theoretical history of composition studies by closely examining how five key words—growth, voice, process, error, and community have been conceptualized in well-known publications about writing and teaching. He does so in an attempt to argue that composition is a “teaching subject” worth of a place within English studies. Harris is not intending to paint a seamless history of composition studies. Instead, he views this history as a “set of tensions and issues that have shaped the current discourse.” His goal is to demonstrate how writing and teaching have been discussed in critical ways. His focus is looking at composition as a teaching subject—a set of practices, concerns, issues, and problems that has to do with how writing gets taught. Harris begins his work by explaining the focus of the Dartmouth Seminar (1966) which was to define English and outline the best ways to teach it. Harris believes that this seminar marked drastic change in English studies from “something you learn about” to “something you do” (Harris 1). At the time of the Dartmouth Seminar, Americans were teaching Standard Written English and literature while the British were focusing on students’ responses to it and teachers’ responses to students’ work. The British growth model of teaching eschewed subject-centered, traditional, standardized testing models or forms, and focused on students’ dialects, personal experiences, and language skills and uses in a progressive education model (Dewey influence) instead. Growth theorists—Dixon, Britton, Moffett—academically validated study of students’ speech and writing. Americans, under federally-funded Project English--designed a “spiral” literature and language Kindergarten—college curriculum (inspired by success of National Defense Education Act). Writing process pedagogy, free- and pre-writing, drafting, revising, and small group work grew out of growth theory. Harris argues that the (mostly British) growth theorists’ emphasis on studying students’ discourse, and the American formalist emphasis on studying canonical literature respond to the “legitimation crisis” when English as a discipline struggled for definition and validation in the academy (Harris 8). Harris is against composition history “narratives of progress” (via Berlin’s Rhetoric and Reality) that claim (superior) social epistemic rhetoric followed (naïve) expressionism. Harris says the struggle among conflicting practices and philosophies is ongoing.
He sees the Dartmouth Seminar as important, dramatizing “with unusual clarity” several “conflicts that drive work in English,” especially “relations between teaching and research” (9). Still, most work in English departments remains unchanged.
Harris continues his work by arguing against the idea of a split between the “real” world and the “college” world, or the “world of action” and the “world of the mind,” saying both are real, active, thinking and working worlds (18-19). He discusses his use of pop culture as a subject for students to talk and write about and considers film, music, advertising, television, and fashion as forms of discourse or text useful for analysis. Harris acknowledges the difficult issues that surface when students engage in these texts. He emphasizes that the value of students complicating their ideas and situating themselves in conversations that connect the “real” and “college” worlds outweighs the difficulty.
Harris sees debate about the nature of self, called voice in writing, reflected in different teaching approaches. He claims that writers are commonly viewed as struggling to express their inner voice, or attempting to appropriate (an) outside voice(s), but seldom seen as actual persons speaking with actual people. Writing voice is thought of as either a personal, mystical emanation, or a type of public, “totalizing [academic] discourse” the writer must “submit to” (Harris 44). Harris calls for recognition that voice constitutes discourse and as such is part of dialogue, that it is conversational, contextual, both personal and public, fraught with interesting complexities, the transformative tension of teaching and learning. He says we should begin writing courses with the concept that our culture (which shapes us) speaks to us (should, ideally) through many competing voices.
Harris agrees with the idea that writing is a process, but he rejects making the study of the process of writing the center of composition studies, rather than students’ writings. This popular 1970s-80s research agenda grew out of cognitive theories of writing that sought to legitimate composition studies with science, and, Harris argues, using the work of Emig and Flower, simply replaces current-traditionalist focus on correctness and form in writing with cognitive focus on correctness and form in process. Harris is more interested in how the idea of teaching writing as a process, rather than a product, manifests in praxis and relates to students’ writing products. He argues that both Emig’s expressivist and Flower’s technocratic views of process “lacked a dialogical sense of revision” (Harris 68).
