Colloquium on the Teaching
of Writing
Professor George Otte
No other site of instruction has been such a testing ground
for composition pedagogy as the City University. Rich in approaches
and answers to the many questions besetting writing instruction,
CUNY has produced an unusual number of composition luminaries.
Yet there is no grand consensus on the complex issues of writing
instruction, here or elsewhere. Beyond a general commitment to
improving teaching and learning, the field is characterized by
tensions, dilemmas, and debates regarding a variety of issues:
assessment and evaluation, kinds and genres of writing (e.g.,
personal vs. academic writing), uses of technology, the relation
of theory to practice, forms of cultural assimilation and resistance,
fluency vs. correctness (especially for non-native speakers of
English), and forms of classroom interaction (the so-called de-centered
classroom, collaborative learning, critical teaching, etc.).
With multiple perspectives on such matters to consider, the colloquium
eschews a speaker-of-the-week approach; instead, every other
week, the colloquium brings together at least two guests from
CUNY's composition community who represent different (often contrasting)
perspectives on these topics, alternating these discussions with
weeks of reflective reading, discussion, and writing. In addition,
the course entails a major online project which may be done individually
or collaboratively.
Authority and Agency in
Rhetorical Theory
Professor George Otte
As a discipline, as a practice, as a body of theory, rhetoric
has always been at the center of the humanist project, the endeavor
of people to know and change their world. Yet tracing this from
Plato's quarrel with the Sophists to Burke, Bakhtin, and beyond,
a survey of theory poses the possibility that we find ourselves
at a post-humanist moment, certainly one when the much-discussed
construction of the subject has complicated, as never before,
such fundamental questions as Who knows--and how? Who speaks--and
how? Contemporary scholarship in rhetoric and composition, preoccupied
with pedagogical practice, senses the special urgency in addressing
such questions--and turning to theory (classical, modern, post-modern)
in doing so. The course traces treatments of the issues of authority
(who knows and can say what) and agency (who's doing--and able
to do--what) in touchstone texts from Plato's Phaedrus to Bakhtin's "Problem of Speech Genres," while students
develop their own rubrics of investigation (e.g., collaboration,
intellectual property, the politics of voice) and look to contemporary
scholarship for compelling ratifications or misapplications of
rhetorical theory.
Composing: Writing Theory
and Practice
Professor Sondra Perl
Over the past quarter century, a new field has grown from
observing writers at work. These studies of composing have generated
new perspectives for writing classrooms, new approaches for developing
student interest in writing, and new theoretical views on reading,
writing, and what it means to create. In this course we will
survey the landmark contributions to research on composing --
works by Emig, Graves, Perl, Rose, Heath, Flynn, Sommers, and
others. But the emphasis will be on developing students' abilities
to extend this inquiry themselves. We will raise key questions:
What iswriting? How does it unfold? Who are we or who do we become
as we write? What fosters or thwarts the act of composing? And
we will use the writing we do together as the basis for responding.
Students will be asked to fulfill three requirements during
the term: (1) present a critical review of one major body of
work in the field, (2) keep a weekly response journal on assigned
readings, and (3) produce by the end of the term a portfolio
of work written during the seminar.
Reader-Response Criticism
Professor Sondra Perl
In this seminar, we will explore theories that highlight the
reader's role in the construction of meaning by studying the
work of Norman Holland, Louise Rosenblatt, Stanley Fish, Wolfgang
Iser and others. Reader-response invites us to treat texts as
social experiences and authorizes students to compose meanings
transactionally and dialogically. To grasp this view and the
possibilities inherent in this approach, we will document and
discuss our own responses to a wide range of poems and novels.
(Specific works will be determined by the class.) Students will
be expected to keep a reader-response journal, to compose a final
reflective paper and to collaborate with others on the creation
of a performance piece (often the highlight of the course) based
on one of the readings.
Voice, Text and Writing:
Composing Amidst Post-Modern Controversies
Professor Sondra Perl
What is voice in writing? How does it manifest itself? In
what ways have post-modern theories of discourse challenged the
notion of voice? In what ways have feminist theories of discourse
appropriated it? What is the relationship of "self"
to voice and what happens when we use Bakhtin's concept of dialogism
to expand notions of self and voice to include a poly-vocal understanding
of discourse?
