Henceforth Be No More Children

Henceforth Be No More Children, Tossed To and Fro:

First-Year Graduate Instructors and Theoretical Anchors

Jonathan Garcia

The chance to teach Writing 150 sealed the deal. I was thriving as a paralegal in downtown Salt Lake City, and the pay was plenty. Since I had seen firsthand the great need for it, I wanted to devote two years before law school to building my research and writing skills so I could be an expert attorney writer. Brigham Young University’s (BYU) Rhetoric and MA program offered that, it was affordable, and I could teach writing. During my phone interview, I explained my blank teaching resume and asked about available resources. Dr. Jackson pointed to August training, 610, and WIMs. “Then we throw you to the wolves,” he said in his comically ironic, matter-of-fact way. Though anchored in Salt Lake City, I was willing to forego my security in order to feel vulnerable at school again—this time in a class before nineteen freshmen. For me, the best experts are teachers.

The second to last day of the August training it hit me: What in the world qualified me to teach writing? Whatever excitement I had, evaporated as I sat down to construct a syllabus. Clueless of how to proceed, I looked at my class’s photos—so young and eager, and ready for the first day—and here I was scared stiff. I imagined them as wolves in sheep’s clothing. I cannot say how grateful I was for the August training, our program assistants, University Writing, and Dr. Jackson’s and Dr. Boswell’s encouragement. Yet I suffered from indigestion, not starvation. I took assiduous notes, reviewed the myriad handouts, and was inspired by the second-years’ testimonials. I was immersed in practical techniques, approaches, and lesson plans but did not know how to make sense of all of them. Each seemed valuable, but I didn’t know why. What I lacked was an integrating principle—I did not have any ground to stand on. I thought to myself: Which of all these pedagogies is right; or, are they all wrong together? And how shall I know it? Like a child, I felt tossed to and fro from theory to theory, from pedagogy to pedagogy.

As I write this, I am fully in reflective mode—I just administered my final yesterday. I had a phenomenal semester, and I cherish the relationships with my students. The ending of things has a way of floating your thoughts back to the beginning. My fears were unfounded—everything worked out. I was not fired nor eaten alive by wolves; even better, none of my students dropped off the face of the earth or died. I am listening to Vocal Point’s “Danny Boy,” now on about the one hundred and fifth play; finals feel a bit like this long funeral march, not a bad or sad funeral, but, well, the end of something great. Death as a metaphor for moving on. What I know now about the program, writing studies scholarship, and teaching constrains me to say we possess underutilized resources to offer first-year graduate instructors who, like me, feel a crippling inadequacy shocking through their veins those first few weeks and months of class.

My argument is simple: I strongly recommend first-year graduate instructors read both Locutorium and abolition debate articles before August training. This will anchor the instructors in the Writing 150 theoretical context so they can be more confident teachers. To support these claims, I surveyed all twenty-four first-year graduate instructors the last day of class for both 610 courses. They answered six questions on the following topics: the impact of the 610 reading list; the influence of the readings on their pedagogy; the effect of the abolition debate articles on their thinking; their likelihood of reading Locutorium and abolition debate articles in the summer; and a ranking of the top eight activities most helpful for their teaching. I would like to highlight one of the principal findings: over 85 percent of the first-years answered “Yes”, or that they would “Very Likely” or “Likely” read Locutorium and abolition debate articles before August training. While I analyze the remaining findings below, I will first explore a brief history of the abolition debate and how it can anchor first-years. The remainder of this paper will explore three points interweaving the survey results: (1) why abolition is the context for our reading list, (2) why transfer is the goal, and (3) why reflection is the means. Abolition debate articles introduce first-years to one of the discipline’s most enduring questions: What is the purpose and place of first-year composition (FYC) in the academy? While reading this scholarship is a great start, Locutorium goes one step further by personalizing the research for us here at BYU; showcasing that year’s classroom successes. I understand these readings are no panacea. Indeed, first-years develop as they face their fears during those critical first days and weeks, experimenting and reflecting in an iterative process. Yet as first-years become familiar with writing studies’ greatest underlying debate earlier, as well as Locutorium, they will be more theoretically anchored and practically effective teachers right out of the gate.

