Going Back to Cali
Two weeks ago, I was happy to receive two emails from NCTE notifying me that my co-proposed special interest group (SIG) meeting and panel presentation for CCCC had been approved: it looks like I'm headed back to San Francisco in March of 2009. The SIG, "Writing at the Military Service Academies," will be a welcome opportunity to exchange ideas with writing faculty from the Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs, Navy at Annapolis, Virginia Military Institute, the Citadel, the Coast Guard Academy at New London, and the post-secondary academy prep schools; and also an opportunity to talk to other curious folks from outside the Academies about the unique nature of what we do, and about the ways that -- as we wrote in our proposal -- "many of the challenges faced by composition today are crystallized by the service academies' hierarchies, structures, and obligations."
But of perhaps broader interest to composition scholars -- especially given past strong critiques of the ways we rhetorically frame the work of our discipline -- might be the panel presentation I'm on (hat tip to Aerobil for passing on Jungian title inspiration), and the other folks on that panel. I think some sparks may likely fly, but even given those anticipated sparks, I think (and hope) we'll manage to have a productive, respectful set of brief presentations, and I'm excited about the discussion that I hope will follow. At last year's CCCC, I heard Cheryl Glenn, Peter Elbow, and Bruce Ballenger all express, in various ways, the concern that our discipline isn't very good at representing what we do (or what we ought to do) to those outside the discipline. The panel I'm on attempts to engage a (very) wide range of perspectives responding to that concern -- and yeah, we're gonna have some fun in breaking down the walls of our various echo chambers.
The Plagiarized Field Manual, Part 2
(This post, the second in a series, builds upon, responds to, revises, and condenses a number of emails sent in somewhat different form to WPA-L, the writing program administrators' listserv.)
In response to the emerging controversy over the plagiarized Army field manual on counterinsurgency, FM 3-24, Chuck Bazerman and Christopher Strelluf made what I think are some important points on WPA-L. On October 31, Bazerman observed that anthropologist David Price's article "is not just a plagiarism gotcha," and I'm inclined to agree: as Bazerman points out, the article offers some "subtle observations about the writing and research process, the ability to handle source material and depth of disciplinary understanding, a subtle understanding of the motives for plagiarism," among other things. For the reasons Bazerman notes, I think Price's article is valuable -- although it also seems to me quite clear from Price's tone that the article was, indeed, primarily intended as what Bazerman and other very smart people before him have referred to as a "Gotcha!" in support of his broader strongly implied claim that Military=Bad. (Note the supporting characterization by the Counterpunch editors of "military enterprises" as "evil.") In serving the ends that its author intended, Price's article critiquing the plagiarized field manual raises other, more complicated issues as well.
The Plagiarized Field Manual, Part 1
(This post, the first in a series, builds upon, revises, and condenses a number of emails sent in somewhat different form to WPA-L, the writing program administrators' listserv.)
The Army recently published a revised version of its field manual (FM) on counterinsurgency, FM 3-24. Field manuals are how-to guides for soldiers: step-by-step, easy-to-follow instructions for everything you can imagine you might have to do in wartime, from loading a boat to reading a map. They're some of the most clearly written documents I've seen, and they're also all in the public domain, since -- like any writing I do in my current official capacity -- they're products of taxpayer dollars.
The counterinsurgency field manual, however, represents a shift in perspective on the Army's part. Field manuals are efficient, straightforward, commonsense. For the most part, FMs are careful to avoid complexity and ambiguity, and eschew the complications that attend upon the intricacies of intercultural interaction. But the Army realized that what's going on today in Iraq and elsewhere is a whole lot more complicated than what they were initially prepared for, and that realization prompted a fundamental revision in doctrine; a revision than actually engaged the complexities and ambiguities of intercultural interactions, and relied upon peer-reviewed academic scholarship in anthropology and sociology to do so.
So there's the initial ground for debate, which has made the rounds in various forms on WPA-L and elsewhere: is it acceptable for the Army to adapt scholarship -- yours, mine, anybody's -- to the warfighting and peacekeeping ends decided upon by the nation's civilian leadership? (I'm doing my best here to make careful distinctions as to who does what, both out of a self-conscious awareness of my status as a civilian instructor at a military institution, and out of a discomfort with the ways I've seen academics sometimes unknowingly conflate military leadership with high-level civilian command.)
The scandal, though, is this: according to anthropologist David Price, the published version of the Army's FM 3-24 on Counterinsurgency is deeply and thoroughly plagiarized, particularly in its Chapter 3, which patches together a wide range of verbatim or minimally edited passages from prominent sociological and anthropological texts without any sort of sufficient documentation in order to establish a series of definitional terms for use by officers, NCOs, and soldiers seeking to implement counterinsurgency tactics in the field.
