JAC Volume 14 Issue 2

If the writing across the curriculum (WAC) movement had a slogan, it would be "write to learn." Although some movement advocates emphasize the significance of informal writing (Fulwiler; Knoblauch and Brannon) and others the value of writing within disciplinary forms, frameworks, and forums (Maimon; Herrington), what seems to hold the movement together is a shared commitment to the idea that writing is an especially powerful mode of learning. It is this idea that we advocates take to the dean's office and from there to the faculty workshop. And it is this idea that underwrites the now commonplace claim that writing across the curriculum increases student learning. Although the claim that writing increases student learning has yet to be substantiated by either an ample body or an exemplary piece of empirical research (Anson 20), WAC advocates persist in pressing the claim. And we do so, I think, not merely because we know from experience that such a claim can persuade our colleagues to take an interest in writing across the curriculum but mostly because the claim makes ideological sense to us.

In calling our promotion of writing to learn "ideological," I do not mean to insinuate that it involves some kind of deception, mystification, or equally unethical falsification of reality. Although commonplace, such insinuations about the ideological strike me as retrograde. Not only do they reinstate epistemological foundations that poststructuralists like Foucault and Derrida have so convincingly deconstructed; they also tend to reinforce those narrow, utilitarian assumptions about consciousness, ideology, and power that Göran Therborn has so constructively--and to my mind, so definitively--displaced. Instead of assuming that ideology is some more or less coherent set of false ideas which certain people, motivated by self-interest, foist upon others, Therborn considers ideology as "a social process of address, or 'interpellations,' inscribed in material social matrices" (7). By invoking and involving consciousness in discursive practices that make sense of the world, social processes of address turn people into ideological subjects. However, as Therborn conceives it, this ideological subjection has a dialectical character: on the one hand, it subjugates people to a given discursive order; on the other hand, it empowers people by qualifying them to "act" as "conscious, reflecting initiators . . . in a structured, meaningful world" (15).

As his approach to ideology attests, Therborn is enough of a materialist to believe in the existence of a non-discursive world. However, he is also enough of a poststructuralist to argue that we have no unmediated access to that world and, therefore, no epistemological grounds for distinguishing the mystified from the real, the false from the true, and the bad guys from the good. In theory, such poststructuralist arguments are now widely accepted. In practice, however, distinguishing the mystified from the real, the false from the true, and the bad guys from the good seems to have become more popular than ever--in part because ideologically-oriented critics tend to favor polemics over dialectical analysis and argument.¹ Not so Therborn. By working within the theoretical framework of a materialist poststructuralism, Therborn produces a dialectical analysis of ideological formation, operation, and transformation which is critically constructive rather than merely polemically useful.

In the following pages, I will draw on Therborn's analysis not only to relate our promotion of writing to learn to the beginnings, present dilemmas, and possible futures of the WAC movement, but also to develop three arguments which are meant to be as constructive as they are critical. First, I will argue for a genealogically-inflected interpretation of the history of the WAC movement; second, I will argue for a situated (re)consideration of our political logic in promoting writing to learn; and finally, I will argue for a progressive transformation in the discourse and direction of the WAC movement, a transformation I call a (re)turn to rhetoric.

On the Ideological Formation of Writing to Learn

In Therborn's dialectical analysis, ideological formations have both a structural and an historical aspect. Structurally, ideological subjects are (in)formed through discursive interpellations which make sense of the world in three different yet related ways: by designating what exists, by formulating what's good, and by scripting what's possible (18). Although ideologies which explicitly link all three ways of making sense tend to enjoy a certain logical stability, no discourse is impervious to change. Nor is the field of available ideologies. By positing alternative visions of what's possible and what exists, conscious subjects can effect such massive revisions in a preexisting discourse that a new ideology emerges (44). More common, however, are less massive revisions such as shifting a preexisting discourse's emphasis from one way of making sense to another and in so doing, producing not a new ideology per se but what might be called a new ideological configuration. As I understand it, writing to learn is just such a production. It is an ideological configuration articulated in the 1980s as advocates of writing across the curriculum consciously and reflectively effected a subtle yet significant shift in the kind of sense to be made of a preexisting discourse: the discourse associated with the beginnings of the WAC movement.

Typically, the beginnings of the WAC movement are located in two places: in Britain with the late 1960s "language across the curriculum" initiative by some members of the London Association for the Teaching of English; and in the United States with the mid-1970s response by some composition teachers to the media-induced perception of a new, nationwide literacy crisis. Out of this double beginning, some recent commentators have constructed the history of the WAC movement as the story of a fall. According to this story, the true origin of the WAC movement is in the late 1960s attempt by a radical group of British teachers to make schooling more socio-culturally democratic and equitable. In the mid 1970s, a group of American university professors formally adopt the idea of writing across the curriculum but in so doing lose the original spirit of the movement: its radicalism. Needless to say, the consequences are dire: in the US, writing across the curriculum turns into something shallow and conservative--a superficial reform effort which ends up reinforcing both predictable educational outcomes and undemocratic social relations (Mahala; Parker and Goodkin; Knoblauch and Brannon).

