JAC Volume 16 Issue 2

Adrienne Rich's remarks in "Claiming an Education" contain a spirited denunciation of the ingrained passivity of education. Urging women students to take greater responsibility for their own learning, Rich describes the relationship between teachers and students as "a pledge of mutual seriousness about women, about language, ideas, methods, and values" (235). Celebrated for its view that responsibility "means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you," "Claiming an Education" has been read as manifesto for student responsibility and empowerment, turning our attention from its feminist values to its essentially student-centered themes (233).

A companion piece directed at teachers, "Taking Women Students Seriously," receives less attention. This address to teachers at a women's college continues the theme of seriousness, but here Rich's exhortation of responsibility for self resists conversion into conventional liberalism or generic educational progressivism. Rich specifies that the first step for women students and teachers desiring to change the academy is taken by learning how to take themselves seriously, a seriousness which begins in their own clear-eyed embrace of women's value:

Rich's idea of seriousness expresses a collective vision, rejecting achievement and self-development attained through either traditional academic values or the antiseptic ideals of studenthood. Personal and social power, for Rich, are inseparable outcomes of a collaborative enterprise conducted by correlating one's lived experience and elements of one's social identity with those of others. Change comes by regarding each other with value and purpose.

In this essay I want to extend the figure of seriousness to collaboration in the writing class. Seriousness, as Rich uses it, carries a challenge to method and epistemology which is addressed to all teaching but seems especially applicable to composition. Related to themes in feminist social theory and postmodernism, seriousness questions traditional sources of knowledge and authority, and casts doubt on individualist suppositions about learning. Collaboration presents possibilities for redirecting conventional channels of learning. In my classrooms I have seen that it is possible to change the place occupied by the teacher, but it is harder to lead students to see each other as sources of knowledge.

When pedagogical roles change, social biases like sexism or racism come to the surface and often prevent students from valuing or even recognizing each other's contributions. Add to this the traditionally individualistic structures of education, of the classroom, and of writing and the resistance to valuing the contributions of all class members is substantial. What institutional and cultural barriers interfere with students learning from each other? How is academic literacy itself inimical to collective study? In this essay I want to consider the issue of mutual "seriousness" between students, how it might come about, and what it might mean to include such a goal in the stated purposes of our pedagogy.

One measure of the institutional inertia we face in trying to change the subject of writing is the degree to which collaboration can reverse certain advances of student-centered pedagogy. We recognize that collaboration alters classroom relationships. Collaborative practices are often justified through reference to student-centered pedagogies responsible for redrawing student-teacher boundaries. Many forms of this decentered pedagogy, however, try to redefine the relationship between teacher and student without considering how such changes entail new student relationships. Perhaps more disturbing than this omission is the proliferation of "manager" discourse by advocates of collaboration, which suggests that paths of knowing have not necessarily changed but may have reverted to a form of teacher-centered authority.

Asking students to work together itself does not change where knowledge is found or how we view each other as teachers and students. As Carrie Shively Leverenz and Thomas Fox have documented, even with considerable planning collaboration can quickly become an exercise in social reproduction, a rehearsal for a drama of tacit control. Collaborative practice needs to actively promote a view of knowledge in which it is understood that though power in the classroom is not always equal, everyone knows something from which we may learn (Wolf 92).

Rich's ideal of seriousness in school requires a reciprocity among and between students and teachers. Mutual seriousness entails an acknowledged reciprocal relation between members of the classroom that is rare. This amounts to more than mutual respect and tolerance; it is a recognition that sharing a classroom creates relationships and that each member is bound up in the success or failure of the others.

The importance of relationships and reciprocity forms the core of Edward Pauly's book, The Classroom Crucible. Examining decades of data on educational innovation and reform, Pauly argues that pedagogical method and other educational panaceas correlate very weakly, if at all, with classroom success. I do not take this to mean that refining how and what we teach is wasted effort. Pauly's point is that in our effort to develop new theories and classroom policies, such work remains divorced from what really happens inside the class. This helps explain the experience we have all had as teachers of being equally prepared for similar classes and having one work and the other fail.

