delivering college composition

Delivering College Composition

The Fifth Canon

Edited by Kathleen Blake Yancey

BOYNTON/COOKPortsmouth, NH

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Boynton/Cook Publishers, Inc.A subsidiary of Reed Elsevier Inc.361 Hanover StreetPortsmouth, NH 03801–3912www.boyntoncook.com

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© 2006 by Boynton/Cook

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic ormechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission inwriting from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataDelivering college composition : the fifth canon / edited by Kathleen Blake Yancey.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references.ISBN 0-86709-509-3 (alk. paper)1. English language—Rhetoric—Study and teaching. 2. English

language—Rhetoric—Study and teaching—Data processing. 3. Report writing—Study and teaching (Higher). 4. Report writing—Study and teaching (Higher)—Data processing. I. Yancey, Kathleen Blake, 1950– II. Title.

PE1404.D3885 2006808�.0420711—dc22 2005031813

Editor: Charles SchusterProduction editor: Sonja S. ChapmanCover design: Jenny Jensen GreenleafTypesetter : TechBooksManufacturing: Jamie Carter

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper10 09 08 07 06 VP 1 2 3 4 5

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To Chuck,for his talk at WPA that began this book

and for his friendship throughout

and

to David, Genevieve, and Matthew,always

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Contents

Preface ix

1. Delivering College Composition:A Vocabulary for DiscussionKathleen Blake Yancey 1

2. The Canon of Delivery in Rhetorical Theory:Selections, Commentary, and AdviceMartin Jacobi 17

3. Faculties, Students, Sites, Technologies:Multiple Deliveries of Composition at a Research UniversityIrwin Weiser 30

4. Getting Our Money’s Worth:Delivering Composition at a Comprehensive State UniversityJoyce Magnotto Neff 48

5. Delivering Composition at a Liberal Arts College:Making the Implicit ExplicitCarol Rutz 60

6. Keepin’ It Real:Delivering College Composition at an HBCUTeresa Redd 72

7. Advanced Placement, Not Advanced Exemption:Challenges for High Schools, Colleges, and UniversitiesDavid A. Jolliffe and Bernard Phelan 89

8. The Space Between:Dual-Credit Programs as Brokering, Community Building,and ProfessionalizationChristine Farris 104

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9. Is It Pedagogical or Administrative?Administering Distance Delivery to High SchoolsPaul Bodmer 115

10. Design, Delivery, and NarcolepsyTodd Taylor 127

11. Toward Delivering New Definitions of WritingMarvin Diogenes and Andrea A. Lunsford 141

12. Undisciplined WritingJoseph Harris 155

13. Asynchronicity:Delivering Composition and Literature in the Cyberclassroom Richard Courage 168

14. Distributed Teaching, Distributed Learning:Integrating Technology and Criteria-Driven Assessment into the Delivery of First-Year Composition Rebecca Rickly 183

15. Delivering College Composition into the FutureKathleen Blake Yancey 199

Contributors 211

viii Contents

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ix

Preface

Many—myself among them—have claimed that college composition today isdifferent in kind rather than degree from the college composition that precededit. Sometimes, those claims are made in the language of postprocess, othertimes in the terms of alt.discourse, still other times in the vocabulary of criticalpedagogy or of cultural studies or of . . . (Too) rarely is the claim exploredthrough multiple classrooms, sites, and programs.

This volume does just that: it takes a look at college composition in diverseinstitutions and regions of the country, using the lens of delivery as a way ofthinking together about what it is that we hope to achieve in teaching collegecomp. For our purposes, delivery is defined as site, as agent (faculty), and notleast, as technology. In this exploration, the first of its kind since the 1980 pub-lication of Eight Approaches to Teaching Composition, we see that the compo-sition of the twenty-first century will indeed take very different forms than itscousin in the twentieth—because of digital technology, yes, and because ofnew ways of defining the teacher, and because of new ways of understandingboth curricular and physical spaces.

It is our hope that in making these differences known, we can all be moreintentional about how to make them matter.

