Few composition scholars two decades ago would have imagined the rate at which their field is now developing, expanding beyond its boundaries, creating new alliances, and locating new sites for research and generation of knowledge. In their introduction to this volume, Farris and Anson argue that, faced with a welter of competing models, compositionists too quickly dichotomize and dismiss.
The contributors to Under Construction, therefore, address themselves to the need for commerce among competing visions of the field. They represent diverse settings and distinct points of view, but their over-riding interest is in promoting a view of the field that values interaction and mutual development above dogmatics and isolation.
Under Construction
Working at the Intersections of Composition Theory, Research, and PracticeUTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1998 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-87421-256-3Contents
INTRODUCTION: Complicating Composition Christine Farris and Chris M. Anson........................................................................................................1ONE Theory, Research, Practice, Work Christopher Ferry....................................................................................................................11TWO Composing Composition Studies: Scholarly Publication and the Practice of Discipline Peter Vandenberg..................................................................19THREE Toward a Theory of Theory for Composition Studies James Zebroski......................................................................................................30FOUR The Dialogic Function of Composition Pedagogy: Negotiating Between Critical Theory and Public Values Rebecca Moore Howard.............................................51FIVE Keeping Honest: Working Class Students, Difference, and Rethinking the Critical Agenda in Composition David Seitz.....................................................65SIX Rethinking the Personal Narrative: Life-Writing and Composition Pedagogy Deborah Mutnick..............................................................................79SEVEN What Difference the Differences Make: Theoretical and Epistemological Differences in Writing Assessment Practice Brian Huot and Michael Williamson.....................93EIGHT Voices of Research: Methodological Choices of a Disciplinary Community Susan Peck MacDonald...........................................................................111NINE Grounded Theory: A Critical Research Methodology Joyce Magnotto Neff..................................................................................................124TEN Feminist Methodology: Dilemmas for Graduate Researchers Shirley Rose and Janice Lauer.................................................................................136ELEVEN Insider/Outsider/Other?: Confronting the Centeredness of Race, Class, Color and Ethnicity in Composition Research Yuet-Sim Chiang.....................................150TWELVE Re-centering Authority: Social Reflexivity and Re-Positioning in Composition Research Ellen Cushman and Terese Guinsatao Monberg......................................166THIRTEEN Tracking Composition Research on the World Wide Web Susan Romano......................................................................................................181FOURTEEN Farther Afield: Rethinking the Contributions of Research Ruth Ray and Ellen Barton....................................................................................196FIFTEEN A Rhetoric of Teacher-Talk-Or How to Make More Out of Lore Wendy Bishop...............................................................................................217SIXTEEN Theory, Practice, and the Bridge Between: The Methods Course and Reflective Rhetoric Kathleen Blake Yancey............................................................234SEVENTEEN Rewriting Praxis (and Redefining Texts) in Composition Research Nancy Maloney Grimm, Anne Frances Wysocki and Marilyn M. Cooper.......................................250EIGHTEEN Coming (in)to Consciousness: One Asian American Teacher's Journey into Activist Teaching and Research Gail Okawa......................................................282WORKS CITED........................................................................................................................................................................302CONTRIBUTORS.......................................................................................................................................................................324INDEX..............................................................................................................................................................................329
Chapter One
Theory, Research, Practice, Work Christopher Ferry
Well, I'm thwarted by a metaphysic Puzzle And I'm sick of grading papers-that I Know. Jonathan Larson, "Rent"
Paulo Freire, long an important influence on composition studies, argues that education must be a process by which students and teachers help each other become "more fully human" and, at the same time, "transform reality." Central to this process is the phenomenon he calls "praxis," the interaction between reflection and action that results in the transformation of the world. For Freire, praxis can be authentic-that is, can accomplish its transforming work-only when it includes both components. Without action, for example, reflection becomes mere "verbalism," shooting off one's mouth, while action without thought becomes "activism," "action for action's sake." In either case praxis, the work of changing the world's material conditions, of eradicating oppression, injustice, illiteracy, for example, the labor of helping each other become more fully human, cannot occur (1993, 68-69).
I want to use Freire's concept of praxis as a starting point to examine the relationship among theory, research, practice, and work in composition studies. Specifically, I want to explore the position of work in our field: what is the nature of our "work" within institutions of higher learning? Compositionist has entered the professional lexicon, a neologism that signifies what people in rhetoric and composition "do." Just the same, the question of what we "do" remains open. On one hand if one peruses the professional literature, our work seems to be researching and making knowledge in a "scientific" way, a method supported by the American academy. Certainly, this situation seems to be what Richard Braddock, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer had in mind when they compared research in composition to that in chemistry and, by extension, all (hard) scientific research:
[S]ome terms are being defined usefully, a number of procedures are being refined, but the field as a whole is laced with dreams, prejudices, and makeshift operations. Not enough investigators are really informing themselves about the procedures and results of previous research before embarking on their own. Too few of them conduct pilot experiments and validate their measuring instruments before undertaking an investigation. (1963, 5)
Compositionists might be said to research and construct a meta-discourse, a totalizing narrative that explains "writing"; in other words, we create a "theory" of composition. On the other hand, discussions of work-by which I mean the material conditions of the "labor" of teaching composition-are not always welcome at professional sites removed from those material conditions. Consider, for example, the editorial policy of The Journal of Advanced Composition: "JAC does not accept articles describing classroom techniques unless the author clearly demonstrates how such practices derive from current theory and research and how they can be applied to the advanced composition classroom in general" (1996, n.p.).
Stephen M. North calls Braddock's Research in Written Composition composition's "charter" as a field of study (1987, 17). North's argument...
