Letter to the Editor

January 20, 2009

Dear Radical Teacher:

Many thanks for the "Radical Teaching Now" feature in RT 83, edited by Jackie Brady and Dick Ohmann. I found it very moving and thought provoking. Jackie's and Dick's "Editor's Introduction" was a strong overview, too, which left me with a question. They say in the "Editor's Introduction": "… in writing programs that are busy trying to legitimize the field of composition and pushing their Ph.D's to professionalize, Freirean and other formerly radical classroom practices have been thoroughly domesticated, their original political purposes almost entirely lost. For these and other reasons, misconceptions of radical teaching are common." I do agree that many doctoral programs in comp/rhet apologize for the status quo and simply sustain the dismal subordination of comp to literature that was installed more than a century ago. I also agree that Freire is often studied carelessly and casually, too well known to ignore and too unsettling to the status quo to study in depth. Such a predicament for radical pedagogies in these hostile spaces appears partly "domestication" and partly political exclusion. Freirean critical literacy has been refused its place in the field along with other consequential schools of thought that have emerged (collaborative learning, expressivism, cognitivism, ethnography, service-learning, writing-across the-curriculum, writing-in-the disciplines, etc.). The professional organization in comp/rhet, the College Conference on Composition and Communication, has a long track record of excluding radical initiatives that surge into its midst, like the 1972 "Students' Rights to Their Own Language" Resolution, like the 1986 "Wyoming Resolution" against adjunct exploitation, like the 1986 "National Language Policy" initiated by Geneva Smitherman, and like the 2003 "Academic Quality Commission" which challenged adjunct exploitation but was derailed by the CCCC leadership as were the prior projects mentioned. When I proposed a Freirean panel for the CCCC Conference one year, it was rejected out of hand and then reinstated only upon my direct questioning. For this Freire session, the interest was apparent—a crowd filled the room—yet Freire papers proposed for subsequent conferences by my doctoral students were rejected. Another example of comp/rhet excluding critical options to the field can be seen in the 1987 Wye Conference on "What is English?" which asked Peter Elbow and Andrea Lunsford to produce reports on the discussions but did not commission any critical scholars like James Berlin or Sharon Crowley or Dick Ohmann. All in all, then, Freire's "domestication" by grad programs into a mere method to teach writing is only part of the story. The bigger story may be more conflictual, I think, the pushing of critical pedagogies outside institutional spaces threatened by such projects.

Ira Shor

Replies

Thanks to Ira Shor for this response, which helps me see some of what I missed, in living through and then looking back upon the years when teachers of college writing successfully professionalized their work, changing it from a disparaged sideline of literary studies to a partly separate discipline with its own body of knowledge (rhetoric) at the center of its practices, professional conferences, a growing number of journals, and—critically—Ph.D. programs and semi-autonomous writing programs in most universities. This structure largely supplanted the package of liberal arts improvisations and prejudices about usage that grounded the teaching of composition in the 50s, when I first did some of it. What struck me on looking back at this process much later (see "Politics and Commitment in Writing Instruction, As It Became a Profession," in my Politics of Knowledge, Wesleyan, 2003), was how the nascent profession had championed democratic, anti-racist, and egalitarian values in writing instruction, formerly a province of thinly disguised gentility—in sharp contrast to the way many academic professions had expunged political commitment when they and the modern university were taking shape. Well, all this is a crude simplification, perhaps tinged by sentimental memories of Wallace Douglas, Elisabeth McPherson, Richard Lloyd-Jones, Ernece B. Kelly, James Sledd, and others who responded sympathetically rather than fearfully to social movements in the 1960s. The warm reception of my own politics by...