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Kate Brown
Dr. Karen Kopelson
ENGL 670
April 17, 2006
What Exactly Do We Do?: A Thematic Review of CCC from June 2005 to February 2006
“a frame is quite confining”
-The Verve Pipe “Photograph”
College Composition and Communication (CCC), one of the best-known journals
in Composition, is instrumental in shaping the direction and scope of our field. Each issue
of CCC contains approximately four or five articles that address a variety of topics that
the editorial board, made up of established scholars of Composition, believes to be most
relevant to the field at the time. CCC sporadically includes a featured section entitled
“Interchanges” where two or three well-known scholars debate contested topics in
Composition, and in the past, “Interchanges” has been the site of famous discussions,
most notably the Elbow/Bartholomae Debate. CCC has recently begun a featured section
entitled “Re-Visions” in which several established scholars revisit and discuss an
important article or moment in Composition history. The purpose of “Re-Visions” is to
discuss the continued relevance of the selected piece for Composition and to reveal the
progress of the debate sparked by the original piece.1
Each issue of CCC, with its juxtaposition of articles and featured sections,
provides a snapshot of Composition constructed by the editorial board. For a journal in a
field that constantly begs the question, what exactly do we do? and is loath to define itself
too rigidly, surprisingly, the content of CCC reflects a reasonably clear definition of
1
CCC also includes a Review Essay in each issue that discusses the contributions of new scholarly material
in the field.
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Composition through its privileging of particular topics over others. To illustrate the
definition CCC has constructed for Composition, I have read issues 56.4 through 57.3
and categorized the articles and featured sections in each of these issues into thematic
categories: Pedagogy, Assessment, Textbook Analysis, and Disciplinarity. The articles
and featured sections in each of these categories support the definition of Composition as
a teaching field that has the ability to forge multidisciplinary partnerships without
sacrificing its goals and content.
Pedagogy
Nearly every article and featured section in CCC exhibits a pedagogical theme.
Therefore, in order to make this discussion coherent, I’m going to have to use
subcategories, breaking down the essays into types of pedagogy they discuss. Richard
Fulkerson’s article “Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century” will help me
to determine a few of these subheadings. Fulkerson’s essay, consistent with CCC
ideology, supposes that Composition is a teaching field. He laments that Composition has
left its state of “axiological consensus” (agreement upon the goals of the discipline) that it
had achieved in the 1990s and has split into three diverging axiological positions. These
positions are 1) critical/cultural studies, 2) expressivism, and 3) procedural rhetoric
(655).2 These axiological positions are strictly pedagogical.
2
Fulkerson comes down pretty hard on CCS pedagogies. He argues that CCS pedagogies are inappropriate
as a content for Composition because they “are unlikely to leave room for any actual teaching of writing”
and they increase “the likelihood of indoctrination” (665). Similarly, he critiques expressivist pedagogies
for rarely being purely expressivist. Instead, they often adopt characteristics of CCS pedagogy that neglect
to “improve written communication or encourage critical thinking” (667). Fulkerson approves of rhetorical
approaches to composition that he divides into three categories: “composition as argumentation, genrebased composition, and composition as introduction to an academic discourse community” (671).
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Critical/Cultural Studies Pedagogy (CCS)
William H. Thelin discusses his “blundered implementation” (114) of critical
pedagogy in “Understanding Problems in Critical Classrooms.” Thelin, after realizing
that his attempt at critical pedagogy was failing, asked his students to write an essay “to
critique all aspects of the classroom to reach a logical conclusion as to why we did not
succeed in meeting our mutual expectations” (119). Upon analyzing the students’ essays,
Thelin concludes that the experience of the blundered pedagogy encouraged the students
to reflect on their learning processes and “on the institutional, social, and political
elements in higher education” (128); thus, it still managed to achieve some of the goals of
critical pedagogy. He posits that we should learn from our blunders rather than too
quickly abandoning a pedagogical model based on only a few experiences with failure.3
While Thelin discusses a specific model of critical pedagogy based on Ira Shor’s
Empowering: When, Valerie Felita Kinloch uses the CCCC “Students’ Right to Their
Own Language” resolution to argue for an “engaged” pedagogical approach that shows a
commitment “to having conversations with students about linguistic systems and
democratic values established in communities, classrooms, and other spaces of public
participation” (90). Kinloch’s pedagogy looks a lot like CCS pedagogy, but a closer look
reveals a touch of expressivism. This pedagogical hybrid resembles the expressivist
pedagogy Fulkerson discusses.
