I am Matthew Williams and You are Not

Textbooks in the classroom: a few thoughts.

2008-08-20T16:42:06Z

One might look, for example, at Ken Macrorie's books, or Elbow's Writing with Power or Brannon, Knight, and Neverow-Turk's Writers Writing. Here, in more intimate, self-conscious personas, the monolith of correctness is recast in a less important form, and attention shifts to the act of writing. But of course the result is no less propaganda. The only difference is that an alternative set of political values is at work. To frame it in somewhat oversimplified terms, the "traditional" texts present writing as a matter of learning to conform, with an emphasis on decorum as a means of identify- ing individual with group; whereas the "non-traditional" books present it as a liberating activity, a means of defining individual as separate from group. The point here is that writing is necessarily more complex, and more variable, than either position can depict-encompasses both of them, and more. In either case, then, the users of such books are presented with proselytizers who differ only in their particular doctrinal allegiance: in short, with propaganda. (31)

--Stephen North in The Making of Knowledge in Composition

* Writing manuals and how-to textbooks devalue the role and integrity of the composition instructor. They follow in a long and storied tradition of seeing the act of teaching as a non-academic or non-intellectual activity. In short, it turns the instructor from a practicing academic into a mere clerk or technician that carries out predetermined activities and routines. A writing manual allows instructors to think less about teaching and consequently prevents them from engaging in self-reflexive pedagogy.

* Textbooks remove the most important element of learning from the equation: the student. It relegates authority to entities external to the localized, specific classroom (e.g., publishing companies, textbook authors, etc).

* The yearly cost of tuition at the University of Minnesota is now over five figures. For many students, it is much more once living expenses are added in. The average student debt upon leaving the University of Minnesota is in excess of $20,000; one of the highest figures in the mid-west for a public university. Government funded aid is lessening and state support is drying up. A 60 dollar textbook represents a small fraction of the total expense of going to college. Yet, a lot of 60 dollar textbooks add up over the course of 4 years.

* Most (if not all) writing manuals are geared towards writing correctly to fill out mythical standard forms of writing with out considering that these forms are constantly changing as they are composed. Research of professional and technical writers has time and time again noted that "correctness" in writing is one small part of many factors that go into being able to "write well."

* The prevalence of writing manuals is a reflection of the state of the discipline and not a reason to use such texts in the classroom. Educators who specialize in composition are actually a tiny minority of people who actually teach composition. The majority of composition instructors are specialists in other areas or graduate students from other fields. For these instructors, the belief is that writing manuals and text books are necessary as the information and knowledge contained within them is too important to let a non-specialist handle on their own. Simply put, it "teacher-proofs" a classroom.

* Textbooks introduce corporations and their marketing into the classroom, whereby decisions of how to teach are guided by successful marketing of publishing company representatives and not necessarily academic or scholarly research/theory. Consequently, the available set of "teaching methods" becomes constrained by what the market makes available to instructors. Further, new theories of writing are constrained by what could be used in a textbook.

* Textbook publishers are typically for-profit endeavors who make a profit from first year writing classes, creating troublesome conflicts of interest for both instructors as well as departments.

* It is unavoidable that textbooks create an environment where students "discover" or "locate" the correct answers, principles, or theories instead of creating them.

* Local, community, individual, and inter-generational forms of knowledge are devalued while institutional, non-localized forms of knowledge via experts contained within writing guides are privileged.

* Writing manuals and textbooks perpetuate a specific ideology of what the classroom should look like and how it should operate. Reliance on textbooks makes it difficult (if not impossible) to envision other, alternative, and potentially viable/valuable ways of understanding the mechanics of the classroom space. An inability to even conceive of how a class might work with out a textbook at the center of it demonstrates how narrow our conceptions of how learning happens really are.

* Textbooks and writing manuals run the risk of being the educational equivalent of setting a child down in front of a TV in order to socialize it.

* When we select a textbook, not only are we supporting the ideologies contained within the book, but we are also perpetuating the system and the network (in all of its socio-political facets) that created and consequently ensure the hegemony of the textbook as the primary source of instruction. In short, the purpose of the textbook ideology is the preservation of the textbook ideology, especially when we consider that much of the information contained within various writing guides and manuals can be found for free in other places (e.g., the internet, libraries, and most importantly, communicative communities).

Five areas of attention for the next 50 years in education, educational research.

2008-08-03T00:36:26Z

1. A revision of "core curricula." In the next 50 years, attention will have to be paid to what exactly constitutes the core of what is "taught" in schools. The 4 traditional categories of "english," "science," "social studies," and "history" will need to undergo extensive criticism and reconstruction if schools are to remain viable in terms of helping students come into society as productive members. Areas such as sustainability as a subject, consumer education, critical literacy, and energy politics must be taken seriously and written into part of the overarching goals of schooling, even if it means supplanting "traditional" subjects.

2. The local production of knowledge. With the decline of petroleum as a cheap and abundant source of energy, much of society that has been built on the assumption of the availability of plentiful energy will begin to change. Suburban life and all of its ideologies will be forced to undergo a painful and potentially violent rapid decline. Distribution networks that depended on cheap oil to be centralized and non-regional will no longer be economically feasible, and this will include informational networks. For instance, the internet and the ways in which we utilize and rely on it are heavily dependent on ideologies that issue from unsustainable distribution networks (information on the internet does not necessarily hold true to all geographic locales, so growing methods of one area may not match other areas). Part of our ability to survive this transition will be our ability to rebuild local distribution networks of goods, services, as well as information. Schools will have to attend to enabling students to produce knowledge that comes from a functional awareness of local interdependencies of land, people, intergenerational relationships, and local business. This stands in stark contrast to our current "wal-mart" model in which resources are pooled by large, non-regional agents that transport things over long distances and are widely available in places that things should not be. Further, educational researchers will have to take seriously the notion that -- like race, gender, and class -- housing and regional design (i.e., suburban/urban, high density/low density, cul-de-sac/grid, etc) are sources of knowledge and information that colors how we make meaning of the world.

3. A de-emphasis on a static oriented mindset when it comes to conceiving of sustainable pedagogy. Part of the implicit assumption concerning "standardized skills" education is that the world is, in large part, static and stable. Further, skills training is adequate because the questions we face do not change. Obviously this is false and severely diminishes our chance of success in transitioning from a globalized culture and economy built on oil dependency to a local, regionally based eco-sustainable economy. In short, it won't be the ability to retain facts and figures but rather our ability to re-conceive of their meaning that will enable us to face unforeseen challenges.

4. An educational model that rejects isolationistic and individualistic models of learning. As economies becomes smaller and more regional due to increases in energy expenses, the need for members of society to be able to productively interact, work, and live with those immediately around them will become increasingly important. The goal will become finding ways to help students learn to live with those around them as opposed to students learning to live against those around them as we see now in our hyper-competitive economic culture.

