- In the Land of the Cited
"You cannot represent a field if you ignore half of it," wrote John Lovas (2002: 276), our late dear colleague. John was referring to an odd state of affairs in composition studies: the work of those who do most of the teaching of basic writing and first-year composition in this country—community college faculty—is rarely represented in our field's most visible scholarly publications. John had done his research:
You could read every issue of CCC [College Composition and Communication] from 1980 to now [2002] and have no sense that basic writing students are primarily two-year college students. When Donna Burn Phillips, Ruth Greenberg, and Sharon Gibson chronicled the history of CCC from 1950 to 1993, no mention of two-year colleges or their writing programs occurs in the article. No citations of two-year college work appear. In the February 2001 CCC, Michael Moghtader, Alann Cotch, and Kristin Hague report on "the first-year composition requirement revisited" in a survey exclusive to four-year institutions. The authors never reference two-year colleges or suggest that findings about "the first-year composition requirement" might differ in those institutions.
(275–76)
I am tempted to follow up on John's last point—a crucial one—that the teaching of first-year composition at two-year colleges is in a way sui generis. Given the complex and comprehensive missions of two-year colleges, it would hardly be surprising that the so-called universal writing requirement would differ at two-year colleges in substantive ways from its counterpart at universities. I am thinking, for example, of the impact of adult returning [End Page 397] students on the teaching of composition and literature—students who make up a significant portion of two-year college enrollment. While eager to obtain workplace literacies and learn what it takes to write well in an academic setting, these students expect more than mere utility from their course and more than simply an academic greasing of the tracks for course success. They want and rightly require that the course provide them with a way of apprehending the world, of making meaning from the odds and ends of experience. The question for them becomes not merely "What does this poem say?" but rather "How can it allow me to live a better life?" Within a composition course specifically, the question becomes not just "How can I write a better essay?" but "What can an essay do in the world?" Our teaching practice, in an effort to address such questions, must be connective and somewhat synthetic. It must reach across genres and across communities. And it must transcend argument and critique to create conditions that will foster meaning and belief.
The role of the two-year college scholar within the field of English studies may very well be to become, in Kurt Spellmeyer's (2003: 175) memorable phrase, "specialists with spirit" bridging the gap between expertise and common experience. In such a role, when two-year college faculty have their students read a work like Hard Times, they do not focus exclusively on the terms of literary analysis and critique (Dickens's use of satire and caricature). Two-year college faculty are prepared to mediate between such expertise and students' lived experience. Such faculty willingly frame a discussion of the novel within the context of work: what it means for their students to be "hands" for the Boss in the Big House and what it meant for Dickens's readers. At my own college, located in the former mill town of Fall River, Massachusetts—and not very far from the cradle of the Industrial Revolution in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and Lowell, Massachusetts—the memory of factory life is still powerful, as is the lived experience of economic displacement, high unemployment, and poverty. Classroom discussion of Dickens's novel must seek to tap into those memories and those lived experiences. The knowledge that faculty aim to promote in their students is, thus, embodied, rather than esoteric.
Their scholarship is embodied as well. Constructing, and drawing upon, richly textured classroom scenes and portraits of individual learners, even as it seeks to...