3
Though Thelin makes some good points about why we should not be so quick to abandon pedagogical
approaches that fail, the underlying theme of the essay is: “Hey, I just got tenure, so now I can bash my
colleagues and my university.” Thelin partially blames the failure of his pedagogy on the fact that he was
on the job market and going to several on-campus interviews, which resulted in no job offers. Therefore,
not only did he cancel several classes during the semester, which might have caused the students to
question if Thelin cared about them or the course at all, but, when he returned, he was depressed because of
his failure on the job market. Also, he believes that students were not prepared for his pedagogical methods
because they were used to being told exactly what to do by other teachers in his department: “they were so
conditioned to traditional teaching methods that they did not know how to handle more involvement and
responsibility” (129).
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Expressivist Pedagogy with a CCS Slant
Kinloch’s version of expressivism with a CCS slant becomes apparent when she
explains that discussions focusing on language and class issues “can motivate students to
critically reflect on their own experience while cultivating their own expressive powers
through methods of inventiveness and analysis” (96). Self-discovery and identity
formation are important to Kinloch’s course goals.
Similarly, Jonathan Alexander presents a pedagogy that uses transgender or
transsexual theories to inform feminist composition pedagogy with the goal to provide a
space where students can explore their personal identities as they are related to writing
and to “extend critical awareness to all students of how writing can be used to explore the
intersection between the seemingly personal . . . and the political” (51). Alexander claims
that this pedagogical approach does not necessarily help to free students from gender
norms, but he believes that it provides students with a deeper understanding of gender as
“much more than a set of roles and rhetorical tropes” (72).
Also, claiming a pedagogy that enables students to explore their identities, but
with a little more reckless abandon than either Alexander or Kinloch suggest, Richard E.
Miller in the first piece in “Interchanges” in issue 57.1 presents his vision for the essay.
He gushes, “[the essay] provides an arena for learning the contours of one’s own
thoughts; it opens up an uncharitable, endlessly changing landscape where one is free to
explore the limits of one’s own understanding” (155). Miller believes that the role of the
Composition teacher is to encourage exploration rather than to enforce rigid guidelines
regarding structure and content: “our pedagogical practices can become the place where
we lay the groundwork for a learning environment that values creativity, a place where
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students are given access to the pent-up power of their own imaginations and then
directed to bring all their mental abilities to bear on the most pressing social, political,
environmental, and economic problems of the day” (155). Miller believes that the current
make-up of most Composition courses stifles creativity and imagination, and therefore, is
devastating to a students’ learning potential.4
Procedural Rhetoric
Phillip P. Marzluf tackles what, at first, sounds like another version of CCS
pedagogy: diversity writing. However, Marzluf’s diversity writing is closer to what
Fulkerson describes as the discourse community approach to procedural rhetoric (678).
Fulkerson recognizes that this approach, based on David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the
University” resembles CCS because it is based on “reading and using extensive materials
relating to a single theme” (678), in Marzluf’s case, diversity, and “giving little direct
advice about either genre or process” (678). In his article, Marzluf rejects the
“salvationist tendency” (517) of diversity writing that encourages students to perform an
“authentic” self. He argues that diversity writing provides a productive alternative to
typical freshman composition courses that focus on sets of generalizable skills, because it
“allows instructors to privilege a notion of writing that is inextricably linked to content
and audience” (517). It seems as if the salvationist tendency of diversity writing scholars
to want to “save, affirm, or legitimize” students (517) is a similar to Fulkerson’s concern
that CCS is bleeding into and corrupting expressivism. Marzluf, however, seems to be
concerned that the authentic, self-discovery aspect of expressivism is bleeding into and
corrupting the procedural rhetoric that diversity writing is based upon.
Irvin Peckham, in his response to Miller, accuses Miller of being elitist. He writes, “I couldn’t help
reading into his theme a privileging of intellectual over manual labor, a privileging that lays the foundation
for social class hierarchies” (160).