The purpose of this seminar is to engage in an inquiry into
this contested area. The inquiry will be both experiential and
theoretical. We will first examine discourse on voice through
listening to what voices say of themselves. We will then attempt
to understand those moments (if we can identify and agree upon
them) when texts embody the qualities we associate with voice
or when they become "voiceless." Texts will include
those composed by students in the course as well as those written
by Bakhtin, Barthes, Cixous, Derrida, hooks, Rich and others.
Requirements include weekly response papers and a final portfolio
of work illustrating and analyzing various experiments with voice(s)
undertaken during the semester.
Rethinking Pedagogy: Global
Theories and Local Stories
Professor Sondra Perl
According to one of the foremost thinkers of the 20th century,
"teaching is even more difficult than learning [for]...the
real teacher lets nothing else be learned than -- learning."
Martin Heidegger suffered numerous faults, but in his evocation
of teaching he sought to elevate pedagogy from its more commonplace,
pedestrian connotations. In this passage, at least, he suggests
that teaching is less about the "what" than the "how."
Heidegger's assertion can lead, then, to many avenues for inquiry.
We can ask, for example, what does it mean to teach -- to "let
learning happen"? When and on what basis is one's teaching
considered good? effective? powerful? postmodern? critical?
feminist? What do such labels mean anyway? Who uses them and
why? And even more to the point, what is the relationship between
theory and practice in the lived experience of students and teachers?
What, in other word, does a Freirean do in the classroom? How
does a feminist teach literature and composition? What might
a postmodern classroom look like? To answer such questions, participants
will take a careful look at teaching as it occurs and is portrayed
in different contexts. Beginning with literature and film, we
will grapple with the way the image of teacher has been constructed.
Second, we will read narrative accounts of teaching by a few
notable professors,
including William Pritchard's recently published English Papers
and Madeleine Grumet's Bitter Milk. Third, we will document instances
of teaching and learning primarily in the classrooms in which
participants are teaching in order to discover what happens when
we bring methods of inquiry to bear on our own practices. The
overall goal of this seminar is to initiate anyone who takes
teaching seriously into what can become a career-long exploration
of the life and culture of classrooms and the roles we wittingly
or unwittingly play within them. Course requirements: Weekly
written responses to texts we are reading, lots of discussion
of classroom observations and an oral report on a pedagogical
school or theorist of interest to the student.
Principles and Practices
in Qualitative Research
Professor Sondra Perl
Research in composition studies is a hybrid affair. It has
roots in the social sciences, the humanities and in philosophic
inquiry. Consequently, designing and conducting research in the
field of composition inevitably leads one to select an orienting
view. In this seminar, we will briefly
explore the various orientations toward inquiry in composition
which have emerged over the past 25 years with a particular and
lengthy focus on one school of thought: the philosophic and practical
implications of what Max van Manen calls "human science."
This approach will bring us into contact with views of reality
that are at once phenomenological, hermeneutic and semiotic.
We will be asking, in essence, what does it mean to study lived
experience -- not only to those of us who engage in such research
but to those who become our subjects? Of what value is such work?
What are the pitfalls whenever we attempt to describe and interpret
another's experience? How, in other words, do we see our own
seeing? How do we account for our own biases and even more troubling
our own blindness? What forms allow us to write accounts of research
that address such issues?
To grasp these ideas, seminar participants will design and
conduct small classroom inquiries. Class sessions will be devoted
to discussion of emerging questions, methods of data collection
and analysis and multiple and conflicting views of interpretation.
The overall goal is two-fold: to provide those new to composition
studies with a way of entering the discourse on and practice
of classroom-based research and to offer advanced students an
opportunity to design philosophically sound research projects
appropriate for the dissertation.
The primary texts for the course will include (but will likely
not remain limited to) van Manen's Researching Lived Experience (SUNY Press, 1990) and Mortensen and Kirsch, Ethics and Representation
in Qualitative Studies of Literacy (NCTE: 1996).