Although this history is not a pretty story, it can be reassuring to those who are willing to believe that with a return of or to the origin, all may yet be well.² But I am not such a believer. Moreover, I question this story's political characterization of American proponents of WAC, its deployment of a binary opposition between British expressivism and American formalism, and its desire for a singularly pure origin instead of a double beginning. As I see it, the double beginning of the WAC movement invites a different, more genealogically-inflected interpretation of the idea's history--an interpretation that recounts the emergence of a discursive field of positivity out of the dispersed, disparate, and relatively ad hoc practices of the mid and late 1960s.³

In both England and the US, the sixties were a time of socio-cultural and political upheaval. Inside, outside, and alongside the schools and universities, various anti-authoritarian polemics circulated, disjunctive romantic individualisms flourished, and local communitarian experiments sprouted. Occasionally, individuals and groups would connect up with each other, sometimes for the purpose of confronting en masse this or that representative of "the System." Although strategic and temporary, such intersections often turned out to be quite vital, not only to the work of individuals but also to the growth of what many of us were beginning to call "the Movement."

For British and American teachers of English, the month-long Dartmouth Seminar of 1966 seems to have been just such a vital intersection. As David Russell explains, "While American education since WWII had generally been moving away from the progressive tradition, . . . the British school reformers had been moving in the opposite direction," toward an "experience-centered" pedagogy in which "talk, dramatics, and expressive writing" were of central concern ("American Origins" 31). At the Dartmouth Seminar, this difference in direction became obvious and the dialogue it provoked not only challenged American educators to reconsider the pedagogical practices and theories of 1920s and 1930s progressives but also incited the British educators to develop the theoretical warrants and disciplinary implications of the pedagogical practices they were advocating.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, a new field of positivity was in the making on both sides of the Atlantic. In London, three British participants in the Dartmouth Seminar--James Britton, Harold Rosen, and Douglas Barnes--initiated a "language across the curriculum" project within the London Association for the Teaching of English. Moreover, two major research efforts, both funded by Britain's Schools Council for Curriculum and Examination, were undertaken: the first, under the direction of James Britton, investigated the development of writing abilities in the secondary schools (1966-71) and the second, under the direction of Nancy Martin, studied writing across the secondary school curriculum (1971-76). On the other side of the Atlantic, two American participants in the Dartmouth Seminar--Herbert Muller and James Moffett--published influential books in 1967 and 1968, each of which advocated a more student-centered, developmental approach to English instruction. A few years later, writing instruction and research in the US took an experiential, expressivist turn, a turn promoted not only by works like Macrorie's Telling Writing (1970) and Elbow's Writing Without Teachers (1973) but also by such local initiatives as CUNY's affirmative action project SEEK and the Bay Area Writing Project.

Between 1975 and 1978, what had been some time in the making explicitly emerged and writing across the curriculum became a recognizable discursive field of positivity. Britton's The Development of Writing Abilities (11-18) appeared in 1975, followed the next year by a session on WAC at the Conference on College Composition and Communication and the publication of Writing and Learning across the Curriculum (11-16) (Martin et al.). In 1977, there was another CCCC session on WAC, an NEH-sponsored summer institute at Rutgers University, the publication of Mina Shaughnessy's Errors and Expectations, and the initiation of two well-funded--and soon to become well-known--WAC projects: one at Beaver College under the leadership of Elaine Maimon and the other at Michigan Tech under the leadership of Toby Fulwiler and Art Young. Although none of these discursive acts was quite the same as the others, the connections amongst them were numerous enough that they could be--and often were--experienced as instances of one address, an address that made ideological sense by scripting the progressive impulse to critique and change what exists in terms of a promising, albeit somewhat vague, possibility: the possibility that schooling could be better for all concerned if writing were understood as a way of teaching and learning rather than as the way to test and rank students.

As I see it, this ideological possibility not only connects British and American contributions to the mid 1970s discourse on WAC, it also links that discourse to such reform initiatives of the 1960s as "language across the curriculum." Consider, for example, the two major publications that grew out of the LAC initiative: Barnes, Britton, and Rosen's Language, the Learner, and the School (1969) and Britton's Language and Learning (1970). Given the recent representation of LAC as a "radical political act" intent on making schooling more socio-culturally democratic and equitable (Torbe 135; cf. Mahala 774-77), a reading of the early editions of these works can be quite surprising. Virtually nothing is said therein about the socio-cultural diversity of students; nor is there much in the way of an explicit argument for more socio-cultural equity in and through education. Instead, the emphasis is on universal principles of individual experience, symbolic expression, linguistic development, and learning.

Nevertheless, a progressive impulse does permeate these works--an impulse scripted in terms of the universal human right of individuals to "become themselves." To encourage the realization of this possibility, schooling as it exists is critiqued and alternative practices promoted. More specifically, the critique focuses on two traditional roles that teachers play: their cultural role as "guardians of linguistic proprieties" (Barnes, Britton, Rosen 160) and their generationally-defined social role as authoritarian adults who know that the "young people's revolution" is "impractical, ruthless, hedonistic and extravagant" (Britton 269-70). As for change, both of these works call for a renewed commitment to learning and with it, an appreciation of expressive language. Teachers who value learning should "totally accept" the expressive language children bring to school; affirm their right to use that language to learn; offer students interactive opportunities through which their symbolic resources can develop in ways that will allow them to choose when and how to adapt their language to achieve various purposes; "admit" that the demands made by the rebellious youth of the sixties "represent fragments of a world we have always wanted"; and finally, "trust" that "by the hard road of their own choices, their own intuitions, [and] their own commitments," the young can and will "become" independent yet involved individuals (Britton 269-71). Discursively, the emphasis is on the universal individual; however, both of these works are progressive in their insistence that what exists be critiqued and changed in ways that will make the development of individuality possible for all.

