[Teaching_Composition] Re: Teaching_Composition digest, Vol 1 #1110 - 2 msgs

[Doug Downs]

Charles, thanks for the very well articulated descriptions of places my
argument stretched too thin.  I took major leaps on relating politics
and ideology to teaching the nature of knowledge and writing.  When you
spell it all out, it takes awhile -- but if anyone's curious, read on.

I'm claiming that to teach a given perspective on the nature of
knowledge and writing is inevitably an ideological, and usually a
political, act because these perspectives mesh into/partake of other
overtly ideological and political constructs.  Depending on how one
defines writing, and depending on what one finds desirable in writing,
one aligns with and supports, or else undermines, varying ideologies and
accompanying politics.  Here's how:

The prevailing understanding of writing, held widely among the American
public and most of our colleagues across the university, is that
"writing" expresses ideas that exist independently of it, and that
therefore that writing is best which "clearly" translates or transmits
the pre-existent ideas without distorting them.  Humankind hasn't always
thought this way: rhetoric until the Renaissance was concerned both with
what to say and how to say it.  But in the 1500's, Peter Ramus and
followers sundered rhetoric from epistemology and made rhetoric's main
concern style, and that division then traces all the way from the 16th
century, through John Locke and Hugh Blair and many others, into the
present reduction of writing, in the popular imagination, to grammatical
and syntactical concerns alone.  Ask students what they're most
concerned about with their writing, and they'll tell you grammar and
spelling, because this is what they have been taught is most important
about writing, and in their mind, this is what writing is.  "Writing" is
*how* you say what you want to say and is not part of figuring out
*what* to say; writing *encodes* and *transmits* independently existing
knowledge.  To believe that entails believing that knowledge can exist
independently of language (otherwise changing the language of a thought
would necessary change the thought, and style could not be imagined as
separable from content).  Believing *that* permits belief in
objectivity: if ideas exist independent of language, then ideas may be
unvarnished by perspective.  But if ideas are altered by language, then
objectivity is patently impossible, because language must always be
selective, partial, slanted, reductive, and therefore subjective.  What
really, really bugged the ultimate empiricist, John Locke, about
language?  He couldn't come up with a *transparent* one that wouldn't
alter the underlying truths newly minted scientists of his time were
trying to communicate.  He and others tried like the Dickens (speaking
of subjective language use), but couldn't, and thus Locke condemned
style (rhetoric) as getting in the way of Truth -- absolute Truth, which
Locke and most other positivists believe in.

Stay with me; we're getting to the ideology.  :-)   You can't believe in
absolute truth unless you believe that language is, or should be,
transparent to ideas (that is, it does not or should not alter them). 
If, on the other hand, language *does* shape ideas, if it doesn't *pass
along* truth but instead *makes* truth, you rule out the possibility of
linguistically accessing or knowing absolute truth.  As a blunt example
of the problems this language-constituting-truth position creates (and,
for this next statement, y'all should know that I speak as a Baptist of
some description and a former fundamentalist Baptist): if language
shapes ideas, the Bible cannot in itself state absolute truth.  Even if
it came from God in a transparent language, that language wasn't
English, so for me, our boy King James and his translators screwed
things up, and now if I read my KJV literally, I read something other
than what God said.  If language isn't transparent to ideas (and,
empirically, it's not), then I can only ever work with texts through
interpretation.  And if I can only understand the text through
interpretation, then whatever absolute truth I understand from reading
the text doesn't come purely from the text.  Ruh-roh!

Now, this literalism vs. interpretationism question is ideological with
clear political consequences.  Fundamentalisms are almost always
literalist, and they are always political.  If I have a fundamentalist
student (and, believe me, living in the Mormon West, I have many) and I
teach the impossibility of literalism (and I do, unequivocally, because
as a professional who has studied the question from both theoretical and
empirical angles, I am utterly convinced that literalism is a lie and an
impossibility), then they and I have an inevitable ideological conflict.
 It's even a *gradable* conflict, because in teaching this point of view
my class gives students assignments that require them to make and
support claims, and the class teaches students about better and worse
ways of supporting claims.  We study material that explains why
literalism doesn't work; and arguments that students attempt to support
with literalist readings of texts will be scored poorly.  Political? 
When I used to let students write about whatever they wanted, a fair
number wrote on gun control, and many of those against relied on literal
readings of the 2nd amendment as their primary support for the claim
that, technically, if it's an "arm," private citizens have to be allowed
to "bear" it.  

