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06/30/2005 Archived Entry: "Carnival III"

Carnival III
The Carnival is kicking into serious gear. Collin, Jenny, and Robert add to the mix (but you have to read the comments too to get what Bradley-who-will-not-blog adds as well.
I'll riff a little on Collin's issue with Fulkerson and place (Comp-landia, Comp-lumbia), which feeds off the map image Derek circulates and Jenny picks out of the essay (via the mention of Broad). Since many of us are interested in place, rhetorics of place, space, and since Fulkerson is mapping out what he imagines as the places of composition, this seems to be a worthy - if brief - departure point.
One place in Fulkerson's piece that we all seem to be picking up on is the last paragraph where Fulkerson quotes Olson predicting "the new theory wars." One question, though, is: which theory? And who will battle whom?
I ask that because I don't think the binaries are so easy to draw out. The two collections on composition scholarship Fulkerson concentrates on demonstrate the problems such binaries create. Are these places of study so distinct? Are they going to war with each other? Do you find yourself having to choose critical pedagogy or cultural studies?
In fact, I would question the idea that there is a war at all. When you map out a text like A Guide To Composition Pedagogies, one thing you should discover (or at least I discover) is how similar all these practices really are. They all agree, more or less, on what writing entails, what writers do, and what teachers should expect from writers. WAC, Community Service, Writing Center Pedagogy - are these areas really in conflict with one another? Are they ideologically at ends with one another? No. While they may target different areas of study (and even that is debatable), or they may enact their pedagogies in different spaces (the community as opposed to the classroom or the writing center), they are still presenting writing, more or less, as the same thing.
In a previous post, I brought up the question of familiarity (which Collin reminds me of the connection to place - home) and uniformity. I'm suspicious of the "war" metaphor Fulkerson alludes to because I still see the field pushing towards uniformity (and, in turn, complacency). Even the so-called most radical parts of composition Fulkerson focuses on (cultural studies) and the so-called radical nature of the content of cultural studies courses (Marxism, leftist politics) strive for a uniformity that becomes quite conservative very quickly.
Which is another place of work I've been trying to write about: the domination of conservatism in our pedagogies. We like to mask that domination with so-called "radical" movements (which include cultural studies nods to Marxism), but in the end, we conserve very specific meanings of composing. Thus, I'm not so preoccupied with an emerging theory war because I think we are more inclined to keep our practices in place rather than disrupt them.

Posted by cbd @ 06/30/2005 03:11 PM EST

authers? Yeah, that's what we need. More authers.

Posted by Donna @ 06/30/2005 12:31 PM EST

OK, well, I wanted to blog a response to everyone over on my place and no doubt will, but meanwhile everyone is blogging more good stuff too fast. So, I'll just say here that I was thinking about this thing exactly--that when I really got to thinking about these divisions and wars Fulkerson was claiming are out there, I really, really wondered what he was talking about. Not just, as I say over on my blog, that we need some divisiveness, but that there really is no divisiveness. Who among the authers in the Tate et al anthology are at each other's throats? No one. And when I, like Jeff, have used this anthology, I didn't find the book really stirring up a lot of dissensus. Now technology--real technology, like say Jenny's use of technology in her CCCC presentation, which I presented to my class last semester--that's likely to stir something up. But not canonized approaches.

We need something like an anthology of non-canonized pedagogies. *That* would be interesting.

Posted by Donna @ 06/30/2005 12:30 PM EST

Still haven't opened the barley wine you left here. Probably this weekend. I've been saving it.

"Just teach writing" is such an interesting phrase that gets circualted. And here's where the other mantra, critical thinking, doesn't come in: ok. then what do folks write about?

D'oh!

Posted by jeff @ 06/30/2005 12:10 PM EST

Why should I blog, when I can just squat here? :)

RF seems to oscillate between "ccs is too radical" point of view and "ccs is more of the same"---either way, I think the real war is here, and that's gonna be folks attacking RF for repeating to some extent Hairston's "just teach writing" or bagging ccs approaches to comp in some way.

Hrm, "just teach writing" is also one of the arguments used against bringing new media into composition. I'll have to look into that parallel a little more...

(BTW, I racked chocolate brown ale, pale ale, and barley wine this AM.)

Posted by cbd @ 06/30/2005 12:03 PM EST

I think you're right about that issue of masking conservatism under radical pedagogies. I'm wondering whether those masks might start coming off. If you remember a WPA exchange a few weeks back, somebody from my neck o' da voods complained that comp didn't have a sense of unity to the public and administrators, that it needed to concentrate on writing and not on CCS, and RF echos this concern when he says that less time in such classes is given to actually teaching writing.

Posted by Robert Leston @ 06/30/2005 11:56 AM EST