Kathleen Blake YanceyTallahassee, Florida

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1

1

Delivering College CompositionA Vocabulary for Discussion

Kathleen Blake YanceyFlorida State University

At first glance, the question of how we ought to teach college composition—and thus how we ought to “deliver” its instruction—seems fairly obvious. If wewant college students to write, then we should ask them to write. And if we fol-low Peter Elbow’s sometime advice, we don’t even need to have faculty avail-able: students can simply write without them.1

At second (and third) glances, however, this question—how do we delivercollege composition?—isn’t quite so simple. Given the ages of today’s collegestudents—from fifteen to seventy—what does it mean to be a college writer?Given the multiple, complex, and ever changing, often hybrid sites where students can receive credit for a college writing course—from high school class-room to shopping mall to university seminar room to cybercafé halfway aroundthe world—what difference, if any, does the site of instruction make? And whatis the instruction in: what is college composition? Not least, what does linkingthese three terms—college and composition and delivery—help us understandabout college composition today, and in the future?

By examining and mapping this vocabulary—college, composition, anddelivery—this chapter sets the stage for just such an inquiry.

College

The best container for learning is not a course.2

A hundred years ago, as James Berlin, Robert Connors, and Sharon Crowleyhave amply demonstrated, college was fairly easy to define: set off from theworld in a world of its own, it was the place that eighteen-year-olds went to besocialized into American culture. In part, of course, college was defined

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through difference. It wasn’t like high school—in expectations; in attitudes;perhaps most especially in location. High school was here, and college wasthere. As important, college was likewise defined by its difference from highschool in population: while the law typically mandated all Americans tocomplete some high school, college attendance was voluntary and, conse-quently perhaps, more restricted. As The Big Test (Lemann) argues, the eight-een-year-olds who went off to college were more often than not sons of thewhite establishment.

Like high school, however, the basic purpose of college, particularly in itsattention to literacy, was the normalization of identity, as Richard Millerexplains:

Whether the writer is Richard Hoggart or Richard Rodriquez, James Baldwinor the students whose work Bartholomae discusses, the movement from thehome to the school and to the world of work almost always involves an untir-ing labor of ascetic self-suppression and refashioning. While debates aboutwriting pedagogy have tended to turn on trivial subjects such as the merits of“clarity” or the need for instruction in “style,” literate practices matter asmuch as they do because they are essential to the normalization of identity.Quite apart from what books and classroom lectures may profess, these booksand lectures teach people how to think and act, how to represent themselvesto themselves and others. (41)

The central role that college and composition play in normalizing thatwhich would otherwise not be normal isn’t in dispute. Rather, what’s interest-ing is how such normalization—which regardless of how it’s phrased (e.g.,inventing the university or liberating the students) is still the goal—might stillbe possible today, when the population is increasingly diversified and the sitesof both composition and college increasingly distributed.

During the twentieth century, the collegiate student body diversifiedthrough legislation and deliberate political acts, for instance, through the GI Billfollowing World War II, and later with open admissions. Or: student bodies havechanged along lines of race, class, and ethnicity, although not as much as welike to think. In 2000, at the turn of the century, while more than half of gradu-ating high school classes, 57.6 percent, enrolled in some form of postsecondaryeducation, only 24.4 percent of Americans completed what they had begun.For students of color, the picture is considerably bleaker: only 10 percent ofAfrican Americans graduate from college, fewer than that for Latinos, whichis not surprising given that in that population, 47 percent of those aged six-teen to nineteen aren’t in school of any kind (Johnson). And don’t even askabout Native Americans. So college: demographically, it’s changing, if tooslowly.

Even more so, the spaces of composition instruction, particularly in theirdistribution of sites, a phrase unheard of one hundred years ago. Even before thecampus variety of postsecondary composition, of course, we had off-campus,

2 Delivering College Composition


informal, unsanctioned varieties, that which we in general call the extracurric-ular curriculum, a way of delivering college learning without teachers, tuition,credits, or degrees. As documented by Anne Gere, Deborah Brandt, and CindySelfe, this site welcomes an informal, self- and communally sponsored learn-ing of writing, at kitchen tables and on park benches, often organized by peo-ple of little formal education. Some colleges (DePaul, for instance) have madeworking with this extracurriculum part of their mission, just as some composi-tion curricula—a service learning curriculum, for instance—likewise link tosuch projects. And there are compositionists, Richard Miller among them, whoargue that these sites of learning offer our best hope for the future. He notesthat “the most important social changes of our time” are taking place outsidethe academy, in what he calls “new and uncoercive forms of interaction organ-ized and developed by couples, families, support groups, ‘salons,’ and congre-gations” (44).

