National Healing: Race, State, and the Teaching of Composition

More Than One

More Than One If compositionists know, now, at this point in the history of our discipline ’s development, that there is more than one rhetorical tradition in the world, why does the teaching of writing change so little, especially when our students do? It is beyond the scope of this book to pay just attention to the many examples of the work that can be cited as challenges to composition’s entrenched order of discourse, but it would certainly be remiss of me not to at least note a few. For instance, in 1986, Judith and Geoffrey Summerfield published Texts and Contexts, a book that encourages students to explore the writing of mixed genre texts of a decidedly postmodern nature. Summerfield and Summerfield did not claim multiculturalism as a rationale for Texts and Contexts, but they developed a vision based in a sound reading of postmodern literature and theory. In it, they proposed form breaking, and, by extension, cultural renovation. In 1995, Lillian Bridwell-Bowles published her article, “Discourse and Diversity: Experimental Writing Within the Academy,” in Louise Wetherbee Phelps and Janet Emig’s Feminine Principles and Women’s Experience in American Composition and Rhetoric. In it, Bridwell-Bowles argues for the expanding of thinking about form to include, potentially, new modes of expression. Describing her writing pedagogy, she writes: I have invited students to imagine the possibilities for new forms of discourse, new kinds of academic essays. I do this because I believe that writing classes (and the whole field of composition studies) must employ richer visions of texts and composing processes. If we try to invent a truly pluralistic society, we must envision a socially and politically situated view of language and the creation of texts—one that takes into account gender, race, class, sexual preference, and a host of issues that are implied by these and other cultural differences. Our language and our written texts represent our visions of our culture, and we need new processes and forms if we are to express ways of thinking that have been outside the dominant culture. (1995, 43) Multigenre theory has also stood as a successful challenge to traditional rhetorical conventions. For educators such as Tom Romano More Than One     49 (2000) and Nancy Mack (2002), multigenre writing represents a productive way for exploring the meaning of experience and an effective discursive avenue for encouraging student writing. In 2005’s Revisionary Rhetoric, Feminist Pedagogy, and Multigenre Texts, Julie Jung articulates a feminist, revisionary rhetoric intended to help students—indeed, all writers—to resist premature, argumentative closure of their thinking when writing about complex social issues. To accomplish inclusive thought, or, at least, a willingness to listen to the ideas of others, Jung would have students embrace writing practices that disrupt and resist the decorum of academic and discipline. Jung teaches her students to “misfit” texts: to blend different kinds of writing, different genres and perspectives to create texts that bridge the personal and the professional . The goal is multiple perspectives, not universalizing discourses, broader vision, not normalizing restrictions. For Robert L. Davis and Mark F. Shadle, the goal is to encourage multiwriting, which they define as “a practice of composing in which multiple genres, media, disciplines, and cultures are potentially open to use. It differs from an allied term in vogue today—multi-genre writing—in that it stresses not the formula of composing in a number of different genres but a more flexible stance, where authors may use any means to compose effectively, reflecting in engaging ways” (2007, 13–14). As they make the theoretical case for multiwriting, Davis and Shadle articulate a methodology, especially evidenced in the intriguing examples of student writing and artistic production that they document in 2007’s Teaching Multiwriting, for facilitating artistic expression through the blending of various cultural and artistic processes, including various visual media such as sculpture. In 2002, Christopher Schroeder, Helen Fox, and Patricia Bizzell edited Alt/Dis: Alternative Discourses and the Academy. This collection also calls on scholars and teachers to broaden their thinking about discourse. Indeed, the contributors to Alt/Dis argue that while academic discourse can be described in general (and Patricia Bizzell [2002] does an especially fine job of this in her essay, “The Intellectual Work of ‘Mixed’ Forms of Academic Discourse”), it is difficult to characterize in particular because it adheres to many and different commonly held assumptions about what constitutes academic writing, depending on the context in which it is defined. It is, they argue...