Although a progressive impulse also informs the mid 1970s discourse on WAC, American contributors to that discourse tend to script it in terms of access and equity rather than in terms of the universal human right of individuals to become themselves. In this regard, Mina Shaughnessy appears to have been a key figure. As Elaine Maimon points out, Shaughnessy not only inspired a new generation of English professors to rethink writing in ways that recognized the intelligence of individual students but also advocated an interdisciplinary effort to address the needs of a socio-culturally diverse population of undergraduates ("Maps" 123-4; "Knowledge" 91; "Errors"). At issue was the CUNY "attempt to build a comprehensive system of higher education" on the basis of an open admissions policy, an attempt that was part of the nation-wide "venture into mass education" which emerged in response to the "protests" of the sixties (Shaughnessy 1).

Historically, whenever institutions of higher education have been opened to more Americans, proclamations of a literacy crisis follow (Russell 5-7). Hence, it is not at all surprising that this new venture into mass education provoked widespread media hype about a nation-wide literacy crisis. Instead of deconstructing this rhetoric of crisis, American proponents of writing across the curriculum tended to deploy it strategically in order to gain a hearing in the university. Once inside, however, what they said differed from the normal discourse universities had developed to manage the putative literacy crises that punctuate the history of American higher education.

As Mike Rose explains, American institutions of higher education had developed a language of exclusion around writing and, with it, a set of practices that marginalized whatever new group of students were being admitted. By advocating access over exclusion and more practice over more remediation, American proponents of writing across the curriculum implicitly--and sometimes explicitly--opposed those who would keep newcomers to the university out of regular curricular offerings until they had learned, once and for all, how to write clear, correct, all-purpose English prose. Arguing that something as complex and situationally variable as writing can never be mastered once and for all, early advocates of writing across the curriculum sought to transform the language of exclusion in ways that would have at least two practical consequences: an institutional commitment to more teaching and learning over more testing and grading and a pedagogical emphasis on writing as a process rather than as a product to be evaluated.

By the early 1980s, WAC initiatives were underway in many American universities (Griffin; Fulwiler and Young), most often under the leadership of composition specialists who were expected to identify and elaborate the subjects, objects, concepts, and strategies that would substantiate WAC as a discursive field of positive knowledge.⁴ No longer was it sufficient to repeat the progressive ideological possibility that schooling could be better for all concerned if writing were understood otherwise than as a way to test and rank students. Something more substantive was called for and advocates of WAC responded by producing a new ideological configuration: writing to learn. In this new ideological configuration, the epistemic inflection of Britton's discourse on student-centered learning and the social inflection of Maimon's discourse on initiation-oriented teaching were bound together and elaborated along the lines of developmental schema--schema that already had substantial theoretical credibility as well as some modicum of institutional support.

Institutionally, developmental schema are supported by an educational system in which elementary, secondary, and university schooling are structurally differentiated yet metaphorically bound together under the rubric of "growing up." What such "growing up" might mean, however, is spelled out in theory: in psychological theories about cognitive, intellectual, and ethical development; in educational theories about the development of reading and writing ability; and in composition theories about the process of developing a piece of writing for publication.⁵ Since such theories not only deploy the idea of development to mediate between the individual and the social but do so in ways that seem much more intellectually substantial than the formal support available through mere institutionalization, it is not difficult to understand why they were so attractive to advocates of writing across the curriculum. Nor is it difficult to figure out why "writing to learn" became so conceptually central and strategically important: here, at last, was a unifying theme, a concept with enough foundational power to legitimate and promote a "second stage" for the writing across the curriculum movement.⁶

In this "second stage" of the movement, what appears to make most sense to WAC advocates is the idea that writing increases learning. Like Young and Fulwiler, "we are 'sure'" that such is the case, even though "we're not sure its been proven" or can ever be demonstrated "beyond a doubt" (137). Indeed, so sure are we that "writing improves learning" that like Young and Fulwiler, we also tend to claim that "teachers who assign certain kinds of writing do, beyond doubt, help students to learn better" (137; emphasis added). Apparently, what we're really sure of is that like writing itself, more learning is such an obvious "good" that our claim should be true. In short, our logic in promoting writing to learn is an ideologic in which our sense of "what's good" overdetermines not merely our sense of what exists but also our sense of "what's possible."⁷

As Göran Therborn points out, emphasizing "what's good" over "what's possible" or "what exists" tends to go along with a liberal political focus on the issues of consensus and legitimation (19-20). While such a focus can be limiting, Therborn does not dismiss liberal political concerns as unimportant. Nor does he confuse the liberal with the conservative as some who look back with nostalgia to the progressive 1960s are wont to do. Although such nostalgia may be polemically useful, it seems to me that it is no more politically progressive (or conservative) than the liberalism it would displace. In my opinion, the political problem with liberal ideologies like writing to learn is that they can be too limiting. To the extent that their discursive emphasis on what's good circumscribes our sense of what's possible, liberal ideologies tend to normalize our desires, hopes, and ambitions. And to the extent that such normalizations blind us to what exists--to the actual ways our ideology operates within prevailing material, social, institutional, and ideological matrices--the liberal can be politically debilitating. Ideologically, writing to learn makes good sense. But that doesn't mean that we have no reason to reconsider our political logic in legitimating and promoting WAC by reference to the idea of writing to learn.

