Keep your eyes on Gallaudet University where the students have barricaded themselves in the administration building to protest the incoming president of the university. Both faculty and students are protesting the Board's selection of her for a number of reasons that relate to questions about her effectiveness and her fitness for the position. She is to be the second deaf president in the history of the university, but she did not learn ASL until she was in her twenties. Some of the coverage refers to her as the "third choice candidate" of the faculty and students. Today's coverage is all over the place: _Inside Higher Ed_ and on NPR and other major venues. There is a complicated history of protest at Gallaudet over the selection of leaders.
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/10/09/gallaudet
While reading the coverage today, I ran across an article written by a student journalist that addressed how students at Gallaudet and elsewhere must have "too much time on their hands" or "too much time between classes" if they are protesting. Protesting is something that college students outgrow said this notable student journalistic sage.
Now what does this have to do with Kinneavy? Well, Kinneavy is worried, too, about what he deems students' "unorthodox and extreme forms of deviant self-expression" (137). Keep in mind that he published this article in 1969 when things were really heating up with the SDS and with anti-Vietnam protests and with civil rights and feminism. He may have other contexts in mind like the demand for education to be relevant. I'm not exactly sure. But instead of looking to the larger social forces as the main explanatory narrative for the students' self-expression, Kinneavy has an interesting theory about why these "deviant self-expressions" are taking place:
"At the college level, in English departments during the period immediately preceding the present, the restriction of composition to expository writing and the reading of literay texts had had two equally dangerous consequences. First, the neglect of expressionism, as a reaction to progressive education, has stifled self-expression in the student and partially, at least, is a cause of the unorthodox and extreme forms of deviant self-expression now indulged in by college students on many campuses today" (137).
This is a really interesting assertion, on some level. English departments neglecting expressive discourse means that students are busting out all over the place with demands for modes of expression. Happenings, sit-ins, consciousness raising groups, political meetings by leftist and civil rights groups and anti-war protestors. Now that is an interesting perspective as it tries to put the English dept. at the center of maelstrom of political and expressive activity. If English would do more to help these students express themselves (if the English dept. would act as an outlet and a regulating force), they (the students) might not resort to such extreme measures. I really want to know more about what Kinneavy was actually reacting to, specifically.
Kinneavy ends with a plea for a "preservation of the liberal arts tradition with composition as a foundation stone" and with a very reasonable assertion that "'[i]t is to the good of each of the aims of discourse to be studied in conjunction with others" (138).
Kinneavy was looking for a way to balance out the study of discourse and a way to refigure English depts. I hear a frustration and anger in this piece at the end that I found fascinating. I don't agree with his interpretation of what was happening with student self-expression (lack of expressive discourse made them "resort" to other outlets), but I appreciate that he saw English depts. as a place that might make a difference for students.
Berlin echoes an aspect of this theme of the importance of teaching discourse when he argues in "Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories" that in "teaching writing we are tacitly teaching a version of reality and the student's place and mode of operation in it" (257). If we see our task as mechanistic, imparting the rules (which Hartwell critiques, too), we fail to realize that we are "given a responsibility that far exceeds this merely instrumental task" (257). Here's another quotation from Berlin:
"We are teaching a way of experiencing the world, a way of ordering and making sense of it" ( Berlin 268). Our notions of what happens with writing relate to our theories of language and rhetoric that inform that work. What are those theories? When we try to answer those questions, do we come out with a mish-mash of maxims of do we really answer the question: How does language work? How do our theories of language directly influence the ways we teach writing? Yes, these are basic questions, but have we answered them satisfactorily?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Eileen!
I had a very similiar reaction to the "conclusions" section of the Kinneavy article. I found the tone to be so different from the earlier sections... urgent, emotive... I would really like more context here to understand the forces acting upon him. (I got a bit distracted by his use of Jakobson, I must admit, but I am intrigued by the way that he seems to be responding to some intervening force.)
How was Kinneavy received then? What was at stake for him?
He is on my generative bibliography for my project, so I hope to find out...
(And - can we talk about this Gallaudet controversy in class? What would Zosha say about THIS?)
Trish
One of the things I find interesting about the Gallaudet demonstrations is the different context between the first major shut down and this one: the first one concerned appointing the first deaf president of the college. There is a moral immediacy in that, justice, the kind which trumps arguments to the contrary. In the second, they are protesting like lots of students protest, hearing and deaf-- they don't like the candidate that's been selected (some coverage has focused on the authenticity angle-- that she lip reads, speaks, learned ASL late, but my sense is that is largely an outlier argument.) That makes the issue less clear cut, one of campus politics-- trustees, administrators, personalities that suit trustees often don't suit students and faculty, etc. etc.--, in which case, they are now a university like all universities, which is a testament, I think, to the success of the first set of demonstrations.
I understand what you are saying about Kinneavy-- I wonder to what extent he may have been responding to that streak of nihilism that began to run through student political culture in the late Sixties-- The difference between Sly and The Family Stone's Greatest Hits and There's a Riot Goin On, one a bright, idealistic dance record, and the other, a scratchy, lo fi portrait of things flying apart.
To your last question, and maybe this is because I'm working on a teaching dissertation and so I play in only one key, minor-- I wonder if our theories of language, such as they are, have mostly gotten in the way of theorizing teaching adequately.
Post a Comment