As it happens, I don't invite such papers anymore because I'm more
interested in having students study and learn about writing, so they
conduct primary research on questions of their invention relating to
writing, writers, discourse, language, etc.  And the main reason we talk
about the everpresence, the unescapability, of *interpretation* is to
talk about research and sources and subjectivity versus objectivity. 
And when we talk about what "writing" is, I'm trying to help students
imagine writing as more than a way of saying what they think, but as a
way of *shaping* what they think.  But all these things are connected:
literalism, objectivity, the tranparency of language, writing as style
and grammar on the one side; interpretation, subjectivity, language as
constitutive of reality (not just describing the way things are, but
*building* the way things are), and writing therefore as
knowledge-generating, not just knowledge-transmitting, on the other
side.  And once writing is taught, in a writing class, as
knowledge-generating, as figuring out not just *how* to say but *what*
to say, then questions of why we think what we think are on the table,
and these are directly ideological and political questions, involving a
ton of cultural critique.  (This is how writing courses can turn into
cultural studies courses so easily.)  And now you have a problem of
power: these understandings of language and writing get directly at the
question of Who gets to claim What is true, and that's a question of
pure power, and power is inevitably political.  Tell students that
textbooks aren't factual (I'm assuming everyone can extract that
principle from the various logical chains in this note) and you suddenly
have very large questions of power, politics, and ideology on your
hands.  And this is good.  :-)  

So all this is why I foresee trouble if I really have to either 1) not
be ideological in my teaching (how do you talk about the nature of
writing without talking about how language works, which is to adopt an
ideology) or 2) teach multiple ideologies as *possible* or
*alternatives* when, empirically and theoretically speaking, not all of
them are true (though the false ones are nonetheless quite popular).  As
it happens, I cover "multiple" ideologies when I tell my students the
ones they learned in high school are by and large unworkable and,
incidentally, often just dumb.  I try to persuade them with various
theoretical and empirical evidence that the perspectives they learn in
my class work better and can help them be stronger, more powerful, more
confident writers.  But it's a HUGE shift of worldviews to go from
believing that texts are factual to believing that facts are claims, and
inevitably students leave the class with a mixture of old and new
understandings and beliefs.  

Anyway, this is part of the reason I won't be signatory to, or cooperate
with, a document that tells me what I can and can't do with ideology and
politics in my little ol' writing class.  What I do with them should be
at my professionally based discretion.

You can probably see from the length of this screed why I compressed it
to a couple quick lines in my earlier lengthy screed.  :-)  And having
said all that, I'll let somebody else tackle the question of
indoctrination.  (A hint: it's structural, not intentional.)   

Cheers --
Doug


Dr. Doug Downs
Asst. Professor, Composition & Rhetoric
Writing Program Coordinator
Dept. of English and Literature
Utah Valley State College
800 W University Pkwy, Orem UT 84058
LA 114w
801-863-8572
>>> "Charles Nelson" <charles.p.nelson@gmail.com> 09/30/06 11:41 AM >>>
Doug, thanks for explaining your perspective in detail. I can see where
you're coming from. Some of it makes sense, and some doesn't. The part
on
indoctrination seemed to be tackling something other than the ABR. It
was
talking about indoctrination of political, ideological, or religious
natures, while you were referring to the nature of knowledge and
writing.
For me, these are apples and oranges. The former is pedagogical
misconduct
while the latter, I hope, refers to an appropriate introduction into
disciplinary knowledge.

I also have to disagree that education is indoctrination. Perhaps with
many,
it is, but it shouldn't be. As a composition instructor, my goal is to
help
my students learn to think for themselves and to learn how to improve
their
writing--not to move them toward Marxism or capitalism, maternalism or
paternalism, or other pseudo-political-ideological-binaries that are not
part of first-year composition content, but to give them the thinking
tools
to decide for themselves the direction in which they wish to move, which
are
part of that content. I am not saying that students will not write on
political or ideological topics. I usually let my students choose their
topics. My role is help them learn how to complexify their understanding
of
their topics and transform that understanding into an argument
persuasive to
their audience. My role, again, is not to move them in one direction or
the
other on their topics. The latter can be indoctrination, while the
former is
education.

Charles Nelson