Peckham: Argument, the Working Class, and Latino Working Class Students (Pt 1)

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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 ideas into words with schema such as thought play, staging scenarios, using analogies, and resting and “incubating.” To demonstrate that heuristics are not useful only for creativity, the cognitivists show that some of these problems to be solved are not only of invention or material use, but also of questions that relate to audience. Seeing that some writers fail to effectively communicate their ideas to their audience, cognitivists see a dichotomy in “writer-based” prose which would be adequate for personal writing but which falls short in academic and professional writing because it fails to transform the internal expressions of the author and also fails to transform private thought into reader-based expression. In contrast, “reader-based” prose deliberately attempts to communicate to a reader. Effective prose, then, requires a cognitively demanding transformation of private expression into structure and style adapted to the reader (Flower, “Writer-Based Prose” 19-20). Piaget's and Vygotsky's ideas of children's egocentric and inner speech show the limitations of seeing objects as complexes. Similarly, the cognitivists believe they can explain why grammatical errors such as fragments occur – because in the writer's mind, the thought makes sense, but in the reader's mind, connection and relationships are lacking. Though neither Piaget nor Vygostky should be considered cognitivists, their observations are used by cognitivists to explain a relationship between the personal talk that all writers use as they negotiate dealings with the real world. Egocentric speech or writer-based prose is not simply a stage of communication maturity, but something all of us use and fall back on in the composition process. It also explains why some adult writers prepare a text that is sufficient for their own internal use, but which often lacks connection with the reader. Again, the writing process is seen as goal-oriented, as a problem to be solved.]

Peckham argues that writers recognize social context as being self-evident or in need of substantiation (67) -- the crux of argument, which Peckham notes has become the catechism of second semester writing courses, moving from the personal narrative-centered first semester, homologous with working class literacy, to a middle class expectation of rhetorical equanimity through argument. Given a topic and often the staid template of classical argument, the student is expected to present her argument first generalized, focused in a thesis, supported with objective "evidence" (and researched/ formatted/ cited sources, which Peckham does not note is often a means of the middle class faculty eliminating the student from the conversation because of an artificial publication convention). Peckham also overlooks the creation, distribution, censorship, and other filters of the "evidence" that are accepted and validated within the FYW course. For example, the first person history, ethnographies, heritage anecdotes/folktales/dichos/etc., and other forms of evidence that would be considered fractured, singular, and otherwise non-objective, but still very "true" to those who experience those truths. This is not the same problem as the inability to distinguish one's point of view from others -- the inability of adolescents to notice or validate the shades of gray in arguments, or of extremist ideologues among the many spectra are well-documented (Shor)-- and that is not Peckham's focus here.

Bourdieu (1984) explains that the distancing of the middle class rhetoric, the objectification and multiple perspectives enabled therein, is a depersonalization from things -- that is, the things of necessity, "enabling the aesthetic disposition" (68, citing Bourdieu). By creating this distance from the things of necessity, one becomes impersonal, able to appeal to logic rather than emotion. The argument here, then, is that the middle and upper classes, no longer needing to focus on survival and sustenance -- those stages where things such as food, transport, clothing, the body -- can claim a position of objectivity and engage in ideas and becoming, instead of simply being.

This stance of objectification is the central ethos of FYW and especially a second semester of "argument" where these middle class values are situated as the objective of the course, while a) the experiences of the individual, especially the working class student and b) the language and resources of the working class student are excluded from consideration. The course, then, devalues personal experience and validates gross generalizations that can be "researched" through databases and bound books, through the ecology of the quants and allusions to middle and upper class geographies and literacies (ie, museums, philosophers, politicians, western histories) which are alien to working class experiences and to which most working class students have either never been exposed to, have been only obliquely exposed to in the problematic schooling spaces of underfunded public education, or even mocked by their own ecologies as foolish and fruitless. Think Bugs Bunny ridiculing the upper class by drinking tea with pinky finger extended.

I argue, in parallel, that it is not the community college's responsibility to "expose" working class students to middle class culture, nor non-white students to white culture. Instead, it is the college's responsibility to teaching critical inquiry into one's own background and culture to for both validation, critique, and for change. This last proposal assumes that a) all cultures do change and that b) all cultures must change to survive. In other words, though I enjoy the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston as much as anyone, the cultures represented there are not any more valuable than the cultures of the barrio, either linguistically, artistically, or textually. It is only through time and conquest that some cultures are valued over others. The dominant culture validated in MFAH's most hallowed wings also represent -- not uncharacteristic of any other culture -- greed, rapine, lasciviousness, infidelity, and any number of Machiavellian strategies to create both topic of the art and the economic environment to support the art-making. We can praise western civilization for giving us capitalism, but that capitalism gave us Enron and Exxon, too.

Back to the classroom. Given that many of our textbooks and our faculty a) do not come from or represent working class histories and b) especially among departments where few faculty -- full-time or contingent -- have much experience with working class or non-dominant-culture ecologies, this immediately presents both a basic linguistic and overall rhetorical barrier for working class, especially multicultural working class students must overcome if to pass the (often required) writing course to advance through the community college and other university degree requirements. As the course has been objectified and reified -- deaf to decades of research and theory to explain this research -- the middle class ethos has become the central "standard" of FYW, ignoring the background, heritage, and living memory of the working class multicultural students. More than ignoring these, often these students are portrayed as being deficient insomuch as their linguistic skills, their discourse patterns, their rhetorical ecologies are alien to the institutionalized classist position of traditions and texts -- formal and informal -- created within the college to maintain its simultaneous sway with and restraint over their largest customer base, that is, the first year student required to take this very profitable course.

[End Part I]
[Part 2]

See also
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice. Harvard University Press, 1984. Print.

Flower, Linda and John Hayes. “Problem-Solving Strategies and the Writing Process.” College English 39.4 (December 1977): 449-61. Print.

Shor, Ira and Caroline Pari, eds. Critical Literacy in Action. Heinemann Press, 1999. Print.


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