In order to demonstrate some of the most important shifts and trends in regard to the correction of error in student writing, Harris outlines the competing theoretical positions of figures such as Mina Shaughnessy (Errors and Expectations, 1977), Mike Rose (Lives on the Boundary, 1989), and Geneva Smitherman (Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America, 1977). In doing so, Harris sets up the following dilemma: If we as teachers ignore the issue of grammatical correctness in student writing we are setting some students (especially those from a lower socioeconomic status) up for failure in college and life; however, if we focus on teaching grammatical correctness, we will hinder the creative process of anxious and inexperienced writers. Harris essentially tries to convince readers that we need to reconsider our conceptions of terms such as “error” and “correctness”. He wants to move away from skill-and-drill instruction toward a pedagogy of critical awareness. This is not to say that Harris believes we, as teachers, are training students to become professional intellectuals (he seems to resist the professionalization of knowledge). For Harris, the critical does not necessarily equal the academic.
Harris also wants his reader to take a critical look at the term community. He essentially wants us to avoid any sweeping, utopian, fluffy definitions of the term. He also wants us to stop thinking of “discourse communities” as spaces where a closely-knit group of people share a common set of beliefs. For Harris, “discourse communities” are much more like large cities where people meet by chance and do not always share the same viewpoint. He is looking to create a classroom space where students come to see the various conflicting and competing “discourses” found both in and outside of academia. He argues that many scholars (including Patricia Bizzell) make the mistake of invoking an idea of community that is both sweeping and vague (utopian). For Harris, these conceptions lead to the following problems: mistaking a discourse community for universality; the belief in “normal” discourse; the term “community” will become empty and sentimental; and the extraordinary power one can gain through speaking in an actual community is ignored. Harris references David Bartholomae’s Inventing the University because it demonstrates how the university is made up of discourse communities that “shift subtly” and are always in flux (something we must continually reinvent). For Bartholomae, the university is a community of various and competing discourses (not a monolithic version of a community). Harris then compares this theoretical lens with Stanley Fish’s term “interpretive community”—a loose, dispersed network of individuals who share certain habits of mind. Harris takes issue with this term because he feels it becomes a “metaphor for a shadowy network of citations and references.” Harris worries that teaching students a “common way” of talking or thinking will likely lead to students agreeing with everything their professors tell them (an issue of privilege). This is not to say that Harris is advocating neutral or value-free pedagogy. Instead, he is arguing against the notion that students should be working toward some well-defined version of discourse. He doesn’t want students to stop being who they are. To Harris, community does not mean consensus. He offers the metaphor of a city, allowing for consensus and conflict, rather than the idea of one utopian community.
A Teaching Subject: Composition Since 1966 (Reviews)
NCTE: Harris identifies five key words that reflect the dominant teaching practices that have been occurring since the 1960s: growth, voice, process, error, and community. However, his essay “Revision as a Critical Practice” seems to take a different approach which is worrisome: literary fiction. The fear is that those that have despised teaching composition will see this as an opportunity to begin seeing it as nothing more than close reading of texts. [NCTE. “A Comment on Joseph Harris’s ‘Revision as a Critical Practice.’” College English. 66 (2004): 554-558.]
Marilyn M. Cooper: The five key words are present in this work as well as the term “contact zones”. Each term shows how composition developed over time and “answered a need in the context in which it developed and how changing contexts and conflicting needs gave rise to alternate positions” (503). The Dartmouth Seminar in 1966 is the pivotal turning point because the British educators that spoke discussed teaching methods that Americans had been trying to shy away from. Harris also discusses the value of voice in writing by stating that the expressivist movement came out of political necessity. Cooper feels that Harris has shown that “teachers inevitably fit their practices to their perceptions and experiences of the particular context in which they work” (505). According to Cooper, Harris is always alert to teaching practices that are prevalent and is gracious and insightful with his discussion of composition. [Cooper, Marilyn M. “Untitled” College Composition and Communication. 51 (2000): 503-505.]
Sidney I. Dobrin: To Harris, teaching writing means that one must “talk about writing in our scholarship” (695). Larger issues of race, class, culture, and gender allow Harris to navigate student writing as students’ attempts to negotiate different public and private discourses. Dobrin is in disagreement with Harris’s emphasis on reading student texts because in his own teaching he has seen that “teaching textual interpretation is not the same as teaching textual production” (695). [Dobrin, Sidney I. “Review: English Departments and the Question of Disciplinarity.” College English. 59 (1997): 692-699.]
Date of Upload
3/15/09