Another Attempt to Situate my Rhetorical Position, This Time through Disciplinarity

Project Row Houses, Houston

A thought experiment, Round II

[For Round I, here]

I come from a working class background, or a lower middle class background perhaps. My father would claim the latter, though he never went to college, married my mother when she was in her first year of nursing school, and then dropped out when I showed up. My grandparents were largely working class, so I claim the former. Regardless, I was the first in the family to go to college and though I consider both my parents to be highly intelligent, without the formal higher education there is the chasm between them and me and my brother; it was their own respect of college -- though almost no one in either family had been to college -- that compelled me to go to a private school first. After that first degree, finances and personal preferences have me a public school and I prefer it there -- I consider myself middle class and I prefer working with/ learning with middle class students and professors. I realize that when we speak of genealogies, we don’t necessarily mean the

lack of genealogy, but it’s there nonetheless. My first education, then is that middle class background and affinity for working class, first-generation (and non-generation?) students make me interested in pursuing a teaching career with students from the same background, working with them to enable (empower? reveal?) their own sense of efficacy in writing.

After I finished the first degree (having converted from Physics to Literature), I went to work immediately in the corporate world. I took some time to get another BA in Psych along the way. Volunteering with lower middle-class kids in Boy Scouts showed me I could relate to adolescents, so I decided to leave the IT world and go into teaching, getting an alternative certificate and an MAT. I moved immediately into a Title I school on the north side of Houston, with 45% Hispanic students, 40% African-American, a  few Asian-American students, a few whites. I was the first white teacher many of these students had ever seen. It’s one thing to hear about inner city schools and the learning deficit of their students; it’s another to see it in action, working with them, fighting against standardized testing instruction, for three years.

With that MA degree, I qualified to teach English at the community colleges (I had had 24 graduate hours in English while still living in Memphis, but, transferred by my company, never completed that MA degree), and thought I had caught up to that narrative of ascendancy -- come from a family without degree, now teaching at colleges. But I was also disturbed, without knowing why, with the curriculum at the community colleges -- both LSC and HCC were teaching “modes” and though I don’t ever remember being taught the modes when I was in college, I followed what department chairs and textbooks prescribed and dutifully regurgitated those to the students. But the students, I think, could tell that the curriculum was busy work, and I that writing had little purpose except to plug into some template. The questions of empowerment returned and it was only when I “was forced”, to take ENGL 6300 at UH that I realized a) there was actual theory there and b) writing was a real field. Taking Zebroski’s History of Composition course the following semester showed me that the field had legs, place and time, and was worthy of study. 

I don’t have much of a formal genealogy. In my head, I hear Zebroski telling us his genealogy and I suppose I should have written that down somewhere. My genealogy is more an organic one, seeing what writing is like in the secondary schools and in the community colleges where most Americans are going to get their writing instruction in their lives. The reading from this course, Butler’s courses, Zebroski’s courses, et al, still feel less like a genealogy than going to some Lollapalooza-like exposure to so many voices and whispers and strands of knowledge and perspectives. So this is less a genealogy than it is an exploration, seeing the trails of others, but not following any one trail yet.

I think my investment is that of reversing the flow of power or authority in the classroom, in the learning process; perhaps this is solely what Friere is saying, but it’s even more fundamental than this. Friere argues for a pedagogy for the oppressed, while I feel simply that the classroom should be/can be a true sharing of perspective and knowledge (is there more than this that an undergrad can provide?). This would have the same effect as Friere’s classroom, but to speak of it without the revolutionary rhetoric would also make it more palatable for those outside the academy, peering in. For the undergraduate, then, this equitable view of writing and rhetoric would be an invitation to the Academy as colleague, and not solely a consumer. Student folklore, student ethnography, community writing, service learning -- all show the student how his life experience is still valid, even when leaving that life for the different life of the academy. 

The requirements for the degree seem like an investment, but sometimes these are more distractions. Still, my choice of courses and extracurricular activity reflect this drive to empower [ug] students at every level, making them responsible for their own learning. This, by the way, is one of the reasons I have committed myself to writing, as it is one of the few fields in the academy that actually expect the student to demonstrate responsibility and that teaches self-efficacy. It’s not math or history, or even biology or even business that actually expect the student to think, act, read for herself. It’s almost exclusively writing that permits the student, especially in her first years, to act as an individual, a person with voice. All others fields, at least at the lower division standing, are impostors

It’s also teaching that drives me. I’ve sat in too many classes … hundreds? … over my life being the recipient or victim of the whole spectrum of teaching. I’ve sat in college classes taught so poorly that I brought my own novels to read during the lecture. I know I aced those classes, but doubt I could recall anything from the courses. It’s only in these courses where the instructor respects the students, learns from the student, where the student feels safe enough to learn not only himself [Preposition:Identifying the agent performing an action], but also himself [Preposition: In support of or in favor of]. It’s using ethnography, folklore, understanding these universal experiences of work and class, that I can appreciate how writing becomes validated for all people and how, I think, students can begin to appreciate that as well.

My investments are the need for long-term employment, and that whole Maslow thing -- self-actualization. Yes, I believe in changing a community change, but I also realize that the powers that are destroying community are larger than what I/we have to offer. I’m not an idealist. Still, I refuse to forget the individual in the face of cultural change. The honest truth is, though, that I’m a better organizer than a scholar -- I can make things happen, but I don’t think like scholars think. In this sense, then, I’m a great match for the community college.

Booth, alluding to Austin, says that “ordinary language does not merely describe (and often distort) surroundings, but actually performs actions, changing the world … it remakes reality, rather than merely reflecting or distorting it” (67). I’ve begun to believe that; I didn’t always believe that. I’m not sure if I will believe it in the future. But, if it is true, then our field must reach out to the more public one. We must resist the Santorums of the world [those in high places and those who just troll the Houston Chronicle web pages] who believes that the academy are solely indoctrination mills, that “the indoctrination that is going on at the university level is a harm to our country." There must be some community to enable this; some public larger than the classroom. And so I would really like to see a public PhD, but I’m not sure what that looks like. Could we bring secondary teachers into the classroom, give them credit, even certification hours? Could we bridge with other universities, campuses, secondary sites, public publications to work together on public rhetoric? The non-public in our work is that its attention on pedagogy is focused on higher ed pedagogy. I would like to see more secondary ed pedagogy and then the whole “let’s get out into the world and stop the rhetrickery.” Perhaps an outreach program for Project Row Houses, to teach people to write -- not creative writing, not literacy (but that, too), but how to write letters to bureaucracies, government officials, newspapers, others. There should be a service component of every degree in a public university. There must be a community component to every degree, especially in public universities. Until even this field, which claims so much to reach out and represent the un-voiced, until this field makes itself leave the campuses and show the suspicious world around us that rhetoric is something that everyone has but not everyone understands, then the field will eventually collapse around its own ideals with no support from the nation at large. But now I’m sounding like an idealist, and I’m not an idealist.

Bibliography

Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Rhetoric. Malden MA: Blackwell, 2004. Print.

Be strong, and courageous.
Dixi et salvavi animam meam
Google +
Twitter @comstone
Professional Blog