Designing a Composition Course

I have now finished my Ph.D. and my first year as an Adjunct Professor. Here's a report from the field. I started graduate school in 2006 at San Diego State University, and in many respects my first impression, there, of the teaching culture in higher education has been the deepest.

The Composition curriculum in their outstanding department of Rhetoric and Writing Studies comprehended one of the key insights that graduate students learn in seminars, our postmodern inheritance: there is no positive, only a set of differences. A grand metaphor for this difference emerged from the writings of Kenneth Burke, the "parlor" of his essay "The Philosophy of Literary Form." In humbler terms, it is the "conversation." To emphasize the conversational nature of academic discourse, the San Diego State program assigned a thin book as a supplement to their standard texts, a book called They Say/I Say, then in its first edition.

This book, now in its 3rd edition, has captured what I have found in 10 years to be the most difficult thing to teach in a composition course: there is no positive, only a set of differences. It may take me a moment to explain this, but I will show how, at long last, this book came to my rescue and I am approaching something of the ideal I imagined 10 years ago.

As an undergraduate at Yale, the most important lesson I got from a writing teacher was to abandon the thesis statement and follow the stubborn unknown in my reading process. What part of that poem gave you the most difficulty? Where did you have to pause and re-read, and why do you think that is? Start from a problem, and write your way from there. The thesis statement will follow. I remember writing a paper comparing the homeless people on the nighttime streets of New Haven, CT, to Wordsworth's blind Beggar:

lost

Amid the moving pageant, I was smitten

Abruptly, with the view (a sight not rare)

Of a blind Beggar, who, with upright face,

Stood, propped against a wall, upon his chest

Wearing a written paper, to explain

His story, whence he came, and who he was. (Prelude VII. 636-42)

It was me and the poem. One professor (in a different class) criticized me for being too "impressionistic." I didn't know what that meant at the time, but eventually I decided that he felt I didn't make an argument.

I kept reading literary criticism after college, mostly the books of Harold Bloom. These books sent me off to read the poets, Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane especially. Through reading Hart Crane's letters I first learned about Kenneth Burke. At some point through my early twenties, as I thought about communication and the theater, Burke's A Grammar of Motives hit me like a thundercloud.

I didn't have a vocabulary for it, but I came to understand, through Burke first, that a paper needs an audience. My undergraduate teachers had kindly allowed me to play my own audience, in the style of a diary (a mode the young Kenneth Burke abhorred, yet later attempted). At San Diego State I encountered a department that embodied this new philosophy, and its key text was They Say/I Say. The preface of the most recent edition quotes Burke's parlor metaphor, but its main idea comes back to the problematic of audience.

The simple premise of They Say/I Say is that in order to write, you must articulate your difference with someone else, to a third party. Harold Bloom had prepared me for this view by declaring that all poems are written against other poems, competing for imaginative space beyond the grave. Kenneth Burke defines "form" as "the creation of an appetite in the mind of the auditor, and the adequate satisfying of that appetite" (Counter-Statement 31). I have chased this elusive ideal my entire life as a teacher.

As I moved from institution to institution, I realized how difficult this is. The normal expectation for education, in students, teachers, and administrators, is positive. There is something positive to do, to learn, to gain, to accomplish. I had spent the better part of my mental powers between the ages of 18 and 27 unlearning this attitude, disabusing my self of the thesis statement. Then I discovered that almost all textbooks and schools have something positive to sell. Students pay and expect to receive something positive in return. I have never been able to give them this, and I even discourage, implicitly or explicitly, students from desiring such a goal.

The main lesson of all education is negative. How do you teach a "controversy"? Conflicting voices? The contingent nature of knowledge? It is not about what you say, but how you respond. You cannot escape the problematics of listening and reading. I never cared for students to "report" some knowledge to me like an encyclopedia, so I am less kind than my own undergraduate teachers: I refuse to let it just be about the students and their knowledge. That is plagiarism city anyways, as they can find a thousand "reports" on the Internet.