Howard Rheingold agrees, though he casts his gaze at an electronic land-scape. In Smart Mobs, he chronicles the use of multiple, interacting telecom-munication devices by teenagers who want to gather immediately, who seeknew kinds of social interaction, and for whom multitasking seems not so muchdesirable as normal. While often these smart mobs gather for social andephemeral (and some might say frivolous) reasons, Rheingold cites some spe-cific instances of political use—in both the Philippines and Senegal. Closer tohome, the Associated Press runs a story on the new digital divide, the gulfbetween the so-called digital “natives” and their digital “immigrant” parents.Some teachers even include instant messaging in their construct of school lit-eracy (although it’s fair to note that if the curriculum is what’s tested, we’re along way from including IMing or just-in-time social gatherings as schoolcommunication tasks). Still others, adults and children, have taught themselvesways to narrate their daily thoughts on blogs and on wikis. Most of these onlineforms of composition, from the text messaging of cell phones to the instantmessaging of college students to the blogging of political candidates, have notgenerally been taught in the academy, much less sanctioned by it.3 Moreover,these sites, because of the freedom allowed by the digital, are no longer sites inthe conventional, physical, fixed sense: they are mobile, flexible, just in time.It’s person as node—or site.4

By contrast, composition instruction seems fairly staid, even if on cam-pus it does occur across a wide variety of sites—in classrooms, still, and aug-mented and expanded in various other sites: writing and learning centers,writing-across-the-curriculum programs, informal individual tutorials, withinfirst-year experience programs and learning communities. At some instititu-tions, instruction can take place on campus and off—at off-campus sites suchas satellite campuses and at other temporary sites like shopping malls.Increasingly conventional and sometimes short-lived is the virtual site: some-times video based, these days more often Web based, and in this latter versionit often exists inside a course management system separated from any larger

Delivering College Composition 3


context, which, as Darin Payne argues, tends to remove agency at the sametime it may increase opportunity. Soon enough, as Chuck Schuster has sug-gested, composition instruction may arrive in our mailboxes as an interactiveCD, with the CD itself as the sole means of educational delivery: CD as col-lege site.

The last principal site of instruction for collegiate instruction, ironically, isthe high school, that place that by its difference from college once defined post-secondary education. In the late 1940s, the Advanced Placement Programallowed students to complete their college composition without setting foot ina college classroom, and without any coursework at all (see Jolliffe and Phelan,this volume). They simply needed to earn a score, typically from 3 to 5 on a1–5 range, that a college recognized as a sign of competence worth collegecredit or exemption from the standard campus course. Even more populartoday, the test itself is not constructed by any college, nor by any group repre-senting colleges per se, but rather by a testing company that is contracted bythe College Board. In a second and increasingly popular version of high schoolqua college, students can earn college credit for composition in dual-enrollmentprograms where students double-dip, collecting college credit while completinghigh school courses for which they also acquire credit (see Bodmer, thisvolume).

In other words, college—if defined by its students and the places it deliversinstruction—is no longer a specific place, if indeed it ever was. Rather, collegeoccurs in multiple sites—physical and virtual, informal and formal, official andjust in time—that are defined explicitly or function de facto as collegiate.

What does this proliferation of sites mean for college composition? Giventhis history, is college composition merely an anachronism?

Composition

The real composition is in the being.5

That composition has changed in the last one hundred years will surprise noone. As Berlin and Crowley demonstrate, composition as a universal require-ment has a long history in this country, one directly connected to the forma-tion of identity. Its briefer, more recent history during the last sixty years, thetime when composition morphed from product to process to situated processto digitized “screen text” (Moran)—and became the discipline we knowtoday—suggests both how central it is to the academy and also how shifting.Which, ironically, means that today it is, perhaps more than ever, in search ofa definition.

In her 1982 article “The Winds of Change,” Maxine Hairston provided acontext for understanding the changes in composition that had taken place inthe prior fifteen years. Invoking Thomas Kuhn’s notion of paradigmaticchange, Hairston argued that the teaching of writing had been revolutionized.



Contrasting what came before, she observed,

It is important to note that the traditional paradigm [of composition and itsteaching] did not grow out of research or experimentation. It derives partlyfrom the classical rhetorical model that organizes the production of discourseinto invention, arrangement, and style, but mostly it seems to be based onsome idealized and orderly vision of what literature scholars, whose profes-sional focus is on the written product, seem to imagine is an efficient methodof writing. (78)

This model, she claimed, was being replaced by one oriented both tostudents and to process, a theme picked up in an advertisement for the new(1982) volume highlighting the various approaches characteristic of this newparadigm, Eight Approaches to Teaching Composition.

