“So what is YOUR course going to be about?” she asked, the edges
of her voice tinged with the manic, insecure enthusiasm I remembered among my fellow
hyperactive humanities students in graduate school.
I blinked, not because I did not understand, but because
I understood the question as well as the expected response, and I wished not to
participate. Instead, I feigned ignorance.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, my course is going to be about race, class, and
gender. What is your theme going to be?”
We were discussing our prospective syllabi for an introductory university-level writing class at a community college where 80% of the incoming
freshmen test into the developmental level in writing – in other words, they
lack the writing skills even to place into the intro level class we both were about
to teach.
I blinked again.
“Um. My course is going to be about writing,” I said, with a little jiggle of my head and a goofy smile
as if to say, “isn’t that nutty?”
I jiggled my head to blunt the point I was making. Now, two
years later, I probably wouldn’t bother.
I am not a decades-long veteran of college teaching, so I
probably have no right to speak on this subject. I’m also not a scholar of
writing pedagogy, and I haven’t read a book about it for at least 20 years.
I’ve stumbled across things about writing pedagogy over the two years since I’ve been
back in a college classroom after a 15-year hiatus from teaching, and I read
them with some interest, but I don’t spend my time reading about teaching
writing.
When I decided to return to teaching, I did spend several days
in the stacks of bookstores at the many universities and colleges near me, just
to see what was out there in the way of writing textbooks. My summary of the 15
years I was away: not much has changed, except the textbooks have gotten a
hell of a lot more expensive.
I am puzzled and impatient with the way college writing
courses are taught by many instructors. These instructors load up their courses
with “themes” that in themselves are admirable, and certainly important, but do
not serve the needs of their students. Students of writing need to study writing: to focus their attention on the
craft, techniques, and strategies for framing a written argument. Overlaying a
theme on a developmental or introductory writing course is like insisting that students sew a wedding gown
when they have never cut out a pattern or operated a sewing machine. Handling complicated
and multi-faceted concepts like racism, for example, is difficult if not
impossible when students have never been invited nor trained into the pleasures
of deeper, analytical writing, and even less so when they are still struggling
to slow down their thinking enough to write a complete sentence, thereby to
frame a complete thought.
One of my former students once said that my courses should
be called “The Philosophy of Writing,” and I took that as a compliment. I
believe writing – the craft, art, technique, and purpose of writing – should be the focus of writing courses.
Readings should either be about writing itself, or used as examples of writing
techniques. In the latter case, the class discussion should focus on the
content only to the degree that it informs the study of how the writer has put
the argument together.
Please understand I am not talking about literature courses,
or what most of us think about when we think of “English class.” Reading
fiction or non-fiction and then writing about its contents is certainly the
business of literature classes, but should not, in my opinion, be the business of
writing classes.
The drive for a “theme” for a writing course implies that
writing itself is somehow not sufficient as a subject of study. I’m guessing
some instructors would argue that reading about
writing or reading to discern the rhetorical strategy of the writer
would not engage students enough. This is not my experience. On the contrary, I
find that students respond not only enthusiastically, but also with palpable
relief when they are finally given the chance to focus on the craft of writing.
They know that being able to write well, with clarity and confidence, will
carry them through not just their college studies, but also their lives.
Achieving this level of writing proficiency is often
derailed by the need among students, many of whom may not yet have sufficient writing
experience, to feign proficiency in discussing the complex themes imposed on
their introductory writing courses by their instructors. Forcing students to wrestle with these complex themes before they have the writing tools that will enable them to
think them through is not only counterproductive, but also, I would argue, lazy
on the part of instructors, and possibly even discriminatory.
In any case, themed college writing courses don’t serve the
task to which I believe we are called as writing instructors: convincing
students who believe they can't write – because they lack the technical skills
and knowledge, and/or because they believe they have nothing of value to say –
that they can learn to write well … and that they should, because if *they*
don't learn to articulate themselves, someone else will do it for them, and
will probably get it wrong.
