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5 c o m m u n i T Y I have structured this chapter somewhat differently than the others in this book. For while community becomes a key word fairly late in the narrative of the field I am sketching here, it was in fact through tracing out some of the uses and implications of this term that I began my first work on this project. I got my first full-time college teaching job in 1984, a point when the sort of cognitivist approaches to composition I describe in chapters 3 and 4 were first coming under sustained criticism by a group of teachers and scholars who came to be known, for better or worse, as social constructionists . I was strongly drawn toward this new line of thinking, but I also felt wary of simply replacing one approach with another, and was made particularly uneasy about the ways various ideas of “community” were being invoked at the time, since they so often seemed, perhaps unintentionally , to conjure up precisely the sort of private and chummy club I was least interested in joining. So in the summer of 1987 I began to write what I hoped would seem a sympathetic criticism of the work of some of the people I most admired in composition, a paper that turned two years later into a CCC article, “The Idea of Community in the Study of Writing” (1989). This piece seemed at the time to strike a responsive chord for many people in composition; its success was what then prompted me to try to write a book (this one) that traced the competing uses and meanings of other such key words in the teaching of writing. So I have decided to begin this chapter by reproducing that 1989 article (with some small updating of notes and works cited), and to end it not by trying to account for the continued and varied uses of the term community since, but simply to suggest how my own thinking around these issues has progressed. • If you stand, today, in Between Towns Road, you can see either way; west to the spires and towers of the cathedral and colleges; east to the yards and sheds of the motor works. You see different worlds, but there is no frontier between them; there is only the movement and traffic of a single city. Raymond Williams, Second Generation Community 133 In The Country and the City (1973), Raymond Williams writes of how, after a boyhood in a Welsh village, he came to the city, to Cambridge, only then to hear “from townsmen, academics, an influential version of what country life, country literature, really meant: a prepared and persuasive cultural history” (6). This odd double movement, this irony, in which one only begins to understand the place one has come from through the act of leaving it, proved to be one of the shaping forces of Williams’s career—so that, some thirty-five years after having first gone down to Cambridge, he was still to ask himself: “Where do I stand . . . in another country or in this valuing city?” (6). A similar irony, I think, describes my own relations to the university. I was raised in a working-class home in Philadelphia, but it was only when I went away to college that I heard the term working class used or began to think of myself as part of it. Of course by then I no longer was quite part of it, or at least no longer wholly or simply part of it, but I had also been at college long enough to realize that my relations to it were similarly ambiguous—that here too was a community whose values and interests I could in part share but to some degree would always feel separate from. This sense of difference, of overlap, of tense plurality, of being at once part of several communities and yet never wholly a member of one, has accompanied nearly all the work and study I have done at the university . So when, in the past few years, a number of teachers and theorists of writing began to talk about the idea of community as somehow central to our work, I was drawn to what was said. Since my aim here is to argue for a more critical look at a term that, as Williams has pointed out, “never seems to be used unfavourably” (1976, 76), I want to begin by stating my admiration for...

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