by Kim De Vries
As a relative newcomer (I've been teaching for about 10 years, but just started my first tenure track job), I appreciate the vote of confidence from fingerpointingatthemoon. As I said in my article, after wrestling with the choice every semester for years, I finally came to the view that I couldn't just teach my students to walk the academic walk and talk the academic talk. But that choice takes place in a context that fingerpointingatthemoon so eloquently likened to a strait-jacket and I think it's worth exploring how the first-year composition class fits in at my school, which I think is fairly representative of a state university system. Making clear the existing conditions may help us better see where we can make the most of opportunities for change.
At my school, most students are native Californians who have enjoyed an education built almost entirely around standardized testing and who speak something other than English at home. About 40% of the students start in developmental writing classes, spending between one and three semesters catching up before they take first-year composition. The other 60% start in first-year comp. and probably make it through in one or two semesters. Unless they choose to take more, they will only take one other writing class before the essay exam they must pass in order to graduate. That exam weighs grammar far more than original thinking or logical arguments. That's the student side of the context.
On the faculty side, most of us teach four classes one term and three classes in the other, without the help of research or teaching assistants. This accounts at least partly for the limited writing and writing instruction outside of the English Department. Teaching writing is among the most labor intensive forms of instruction, because, as any writing teacher can tell you, it takes time to read and write responses to multiple drafts of students' essays. Because our school (and in fact our entire system) has been under-funded every year for some time, smaller class sizes or lighter teaching loads have been ruled firmly out by our administration.
Now, this sounds pretty grim and you might be thinking "didn't we say we weren't going to act like victims?" This very lack of options is what pushed me to realize that the easiest and most effective thing to change would be the students' and maybe my colleagues' attitudes. In other words, to remind people that yes, we are having a conversation. To this end I've come up with several strategies:
1. I try to make my own students care about writing by helping them see that what they are learning can and does change their thinking and their lives. And by making them publish an essay in an online class magazine that they design.
2. I am trying to make writing and scholarship more visible and important on campus by launching a journal to showcase writing from the writing classes, and by starting a public colloquium series for faculty and grad students.
3. I am redesigning the website for the composition program using a program similar to the one used by Exterminating Angel, so that all of the writing teachers can more easily make contributions and so that we can keep it up to date with news and announcements.
Of course I have help with this–several other teachers will be involved with category 2 and I hope the students themselves will be central to changing each other's attitudes and working on the journal. But I will have to do most of the website myself initially, and both the journal and the colloquium have been tried before. Unfortunately, heavy teaching loads have forced many teachers here to give up these kinds of projects (if they have families, at least).
But lately we have reason to be hopeful; our new president is committed to high academic standards and while the proof is in the pudding, has given permission for two more faculty searches in our department and has allocated more money for merit based scholarships. I have also gotten more release time to spend on the Composition Program, so the projects have a better chance than in previous years when their supporters had to carve time out of already filled work schedules.
I don't know if all of these strategies will work out the way I hope, but at least they'll give us space to have conversations that are between writers or speakers and real audiences–not just those imagined for the sake of an assignment. And the most important thing for students to learn as that regardless of jibes about ivory towers, what goes on here is real, that their lives here are real, and that their voices can carry.