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10~ THE POLITICS OF COMPOSITION Icelebrate teaching that enables transgressions-a movement against and beyond boundaries. It is that movement which makes education the practice of freedom. -bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress There's a canard about teaching that goes like this: "Just when you design the right syllabus, the wrong students walk in the door." Unlike academics who construct their pedagogical task as passing on knowledge (that is, unlike teachers in almost every other academic discipline), composition teachers profess the development of students' abilities. Hence the canard applies to their work with particular force. Preparing a syllabus involves making predictions about how a semester's work will be orchestrated. The obvious predictions made by a syllabus are about timing and pacing. But a teacher preparing a syllabus also makes predictions about who students are and what they want from her class, and she predicts as well how what she knows will be integrated into the class. An experienced teacher of writing knows that what she knows will be modified by the experience of teaching a composition class, and she must admit as well that the conduct of any class is affected by her desires as well as her health and her well-being. All of these things can change on a daily or even an hourly basis. When she is preparing a syllabus, she has to guess about how all of this will affect her plans as the group grows or shrinks, as students work together for fifteen weeks, and as their desires, health, and well-being affect classroom interaction. No wonder that syllabi are difficult to write. The teacher who prepares a syllabus is asked to make generalized predictions about a time-bound and localized activity. The activities that go on in writing classes may be much more localized and temporal than they are in a class where the aim is to impart knowledge rather than to improve abilities. And in other fields where it is important to impart skills to students, such as 21) 2r6-- 219 ring "in a sociopolitical milieu which ... at its worst is a cover for irresponsibility and laziness" (Patrick Shaw I 55). The adoption of process pedagogy marked a sea change in the politics of composition instruction, since process pedagogy is undeniably indebted to liberalism. Teachers who have adopted process pedagogy encourage novice writers to write as though they are free and sovereign individuals who have unimpeded access to their (supposedly unique) "selves." Each such individual is encouraged, as the textbooks say, to find her own voice. The free and sovereign individual is, of course, a central assumption of liberal thought (Arblaster). The liberal individual is imagined to possess the capacity to reason , which capacity insures his autonomy and sovereignty.' Liberals assume that this individual has clear and unmediated access to whatever desires motivate behavior; that is, with sufficient reflection, the sovereign individual can become aware of the reasons that support his decisions and actions. This reflection is assumed to occurin a perfectly private arena of individual thought, which is, ideally, uncontaminated by either communal memory or public discourse . That is to say, the private reflecting individual of liberalism is thought to be able to make rational decisions about behavior as though these decisions were not affected by the ideologies that circulate in culture, his history, or his desires and those of others.z Conservatism and liberalism differ significantly in their assessment of the worth of human nature. While conservatives retain a healthy respect for the inherent human proclivity to go wrong, liberals assume that individuals are either inherently good or are subject to shaping toward it by supportive environments. Hence liberal educational theory is motivated by the metaphors of emancipation and empowerment (Bowers). Unlike conservatives, who assume that the point of education is to acquaint new generations with respected traditions, liberals assume that the point of education is to help individuals get better at whatever they want to do. Education accomplishes this by enhancing individuals' capacity to reason and to think through problems on their own. As a corollary of their faith in education, liberals assume that education allows individuals to overcome the impact of circumstances on their development. Indeed, liberals are fond of referring to such circumstances as class, race, and gender as "accidents" whose cultural liabilities can be overcome if individuals will only work hard enough and acquire sufficient education) Since liberalism rejects the authority of tradition and common sense-since, in short, it rejects ideology-liberal teachers must insist...

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