Starting Somewhere Better: Revisiting Multiculturalism in First-Year Composition

It has become something of a commonplace to assert that composition, perhaps more than any other aspect of English studies, has its scholarly endeavors firmly rooted in pedagogy. Because of those roots, we expect that compositionists will write about pedagogy; we also expect—almost without saying so—that no composition pedagogy will gain general acceptance without initial and continuing scrutiny by the field's best scholars. Yet most composition teachers can reach up to their office shelves and find at least one popular, mass-market textbook, designed explicitly for a first-year writing course, that also explicitly professes the teaching of an American multiculturalism as a central pedagogical goal. As a multicultural literature specialist in my earlier scholarly life, I would like to cheer "hurrah!" and count this a victory. As a compositionist, program administrator, and teacher-educator, however, I find myself wondering whether these textbooks and curricula are getting the necessary scholarly scrutiny. When did we agree that—beyond making our textbooks represent diverse views to better reflect our diverse students—we should also teach multiculturalism as a disciplinary focus in first-year writing courses? And when did we decide how this should best be done?

In the pages that follow, I argue that the field of composition studies, rather surprisingly, has not so agreed: we have not vetted multiculturalist pedagogies and their implications as carefully as we need to. To help ground further discussion, I begin by defining multiculturalism as distinct from diversity initiatives or cultural-studies approaches and set up parameters to examine how multiculturalism and first-year writing classes operate together on an institutional scale. I then evaluate the textual and human resources that we can currently rely on to support such a difficult pedagogical endeavor and find those resources to be sorely insufficient. Thus, until composition teachers and scholars devote more time and study to investigating and discussing how multiculturalism and first-year writing pedagogies can work together—an educational connection that I think is eminently worth our further consideration—I recommend at the very least a return of our more common pedagogical skepticism about the ease and likely successes of such a curricular combination. I also conclude that in some situations, stepping away from multiculturalist writing classes may be the best way to ensure the quality of both aspects of students' education, at least until more substantial institutional resources can be marshaled in support of such programs.

Maxine Hairston's "Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing" (1992) may appear to be evidence both that compositionists have indeed discussed this issue at length and that my own concerns have already been identified and dealt with. Hairston claimed, among other more moderate arguments, that many teachers who created "multicultural" writing classes were self-centered radicals who were spouting "nonsense," showing "open contempt for their students' values, preferences, or interests," and "threaten[ing] all the gains we have made in teaching writing in the past fifteen years" (184, 181, 188-89). Her article provoked a quick flurry of intense, oppositional responses. According to many of those who responded, Hairston, and by association those who might agree with her, were "neoconservative[s]" engaged in "a retreat from rhetoric" and discussion of a "naïve belief" that the "field ... [had already] moved beyond"; they patronized, underestimated, and indeed did not trust their students. ¹

The publicity and energy of this debate, however, camouflages an empty space at its center. Despite Hairston's (1992: 190) mention of "so-called multicultural courses," she and her critics were primarily concerned with cultural studies as an approach to teaching writing courses or were interested in attempts to teach writing to an increasingly diverse student body. Thus, discussion continued along those lines, inquiring about cultural-studies, antiracist, or critical-liberationist pedagogies, or investigating ways of teaching writing to students who come from a range of cultural, ethnic, racial, or gendered backgrounds. Multiculturalism, as other scholars have continued to discuss it, involves a wider-ranging examination of...