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.

Crowley's Disciplinary History

Crowley, Sharon. Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1998. Print.

As I continue to explore the development of and the effects of disciplinarity on composition this week, I was drawn to some histories of English in the university. So I will write about a few chapters from two texts I read this week. One book that has been on my shelf for perhaps a bit too long was Sharon Crowley’s Composition in the University.

Chapter 2: “The Toad in the Garden”

In this chapter, Crowley focuses on the Gary Tate-Erica Lindemann debate (that took place in College English) about the appropriateness of literature in freshman composition courses. What she found most compelling in the debate was Lindemann’s question on what the focus, the subject of freshman composition should be. Crowley examines how those who were responding to Lindemann missed the value of this question and instead expound on the importance of literature’s humanist values. As a result, the responses in the debate maintained the same separations of composition and literature, claiming for literature universal value and therefore higher status than composition. But these responses (she points to one from Leon Knight in particular) ignore pedagogical issues. Other responses claimed that literature, because of its “higher” moral and intellectual value, was saving composition from being a service course only. Still others equated English with literary studies, suggesting composition was somehow outside the discipline. Extending from this, some argued for cutting composition altogether. Crowley points to these arguments as maintaining the disciplinary hierarchies that had marginalized composition for decades and failing to address the real issues generated by Lindemann’s question. Crowley takes on that question and Lindemann’s proposals in the last part of the chapter.

While she liked the question, she did not particularly favor Lindemann’s proposals. Lindemann suggested that composition focus on a broad set of texts and writing practices drawn from various disciplines to help students learn the writing skills/practices they would need to write successfully in their areas of study. While a noble goal, Crowley says this makes the focus of freshman composition too narrow or too broad. As she says, “it must either become so specialized that it becomes difficult to see what would hold it together, or it must become so abstract that the work done there would have little reference to actual academic or professional writing” (28). She is also concerned that this response does not change composition’s status as service work. In the end, she concludes that we may need to consider the universality of the freshman writing course. In other words, she is staging those larger questions we must consider about the discipline: What should the subject matter of composition be the keep the class relevant and intellectually valuable? How should we go about teaching this? And are the problems of composition created by the fact that it is a universal requirement? But these are the kinds of questions that have existed since the beginning of the discipline, which she picks up in subsequent chapters.

Chapter 4: “The Invention of Freshman English”

As the title indicates, this chapter traces the development of freshman composition during the latter half of the nineteenth century, emphasizing particularly the last decades of the 1800s and into the early 1900s. In doing so, she gives much of her attention to the loss of rhetoric (as more classically defined) in this period as well as the marginalization of composition, which she says shaped English studies as a whole. These trends have made change in the discipline ultimately quite difficult.

To claim that rhetoric was “lost” during this development of freshman composition means, of course, that it had to have existed visibly in the curriculum before, and Crowley clearly illustrates the prominence rhetoric held in the classical college, often being a significant part of the college curriculum from beginning to end. The significance given rhetoric fit the purposes of education at the time period prior to the Civil War. These purposes were, quite simply, to create good men with strong civic aptitudes and notions of civic responsibility. Rhetoric was civic rhetoric at this point, but this was to change with the increasing popularity of the works of Campbell, Blair, and Whately, which began to put a more humanisitic and belletristic spin on rhetoric. Another significant change that began altering the curriculum (including the place of rhetoric) was the adoption of the German model of university education that emphasized research over teaching. Because of these shifts, she says English needed to adopt three strategies to develop into a discipline. First, it needed to establish that students had problems in English; those in the field achieved this end by emphasizing issues of purity and correctness—and complaints of students lack on these accounts. Second, the discipline needed to test for these problems. Entrance exams were established and, as tests typically do, they found numerous “deficiencies” that justified the need to teach English. Finally, the discipline needed a course that would address these problems, and thus composition was developed and turned into a more mechanistic course, given the concerns on clarity and correctness.

