Two Feet In | Writing and the Institution

Previous post on Hannah Arendt and action = promise + forgiveness If I accept Arendt's proposition that action requires promise and forgiveness in an ideal public, or even to nurture a nascent public, then I also need to define that public as an associative one, not an agonistic one, such as our current social constitution today. Seyla Benhabib explains this where he argues that Arendt's vision of public is a liberal one, in the Kantian sense, such that liberalism is a culture where the question of legitimacy is paramount and necessarily consistent. Calling upon Ackerman “Whenever anybody questions the legitimacy of another’s power, the power holder must respond not by suppressing the questioner but by giving a reason that explains why he is more entitled to the resource than the questioner is” [Ackerman 14]. Ackerman understands liberalism as a way of talking about power, as a political culture of public dialogue based on certain kinds of conversational constraints. The m...

Rambling, Part I I'm rereading Long's  Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics  and thinking about how the institution of the community college fails in its approach to literacy because of its allegiance to the state system and not to the community which it claims to serve. They make two claims, both which meet the cultural expectation that "education leads to success": Community colleges are inexpensive institutions that provide accredited courses which transfer to four year institutions; the assumption there that it's the four-year degree -- not the two-year degree or certification -- that fulfills the promise that a college education leads to success "Careers, not jobs." Here, the claim is that, instead of starting entry-level in retail or the service industry, with few skills to meet the demands of globalist corporate practices that hire and fire at will, the community college student will gain skills that prepare for long-term ...

[ Part 1  where I introduce Peckham's discussion of argument and middle class "objectivity"] Di. "Spew" 10 October 2013. Flickr Creative Commons Objectivity, Redux  Peckham continues with the discussion of objectified pronouns, with the first person "I" largely permitted in most courses, though even there the first person must be objectified, "the writer in possession of her reason, language and stance" (69). Working-/ poverty-class students resist using the first person "I" in writing even in ethnographic or public discourse writing because of their secondary education training, even when it makes rhetorical sense with the project at hand. On the other hand, they tend to use the second person easily, naturally, as if somehow the first person has been drummed out of them but instruction about second person pronouns was overlooked. Something is happening, then, in secondary education about that author-as-expert vs author-as...

Creative Commons Peckham, Irvin. "Arguing." Going North, Thinking West: The Intersections of Social Class, Critical Thinking, and Politicized Writing Instruction . Logan UT: USUP, 2010: 67-85. Print. FYW's distinction is to see one's writing from the other's eyes. This goes back to Flower and Hayes and earlier -- the need for the author to write beyond himself, expecting a reader to experience and interpret.  As cognitive psychology progressed in the late 1970s, more specific applications of the social science were proposed for the composition course. In 1977, Carnegie-Mellon English professor Linda Flower directly proposed the use of problem-solving strategies in composition (Flower and Hayes, “Problem-Solving Strategies” 450-452). [Flower and her psychologist colleague John Hayes believed that heuristics open complex communication processes to the possibility of rational choice. These problem-solving strategies could help the struggling writer put idea...

[This was the post I was told to remove/unpublish]. Considering that a) it's an actual account of a public meeting where b) the Texas Open Meetings Act would validate all my account except the c) sardonicism, which is my First Amendment right to hold even if it might reflect poorly on my maturity, I re-post it here as an academic and intellectual inquiry. Read at your own risk.] "...culture and education aren't simply hobbies or minor influences. They are hugely important in the affirmation of differences between groups and social classes and in the reproduction of those differences" (Pierre Bourdieu,  "The Intellectual Class Struggle,"  New York Times , Jan. 6, 2001 ). After the current semester began, the faculty and staff began to receive multiple emails about a "College Forum" to be held, with breakfast  and that all are invited. First, as I tend to do, some etymology: college (n.)   "body of scholars and students within a univers...

Bartholomae, David. “Inventing the University.” When a Writer Can't Write: Studies in Writer's Block and Other Composing Problems. Ed. Mike Rose. New York:Guilford, 1985: 134-65. Rpt. in Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader Ed. Victor Villanueva, Jr. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1997. 589-620. Print. Deep within this canonical essay, Bartholomae addresses Flower's assumptions that struggling writers are not engulfed within “writer-based” prose or are egocentric; instead, such writers simply are not initiated or are comfortable with academic discourse. Whereas Flower sees the struggling student as having difficulties negotiating writer-based and reader-based prose, Bartholomae sees the student as shut out from the privileged languages of public life. As students navigate their way through the university, they essentially have to pretend they know how to do the writing they are being asked to do, before they actually know how to do it. St...