Abolition is the Context

The cool umber of autumn was setting in on Provo during late October and early November; the leaves were flitting through the air and lay splayed across the ground. Around this time, we read the classic debate pitting David Bartholomae’s academic discourse against Peter Elbow’s expressivism. We read about the marginalized role of writing instruction in the academy and arguments questioning what qualified English graduate students to teach FYC in the first place (Rose 1985; Smit 2004). We also read scholarship claiming FYC forms the “primary testing site” of the discipline, and other arguments for completely abandoning the course in favor of launching “writing studies departments” (Roemer et al. 1999; North 2011). Abolition is the perennial composition debate, a debate which seasonally dies down, but then can resurface with the retaliation of an Eliot-esque spring, “breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain” (1922). It pointedly asks: What is the purpose and place of FYC in the academy? Should FYC be reformed or abolished?

I maintain that the debate, dating back to FYC’s late nineteenth century origins (Connors 2003), has formed writing studies’ main research catalyst. Hence, it serves as the context for the discipline’s other lasting debates, from product and process to rhetoric and critical cultural studies; from peer review groups and instructor conferences to genre studies and transfer. The 610 class’s approximately 910 page reading list is framed upon these various “enduring issues and controversies,” all with the goal, as its syllabus states, of helping first-year instructors “explore principles and theories that will help [us] become [effective] writing teacher[s] committed to theoretically-sophisticated, reflective, and professional teaching” (Jackson 2014).

In addition to 610, I took the 613 Introduction to Writing Studies seminar where our readings also focused on the abolition debate. The scholarship indicated that contingent, part-time faculty (adjuncts and graduate students) teach the lion’s share of the courses, normally with less-than appealing compensation, without much hope of advancing to the tenure track, the content and genres of FYC are acontextual “mutt-genres” (Wardle 2009), and worst of all, because students forget much of what they learn, transfer is very difficult. Article after article soured my confidence; I became cynical about FYC.

Backed against this wall I had no legitimate way to justify the course, other than my visceral impression that I was actually engaged in an incredibly worthwhile experience both for me and my students. I had to concede, along Bartholomae’s, Petralgia’s, and Connor’s lines of thinking that a course stripped of its genuine “academic discourse” contexts and audiences, and riddled with the problems of transfer, made my class seem, well, to put it nicely, hopelessly naïve, what with all its at-times aimless free-writes, half-baked lectures, discursive student-presentations, disappointing peer reviews, ambiguous instructor conferences, off-target reflections, and laborious grading. It’s one thing to feel the shock of inadequacy, it’s entirely another as your heart drops when you see the whole enterprise as futile.

Then we read excerpts from David Fleming’s From Form to Meaning: Freshman Composition and the Long Sixties, 1957­1974. For an American studies major, this grand tour of American composition history spoke my language. It made one of the strongest cases in favor of FYC I had read yet. Fleming argues FYC’s generality, universality, and liminality make it invaluable. Because the course is stripped of a specific “academic discourse” context, it thus works against the academy’s ever increasing disciplinary fragmentation. Instead of beginning students’ college careers with major-specific course content, FYC, unlike any other course, offers a “general” introduction to the academy. That the course is also required so pervasively in American higher education speaks to its “universal” nature. Finally, because FYC negotiates the boundary between high school and college majors, it becomes a gateway to the academy. FYC is a sort of American “rite of passage,” which, for all its faults, is the only place that first formative year where teachers know students by name; these are colors I’m willing to fly. Yet if the abolition debate contextualizes the 610 reading list, why postpone reading about it?

Here I would like to highlight the results of the survey’s question four which reads, “Some scholars, like North and Smit, argue for abolishing FYC. Others, like Roemer et al. and Rose, argue FYC is useful in the academy. How did these abolition debate readings impact your view of FYC?” The results, surprisingly, showed a trend of first-years stating they afterwards viewed their classrooms in ways similar to my paradigm-shift. Table 1 shows a few points: first, two out of the twenty-four first-years were in favor of abolishing FYC; one respondent comically said “I am now secretly in favor of abolishing FYC. Don’t tell anyone.” The other twenty-two first-years ascribed some value to FYC, though two commented the abolition debate was ultimately not important as they were “not making a lifelong commitment to FYC.” Just under half of the first-years merely read the question as asking them to vote for or against abolition and that they voted in favor underscored they viewed FYC had value. Most interesting though, was the fact that nine first-years implied notions of transfer. In other words, they saw transfer as a way out of the dark agnosticism of abolition. Three first-years explicitly used the word “transfer” in their responses; one wrote: “I really believe that FYC should be required, so it made me more interested in transfer because I want to prove that this particular class is valuable to all students.”