5. A vision of social, cultural, economic and political problems as educational problems. As it is now, the problems we face are seen as separate, isolated, disciplinary problems to be solved by specialists in various areas. This model of informational growth is not sustainable. For society to be responsive to a world in which change increases at an exponential pace, schools must be employed as responsive institutions themselves to address these very problems. This includes de-coupling the goals and methods of education from "universal standards" and their accordant ideologies. Pedagogy itself must be realized as social, cultural, economic, and political. To think it can ever be neutral is itself a learned ideology. Schools must be able to seek new avenues of understanding, even when they directly confront and challenge status quo modes of living. Schools must become a source of critical questioning and not merely a repository of value-free information.

The Job Market Myth

2008-06-23T05:05:25Z

The economy is often times like a large body of water. Here in the mid-west, we've been reminded lately that bodies of water do indeed rise and fall. We know this. We have historical records reminding us. We have stories to tell of '93, '99, and now 2008. And yet, for all that, we always seem to forget that bodies of water are not static. We always seem to live our normal, daily lives as if bodies of water are stable. We go about business assuming that where the water line was yesterday is where it will be today.

The problem with that, of course, is that it is simply not true. But what is more interesting is when these water levels shift a great amount in a short span of time we often times realize the fallacy of our static-oriented mindset.

Take for example Lake Delton in the Wisconsin Dells. It is a man-made lake, and for years stood as the cornerstone of a small economic machine that drove the local tourist economy. And then, during the floods, the man-made dam that held the water in broke open, and drained the entire lake.

What followed is what I'm trying to get at. For the first time in a long time, sans water, residents of the area saw the bed of Lake Delton. It was these startling images that reminded us that many assumptions people had about the way things work were simply wrong.

In that same vein, with the deepening of the recession we're in, the draining of our national economic lake is revealing for the first time in a long time several misconceptions and false assumptions/assertions we've been making for far too long. One of the biggest false assumptions we've been making here in higher-education that is now finally being exposed as the economy worsens concerns our relationship to preparing students for the job market.

Simply put: what goes on in the classroom is a small, insignificant part of very large and complex equation that results in gainful employment upon leaving college. Take for example the thousands upon thousands of incredibly qualified, highly intelligent college graduates who are unable to find any work simply because the economic situation shies away from hiring new employees. For these unfortunate individuals, the ability to thoughtfully draft a cogent argument has absolutely no effect on their ability to secure employment in any area that would require such a skill. In fact, it might make these individuals too expensive to hire in this economic climate.

This, of course, completely shoots a very large hole in the argument that we should be preparing students, through batteries of testable skills, for the job market. Frankly, it's not the skills that results in a student getting a job. Once a student has passed all but the most fundamental levels of "skills" in various areas (which most do well before they reach college), then whether they got an A or a C in a first year writing classroom is ultimately of absolutely no importance what-so-ever. The "skills" most employers need out of employees are usually the sorts of "skills" that are learned on the job, and simply cannot be provided for in college classrooms, especially college writing classrooms.

What lands a student a job? An expanding economy and luck. Not much else, as we're finding out. Take out the expanding economy part and NO student, regardless of how well they did in school, will fare well on the job market. "Job market skills training" helps only the ones who actually get jobs, and this number is falling sharply as the economy worsens. What of the ones who get squeezed out and cannot find a job that, while they may be highly qualified for, just does not exist? These are the ones I stay up at night worrying about.

In my mind, the question now turns to: what sorts of classrooms might make a student's life more worthy as they realize the job market doesn't care who they are when they are standing in the unemployment line with a college degree in one hand and an inside-out empty pocket in the next. We can't stake our role in society as an institution that gives people "skills" that ultimately are only worthwhile for the select few who wind up using them on the job market. We have to be about something else. Somehow I doubt any textbook is up to this task.

There's something about writing.

2008-06-07T21:51:22Z

I get asked a lot about what exactly it is I do. Often times people don't quite know what "composition" really is beyond handing out worksheets filled with "drills 'n skills" to students. While a lot of fields in academia are poorly understood by those outside of the fields, composition seems to be towards the top were we to rank "the most misunderstood fields" today. But that's OK. Part of what we are as a field is an attempt to investigate these misunderstandings and to untangle where they may have come from.

But every now and then, I get asked why I do what I do. The first question of what it is I do is hard to answer, but answering why I do what I do is actually really easy.

For many people, "writing" is something they usually take for granted. The simplistic understanding of writing is that it is a set of skills and techniques one masters and then employs. Sadly, even for many people who earn a living "teaching writing," this is as far as their understanding of writing goes. To people like this, the "key figures" in the field of composition are the authors of textbooks, handbooks, and style guides. People like James McCrimmon, Diana Hacker, and countless publishing houses that peddle exorbitantly expensive writing manuals to hapless freshman (e.g., the Longman's Writers Companion, The Bedford Writers Handbook, etc).

For me, one of the key documents in my work is Michel Foucault's "What is an author?" This essay describes the field of inquiry in composition studies as I understand it. That is, what is important are questions concerning the role and function of writing, authorship, creativity, and so forth within culture, not prior or external to it.

Ultimately, the most important thing about using Foucault's essay as the starting point in any composition setting is that it forces us to understand not only the rules of writing as being a product of culture, but writing itself to be a wholly cultural phenomena. Using this as the basis for any work in the field (be it in a classroom or through research), what we're talking about when we talk about writing is ourselves, not some eternal, external set of rules that exist prior to culture. When we talk about communication what we're talking about are the ways in which we extend our biological boundaries to include others in our environment. Or, to put it bluntly, anytime we talk about how we communicate, what we're really talking about is how we negotiate the ways we live together within a society; or, in other words, Dewey's definition of "culture." In essence, to talk of communication or writing is simply to talk about who we are as a culture and how our culture works. Thus, writing IS culture.

Writing, as a form of communication, is distinct and unique from other forms in that it exists within a temporal realm. Unlike vocal speech, writing persists through time. It is because of this that when we talk about writing in specific, not only are we talking about the ways we currently live together, but we are also in a position to talk about ways we want to live together. Learning to write is consequently learning to take the stuffs of the environment we find ourselves in and using those things to create something new. Writing is democracy as Whitman understood it. Writing is art as Dewey understood it.

So, to answer the question of why I do what I do is rather simple. In my understanding of the task, the teaching of writing is ultimately engaging in an act and a process that is directly related to purposefully seeking out new and better ways to live both individually and as a society. I joke that I would rename the department of "writing studies" to "the department of democracy and hope." Cheesy, but not that far off the mark from how I understand what it is we should do as teachers of writing.