Now, initially, when I saw this, I immediately got out all my old FMs: not a single works cited among them. David Price writes that "The cumulative effect of such non-attributions is devastating to the Manual's academic integrity," but apparently fails to grasp that this is in some ways a matter of genre: FMs are manuals for use in the field rather than the library, and the sergeants and lieutenants and captains who will put them to use are far less interested in where ideas come from than in matters of implementation. Some officers I've spoken to have echoed the observation that Army writing is community property and definitionally in the public domain, which likely contributed to the habits of mind that led to the failures of documentation. I don't believe that excuses the plagiarism -- particularly given Price's point that "The most damning element of the Manual's reliance on unattributed sources is that the Manual includes a bibliography listing of over 100 sources, yet not a single source I have identified is included" -- but it does help to explain it.
But I've put my hands on a copy of the new FM, and the plagiarism is unfortunately damning, particularly given the hyperattention to citation in other areas. I don't know whose intent it was, but the bottom line is this: there is clearly some intent to deceive associated with the citations in this document.
(More to follow.)
UNH07 A3: The UNH Longitudinal Study
Mike Garcia, Jim Webber, and Kate Gillen presented on various aspects of the ongoing University of New Hampshire longitudinal study assessing the university's current writing requirement. Mike led the presentation with a relaxed, comfortable talk offering an overview of the various forms the study has taken and the way it's evolved over the years. The university has a set of writing-intensive courses, and according to Mike, the study was designed to assess what writing- intensive meant, precisely, and whether as a course requirement it actually did any good: in sum, the longitudinal study responded to the fact that the Writing Program had instituted a writing requirement without any built-in assessment method.
Recuperating the Individual
In his chapter "Can Economics Start from the Individual Alone?," Geoffrey M. Hodgson gives an account of how economics turned its attention as a discipline away from a systemic focus and toward the individual homo economicus as its sole starting point. As Hodgson describes it, within the span of a few decades, scholars in economics chose to make their topic the "allocation of scarce means between alternative uses, as a universal matter of choice for every individual in a world of scarcity. Instead of the whole system of production and allocation of the means of life, the choosing individual alone became the foundation stone of economic theory" (57). To the contrary, Hodgson proposes that "the isolated individual is not viable as an analytical starting point" (58), and I see in his argument some instructive parallels to the shift in philosophical emphasis that some in composition have called "the social turn." One of the more widely recognized indicators of that social turn is James Berlin's landscaping of the field, wherein scholars focusing on formal concerns were labeled current-traditionalists, others focusing on the mental processes of composing were labeled cognitivists, and those focusing upon the authorial choices of the composing individual were labeled expressivists, to whom Berlin counterposed social-epistemic rhetoric, with its examination and critique of the ways social structures and institutions construct knowledge and interpellate individuals into hegemonic ideologies.
Berlin sets up social-epistemic rhetoric as a strong critique of what he characterizes as expressivism's focus on the authorial choices of the individual composer, indicting that focus as divorced from the social and thereby unable to engage in anything other than apolitical, disconnected writerly solipsism. So, too, does Hodgson see a shift in political economy toward an emphasis on the choosing individual, which his essay strongly critiques -- but his critique takes a direction quite different from Berlin's.
Someone Not Trained
There's an excellent article in the June 2007 CCC that's had WPA-L abuzz with excited discussions, objections, and elaborations. I think the excitement over the piece -- "Teaching About Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning 'First-Year Composition' as 'Introduction to Writing Studies'" by Douglas Downs and Elizabeth Wardle -- is merited: there are some startling ideas here, provocatively posed, and Downs and Wardle have certainly got me thinking. Composition, they suggest, isn't only (and shouldn't be) about teaching a set of discrete and isolable techniques that help students write good essays in standard academic discourse for their other classes; and they thoroughly demonstrate how the study and teaching of writing has been shown in our discipline's research to be considerably more complicated than that. (My inadequate account of the article does it discursive harm: please, read it yourself, rather than relying on my poor summing-up.) As some on WPA-L have pointed out, the article is not without its difficulties, and there are perhaps some underexamined terms and arguments, but overall, it's a smart and exciting piece that's sure to continue to stir discussion.
