Reflections on Leaving the CWC
As we finish the academic year 2015-2016 at the Center for Writing and Communication (CWC) at the University of Memphis, I wanted to leave some reflections on my experience there.
The CWC was created two years ago somewhat parallel with the entrance of the new incoming president of the university, M. David Rudd. The leadership structure mandated in its founding wisely (to me) paired the English and Communication departments, on the basis of a shared commitment to foundational courses in writing and speaking. I prefer to think of this pairing, as well, in terms of a shared rhetorical pedagogy: a dynamic view of discursive processes as active, audience-dependent, and argumentative. The CWC employs two students, one from each department, in the position of Graduate Assistant Director. My role in this capacity began last August, 2015, and will conclude at the end of the upcoming week Thursday, April 28, 2016.
As a representative of the Communication department, I felt responsible for supporting our tutors ("consultants") in the Oral Communication curriculum, our Comm 2381 course. One of the first things I did last fall was to scour every page of our required textbook to pull out a list of general topics covered in the course. Then I made reference sheets and put them into binders to lay around the CWC in case anyone wanted to use them during a consultation.
The idea was to provide a common starting point for consultants and clients on most of the possible topics which might arise, including brainstorming, research, outlines, polishing style or transitions, and doing a practice run-through. On this latter point, we have a recording studio with a ceiling microphone and a large monitor for displaying visual presentations (Powerpoint, Prezi, etc.). Clients who brought in a USB flash drive or laptop would be able to leave with a split-screen recording of the video of their performance on one side, and their slideshow on the other.
It has taken consultants some time to grow used to these "technologies." Use of the recording studio increased over the past year from a starting point of zero, because no one knew how to use it at first. The reference sheets were not used as frequently as I had hoped, but I used them myself whenever I met with a client working on a Comm 2381 assignment. More than once a client asked if I could make a copy of one of the reference sheets. I still think the sheets have potential for advanced work in speech design, research, and style, and I plan to incorporate some of these exercises when I teach in the future.
On another side of curriculum development, I took part in planning and leading several writing-skills workshops. My colleague Donald Moore and I led a workshop last fall on developing research questions and outlines for an audience of University College students. The most interesting discussion to come out of that workshop, to me, surrounded the idea of a thesis statement, that ubiquitous creature of writing and speech curricula.
My philosophy of the thesis is such that it can arrive in two ways. I am working through this myself, so I will provide cases from my own research. I think in most cases true thesis statements arrive as a very final word or conclusion to a methodical study. The writer may "sense" an incipient thesis while approaching a given material (in science called an "hypothesis"), but confident utterance typically does not arrive until evidence has been sorted and weighed.
For example, my mentor and friend Jack Selzer argues for the predominance of the French personae of Charles Baudelaire and Jules Laforgue in Kenneth Burke's early poetry (Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village, University of Wisconsin Press: 1996, pp. 72-79). I began to suspect and look for a corresponding English influence. I now hope to argue that admiration for George Meredith, along with a temperamental resistance to British aesthetes Walter Pater, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Oscar Wilde, on the one hand, and the romantic effusiveness Burke perceived in Lord Byron, on the other, may have had a greater impact. Part of this claim hinges upon documentary evidence that Burke does not begin writing to his friend Malcolm Cowley about French literature until well after he had written many of the poems Selzer cites. It is not an air-tight thesis, and Selzer did not have access to the documents now available. But it would be impossible for me to formulate such a claim at the beginning of the research process. The thesis concludes an inductive inquiry.
In other cases, more startling and rare, I believe a thesis rises out of what Kenneth Burke might call a "mass of squirming sensations" (see Paul Jay, ed., The Selected Correspondence of Kenneth Burke and Malcolm Cowley, Viking: 1988, p. 16) to synthesize or crystallize an insight all at once. I believe I came up with such a thesis in correspondence with Dr. Selzer recently, as I was describing my research process to him. I wrote,
The idea that Kenneth Burke 'abandoned' aesthetic later to turn rhetorical is an institutional prejudice. Rather, it is important to learn how his aesthetics already contained the developments of the '30s, or how it learned them. This is the basis for re-uniting rhetoric and aesthetics, which never should have been separated in the first place.
Dr. Selzer agreed with me, and one of those "breakthrough" thesis statements was achieved. If it can be called "deductive" to correspond with the "inductive" poetry example above, then it was not externally assembled from logical parts. Rather it fused under pressure of the synthetic imagination always at work. It took a long protracted process of meditation and integration, much of it done sub-consciously, as one tends to dream of one's dissertation. We cannot hope all students will pursue their projects synthetically with the same intensity, but we can show them that such intensity is possible. To make the thesis more difficult, but more human, de-mystifies it.
I seem to have digressed from my discourse on the Center for Writing and Communication, but in truth the need to present research workshops to students pushes me further in my work. And my own work is the best reservoir I know from which to "invent" the components of my instruction. So I thank especially Lorraine Meiners-Lovel, Senior Project Coordinator for University College, for inviting us to work with their students. I did a similar, briefer, workshop for Cornell Sneed's ACAD 1100 class last fall, and my colleague Chuck Robinson and I conducted two more workshops for University College this spring. We may not have reached every student, but we did reach some of them, and it was a good learning experience for us too. While I'm thanking people, I must include William Duffy, the CWC's Interim Director for the past two years. He provided support and encouragement for these collaborations.
The last collaboration I want to mention has just recently ended. Mollie Anderson, a psychology professor, contacted us to coordinate visits to the Center for group projects, including visual presentations. We recruited a group of 9 or 10 consultants to handle these special appointments. Chuck and I visited Dr. Anderson's classroom and had everyone fill out forms and register for our software. Each group of clients had its own situation: some were very prepared and ready to practice, while others still needed help on the earlier stages. Anecdotally, the whole affair went smoothly. I was pleased and we got to show off some of our fancy technology at the same time!
I will wrap up this post with an explanation of the photograph below, and an inspirational quotation from a book I read a few months ago. First, I took the photograph at the Southeastern Writing Center Association Tennessee branch's Writing Center Director's Day, hosted by Middle Tennessee State University (Murfreesboro, TN) on April 2, 2016. Chuck and I attended and were very impressed by MTSU's Writing Center led by the admirable Dr. Bené Cox, Caty Chapman, and Dr. James Hamby. I took a photo of their consultant development bookshelf, which made my few efforts at the beginning of last fall seem meager by comparison. Even though the photo is a bit blurry, it shows how an institution can grow pedagogically.
And the inspirational quotation, from Henri Bergson's 1907 masterpiece L'Évolution Créatrice, translated into English by Arthur Mitchell in 1911. It's for anyone out there struggling with a thesis statement; it exhorts you to take a breath, keep working, and remain patient:
"We possess the elements of the problem; we know in an abstract way, how it will be solved, for the portrait will surely resemble the model and will surely resemble also the artist; but the concrete solution brings with it that unforseeable nothing which is everything in a work of art. And it is this nothing that takes time." (p. 341)