Teaching Composition as Fun with Real Audio

2008-05-20T07:45:28Z

One of the animated segments on Saturday Night Live that I always enjoyed was the "Fun with Real Audio" segment in which they would take the audio track of something, usually an interview, and then animate something else while the audio went on. The effect was to de-contextualize the audio and to turn it into something else. It was always comedic because the words, depending on the animation going on, took on drastically different meanings. Of course, on SNL, the goal was comedy, as many animations quickly evolved in to hilarious juxtapositions of serious interviews and bizarre and surreal animations. But there's an important process going on here that I was reminded of today. During our first year writing instruction symposium I was reminded several times that similar things could be brought upon our own teaching practices. For instance, for those who don't know, the current description of our FYC (first year composition) class reads as follows:

WRIT 1301 fulfills the first-year writing requirement. It involves critical reading, writing, and thinking as students practice some of the types of writing they may expect in their college career such as summaries, essays, academic arguments, bibliographies, and papers built on research. The course helps students develop, at a minimum, an approach to writing that relies on clear statement of a thesis and support of that thesis with appropriate sources and documentation. Time is spent discussing rhetorical elements of writing such as audience, purpose, and argumentative structure. Students also practice steps in the writing process such as invention, research, organization of ideas, paper drafting, revision, and editing. Students report, synthesize, and draw conclusions regarding the significance of what they read. Students become more aware of the rhetorical choices available to them and learn to make appropriate choices. Some sections may be taught in computer classroom. Some sections are offered online. Some sections may include a service-learning component.

As I see it, there are 5 key "terms" that the whole endeavor is built on. These are the 5 "Rs:" Reading, Research, Revision, Rhetoric, and Writing. I've highlighted them in the description. But returning to the idea of "Fun With Real Audio," one thing that struck me as I was listening to my colleagues at a FYW (first year writing) symposium today was that when we use these terms, we all assume we know that we all agree on what the terms mean, but in actuality we don't. For instance, during a panel discussion on teaching with "research," in my notes I had the question "what IS research" and "what is the function of research" written down several times. I also noted that with research, we all "know how to do it" but don't really know what "it" is when we teach it. The question of "well, what IS research anyway" seems so simple that we just neglect to ask it, let alone attempt to answer it. But returning to these terms themselves is fruitful and important if we're concerned with not just replicating the errors we've made in the past. So, this got me thinking: what happens to the writing class (real audio) when we change the definition of these terms that we use to describe it (the animation)? That is, what happens when we de-familiarize the familiar when we approach designing a writing class? As such, I offer "alternative" definitions to the 5 "Rs" (and yes, I know "writing" isn't an R word, but it sounds like one, so just play along, ok?).

]]> Rhetoric: Since the formation of the new "writing studies" department that, in no small way, did not include the few compositionists from English, the term "rhetoric" has popped up virtually all over. When I was teaching composition for the English department, the term "rhetoric" was one that most people sort of knew, but really couldn't say much other than it had something to do with argumentation or persuasion. I can say, looking back now, that in the past year I have never heard so many people use the term "rhetoric" so many times in my entire life. And, as such, I and others have had to wrap our minds around what the hell people are talking about when they talk of "rhetoric" this and "rhetoric" that and "rhetorical" bla bla bla and "rhetorical" whatevers. If there ever was an instance of people throwing out a term but never really talking about what it means, "rhetoric" would be it. To think that even the term "rhetoric" is a static term that we can consult some book to discover the "True" definition of it is, like anything else, flat out wrong. But so help me there are those who do very high level work in "rhetoric" without even thinking about it. To them, rhetoric is, as Aristotle formulated it, simply the art of discovering the available means of persuasion, or some formulation of that idea. This ignores, however, others strands of rhetoric, most notably the "sophists," for which there have been several contemporary squabbles about their existence and meaning. It basically boils down like this: Plato claims there are eternal truths, or things that are true simply because they are. Other philosophers at the time had other views, and realized what is true depends on the context, contingency, and some sort of power. It is no mistake that this latter group was the first group to really set out to try to encode just how ideas are given power so that others might adopt them. As we know it today, Rhetoric owes much more to Aristotle than the Sophists. That is, there IS a real truth out there, and through formulaic forms of rhetoric, we can approximate some sort of control over what is believed and what is not. Or, in other words, to master rhetoric is to know what means of persuasion are available and to use them. The study is a study of method; the point is to force someone else to adopt your position or to prevent someone from doing it to you. But, keeping in mind these fringe roots of rhetoric, teaching "rhetoric" doesn't have to mean teaching "the available means of persuasion." Rather, the significance of rhetoric lies in an investigation of why such a thing as "rhetoric" exists in the first place: an acknowledgment that even Truths are not "self-evident" and that, further, the only thing separating a Truth and multiple (and consequently various forms of subjugated) truths is a system of cultural habits and understandings that privilege one truth over another. Put rather simply, teaching "rhetoric" should be leading an investigation over why some forms of knowledge are privileged and why others are subjugated, oppressed, and ignored. Teaching Toulman models are worthless and pointless if the discussion stops at "this is how to make an argument" with out ever talking about why "arguments" exist in the first place. To ignore the role "power" has in granting "Truth" status on various ways of thinking is to ignore the real lesson of rhetoric. Further, and this might be the most radical departure I am making with the people I work with, the real purpose of considering rhetoric is not as a means to "learn how to do it" but rather as a means to increase our sensitivity and awareness of the ways truth is constructed and not simply "discovered." Or, in short, the primary purpose of a study of rhetoric is learning to listen and not learning to foist a conclusion on someone else. While many scholars of rhetoric realize this in their research, rarely, it seems, does this understanding of rhetoric make it into our classrooms, where teaching "rhetoric" usually means teaching the styles or forms of argumentation. Unfortunately, to merely teach the "how" leaves the "why" (and by "why," I mean the moral/ethical aspect of creating truth) out of the picture. This, in my view, is a greatly impoverished view of what "rhetoric" is good for. The greatest gift Rhetoric has given the fields of human understanding is the acknowledgment that truth is not "given" but rather truth is created and employed through various forms of power and to understand this is, following Foucault, to understand the way things are now are not that way because they are "right" by some eternal authority and consequently we are free to imagine other possibilities of living.