Eight new essays reflect a dramatic “paradigm shift” in the field of composi-tion, and offer exciting course options for all faculty members and graduateassistants called upon to teach composition. The focus has shifted from finalproduct to process. . . . Approaches include: pure process, prose models andprocess, experiential, rhetorical, epistemic, basic, conferencing, and cross-disciplinary.

Put differently and as Paul Matsuda has argued, composition in this shiftboth has and hasn’t changed. On the one hand, we still wanted texts, forinstance, that had a thesis and support and that were correct. On the other hand,we saw the significance of invention, and we were prepared to take a processapproach to helping students create text, based in part on new understandingsof composing mapped by Sondra Perl and Janet Emig and on work undertakenon invention by scholars like D. Gordon Rohman, Elizabeth and GregoryCowan, and Alton Becker, Richard Young, and Kenneth Pike.

Still, if composition itself hadn’t changed so much, the model for teachingwas changing, from an analytical, prose- and product-based pedagogy inwhich class time was spent in analysis and in which the chief purpose of theclass—composing—was to take place outside of class, to an in-class process-based workshop model that was decidedly social. It still persists today:

Because our discipline has embraced a pedagogy of draft and revision andclose work with a “coach”/teacher, because our classrooms typically promotecollaborative learning, and because we often choose to speak at length withstudents individually as we work with them on drafts of essays, we often formstrong bonds with our students. We become invested in our students’ suc-cesses and failures in ways that are significantly different from those of ourcolleagues. (Sullivan 378)

Many of the key scholars who influenced this movement early on, sincelabeled “expressionists,” spoke to a particular set of values: “voice” and “truth”and “individuality.” Fairly quickly, others spoke to other values: David



Bartholomae to academic discourse, James Berlin to the epistemic role thatcomposing always plays. With this latter claim in particular, composingbecame rhetorical in another sense: students’ work was identified not only as ameans of knowledge for us but also as a means of creating knowledge for them,which is itself a different enterprise than merely reproducing knowledge deliv-ered to them.

As is well known, for nearly a decade the tension between Bartholomae’sposition and that of those advocating a more personal writing ensnared the dis-cipline. Finally, in a synopsis that reflected the views of many, College Com-position and Communication editor Joe Harris remarked,

Indeed the whole argument over whether we should teach “personal essays” or“academic discourse” strikes me as misleading and debilitating—since theopposition between the two tends quickly to devolve into a stand off betweenbelletrism and pedantry, sensitivity and rigor, and thus turns both into somethingthat most students I have met show little interest in either reading or writing. (2)

At about the same time that Harris was pointing to the enervating effectsof this divide, some ten years after Hairston’s “Winds,” Charles Moran invokedthe same metaphor to point to the next revolution already under way. In “TheWinds, and the Costs, of Change,” Moran argued that with the advent of thePC, we had another option before us, a new composing medium that wouldchange both teaching and composing: “It is clear to me and to others . . . thatcomputers have changed our work in ways as fundamental as the advent of theprocess paradigm announced in 1982 by Maxine Hairston. The change hasoccurred; it would be foolish to pretend that it has not” (1).

Moran’s claim, like McLuhan’s before him, was that the medium did makea difference, that the computer changed not only the process of creation butalso the product itself. He also suggested that this shift in medium providedstudents with a novel and difficult rhetorical problem:

As computer-writers, they were ahead of much of the rest of the institution.If they chose to work in this new medium, screen text, they knew that their readers—the professors for whom they were writing in the courses otherthan ours—were requiring printed text. Somehow they had to write on thescreen, all the while imagining their work being read on paper. It is perhapsfor this reason that they printed out their work so often. It may be that negotiating this passage—between screen-author and print-reader—contributes to the difficulty writers report having as they read their own workon-screen. (6)

Interestingly, Moran’s observation still holds: one way to understand thismoment in the profession, as Richard Fulkerson in casting a wider net alsoargues, is to say that we don’t seem to have a disciplinary consensus aboutwhere our focus belongs: on the print side; in screen and print contexts both; inthe passage between; or in all of the above.