If we are to take the concept of audience seriously, we open into a hall of mirrors, each with a razor's edge of defensiveness that comes with all discourse. Harold Bloom's insights about competition are not neglected. How do you teach the interest and bias of all sources? So many public speaking courses, for instance, stress a difference between "information" and "persuasion." Information is supposed to be neutral and universal. Persuasion implies something "extra": as Aristotle might have put it, the ethos of culture and the pathos of suffering.

The same programs that serve these positivistic textbooks and curricula insist upon relativism in their graduate courses. No stable reference for truth! The constant relativism of Protagoras and Gorgias, Plato be damned! I agree with relativism. Yet we must have something positive to give, something positive to take home. I want to teach the challenge of uncertainty, the everlasting "no," not as a discouragement, but as a stimulus. The eloquent articulation of "no" is the substance of all poetry and religion, and the skeptical foundation of intelligent discourse.

I can work within any syllabus if given time, but if students have to buy a textbook, I will teach the textbook. Which brings me to Christian Brothers University in Memphis. I got a request to teach a night class in Composition for the adult professional program last fall. The course was in a stage of transition, so many of the details were unwritten, but the core was the textbook They Say/I Say. All of a sudden it was like a breath of fresh air.

I tried this textbook out on the English 120 course at Christian Brothers twice, under the supervision and permission of the program. I also began taking their online training program, through Comcourse. I may have the opportunity in the future to write more on this blog about the training, but part of it involves designing the Course Overview and Weekly Overviews of an 8-week online or "hybrid" course.

Part of the training, I learned, also involves capitulating to positivism. I was ok with this. For instance, the normal educational view in developing learning objectives relies on Bloom's Taxonomy (no, not Harold Bloom). This was helpful to consider, partly because I often take for granted my own learning, over the years, of how to read. I was an actor in high school, so I learned to ask what the text wanted me to do, whom it wanted me to be. The idea of "responding" to a text makes sense to me based on that experience.

The average college student of any age must learn many different layers. Bloom's Taxonomy, helpful in breaking down more and less difficult cognitive skills, does not prove entirely adequate. The highest stage of the pyramid, "create," relies on an individualistic, positive model of the romantic and scientific subject we are supposed to discard.

I don't mind the positive subject in writing -- I just insist on individuality, not anonymity. Proper names, the sometimes ugly national history of letters (politics of the English language), the influence of money in the production of discourse, the list could go on. How can you begin to fit all this into the categories of ethos, pathos, and logos?

Just like the English did, through trial and error. As an adjunct, it was rare to receive permission to innovate and tinker with patience (from above) to fail and discover better tactics. The result is far from complete, but I have recently developed a prototype course overview. The next phase of the training is about assessment! Designing quizzes and grading rubrics, oy! The journey never ends. Strangely, I have realized, full circle, how difficult positivism can be. These things take time, and no one does a service by stating otherwise.

The more you teach a class, the more data you have as to which assignments work, in which order, the appropriate grading criteria, and any number of other factors that go into making a successful class. The genius of the San Diego State program was in having tenured faculty actively managing the Composition curriculum all the time--they changed the syllabus each year, wrote the prompts, designed smaller activities, and allowed teachers to choose their own texts after one year of teaching.

If you make an investment in your teachers and push them to make the curriculum better each term, while giving them the freedom to do so, it will add value to your university. Ultimately there are many higher skills to be learned in Composition, and one course can turn into a course sequence. It can be tailored to the mission of the university and the needs of the students, as the assessment literature mandates.

Still, whatever positive things we can learn, the negative, the difference, is always the greater achievement. At the end of the day, learning is difficult. It takes place in the reaction more than the action. You need to read before you can write. The teacher comes to occupy an important place, but the teacher always mediates between the institution and the students. And for those of us who can't help being students even when we leave school, the absence always invites more than the presence.