[Teaching_Composition] the ABR and stifling FYC teaching
Thelin,William
teaching_composition@mailman.eppg.com
Fri, 29 Sep 2006 14:27:08 -0400
Thanks for taking the time to post here, Doug. Your points should give
us something to chew on. I'll refrain now from saying anything and hope
that some other voices take up the challenge you have provided.
Bill
-----Original Message-----
From: teaching_composition-admin@mailman.eppg.com
[mailto:teaching_composition-admin@mailman.eppg.com] On Behalf Of Doug
Downs
Sent: Friday, September 29, 2006 12:08 PM
To: teaching_composition@mailman.eppg.com
Subject: [Teaching_Composition] the ABR and stifling FYC teaching
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> 09/28/06 11:45 AM >>>
Can someone reply more specifically how it would stifle FYC teaching?
Sure, Charles, although I think Bill's original post did a reasonably
good job of explaining these potentials as well. I've copied into this
email the 8 key points of the ABR. Concerns for FYC teahing interwoven
with points:
1. All faculty shall be hired, fired, promoted and granted tenure on
the basis of their competence and appropriate knowledge in the field of
their expertise and, in the humanities, the social sciences, and the
arts, with a view toward fostering a plurality of methodologies and
perspectives. No faculty shall be hired or fired or denied promotion or
tenure on the basis of his or her political or religious beliefs.
While it's massively unclear what "a plurality of methodologies and
perspectives" with reference to FYC (and that unclarity itself means the
document is either unenforceable or perfect for witchhunts), as far as I
can tell it would have to come down to the material I teach about
writing and the perspectives I offer on it. The rhetorical stance
(antifoundational, radically contingent, politically aware) toward
writing is the only one I'm interested in teaching. I see no redeeming
value in providing a true plurality of views on this question. Yet, a
strongly opposing point of view would be a "grammatical" stance that
insists writing is a basic, fundamental skill best taught through
grammar drills. I won't *EVER* teach that. Were I to refuse to, I
could be considered in violation of the ABR *if* someone were out to get
me. (If no one were out to get me, no one would care. Another MAJOR
systemic problem with the notion of the ABR.) *AND*, the most likely
ideology/group to WANT me to teach a grammatical stance corresponds
closely to the people who wrote the ABR. If my school were to adopt and
actually enforce the ABR, only my "F--- you" attitude would keep the
content of my course "unstiffled."
2. No faculty member will be excluded from tenure, search and hiring
committees on the basis of their political or religious beliefs.
Lots to say here. Ironically, the anti-hate laws and discrimination
protection laws traditionally opposed by groups favoring the ABR already
provide this protection and have for years or decades, depending on the
category of identity we're talking about. If religious creed or
political stance has nothing to do with job qualifications, dismissal
based on them would be legally actionable.
Interestingly, the underlying motivation here seems to be to ensure
diversity of ideology on hiring and RTP committees, YET the ABR mandates
that ideology not be allowed to factor into their decisions. How, then,
would it ensure any more diverse hiring to build diverse hiring
committees that nevertheless, according to the ABR, are to leave their
ideologies at the door? In a world of enforced ideological plurality,
ideological diversity doesn't matter, right?
Now, how could this stifle FYC teaching? There are members of my
faculty whose beliefs about writing and how best to teach it correspond
directly to their political beliefs. Because of their beliefs about
*writing*, I don't let them within 100 yards of my untenured, contingent
FYC faculty, or hiring decisions about them. If I were to, the wrong
kind of thinkers with respect to writing would get hired and fired and
we'd be teaching stone-age writing courses. The ABR provides these
faculty that I am deliberately, professionally excluding from these
affairs grounds to force their way in or have me punished based on a
*correlative* tendency that doesn't factor into my thinking but can be
shown to have the same effect.
Read me carefully here: there is no political discrimination. But
there's no way for my to *prove* that negative if professional judgments
lead to the same place: certain faculty being forced to keep their
distance from hiring and firing decisions regarding "my" adjuncts.
And then there's the underlying structural distrust of professionals to
make their own decisions. This is, again, ironic, coming from an
ideology that concerns itself with resisting paternalistic government.
3. Students will be graded solely on the basis of their reasoned
answers and appropriate knowledge of the subjects and disciplines they
study, not on the basis of their political or religious beliefs.
The formal logicians in the group should love the false binary
constructed here: I have to grade students on the basis EITHER of
"reasoned answers and appropriate knowledge" OR "political or religious
beliefs." What if I want to grade them on *performance*? Or
*engagement*? What if I want to grade them on how well they
participated in classroom discussions, but the content of those
discussions was distasteful to students so they didn't participate?
(That might be political matter, or moral matter, or simply boredom.)
The ABR gives them the right to challenge a perfectly reasonable and
widespread grading policy. The ABR makes it my job to not put students
in uncomfortable situations whose outcomes are graded. That's pretty
unworkable. But students don't have the right to not be uncomfortable
or challenged, and they don't have the right to not be graded on their
engagement with difficult problems or their participation in class
activities.