On the Ideological Operation of Writing to Learn

As an ideological formation, writing to learn tends to reinforce the politically liberal belief that more learning is key to the achievement of socio-cultural equity, not merely because it means more access to better employment opportunities but most of all because it furthers democratic communication, consensus, and community.⁸ Those of us involved in the WAC movement are bound to find this argument appealing. However, there are good reasons nowadays to question its political logic and in so doing to reconsider our ideological promotion of writing to learn.

Perhaps the best place to begin such questioning is with the curriculum in which students are to learn more by writing. In most American institutions of higher education, that curriculum is structured for knowledge distribution and consumption rather than for knowledge production. Typically, knowledge is distributed among departments where it is hierarchically classed in terms of what is appropriate for, and appropriable by, lower-division students, upper-division majors, and apprentice professionals or graduate students. What usually results from this classing procedure are large courses in which lower-division students survey neatly bundled and labelled information, mid-size courses in which majors are introduced to specialized knowledge, and small seminars in which apprentice professionals discuss not only what is known but how it was produced. As numerous critics have pointed out, this curricular structure is indebted to the disciplines and through them to a Western tradition of epistemological foundationalism in which the socio-historical relations among discourse, knowledge, and power are effaced in ways that legitimate both the formation of disciplines and the (re)production of a professional class.⁹ The curriculum repays its debt to the disciplines in two important ways. First, it protects foundationalism by denying, displacing, and limiting debate. Lower-division survey courses foreground information and terms for order; in so doing, they tend to deny debate, usually on the assumption that students don't yet know enough to discuss, let alone debate. In the major, debate is displaced as students are introduced to one specialty after another, with specialties being added to the curricular offerings to accommodate the work of this or that individual faculty member. And finally, at the graduate level, debate is limited; not only is it confined to an elite but too often it is shaped as a discussion of disciplinary methods rather than as a dialectical inquiry into the configurations of discourse, knowledge, and power that found and sustain a disciplinary formation.

But the prevailing curriculum does more than simply protect disciplinary foundations and formations; it also supports the (re)production of disciplined professionals by institutionally mediating three related hierarchical distinctions: the distinction between knowledge distribution and knowledge construction; the distinction between the need to teach and the demand for research; and the distinction between students who do not (yet) know (enough) and professors who do. Of these three distinctions, professors tend to find the division between teaching and research especially painful. For most, however, the existence of a curriculum that is hierarchically classed eases the pain. It provides some with graduate seminars in which they can discuss their research; it offers the many a chance to tell others what they know about their specialty; and it gives the hapless few assigned to the large survey course not only the authority to represent the discipline as a whole but also the undisputed right to monologue. Although all these options respect the distinction between knowledge distribution and knowledge production, they do so in different ways--ways that represent both respect and distinction as a matter of degree(s), not kind.

Such representations are crucial to the (re)production of professionals for they transform a seemingly absolute distinction between professors who know and students who don't into a relation that is mediated by discourse and monitored by degrees. Throughout the curriculum, professors not only talk; they also address students in terms of a disciplinary discourse and then test to see how much, or to what degree, individual students have learned the discourse. In so doing, professors make students subject to and therefore potentially subjects of, their disciplinary discourses. In lower-division surveys, equity seems assured by the largesse of address; all students have access to the discourse. But even though all may be subject to the discourse, students do not all respond in the same way. Some seem to turn away; others appear to accept their position as subject to the discourse but don't yet see themselves as subjects of the discourse; and a few look as though they have appropriated the discourse by recognizing what it's really all about. Through grading, we professors (re)mark these differences in response, thereby telling some to go away, encouraging others to go on, and qualifying a few to move on up.

<b>Many advocates of writing to learn dream of qualifying more than the few.¹⁰ Through writing, more students will come to recognize that it's really all about discourse and not the memorization of information; in so doing, these students will learn more about the disciplines and about what it takes to move up in this world, to qualify for membership in the professional class. Although a cynic might retort that what this "more learning" really entails is more domination through deeper subjection, such a retort fails to recognize that when it is linked with qualification, subjection is to some degree empowering. Indeed, if our material, social, and ideological context were what it was in the fifties, sixties and seventies, it would smack of bad faith to (mis)represent disciplinary subjection as a simple case of domination rather than as a complex and contradictory mode of empowerment. But our context is not what it was. In the fifties, sixties, and seventies--and to some extent, even in the early eighties--more Americans than ever before had the opportunity to go to college and from there, into management and the professions. Now, however, "downsizing" is the order of the day. Economists tell us that compared with Japan and Germany, the American workplace is top-heavy and therefore less productive and globally competitive than it should be.¹¹ And many of our students tell us that try as they might, they can't find work in management or the professions--no matter what kind of degree or how many degrees they have. Clearly, this is not an opportune time to count on the economy to reward all those who will have learned more by writing across the discipline-based curriculum as it currently exists.¹²