Like William James's adage that truth happens, Pauly concludes that the outcome of any classroom is a collaborative effort: "Ordinary classroom life creates a stream of power struggles that is neither predictable nor controllable. It is the joint, unintended product of the people in each classroom" (71). Each classroom environment is a unique educational context which exerts its influence over every member, teacher and student alike. Hence, an enormous proportion of what a student actually learns in a particular course is attributable to classroom experience.

Because he is not speaking the language of contemporary social politics, Pauly may appear to be a strange ally for Rich. Yet both writers present a theory of reciprocity which intimates the centrality of classroom relationships in the success of teaching. Arguing that power in the classroom is always negotiated, Pauly proposes that "Each use of power reminds everyone in a classroom how vulnerable they are to the people around them, and it simultaneously blinds them to their own modest ability to control events" (67). Rich's feminism helps remind us of the lines along which some of these relationships will be formed. Written for and about women, Rich's vision of seriousness relies on a pedagogy of identification, which highlights conflicts between collective identity and mutual respect. If Pauly establishes the importance of classroom relationships, Rich's notion of coordinated social history poses difficult questions for those social relations: What happens when affinity politics takes center stage? How do we create a pedagogy of identification that doesn't negate the cooperative premise of the classroom? What if we can't? And in a writing class, how do forms of expression reflecting cultural difference come to be seen as equally valuable?

Speaking directly to the issue of students searching out each other's knowledge, the collaborative work I consider here seems to exemplify seriousness among students by virtue of its sustained collective identification. Students self-identify in the classroom typically on the basis of likes and dislikes, localized social involvements, and the amalgam of tastes and preferences they have learned to consider as their unique selves. For Sharon an Iris, however, discovering a shared history as women writers helped them understand classroom experiences that might otherwise have been perceived as a personal trial.

Central to the meaning of Iris and Sharon's collaboration is where it began. During the course, they had little personal interaction, each being randomly assigned to work the entire semester in different small groups. They neither knew each other socially nor talked outside of class. The differing composition of their respective groups would have led me to expect significantly different classroom experiences—Iris worked in a group with two, socially-conservative white males, while Sharon's group included one white male and another white female—yet their experiences were very similar.

What initiated their work together was a class discussion of group writing study which exposed problems normally hidden within groups. I had been trying for several weeks to reduce the aura of privacy which often develops among small groups so that the entire class could benefit from the work that each team was doing. In a stunning betrayal of the so-called academic community, the discussion drew together what had been parallel struggles. Sharon sets up what happened this way:

Throughout the semester, these writers were taken to task by their male group members for their failure to adhere to the norms of academic discourse. The only other woman involved was in Sharon's group, and she avoided giving evaluative commentary. In earlier writing analyses, the male students in Sharon and Iris's writing groups were critical of departures from the appropriate school style. Jim was increasingly critical of Sharon's creative attempts, commenting, "I think she needs to focus on style." Iris's group was more harshly dismissive. Months before Jim characterized her writing as "fluff n' nutter," Bob criticized her for not using "common traditional formal language" and suggested that she find more "proper and distinguished phrases."

These are not necessarily uncommon transactions in writing groups. The most frequent problem I have seen in collaborative student groups is getting students to not become the embodiment of received assumptions about literacy. But Iris and Sharon find in the dismissal and correction of their peers more than some disembodied Foucauldian voice. As they write in the conclusion of their collaborative paper:

That Iris and Sharon would come to see their classroom experience and the reception of their writing determined most strongly by gender difference is at odds with the instrumentalist understanding of language promoted in the academy. In the rare instances when the realities of linguistic gender bias are acknowledged in our culture, the link between academic discourse and masculine styles of expression often gets described as a kind of historical accident, an unintentional byproduct. Consistent with a commonsense "mirror theory of discourse" in which language reflects but does not determine social structures, such reasoning implies that academic writing took on the characteristics of male language use more as a consequence of men's social dominance than as a specific vehicle of social control. In Manly Writing, however, Miriam Brody argues that the denigration of the feminine and women's language to elevate androcentric literacy has been a deliberate and systematic process. Her research helps us recognize that discursive styles and language habits continue to be active constructions.