Critical Whiteness: Gender,
Rhetoric, and Pedagogy in "Whiteness Studies"
Professor Ira Shor
A century ago, W.E.B. DuBois published THE SOULS OF BLACK
FOLK, an extraordinary book for which no equal exists vis
a vis "the souls of white folk." Why has "blackness"
been so much more examined than "whiteness"? Does the
under-explored condition of whiteness help play down white advantage
in school and society? Does the dominant position of whiteness
confer protection from scrutiny as well as license to observe
and define others? As it happens, the under-examined profile
of whiteness has been changing. For over a decade now, a critical
discourse on whiteness has been evolving in several areas. Growing
out of multiculturalism, feminism, cultural studies, and critical
legal studies, this new "whiteness" field is controversial.
Some see it as narcissistically re-centering the white position
in the face of multicultural efforts to dismantle racism. Others
see it as a needed inquiry into an "invisible whiteness"
which privileges white people. As an intellectual project, "critical
whiteness" asks why white privilege continues even though
racial segregation is illegal and equality is the law of the
land. Laws that once required segregation and the subordination
of dark-skinned peoples have been vacated for decades, yet racial
inequality remains pervasive. Why does white supremacy persist
in a society legally "color-blind"? To make sense of
this dilemma, "critical whiteness" looks at institutions
as well as representations of "whiteness" in social,
visual, and literary texts, to read them as cultural pedagogies
that teach racial identity. For example, common parlance uses
the label "people of color" to describe minorities,
not the white majority, as if only those with dark skin have
a color. Is white then not a color? How is the racial identity
of white people socially constructed? How does whiteness remain
peculiarly unmarked at the same time that it dominates education
and society? How is whiteness taught and learned through curricula
and media that have no apparent racial agenda? How does color
cross paths with social class and gender? These are questions
undertaken in this seminar through the lens of rhetorical study
that treats discourse as a material force in the making of people
and society. If discourse is a material force that socially constructs
us, rhetoric is sometimes thought of as the deep structure of
rules and values which enable and limit discourse. Rhetoric can
be defined as implicit and explicit rules for making discourse
that teach us what subjects can be spoken about and how we should
speak about them. From this starting point, then, "critical
whiteness" is a discourse whose rhetoric challenges white
privilege. Can the rhetoric of "critical whiteness"
reinvent pedagogy, research methods, as well as our gender and
class identities?
READINGS:
THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK (1994[1903]), W.E.B. Dubois, Dover
WHITE WOMEN, RACE MATTERS (1993), Ruth Frankenberg, U
of Minn. Press
THE WAGES OF WHITENESS (1999, rev.ed), David Roediger,
Verso
WHITE(1997), Richard Dyer, Routledge
PORTRAITS OF WHITE RACISM (1993), David Wellman, Cambridge
UP
MISS GIARDINO (1997[1978]), Dorothy Bryant, Feminist Press
PLAYING IN THE DARK (1992), Toni Morrison, Vintage
DANGEROUS MINDS (1992), LouAnne Johnson, St. Martin's
THE YELLOW WALLPAPER (1997[1892]), Charlotte Perkins Gilman,
Dover
"Whiteness as Property," Cheryl Harris, HARV LAW
REV., 106.8, June 1993, 1709-1791.
"White Privilege and Male Privilege," Peggy McIntosh,
Wellesley Center for Research on Women, 1988.
"Coloring Epistemologies: Are Our Research Epistemologies
Racially Based?," J.J. Scheurich and M.D. Young, EDUC
RES, 26(4), 1997, 4-16.
"Race: The Absent Presence in Composition Studies,"
Catherine Prendergast, CCC, 50.1, Sept. 1998, 36-53.
"Reading Whiteness in English Studies," Timothy Barnett,
CE, 63.1, Sept. 2000, 9-37.
"Inviting the Mother Tongue: Beyond 'Mistakes,' 'Bad English,'
and 'Wrong Language,'" Peter Elbow, JAC, 19.3, 1999, 359-388.
Other article selections.
WRITINGS:
1. Informal journals on weekly readings.
2. Final paper.
Suggested Background:
AUTOBIOGRAPHY of AN EX-COLORED MAN (1995[1912]), James
Weldon Johnson, Dover
HOW JEWS BECAME WHITE FOLKS(1998), Karen Brodkin, Rutgers
UP
HOW THE IRISH BECAME WHITE(1995), Noel Ignatiev, Routledge
RACIAL FORMATION IN THE US(1994), Michael Omi and Howard
Winant, Routledge
THE POSSESSIVE INVESTMENT IN WHITENESS(1998), George Lipsitz,
Temple UP
