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From the Editor 513

College English, Volume 74, Number 6, July 2012

From the Editor

I

John Schilb

n its January 2001 issue, College English featured a major document: the WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition, produced under the auspices of the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA). Though this set of goals had already appeared in a number of venues, publishing it was a natural

move for CE, given the journal’s longtime interest in college writing instruction. Just as appropriate is the present issue’s symposium on the equally important Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing, a recent collaboration of CWPA, NCTE, and the National Writing Project (NWP). The symposium consists of an introduction to the Framework by some of its drafters; the document itself; and responses to it by six veteran composition scholars. You’ll see that the respondents vary in their de-grees of enthusiasm. This should be no surprise, I think, for any such manifesto will garner fans and critics while leaving others ambivalent. Here, I’ll simply venture to say that regardless of whether you yourself fully endorse the Framework, it deserves serious analysis by all teachers and administrators concerned with transitions from high school to college. Moreover, the three organizations that teamed to produce it deserve much praise for their sheer hard work.

The concept of transition applies to a second piece in this issue, one that again differs from our usual article format. It’s an interview I conducted with the novelist and short story writer Samrat Upadhyay. The main subject is the process of writing cross-culturally. During my time as CE editor, we’ve published several articles on world literature, globally diverse forms of English, and linguistic hybridity. This pattern reflects, I believe, a larger trend in English studies, which my conversation with Upadhyay in effect continues. Born in Nepal, he has attempted in his fiction to make Anglo-American readers more familiar with his native country. This project has compelled him to grapple with a question of translation: when, if ever, should he explain particular Nepali words, cultural habits, and political events to his audience? In evaluating possible answers, Upadhyay has probed how other writers linked to South Asia face similar challenges. Here, he discusses their strategies along with his own.

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514 College English

*****In the past few issues, I’ve offered bits of advice for prospective contributors to CE, based on problems I’ve commonly found in manuscripts we’ve received. With this, my final issue as editor, I turn to our most typical kind of submission: the essay on teaching. How should we in English studies write about teaching? What rhetorical strategies might we use to make our texts about it look worth reading? What standards should editors follow when they consider such work? If this kind of scholarship is to count for tenure or promotion, what are its ideal features? As yet, these questions lack firm and unanimous answers. Still, I sense a rough consensus among editors of teaching-related journals in the humanities, among referees I have consulted as CE editor, and among educators affiliated with institutions like the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. And I’ve expressed their common sentiments in responding to CE submissions on pedagogy. Quite a few of these manuscripts, unfortunately, haven’t seemed ready for prime time. The most frequent problems occur with accounts of the author’s own teaching—that is, when the author must somehow turn personal experience into an analytical argument that will appeal to our journal’s audience. When writers ignore or fail to meet this challenge, the following are recommendations I’ve often made to them. Basically, I suggest ways of enhancing the essay’s credibility and relevance.

First, credibility: I suspect that most CE readers won’t demand that an essay on teaching wear the trappings of science. For a particular stretch of time—chiefly, the 1980s—composition scholars did feel obliged to give their work this aura. As one writing specialist, David Foster, ruefully remarked in 1988, many in the field strived to establish “an empirically verifiable field of knowledge,” by displaying “a full panoply of statistical analyses” as well as flow charts, control-group comparisons, and “case-study protocols with detailed taxonomies” (453). Eventually, the author-ity of this imperative waned. One reason was that in order to do such research, you needed intense training in technical methods, which proved a formidable task. But another factor was philosophical. Along with other parts of the profession, writing studies grew unwilling to equate science automatically with objective truth. The field came to assume that knowledge claims are dialogically constructed, rooted in concrete situations, reflective of social differences, inevitably provisional, and argumentative in nature to boot. At its best, I would say, this premise spurns crude binaries between science and postmodern thought. The scholar carefully develops and weighs empirical observations, rather than chuck them as insidious myth. Nev-ertheless, much writing about composition teaching now chronicles and ponders it by relying on narrative ploys. These have become tools for tracing and interpreting dramas of specific writing classes or groups. It’s a kind of discourse that often mixes ethnography with aspects of literature.

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From the Editor 515

Much can be said for this approach. But it leaves those of us who write about pedagogy with a composing problem of our own. How can we now gain readers’ trust? If, as so many of us do, we eschew a rhetoric of science or use it cautiously, what means of building credibility remain? This challenge is especially great when we describe our personal classroom performance. Readers may think we’re out to hide its flaws.

A wise strategy is to limit bragging. Let’s face it: often scholars who write about their teaching are impelled by a sense of triumph. They’re keen to publicize their instructional feats. Granted, in some pieces the author does seem depressed, ruing at length a classroom quandary or slip. But far more common is the impulse to tell a tale of victory. To head off suspicions that the story is just too rosy to be true, a good move is to mention at least some uncertainties, dilemmas, and stumbles. Further, when writers tout their classroom habits—instructional methods that have served multiple courses—they gain credibility if they concede that these measures haven’t been foolproof. I’m skeptical when I see teaching achievements described in present tense: for example, “Through this exercise, my students hatch good theses.” The implication is that the author’s classes always go according to plan. But hardly ever can pedagogy be smoothly ritualistic; in any classroom, the unexpected can loom. An essay on teaching will seem more realistic if the writer resists the persona of expert manager. Better to acknowledge that surprise events can alter the scheme for the day.