And while the nature of composition—what is it?—is contested, facultycontinue to introduce new tasks, to be created in new genres, composed notonly on the screen, which suggests a kind of planar approach, but also withinnew environments, which suggests a place for composing that in its three-dimensionality is like the classroom that they seek to extend, expand, and com-plicate. Advocates of digital composition, indeed, argue that by comparison,print literacy is limited literacy, and that the digital environment is introducingnew genres of writing more quickly that we have time to study them. TheSpooner and Yancey article announcing their “postings” on a genre of emailwas perhaps the first scholarly article to make this claim, but since that time e-genres have themselves diversified:

Whereas these specialized genres [i.e., genres of academic writing] for stu-dents have served as the measure of freshman writing ability for a hundredyears, transformation of writing courses by computer technology is a recentphenomenon. Composition instructors first welcomed word processingbecause it facilitated production of the standard freshman essay. However, themove into electronic environments rapidly began to revolutionalize class-room practices and genres. Today the expanding possibilities for writingengendered through desktop publishing, email, Web-based bulletin boards,MOO’s, Web page and other hypertext authoring and presentation softwareshow up the limitations the freshman essay imposes on thought and writing.(Trupe 1)

Classroom writing in new environments has also led to new definitions ofwriting, ones that are often heavily influenced by spatial notions of productionand circulation. For instance, Johndan Johnson-Eilola remediates the process-based, single-author notion of writing into multiple authorship and communaltexts. He sees

WRITING AS THE RECURSIVE, SHARED, (AND SOMETIMESABSCONDED WITH) COORDINATION OR BUILDING OF SPACESAND FIELDS. In other words, writers are not individuals (or even groups)who produce texts, but participants within spaces who are recursively, con-tinually, restructuring those (and other spaces). (1)

The role that these multiple genres, media, and environments will play indefining composition, finally, isn’t clear, nor can the current major positionstatements of the field help. The composers of the Council of Writing ProgramAdministrators (WPA) Outcomes Statement, for instance, decided (after muchdebate) against addressing these issues of digital technology specifically, otherthan to say that writers should use the appropriate technology. As the previousdiscussion suggests, the technology chosen is directly related to the definitionof composition provided and thus to the composition taught and valorized inwhichever assessment scheme prevails. Given that the WPA document wasadopted in 2000, we can see how quickly the digital revolution is changing



conventional understandings of composing and textuality, and indeed, as ofthis writing, the WPA is again taking up the issue of technology and its rela-tionship to first-year composition. A quick review of the 1995 Conference onCollege Composition and Communication (CCCC) Position Statement onAssessment makes the same case about change more dramatically: not only arethe more progressive methods of assessment like portfolios, or still experimen-tal methods like online placement or self-directed placement, barely visible,but no mention is made of digitized text, digitized environment, or assessmentof the digitized.

All of which leaves us still asking, on the edge of this new century, whatdoes it mean to write? To compose?

Delivery

Classical rhetorical theory was devised a long time agoin cultures that were rigidly class bound and whose economies depended upon slavery. They were invented for the use of privileged men,speaking to relatively small audiences. Those audiences were not literate, and the only available technology of delivery was the human body.6

The role of delivery in shaping college composition has taken some peculiar,some invisible, and some ubiquitous forms, but as a matter of concern forAmerican teachers of writing, it has been with us for a very long time. In fact,a quick history of the twentieth century indicates that for compositionists,delivery of composition has been key to our disciplinary identity, a feature thatmakes us unique in higher education.7

In the 1912 inaugural issue of English Journal, Edwin Hopkins openedhis lead article with the question “Can composition be taught under the cur-rent conditions?” Hopkins immediately replied to his own question, “No,”arguing that the teaching of writing was a form of “laboratory” instruction, sothat as in the case of a science lab, compositionists should be assigned smallclasses and fewer of them. As Hopkins pointed out, however, labs are smalllargely because of the material conditions required for the learning of science:lab equipment, stations for each learner, and space to work. From this materi-alist perspective, the “labor difficulty” in the teaching of composition was thatit—unlike science—required no special conditions at all. Much like Socrates,we could meet anywhere, anytime. The teaching of writing did require time,admittedly, which functioned as a double-edged sword: it was what cost com-positionists (rather than institutions) so much, but because it (unlike materialconditions) wasn’t commodified, it bore no relationship to the teacher’s work-ing conditions or compensation. For very nearly a hundred years, then, ourcommitment to a laboratory model of delivery—characterized by many



assignments, a single teacher, and small class sizes—has defined the field. Andeven where it has not be instantiated, it nonetheless continues to capture theimagination of many teachers, as Todd Taylor explains later in this volume.