Table 1: Impact of Abolition Debate Articles on View of FYC

Ironically, though Fleming rocked my paradigm, I finally felt anchored. I appreciated the arguments against FYC, but now I had a reason to go back to my class with an enthusiastic vengeance: transfer or bust. Likewise, these findings suggested the abolition debate forced more than one colleague to same theoretical moment of crisis I experienced. Backed against the wall, we had to decide what colors we would fly. My colleague who wrote that the abolition debate “made me more interested in transfer,” leads into our next discussion on the why behind transfer.

Transfer is the Goal

Working then, with the Writing 150 curriculum, I now approach my class with a combination of expressivism and academic-discourse-mindedness. My goal is transfer. After my paradigm shift, I had a “come to Jesus” with my class. They first wrote about ways they could spend a windfall $625. Then, simplifying my abolition debate readings to a short lecture at the beginning of the Rhetorical Analysis (RA) unit, I argued why they would forget everything within weeks; never write another RA in their lives; and why, instead of wasting their time and $625 tuition dollars, they could have instead flown to Hawaii or bought a laptop. A sickening silence fell on us, broken only by a student who wryly said, “If you are trying to persuade us not to write the RA, you’re doing a good job.” The class nervously laughed. “If and only if you transfer what you are learning to future classes and into your majors, can we salvage Writing 150,” I said, repeating it throughout the semester. “The critical thinking skills you gain will matter later,” I continued, “as you write into your respective academic discourse communities.”

The survey’s questions two and three suggest my fellow first-years also found solace and energy in transfer theories. Tables 2 and 3 reference the following questions: “In the left column, put a check next to four readings that most influenced your teaching this semester. You can select from either the theoretical or practical* groupings however you wish” and “Of the 4 readings you selected, now choose 2 and elaborate as to how these readings were incorporated into your classroom practice.” Unfortunately, the survey’s design for these two questions lent itself to some confusion, where six responses were irregular, ranging from marking three to nine articles (these were omitted from the data pool.) However, question three built on question two to create an influential article hierarchy that further narrowed selection of the “most” influential pieces. Another survey challenge was asking students to remember back to the start of the semester which possibly reduced the selection process to a “familiarity test.” One respondent wrote, “This probably isn’t reliable. I’m guessing based on familiarity.” Nevertheless, that same respondent selected Kathleen Yancey et al.’s “The Content of Composition, Reflective Practice, and Transfer of Knowledge and Practice in Composition” writing “[their] article on transfer has been incorporated through classroom practice.”

Table 2: Articles Most Selected (The top 12 out of 43 articles)

Table 3: Articles Most Written About (The top 23 out of 43 articles)

Tellingly, Nancy Sommers’s Responding to Student Writing and “Revision Strategies” top the lists of both tables. One first-year wrote on how these articles were practically useful to “monitor how much time I should spend on responding to writing.” In some ways, these readings offered not only practical advice, but advice that could generate immediate results, such as reduced time spent grading and commenting. Drew Merrill’s Locutorium article “The End Comment” also fits into this category, and it was referenced in both tables. It is not hard to see why streamlining grading matters. However, you will also notice that Yancey’s “The Content of Composition” and “Constructive Reflection” and Amy Devitt’s “Genre Pedagogies” also appear prominently on both tables. One first-year wrote, “Kathleen Yancey’s article changed the way I approach lesson plans. I try to incorporate activities that will transfer to other genres and disciplines. My goal is to teach for transfer.” While the data suggests Sommers’s work is foremost on students’ minds, practicality is chiefly a short-term concern. Transfer, on the other hand, is about the theoretical long haul, a gesture towards the bigger picture. Both inform one another, and should not be divorced. They are a double-helix, the essential DNA of a teacher’s praxis.