One passage in particular got me going, because of my institutional situation here at the Point, but I imagine others might have found it provocative as well. My situation: I'm civilian faculty, an assistant professor, with a PhD. As in most departments here, our faculty split is around 70/30 or 80/20 military/civilian. Military junior faculty come in with an MA, teach three years, and rotate back out into the Army, possibly coming back when they've got their PhDs, while civilian faculty tend to be more permanent. This proportionally faster turnover rate for military as opposed to civilian instructors creates some unique instructor training exigencies, as does the fact that the Army pays full ride for its military instructors' graduate degrees, and strongly discourages (perhaps even forbids?) them from working as teaching assistants. So our Army instructors come to us with no college classroom teaching experience, although of course they've held company command and have immense experience leading and managing hundreds and sometimes thousands of soldiers. The military junior faculty are, on the other hand, burgeoning experts in their chosen fields, which tend for the most part to be associated with literature.
And therein lies the rub. According to Downs and Wardle, the pedagogy they propose "cannot be taught by someone not trained in writing studies" (574). Later, they elaborate, describing and indicting
the myth that content is separable from writing -- that a FYC [first-year composition] instructor need not be expert in the subject matter of a paper in order to evaluate the quality of writing in that paper, or need not be a subject expert on writing in order to teach writing. Such claims accept the premise that writing instruction can be limited to fluent English syntax, grammar, and mechanics.
The first statement raises some difficult and complex concerns for me, but I very much agree with the latter sentiment. I can't help but bristle when I get well-meant emails from friends or family equating what I do with teaching basic rules of grammar and mechanics. I am an expert on writing, just as my friends who teach chemistry or literature are experts on their topics, and I teach writing well. And this summer, I'm taking part in our arriving faculty workshop, and helping to talk to junior officers about best pedagogical practices for teaching first-year composition. Some of them -- who'll be teaching sections of first-year composition -- have barely heard of our discipline. Certainly, some are enthusiastic: one major, although she wasn't presenting, registered for this year's CCCC in New York and took the train down two mornings to attend as many sessions as she could, and came back (to teach her afternoon classes) deeply enthusiastic and quickly put together a proposal for 2008. And certainly, we're training them, to the limits of our time: we've got sessions on the rhetorical situation, the writing process, peer response, conferencing, commenting, reflection; we've got a set of required comp-theory readings; they're watching Take 20 -- but does that constitute being "trained in writing studies"?
I don't know. It's a start, maybe. But it's a question Downs and Wardle raise: how does the pedagogy they propose intersect with academic labor practices? Even if the pedagogy they propose is a good thing, which I most definitely think it is, how can it be done? What do we do at my institution, if we have only a tiny fraction of our composition instructors with expertise in writing studies -- and what does it mean to have expertise?
Benkler Meets Murray
What happens when we take the (allegedly old or superannuated, according to some) process pedagogy approaches -- in fact, I'm thinking primarily of those who have been labeled (accurately or not) expressivist -- and put them into play with the approaches of those (of whom I am one) who concern themselves with emerging technologies? When one reads Peter Elbow's Everyone Can Write with care, with generosity, with a critical eye, what might it tell us about student writers and the condition of being digital?
If we go back to Donald Murray's "Teach Writing as Process Not Product" or A Writer Teaches Writing, what might we gain from Yochai Benkler's three observations from The Wealth of Networks that "first, non-proprietary strategies have always been more important in information production than they were in the production of steel or automobiles" (or other industrial goods); that in a networked information economy, "the aggregate effect of individual action, even when it is not self-consciously cooperative, produces the coordinate effect of a new and rich information environment" (or what we might call a new commons); that we have recently seen the emergence of "effective, large-scale cooperative efforts -- peer production of information, knowledge, and culture... typified by the emergence of free and open-source software" and the overflow of the open-source ethos into domains far beyond those of the programmer (Benkler 4-5)? Quite a bit, I think. Murray's and Elbow's concerns with individualism and ideas mesh quite well with Benkler's focus in ways that the so-called social turn in composition studies could not at all anticipate.
Interestingly, so much of that theory in the social turn was derived from Marx and his inheritors, but today seems inadequate in the context of Benkler's observation that the Internet "is the first modern communications medium that expands its reach by decentralizing the capital structure of production and distribution of information, culture, and knowledge. Much of the physical capital that embeds most of the intelligence in the network is widely diffused and owned by end users... This basic change in the material conditions of information and cultural production and distribution have substantial effects on how we come to know the world we occupy and the alternative courses of action open to us as individuals and social actors" (30). Ownership of the means of production and distribution is returning to individuals -- is decentralizing -- and we're needing to turn back to a focus on those individuals, not as isolate or solipsistic, but as networked agents, as writers and composers whose actions have concrete and tangible effects.