At the same time, all too often, the typical physical classroom—whatBarker and Kemp have since labeled the “proscenium classroom” (quoted inMoran)—stipulated a specific model of teaching in which the instructor deliv-ered and the students received in a space designed perfectly, it seemed, for aproduct-based model that effaced composing. Inside that space, this construc-tion of learning was reiterated by the kind of furniture provided as well as byits placement—fixed (and often uncomfortable) chairs with little desk space onwhich to write, set in rows facing the front, almost as in imitation of the church,with the teacher at the front, of course, as priest. And later in the century, thisspace for teaching—in opposition, it seems, to learning—remained the same,even as researchers began articulating models of composing (as opposed tocomposition),8 and the discipline itself seemed coalescing in new ways, withCCCC flourishing, WPA beginning, and new journals being created. Therooms: they stayed the same boxes, stipulating the age-old relationship of stu-dents to teacher to materials. To attempt a new pedagogy, then, compositionistsneeded to work against the physical space: gathering chairs into circles(assuming the chairs moved) and moving them back into rows for the nextclass; using walls for pinups and gallery spaces rather than the blackboard atthe front; finding ways for students to contort their bodies so that they couldwork in small groups; finding more desk space for students to redraft texts andsort through successive drafts of texts as they reflected on process or preparedportfolios, this last the very kind of activity that has been shown to be crucialfor the production of knowledge (Sellen and Harper).

From the 1960s to the 1980s three other sites of curricular spaceappeared—communications programs; computer teaching classrooms; andwriting centers—each of which brought with it a demand that the physicalspace for delivery be congruent with the activity. From each, there are lessons.Communications programs, which lasted from about the 1940s to the 1960s(and which account for the fourth C in CCCC; see Trimbur and George),required the very kind of support advocated by Hopkins some fifty years ear-lier. Unfortunately, their promising start led only to a quick demise, in largepart because of those material conditions and the cost of maintaining them. Inother words, while these programs may have enhanced the material conditionsof those teaching in them, that enhancement was temporary: “Given the intel-lectual demands that communications skills placed upon teachers, and giventhe administrative support necessary to fund labs, clinics, support staff, andequipment, it does not surprise that communication skills programs did not lastlong” (Crowley, 183). Those programs in fact died in the 1960s. One lessonhere, then, is that creating the material conditions that enhance both teachingand learning may provide a lever for change, but without other supports, thechange will not endure.



On the composition side of CCCC, we have seen a similar impulse atwork in computer classrooms, the outcome of which is still to be determined.Typically, these classrooms have called for special equipment—hardware,software, furnishings—and in part because the same dollars don’t go as far asthey do in a conventional classroom, the rooms have been smaller, thus per-mitting smaller class sizes and something approximating Hopkinian lab con-ditions. Interestingly, in the creation of these new spaces, there has been muchdisciplinary discussion about these rooms as to appropriate configuration ofdesks and workstations. The task was often (though not always) sufficientlynew that there was a sense that the old options would not suffice.9 In addition,the equipment (computers, printers) brought its own set of needs: blackboardscreate dust that can clog computers, so whiteboards became standard, forinstance, and this shift made computer classrooms less like school spaces,more like workplace spaces. Moreover, as postsecondary education hasbecome corporativized, this resemblance of school to work is often viewedfavorably.

At the same time, there are real questions both as to the financial sustain-ability of these spaces and as to their potential to motivate change for the longterm. Some of these spaces are finding their purposes being altered as the costof maintaining machines becomes prohibitive; one-time classrooms are lost asthey become labs. And as the world, even higher ed, goes mobile, laptops andhandhelds look more attractive. Institutions can require students to buy andmaintain laptops, and when the campus requires them, grants and loans areavailable to underwrite students’ purchases. Moreover, the fact that you havecomputers doesn’t mean that you necessarily go small: some compositionprograms, like Texas Tech (see Rickly, this volume), are using this technologynot only to increase size of classes but also, and more importantly, to changethe ways those classes are delivered altogether. Perhaps the most fundamentalshift this program makes is to separate completely two teaching functions thathistorically have been unified in a single teacher—(1) instruction and (2) sum-mative evaluation—by assigning them to different people. The lessons fromthe experience of integrating technology with teaching, then, are still inprocess.