Brody asserts that "To write well in Western culture is to write like a man" (3), a proposition I imagine that is tested and confirmed countless times each semester in writing groups and peer editing sessions. Brody's book examines composition texts and "advice literature" to present a complex history of instrumentalist language consciousness, grounding the development of transactional rhetoric in material conditions, emerging philosophies of mind, and a centuries-old metaphoric and social context organized to privilege the masculine by containing the feminine. As Brody explains, "Imagining the making of knowledge as a brutal assault on female nature, the early Enlightenment rhetoricians represented composition as the task of a male hero who wrested truth from a world that had newly yielded itself up to scrutiny" (32).

Pursuing the evolution of this rhetoric, Brody finds that the entrepreneurial values promoted by the industrial and commercial context of American society helped redefine the "terrain to be conquered as internal and individual" (33). One product of this transformation is a literacy characterized by a mastery of language, the presumption of objectivity, the use of logic to uncover truth, and a plain, declarative style as the chief form of expression. The writerly subjectivity resulting from such individualistic literacy instruction teaches the habits of solitary introspection in order to find knowledge by looking inside oneself.

Opposing claims for the naturalness of androcentric rhetoric, alternative paradigms of language and knowing have appeared in the last twenty years. Brody's history is a welcome elaboration of the themes brought to light in studies of gender and language responsible for naming the features of women's experience and socialization. Work across a wide disciplinary spectrum has shown that what manly rhetoric and androcentric science labeled the "weakness" of women's minds and the "excesses" of their discourse may be construed as expressions of epistemological difference, alternative modes of interpreting the world and responding to social relationships.

The initial composite that emerged from this work was of a non-competitive, non-hierarchical subjectivity tending to be more responsive to the contexts of relationships than to an inflexible belief in right and wrong. This ideological inversion has been tempered to portray women as less, rather than not, competitive and hierarchical. Many observers characterize women's discourse styles as more nuanced, more inclined towards inclusion, more likely to express the subjective basis of knowledge, things felt as much as known. Deborah Tannen's distinctions in You Just Don't Understand between male report-talk and female rapport-talk provide one example of what appear to be very different transactional purposes for language. According to Tannen, men use language mostly to transmit information, reporting data much like the Royal Society empiricists Brody discusses. Women, on the other hand, are more likely to be mindful of maintaining rapport, communicating in ways which balance message with the connection between participants. Almost no description could be more accurate to describe the differences in Iris and Sharon's language from that of their male counterparts. Though we did not read Tannen in this course, Iris almost seems to have her work in mind when she playfully mocks the "analytic dimension" pervading Bob's writing, citing the phrase "Evaluating the car as driveable . . ." as evidence.

In the study of their own writing, Sharon and Iris find significance in both the style and content of their writing. Many of the features they observe support conclusions about women's language styles made by Tannen, Gilligan, and Belenky and her colleagues. Sharon lists among the features of Iris's writing a willingness to express discomfort and emotion openly, a resistance to come to a set resolution and a tendency toward implicit meaning. She also comments on more typical features like the presence of humor or the use of imagery. Iris talked more of her own desire to risk more, but admits to the fear that "people would not chase after the real me." Admiring Sharon's ability to speak so openly about her family, Iris shares as a point of contrast her conscious attempts to hide her family and the embarrassment she felt as a child of immigrant parents. What she seems to be expressing is her desire to write in a way inclusive of relationships, the absence of which troubles her. Iris's reluctance to write about family is a potential site of conflict that may have led, had their collaboration been given more time to develop, to a complication of the identification these two writers shared.

Iris's analysis of Sharon's writing centers on similar themes, especially what might be called the performative nature of the language. Picking up on Sharon's statement that "I purposely play with my writing by adding underlying messages," Iris catalogs the subtleties at work: from the re-creation of childhood experience that required a child's persona and a child's language to the recurrent use of understatement when using direct discourse. The seriousness of Sharon's work for Iris is announced in her comparison of its demands to what we typically call critical literacy. Indicating the need for a high degree of reader involvement, Iris writes, "Just as people easily miss the implications of racial, sexist, or monetary remarks, Sharon's essays get pushed aside."