Revision: The typical story on revision pretty much goes like this: Students, who are "apprentice writers" (an academic bullshit code word for "bad writers"), will always fail on their first draft to do something well. Consequently, the purpose of revision is to clean up the vulgarities of their ways of writing so that it is more like what we find to be pleasing or acceptable. Often times the term "polished" is used, which is all well and good but also implies that what came before was unclean and dirty. So to revise, students fix up their grammar, consult a thesaurus, possibly tinker with a few sentences, and "expand" areas to meet arbitrary page quotas. The "final" draft of this process is, in many ways, the same paper that was first written, but has been smoothed over to have an appearance of being "better." But the problem with this understanding of revision is that it says nothing about the quality of what is being said in the paper. Or, to put that another way, just because a paper is "polished" doesn't mean it says anything of any importance to anyone, let alone say it in a compelling and interesting way. Further, it understands the development of a paper as being a straight, simple, clean, and unproblematic line from A to B to C to D, with very little trouble along the way. Instead, if we think of revision as "re-vision," then we have something completely different. Instead of looking for error, we read our writing as a means to do it again. We look over our writing to understand what it is we're trying to say. Our act of reading is really an act of writing in which we re-create something else using an earlier draft as our starting point. In this form of writing, the act of re-vision means more composing and not mere "tinkering" or fixing. It means creating something new again. It means using the earlier draft as a storehouse of ideas to be further played with. And, in this formulation, there is no promise that the next draft will be any better than the first; instead, it could actually be worse! But that's not a problem, nor even the point. The point is to continue to try new things as an expression of experimentation in order to further develop and test out different ideas and different ways to express those ideas in writing. Further, it treats writing as a never-ending process of creation and interpretation, ebbing and flowing, stable and dynamic. "Drafts" do not progress quantitatively or even qualitatively, rather drafts progress experimentally in an effort to continually reformulate our understandings of the environment we live in.

Reading: That the "current-traditional" understanding of teaching writing from an English department ideology understands learning to write as a process of reading "good writers" and emulating has been so thoroughly written on that it is not worth repeating here. The problem, of course, is a problem of getting from A to B. If "good reading" is A, and "better writing" is B, then the assumption is IF A, then B. However, there is still no clear understanding of how one leads to the other. What this ideology has failed to address is the relationship reading has to WHY writing occurs. That is, it doesn't help to explain the phenomena of writing if we are to only understand it as an act of imitating what we read. It might partially explain HOW people come to write in certain ways, but says nothing of why. This problem is most evident in composition classes that are really "intro to literary analysis" classes. This is not to say that close reading is not important (although the idea of a "close reading" is problematic as well), but rather this is to say that in emphasizing "reading" often times "writing" is not even considered and taken for granted. Classes that are heavy on reading "great essays" and then engage in forced, dry, boring writing assignments really don't grasp the entire picture. So how can we understand the role of "reading" differently? The most important way to re-describe reading in a writing class is to simply flip the order of events. In the common understanding, you read and then you write. Instead, we can understand reading as the end result of writing. That is, we don't read to write, but instead we write to be read. In this formulation, we greatly expand the conditions involved in writing to include the totality of environment. Further, writing consequently becomes an act of creation and not merely an act of imitation. In short, the reason we write is to extend our biological boundaries outside of our bodies to enact a transactional engagement with the environment we find ourselves in. This environment includes, among other things, other people, culture, histories, and languages. In this guise, reading is part of taking fragments of our environment to use them as components of a piece of work that creates unity.

Research: This term was the first term that got me thinking about all of this. As one person pointed out, it is very obvious in all the descriptions of what the "new" FYC should focus on: research. But what is "research" anyway? Do we simply mean teaching students to "do what we do?" Or, simply, to find smarty-pants things to impress an instructor so that they'll give you an A for being a miniature replica of them? And, if this is the case, I think we have good cause to categorically reject this idea of research in our classroom. At the least, we know that less than 1% of all our students will actually go on to get their PhDs and do what we (academics) do. In fact, 10-15% won't even remain in the U of MN after one year. So when I say research, what I'm talking about is "re-search." That is, to take already given assumptions and returning to them in an effort to establish a deeper understanding of the hows and whys things work and work together. The goal and the function of research is to take various experiences and questions and to, through inquiry, develop understandings of them that articulates the interdependence of their consequences as well as the roots of their causes. For Deweyans, this is not so different than his discussion of the function of Art, and I think this is purposeful. Research, as properly understood as an artistic act, underscores the importance of giving unity and coherence to fragmented and disjointed phenomena. The reason we DO research is to better understand how and why things work. We don't do research to "master" one methodology or another, or to show that we know how to find a book in the library. All things involved in research, to be sure. But those parts alone do not describe the "research" act nor why anyone should do it. The goal of research is to foster an attitude or way of being that is more intelligent than what each student was capable of before. Sadly, our focus is on much more trivial things: properly citing sources, finding "scholarly" journals to look at, etc. These are the ends as we understand "research" right now. But this speaks nothing of the richness of experience and our understandings of the world that are possible through inquiry. If that is our end result, the means we use to accomplish it could, justifiably, look radically different.

Writing: It all comes down to this term. After all, "writing" is what we're about. However, the typical understanding of writing is a foolishly simplistic understanding. That is, writing is simply a set of skills that one masters. Master the skills, and you are a good writer. If you know how to organize an essay, have good transitions, use proper grammar/mechanics, and essentially follow the rules, then you are virtually guaranteed success. Therefore, in order to teach writing, one merely needs to teach the skills involved. The fatal flaw with this understanding, though, is that it purports to understand the whole by naming and encoding the parts, with out ever understanding that the whole comes first and THEN we go back and ask "how the heck did that happen?" In short, writing happens; it is only after the fact that we can go back and dissect what occurred in the name of encoding and deciphering the phenomena. However, the mistake is to think that our interpretation of what constituted the whole IS the whole. It is not, it is merely various ways to break down the whole into parts that we can understand. These parts say nothing about writing and are instead merely a shadow of ourselves and our culture. Because of this, there is an infinite amount of ways to interpret or decipher a piece of writing. We can look at its structure, we can look at the meanings of words, we can linguistically investigate the syntax, we can culturally decode the histories of words used, we can look into the rhythm of consonants, we can try to figure out if it is persuasive, and so on and so on. There can never be an exhaustive list of the "parts" that will finally and firmly constitute the whole. So instead, we're left with a whole that can never be reached through the parts, even though the parts define the whole. To try to understand the teaching of writing as based on parts of writing will not really get us anywhere. Instead, when we look at the phenomena of writing as the outcome of certain circumstances, we can then seek to replicate these circumstances in the classroom to understand WHY writing might happen in the first place. Understood as such, writing, and the whole of communication, exists because it answers a certain or particular obstacle or problem we encounter in our environment. That is, we write because we live with others and are not in isolation. For us to survive, we have to find ways to cultivate these interdependencies, whether it be a child figuring out how to get the attention of a parent, or a compositionist trying to figure out how to reconfigure the field. Writing is one such way in which we can interact with our environment as a means to understand it and survive within it. As such, writing is a consequence of a transaction with the world we live in, a world that involves other people, cultures, power, inequities, histories, wants, desires, fears, hopes, and so forth. While writing can happen simply because an instructor demands that it happens, this sort of writing is an empty sort of writing that doesn't really do anything. Instead, if writing is understood as a culturally fixed act of creation that takes fragmented parts of our experience and seeks to unify them in order to understand something, then we're on to something. We don't write to show mastery of something or to shove our opinions down someone else's throat, but rather we write to find harmony in a world in which we must live with others and not against others.

