Number 12: for the week of April 15, 2010

My dear readers,

The main overarching issue with that I see in this week's articles is the concept of ideology. What is it? How is it expressed? What role, if any, does it or should it play in the composition classroom of the new millennium? In her article "diversity, ideology, and teaching writing" Maxine Hairston, appears to make the claim, unless I am missing something, that ideology has no place in the composition classroom. Indeed I would argue she sees no room in the composition classroom for anything other than what we might think of as strict composition, that is grammatical considerations and just simply trying to figure out what it means to write.

Okay, I can see where she gets that since composition studies is a new discipline and she's trying to show it as separate from literary studies. However I think she goes too far. As I stated earlier in one of my previous blog entries I am an outer directed theorist as defined by Bizzell. In other words, I believe that nothing happens in a vacuum. However, according to Hairston apparently composition studies takes place in a bubble where nothing else has any business being at any time. Well, forgive me for saying so but that sounds to me like guarding the tower the first and most academically shortsighted stage of "diving in" by Mina Shaughnessy. All right, Madam Hairston so you don't want the writing class to be all about politics, eh? Fine neither do I to be honest with you. But in the same breath, you also don't want it to have anything to do with literature.

Again, fine. Remember though, that as Peter Elbow points out in his article, “reflections on academic discourse: how it relates to freshman colleagues" having students just write what they are comfortable with isn't necessarily productive either. Besides, even if students only write about their own experiences, all of those experiences are still going to be influenced by the world around them, which is itself literally dripping in ideology of one form or another because the people in it have ideological beliefs whether they realize them or not.

As Berlin points out a rhetoric can never be neutral or just an arbiter of cultural disputes because it is built by people that have a stake in those disputes. Show me one person who can truly be neutral on a topic about which they care passionately. I do not think you can do it. Nor would I expect you to be able to. Freire correctly points out that "all educational practice implies a theoretical stance on the educator’s part”. In other words, even by asking my students to call me "professor Altman" as opposed to "James" I am making the choice. I make the choice in this case because that is what I am used to, and more importantly that is what I believe is proper for an educator at any level. Why do I say this? Why am I uncomfortable with my students calling me by my first name? Simply put, I cannot recall ever taking a class where a teacher said for instance "call me Jack". In 1980s East Texas, and suburban Los Angeles, that just wasn't done. In fact, the one kid I saw try it got his face slapped. That was still legal in those days.

More importantly, my family taught me that to call a teacher Mr. or Ms. or professor or Doctor. was not simply good manners but was an acknowledgment of the hard road they had to travel to get to the point to where they had enough knowledge to be able to teach little old me. To call them by their first name would be to disregard everything that they had gone through and to try to place myself on an equal footing with them to which I was not entitled. Now did that mean all my teachers were aloof? Certainly not, but they all maintained the sort of respectful distance which I now try to maintain. It is the same thing when I open my blog entries with "my dear readers" I'm not trying to be pompous or anything, it just seems to me that that is the way for one to properly open this type of correspondence. Yes, as I see it a blog is a form of correspondence I treat it no differently than the letters I send my family, the only difference is this letter can be seen by anybody with a computer so I have to watch what I say language wise a little bit more than if I was back home in the Sierra.

Like I said earlier everything has to do with ideology whether we realize it or not, and that isn't always a bad thing. After all, everything has to have a point or why bother doing it. Shor, takes Freire’s ideas and begins to apply them to a real American classroom. I must admit that was the one thing I found missing when I first read Freire’s masterstroke "pedagogy of the oppressed" for English 791 with Stephen Brown as a master’s student. I loved the book and still do reread periodically but I remember complaining more than once that I needed to see how it would work in industrialized America as opposed to the Third World. Dr. Brown, as all good educators will, used my complaint, as a springboard to stir me to action saying that in fact I should not simply whine about a lack of example but should create that example in my own teaching. Thus I have strived to do ever since.

Mind you, I wonder how many people do especially after reading "students’ goals, gatekeeping, and some questions of ethics" by Jeff Smith. Gatekeeping in its traditional exclusionary sense makes me queasy, as it does Smith. I understand that standards must be set in any profession or endeavor. That is a sort of quality control measures, if you like. It ensures that persons within a profession actually know how to do what they claim they can do. I'm all for that. The problem is gatekeeping is more often used to keep out those who might challenge or change outdated practices, or more generally cause headaches for the elite by reminding them that not everyone is elite. In this respect, I'm reminded not only of Mike Rose and his ideas that rhetoric can be exclusionary, but also of "Inventing the University". Recall that in that article we were faced with the theory that every student in every class must relearn or learn to begin with how to communicate within academic discourses. Those who were able to do so more fluently we call successful, those who struggled we call below average or any one of 100 things rose brings up as possible reasons why people are excluded from opportunities in every walk of life. At the core of all that is the idea that every system of gatekeeping because it is created by human beings who are influenced by ideology will itself contain an ideological slant which would favor some at the expense of others. While I grant you no system is perfect, do we not owe it to those whom we teach to at least understand and come to terms with the ideological harnesses with which we either hoist them up into the Academy or cast them down into the "real world"?

Thank you so much for your time,

James Altman