As she sketches this history, Crowley focuses mostly on the changes that occurred in the larger private and research institutions (Harvard, Yale, etc.). And while these institutions did carry considerable cultural cachet and could (and did) influence curriculum on a broad scale, Crowley does treat these changes as somewhat universal. Furthermore, she establishes a useful disciplinary trajectory of the development of the freshman writing course, but though she claims this chapter argues that composition legitimated the whole field of English studies, she does not realize that argument in this chapter. Instead, she addresses it in the next chapter.

Chapter 5: “Literature and Composition: Not Separate but Certainly Unequal”

Crowley uses this chapter to extend her discussion on the disciplinary development of English studies, this time examining how literature worked its way into composition courses and how the focus of the discipline became literary studies. And again, she ties the marginalization of composition to the decline of rhetoric. As rhetoric fell from prominence and belletrism began to take its place—at least in English departments—the field began to develop a sense that familiarity with “good” literature would be sufficient to teach students how to write well. A sense of elitism pervaded the curriculum of the discipline: literature was reserved for those who proved their propriety; rhetoric (and composition) was for those who needed more “refinement.”

Her discussion of this dichotomy leads into the familiar tale of the development of English A at Harvard and the preponderance of daily themes. Such heavy workloads forced faculty to rely on an efficiency approach that emphasized formal and surface-level concerns. This developed into current traditional rhetoric (CTR). This was a formulaic system that, a la scientific approaches, tried to develop universals that could be applied to writing. Form was privileged over rhetoric, and failures of students to apply the forms correctly suggested character flaws in the students. Through CTR, Crowley claims literature began to creep into composition because faculty could point to literature as exemplifying both effective form and good character. From this point through the 1970s (and even somewhat today), literature provided the main texts for freshman writing courses. Even the communication skills movement in the 1940s and 1950s could not unseat CTR methods and literature from the composition classroom. After this point, though, questions began to arise about the need for composition to have a subject. The humanists again quickly turned the focus back to literature as the appropriate subject for composition. She says that composition was so buffeted about “because of the absolute lack of theoretical innovation in composition” prior to the 1970s (115). The problem, as she describes it here, was perhaps less because of the lack of a desire for composition to advance theoretically as it was the traditional humanists who held positions of power denying any moves toward pragmatics.

In these three chapters, Crowley bases her sense of the history of the development of composition—the freshman writing course in particular—on the status of rhetoric. As rhetoric lost favor, or rather shifted into something closer to literary belletrism, literature began to fill the vacuum left by traditional rhetoric. As it did, composition became associated with rhetoric and therefore fell in value compared to literature. This is the root of the disciplinary inequity for Crowley, but as the next text I will examine argues, the inequity may have another source.

Modernist vs. Postmodernist Interdisciplinarity

Leitch, Vincent B. “Postmodern Interdisciplinarity.” Profession (2000): 124-31. Print.

While this is a brief article without much detail and is perhaps becoming a little dated in some of its views about the lack of institutionally sanctioned interdisciplinarity, it does draw attention to some key obstacles to interdisciplinarity. It focuses on four areas/issues related to interdisciplinarity: “that university professors in North America are disciplinary subjects, that academic interdisciplinarity work does not alter the existing disciplines, that the university is a disciplinary institution in a disciplinary society, and that the conception of interdisciplinarity is currently undergoing significant change” (124).

In his (brief) explorations of these issues, Leitch does offer some good/useful points to consider. One such point is that interdisciplinarity is necessarily bound up with disciplinarity. While this seems obvious, I had not considered the importance of disciplinarity for interdisciplinarity. Part of this is because perhaps I had been considering interdisciplinarity in its modernist form. This form, Leitch argues, attempts to gloss the differences in favor of a near-seamless interdisciplinarity. Such an approach instead of promoting greater creativity and investigative power actually reinforces the modernist view of the narrow and stark structure of the university. Leitch contrasts this with the postmodern view of interdisciplinarity. This view does not try to avoid acknowledging the role of different disciplines in forming an interdisciplinary field of study. Rather, it highlights those different disciplines, valuing the varied contributions to create the whole. Furthermore, Leitch extends this view to the disciplines themselves, recognizing the interdisciplinary nature within what we might call more “traditional” disciplines. He points to the contributions of mathematics, chemistry, and astronomy to the discipline of physics as one example. Yet, Leitch’s other discussions point to the dominance of disciplinarity in the modernist sense, mostly because of the structure of universities and of the wider society that they serve.