As Therborn points out, changes in the matrix of economic affirmations and sanctions can seriously disrupt prevailing modes of subjection-qualification, thereby making it difficult to continue with business as usual. But the economy is not the only--nor even the most important--locus for what Therborn calls "disarticulating, uneven developments" (45). Demographic shifts, changes in interpersonal and group relations, and disturbances in eco-social systems also have some disarticulating force and, therefore, the possibility of provoking the ideological crises that result when prevailing modes of subjection-qualification are disrupted. By this accounting, the current crisis in higher education is overdetermined. The demographics of our student population are changing; relations between women and men, homosexuals and heterosexuals, and racial groups are in dispute; and our relations to the environment are shifting. Nor is it surprising that when economic affirmations and sanctions become less clear, people seek affirmations in other aspects of their life like group identity. Such alternative affirmations, however, are hard to come by in our institutions of higher education; not only does the diversity of the student body make their achievement difficult but the disciplinary structure of the curriculum tends to marginalize or exclude social affirmations that are other than professional or managerial.

One response to the disruption of business as usual is ideological mobilization, a process that typically involves a demonizing strategy, accusations of politicization, and the deployment of binary oppositions (Therborn 116-19). Nowadays, just such a process seems to be at work in and around American institutions of higher education. Right and left, professors are being demonized as perverse derelicts who prefer to serve the political interests of the left or right rather than to fulfill their true obligations to culture and society. And what are those true obligations? When the issue at hand is curriculum, there appear to be two, absolutely opposed answers: our obligation is either to preserve traditional discipline-based discourses and practices or to overthrow disciplinary hegemony and install in its place socially-oriented, identity-affirming discourses and practices. Those mobilized around preservation tend to represent shared information or knowledge as fundamental to social communication, democratic community, and economic well-being; tend to see traditional disciplinary discourses and practices as the best, if not the only, way to produce and distribute such knowledge; and tend to insist that what students most need is to learn more in and through the curricular structure that now exists.¹³ For their part, those mobilized around the overthrow of disciplinary hegemony tend to represent the articulation of socio-cultural identity as fundamental to authentic literacy, political citizenship, and the realization of an affirmatively active democracy; tend to see discursive consideration of the subjects of race, gender, sex, class, and ethnicity as the best, if not the only way, to provoke explorations of socio-cultural identity; and tend to insist that what students most need is to unlearn the habit of complying with the individualizing and authoritarian discursive practices that the prevailing curricular structure has institutionalized.¹⁴

In this polarized ideological context, it is easy for those of us who advocate writing across the curriculum to lose our way. Superficially, our promotion of more learning through writing sets up the possibility of an alliance with those who are ideologically mobilized around the preservation of traditional discipline-based discourses and practices. Even more troubling is the way writing to learn subtly reinforces the (re)production of the same by propping itself on developmental schema. As Joseph Williams points out, developmental schema not only represent student growth in terms of a movement from lower to higher--or from outside to inside--but in so doing encourage professors to see themselves and their disciplinary discourses as the standard for, if not the epitome of, intellectual and social maturity. In consequence, it becomes all too easy to assume that "more learning" means "more like us" and to forget that material and social conditions are making such an additive approach to equity both existentially and politically questionable.

Of course, ideological mobilization also induces various kinds of forgetting when it demonizes, politicizes, and polarizes what is actually a complex and overdetermined situation. Yet doing so yields at least one benefit: it makes it more difficult for us to feel comfortable with alliances and assumptions that appear too easy. In regard to writing across the curriculum, ideological mobilization has made it increasingly difficult to believe that the more a diverse student body learns by writing within the prevailing disciplinary curriculum is enough--either for them or for those of us who value an equity that is not purchased at the expense of affirming diversity. However, those of us who have long been involved in the writing across the curriculum movement also have difficulty believing that cross-curricular, institutional change can be effected in terms of discursive practices and positions developed outside of, if not in opposition to, prevailing disciplinary structures--say, for example, in terms developed by socially-oriented composition and cultural studies teachers. Indeed, as David Russell's history of humanist and progressive efforts at writing reform documents, the attempt to work outside of or in opposition to disciplinary structures is as much a part of our educational tradition as utopian imaginings are a part of our canonical literature. In both cases, the danger is not merely that such utopian attempts may go nowhere; it is also that they may inadvertently sustain the systematic (re)production of the same tradition rather than provoking its transformation. In short, it seems that the writing across the curriculum movement is in a double bind. It cannot do without the disciplines; and yet, if it is to be politically progressive, it can not live with(in) the disciplines as they now exist. So what then is to be done?

The (Re)Turn to Rhetoric as Ideological Transformation

One possibility is to work for "a change in rather than of the dominant discourse" (Therborn 124). Although this kind of work lacks the high drama of ideological mobilization, as Therborn points out, it may effect more widespread and long-term institutional change than utopian attempts to overthrow the system. What such work involves is a gradual process of expanding the range and kinds of speech acts that count and in so doing, extending the right to speak to more subjects--a process which Therborn associates with democratization in the realm of politics and which I associate with a (re)turn to rhetoric in the disciplinary realm of higher education. In short, I believe that if writing across the curriculum is to work for a progressive transformation in the prevailing discursive practices of the academy, then it must now take and promote just such a rhetorical turn.