Benkler’s Production Grid
In my CCCC presentation, I tried to mash together Yochai Benkler's diverse motivations for production, my own thoughts about the work > appropriation > ownership > use > work cycle, and Gibson-Graham's tabular charting of the various market, alternative market, and nonmarket forms of economic activity, and to apply that mashup to the composition classroom. Right now, I'm planning out how to turn that mashup into an article, and I've gone back to Benkler and re-stumbled across yet another table, on page 43 of The Wealth of Networks. Benkler charts three types of strategies for "Cost Minimization / Benefit Acquisition" across three domains: the public, the intra-organizational (he calls it "intrafirm" but I want to open up that term to more explicitly include noncapitalist or alternative capitalist enterprises), and the semi-private. His three strategies are those of rights-based exclusion (in other words, profiting from copyright and associated strategies), nonexclusion-market (producing information from which to profit, but not via exclusivity), and nonexclusion-nonmarket (e.g., reputation economies and the like). I think Benkler's taxonomy is helpful, particularly in considering the domain/context/scope of activity, and I want to work to map it over Gibson-Graham's and my own subsequent elaborations, but I also think it's somewhat incomplete, particularly in light of Benkler's own work on non-market motivations for information production.
Which is what I'll be working on as soon as I see the light at the end of the end-of-semester forced march.
CCCC07.P04: Pedagogic Violence
The full title of this session was "Pedagogic Violence and Emotions of (Self-) Assessment: Anger, Mortification, Shame," or, as panel chair Elizabeth Weiser summed it up, "The Happy Panel!"
Amy Robillard began her presentation, "The Functions and Effects of Angry Responses to Plagiarism," with some questions to the audience: "How many of us have suspected plagiarism?" All hands went up. "Felt insulted by it?" All hands. "Felt angry?" Again: all. Robillard offered an anecdote from a course she had taught wherein a student turned in a paper with one passage in a noticeably lighter font than the rest of the passage. She Googled the passage and discovered that the student had actually plagiarized three separate passages in the paper from weblogs. Robillard described her anger at the attempt at deceit, and her anger at the student's implicit presumption of stupidity on Robillard's part; the presumption that Robillard would somehow be dumb enough not to recognize plagiarism when she saw it. This anger, Robillard suggested, helped her to maintain an identity as a writing instructor sufficiently expert to make the distinction between that which is plagiarized and that which is not. But of course, she acknowledged, she could have missed it as well, because it was the font color that spurred her curiosity -- and that acknowledgment led for Robillard both to a possible anger at self for writing teacher and to the question (itself carrying an inherent affective teacherly freight) of how many plagiarizers go uncaught.
CCCC07 N: Re/Visions of a Field
At this excellent (and disappointingly under-attended) featured session, "Re/Visions of a Field: Representing Disciplinary Identities in the Pages of College Composition and Communication," Deborah Holdstein began by talking about her work as the editor of CCC and offering an overview of article titles from the journal from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Her rhetorical intent in so doing was quite clear: the titles sounded very similar in focus and scope to the concerns our field discusses today. That they sound familiar, as Holdstein put it, is a "modest revelation," but one that we ought to heed and act on for important reasons. Holdstein pointed to Joseph Harris's 1999 comment as editor of CCC that in 1949, composition didn't yet exist as a discipline: in fact, Holdstein pointed out, a prototype for the current state of composition studies was set in the 1950s in the pages of that same journal. Yet despite the longstanding disciplinary concerns that recur in those pages, we are largely neglectful of our bibliographic reach and scope: the CCC bibliography was for a long time unavailable, and we've all but lost our deep connection to rhetoric and rhetorical history. We ought to use our past more than we do, Holdstein argued, pointing as an example and possible model to Cheryl Glenn's 2006 MLA examination of the usable past of rhetoric in the pages of 1960s issues of CCC. The journal has been an accountable voice for scholarship, and we stand obligated to use that history of the "golden age" of composition as a precursor and foundation upon which to build our scholarship today, lest we continue to find ourselves rehashing old debates. Holdstein's argument seems beyond dispute here, and I might extend it beyond CCC (which was, of course, the focus of the presentation: this is in no way a criticism of Holdstein): Helen Sard Hughes anticipated by 70 years or so the controversy among James Berlin, Linda Brodkey, Maxine Hairston, and others about what should and shouldn't be taught in composition courses in her 1922 English Journal piece on “English, Economics, and Literature;" and Arthur Coon's 1947 College English essay “An Economic X Marks the Spot” prefigures the debates over the labor of teaching college writing by half a century. The bibliographic reach and scope Holdstein describes is part of her reason for instituting the Re-Visions feature at the CCC Online Archive, she said, and she hopes to continue such conversations in the journal's paper and online pages. Ultimately, she said, she's humbled to peruse the journal's old pages. Many of our practical concerns remain the same, and we ought to take this history and use it as we seek change: the past, as Jefferson said, is prologue.