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.

 

I like to kick the tires of the FYW courses, looking for places that might need reinforcement or further thought. One soft spot I am always noticing in my own courses is my delivery on the promise that the writing we do in the class is not just a performance of competence or a simulacrum of engagement that effectively goes nowhere, what I refer to as “writing for the teacher.” I do act on this promise. Each new iteration of my FYW courses pushes further toward more circulation of student work, more collaboration, and more focus on student-driven commentary. I see the FYW courses as essentially environments designed to feature and support communication by students to students. The writing seminar is most of all a place for students to see their writing, perhaps for the first time, as something purposeful and context-specific, designed for others’ use. As we explore—verbally and through drafts—our various interactive encounters with texts and ideas of others, we all learn from the discourse that begins to flow out of the course itself. And supplementing this work with a range of supporting articulations such as presentations, abstracts or introductory statements, and responses to other projects allows for further recognition that the learning in a writing seminar happens in this open exchange. For the most part, I am delighted by this evolution toward exchange that makes the other courses I teach (often content-driven literature courses) feel a little old-fashioned, wooden, unidirectional.

And yet, in my FYW classes, the final drafts of formal projects are usually delivered to and read only by me. The individuating work of assigning grades to essays, a task with a value that seems less clear to me than it once did, effectively closes the conversation. I don’t want to overstate the case here. Most students feel that they do learn, more or less, what other students are up to. But, unless we decide to have students share or present final essays to each other, the last wave of revision and writing remains a private exchange between student and teacher.

I’ll admit that I’ve never liked writing contests for FYW courses. Stripped of their contexts, student essays “compete” in ways that, to me, run counter to the values of the courses. Is the goal to demonstrate a kind of mastery over a generalized form? Is it to give pleasure to readers? Contests do provide opportunities for students to see their writing beyond the course context, and this is important. But I’d like to imagine ways to do so in ways that might retain the more purposeful goals of the academic writing students produce in FYW courses.

At UConn’s Hartford campus, we’ve begun to think about an idea that could offer an example for something like this. Because our campus is moving next year to downtown Hartford, we will all be adjusting to and learning about the city. I’ve floated the idea of having FYW sections broadly address themes that might relate to this transition. Texts and assignments might take up questions related to cities, Hartford itself, public space, museums or libraries (we’re next door to the Wadsworth and the HPL), and so much more. Many teachers already teach courses with content that easily folds into these topics, and no one would be obligated to participate. But an end-of-year event related to this transition that features student work happening within and beyond the FYW courses might create a forum that would invite students to see their work as potentially meaningful in a greater context. The event would be more recognizable as an academic conversation, an inquiry into an ongoing set of questions, than merely a contest. It’s not an entirely new idea, and it is only in an embryonic form. But I’m hopeful it can become a sustainable site for FYW work.

What ideas do you have for how we might get past the hushed finality of “final draft submission”? I’ve tried to unlock the comments for posts feature. Let me know if you have trouble responding.

 

*Image: Miyagi Gengyo, Picture of a Balloon (1860)

It’s an impossible, multivalent question, but it’s a question we should continue to ask as our teaching—sometimes imperceptibly and sometimes by design—develops and changes over time. Surely FYW courses are primarily writing courses, and it is writing that most explicitly defines the work we do in them. Defending the required college writing seminar means arguing that students learn something about writing by the course’s end. And yet I have always been resistant to and even a little alarmed by a course that would merely present writing as set of techniques or tools to be acquired and perhaps mastered. If a writing seminar is just shop class for words, count me out.

In recent years, I’ve given increasing attention to the general education context of the First-Year Writing courses. I started to include the “Habits of Mind” from NCTE’s “Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing” because they speak to values that reach beyond the instrumental skill of writing. Writing, here, is described as emerging from and contributing to activity that prioritizes openness, engagement, creativity, curiosity, and the like. And this year, I even added to my syllabus some of the exact phrases of UConn’s General Education Guidelines, which emphasize “critical judgment,” “moral sensitivity,” “awareness,” and “consciousness of the diversity of human cultures and experience.” In the narrowest, most technical sense, FYW courses serve as introductions to students’ writing requirements at the university and to the information literacy competency that all students are expected to achieve. Greater literacy and more writing (especially writing within shared, collaborative contexts) undoubtedly implicitly supports the development and practice of critical judgment and moral sensitivity. But, at a time when very little about the goals of education can be assumed, it helps to make explicit the close connection between inclusive, ongoing, evidence-driven inquiry and the broader practices of informed citizenship.

Theodor Adorno is probably the writer I turn to most often to both support and challenge my teaching. Many of his essays explore the interface between large, standardizing entities (like universities, government offices, etc.) and the malleable individual, who desires to be legible and connected to larger systems but who is also subject to the distorting and sometimes even cruel elements inherent in such systems. Adorno, who witnessed Germany’s fall into fascism, remained allergic to mass movements or standardization of any sort, but he saw a clear role for teachers: “The premier demand upon all education is that Auschwitz not happen again” (191). I’ve triggered Godwin’s Law just mentioning this, so I will move away from any hastily drawn historical comparisons. Still, Adorno’s plain declaration is directed at any technologically advanced society that exerts pressure on the individual:

One can speak of the claustrophobia of humanity in the administered world, of a feeling of being incarcerated in a thoroughly societalized, closely woven, netlike environment. The denser the weave, the more one wants to escape it, whereas it is precisely this close weave that prevents any escape. This intensifies the fury against civilization. (193)

Adorno poses education as a process of historical inquiry, self-reflection, and confrontation with fear. Although he speaks out against the hardness and coldness that can come from educational models too focused on training and discipline, he dialectically rejects the premise that love could be ”summoned in professionally mediated relations like that of teacher and student” (202). Rather, he asks us to engage with one another in manner that combats isolation without superimposing a unifying order. Education provides a site for community building and interaction, but it also offers students the prospect of some autonomy, of exercising “the power of reflection, of self-determination, of not cooperating” (195).

When I think about what an introductory writing seminar should be, I think of it as a site for staging this activity, this dance of connection and differentiation, through writing itself (and through the subsequent circulation of this writing). Although Adorno’s contexts are grim and we hope quite distinct from our own, we should perhaps heed his warning about a model of learning that is too certain of its goals and methods, too quick to privilege reproduction of the system over engagement with its members.

*All quotes from Theodor Adorno’s “Education After Auschwitz” in Critical Models (Columbia UP, 2005).