But what, one might ask, does it mean to (re)turn to rhetoric? Does it mean what Eagleton presumes it means when he demands that we give up "fashionable, new-fangled ways of thinking" and "return . . . to the ancient paths" of studying "both the practice of effective discourse and the science of it" (206-07)? Or does it mean what the editors of The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences (1987) seem to think it means: "interdisciplinary research" on "how scholars communicate among themselves and with people outside the academy" coupled with poststructuralist reflections on the interdependency of "rhetoric" and "reason" (Nelson, Megill, McCloskey ix; cf. Dillon; Simons)? Or does it mean something else, something along the lines of Berlin's argument that every rhetoric entails an ideology, every ideology implies a pedagogy, every pedagogy is a politics, and vice versus? And what about Bizzell for whom the (re)turn to rhetoric seems to mean ideological mobilization on behalf of a democratic cultural politics?

As this sampling of possibilities suggests, what the rhetorical turn means, may come to mean, or will come to have meant is open to debate. Yet that is one reason why it may have the power to effect a change in the prevailing disciplinary discourses and practices that structure the curriculum. As I've already pointed out, our current curricular structures work to deny, displace, and limit debate. In so doing, they tend to support the reproduction of the same rather than the possibility of transformation. The writing across the curriculum movement, however, has been intent on transformation from its beginnings. Moreover, one of the reasons the early movement flourished is that no one quite knew exactly what writing across the curriculum meant, might come to mean, or might come to have meant. And so, there was plenty of debate in faculty workshops, especially about writing, teaching, and learning. As I understand it, the theme of writing to learn emerges out of that debate, marks its end by establishing a meaning for one phase of the movement, and makes it imperative that we turn elsewhere both to get debate going again and to provoke further transformations in institutionalized discursive practices, including, of course, the now institutionalized discursive practice of writing across the curriculum.

But how are we to get debate going among faculty who come to writing across the curriculum workshops with little or no interest in rhetoric, let alone in the rhetorical turn that the human sciences are taking? I suggest that instead of starting with either a discussion of problems in student writing or a consideration of learning objectives, workshops should begin by questioning the goals and practices of higher education. In my experience, beginning with such questions occasions a rhetorical turn that provokes debate both in and beyond the faculty workshop.

Two years ago, I asked faculty participants in a semester-long writing across the curriculum workshop to do some writing and reading before the first meeting of the workshop. More specifically, participants were asked what kinds of writing they require students in their courses to do and why they require them to do it; what kinds of writing they do and why; and what they think the goals of a Queens College education should be. As for readings, participants were provided with copies of three essays: Mike Rose's "The Language of Exclusion: Writing Instruction at the University," Janet Emig's "Writing as a Mode of Learning," and Richard Rorty's "Hermeneutics, General Education, and Teaching." Although virtually everyone did the writing, many put off the reading until after the workshop debate was well underway--a fact that came in handy whenever my colleagues asserted the priority of reading over writing or debating.

During the first session of the workshop, participants were divided into small groups to share whatever seemed most important to them at the time. Those who teach writing won't be surprised to hear that what participants had written seemed more important to them than what they had read--or had been asked to read. And those who lead writing across the curriculum workshops for faculty won't be surprised to hear that what participants had written about the assignments they give seemed to be more important than what they had to say about their own writing practices or about the goals of a college education. In fact, the focus of all the small groups was on sharing assignments, their rationale, and the degree to which students were willing and able to do well on these assignments. And the result--reported to the workshop as a whole--was not only a renewed sense of collegial solidarity but also an interdisciplinary consensus that something had to be done to enable more students to do well on the writing assignments they were given.

Although some kind of collegial solidarity and consensus may be necessary to get a faculty workshop going, they are not, in my opinion, a sufficient ground on which to base our efforts to transform prevailing disciplinary discourses and practices. Writing, however, is a different matter--or so it seemed to me when I read what the faculty had written for our first workshop meeting. I had collected that writing with more or less the same purpose in mind that had led me to structure the first workshop meeting as small group discussions: I wanted to demonstrate ways of responding to writing that are social and dialogical rather than individualizing and judgmental. In this instance, my plan was to assume the role of the more traditional teacher--the role of someone who collects what others have written. My intent, however, was to play that role differently by demonstrating that when a teacher takes cues from what others have written, he or she cannot only respond collectively to the work of individuals but in so doing, must encourage individuals to see their work as part of a collective venture. And so, I read what the faculty participants had written, looking for cues that might further our collective work. The first thing that struck me was the discursive discontinuity between responses to the question about goals and responses to the questions about writing. Whereas the latter were uniformly expository in mode, objective in disposition, and no-nonsense in style, the former were less uniformly expository in mode, more expressive or affective in orientation, and quite disjunctive, if not sublime, in style. So, for example, one faculty member began his response to the question about goals with the rather plaintive remark that "This is not an easy time for defining educational goals--or for that matter, educational needs." And even though other writers did not appear to be quite as troubled by the question of goals as this writer seemed to be, most engaged in some kind of (self-)reflective commentary before offering up a list of goals for the college.