Involvement is one of the traits that unites these writers, a certain quality of reading incorporating an affective, receptive response. It is more than the false sense of agreement that often occurs between basic writers who measure rhetorical effectiveness by similarity of experience. Expectedly but unintentionally, their paper expresses the sensitivity missing from their small groups. Iris supports Sharon's initial sense of identification, noting that "Sharon has come closer to understanding my papers" than her male group members. This receptivity becomes evident in statements such as Iris's claim that "the pain of the simple words is there" or Sharon's response that she could "sense Iris's feeling of dread from this one line." In their reading of each other's work they respond to the combination of language and experience, a trait also reported by Tannen and Belenky. By taking each other seriously, these students identify as writers and women, each validating the other's knowledge and rhetorical style.

Public and private legitimation is critical for the formation of an authoritative stance among beginning writers. In her study of women writing in the academy, Gesa Kirsch identifies authority as one of the key issues for women composing their way into academic communities. Emphasizing how perceptions of authority depend on audience, Kirsch reports that while all writers struggle to develop a sense of confidence, women in the academy have particular difficulty imagining "supportive and interesting audiences" and tend to internalize the skepticism about audience to represent uncertainty about their own ability (79).

Kirsch's view may be juxtaposed to David Bartholomae's claim in "Inventing the University" that writers take their place in a community through discourse before they are ever extended membership. Bartholomae's analysis illuminates one legacy of manly rhetoric: the always-already paradox of writing in which acceptance is achieved when it can no longer be denied. As a description of what is sometimes a lengthy and painful process of development, this vestige of manly rhetoric—counseling self confidence and fidelity to one's own vision—fails to counter the effects of historical and daily exclusion. Bartholomae's scenario offers an unreassuring logic of inevitability: successful writers become successful by making the moves successful writers make. Kirsch's informants dispute this narrative, repeating the familiar story of taking on the discourse of the academy only to be ostracized according to the cultural logic that reserves assertive behavior for men.

As the experiences of Iris and Sharon bear out, the tendency for the concerns of women and their discursive styles to be dismissed as non-serious persists in the academy. At a time when so-called personal writing enjoys great prestige in many composition programs, to invite women students to write their experiences (let alone use a non-academic idiom) risks recreating the reasons for silence. The authority that Bartholomae implies comes from a kind of pretending-to-be is harder to come by when, as Kirsch explains, women's "talk—and writing—has been labeled trivial, illogical, or emotional"(80). If there have been scholarly inroads in the validation of women's experience, that legitimacy has yet to be a regular tenet of the general classroom environment.

Authority is often an issue in collaborative situations. In classrooms organized around principles of competitive self-interest, authority is challenged, never granted outright, making the academy hospitable to male discursive patterns. Seriousness among students implies the opposite: a presumption of contributory knowledge. Iris addresses this describing a discussion in which she contradicted one of the men in the class:

The "marketplace of ideas" is, as Brody shows, an outgrowth of a masculine paradigm of language use. And the discursive business of such agonistic space is conducted according to male patterns of communication, a point not lost on Iris when she writes:

Questions of personal power and solidarity are common in applications of feminist language research to the teaching of writing. Arriving in association with the subjective orientation of expressivist pedagogy, an example of feminist writing pedagogy struggling with these issues is Cynthia Caywood and Gillian Overing's Teaching Writing: Pedagogy, Gender and Equity. The Caywood and Overing volume exemplifies the difficulty in trying to reconceive the scene of writing in ways similar to the attempt of Iris and Sharon to find a description of their writing that incorporates both social and personal selves. Despite their commitment to feminist ideals, the writers tend to measure the value of feminist pedagogies for what they confer on individual writers. The transformative power of composition for Caywood and Overing lies in its potential to give students "confidence in their own ideas and belief in their own authority" (xv). Though several writers address collaboration as a means of resocializing composing, most pursue a pedagogy that "fosters the individual voice in the classroom" (xi). The concepts of voice and authority essential to many expressions of feminist pedagogy represent a problematic alliance between the project to rediscover value in gender difference and the clichéd discourse of individualism.