As I work on exploring how a rhetoric/composition specialist may need to function as a generalist in a smaller department, the ideas Leitch sketches here will likely be important ones for me to consider. If the institution looks to disciplinarity, how does that complicate how a rhetoric/composition expert can function within those smaller departments? And how does that affect how her/his colleagues and administrators view their work? On the other hand, if interdisciplinarity is becoming more commonplace and accepted, how much of a concern is this anymore? Are smaller departments better at embracing such interdisciplinarity given the nature of the work required of faculty in those departments?

Four Readings from Shumway and Dionne

Shumway, David R., and Craig Dionne, eds. Disciplining English: Alternative Histories, Critical Perspectives. Albany: SUNY Press, 2002. Print.

Shumway, David R. and Craig Dionne. Introduction. Shumway and Dionne 1-18. Print.

In their introduction to their collection about the development and effects of English disciplinarity, David Shumway and Craig Dionne work on establishing the value of exploring the current functions of English studies that grew out of its history. In doing so, they consider first what they mean by “discipline.” The first view of this term is that of a rating, a valuation based on what a given field produces or studies. Instead, they use “discipline” to refer to a socially constructed set of ideas and practices that establish a field as coherent and engaged in the production of certain types of knowledge. This more open definition allows them to consider English as a discipline in spite of some external views that question whether English and other fields in the humanities do, in fact, produce knowledge (5). They also examine “discipline” in its Foucauldian sense. Viewed in this way, the socially constructed nature of a discipline serves to create a system that determines how has the right to speak and be heard within the discipline as well as a system of surveillance that disciplines its members.

Of concern, though, is that disciplinarity leads to some narrow work within the disciplines. Often, the goal of research becomes more about adding new (and sometimes narrow) information to the field than considering the broader applications of that knowledge. Citing Thomas Gieryn, Shumway and Dionne refer to the “boundary-work” of the disciplines that establishes and maintains the disciplinary divisions between and within disciplines (6). At the same time this work entrenches the borders between disciplines it also serves to establish public confidence in a particular discipline to “perform the service it controls” (6-7). In other words, the sometimes narrow and even esoteric issues of English studies prove to those outside the field that those inside the field are capable of studying and teaching these issues. While this serves to legitimate a discipline, it also serves to fragment it, as different areas of interest and theories begin to establish subdisciplines that may cordon themselves off from the objectives of the larger discipline. As Shumway and Dionne note, this creates “the paradox that within the field of English heterogeneity and hegemony exist simultaneously” (9). In English’s case, the dominant subdiscipline is still literature, despite an influx of theories and practices that would call such hegemony into question, but by examining what they call the “the arbitrary and constructed boundaries that constitute the field,” we might be better able to understand and challenge the questions and concerns created by disciplinarity.

What Shumway and Dionne’s introduction calls upon readers to consider is the ways in which disciplinarity shapes the work we do in the academy but in ways that ask us to be mindful of the consequences of not considering the roots and forces that shape our disciplines. Doing so may provide us with a greater depth of understanding of our own work, and, for my purposes, can bring to light spaces where disciplines and subdisciplines may productively intersect.

Russell, David R. “Institutionalizing English: Rhetoric on the Boundaries.” Shumway and Dionne 39-58. Print.

In David R. Russell’s contribution to Shumway and Dionne’s collection, he examines the divide between literature and composition. This split, which privileged literature as the research side of English and relegated composition to a service role, was essential in developing English as a discipline. Moreover, Russell argues that this marginalization actually served to strengthen English as a discipline. Composition gave English a presence in the other disciplines across the university. The problem Russell addresses here, though, is how this disciplinarity created the illusion that a discipline was self-developed and self-sustaining, despite its dependence on and interactions with other disciplines. Such is the nature of the relationship of literature and composition.