In reading through those lists, I was struck by another discontinuity: a disparity between the range of educational goals and the range of pedagogical reasons for assigning writing. In describing the kinds of writing they required, a few faculty articulated their preference for student-centered, expressive writing assignments, while most demonstrated their commitment to discipline-centered, transactional writing assignments. In both cases, however, the pedagogical rationale was the same: the advancement of student knowledge about some specific subject-matter. Of course, knowledge also figured in the lists of educational goals; however, there it tended to appear not only as an "understanding" of various "fields of human endeavour" but also as only one of the important aims of education. Equally important were socio-cultural goals with a performative rather than a constative orientation: in the end, college-educated people should not only understand but also "take up and solve practical problems," "decide on a career," "participate in debates about issues of social import," "act deliberatively and ethically in private and public life," and "work to enlarge the sense of community." But if the ends of education are performative as well as constative, then why were virtually all of the writing assignments rationalized in terms of the acquisition and demonstration of subject-matter knowledge? Was there really as much of a discontinuity between educational ends and pedagogical practices as there appeared to be? It seemed to me that broaching such questions might further our collective work, but only if I could figure out a critically useful way of doing two things at once: linking educational goals to the pedagogical practice of assigning writing and representing what the faculty had written about goals and practices.

It was at this point that I turned to rhetoric. More specifically, I turned to Walter Beale's A Pragmatic Theory of Rhetoric for some assistance in representing what I had read. Although I don't want to argue that the best way to effect a rhetorical turn is through Beale's work, I do want to point out why his book seemed useful to me at the time. First of all, Beale emphasizes the aims of discourse, an emphasis that seemed well-suited to my concern with goals. Second, Beale's approach to the question of aims is categorical, an approach which seemed well-suited to my intention of responding collectively to the writing of individuals. Third, Beale defines his categories in ways that are empirical but not positivist, and constructivist but not formalistic--a definitional strategy that seemed well-suited to my desire to respect the specificity of what I had read while at the same time organizing those specifics in a way that promoted pragmatic reflection on the relationship between educational goals and pedagogical practices. But, what I found most appealing about Beale's version of the "it's all rhetoric" argument was its pluralism. At one level Beale's work entails a return to the ancients, and most especially to Aristotle. However, since he recognizes that print technologies and information systems have subverted the epistemological bases of the classical rhetorical tradition, Beale undertakes a rhetorical revision of such concepts as knowledge, truth, and reality by representing them as contextually variable and discursively produced. As for discourse, it too appears as rhetorically multiple; that is, it is represented as teleologically and practically motivated to carry various kinds of meaning and to perform diverse socio-cultural tasks.

To map the teleological motives of discourse, Beale uses the two semiotic paradoxes that underwrite the rhetoric of deconstruction: the constative/performative paradox and the referential/tropological paradox. This mapping yields four related yet rhetorically different discursive aims: the scientific, instrumental, poetic, and rhetorical. According to Beale, these four aims are teleologically oriented toward different constructions of reality, different dimensions of consciousness, and different social roles. In practice, however, each aim is aligned with a category of discourse that can be described, if not normatively defined, in terms of such traditional rhetorical features as situation, purpose, author-audience relations, form, and style. By drawing on the analytic tradition of the ancients, the semiotic paradoxes of the poststructuralists, and the historical, social, and cultural concerns of progressive pragmatists, Beale's version of the "it's all rhetoric" argument betrays a totalizing impulse. The intention seems to be to create one coherent, all-encompassing theory of rhetoric. However, the attempt to totalize does not produce a seamless whole. Instead, it induces "perspective by incongruity" (Burke) and, with it, a pluralism that is dialogically dynamic rather than ideologically complacent. Assuming that this kind of perspective might be necessary to provoke discussion, if not debate, among my colleagues, I decided that in responding collectively to what the faculty had written, I would also display a totalizing impulse.

And so, I began the second session of the workshop with a double gesture. Quoting liberally from what my colleagues had written about educational goals, I suggested that the goals they articulated could be grouped into four categories: individual-developmental goals, intellectual-disciplinary goals, social-instrumental goals, and social-rhetorical goals. Then, in a totalizing move, I posited a fit between those categorical goals and the aims of discourse, between the aims of discourse and kinds of writing assignments, between kinds of writing assignments and the purposes of writing across the curriculum, and between the purposes of writing across the curriculum and the goals of education. With this hypothesis on the table, we turned to a consideration of the individual-developmental category of goals. Although no one objected to the category or to finding his or her phrases cited to instantiate the category, debate began to emerge when I attempted to align this categorical goal with the "poetic" aim of discourse, with exploratory kinds of writing assignments, with Britton's version of writing to learn across the curriculum, and with a student-centered approach to higher education. Questions, objections, and counter-objections erupted. Was individual development merely an issue of discourse? Surely, something else, or at least something more, was involved. Drawing on their disciplinary knowledge, a couple of participants cited this or that study of cognitive or emotional development. Others countered by pointing out that such studies deployed metaphorical concepts of the self, mind, and subjectivity that were neither historically nor socio-culturally universal. Still others argued that to call the discursive power to develop a self "poetic" was a pretty piece of polemic, as if literary writing were the only or even the best way to develop a self. Following Britton's lead, a few suggested that "expressive" was the more appropriate term, for it named a type of writing which was central to learning and therefore to individual development. But that kind of writing--as well as Britton's arguments for the value of expressive language--seemed much too touchy-feely for others who were quick to charge both with a sixties-style anti-intellectualism and to argue that what is really central to learning are the knowledge and methods provided by the disciplines.

