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Re-Valuing Student Writing 17 the FYC site and FYC student writing, not as dooming any projects to be pursued there, but as working conditions to be worked by teachers and students both: to be put to use, that is, despite the low exchange value ordinarily assigned to activities conducted in such conditions. The alternative , in fact, is spurious in its literal im-materiality: to assume either that any other kind of writing can or does take place free from social, institutional, and historical circumstances, or that student writing is somehow removed from these—that students, their writing, and the first-year writing courses where they are found are somehow imaginary. But, as Charles Bazerman has wryly observed, “If we start analyzing the first-year writing course[,] we find it is a very real place” (1995b, 254). Confronting this material reality involves overcoming two ideological challenges. First, while, as Trimbur acknowledges (2000), there is no escaping the in loco parentis, intimate domestic character of social relations obtaining in the FYC course, we need to recognize that this character does not entirely determine those relations or the work produced there. Counter to what is implied by the invocation, familiar to anyone moderately steeped in composition scholarship and teacher-corridor talk, that “the teacher, after all, has the power of the grade,” such power does not, in fact, eliminate all possible value or authenticity to student writing and the kinds of social relations that might obtain in an FYC course. There are two problematic assumptions to claiming otherwise. On the one hand, there is the assumption that the in loco parentis situation itself obtains only within the rarefied sphere of the academy, rather than being a characteristic of all writing. But it is manifestly the case that display, after all, or the desire to display and “perform” for evaluation , operates in virtually all writing, in and outside the academy. On the other hand, despite in loco parentis, good work can be accomplished. Students, like the rest of us, can accomplish useful work despite the fact that doing so might earn them good grades, just as academics can produce useful writing that gets published despite the fact that publications inevitably add lines to their vitas, and just as professional writers can produce valuable books despite the fact that doing so adds to their incomes (Brandt 2009). To think otherwise is to assume that a commodity ’s exchange value negates any possible use value it might have. The notion that the academic setting of FYC restricts the value of what it is possible for students to accomplish in their writing points to a second challenge teachers face in attempting to engage their students in useful work as FYC students: the sense that conventionally academic 18 TEAC H In G WI T H ST U D En T T ExT S writing of the sort frequently assigned in FYC courses is by definition of no “real” value (signaled by its denigration as being “merely ‘academic ’”). There is a long history of compositionists responding to academic institutions’ denigration of composition by returning the favor and denigrating academic work. This leads to valorizing writing that is recognizably non-academic in its formal conventions and to denigrating the value of writing assignments that have students take on conventional tasks, such as producing readings of published texts (France 1993). But such responses fetishize particular forms or genres for the work accomplished in their production. Those who valorize writing recognizably nonacademic in its formal conventions (and who doubt the value of writing conforming to academic formal conventions) confuse the work of those involved in the writing with the forms themselves: it is only by doing so that they can conclude that changing the forms will by itself change the value of the work the writing accomplishes. Likewise, those who reject the value of student work taking the form of “readings” accept the dominant’s denial of the contributions that the labor of reading makes to the production of the use value of writing by assuming instead that the value of writing resides in the textual commodity. Alan France (1993), for example, complains that pedagogies asking students to be “textual critics” place students in a “discursive position . . . divorced from political praxis, or in terms of traditional rhetorical education, from democratic agency in the public forum,” a position he derides as “no more politically enabling than the [role of] experiential soothsayer,” a role he sees expressivist pedagogies assigning to students (594, 602...

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