To boil it all down, here is a condensed list of the 5 "R's" of composition with a brief definition:

* Rhetoric: A recognition of subjugated knowledges and the related inquiry into why some forms of knowledge are validated and others are not.
* Revision: An act of creation using a previous draft plus new understandings and insights.
* Reading: The end result of writing; part of the environment from which the phenomena of writing comes from.
* Research: The act of returning to habits of thought/action in order to deepen our understanding of them as well as to revise them.
* Writing: The consequence of the living body in transaction with its environment that includes other people, cultures, histories, and circumstances.

A composition class built upon THESE definitions will obviously be radically different than other composition classrooms, all while still using the same "Rs" as mandated by administration.

Summer Reading List

2008-05-10T21:20:00Z

Ah the life of academia. How bizarre! I just finished up (save for some grading next week) with the semester, and now I am kind of in a daze thinking...whoa, what now?

So, to stave off boredom, I'm baking bread and thinking of a reading list to try to tackle this summer. So, with no further ado...

]]> * Pierre Bordieu's Outline of a Theory of Practice

* Kenneth Burke's On Symbols and Society

* Louise Rosenblatt's The Reader, The Text, The Poem: The Transactional Theory of Literary Work

* Cornel West's The American Evasion of Philosophy

* And of course, lots and lots of Dewey.

No more Dewey After Dark for me....

2008-05-09T18:36:37Z

Last night I dreamt that I was at a conference in colorado and was sitting in a large auditorium... Suddenly, the man next to me turned to me and began to tell me that I was on the right track with Dewey and that a lot of important stuff is yet to come. He told me to keep on doing what I am doing no matter what the cost.

OK, so that was weird enough. But even weirder? The man was Al Gore.

11 Theses on Dewey

2008-04-11T06:10:15Z

1. We have attempted to understand and consequently teach writing from the perspective that the parts comprise the whole. What we have not done is sought to understand the whole as precedent to the parts. It is not that grammar doesn't exist, or that it isn't important. But a thorough understanding of grammar itself does not create writing. Writing exists; writing happens. From this we seek to identify the parts that comprise the whole.

2. I remember a Stanley Fish essay once concerning how to know when you've encountered a poem. Frankly, I can't remember for the life of me what he said. No matter. Dewey answers it again for me. You know you've encountered a real poem (or any real work of art for that matter) when the past, the present, and the future all meet in a singular moment in time and experience and at the conclusion of that moment all three have changed. Of course, this greatly expands the definition of "poetry" beyond anything that can be captured in a literature class.

3. I am concerned about critical pedagogy. Let me explain what I mean by "concerned about." I am concerned because I agree with the basic premise that is the core of any conception of critical pedagogy; mainly, that the classroom is a culturally (and thus politically) situated space. Further, even IF it were possible to have a valueless, context-free classroom space, we still wouldn't want such a thing. If schools are an extension of our hope for a better tomorrow, the last thing we would ever want would be to remove the concepts of struggle and creation from sites of learning and understanding.

That said, the results of the post-structuralist moment we are still living in has cautioned us and taught us to be more careful of totalizing and universalizing agents or discourses in our thought. While we've learned to be more sensitive to voices and forms of knowledge that have been swept under the rug by desires to find the "ONE ANSWER" or the "true" route to social justice free from "false consciousness," the floor we now find ourselves standing on is weak at best. In fact, there is more than a little truth to the notion that post-modernism is best understood by what it avoids than by what it stands for. Dewey may give us back something that is relatively stable enough to go back into the classrooms as empowered educators.

4. The term "tacit tradition" is often used by people who want to talk about Dewey and want to talk about composition. To me, it is much more than a "tacit" tradition. Once we jettison the idea that we can, through drills and worksheets, "teach" anything about how to write, we are left in a vacuous space in which the only reason we have for existing is that we somehow work with something that has something very important to do with democracy (or, the way we live with each other). Dewey's work is our work. We just haven't realized it fully, yet.

5. I don't believe in the term "false consciousness" and neither does Dewey. But, that also does not mean that it is impossible to have an unexamined consciousness. Problems happen when we never take the time to sort through our experiences to come to some sort of understanding of why we have mapped out our experiences the way that we have. Sometimes, it's this reflection alone that is enough to dramatically alter the way we think about how we live.

6. For Dewey, it's not that our future is not set; it's that the world itself is still forming, changing, and becoming.

7. Dewey reminds us that even in the Genesis story, it took God a full 6 days to create the world. It's not enough to have something to work with, it also needs a little time. To demand otherwise is to expect the impossible

8. The scientific method does not guarantee the "Truth." But, making sure your ideas somehow correspond with how things happen in everyday experiences is a pretty good way to make sure that those ideas will be good enough to do what you want them to do. To do otherwise is to throw some feathers on a bus and expect it to fly. I've created a few chicken buses in my day. The trick, as I see it, is to create fewer chicken buses and to just see where a regular bus will go.

9. Parents, and sometimes students, continually complain when professors have "an agenda." Of course they do. If they didn't, nothing would get done. But if what they really mean is that professors have a vision of a sort of world they want to be in and conduct their classes accordingly, then of course they do. Instructors are as much a member of a community as parents, and to pretend otherwise is to live a lie.

10. Dewey wanted to change his use of the word "experience" to "culture." I find this significant. It is too easy to say "whose experience?" and to answer with "my own private ideas." Instead, if we are to ask "whose culture?" we are left with a whole other ballgame.

11. The goal of education has traditionally been seen as a process of mere transmission of the world; the point, as I understand it, is to make the world better through active participation in it.

The commodification of writing in secondary schools

2008-03-04T17:26:32Z

I noticed this poster hanging on a sign at a local area HS last fall, and it has been bothering me ever since. I suspect there are lots of posters and signs out there, all of which has lead me to a project of looking at the visual rhetoric of commodification and learning in K-12 education.

I think the image speaks for itself.

Of course, what is most interesting is that the reason to learn is tied to an ability to get money, therefore the ability to write well becomes a commodity that can later be sold and bought on the open job market.

It's little wonder why incoming university students believe with conviction that the sole reason schools exist is to prepare them to get a job that pays well. They simply cannot fathom any other reason for school.

Another day, another school shooting.

2008-02-15T18:48:16Z

For the past 12 hours or so, ever since I heard the news out of Northern Illinois, I've been trying to collect and somehow make sense of the feelings and thoughts swirling around in my head. I know for myself, and probably many others in my profession, the idea of any sort of harm or violence coming to our students as they sit in our classes is one of the toughest, grimmest thoughts ever. I sat staring blankly out my window last night after I heard the news, feeling some sort of unease and terror wash through me. To take solace in the idea that "this couldn't happen here" no longer works. It only seems to be a matter of time now before all the bomb and gun threats that come and go each semester cease being threats and turn real.

