In his article “Public Opinion and Professional Belief,” Carl Klaus calls for an interdisciplinary approach to the teaching of writing. Back in 1976, Klaus saw an inscrutable problem with the way composition was taught in the university classroom. Left to literature professors, writing pedagogy focused less on the process involved in effectively communicating ideas and more on the successful analysis of a literary text with regard to unquestioned rules about what constitutes good writing: grammar, mechanics, and usage. That's what happens when people who were taught that good writing is literature teach writing.
But there is a flaw in this model, and Klaus points to the teachers of writing to remedy the problem. Writing is not about literary analysis and an arbitrary system of grammatical rules. Such a system “isolates the use of language from the mental processes that give rise to it,” and what students are left with are professors with rulebooks and red pens who lack the pedagogical wherewithal to treat writing for what it is, a process (337).
An interdisciplinary approach to the teaching of writing removes the dated rulebook and replaces a write-or-wrong composition pedagogy with the understand that formulating and communicating ideas and experiences involves cognitive and developmental processes. A writing teacher should understand the social, psychic, and linguistic factors that a writer encounters when using language to relay experience. In other words, a 5-7 page argumentative essay assignment isn't what a student needs to learn how to write. The student of writing needs a professor who understands that even picking up a pen to write is a step in the process of the communication of ideas and experiences, that a lot more goes into writing that what our high school and college English teachers have led us to believe.
Ultimately, Klaus calls for the creation of the academic discipline of writing. In this arena, composition theories can be studied alongside pyscho-and sociolinguistics, rhetorical theory, and linguistic anthropology. Until this happens, Klaus argues that we teachers of writing are “at best dedicated amateurs, who for all our dedication may well be doing our students more harm than good” (338).
Klaus wrote this article over 30 yeas ago, and I wonder what has changed in the teaching of writing since. The first place I look to for a recognizable paradigm shift in writing pedagogy is my own undergraduate education and the ways in which I was taught to be a writer. By the time I hit the college scene in the fall of 2003, writing was on the map as an academic discipline, and unknown to me at the time I accepted the scholarship and moved off to the University of Central Arkansas, I was about to enter a setting in which writing was taught separately from literature within its own department housed in an entirely different college from English.
My first semester at UCA met me with the usual line up of general education requirements: theatre appreciation, a survey of world religions, and of course, freshman composition. I quickly learned that Comp II would be my easiest course because I was able to nail down the composition concept for each paper assignment: the personal essay, the argumentative essay, and the persuasive essay. I understood the components of a good paper, a clear thesis, topic sentences, and meaningful transitions, and I diplomatically argued in favor of repealing the recently-born P.A.T.R.I.O.T. ACT and convincingly persuaded my audience of the moral lessons taught in Harry Potter novels. All in all, I had a successful first semester college writing experience.
And then there was English. I declared English as a major early on, not because I necessarily loved literature, but because from my high school experience, I realized it was basically the only discipline I was pretty good at. In the English classroom I learned all of those age-old writing rules: avoid passive voice, don't begin a sentence with a conjunction, always place the thesis statement at the end of the first paragraph. I found success in such a strict writing environment, because as a young writer, I was more interested in writing for an A instead of writing for the sake of working out my ideas. Needless to say, I learned little about thinking for myself in the literature classroom.
Where reflection and self-discovery were encouraged, however, were in classes for my minor, which was Interdisciplinary Studies. Writing instruction in my IS classes was much different from the workshop model I learned in the creative writing classroom and the write-for-summary model I was taught in literature. Interdisciplinary Studies classes challenged me to look at specific issues in broader context, to question why culture accepted the paradigms it did. In the first survey course I took in the minor, Honors Core II: The Search for the Community, I was presented with lots of classic philosophical texts, from Heidegger to Hobbes, Plato to Kant, and I had to not only make heads or tails of the philosophy contained within their ideas, but also I had to come to my own conclusions about the way the world should work. I did a lot of growing, both emotionally and intellectually, in interdisciplinary studies courses, trying my hand at everything from religious studies, theories of gender, political philosophies, and scientific research.
The problem with the interdisciplinary model I was a part of, however, is that little emphasis was placed on the teaching of writing. Sure, I wrote papers, and sure, my professors gave me the best comments they could on them. The problem was I was being taught to write by professors who weren't writing teachers. They were philosophers, theologians, and historians. They were scientists and literature scholars who had different approaches to writing pedagogy, and none of them were consistent. Thank God for English, the department of one of my majors, because there I learned the down and dirty rules of good writing—the grammar, the structure, the mechanics—but I was rarely encouraged, or in some cases even allowed—to apply the critical thinking skills I learned in the interdisciplinary studies classroom to my literary analysis. No, I was taught, predominantly, that there is one way to look at a text, usually the way my professor looked at it, and any other approach was incorrect. Any hope of my own unique voice shining through in an English essay was squashed early.
And in stepped Writing, my second major. I love the creative writing classroom. I love the freedom to express my own ideas and the comfortable atmosphere of the workshop model. In poetry and fiction workshops, I learned that I have an important and unique voice, and it is important that I share it with the world. I would leave classes empowered as a writer thinking I could go out and change the world. The problem with feeling so great about my own writing is that I feel I was rarely exposed to what good writing is. In literature classes, I got that exposure. I read lots of good literary texts, and I learned how to analyze a poem for literary quality. However, I failed to make the connection that I could mimic technique in my own work, and sadly, in the creative writing classes I loved so much, I was rarely exposed to the world of contemporary poetry or criticism. So when I got to graduate school and took my first poetry workshop, I was under prepared for the type of reading and critical responses I was asked to do. Essentially, I had to re-learn how to be a valuable workshop member.
I do not wish to knock my writing education too hard. I learned very important aspects of the writing process in the classes of each of my majors and minors. What I wish I would have had the direction to do (or the smarts to see for myself) is how I could take everything I learned about critical thinking, technical precision, and voice and incorporate them into my writing process for all classes. I was stifled by departmental divides and learned to write a certain way for each class, which got me a summa cum laude BA, but set me up for a rude awakening once I began writing at the graduate level.
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