Looking a little deeper, what is the warrant of this claim regarding
grading? That the only gradable measures (in the *humanities* and
*social sciences*, for God's sake) are objective and factual. But most
teachers in the humanities understand that reason*ing* is more important
that any given "answer"; it is the work of the humanities to ask
ultimately unanswerable questions.
Who gets to decide what "appropriate knowledge" is? Only the teacher
can know that, because only the teacher can know both 1) what she wanted
the class to learn, and 2) what ground the class actually covered.
Students can tell you (kind of) #2; the teacher's peers and supervisors
can tell you (kind of) #1; but only the teacher is qualified to judge
both together. So the rule is unenforceable, if justice is blind; but
if justice is a witchhunt, this rule is a big club.
More to be said here, but you get my drift.
4. Curricula and reading lists in the humanities and social sciences
should reflect the uncertainty and unsettled character of all human
knowledge in these areas by providing students with dissenting sources
and viewpoints where appropriate. While teachers are and should be free
to pursue their own findings and perspectives in presenting their views,
they should consider and make their students aware of other viewpoints.
Academic disciplines should welcome a diversity of approaches to
unsettled questions.
Again with the problem of measurability on this one. How much
"diversity" is *enough*? It's, again, either unenforceable or a nice
weapon in a witchhunt. Who judges the state of questions and knowledge
in a field and decides what students can, should, and need to be exposed
to in a course of a given level and a given length?
In FYC specifically, I can see two dangers here. 1) Outside imposition
of what is *not* appropriate to teach in a course of a given subject.
How would the Brodkey/Texas fyc curriculum debate have played out in the
presence of an ABR taking even more discretion away from subject-area
specialists in terms of what is appropriate for the composition
classroom? 2) Again with my responsse in one, which is that the ABR
might require me to make my students aware of ideologies regarding
writing that I don't want them to be aware of except insofar as to
overthrow those ideologies.
Which leads me to a final point here: This rule doesn't even plug the
gap its proponents assume it does. You can force me to talk about all
different kinds of ideologies w/r/t writing, but I don't see anything
here about the frame in which they're presented or the perspective from
which they're discussed. If a rule doesn't even solve the problem its
proponents think they're addressing, *and* it creates the potential for
academic chilling, why have it?
5. Exposing students to the spectrum of significant scholarly
viewpoints on the subjects examined in their courses is a major
responsibility of faculty. Faculty will not use their courses for the
purpose of political, ideological, religious or anti-religious
indoctrination.
The hell I won't, and the hell we all don't. My fyc students come to me
after 12 years of indoctrination about the nature of knowledge, the
possibility of objectivity, and what makes "good" writing, NONE of it
consonant with what I professionally know to be true of research and
writing. Now, it *happens* that my teaching philosophy is one of
persuasion rather than assertion: I believe that putting students in
real-world situations and giving them questions to ask about it will
lead them to the same conclusions I have reached, over time, about the
differences between what they've been taught good research and writing
is, and the ways people *actually* get it done. But, if I wanted to
make and enforce rules that indoctrinated my students in the very same
way (but to a different end) that all their previous education has done,
wouldn't that be within my purview as a teacher?
The notion that *some* education indoctrinates while other education
doesn't is itself faulty. If education didn't indoctrinate, it wouldn't
be education and it wouldn't work. (The notion that education is
valuable, necessary, "a ticket to work"? All indoctrinated.) There is
only more or less compulsory indoctrination.
Furthermore, fields *come with* ideologies. You cannot be an engineer
unless you adopt instrumental, analytical, and division-of-labor
ideologies. You HAVE TO think that way to do that work. At some level,
this is true of all fields.
Now, I know this isn't what the writers of this document mean. They
MEAN to prohibit "agree with me or fail" compulsory indoctrination.
Most people in most disciplines would acknowledge such approaches to be
bad pedagogy or even academic misconduct. Again, therefore, a problem
already taken care of by peer-review and tenure systems. What this rule
DOES is ignore the realities of education in general in its attempt to
correct a particular and rare problem.
6. Selection of speakers, allocation of funds for speakers programs and
other student activities will observe the principles of academic freedom
and promote intellectual pluralism.
My FYC program doesn't usually invite speakers, but when they do, we
can't afford to bring two. By definition, we can't guarantee
intellectual pluralism. This has to be worked out over time, like,
literally, a frame of years. We don't have the budget to "shop the
mall" for our speakers: we get who we can get, when we can get them,
based usually on a favor exchange or publisher largesse. And *again*
with the professional discretion: *I* know the speakers in my field, how
they relate to its overall conversations, and what directions they take
the conversation in. Howard Horrowitz doesn't. The rule can't be
enforced from the outside unless it's a witchhunt.