Reflection is the Means

In the spirit of Elbow expressivism and Yancey’s reflection research, I believe one way we can achieve transfer is by students learning from each other’s writing. That is, using Elbow’s idea of a “class magazine” (1995), I culled the best paragraphs or sentence-level moves my students made in the RA and Issues Paper (IP), calling them “Highlights.” When I returned my students’ graded RAs and end-comments, I gave copies of the Highlights, requiring a 1-page reflection. I found the exercise fruitful. As a result of their responses to the Highlights, and after I read Kathy Cowley’s Locutorium article “Opinion Editorials, New Media, and Participation in Real Public Discourse” (2008), I had my students select real audiences for their IPs. Some sent their cyberbullying IPs to the governors of Washington, Arizona, and New Hampshire; some sent their youth-leaving-church IPs to former seminary teachers and now-less-active friends; and some sent their ethical foods IPs to Subway and the Daily Herald. I split the IP’s points into 250 for the final draft, twenty for peer review, and thirty for revisions after my grading and before sending out a final final copy to their audiences. As part of the thirty revision points, they were tasked to incorporate the Highlights. One student wrote

When I initially turned in my paper I felt fairly confident in my work. I had worked hard

and made strong progress since my first paper written in this class…Looking at the classes [sic] IP highlights as a whole enabled me to make even more progress on my paper…I realized my own conclusion was rather boring. I tried to make it more memorable and personal. To do this I addressed my audience directly and said “Brother Edmonds, you once said that in all your fifteen years of teaching seminary you have never once gone a whole school year without one student falling away from the church. I will never forget the tears that filled your eyes as those words left your mouth. You and I both know the sad reality of the situation. However we can fix this problem by implementing these solutions.” I added this in hopes of adding a more emotional appeal to the conclusion. These couple sentences…personally made me feel much more confident in the conclusion….

What was so critical about this reflection, was that this student’s Opinion Editorial was a self-indulging rant for more parking on campus, woefully out of touch with her audience. Without being required, she reflected on this experience nearly two months after the fact and showed marked progress in audience-awareness by personalizing her conclusion for her former seminary teacher. Reflections like these have fully persuaded me that my students can greatly learn from each other. Reflection is hard work but it provides the wherewithal to trigger transfer.

Conclusion: Henceforth Be No More Children Tossed To and Fro

So the proposal is simple: new hires should be required during the summer to read,, a good smattering of the Locutorium and abolition debate articles— like four to six each. There is much to be said about successful students’ deliberate, researched, and reflective writings, as well as already-published scholars’ writings. Locutorium invites us to turn regrets, frustrations, and breakthroughs of that first semester into publishable reflections. And then those reflections hopefully can be packaged as nice gifts, a welcome to the thrill and terror of teaching! sort of thing. Not only that, but they increase our genre awareness by introducing us to the genres we will be expected to write by the end of the semester. As table 4 suggests, first-years’ overwhelmingly positive response to the summer reading question implies this proposal may be well received, “Consider when you were hired in the summer. If you were strongly encouraged to read 4-6 abolition debate and Locutorium articles each before August training, please rank your likely reading disposition”:

Table 4: Summer Reading Disposition

Table 5: Average Ranking of Useful Activities

*Only 20 of the 24 respondents were counted; 4 were irregular and thus discarded.

By contrast, table 5 is the reality check that the 610 reading list lags well behind the more practically useful August training, trial and error, 610 class discussions, WIM, student feedback, and carrel lore. This should not be a surprise. However, as discussed above, this ranking may not fully capture the contextualizing power of the readings. Practical helps may rank higher because they are immediately useful, where theoretical readings are more concerned with the long-haul, the bigger picture; yet both are indispensable.

I want to emphasize that the problem is not that there is too little provocative, compelling writing studies scholarship. The problem is that without knowing its context, the current reading list works like a centrifugal force. When we are pulled each week with a new technique =, worksheet, PowerPoint, YouTube video. or wiki idea, we in effect upset an already-fragile, barely-sprouting pedagogy at every turn. We reap what we sow; are we willing to grow a theoretical garden, or are we expecting to change our whole approach whenever we hear any new idea, method, or technique? We have to settle into our own methodology. Doing otherwise destabilizes reflection, a meditative experience that cannot be rushed. It takes time. Reflection counteracts the rash impulse to pull up the daisies after every class period to see how the roots are doing. With that said, there is a place for assessment and there is a need for evaluation. I’m only saying that the temptation that first semester is to give up our agency simply because we don’t see instant results.

