Author: Sarah Moon

Teaching Writing: Our Common Purpose

chat sketch

Much of the discussion between administrators, university faculty and high school instructors involved in concurrent enrollment programs like UConn’s Early College Experience is necessarily around compliance of high school-based courses with college standards. But if this remains our only focus, we lose a meaningful opportunity for critical communication across institutional boundaries about what we teach.

At the end of his last book, Rhetorics, Poetics, Cultures, compositionist James Berlin writes

No group of English teachers ought to see themselves as operating isolated from their fellows in working for change. Dialogue among college teachers and teachers in the high schools and elementary schools is crucial for any effort at seeking improvement to succeed. For too long, college English teachers have ignored their colleagues in the schools, assuming a hierarchical division of labor in which information and ideas flow exclusively from top to bottom. It is time all reading and writing teachers situate their activities within the context of the larger profession as well the contexts of economic as well as political concerns. We have much to gain working together, much to lose working alone (178).

Berlin argues that current English departments are dominated by scholars who have ignored rhetoric in favor of an aesthetic approach to language which hides an unconscious elitism: “The English department’s abhorrence of the rhetorical…works to exclude from the ranks of the privileged managerial class those not socialized from birth in the ways of the aesthetic response” (14). Berlin favored a re-conceiving of the English discipline to be more rhetorically minded, arguing that “the English classroom should…provide methods for revealing the semiotic codes enacted in the production and interpretation of texts, codes that cut across the aesthetic, the economic and political, and the philosophical and scientific, enabling students to engage critically in the variety of reading and writing practices required of them” (88). Berlin makes the argument that the emphasis of English literature courses on the aesthetic analysis of revered texts both reifies class lines and occludes from study the politically interested context in which language is produced and received. This practice prevents students from developing a critical understanding of all language as rhetorically charged, an understanding that can help them navigate their worlds professionally, personally and politically.

While writing instructors at the university level often feel outnumbered and marginalized within English departments, they can find the benefits of a large community through connection with teachers of writing in concurrent enrollment programs. In Connecticut, only a handful of full-time professors at the five UConn campuses teach First-Year Writing courses; however, there are about 180 teachers of college writing in the high schools. As Berlin emphasizes, we have much to gain from speaking to each other as colleagues with a common sense of investment in writing education and a diverse array of experiences that inform our individual senses of purpose. Public high school teachers also bring an experience-based understanding of the need for a more egalitarian approach to language instruction than do college professors who only have contact with the upper tiers of high school students.

Berlin believed that “Education exists to provide intelligent, articulate, responsible citizens who understand their obligation and their right to insist that economic, social and political power be exerted in the best interests of the community” (52). Writing instructors at colleges and universities can see today, more than ever, the absolute necessity of our work in supporting just societies. It is our job to help students learn to consider language critically, to understand that language, including poetry, fiction and drama, is always historically, socially and politically situated with rhetorical ends. With this, we help produce a citizenry who are both savvy communicators and savvy audience members, less vulnerable to manipulation than those who take language, especially that which flatters their personal interests and sense of identity, at face value.

I see the UConn ECE English program as providing a unique opportunity for discussion about the teaching of writing between college and high school instructors. One of the existing ways this happens is through site visits which are, on the one hand, about compliance, but also an important opportunity for communication between professionals about our common work. We are currently re-conceiving the fall conference to serve as a better forum for high school teachers both to lead discussions and have more opportunities to engage in dialogue. It would be exciting to see ECE English become a vibrant site of stakes-driven discourse among high school and college instructors around our common work, even a site for re-conceiving the discipline along the lines Berlin envisioned toward more socially relevant ends.