Russell briefly traces some of literature’s history, especially its less prestigious times when rhetoric was privileged over the written word. But as research became the dominant focus of universities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, more service-oriented courses began to lose prestige.  During this period, Progressive reforms began to take hold, and these reforms particularly valued the practical.  The humanities, including literature, positioned themselves as the anti-utilitarian disciplines. English quickly separated literature (the elevated, research-oriented side) from composition (the remedial, service-oriented side). Doing so allowed those in literature to develop it as a research subject and establish literary texts as its objects of study. At the same time, the heavy workloads in composition and its mechanistic nature impeded its possible development as a field of inquiry. And even though composition as controlled by English departments connected composition to nearly every other discipline in the university, the fact that composition existed removed writing instruction as a responsibility of the disciplines, including literary study. Thus, composition’s role as a service course allowed English to make its “serious” word the reception and interpretation of texts and not their production.

While Russell recognizes recent efforts to recuperate the interconnections of literature and rhetoric/composition, the discipline of English developed and became established with the hierarchical divisions Russell discusses here—and rather naively so. As Shumway and Dionne’s introduction asks us to consider, Russell’s piece illustrates how disciplinary divides can both rely on and elide interdisciplinarity, and English’s long-standing acceptance of disciplinary divides within it as a discipline has led to a hierarchical structure that is still in place and that, in my opinion, has significant potential to limit the ways we educate students.

Wilson, Elizabeth A. “A Short History of a Border War: Social Science, School Reform, and the Study of Literature.” Shumway and Dionne 59-81. Print.

Wilson’s article extends the arguments raised in Russell’s article. She focuses on the interactions English (especially literature) had with other disciplines as it was attempting to establish its own identity. She argues that because English defined itself as a dealing with universals of humanity, it put itself in direct contrast to social sciences and Progressive education reforms. As such, it opened itself to critiques of elitism and of impracticality. Progressive movements began to call for education that served a broader population and that direct application to students’ everyday lives. This pushed against the perceived elitism and classism implied in literature’s attempts to develop “appropriate” tastes in students. As Wilson notes, the goal of progressive education was “to undermine [liberal education] as a bastion of social privilege and undemocratic ideals” (65).

Since Progressive education reforms were closely connected to the developing social sciences, literary studies began distancing itself from the social sciences. Its emphasis turned to developing the individual and to “humane learning” as opposed to the types of problem-solving scholarship of the social sciences (68). Literature was positioning itself as the explorer of the “human experience” as opposed to “a scientific accumulation of facts” (69). From both staffing and financial perspectives, these moves seemed to cost literature in the shifting focus of the university. From 1920 to 1950, the social sciences were adding faculty while faculty in the humanities (including English) declined. In addition, government and private grants and other financial support grew significantly for social sciences and concurrently declined for the humanities (71-73).  Wilson contrasts the ideological moves made by English with those made by history. Instead of distancing itself from social sciences, history embraced the social sciences and its methods. As a result, history was more able to legitimate itself as a practical field while it distanced itself from literature. Thus, literary studies and other disciplines in the humanities that took similar approaches to Progressivism and the social sciences came out seeming less practical, a little out of touch. Wilson notes that the saving grace of literature was New Criticism. New Criticism distanced itself from social, biographical, political, and/or historical matters. Its emphasis on the text required specialists, allowing literature to maintain some of its position within the university.

In this ideological history sketched by Wilson, we can see a discipline making quite conscious choices about the status it sought for itself. But this maneuvering was not without consequences, and English, particularly the literary side of the discipline, was left to defend its value in an altered university. Though Wilson’s piece addresses this part of the disciplinary history of English in rather general terms, the division of literature from the social sciences also seems to speak to some of the tensions with rhetoric and composition, especially as composition and rhetoric began establishing itself as a discipline and often allied itself ideologically and methodologically with social sciences instead of with the artistic and “culturing” aspects of literature.  

Schilb, John. “Composing Literary Studies in Graduate Courses.” Shumway and Dionne 137-48. Print.