7. An environment conducive to the civil exchange of ideas being an
essential component of a free university, the obstruction of invited
campus speakers, destruction of campus literature or other effort to
obstruct this exchange will not be tolerated.
This one isn't going to chill my comp courses. :-) Although I can
imagine some of my students getting censored for burning the white
supremacist flyers that blanketed their cars a couple years ago on my
campus.
8. Knowledge advances when individual scholars are left free to reach
their own conclusions about which methods, facts, and theories have been
validated by research. Academic institutions and professional societies
formed to advance knowledge within an area of research, maintain the
integrity of the research process, and organize the professional lives
of related researchers serve as indispensable venues within which
scholars circulate research findings and debate their interpretation. To
perform these functions adequately, academic institutions and
professional societies should maintain a posture of organizational
neutrality with respect to the substantive disagreements that divide
researchers on questions within, or outside, their fields of inquiry.
If professional organizations and universities didn't already reflect
the will of the majority of their constituents, they would change to do
so. In the FYC classroom, it's already my responsibility to negotiate
my professional stance in terms of the professional stances of various
organizations I'm a member of. CCCC famously has the resolution on
"Students' Right to their Own Language." It's important that my
students are aware of the issues it discusses -- the stance the
organization takes is obvious -- and their professor's stance on it. By
the rules of the ABR, this statement couldn't exist because it's an open
and divided question. But as a professional in the field, I'm quite
capable of negotiating the statement's ideology, slant, and motivation,
and helping my students do the same. If this statement did not exist,
as the ABR would wish, my students and I would lose a value example of
an available position on the issues the resolution takes up. My
organization's ratification of the statement and my own dissent from it
is something students will just have to think through on their own. I
wouldn't want them to miss the opportunity to do so.
To summarize:
- The ABR puts people who don't know what they're talking about, with
regard to my field, in the position of policing my professional
judgments. That's chilling.
- The ABR is largely unenforceable *unless* it is used as designed,
which is to supply grounds for complaint against disfavored parties
judged guilty a priori, the victims of witchhunts. That's chilling.
- The ABR in its paternalism and presumption of my incompetence and
guilt constitutes an insult to my professional ethics and the ethics of
my profession. That's chilling -- and gauling. :-)
So, okay, this is one *available* set of responses to the question of
how the ABR could specifically chill the FYC environment because in FYC
we deal with major cultural values about what constitutes good writing,
and we have a radically different story to tell about that than the
proponents of ABR want to hear. I'm sure there are many other
responses, as well as arguments against these points. But in my
particular context, these are what plays, and why I'm in no hurry to
bring the ABR onto my campus and into my comp classrooms, or those of
the adjuncts I mentor and supervise.
Cheers --
Doug
>>> "Charles Nelson" <charles.p.nelson@gmail.com> 09/28/06 11:45 AM >>>
I asked specifically about the ABR itself (meaning the document)
somehow stifling teaching. As Bill wrote at the website, "In fact, I
daresay that in a different political climate, people on the political
left might look to such a document to support teaching methods and
curriculum not aligned with the status quo." It's rather obvious that
some dislike "David Horowitz and his ilk", but I cannot see anything
in the ABR that would stifle my teaching of first-year composition.
Can someone reply more specifically how it would stifle FYC teaching?
Charles Nelson
> Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 09:12:19 -0400
> From: "Thelin,William" <wthelin@uakron.edu>
> To: <teaching_composition@mailman.eppg.com>
> Reply-To: teaching_composition@mailman.eppg.com
>
> Hello All:
>
> Pardon my delay in responding, but I was hoping someone else would
jump
> in and post about Charles's query. I will offer my interpretation but
> still look for other perspectives.
>
> The ABR did not suddenly appear on the scene. It is part of an
ongoing
> battle, now spearheaded by Horowitz but certainly transcending his
> input, to prevent universities and colleges from challenging the
status
> quo. This latter term in itself is vague, but for now, let's think of
> it in terms of a patriarchal, white (western), monotheist (mostly
> Judeo-Christian), heterosexist, capitalist society. The forces
> opposing the status quo--feminism, Marxism, multiculturalism,
etc.--were
> not just looking for changes in curriculum content; advocates sought
> (and seek) structural changes. Our reliance on hierarchy would be one
> example of a concept that would need to be altered if we seriously
> listened to advocates of change. Another, which is clearly part of
the
> ABR, is the idea of neutrality and objectivity. The people and
> ideologies currently in power can rely on concepts like "fairness" and
> "compromise" because these concepts, unlike "revolution," keep the
> status quo in place. Beyond this, though, is the sense that in
> acknowledging the validity of feminist, Marxist, multiculturalist,
> heterosexist, and (often not discussed) polytheistic ideas, our
teaching
> must change. To deny the place and purpose of women's studies and
> multiculturalism, which Horowitz has done (see the links I provided),
is
> to deny the worthiness of changes to teaching.
>
> What do others think?
>
> Bill
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