That argument, however, became more problematic when we turned to consider the intellectual-disciplinary goals of education in relation to the scientific aim of discourse, conventional kinds of academic writing assignments, and the purposes of discipline-centered versions of writing across the curriculum. Were the foundations and operations of the disciplines really nothing more (or less) than discursive productions? Was referentiality merely a rhetorical effect? If so, then how could one account for changes in the discourses of knowledge? And anyway, what practical difference would it make if the disciplines were taken to be discursive formations? If students are to have anything to discourse about, they must begin by acquiring some information. Definitions, summaries, and reports come first; analysis second; and interpretation and critique last. Although this order of discourse rankled those who believed that expressive writing is central to the intellectual development of individuals, as a group we had come to a sort of stand-off. Apparently opposite ideological positions had been articulated and yet debate seemed to flounder, perhaps because those ideological positions were too easily attributed to disciplinary differences. The implicit assumption seemed to be that it was natural for those in the humanities and arts to give priority to individual-developmental goals and for those in the sciences to give priority to intellectual-disciplinary goals.

However, such disciplinary rationalizations of identity and difference were harder to come by when we turned to the social-instrumental and social-rhetorical goals of education, for in these instances we all seemed to be between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, everyone seemed to believe in both the importance of these educational goals and the social value of his or her discipline. On the other hand, virtually all the writing we assigned seemed to be primarily scientific or expressive rather than instrumental or rhetorical in aim. What were we to make of this discontinuity? Although one person suggested that deep-seated anxieties about the relations between knowledge and social power might account for the lack of assignments with explicitly social- instrumental or social-rhetorical aims, others attributed the discontinuity between educational ideals and actual practices to something more obvious: our every-day concern with course objectives and student learning. Throughout the existing curriculum, the main objective is to ensure student learning of some specific body of knowledge. That objective is so difficult to achieve that there is little or no room for assignments whose purposes are either "the governance, guidance or control" of the actions of others or the participation in debates that concern "the well-being and destiny of communities" (Beale 94). In brief, the argument was as follows: before doing history or deploying it in a debate, one simply has to know it.

And yet, as some faculty were quick to point out, it is in doing or deploying history that one really gets to know it. While others did not disagree with that point, they insisted that students cannot be expected to act reasonably as either experts or social critics until after they have acquired a body of knowledge. But in a curriculum designed for the acquisition of one specific body of knowledge after another, would that "after" ever come? Was there any place in the curriculum for writing assignments in which students assumed the authority to address practical problems or to take a position on controversial social issues? Or was higher education primarily a deferral or displacement of socially relevant discursive action? Should we accept the apparent discontinuity between our educational goals and our pedagogical practices and agree that given the nature of things, ideals and actualities never match up? Or is it possible to expand the kinds of writing that count in our classrooms? Should we revise our sense of what gives someone the authority to use discourse instrumentally or rhetorically? Besides disciplinary knowledge, are there other kinds of knowledge that students might draw on to support and develop their assumption of the social power--and responsibility--of discourse?

Rather than consensus, our consideration of educational goals and practices produced a debate that left us all with some serious questions to consider. And that, I think, made a significant difference when we turned to the more commonplace issues that writing across the curriculum workshops take up (such as, designing assignments, the process approach to writing, and ways of responding to student writing). So, for example, in the midst of our discussion of peer review, one faculty member suggested that it might be a way to address the social-rhetorical goals of education. Others, however, objected to what they considered to be a relatively limited and therefore a much too mechanical way of putting into practice the social goals we preach. And once again, a debate about educational priorities and pedagogical possibilities erupted.

Of course, such workshop debates do not ensure that a much-needed transformation in the prevailing discursive practices of disciplines will occur. At best, they mark the beginnings of a rhetorical turn. Nevertheless, I have some reasons to believe that we are headed in the right direction. By provoking debate, the workshop's turn to rhetoric made it difficult for all of us to feel comfortable with business as usual; incited many of us to articulate our experience of felt contradiction; and moved some of us to insist that what is really needed is not more of the same but something other. In addition, workshop participants shared their discomfort, their sense of contradiction, and their ideas for change with others, including administrators, departmental colleagues, and, in a few instances, students. Soon debate began to surface in other places, including in the newly-formed committee to reevaluate the priority of research over teaching in promotion and tenure decisions; in the interdisciplinary committee appointed to advise the Provost on writing across the curriculum; and even in the precincts of the English department where various ways of sharing responsibility for writing instruction were proposed and ideas for introducing a rhetorical turn into both the college's and department's curriculum were considered. Currently, faculty workshops on rhetoric, reason, and the disciplines are being planned, as are changes in the college's curriculum. All of this gives me some reason to hope (and to argue) that in taking and promoting a rhetorical turn, the writing across the curriculum movement can become a force for disciplinary transformation--a force that introduces the possibility of revising prevailing curricular structures by quite literally writing across them.

Queens College, CUNY
Flushing, New York

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Works Cited