]]>
Even though I had been enrolled at a University for a couple years, 1999 was the year I finished high school. It was almost exactly a month before I officially graduated that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, both who were my age, did what no one wanted to believe was possible. I remember watching it unfold on television before I went off to work that evening, unsettled but curiously calm. It didn't seem real. Columbine HS was thousands of miles away from my own small city in Iowa. Even though all of my friends (including myself) owned and had easy access to firearms, the thought of ever doing anything like that had never once even crossed our minds. It was unfathomable. Simply unfathomable.

There was an outcry, lots of media attention, but by the next day or so, my friends and I had moved on. It really didn't seem to affect us, and was filed away in our minds as something of a historical nature, but not a living, breathing moment that changed us.

Almost exactly 8 years later, Seung-Hui Cho walked on to the Virginia Tech campus and, before the end of the day, 33 people including himself were dead as a result of his actions. In those 8 years I had moved from the audience in a classroom to the front of the classroom. I, along with many of my colleagues, were overwhelmed by reports of the indiscriminate carnage, the magnitude of loss, and of the stories of professors such as Dr. Librescu who held the door shut to his classroom while taking gunfire all in the name of buying his students some time so they could live. Dr. Librescu survived the Holocaust but died that afternoon.

For me, suddenly it became personal. This was no longer something we just watched on TV. This was now the world I lived in. And it hit me hard.

Every year (if not every semester), I encounter student writing that raises eyebrows. This was especially true when I was teaching creative writing classes. My colleagues and I were no stranger to stories, poems, plays, and non-fiction pieces in which we felt uncomfortable, queasy, or nervous as readers. Until Virginia Tech, I, as well as most of my colleagues, faced this darkness with an overwhelming belief in trust. We knew our students had problems, but we trusted them. We trusted them to be capable of handling it in their own way. We referred them to help when necessary, but sought to take solace in understanding. Understanding that recognized that we all have troubles and sometimes writing is the first place in which we face the ugliness we perceive. We understood this because, as human beings, this was the reason many of us were writers in the first place.

After VT, that trust was profoundly shaken. Stories were no longer just stories. They were credible threats. They were whispers of a tragic tomorrow. They were no longer explorations; they became warning signs. Many, out of fear, clamped down on what could and could not be written. We turned to rigidity and guidelines to get rid of the darkness. Of course, we didn't get rid of the darkness, we just stopped looking at it.

The effects of this have been chilling, especially for those at the front of the classroom. Every time the words "shooting" and "school" appear in a headline, my thoughts immediately turn to every student who wrote things that didn't quite fit in. I think of every student I've had to give a bad grade to simply because I couldn't find a way to get through to them. I wonder about the people walking in halls while classes are in session. I find myself wondering what I would have to do to barricade a door should I ever hear gunfire. I wonder if I, like Dr. Librescu, would take 5 9mm hollow point bullets to my body to protect the very thing I care most about: the safety of my students.

When those in education used to talk about "safe-spaces," we were referring to a safe place for all sorts of ideas, even if they were not popular or deemed "proper." But now, when elementary and secondary classrooms are equipped with color coded cards to be stuck out of the bottom of doors to indicate safety of a classroom should the SWAT team ever have to come, the idea of a "safe-place" takes on a whole other connotation. And as we barricade ourselves in our classrooms from the physical threats of the world, even ideas no longer seem capable of being safe.

As much as we try to put on our game faces and head back into our classrooms fearless in the face of danger, every time a student dies in a classroom, we're reminded that somehow, something is going on that we don't understand and have very little control over. It pulls the rug out from under us. And for many of us, the bruises we get each time this happens never seem to have a chance to heal before it happens again.

I wish I had something I wish people could consider, a wish I could have granted, an issue we could all re-evaluate. But I have nothing.

Real talk.

2008-01-31T07:54:12Z

In one of MY classes (that is, not a class I'm teaching), a few of my colleagues/fellow teachers were talking about the movie Half Nelson with Ryan Gosling. They're thinking about using the movie as a means to help get at/understand various ideas swirling around critical pedagogy and all related methodology within this tradition.

However, even though this movie has been on my netflix queue for over a year, I still have not found the strength to ever let it reach the number one spot (thus sending it to me). I guess that's a complicated way of saying I haven't seen it.

I only have a general idea what it's about. It's about an idealistic young teacher who has problems in his own personal life. At some point, he finds it hard to separate the personal from the professional, and in this some barrier between him and his student(s) breaks down.

I'm assuming, since this is Hollywood, that somehow the teacher in the film finds salvation and consequently becomes a mythic hero figure.

I think this is why I've subconsciously been avoiding this movie. I don't want to see a screen representation of the teacher as a heroic figure. It frightens me. And the reason it frightens me is that teaching, to me, is not a heroic act at all. When I walk in a classroom, I don't feel like a hero. Instead, I feel a sense of tremendous humility and frailty. I feel exposed; and, consequently, I feel human.

Freire and bell hooks, among others, talk of "love" when they talk of teaching. This seems appropriate. The risks of teaching are the risks of love. Each day you have to put the fact that you care on the line, as others (both inside and outside the classroom) sometimes try to take advantage of that, drag you through the mud, and disrespect the humanness of the teacher that is often times taken for granted. We're not machines, we're feeling beings, too.

Of course, as with other forms of love, you love in spite of the risks. You get up with the dirt and grass still in your teeth and smile and ask for more. Maybe that's masochistic. I don't know. Maybe it explains why so many teachers, professors, instructors lead horrifically tormented lives that sometimes over take them. Again, I don't know.

Rarely there are Hollywood endings. As soon as you think you've made a break through, reached some sort of pedagogical salvation, new students come in who question your abilities, your credentials, your worth as a human being. You're not a human being to many, you're simply someone sent in to follow through on the predetermined rules of the game. They roll their eyes, administration never trusts you to do as you believe, and parents never think you're doing enough. Heroes? No.

For some of us, it's enough to know that somewhere something is happening out there. Sometimes we hear of it, many times years after the fact in a coffee shop, from a letter, a chance encounter outside of a lecture hall. Sometimes we'll hear those words that makes it worth it: "that class" and "changed me." It doesn't have to be big, but enough to know that somewhere something, even a minuscule realization, changed someone for the better and you were half of the cause.

But that's not a Hollywood ending. That's love in the real world. And there are times when it sits on the cold steel of a razor.

Random thoughts and notes for a new semester

2008-01-20T20:29:13Z

I'm still working on a few things...but to keep this blog fresh...some random thoughts running around in my mind.

1). Style is what happens when rules are broken. If everyone used Strunk and White as their bible, then we'd all write like E.B. White. Boring. Diversity of language and composition is what makes it all interesting.