In the final selection from this collection I want to address, John Schilb puts some of the history of English disciplinary divisions into more current and tangible terms. Like the other works in this collection, Schilb’s focuses on issues related to literature, but here he addresses a problem in literary graduate studies that has been caused by the marginalization of composition. Schilb argues that this marginalization left literature faculty ill-prepared to expound on the writing and rhetorical practices associated with their discipline. He develops this concern by examining the rather readily-accepted notion that a discipline, “as a regulative ideal” in the Foucauldian sense, makes use of discourse to initiate members and determine authority and credibility (137). Despite this recognition, he claims little has been done to instill this awareness in literature students.

One reason for this oversight is an already overfull curriculum. He claims the development of various theories and emphases of different periods and different groups of people have done much to inform literary studies but have also served to limit how much class time is available for other discussions, such as those on writing practices. But beyond this, Schilb says are reasons that connect more so to “the average English department’s enduring failure to make composition studies truly integral to its mission” (140). This may lead literature faculty to assume student preparedness for writing in the discipline, to view writing skills as more associated with talent than teachable methods, and to emphasize published texts over students' works-in-progress.  Schilb sees the emphasis of rhetoric and composition faculty on writing and rhetorical practices (from which he claims literature faculty have become distanced) as inviting stronger considerations of disciplinarity and what makes up the discourse of literary studies. Drawing on an example of a literary analysis, he sketches how an instructor might demonstrate the rhetorical moves of the author and thereby teach students how to think more rhetorically about their own writing. But he also argues that literature faculty should not just teach students how to replicate the dominant discourses of literary studies. To this, he adds rhetoric and composition’s recent attention to developing approaches that teach students to use rhetorical conventions and to question their dominance and the consequences of their dominance over other forms of discourse.

What is striking to me about Schilb’s discussion here is the interdisciplinarity it encourages within English departments. While he focuses on graduate work, addressing the rhetorical considerations of discourse is readily applicable to undergraduate courses as well. And this not only better prepares students for work in the field; it also calls upon faculty to work together to institute such practices. If literature faculty are more removed from rhetorical terms and considerations, rhetoric and composition faculty may work with them or hold workshops to help them consider these elements. Faculty may also work together to develop undergraduate courses that address writing in the discourses of various fields within English. Such integrative practices offer the possibility for the productive intersections of disciplines that Shumway and Dionne’s introduction suggested.

A Week's Worth of Articles--What They Suggest about Digital Writing Research in Practice

This week, I emphasized articles from Computers and Composition in my blog, for two reasons. First, as my attention for the past two weeks has been on digital writing research methods, Computers and Composition was an obvious choice for research articles related to this subfield of writing studies. Second, and more important, this journal’s articles often utilize numerous research designs. Having such variety to analyze, I felt, would enable me to address (if rather simplistically and generally) how research in this area adheres to the methodological theories and approaches that I have been examining for the past month. What I have noticed in reading these articles and thinking about their methods is that they utilize traditional research methods in ways appropriate for the complexity of digital writing research.

I want to begin by discussing how some of these articles adhere to more traditional research methods. The studies I selected for this week’s readings covered a variety of research methods, but as an example of how these studies rely on and differ from traditional formulations, I will address Jin and Zhu’s case study approach. The goals of a case study are exploratory in nature, not attempting to develop cause/effect notions but to establish potential variables to explore more fully (Lauer and Asher 23). In addition, case studies tend to rely on either broad or representative samples of populations to study, a variety of sources for data, careful coding and reliability examinations, and “descriptive accounts” to report their findings (Lauer and Asher 25, 26-27, 31, 32). Jin and Zhu are clear that their study is exploratory, especially in terms of discovering potential ways computer-mediated tools affect students’ activity (286). Furthermore, they also demonstrate the use of selective sampling by choosing two students who have different levels of computer skills/knowledge (287-88). However, while Jin and Zhu do address their coding procedures, they do not address reliability issues related to their coding. This lapse does not seem to weaken their study. Their focus on motives and the numerous streams of data they use (video observations, interviews, IM transcripts, etc. [288]) they triangulated to better understand and validate participants’ claims about their motives (289) suggest an effective methodology for making sense of the data they collected.

