The Better Part of Pedagogy

Pedagogy is the forgotten subject in higher education. As college and university administrators demand ever more attention to assessment and the development of "outcomes," faculty sometimes respond by lamenting the rise of "service" courses and by continuing, even intensifying, their scholarship as a way of reasserting the priorities of their professional lives. The subject of teaching is often lost in the struggle to define what the university will be. David Bleich's (2001) "The Materiality of Language and the Pedagogy of Exchange" reverses that unfortunate trend, reconfirming the fundamental link between scholarship and teaching.

Bleich's essay makes an important contribution to what others have called an ecological model of language (Cooper and Holzman 1989; Barton 1994), a metaphor that arises in Bleich's essay as well. Blending work reclaimed from language philosophers with treatments of genre in literary studies and writing theory, Bleich articulates an approach to language study that circumvents the polarized conception of writing as either expression or conformity--what in composition has been a stalemate between those who value the sanctity of "voice" and those who value the power of "discourse." By enlarging the discussion about the subject of writing pedagogy to include materiality and genre, Bleich brings together two divergent strands of thinking about language in order to make an argument for the primacy of pedagogy.

As a writing teacher and as one who teaches teachers of writing, I am especially interested in materiality's pedagogical consequences. Because most of us tire of "repeated searches for the right formula that will solve the conundrum of writing pedagogy and turn out 'good writers' fast" (Bleich 1998: 229), I imagine that many teachers will find compelling Bleich's advocacy for a pedagogy that attends to students instead of subjects. Yet the concepts of materiality and genre are unsettling to a commonsense view of language, to say nothing, for the moment, of the challenge they pose to our usual picture of classroom teaching. Here I hope partly to clarify what it might mean to see our subject so differently. I am encouraged by Bleich's insistence that materiality is understood best under conditions of exchange, because by identifying the situatedness of our language, we cannot help but change our relationships to literacy even as we continue to speak.

Rejoining Curriculum and Pedagogy

The overarching concern in Bleich's essay is the inseparability of curriculum and pedagogy. It is important to remember this premise, because, however one might dispute his claims about materiality or genre, Bleich's aim is always pedagogical; that is, the point of presenting materiality or genre in new ways is to understand how classrooms might be configured differently as the subject of language changes. Owing to the complexity of his argument, this primary consideration is not always immediately visible (for example, as Bleich works out a response to traditional genre studies). But always the link between teaching and subject is foremost.

Bleich's reconfiguration of writing pedagogy relies on recovering and maintaining an explicit relationship between subject matter and its study. Indeed, he declares that "language use as a formal subject matter necessarily includes its pedagogy" (Bleich 2001: 118). This is a very unusual claim. Most teachers learn to treat subject matter apart from pedagogy, assuming that the modes of teaching are unrelated to the material to be taught. Certainly, the subject-matter emphasis of graduate education and secondary-school training testifies to the presumed unimportance of pedagogy. But if all language "must appear in genres" (126), if there is no language outside of language in use, then there is no subject for a course outside of its enactments in the pedagogy we embrace.

Linda Brodkey (1996) makes a similar case for understanding the relationship between pedagogy and curriculum in Writing Permitted in Designated Areas Only. Addressing the institutional reception of multiculturalism --one of several post-1970s curricular responses to the real contexts of students' lives--Brodkey repudiates higher education's "tendency to conflate curriculum and pedagogy," arguing that higher education is more mindful of...