Know and Tell

It is common knowledge that writing teachers and writing instruction receive little status or authority within the university system. Composition courses are typically taught by underpaid graduate students and are usually regarded as a domain in which scholarly pursuit gives way to the study of technique. Most rhetorical handbooks, for example, explain that in such courses, students are expected to “learn the rules of academic discourse.” This platitude suggests that the point of the course is to teach students to devise interesting thesis statements and compose well-organized paragraphs, if only to demonstrate that they are capable of expressing the reasonable, coherent thoughts expected of university graduates.

Those of us who teach composition, however, know that much more is at stake than instruction in how to write a beautiful essay. The capacity to do so will earn one respect and privilege. Michel Foucault’s analysis of how power relations materialize in discourse is especially relevant to a composition class, which conventionally rewards students who successfully express themselves in socially sanctioned ways. For the writing instructor who seeks to understand the complexity of cultural struggles, the Foucault-inspired examination of language and power raises a pedagogical dilemma. Should she offer pragmatic lessons that teach students to “know the code” and gain access to authoritative speech, or does such an objective perpetuate the politics of domination that enable some representational strategies to garner social acceptability at the expense of others?

In Know and Tell: A Writing Pedagogy of Disclosure, Genre, and Membership, David Bleich gives this issue thorough attention and argues for the need to redefine the purpose of writing courses. Rather than initiate students into a membership of those who write like academics, the writing class can be a place in which students explore how their social identities are formed, in part, by the ways that they use language. Like other teachers, Bleich would have students think about how to represent the personally significant events in their academic lives. But his vision involves more than having students use “personal narrative” as a rhetorical strategy or even encouraging them to consider their audiences when devising statements that aim to persuade. These practices, while important, leave intact an organizational structure that configures the writing class as a place in which students constantly are judged as to whether they have worked hard enough on their own to acquire a specialized literacy. Bleich wants teachers and students to become partners in a writing community, with each member understanding that writing emerges from contingent, lived situations which affect how language is used and evaluated. Bleich uses the word “genre” to describe the various kinds of speech each of us practice at different moments in time, which signify our memberships within diversified communities. He argues that because all of our speech habits emerge from cultural contexts, no mode of speech should be considered more authoritative than should another. The question of whether any language practice is appropriate is determined by the social values of the speakers in a given situation. Hence, academic speech becomes one more rhetorical strategy rather than a privileged form that seems especially capable of representing the writing subject as a knowledgeable person. Indeed, within the terms of Bleich’s pedagogy, professors as well as students are called upon to understand and disclose how their social identities are formed and sustained by the languages that they speak.

By challenging the authority of academic discourse, Bleich seeks to do more than alter what happens within classrooms that focus on writing. He maintains that the devaluation of composition courses is indicative of the larger problems facing a university system that functions like a corporation while serving the state and a military-industrial complex. It is not merely ironic that writing teachers perform work considered essential to the corporate structure, yet have little power or authority of their own. Rather, their lowly status is effected by a system that replicates itself precisely by systematizing expectations about what constitutes legitimate speech. The power of that system...