Writing Matters: Rhetoric in Public and Private Lives

THREE. “Authority” in the Writing Classroom

“Authority” is a troubled term today, I wish to argue, precisely because of the ethical issues it raises for teachers of writing and reading. I hope to foreground what I take to be the crux of these issues by sketching in two very different scenes. In the first, two bright and talented graduate students are reflecting on “authority.” One remarks that he has dropped the term altogether from his statement of teaching philosophy: “I spent most of the term writing in my journal about ethical issues of authority—my authority in the classroom, the authority of published authors, the authority of academic discourse, and so on. It occurred to me . . . that the term authority carried with it, at least in my mind, negative connotations . It suggests a top-down pedagogy, where the teacher and his pet theorists are in the know and students are in need of enlightenment ” (Grey). Another student preparing for a research project on writing worries about the ethics of ethnographic techniques, knowing that interpretation inevitably involves some degree of appropriation . “For this reason,” she says, “I believe it is important to Three “authority” in the writing classroom share our stories and interpretations with informants, to negotiate with them in the construction and telling. This is a practice that, I’m embarrassed to admit, I don’t often carry out when I write essays. For as much as I fear and question my own authority and interpretations, I don’t hand them over to others easily. The fact that other interpretations may differ significantly from my own is both frightening and disconcerting to me; this fear largely results from my conservative religious upbringing where interpretations were not negotiable, where certain interpretations (mainly the interpretations of men) were authoritative and privileged, and all others were deemed wrong” (Goldthwaite). Compare these two graduate students’ thoughts on the ethics of teacherly authority to the following paraphrase of a college president ’s remarks at a national conference on ethics and teaching. “I love authority,” he said, and he went on to say that he used authority “powerfully” in all his classrooms, as did those great teachers that he held in such high regard, and that students “better all know this” before they take his course. Whereas the graduate student teachers were wary of “authority” because it represents, potentially, power over others (and particularly over students), the president suggests that such authoritative power, if based on respect due deep knowledge and experience, can be used appropriately to inspire students. Now presidents are by definition in positions of extraordinary power while graduate student teachers are not, but I pass over the remarkable power differential at work here to focus instead on these two competing senses in which “authority” can inform classroom teaching , for the operative definition will contribute substantially to the ethos of any class and may in fact be the most significant factor in 36 ~ Chapter Three establishing that ethos. In the remarks that follow, I intend to trace my own understandings of the term “authority,” to reflect on how negative associations with “authority” can work against our best efforts at establishing ethical classroom communities, and to suggest that unless we can recuperate a positive idea of authority—as a source of knowledge and experience we can and should respect—we may be better off to eschew the term altogether. In “On Authority in the Study of Writing,” Gesa Kirsch and Peter Mortensen offer an extremely valuable analysis of the term “authority ,” review feminist critiques of the term and its practices, and argue that those in composition studies should try to move “beyond a notion of authority based on autonomy, individual rights, and abstract rules” and toward a classroom model and a classroom ethos “based on dialogue, connectedness, and contextual rules” (557). That is to say, we should try to enact a model that would combine the best of the president’s vision of authority with the best of the graduate students’ thinking on how to act responsibly in terms of our own classroom authority. Indeed, on the face of it, such a move should be possible, at least definitionally, for—as Hannah Arendt notes—the word “authority” is related etymologically to Latin terms for “augment ” (“augere,” meaning “to make to grow, to promote or increase”) and, of course, “originate” (as in the word “author”). These terms all suggest connection and reciprocity. As a 1602 text has it (with an...