2). In elementary, junior high, and high school, we had to pass these "tests" for gym (physical education). One test in particular that I could never pass was the mile run. Most times I had trouble even completing it. However, looking back, I realized that this test consisted of going outside and running. Never ever did we spend weeks/months slowly working up to running a mile. Rather, the idea was either you could do it or you couldn't. In other words, we were never given the chance to succeed, and consequently were set up to fail. I felt hopeless to change the state of my fitness until I realized that maybe I should read up on it and educate myself. I started running 30 seconds and walking 4 minutes. Then I was running 1 minute and walking 3. After a summer, I ran my first 5k race in a time of under 24 minutes.

I felt hopeless about it because I was never given the sort of training that focused on what was possible. Instead, the only education I got was education that focused on what already was.

I find myself thinking about this when I hear young students speak of their apathy for politics and the community they live in. I think of this when I hear them say "what's the point?" and "my vote wouldn't matter anyway."

3). As of right now, I refuse to talk to anyone about our "situations" in Afghanistan and Iraq until they have read Steinbeck's The Moon is Down. Then we can have a good discussion.

4). The cost of a frozen pizza (a staple of poor grad students all over) has reached 5 dollars at many local grocery stores. Grad students in CLA haven't had a substantial raise since 2004 (and perhaps longer). Makes one wonder how much longer it'll be until they threaten to organize again. Starving your employees doesn't increase their sense of duty to their employers.

5). Liberty, equality, justice, and freedom are not privileges granted to those born out of dumb luck on American soil. They are an attitude about living; they are a duty towards one's community. Lou Dobbs, if he wasn't an idiot, might realize this.

6). Why are there shortages of teachers? Why are there even more shortages of male teachers? I don't know. I hope to get a greater perspective on this through the class I'm teaching this spring.

7). Dear Spring, I miss you.

An addendum to the previous post.

2008-01-04T20:41:07Z

Anyone in the blogosphere, the media, or academia who tries to apply old terms and faction names to the current political reality unfolding before us does not get it.

Just now I saw a report on MSNBC in which a commentator tried to explain how Obama pulled off the "progressive dream" of having the youth turn out and that explains his victory.

Except, it doesn't. He also got out the vote with women. Across the board. Against a woman.

Again, attempting to use old frameworks and semantics to describe what is happening is futile. We are now in a period where the lines that have hardened over the past 40 years no longer matter. Both left and right.

And one further thought on all this: I don't think Obama created this. But, in this climate, he has been anointed by a pervasive social and political climate as the leader of what is to come. The times demand something else, and no one has control of that right now.

Further, Obama himself might not actually, in reality, be what people want. He might be just as much of a sneaky politician as anyone in the campaign. In substance, there might not be much difference. But this is not about the "reality" of Obama that makes this interesting. Rather, and I cannot stress this enough, it is what the caucus goers in Iowa committed themselves to believing what is true.

That is, what voters have decided to believe is what matters the most. Whether or not Obama truly represents this is a secondary concern.

The question remains, how will this affect liberal arts education, which for better or worse, have become the safe haven for critical theorists and post-structuralists in America. There will be those in denial, but it seems this era is starting to fall apart.

Random thoughts and notes for 2008

2008-01-03T01:50:31Z

I'm working on a longer entry concerning the state of technology and education, but have a few other random notes/ideas that I want to get down.

1). While I generally find the concept of agonistic pluralism in various forms of "radical democracy" (as especially theorized by Mouffe and Laclau in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy) to be especially interesting and promising, the difficult jump from theory to practice is one that I find most fascinating in that it exposes a strange anti-Americanism rift in academia. If in an agonistic pluralist culture we are to embrace difference as our main mode of civic interaction, then we have to concede that the only way we can do this is to rely on an a priori set of "ground rules" or standards by which we can express our differences in ways that make our differences visible, understandable, and meaningful.

Why this exposes an anti-American rift in academia is that this is a really confusing way of re-inventing what the framers of the United States constitution set out to do by setting up a federal republic. Fearing a direct democracy in which minority rights could be trampled by majority decisions, the framers sought to ensure that all citizens were equal and subject to the laws of the country. Therefore, certain rights were deemed to be unalienable, or above discussion. It is these rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that consequently served as the tools of commensurability in which competing or divergent needs, desires, and wants of different groups in society could be understood, evaluated, and discussed.

Yet, to get there, we don't look to Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Paine, etc etc. We instead attempt to re-invent the wheel by going through Marx and a whole slew of other, non-American theorists to arrive at what our country, in many regards, was originally founded on. (And don't even get me started on Marx. John Adams was warning people about merchants and businessmen as early as 1776...some 42 years before Marx was even born).

This leads me to my second winter break thought:

2). Post 1960s/1970s, we've replaced Abe Lincoln with Foucault, John Quincy Adams with Derrida, and Henry Clay with Adorno. What this leads to is a situation in which young students feel no reason to participate in the politics and democracy of their own country. Why should they when every day the message they get is one of relentless criticism of America, even though many of the issues our founders sought to confront and solve are not so different than the ones critical theorists from other countries have commented on. The real danger of this sort of bias in education is that students honestly believe there is no way for them to achieve liberty and equality through the democratic participation in politics, and consequently don't bother. This allows a small minority of those who already are within power to further strengthen their grip on the political mechanisms that drive our country.

Thoughts on Feminism and Rhetoric...

2007-12-16T07:42:01Z

During the presentation E. S. gave to our class during the first historiography issue, he presented us with three statements of "fact." These statements were: John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and the sophists represent a unified theory of rhetoric in ancient Greece. The idea, according to Schiappa, is that these statements of "fact" or "truth" have consequences, and consequently matter. Therefore, we should be very careful in claiming historical "fact" when really, we are creating historical facts to serve our contemporary needs. In C. Glenn's Rhetoric Retold, this is precisely what is happening. This idea of the "usefulness" of history for our contemporary needs and desires unleashes several troublesome questions that, at the least, force us to reconsider what is "fact," what counts as scholarship, and how disciplinary institutions serve as gatekeepers to resist resistant scholarship. Perhaps even more important, what is at stake here is a site of disagreement as to how new knowledge is created and by what means it becomes validated.

]]> The goal of C. Glenn's Rhetoric Retold is to re-imagine, remap, and rewrite the history of rhetoric to include the role, impact, and influence of women. This is more than mere "tokenism" as her task is to not just simply "include" women, but to join the task of inclusion with the task of retelling. For Glenn, a rhetoric that includes the influences of women cannot be the same rhetoric that excludes them. The act of including women means reconfiguring how we understand the history of Rhetoric. To do so, she considers three methods: plotting resistant readings by women and men of the paternal narrative, consideration of female authored rhetorical works compared to male-authored works, and broadening definitions of rhetoric to move it an exclusionary to an inclusionary enterprise (4). From there, she considers three angles by which these methodologies can be understood: historiography (questions how one defines "rhetorical history), feminism (situating females within the rhetorical tradition), and gender studies (understanding gender not as a hierarchy but as a category of understanding and interpretation) (4). The results of such scholarship are pretty straightforward to Glenn: "I had to come to an understanding of what I wanted my map, my history, to do. I wanted to challenge the male-dominated story of rhetoric by telling a story of Aspasia that illustrated just how the various renditions of her configure an emblem of Woman (and women) in rhetorical history. I wanted to tap many of the same secondary sources that have validated Socrates, for whom we have no primary sources" (5).