4
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Scott Wible5 recovers a pedagogical approach based on procedural rhetoric
developed during the 1960s and 1970s that enacted the recommendations of the CCCC
“Students’ Right to Their Own Language” resolution. Wible’s article is largely based
upon archival research from which he is able to piece together a narrative of the
construction, application, and eventual dissolution of a course of study designed by the
Language Curriculum Research Group (LCRG) for students who displayed features of
the Black English Vernacular (BEV) dialect. Members of the LCRG “began to create
exercises and writing assignments for a composition textbook that would allow students
to learn about the language varieties of their communities as well as how to edit their
prose to reflect the SE [Standard English] conventions expected by most teachers in
college courses” (446). The textbook and related curriculum encouraged reflection and
analysis of two seemingly divergent discourse communities by exploring the grammar
and usage rules in each community. Despite its innovative pedagogical approach, Wible
explains that the public’s enduring perception that BEV does not belong in the classroom
led to the program’s failure.
Fulkerson’s categories cover a majority of the pedagogically based articles and
featured sections in CCC, but the following sub-categories Fulkerson does not mention.
WAC and WID: My Worst Nightmare
The feeling that teaching writing should be a “multidisciplinary project” (Harris
536) is alive and well in Composition based on the content of CCC. Joseph Harris, in the
inaugural “Re-Visions” section reacts to Maxine Hairston’s recommendation in
“Breaking Our Bonds” that Composition should split from English, with an accusation of
elitism. He writes, “The disdain long expressed by literary scholars for teaching writing
5
Scott Wible is a graduate student. So, yes, graduate students can publish in CCC.
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has been matched by the eagerness of many current composition theorists to distance
themselves from the service mission of the first-year course” (540). Cary Moskovitz and
David Kellogg in “Primary Science Communication in the First-Year Writing Course”
and Doug Brent in “Reinventing WAC (Again): The First-Year Seminar and Academic
Literacy” share Harris’s vision for a multidisciplinary first-year course.
Moskovitz and Kellogg argue for the use of primary science communication
(PSC) in first-year courses that value students’ engagement with science. They believe
that PSC is appropriate to first-year writing courses partly because “it is more helpful to
recognize the constraints of disciplinarity wherever they are found than it is to seek the
quixotic goal of cross disciplinary transcendence” (314). PSC would enable potential
science majors to become involved with some of the real questions of their discipline,
rather than learning general skills that they may or may not need once they become
immersed in their major. Moskovitz and Kellogg explain that such an approach to firstyear writing “will move the writing program closer to being in a position of working for –
in a very visible sense – the entire academic community” (320).
Brent presents a similar idea in that he pushes for first-year writing courses to be
research oriented, academic content seminars. Instructors from each discipline would
teach a first-year seminar based on their current research. Brent explains, “the seminars
bring out a pedagogical style that emphasizes building relationships with students above
transmitting information to them” (268). Therefore, students become acclimated into the
academic discourse community through a small-group mentoring situation, in which they
can become more familiar with their prospective major area of study.
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The Outlier: Multimodal Pedagogy
Jody Shipka’s “A Multimodal Task-Based Framework for Composing” uses
detailed descriptions of two students’ multimodal projects created in Shipka’s Rhetoric
105 course to suggest that multimodal assignments can encourage students to:
(1) demonstrate an enhanced awareness of the affordances provided by the variety
of media they employ . . . (2) successfully engineer way of contextualizing,
structuring, and realizing the production, representation, distribution, delivery,
and reception of their work; and (3) become better equipped to negotiate the range
of communicative contexts they find themselves encountering both in and outside
of school” (284).
Shipka provides a clear account of her task-based framework that she believes
encourages students to “learn by doing” (291). She believes that multimodal assignments
expand upon the goals of a traditional writing classroom, but still emphasize the
importance of writing, research, response, and revision.
Assessment
Like pedagogy, the theme of assessment contributes to CCC’s definition of the
field as a teaching field. This is especially true because the assessment articles in CCC
discuss assessment of student writing or individual writing courses, rather than
widespread program assessment. Susan McLeod, Heather Horn, and Richard H. Haswell
describe a study that uses a variety of research methods, both qualitative and quantitative,
to assess the effectiveness of accelerated writing courses. They emphasize that the local
context is important to consider in any assessment project; therefore, research methods
can be shared across contexts for replication, but in each unique situation, the local
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factors that could potentially affect the assessment must be critically considered. Contrary
to popular criticism of accelerated course, McLeod, Horn, and Haswell found that
accelerated courses do not curtail improvement in writing.