These studies also adhere to the principles addressed throughout Heidi A. McKee and Danielle Nicole DeVoss’s anthology on digital writing research, especially approaches to theory, ethics, and collecting data effectively. As is clear in McKee and DeVoss’s collection, many scholars in digital writing studies rely on theory as a guiding principle to understand and explore their research topics (e.g., Hilligoss and Williams 232-36;  Kimme Hea 273-74; Romberger 251-54). Jin and Zhu, for example, embrace activity theory to establish and explicate their focus on motivation and how technology can affect these motives (285-86). In addition, some articles in McKee and DeVoss’s text emphasize the complexity of ethical issues related to digital research (see Banks and Elbe; Pandey for a couple of examples). In my readings this week, Stedman’s article addresses most explicitly the complexity of these issues, noting his concerns about the treatment of fan communities by previous researchers, his decisions that being ethical in the eyes of this community meant being explicit about his intentions, and his sense that his IRB permissions did not precisely address the ethical considerations he had to make (110-11, 117). Finally, many of the authors in McKee and DeVoss’s anthology note the need for considerable flexibility in terms of their research methods to adapt to the malleability of digital research (e.g., DePew; Rickly). One particularly representative example of this from my reading this week was Jin and Zhu’s article. Though they did not rely on quantitative methods, they did use multiple approaches to collect their data (see above). Many of these methods (video recording and chat transcripts, for example) allowed them to gain insight into their participants’ motives less obtrusively than traditional observation and possibly even yielded more accurate information.

What these articles demonstrate in terms of research methods, then, is both an attention to the research tradition in maintaining high intellectual standards and a willingness to add to or tweak these practices in response to changing research contexts as a result of computer-mediated technologies. As I have noted previously, such flexibility is important for research in the digital age if it is to be ethical and rigorous, and despite some lapses in methods or analysis (see my entry on Garrison’s article), the research I examined this week seems to illustrate such ethics and rigor.

Works Cited

Banks, Will, and Michelle Eble. “Digital Spaces, Online Environments, and Human Participant Research: Interfacing with Institutional Review Boards.” McKee and DeVoss 27-47. Print.

Garrison, Kevin. “An Empirical Analysis of Using Text-to-Speech Software to Revise First-Year College Students’ Essays.” Computers and Composition 26.4 (2009): 288-301. Print.

Hilligoss, Susan, and Sean Williams. “Composition Meets Visual Communication: New Research Questions.” McKee and DeVoss 229-47. Print.

Jin, Li, and Wei Zhu. “Dynamic Motives in ESL Computer-Mediated Peer Response.” Computers and Composition 27.4 (2010): 284-303. Print.

Kimme Hea, Amy. “Riding the Wave: Articulating a Critical Methodology for Web Research Practices.” McKee and DeVoss 269-86. Print.

Lauer, Janice M., and J. William Asher. Composition Research: Empirical Designs. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. Print.

McKee, Heidi A., and Danielle Nicole DeVoss, eds. Digital Writing Research: Technologies, Methodologies, and Ethical Issues. New Dimensions in Computers and Composition. Ed. Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe. Creskill: Hampton, 2007. Print.

Pandey, Iswari. “Researching (with) the Postnational ‘Other’: Ethics, Methodologies, and Qualitative Studies of Digital Literacy.” McKee and DeVoss 107-25. Print.

Romberger, Julia E. “An Ecofeminist Methodology: Studying the Ecological Dimensions of the Digital Environment.” McKee and DeVoss 249-67. Print.

Stedman, Kyle D. “Remix Literacy and Fan Compositions.” Computers and Composition 29.2 (2012): 107-23. Print.

Research Ethics Remix

Stedman, Kyle D. “Remix Literacy and Fan Compositions.” Computers and Composition 29.2 (2012): 107-23. Print.

Because of participatory Web technologies, remixing has become a more common creative enterprise. As Stedman defines it, a remix is “any act of composition that involves the deliberate manipulation of previous passages, clips, or samples throughout a majority of the work" (108). Stedman argues that studying remixes is not especially new, but the focus tends to be on an analysis of the product. He wants to explore how the remixers do what they do—how they function in their communities and what remix literacy might entail.

