David Bartholomae - "Teaching Basic Writing: An Alternative to Basic Skills"
Of the pedagogical concepts that Bartholomae elaborates here, I think the idea about not focusing on 'how to write correctly' is the one that I've internalized most instinctively-though, to be fair, this hasn't been for his theoretical reasons, but rather because I've got no idea how to lecture on grammar in such a way that it would be comprehensible to my students, let alone interesting. So this strain of Bartholomae's I've read as little more than a rationalization of what I wanted to do already. Yet, here I am, looking at papers with some fairly significant grammatical problems, and I'm not sure what to do about it. I feel like I'm cheating my students if I let them get away with too many errors, but how am I supposed to call them down on errors if I'm at a loss to explain how to correct them?
Irritating. What I really wish would happen is that my students would magically acquire a grasp of what written (academic) English is supposed to look like, and then just sort of, you know, do that. Practically, I think that's sort of what I'm doing, too-just sort of waiting and hoping that the lights will come on. And, at least in some small way, maybe they are. My second set of papers seemed to be much better (in every way; not just grammatically), so perhaps even the limited exposure to academic writing that my students have had so far has been of some help. Still, planning out this week's lessons includes two lectures on mechanics, and I used Tuesday's up on the relatively straightforward minutiae of MLA style, and am rather at a loss on what to do for tomorrow's 'Joy of Punctuation' lesson.
Of course, as Bartholomae says, it sort of behooves us as writing teachers to teach writing (at whatever level) rather than "skills." Here's something he says:
Basic writers, because they equate thought with order, profundity with maxims, often look for the means of reducing a subject to its simplest or most obvious terms. Ambiguity, contradiction, uncertainty-those qualities that are most attractive to academics-are simply "wrong" in the minds of students whose primary goal is to produce controlled and safe essays.
As long as writing teachers' instruction represents thinking in terms of structures, and not process, the attitude that courts uncertainty or contradiction is unlikely to develop. (39)
I'm not sure what Bartholomae would have his students do is the same as what I think it's important for them to learn (at least if the assignments in Ways of Reading) are any indication. For an easy point, what makes him think that academics value "ambiguity, contradiction, [or] uncertainty?" Academics hate these things. Nearly every essay I read-works of practical criticism, most of them-are deliberately seeking out ambiguity and try to control it. We try to explain what the ambiguity means, what it does to the readers, how it worked its way into a text, how something is ambiguous in precisely this way, and so forth. Not very many essays characterized by uncertainty or contradiction get published; the most respected academic writers seem to be the ones who put their arguments most forcefully.
Why, then, shouldn't I regard it as a problem if my student's papers are uncertain or uncontrolled? Whatever the learning process we go through in the transition from our current state of relative 'ignorance' to one of 'knowledge' at the completion of a writing task, it seems like we should present ourselves as having arrived somewhere, at having reached some kind of (perhaps admittedly partial) conclusion at the end of our journey. If the final product of that writing task is self-contradictory, or muddled, maybe it shows that the writer is struggling to think through some ideas (which is good), but it also means that the paper isn't really finished either.
For my own writing, I find that at some point I have to stop thinking about the problem and begin to write, articulating a position, and claiming it as mine whether or not I think it the best possible, or even a particularly worthwhile, position. If I waited for my ideas to become perfectly formed before I started writing, I'd never get anything (journals included) written. What ends up on the page is inevitably clearer and probably more pedantic and useless than what was in my head before I started to write, but the alternative seems to be writing the sort of jumbled, mixed up, uncertain free-writing sorts of things. Useful, perhaps, as part of the writing process, but not really acceptable work for any setting I can think of.
So, perhaps I place a higher premium on 'control' than does Bartholomae. On the other hand, I can see his point, too. Inadequate control was not really a common problem on the first set of papers. Rather, they just lacked a certain something. Many of the responses to my first assignment read like the students had ad-libbed entire pages of their essays from some After School Special episode called "Why Stereotypes are Bad, but Unfortunately Necessary." My problem wasn't getting students to make an argument and follow through with it, it was getting them to have an argument worth writing about. In 16 or 17 cases out of 19, the students saw the issue I presented them with (in the most general of terms, "what ideologies are presented by stereotypes in advertising") as a closed subject, not susceptible to investigation or conversation.
I suppose Bartholomae's approach to this problem is this:
The [ . . . ] focus for conversation is the students' writing as evidence of intellectual activity, as a way of knowing. [ . . . ] The appropriate question would be something like, "Who do you become by writing that?" or "What sort of person notices such things and talks about them in just such a way?" Or perhaps the question would be, "Who do I have to become to take this seriously, to see reading this as the occasion for learning and discovery?" (36)
Of course, what he doesn't address is how to convince the students to take these questions seriously. I don't know, maybe I should try asking these things, but I suspect that the answer I would get (from some of my students) would be "A paranoid loonie" on all counts.