THE ACTIVIST WPA

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments..........................................................................................................vii1 Working from a Point of Principle..................................................................................................12 Looking Backward...................................................................................................................364 Changing Conversations about Writing and Writers: Working through a Process........................................................855 Taking Action to Change Stories....................................................................................................1286 Working from My Own Points of Principle: Tikkun Olam, Prophetic Pragmatism, and Writing Program Administration.....................164Appendix: Contact Information for Community Organizations/Media Strategists..........................................................186Notes................................................................................................................................187References...........................................................................................................................190Index................................................................................................................................204

Chapter One

STORIES TOLD ABOUT SCHOOL: WRITERS AND WRITING

Alarmist stories about student writers or college-level writing that run counter to the ones that circulate among writing teachers on disciplinary listservs or in discussions in professional research are easy to find. Using the search terms "writing skills and college students" in a database like Lexis Nexis Academic reveals news items headed by such titles as "Grammar Is Making a Comeback; Poor Writing Skills Among Teens and a New Section of SAT Fuel Return to Language Basics" (DeVise 2006) and "Students Fall Short on 'Information Literacy,' Educational Testing Service's Study Finds" (Foster 2006). Ask people on the street about student writing, and one typically hears a dazzling array of stories attesting to problems with (college) students' writing as well.

What don't come up as often in news media or in conversation are stories suggesting something else-that everyone can write; that students are astoundingly knowledgeable about composing in contexts that some teachers know relatively little about; that schools are being put in virtually untenable situations with regard to literacy instruction; or that it might be worth questioning the criteria by which "quality" is being determined. That's because these stories do not fall within the rather tight frame currently surrounding discussions of education more generally. Instead, typical are stories like those that follow the headlines above, or one from the December 3, 2006, suburban Chicago Daily Herald that begins, "The majority of freshmen attending area community colleges left high school unprepared to take college-level classes, statistics from local community colleges show." The next paragraph continues: "More than half of recent high school graduates attending these two-year colleges required remedial help-in courses that don't count toward a degree-because they lacked fundamental skills in math, reading, or writing" (Krone 2006).

For as long as I have taught composition-going on 20 years-I have listened to some people outside of the field (faculty colleagues, professionals outside of the field, people I meet on airplanes, administrators on the campuses where I have worked) tell stories like the one in the Chicago Daily Herald. Students can't write; they read the wrong things or not at all; they aren't prepared or they have to take "remedial" courses; teachers (college, high school, middle school, grade school, presumably preschool) aren't teaching them "what they need to know." I would venture to guess that nearly anyone teaching writing (or English) has heard this lament. These claims form the core of a story about writers and writing classes that seem to resonate particularly strongly now.

I have also long thought about how to tell other tales about students, writing, and the work of teaching writing. This desire to work from different stories-in fact to change the dominant story about the work of writing instruction-comes out of my own experience as a student, a person living and working in the community, and as a composition instructor and program administrator. As a field, composition and rhetoric seems to be turning its attention to thinking strategically about how to shape stories about students and writing. As I listened to and talked with colleagues about going about this work I realized that it might be useful-certainly for me, but perhaps for others as well-to think about it as systematically and strategically as we do, say, the research that we conduct or the courses that we design. To pursue this interest, I've immersed myself in textual research about how we might go about this work of telling other stories, and I've spent time with and listened to community organizers and media activists who engage in this work on a daily basis. The result is this book, The Activist WPA: Changing Stories about Writing and Writers.

The key word here is story. Robert Coles, the psychiatrist and student of documentary production, provides an especially useful way to think about stories. Coles explains that as a child, he found the stories that his parents read to him helped them put his experiences in a broader perspective. When Coles began to think about relationships, for example, his mother suggested he read War and Peace. In college, Coles took a course with noted literary scholar Perry Miller; reading William Carlos Williams's poetry during that course, he decided to contact the physician and poet. Williams invited Coles to shadow him as he worked with patients in Patterson, New Jersey. Following Williams and hearing his stories, Coles implies, led him to choose a career in medicine rather then teaching English. Coles goes on, in the early stages of The Call of Stories, to describe other personal stories that shaped his experiences as a professional.

Coles' discussion of his own stories telescopes out from personal significance to broader, social significance. During psychiatric training, for instance, Coles heard patients differently if he asked them for and listened to their stories. They became not lists of symptoms to be addressed or behaviors to be modified, but whole people whose existences were comprised of these tales. As a result, Coles became interested in "the many stories we have and the different ways we can find to give those stories expression" (Coles 1989, 15). Coles also realized that he understood patients' experiences through his own, that his personal story extended to the ways in which he used others' stories to construct a broader experience. And studying school desegregation in the south during the early 1960s, he realized that the ways in which these stories were constructed had consequences far beyond himself or his patients. Coles writes that:

[The children whom he was observing in southern schools] were going through an enormous ordeal-mobs, threats, ostracism-and I wanted...