This study is more ethnographic in nature, attempting to capture the processes of remixers in the context of their communities, in this case online fan communities. Stedman initially began his work with surveys distributed online to various fan communities that he was familiar with. He followed the surveys up with more in-depth interviews (via email, phone, or private online messages) with certain respondents and analysis of their texts these to highlight their rhetorical and aesthetic considerations.  But perhaps one of the most important parts of his methodology is how he positioned himself as a participant-observer within these communities. He discusses at some length how online fan communities responded to a survey dubbed “SurveyFail.” This survey was dishonest in its objectives, and the fan communities quickly labeled these researchers as outsiders, stifling their study. Stedman, instead, made the very conscious choice to be clear in his intent and to use his knowledge of these fan communities to position himself as both a researcher and an insider. Through his results, he found deep feelings of creativity and originality, significant attention to detail to create particular effects or reach certain goals, a strong sense of community and collaboration, various sources of inspiration, considerations of the relation of form/medium and content, use of a variety of appeals to audiences’ intellect and emotions, and attention to multiple purposes in composing (119). Ultimately, such considerations might be something instructors could incorporate into their classrooms to illustrate to students how some of them already employ rhetorical principles and/or how these principles exist outside the academic essay.  

Stedman’s ethnographic approach certainly suited his goals of learning what remixers do and why/how they do it, relying on the producers’ insights rather than his interpretations. Had he not done so, he might not have discovered how deeply committed these authors are to originality and creativity, for example. Though we might say his sample population may not quite allow him to postulate remix literacy’s characteristics definitively, his conclusions about their classroom applicability are tempered by his claims that remix literacy is one skill among many needed by students in the digital age. Finally, his attention to ethics provides other researchers with a host of considerations if they are to conduct online research effectively and ethically.

Studying Teaching Time

Reinheimer, David A. “Teaching Composition Online: Whose Side Is Time On?” Computers and Composition 22.4 (2005): 459-70. Print.

Reinheimer is responding to the (still) common concern about the amount of time online courses require of their instructors, especially compared to the time requirements of face-to-face (F2F) courses. Through his literature review, he explains that the evidence that online courses require more time of instructors is too sparse, too anecdotal to be administratively useful. While he says time-use research in distance education fields is a bit more detailed, these studies focus on teacher-centered pedagogies instead of the student-centered pedagogies more typical of composition instruction. Therefore, he hopes a quantitative study will produce some firmer conclusions about composition faculty workload related to online courses.

To collect his data, Reinheimer relied on the time-use recording of his participants. The first participant (the F2F instructor) was a teaching assistant who had taught in two previous semesters; the second participant (the online instructor) was the researcher. The data collection began in the semester the F2F course and the researcher’s first online section were offered. Reinheimer continued compiling data from his online courses in two subsequent semesters. The participants kept track of time spent only on student contact activities (e.g., direct communication with students, grading/assessing work, office hours). His initial results showed the F2F course requiring almost one third more time than online classes. Since the F2F course had set course meetings (and thus a pre-established minimum of contact time) and more students, he divided the time spent on each course by the number of students, arriving at time spent per student. This new calculation demonstrated that in the first semester online faculty time spent more than twice the time per student than did F2F faculty. This disparity did shrink dramatically in the second and third semesters of the online course. Reinheimer attributes this decrease in subsequent semesters to improved technology, course maturity, and instructor experience. Based on these results, he ultimately argues that faculty and administrators should discuss possible solutions to these workload concerns.

Anyone who has taught an online course and tried to demonstrate to others the amount of work and time needed to develop and deliver such courses can appreciate what Reinheimer is attempting to do here. However, I do have a few quibbles with his methods. First, the fact that his quantitative data comes from the self-reporting of his participants makes assessing their accuracy difficult. (On the other hand, I’m not entirely sure how else one might measure this more objectively.) Second, he only used one F2F course as a basis for comparison. Having data from the same number of online and F2F courses might allow one to make some more definitive claims. Finally, since the F2F course and online courses were taught by different instructors, we could easily argue that the differences in time spent per student were based wholly or in part on the instructor and not necessarily on the method of delivery. That being said, understanding these as concerns may serve to improve future studies.