Granted, I’m not against having my own thinking and practice challenged—I came here to learn what I don’t know. So I’m talking about an unnecessary type of wrenching and jerking, one that we can address with curricular design. The 610 reflective essay assignment begins to address the question “How does [FYC] fit into a university?” and may benefit by being combined with the summer readings. If we introduce the context earlier, then we allow for each new 610 article in autumn to build upon an already laid foundation, instead of a merry-go-round of scholarship. As New Abolitionists have argued, divorcing writing from context is a disservice to our students. I believe there is enough “throw[ing] out of the frying pan of undergraduate education…into the fire of graduate school and classroom instruction” (Petraglia 1995; Newton 2006) for us to better serve new instructors by giving them the context for a vast, daunting, exciting, and challenging adventure with which they are about to engage for two years. It’s helpful to get information from second-years, but we must come to our own conclusions ultimately. Carrell lore has its limits. No one can permanently substitute for another instructor and no one should. We are hired to fill the shoes and to fit the bill.

To conclude, I’d like to quote our resident rhetorician, Paul, who said, “And he gave some, Bartholomae academic-discourse-citizens; and some, Devitt genre-analyzers; and some, Yancey reflective-meta-cognitivists; and some, Wardle writers-about-writing and Elbow writers-without-teachers, for the perfecting of the students, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of BYU, till we all come to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of Aristotle, the perfect man, unto the measure and stature of Cicero; that we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine” (Ephesians 4:14). Far from being just another checklist item on the reading list, the abolition debate readings can become like a foundry where first-year graduate instructors forge theoretical and metaphorical anchors at the most pivotal time of their teaching careers. Equipping first-years with anchors sooner than late October and early November is a good idea, one which we can readily address with straight-forward curriculum design. The student willingness is there. Yet as John Shedd said, “A ship in the harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for.” After August training, anchors aweigh.

Works Cited

Bartholomae, David. 1995. “Writing With Teachers: A Conversation with Peter Elbow.” College Composition and Communication 46 (1): 62–71.

Connors, Robert J. 2003. “The Abolition Debate in Composition: A Short History.” In Selected Essays of Robert J. Connors, edited by Lisa and Andrea A. Lunsford,  279–94. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s.

Cowley, Katherine. 2008. “Opinion Editorials, New Media, and Participation in Real Public Discourse.” Locutorium 1–15.

Devitt, Amy. 2014. “Genre Pedagogies.” In A Guide to Composition Pedagogies,  edited by Gary Tate et al. 146–62. New York: Oxford. 2014. 146-62.

Elbow, Peter. 1995. “Being a Writer vs. Being an Academic: A Conflict in Goals.” College Composition and Communications 46 (1): 62–71.

Eliot, T.S. 1922. “The Wasteland” New York: Horace Liveright.

Fleming, David. 2011 From Form to Meaning: Freshman Composition and the Long Sixties, 1957–1974. Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press.

Jackson, Brian. 2014. “610 Course Syllabus.” Copy on file with the author.

Newton, Daniel. 2006. “Beneficial Disclosures: Teacher Revelations in the Classroom.” Locutorium. 46–57.

North, Stephen M. 2011. “On the Place of Writing in Higher Education.” In The Changing Knowledge in Composition: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Lance Massey and Richard C. Gebhardt, 194–210. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press.

Petraglia, Joseph. 1995. “Writing as an Unnatural Act.” In Reconceiving Writing, Rethinking Writing Instruction, edited by Joseph Petraglia. Mahwah, 79–100. NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Rose, Mike. 1985. “The Language of Exclusion: Writing Instruction at the University.” College English 47 (4):   341–59.

Roemer, Marjorie, Lucielle M. Schultz, and Russel K. Durst. “Reframing the Great Debate on First-Year Writing.” CCC 50.3 (February 1999): 377-92.

Smit, David W. 2004. The End of Composition Studies. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Yancey, Kathleen Blake, Liane Robertson, and Kara Taczak. 2014. “The Content of Composition, Reflective Practice, and the Transfer of Knowledge and Practice in Composition.” In Writing Across Contexts: Transfer, Composition, and Sites of Learning. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press.

Wardle, Elizabeth, and Doug Downs. 2014. Writing About Writing: A College Reader. 2^nd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s.

Wardle, Elizabeth. 2009. “‘Mutt Genres’ and the Goal of FYC: Can We Help Students Write the Genres of the University?” College Compositions and Communications 60(4) 765–789.