Edward M. White, in his article that follows McLeod, Horn, and Haswell’s piece,
discusses an efficient method for assessing writing portfolios. He argues that holistic
grading is not appropriate for portfolio grading and that there are two essential elements
for efficient and effective portfolio grading: 1) a goal statement that outlines the desired
outcomes of the portfolio. This goal statement must be familiar to faculty who will assess
the portfolios and to students who are assembling their portfolios; and 2) a reflective
letter. The student writes this letter to the graders explaining how he or she has met the
requirements outlined in the goal statement. This letter will usually point to particular
sections in the portfolio to illustrate where specific goals have been met. White claims
that this method of assessment could work for small-scale assessment of portfolios in a
first-year writing course and could also be effective for larger-scale exit portfolios that
many universities require for graduation.
Textbook Analysis
Articles on textbook analysis, like articles on pedagogy and assessment, support
the understanding that Composition is a teaching field, because, unless you are Maxine
Hairston, you probably teach using a textbook. Despite this obvious connection between
textbooks and teaching, I was surprised to find this theme in CCC.
Xiaoye You6, in his essay “Ideology, Textbooks, and the Rhetoric of Production
in China,” discusses in detail how widespread ideological changes in China between
1984 and 1994 are evident in the content of A College Handbook for Composition, “the
6
You is also a graduate student.
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most widely used English writing textbook in Chinese colleges since the end of the
Cultural Revolution (1966-76)” (633). You uses examples from the textbook to show that
the first edition (1984) espoused what he calls a Socialist Ideology, though “hints of
alternative ideologies are traceable in the textbook” (639). However, You reveals that in
the second edition “Explicit communist or socialist teachings are hardly noticeable”
(646). He explains that these ideological changes not only affected the text itself but also
its production, dissemination, and consumption (650).
Suzanne Bordelon’s discussion of George Pierce Baker’s Principles of
Argumentation is quite different than You’s analysis of A College Handbook for
Composition. Bordelon takes on Robert Connors and other’s claims that Baker’s
approach to argumentation is strictly logic-based. She argues, using examples from
Principles of Argumentation and other archival materials, that Baker was a progressive
educator whose approach reflects some elements of feminist teaching practices. She
accuses previous historians (e.g. Connors) of being too narrow with their analyses of
Principles of Argumentation because they do not consider “what the text meant in terms
of instruction” (420), and they do not analyze any of Baker’s other texts.
Disciplinarity
The theme of disciplinarity came up in two of the featured sections. In
“Interchanges: Is the English Department Disappearing?” David Laurence argues that
there is no evidence to support Kathleen Blake Yancey’s assertion in her 2004 CCC
Chair’s Address that English departments are decreasing in number. In response to
Laurence, Yancey presents a table showing the numbers of departments called English
and departments that have been consolidated into Humanities, Languages, and under
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other labels. Using this table she concludes, “that in being consolidated into other units,
English departments are both less viable and less identifiable as an institutional unit”
(362). Yancey ends her response with a quote from her chair’s address emphasizing
“what’s important . . . is where we in composition studies focus our efforts, not the
institutional units that house them” (363).
Yancey, then, would not be interested in the debate between Susan McLeod and
Joseph Harris7 in response to Maxine Hairston’s “Breaking Our Bonds.” In this “ReVisions” section, McLeod supports Hairston’s belief that Composition should split from
the English department. However, she explains that in order for this split to be successful,
we must establish an undergraduate writing major, and we must begin to embrace a
variety of research methods: “The scorn for other research traditions is in fact a form of
prejudice and we need to get over it” (531). Harris’s and McLeod’s opposing viewpoints
reveal a divide that shows itself not just in this featured section, but in the pages of CCC
and in the discipline as a whole. It is difficult for many scholars to imagine an
independent Composition (or Writing Studies) department that does not “serve” the
university, while it is equally difficult for other scholars to imagine an independent
department that only “serves” the university.