The link between academic literacy and the establishment of individualism as a cultural ethos is an especially critical relation for women writers. The emergence of individualism as a theory of social relations alongside manly rhetoric makes it hard to identify "women's discourse." As androcentric subjectivity has plagued feminism as a whole, individualistic assumptions in many paradigms of writing instruction have inhibited the adoption of feminist ideals. Indeed, the use of expressive pedagogy as a vehicle for feminist approaches to composition appears roughly analogous to the relationship between Enlightenment political theory and the pursuit of Women's Rights.

Some feminists have begun to take issue with composition's use of women's discourse models and epistemic modes described by Belenky et al., Gilligan, and Tannen. Susan Jarratt doubts that a nurturing, relationship-building paradigm drawing on this work is enough. Jarratt shares the goal of transforming the classroom but thinks that avoiding conflict "leaves those who adopt it insufficiently prepared to negotiate the oppressive discourses of racism, sexism, and classism in the composition classroom"(106).

Responding to the idea that the argumentative character of academic discourse perpetuates a kind of violence against women, Jarratt presents the counter-thesis that an exclusively affirmative writing class would end up like many student-centered pedagogies in which teachers, unable to say no, end up tacitly legitimizing dominant ideology, for example "endorsing the clichés of competitive self-interest that perpetuate a system of racism, sexism, and classism" (109). Jarratt's foremost objection is that an education in nurturing seemingly designed to influence male discourse would only condemn female students to the same modes of expression and public behavior that have been used to justify their position at the margin.

Jarratt's argument against nurturing different writing styles appears to underestimate the possibility of students working together to resist the colonizing discourse of others. What happened for Sharon and Iris suggests this possibility. Unable or unwilling to much more than individually intimate the conflict each faced, their work together enabled them to publicize the discursive bias they faced. While there is merit in Jarratt's desire to bring students into a critical relation with the discourses they face, working against essentialized notions of women's language to reclaim argument as "a progressive mode of discourse" she seems to locate the ability to resist in one, rather traditional form of discursive opposition (106).

Sharon and Iris's collaborative paper seems to m successful in naming the specifics of the classroom scene and their own experiences (the necessity of which Pauly's work implies), so I did not anticipate Iris's sense of social defeat in this class. The paper documents the value in each other's writing, but it concludes with a sense of loss. Coming to a topic that "needs to be addressed," Iris uses the last few pages of their paper to understand the phenomenology of this particular class and the response of the women in it:

These writers do not document how or when they came to this realization, or even what it ultimately means; Iris's writing indicates that these are not entirely new thoughts. But this expression of the difficulties of writing against the androcentric academic grain or of claiming classroom space is new, and it is a product of joint labor.² Calling for the development of an ecofeminist poetics, C. Jan Swearingen speaks of the need to "promote modes of individualism that draw on collective, participatory models of knowing, meaning and action" (231). Collaboration can be an important venue for pursuing these new relational paradigms, but it needs to find ways to turn students toward each other, not just a common goal. In the case of Iris and Sharon, collaborative work allowed two women marginalized by both institutional custom and classroom politics to enter the confrontational modes Jarratt advocates without feeling compelled to abandon alternative forms of expression. Nor did they have to go it alone as the traditions of schooling have long insisted.

What would it take to create the conditions for such serious work? We could begin by adding the resources students bring to the classroom to what Louise Wetherbee Phelps has called the "geography of knowledge" in composition. Identifying one's communities of interest announces a new classroom context, one in which learning depends on inquiring of others about the sources of meaning and value each bring. We would also need to recognize the contingencies of classroom work and be willing to support pedagogies designed not to circumvent them, but to let them flourish. Serious work can take many forms, but it will not simply happen; it is the result of collective action. Students will regard each other and the work they do together seriously when learning from each other becomes inseparable from learning for oneself.