Thomas Miller, Professionalizing Teaching, and Developing Literacy Studies

Miller, Thomas P. The Evolution of College English: Literacy Studies from the Puritans to the Postmoderns. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2011. Print.

Introduction: “Working Past the Profession”

Thomas Miller’s history of the development of English studies in American colleges and universities examines a bit of a different concern than did Crowley’s history. Miller looks, first, a bit more broadly at the field and includes literature, writing, language, and English education in his discussions. But he also notes a relative “incoherence” to the field because of its breadth of subjects (1). Furthermore, these four parts often worked in isolation from, or even in opposition to, one another. His goal with the book is to reshape English studies as literacy studies to bring the four parts of the field into more collaborative and integrative relationships. Like Crowley, he acknowledges that the emphasis on developing disciplinary status caused the field to fracture into hierarchical relationships that would ultimately impede later developments and even the ability of the field to claim relevance in the university and society at large. However, Miller argues that the key problem was not the distilling or rhetoric nor the rise of humanistic belletrism; rather, he says the problem was that those working in the field as it was growing began to view themselves “not as educators but as disciplinary specialists” (5). Research took over teaching and institutional responsibilities as the focus of the field.

As he progresses through his introduction, he sets up the idea that the loss of attention to such a key and pragmatic issue as teaching has undermined the field, taking agency away from teachers and giving it to researchers, resulting in the “deprofessionalization” of teaching (13) as an aim of the discipline. In addition, he notes how his history of the discipline will focus less on what research universities were doing as somehow determining the direction of the field. His focus, instead, will address the changing conceptions of literacy to which the discipline was responding. This will show, he claims, how English studies has ignored some of the key changes in literacy to its detriment in favor of putting all its intellectual eggs into the literary studies basket. 

Of course, his introduction is a brief sketching of the issues he addresses throughout the work, but we can see some clear differences between the history he is trying to develop and the one Crowley presents. At this point, I will say that I find these to not necessarily be mutually exclusive. Perhaps both histories can complement and supplement one another; perhaps both can be right in that together they capture a broader history. However, Miller’s call to a focus on literacy and on teaching speaks to my experiences and my practices, so I may be a little biased in favor of his argument.

Chapter 4: “How the Teaching of Literacy Gave Rise to the Profession of Literature”

Miller finds some common ground with Crowley here. He begins by acknowledging that literature gained disciplinary strength as rhetoric lost its cachet, which created a unique disciplinary situation. As Miller says, “By identifying literature as a higher calling and writing as a basic skill to be tested, the profession made part of its work a mystery and the rest merely methodological” (137). Miller identifies the low status and hard work of writing instruction as key contributing factors to the shift in the discipline’s focus from instruction to research and ultimately to the “temping out” of writing instruction to recent graduates and, later, graduate students (143). In response, composition focused on what was efficient, not always what was most beneficial to students’ learning. This is Miller’s main concern here: these moves all undermined the ability of the field to emphasize its educational role, leading “English [to adopt] a disciplinary economy that reduced its learning capacity and public agency” (151). The problem, then, was not the ascendency of literature’s status; it was the lack of recognition given to the role of teaching in the discipline.

This neglect led to tensions with the Progressive movement that worked to isolate the discipline from the wider culture and reduce some of its relevance. As Progressivism’s pragmatism gained popularity, the discipline, particularly literary studies, positioned itself against that pragmatism. But Progressivism was much more open to interdisciplinarity, to collaboration, and to a number of other values and practices that were gaining more significant value in the wider society. Because of its stance against progressivism, literature, and ultimately English as a discipline, found itself more isolated, and it further marginalized composition by associating it with the practicality of Progressivism and therefore beneath its scope of interest.  As an example of the costs of such isolation, Miller looks briefly at the work of Kenneth Burke and the reception (or lack thereof) he received in literary studies at the time. Burke’s interdisciplinarity and the wider fields of exploration it opened were roundly rejected, as were even general attempts to combine literary studies with education because of these ideological differences with Progressivism.

What strikes me here is that Miller does not only turn to the traditional target of literature and its attempts to gain status as a discipline as the source of composition’s marginalized status. Undoubtedly, literature’s disciplinary quest played a meaningful role in this, but Miller looks further into this, examining how this marginalization stemmed more so from the division of the practical aims of the, especially teaching, from its research. As this played out in the field, he claims that, yes, the discipline did gain status, but it lost or missed a number of opportunities to develop interdisciplinarity and to professionalize teaching. As he discusses in the last chapter and the conclusion, this separation disabled the discipline’s ability to maintain relevance and meet the needs and demand of students and society in the latter half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century.