In the 1970s, we also saw a resurgence of interest in writing centers(Lerner), which provide another site for delivery of composition instruction.Perhaps because they typically operate outside the FTE (full-time-equivalentstudent) economic structure, perhaps because they often grew from more gen-eral learning centers (with a prototypical space of their own) rather than fromclassrooms, these sites typically construct a much different model of teaching,one based in collaborative learning. The physical site itself tends to be infor-mal, more domestic than institutional, filled with furniture one might actuallywant to sit on, couches and overstuffed chairs, with an ambience more likehome than school. The site thus constructs a different kind of learning thandoes the classroom; it’s a place where peers tutor peers side by side, with



experienced tutors coaching those less experienced, a place where grades aredeemed superfluous if not indeed harmful; a place where another curriculum,in Steven North’s terms, is offered. At the same time, this place has notbecome the primary means of delivery for composition across the country; ittends to employ few tenure-line faculty; and since it augments the FTE-dominated curriculum, its curriculum too is still largely shaped by that of thepredominant model of delivery. To put it succinctly, it has created a new kindof physical site for its curricular work, but since it has not been written intothe “regular” curriculum, it seems, it hasn’t moved to the center nor offered aviable, sustainable alternative to the standard model. The lesson here, then, isthat it is possible to design a physical site congruent with a curricular site, andto do new kinds of curricular work, but apparently only if it maintains its posi-tion outside the mainstream. As a lever for systematic and widespread change,it is limited.

Yet another way to think about delivery is through the human: who isdoing the delivering of instruction? Earlier in the century, higher educationserved fewer students and a fundamentally less diverse student body with astaff composed by full-time faculty. As Crowley explains,

Composition was not always staffed the way it is now. Until 1940 or so, com-position classes were taught by full time teachers, although they generallywere the newest members of the permanent faculty. This changed when dis-ciplinary specialization began to affect staffing in the undergraduate curricu-lum. With the narrowing of faculty interests that accompanied adoption of theresearch ideal, it became increasingly difficult to find full-time faculty whowere willing to teach general or introductory courses, and by 1950, Americanuniversities with graduate programs had begun to rely on graduate students tostaff the required first-year composition course. They had also begun thepractice of hiring part-time help to meet staffing demands imposed by thepostwar explosion in college enrollments. (119)

Ironically, then, at about the time that Harvard was helping establish gen-eral education through its Red Book, composition and its teaching—one of thekeystones of most general education programs—were relegated to a facultylabeled as contingent.

Today, the personnel delivering college composition include graduate assis-tants; part-time adjuncts; full-time lecturers or instructors; and tenure-line fac-ulty. Both the compensation (including benefits) and the material conditions ofteaching vary widely, with senior tenure-line faculty earning as much as six fig-ures for the same labor and outcomes produced by adjuncts on a piecework basis,much as in a Fordist model of factory work. At some private institutions, anotherrecent staffing option is the “post-doc”: PhDs teach on a multiyear contract, typ-ically combining the teaching of writing with their academic specialty (e.g., his-tory, philosophy) in a first-year seminar model of delivery (see Harris, this vol-ume). Given the diversity in the human agents of delivery, a shared general



assumption seems to be that no special expertise, at least in content, is required.It should also be noted that composition’s connection to general education oftenexacerbates this problem. General education is, of course, a worthy program, butit is also the case that its purposes can be somewhat “amorphous” and very gen-eral, suggesting again that specialization is not required:

General education is, in a sense, the most amorphous part of the humani-ties curriculum. Its goals are perhaps less easily definable and more ambi-tious than the aims of a major. But the purposes that general-educationcourses in the humanities should serve for our students are extraordinarilyimportant. In English courses designed for general education, studentsshould learn to participate intelligently and ethically in the discourses ofthe communities to which they do and will belong as citizens. (Lloyd-Jones and Lunsford 29)

And when composition is said to perform various other noncompositiontasks as well, from introducing students to the library to helping socialize themonto campus, we reinforce some unwise perceptions—that composition hasthe capacity to be all things to all students and that it can be bent, folded, andturned to serve any and all educational purposes.

Does it matter that these aims are in sharp contrast to those of specialists,whose talents, methodologies, and expertise are well defined? And what, ifany, difference does the site of instruction make?

The View from Here

What Is “College-Level” Writing?10

The use of delivery, the fifth canon of rhetoric, to talk about college composi-tion, of course, is metaphorical. In this sense, the study of it in this volume is aremediation of the term, with specific application to how we understand boththe teaching and the learning of composing. I’m also evoking Lanham’s senseof delivery for our conception of the potential of writing. That’s a remediatedversion of the word composing: composing as work with various materials tocreate diverse kinds of communications for various purposes and audiences, acomposing that may move us from print to screen, from poster to person—andback again. What kind of curriculum is this, and how is it best delivered?Another way to think about this metaphorical use is to see it as a verbal mappingthat permits us to read across various institutional sites as we ask, What is com-posing? How should it be delivered? The hope is that this vocabulary, and thisverbal map, will enable us to calculate the value of our current paradigm ofdelivery, with an eye toward being intentional about what college composing is,how it is best learned, and what that might mean for a curricular space that isaffected and shaped by—indeed in dialogue with—a corresponding physicalspace.