Certainly our students can act unpredictably. If we emphasize class discussion, we can’t guarantee what they’ll say. In a writing-intensive course, they produce papers new to us—texts we’ve never seen. Unfortunately, much past scholarship on teaching failed to grant students agency. Many articles in composition journals por-trayed them as feeble semi-illiterates, lost without teachers’ guidance. As Marguerite Helmers showed in her 1994 book Writing Students, composition as a field has often represented students harshly, stressing their supposed excesses or lacks. In the years since Helmers’s book, however, the dominant images have altered. By now, increasing numbers of writing specialists reject the stereotypes of yore. For one thing, many of them are acutely conscious that a class may be diverse, not a monolith easily profiled. Today, then, whatever the course topic, essays on teaching seem more credible when noting how students aren’t alike. Conversely, an essay may arouse suspicion if it treats them as a uniform mass. Consider this claim: “When I informed the class that Charlotte Brontë used a male pseudonym when she wrote Jane Eyre, they were amazed.” Surely the news about Brontë didn’t lead every student to marvel. Readers, then, are apt to think that this writer exaggerates. My example is imaginary, but it has many real counterparts, stories of teaching that prefer hyperbole over nuance. The alternative is to discuss how students vary in their reactions, as well as in their learning styles and overall lives.

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516 College English

Further, nowadays a pedagogical essay seems more plausible if it presents stu-dents as active thinkers—as genuine contributors to academic life. To achieve this goal, the writer needs to incorporate the students’ voices in the first place. In many CE submissions, authors report what they said in class but nothing their students said. I feel as if I’m reading lecture notes. A more realistic picture wouldn’t show students just bathing in their teacher’s fount of truths. It would depict them as the teacher’s co-inquirers. This representation may entail mentioning abilities that some students have and some faculty lack: for example, fluency with social networks and with trends in popular culture. There is, I realize, some risk of overemphasizing students’ strengths. Relentless praise of their talents may cause a reader to wonder why these geniuses had to take the course at all. Nevertheless, articles about teaching are usually more believable—and, I’d argue, more interesting—when they recognize resources that students bring to class.

That said, most pedagogical accounts in our profession will include claims about students’ development, especially about growth of their reading and writing abilities. It’s understandable, in fact desirable, that such texts address the issue phrased most memorably by President George W. Bush: “Is our children learning?” Probably the writer will offer a definition of student “progress,” as well as judgments about which class members have showed it. Any evaluations like these require evidence. But of what sort? If relatively few readers in our profession insist on scientific proof, several do expect ample support, especially when authors boast that their teaching shines. Usually authors will need to back this claim with specific examples of their students’ discourse, including specimens of actual prose that aren’t just testimonials gleaned from end-of-term course rating forms. An essay on teaching doesn’t, I think, have to feature complete papers (which might even drive readers away!). But judicious use of excerpts from the class’s discussions and writing is a way to allay readers’ doubts. So, too, can authors’ credibility increase when they admit the limits of a single course. In one semester of composition or literature, students can develop significant skills, but not all they will ever need to know. They will have to negotiate shifting sets of rhetorical and interpretive conventions as they move through college, through their careers, and through other parts of their lives.

As for relevance: Years ago, plenty of books and articles on the teaching of writing strived to seem worthy by claiming to be practical. Authors were content to explain why something they tried in a writing class would be useful to other instructors. And quite a few people still scan the field’s journals for teaching tips—help in rous-ing a sluggish English 100 class tomorrow. But officially, so to speak, composition scholarship’s definition of relevance has changed. The readers of a text about the teaching of writing are apt to want more than an infomercial. They expect the text to transcend sheer pragmatism. They want it to argue for the novelty and significance

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From the Editor 517

of the author’s theories. Nowadays, texts on the teaching of other subjects—for example, literature—are coming to face the same demand.

It entails situating one’s account of teaching in relation to existing scholarship: previous conversations on the content and process of the pedagogy under study. A question on the review form I send CE referees is, “To what extent has previous scholarship on the subject been acknowledged?” This mandate doesn’t mean that the essay under consideration has to teem with references. As an editor, I’ve read many an essay that amasses other people’s thoughts while never zooming in on the author’s own. What’s important is to choose citations carefully and then synthesize them, as background for the author’s new insights.

