JAC Volume 12 Issue 1

In their introduction, the editors describe one impetus for this collection, and it explains one facet of the balancing metaphor of their title: "Composition studies seems to us just now especially prone to excesses and imbalances. There is an understandable but dangerous drive toward what could be a tyrannizing theoretical order." Another impetus is more explicit in the editors' title: their desire to honor the career of William Irmscher. Seven of the twelve contributors to this volume are former graduate students of Irmscher's (including all three editors), and the other five have been close associates and colleagues of his over the span of his career, certainly one of the longest and most influential in rhetoric and composition studies.

Chappell, Buley-Meissner, and Anderson describe their collection as a "festschrift" to honor Irmscher, and "a calling back to the center: to the concreteness of the teaching moment itself, to the concreteness of the everyday«however complex the theories that describe that concreteness." Again, the metaphor of "balancing acts," the struggle to find a balance between theory and practice which has been the essence of Irmscher's influence. As a theorist, Irmscher was "one of the first to bring theoretical respectability to composition studies. Yet whatever the complexity . . . [he] always strove to express the issues in clear and fluid language."

The effort to balance theory and practice, to inform practice through theory, and to discuss issues with coherence and clarity is certainly a hallmark of all of the essays in the book. The collection is divided into two sections of six essays each. The first section, "Identity and Community," consists of essays concerned with guiding students in the exploration of their identities as writers and how these identities function as members of multiple communities. The second section, "Intuition and Institution," focuses on the complex balancing acts that teachers of composition most often perform when faced with making decisions about theory and pedagogy within the entanglements of institutional politics.

I found the first three essays to be the most engaging of the collection. I found myself nodding in enthusiastic agreement and then arguing with the authors with equal enthusiasm in a challenging dialogue that I suppose embodies what the editors would call the "Irmscherian enterprise": seeking compromise and "ways of blending and merging what seemed to be conflicting points of view." In the opening essay, "Balancing Ax: Efficiency and Struggle in English 101," Kurt Spellmeyer describes the influence of the cultural hegemony of the business class on the history of the American university and the resulting emphasis of composition courses on efficient communication. He warns teachers of composition that such a focus "does violence to" students and their language and should not be the aim of a composition course situated within a society that is economically, politically, and linguistically pluralistic. Striving towards a pedagogy informed by the theory of Burke and the teaching of Irmscher, Spellmeyer describes how his classroom practice reveals an "intention to overturn the ideal of 'clear writing,'" and the struggle for "a society less closed to unfamiliar voices."

In "The Description of an Embarrassment: When Students Write About Religion," Chris Anderson discusses a situation most composition teachers have faced: confronting "born-again" rhetoric in a young writing student. In one of the most careful and thoughtful examinations of this problem that I have ever come across, Anderson calls upon a critical reexamination of the theory of "social-epistemic" rhetoric and the mediating influence of Irmscherian compromise to defuse a complex problematic situation. Within his discussion lies a poignant caveat to teachers of composition: beware the attitude of "unexamined authority" which we may too easily fall into. One of the tenets of "social-epistemic" rhetoric is that if we change the way students write, we also change the way they think, an ominous responsibility. Tolerance and self-examination are what Anderson would counsel us to teach, "applied to religious experience as to anything else," and he would remind us that all of us are "continually engaged in the search for values and the making of commitments."

Editor Buley-Meissner's "Rhetorics of the Self" is perhaps the most challenging contribution. Carefully grounded in poststructuralist literary theory and an analysis of her students' papers (three of which are included in an appendix), her inquiry into the concept of self and its place in contemporary rhetoric and composition pedagogy is complex, confusing, and thought provoking. Her concepts of "the self writing and the self being written" I will take to my own teaching, and her aim to develop in students a self-conscious voice is one we should all share. A self-conscious voice should enable students to "participate in the kind of dialogue essential to progressive education«dialogue that places students in active, critical relationship to teachers, texts, [and] institutions.

The next two essays both show how common sense classroom practices can be based on and informed by theory. Virginia Chappell goes to transactional reading theory to build a foundation for her call for collaboration and understanding in "Teaching like a Reader Instead of Reading like a Teacher," and Kathleen Doty shows how her training as a linguist led her to design a unique composition course based on pragmatics: the study of utterance in context. The study of conversation and dialogue can reveal much about how spoken language works, and "understanding the interpretive strategies used by speakers and hearers . . . can help our students in their attempts to make and remake the world through language." In the closing essay in this section, Edward P.J. Corbett offers a lesson from the perspective of another long and illustrious career as a teacher and researcher: "Of all the elements which play a part in the communication process, audience is the most important. Teachers are defined by their students."

In leading off the second section of essays, Christine Farris describes her year-long ethnographic study of how new teachers of composition adapt and incorporate major pedagogical theories in their own classroom practice. The results of her research suggest that individual contexts are powerful forces and must be taken into consideration when reshaping composition programs and training new teaching assistants. Ann Ruggles Gere also underscores the role of the teacher-researcher in the advancement of composition studies and urges a redefinition of professionalism and a reconception of teacher research "as a form of cultural studies." Richard Lloyd-Jones presents us with "A Balanced Survey Course in Writing," in which he describes the role of the writing teacher as primarily "a coach, not a grader." His detailed description is based on the view that language is "a designed map of an aspect of reality" and that the "needs of the audience alters one's own sense of reality."

Evolution is the metaphor Richard Young suggests when developing WAC programs. The program he describes at Carnegie Mellon is "teacher-centered rather than curriculum-centered or student-centered," emphasizing faculty development as an agency of change, similar to the program developed at Michigan Tech by Art Young and Toby Fulwiler. Unlike so many WAC programs, the Carnegie Mellon program has flourished, in no small degree due to Young's decision to "regard the development of the program as open-ended, rather than as something that can be completed and then simply maintained." Next, Charles Schuster, in "Teaching as an Act of Unknowing," offers a pedagogy based on the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin. While the decentered classroom that Schuster describes is not at all unusual, his metaphor of teaching a class as creating a Bakhtinian, dialogic novel is. While the metaphor is a fascinating one, at times the effort to link the classroom description with literary theory seems a bit strained and overly complex. The final selection is Richard Tracey's "He Takes the Teaching of Writing Seriously," a brief summary of Irmscher's life and career, as well as a complete bibliography of his works.

Balancing Acts is indeed a valuable collection. While at times the readings may require leaps of faith or strains of disagreement, any good collection of this kind should provoke questions, dialogue, and critical reflection. What is remarkable here is the way all the essays manage to manifest Irmscher's scope and inclusiveness: the even-handed blending of contrasting points of view are truly balancing acts. Never insistent, always engaging, these essays will speak to any caring teacher of composition. There are no throwaways here. This is certainly a fitting tribute to the career of William F. Irmscher.