As Hairston notes, without a new vocabulary, the tendency is to revert tothe old:

As Kuhn points out, the paradigm that a group of professionals accepts willgovern the kinds of problems they decide to work on, and that very paradigmkeeps them from recognizing important problems that cannot be discussed inthe terminology of their model. Thus teachers who concentrate their effortson teaching style, organization and correctness are not likely to recognize thatthe students need work in invention. (1982, 80)

Whether or not we need a new paradigm for the delivery of college compo-sition or something less radical isn’t clear; what is clear is that an articulation ofthis issue in these historical and epistemelogical terms helps us see that we areindeed at a critical moment in time, one that allows—perhaps even requires—that we take up a closer examination of composition and its delivery. As weknow, the staffing issues do not seem to be improving. Dual-enrollment and APare growing, not shrinking, suggesting that the composition we deliver on cam-pus is not particularly valued by our own institutions. The role that we haveplayed as socializers of first-year students is now often provided by other aca-demic and student support units: learning communities and first-year experienceprograms. (And in using full-time staffers and full-time faculty in many depart-ments, they have been smart in their staffing in ways we have not.) As problem-atic is that the value of college composition, for some, lies not only in the exemp-tion of it but also in the role that exemption plays in attracting students:

[A]bout 15% of our incoming students don’t take composition because ofvery high SAT and ACT scores or because they took advanced placementcourses in high school. These are “recruiting issues” and are not to be tam-pered with. Although the loss of the CLEP [College Level ExaminationProgram] has occasioned some gnashing of teeth among the various colleges,who would like to get their students onto their own revenue-generating soil asquickly as possible, the general sense is that composition and the universityare better serving the students. (Kemp)

And as we have seen, schools themselves are changing. The primary roleof the college course as a vehicle for delivery of education is being eroded,and even if we opt to retain it, it is likely to look very different than it has.There is the influence of the online. There is the influence of the local: theCouncil of Writing Program Administrators hopes to articulate a common setof outcomes while schools with specific cultural agendas—like historicallyblack colleges and universities—talk back and rewrite that common curricu-lum in interesting, provocative ways, as Theresa Redd here explains. There isthe influence of the discipline itself, which seems to say to individual teach-ers, “Here is your set of outcomes,” regardless of your individual philosophies(Soles). At which point, Richard Miller asks, referring to students, “Are weprepared to accept non-specialists in the making of knowledge?”



Given this context, these definitions, and these observations, we ask:

• What does this proliferation of sites mean for this thing we call collegecomposition?

• Do we still conceive of college as a place where relationships—betweenpeople as between people and materials and knowledges—are central?

• What are the appropriate places and structures for the learning and theteaching of composition?

• What does it mean to write? To compose?

• What is college composition? (What should it be?)

• How does a particular curricular space position teacher, student, materials,and learning?

• How does a particular physical space position teacher, learner, materials,and composing?

• How does the online curricular space position teacher, learner, materials,and composing?

• And not least, how/does the delivery of college composition matter?

Notes

1. See Peter Elbow’s Writing Without Teachers.

2. This statement was made at the opening session of the Conference of the NationalLearning Information Initiative, a division of Educause, in January 2003.

3. Some educators are using blogs: see the September 2003 issue of English Journal,and see Teddi Fishman’s blog for a technical writing class, at http://people.clemson.edu/~tfishma/314/engl314H.html.

4. And if this analysis is correct—students have a communication need and meet it;the fact that they gather when and where they plan to is a pretty good assessment—it’snot entirely clear why we need college.

5. Sirc, English Composition as a Happening.

6. Crowley, Composition in the University.

7. See, for instance, Joe Harris’ review of Rhetoric and Composition as IntellectualWork in the September 2003 issue of CCC: “I am drawn to composition preciselybecause it values teaching and service, because it defines intellectual in far more expan-sive ways than most disciplines. The essays collected by Olson in Rhetoric and Com-position demonstrate that our field has achieved the status of a conventional academicdiscipline. It remains to be seen what the impact of this discipline will be on the intel-lectual work of teaching writing” (174).

8. Sullivan, “What Is ‘College-Level’ Writing?”

9. It’s also so that the old can overdetermine the new, as we see in computer class-rooms where workstations are lined up in rows so that students can face the front evenif they can’t see over the monitor to the front.

10. Sullivan.



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delivering college composition

Documents