Usually the citations lay out a theoretical issue: a question or problem that has gripped some area of English studies and that the author now seeks to resolve. But what issue to tackle in the first place may not be obvious. About some pedagogical concerns, the author may have trouble saying anything new. One much-addressed topic, for instance, is the potential limitations of critical pedagogy. Stanley Fish notably lambasted this politically conscious mode of teaching in his 2008 book Save the World on Your Own Time. Various people have subsequently challenged or com-plicated his position (for example, Bizzell; Lazere). In fact, as Thomas Rickert has observed, debates about critical pedagogy by now “make up a substantial body of work [. . .] particularly in rhetoric and composition” (303). Rest assured, though: I think there are promising topics for those of us who would write about our teaching. Clearly one of them is the question of how best to incorporate new technologies and their related literacies into courses. Perhaps counterintuitively, I’d add that some age-old preoccupations haven’t been settled and deserve further treatment. We have by no means reached the last word on such perennials as how to comment on student writing; how to teach close reading; how to help a class grasp a work’s historical context without lecturing them ad nauseam; how to handle “hot” moments in the classroom; and how to foster effective peer review along with other kinds of small-group discussions. In addition, many of us who teach in the academy are pondering how to cope with mounting calls for standardized assessment. Among other things, these push us to be more specific about our courses’ learning objectives, as well as our means for determining whether our students meet them.

Even as a personal account of teaching aims to influence a larger field or profes-sion, it ought to acknowledge distinct traits of the writer’s workplace. Most of us in composition realize we’re quite past the time when we could write as if our college resembled all others. Readers of any text on pedagogy are bound to be conscious that sites of teaching differ, along with the backgrounds of the students who arrive at them. Awareness of academe’s heterogeneity needn’t be paralyzing, though. Scholarship on teaching can still suggest that theories aren’t just local—that in key ways, they

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518 College English

conceivably apply to campuses beyond the one discussed. What does seem necessary is a two-pronged approach. In it, authors concede the particular circumstances of their teaching even as they argue that their insights deserve to travel. Through this balancing act, their text might seem relevant and credible at the same time.

Whatever problems we have with the new rage for assessment, they force us to consider how much all of us are still learning about the process of teaching. Indeed, perhaps the most worthwhile scholarship on teaching is that which helps both author and audience see themselves as learners, rather than assign that role to students alone. This vision of the genre is increasingly articulated by veteran practitioners of it in our profession. For example, Carnegie Academy scholars Mariolina Rizzi Salvatori and Patricia Donahue encourage us to write about students “as flesh and blood subjects whose intellectual, cultural, and emotional makeups test the assumptions that every teacher brings to instruction and can, in the long run, lead to significant revisions of educational theories and practices” (32; emphasis in original). In effect, they rein-force the starker message of Richard Gebhardt, former editor of the journal College Composition and Communication, when he pointed out back in 1997 that “working on a teaching-related article can address the faculty member’s need to learn” (36; emphasis in original). What I find especially compelling about rationales such as these is their recognition that in the classroom important knowledge can be produced, not merely purveyed. It’s a premise that I hope will inspire future submissions to CE.

*****But my own time at the journal as its editor has come to a close. Let me take this opportunity to acknowledge various people who have made this post so pleasant for me. They include CE’s readers, including you who are looking at it right now. I’m especially grateful to the many who’ve taken a moment to share with me their fondness for an article—or even their critique of it. I appreciate, too, the time, thought, and effort reflected in every submission I have received. Although this issue conveys my usual gratitude to the past twelve months’ reviewers, I want to salute all of the referees I’ve consulted. I’ve been constantly awed and delighted by the care they lavish on manuscripts. NCTE’s copyeditors and typesetters have also been sterling practitioners of their craft. NCTE production editor Carol Schanche has been an incredibly helpful and congenial guide for me. At Indiana University, I have received strong support from a series of English department chairs: Steve Watt, George Hutchinson, and Jonathan Elmer. Hannah Notess and Corey Sparks have been wonderful assistants. Finally, I proclaim with deep gratitude and humility my utter dependence on Lisa Ottum, CE’s associate editor for the six years I’ve served in this position. I couldn’t have pulled it off without her wisdom, energy, discipline, fortitude, and rich sense of humor. May all editors have someone like her as a partner.

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From the Editor 519

W o r k s C i t e d

Bizzell, Patricia. “Composition Studies Saves the World!” College English 72.2 (2009): 174–87. Print.Council of Writing Program Administrators. “WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition.”

College English 63.3 (2001): 321–25. Print.Fish, Stanley. Save the World on Your Own Time. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.Foster, David. “What Are We Talking about When We Talk about Composition?” 1988. The Norton

Book of Composition Studies. Ed. Susan Miller. New York: Norton, 2009. 451–60. Print.Gebhardt, Richard. “Scholarship and Teaching: Motives and Strategies for Writing Articles in Com-

position Studies.” Publishing in Rhetoric and Composition. Ed. Gary A. Olson and Todd W. Taylor. Albany: SUNY P, 1997. 35–46. Print.

Helmers, Marguerite H. Writing Students: Composition, Testimonials, and Representations of Students. Albany: SUNY P, 1994. Print.

Lazere, Donald. “Stanley Fish’s Tightrope Act.” Review of Save the World on Your Own Time by Stanley Fish. College English 71.5 (2009): 528–38. Print.

Rickert, Thomas. Review. “Is This Where You Live? English and the University under the Lens.” College English 72.3 (2010): 293–310. Print.

Salvatori, Mariolina Rizzi, and Patricia Donahue. “Disappearing Acts: The Problem of the Student in Composition Studies.” Pedagogy 10.1 (2010): 25–33. Print.

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