While the rewards of Glenn's project are, without doubt, sorely needed, Glenn herself is not deaf to the possible risks and dangers inherent in her project. As she notes, "We must risk, then, getting the story crooked. We must look crookedly, a bit out of focus, into the various strands of meaning in a text in such a way as to make the categories, trends, and reliable identities of history a little less inevitable, less familiar" (7). It is exactly this risk of "getting the story crooked" that threatens the rewards of such scholarship. Glenn herself recalls the debate of Schiappa and Poulakos and is cognizant of the risks. But, for her part, "[she] wanted and needed to see sophistic rhetoric so that [she] could see beyond it, beyond the Sophists, beyond the scraps of texts that have insufficiently represented them" (8). But this want and need of Glenn's does not dismiss the objections raised by Schiappa in regards to sophistic rhetoric.

The problem Schiappa sees with those who were pushing for a theory of "sophistic rhetoric" is that this definition or theory is not supported by actual historical "fact." For him, the danger is larger than just getting the facts wrong. If we accept loose standards as to what is "true," then "…Ronald Reagan's history of the Vietnam War is as reliable as that of Stanley Karnow, and his account of the Iran-ContraAffair is as good as that of Bill Moyers" (Sophistic 13). Instead, some sort of foundationally grounded standard must be retained so that we can compare and evaluate competing interpretations. In Glenn's case, one might object to her entire project by claiming it is only through our own contemporary needs, desires, and interpretive frameworks can she even begin to speculate on the role that women such as Aspasia and Diotima had in forming rhetorical theories later spoken by men. It is a leap of conjecture that is not supported all that strongly by the written record we have to work with. Of course, as Glenn herself notes, this conveniently overlooks the fact that we have done exactly that with Socrates (who left no written record himself) for the past 2,000 years (8).

For his part, Schiappa seems to be confounded as to why we would want to put history into service for contemporary needs when we should really "skip the detour and move directly to the contemporary sites of social and political struggle" (14). I don't think Schiappa would, as a whole, object to Glenn's work. Later in his essay, he does write that "If we want to empower certain contemporary discourses with identifying labels, then let us use labels that are more straightforward: feminist rhetoric, oppositional discourse, and cultural critique are three examples" (15) . His beef seems to be mostly with the label "sophistic" as completely and wholly ahistorically constructed. Yet, the fact that Glenn's work uses "sophistic rhetoric" as a rather important starting point is troublesome. Troublesome because it suggests that if we are to agree with Schiappa, then work like Glenn's will always have to carry the moniker "feminist rhetoric" as opposed to just "rhetoric." The term "rhetoric," of course, need not state what is becoming obvious, which is when we say "rhetoric" we are really saying "masculinist rhetoric." Whether or not Schiappa intends it, forcing the term "sophistic rhetoric" to instead be labeled "neosophistic" or "modern sophistic" denies access to the privileged and institutionally validated area of the "History of Rhetoric." While this may seem benign, when we apply the same principle to Glenn's work, the results become simply incommensurable with our current, contemporary understandings of ethics and morality. Cheryl Glenn is more interested in using her angles to "identify previously unseen and unconsidered problems of 'foundational' knowledge, in this case the tradition of rhetorical history. Therefore, 'The History of Rhetoric' is quickly displaced by questions. Whose history? Whose rhetoric? Which rhetoric? All necessary challenges to a canon that continues to be so unrelentingly elite and male" (5). If Glenn's attempts to rewrite, regender, and remap the History of Rhetoric are relegated to be labeled "feminist rhetoric" or "contemporary ahistorical feminist interpretations of the rhetorical canon" (which, is what they are), then the very precepts Glenn is attempting to challenge are upheld and (masculinist)Rhetoric once again wins the day. Or, to put it more starkly, this enforcement of labeling reasserts the masculine hierarchy that "feminist" rhetorics (rightfully) seek to destroy by naming these rhetorics as being something other (and potentially outside and lesser) than Rhetoric.

Another way of looking into the danger of constructing hierarchies through labels is to consider the dispute over the role of intention in historical scholarship, not only the intention of the scholar, but the (assumed) intent of the writers being studied. For example, Aristotle did not intend to create and offer a justification for slavery that could be used by others, but just happened to discuss it while discussing different constitutions in his Politics. So can we use this discussion of slavery against Aristotle? The consensus seems to be we can, as long as we are clear that we're not actually talking about Aristotle, but something outside of the text. Or, that we're using the texts for something other than what they were originally intended to be used for. I get the feeling that this is why Glenn spends considerable time discussing her method at the outset of her book. And, in one sense, this seems prudent. If we are to forget the role of intent when considering other writers, we run the risk of distorting, ruining, and misunderstanding what another writer means. No one wants their own words to be taken out of context and used against them. Because Aristotle died a couple thousand years ago, does that make it acceptable to do the same to him when we'd never do it to a colleague who works down the hall? Yet, using Aristotle as a means to understand and reinterpret things we currently believe about slavery (and perhaps race) might be incredibly beneficial to shedding light on situations that perplex us. If we must continually declare this is what we're doing, how much is enough? And, by apologizing for doing this sort of scholarship, do we undermine the persuasiveness of the work by instantaneously claiming that, while this might be interesting historical scholarship, it is not Historical Scholarship in all its privileged form? In my own opinion, I fear that we do. That the gold standard of historical scholarship stays within the text, and other methods utilize an unholy mixture of historical texts washed through current political wants and desires. Glenn's scholarship, since it requires our contemporary understandings of how gender functions, or starts with an admittedly political agenda of reinserting women into the canon, fails this test: too much post-modernism, not enough New Criticism.

For Schiappa, "we need not turn to Athens to find strategies of oppression and marginalization; we need only look around us" (14) Granted. But what Glenn seems to realize is that understanding the Rhetorical History as a history of oppression, silence, and marginalization gives us an incredibly powerful platform from which to understand how one history (Rhetoric) has and continues to tell the story from only one perspective. And it is exactly this empowered platform that contemporary struggles against (masculinist)Rhetoric can begin to succeed. Telling a different story of rhetoric, enabled by contemporary understandings, wants, and needs, allows this to happen. To disallow these retellings to dwell in the same space as Rhetoric protects more than we ultimately may want to protect.