Chapter 5: “At the Ends of the Profession”

Miller continues to explore the discipline’s anti-pragmatic streak and its consequences through the end twentieth century. Here, as in the previous chapter, he argues that this created a number of missed opportunities and left the field less prepared for the social, economic, and technological changes that pluralized literacy. Again, this was a direct consequence of English’s attempts to improve its disciplinary status. As more research funds became available in the wake of Sputnik and the space race, English wanted to get its share of the money. English had an opportunity to prove its use as a practical discipline but chose to forego that possibility in favor of trying to establish itself as a research discipline. Another opportunity presented itself in the 1960s when many undergraduate students in this period wanted to learn about English and education, but as before, the desire for research grants and the resentment of the “practical” label cost the discipline this opportunity to develop a broader base.

Around this time, the field began to discuss composition more vigorously. No significant changes had occurred in composition since the beginning of the current-traditional paradigm, but now those in the field were beginning to discuss what the subject of composition should be and how to teach it. For a moment, some work connecting composition and creative writing took place, but rhetoric also began to come back into composition, and this severed the ties to creative writing. Then came the conservative movements of the 1980s. Based on the report, A Nation at Risk, people began clamoring for “Back to Basics.” Along with this came calls to maintain cultural norms and values by focusing on the canon and coverage model courses, which pushed directly against the diversity of literacy that was being recognized elsewhere. Yet this was also in the wake of broader cultural awakenings in feminism and multiculturalism, for example. So the traditional courses remained and some new courses came in as well, creating quite a diffuse, even incoherent mix of courses. As a result, teaching once again was relegated to the back rooms while literature and theory occupied the discipline’s front rooms. Rhetoric and composition, too, began to suffer from this theory/practice divide, as scholars turned their attention away from teaching and toward theorizing the discipline.

We cannot blame the discipline for seeking greater status. Indeed without having done so, the discipline may well have floundered in the early years. But Miller astutely points out the field’s missed opportunities to continue to reinvent itself and to make itself not only more appealing but also more relevant as notions of literacy began to diversify. Miller, citing Erwin Steinberg, notes that the research model is quite effective for the sciences, but the humanities have a different agenda and need a different model, one Miller sees as being more “integrative” (214). He is hopeful that such models are beginning to develop in cultural studies and community literacy programs, and in this conclusion, he addresses how else we might develop this integrative model. 

Conclusion: “Why the Pragmatics of Literacy Are Critical”

Miller uses his conclusion to propose potential remedies to the problems he has cited throughout the book. First is to abandon past isolationist attitudes. He claims that “those of us how work in more publicly accessible institutions should consider how literacy studies can provide an integrative framework for harnessing the converging potentials of work with teaching, writing, language, and literature” (220). Second is to accept more pragmatic views of the discipline. In short, he argues for a recasting of English studies as literacy studies.

He points to a few spaces where such work might take place. The first is the general potential for overlap in the field, “where work in the four corners of the field may be brought together to advance cumulative innovations in undergraduate programs of study […]” (233). Small institutions that have not experienced the disciplinary separations and have maintained more emphasis on teaching also provide useful models for integrating the discipline. He also suggests that the discipline develop community and political missions as well, developing service learning and community outreach projects and becoming involved in the political issues that affect us (e.g., “English Only” debates). Engaging in such integrative practices, he argues, will allow the discipline to develop a more coherent sense of purpose and to articulate more clearly and effectively its function and value.

He also says this work must highlight the importance of teaching. Unlike the sciences, research does not do much to fund English; it is teaching that provides the income to sustain the discipline. Recognizing this and attending to the need of teaching is vital to the reinvigoration of the discipline according to Miller. This means, though, that the discipline must address its inequitable labor practices that rely on poorly paid, highly over-worked instructors who have few benefits and even fewer opportunities for advancement. Furthermore, he says the institutional critiques that have developed in the field also need to be translated into plans of action, into pedagogical possibilities. Ultimately, he advocates we work to break down those “hierarchies that have maintained a conservative standpoint on the diversification of literacies” (244). He sees literacy studies as a way to bring the parts of the field back together, to give them a common purpose that covers a wide breadth of issues, values, and epistemologies that create numerous opportunities for collaboration within and outside of the discipline.

Though these are somewhat generic suggestions, I think they must be. To address such issues effectively, one has to work within her or his local institutional contexts. But overall, I feel Miller’s history and his suggestions illuminate the tensions as well as the promise of the field in insightful and intriguing ways. He repositions the agenda of the field toward more practical ends and relentlessly promotes the need to professionalize teaching. Such work may be dubbed “service” work pejoratively; but it seems to me that such work puts us in the service of our students and in the service of our discipline at once. We can meet the needs and demands of our students at the same time we add depth and breadth to the discipline through integrative work.