Teacher Inquiry -- Saturday March 6

Here I am again in Burnham's TI class. I enjoy coming, even though my heart on Saturdays is always outside. This is a place where I can do professional work that I take no other time to do. In this mini-semester I hope to interrogate my approach to developmental writing pedagogy, with the aim of finding ways of inserting my experience into what I'm reading for my comprehensive exams. I know what I want in a way that can't tolerate doing something if it doesn't advance something. My comprehensive exams must advance more than just another step toward my Ph.D. I want the work I do in preparing for them and in actually writing them to inform my own pedagogy.

So I'm going to continue to talking about Miller's article "Composition as a Cultural Artifact." But first a word about Greg. At breakfast yesterday Pierre and I told him about the composition history question that we are both answering. It asks us to look at how the field has been under-valued. Miller makes the argument that it is under-valued as a result of a cultural imprint -- an imprint that is seemingly set in cement. This imprint places composition teachers in the roles of nurse/doctor (cure the ill student), maid (scrubb the student clean), mother (nurture the immature student), and priest (mediator between high -- academia, and low -- student). All of this makes perfect sense to me. I understand the metaphors at a gut level. But Greg seemed not to get any of this. He asked at least two times something like "who says we're undervalued?" It was a new idea to him. He talked about non-English faculty treating him as if he were a magician. Pierre said that the general public treated him like a saint. In public, I often feel like a leper once I've announced my profession. I don't feel like either a saint or a magician.

Why am I in this field? I came to it in a circuitous way, but the long and short of it is that I like to teach -- I don't know that it is specifically writing pedagogy that I love -- but language in general. I love language and I love to teach, and so here I am. Maybe I would have stayed in TESOL, my first career, except that it is even lower than the field of composition -- less professionalized and the textbooks even less about theories of second language acquisition than writing textbooks. I found like minds in composition -- colleagues who wanted to talk about the complexities of teaching somebody something that can't quite be considered content, but also can't be reduced to a skill, like learning how to write D'Nealian script as a style of penmanship. The idea that writing instruction needs to account for rhetoric, culture, specific skills, critical thinking, gender, class, identity, and the list goes on -- is exciting to me, but so hard to pin down in a world that loves to define and categorize and taxonomize -- a world that only wants to ask questions that can be answered by science instead of through reasoning and judgment -- a world that only valorizes the rational. How can this field of writing instruction -- especially basic writing instruction -- professionalize with in the rank and file? How can it resist the hallowed halls of empircal research? Maybe it shouldn't? Is there more than just two ways of conducting scholarly inquiry and doing scholarly work and producing knowledge?