Conclusion
The snapshot of the field that the last year of CCC captures is not a picture of
harmony, but it is also not a picture reflecting utter disagreement and acrimony. There is
no doubt that CCC constructs Composition as a teaching field. Yet, it is a teaching field
that can’t decide upon its role within the university. In many of these articles, there seems
to be a fear of becoming an elitist discipline, like Literature, whether it’s through the way
7
I discussed Harris’s position on page 6.
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we choose to teach, write, research, or locate our departments. This fear is almost
comforting to me as a scholar just entering the field because I believe that the concern
itself can fend off the onset of elitism. However, I worry that this fear, for many members
of our discipline, is so great that it will not only fend off elitism, it will ensure that
Composition remains in a marginalized position within the university.
The snapshot also depicts a glaring absence of rhetoric despite Deborah H.
Holdstein’s8 invitation to scholarship in “English studies (including literary studies),
rhetoric, cultural studies, critical theory, etc.” (552). Fulkerson’s discussion of procedural
rhetoric as an axiological position and Marzluf’s and Wible’s implicit discussion of this
rhetorical pedagogy represent the extent of rhetoric in CCC over the last year. In fact,
many scholars whose essays are selected for CCC seem careful to refer to the discipline
as Composition or Composition Studies rather than as Rhetoric and Composition.
Holdstein addresses the nominal schizophrenia in the “Guidelines for Writers,” when she
says, “CCC invites articles that contribute to the growing body of scholarship in
composition studies, the field sometimes called ‘rhetoric and composition’” (552), but
she resorts to calling the discipline Composition Studies.
It will be interesting to see how this snapshot of “Composition Studies” changes
over the next year or two. Changes in editorship will certainly affect the way the field is
defined in CCC equally if not more than the shifting trends in teaching and scholarship.
CCC only provides us with a look at a small cross-section of scholarship in Composition,
so it is important for us to keep the limits of this frame in mind when we are, once again,
looking for an answer to the question: What exactly do we do?
8
Holdstein is the editor of CCC.
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Appendix A
An Annotated Bibliography of the Essays I Did Not Include in my
Thematic Analysis
DeVoss, Danielle, Ellen Cushman, and Jeffrey T. Grabill. “Infrastructure and
Composing: The When of New-Media Writing.” CCC 57.1 (2005): 14-44.
Suggests that teachers of new media engage in infrastructural analysis, which
includes analysis of support systems, budget and funding, and surveillance, in
order to be able to predict potential problems and affect necessary change in
these structures.
Fishman, Jenn, Andrea Lunsford, Beth McGregor, and Mark Otuteye. “Performing
Writing, Performing Literacy.” CCC 57.2 (2005): 224-52).
Illustrates the links between performance and literacy/writing using examples
from students who use or have used performance to negotiate these often
unfamiliar situations.
Hesse, Douglas D. “2005 CCCC Chair’s Address: Who Owns Writing?” CCC 57.2
(2005): 335-57.
Claims that Composition teachers must agree that we own writing, but we must
work to define the kinds of writing that we own.
Kates, Susan. “Literacy, Voting Rights, and the Citizenship Schools in the South, 19571970.” CCC 57.3 (2006): 479-502.
Using archival research, explains the history of the Citizenship School Program
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and argues that his movement to help African-Americans in the South pass
literacy tests so they could attain voting rights was an example of a successful
literacy crusade.
Ritter, Kelly. “The Economics of Authorship: Online Paper Mills, Student Writers, and
First-Year Composition.” CCC 56.4 (2005): 601-31.
Argues that students do not share our notions of authorship and that paper mills
and consumer culture exploit students’ understandings of authorship by further
complicating notions of writing.
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Works Cited
Alexander, Jonathan. “Transgender Rhetorics: (Re)Composing Narratives of the
Gendered Body.” CCC 57.1 (2005): 45-82.
Bordelon, Suzanne. “George Pierce Baker’s Principles of Argumentation: ‘Completely
Logical’?” CCC 57.3 (2006): 416-41.
Brent, Doug. “Reinventing WAC (Again): The First-Year Seminar and Academic
Literacy.” CCC 57.2 (2005): 253-76.
Fulkerson, Richard. “Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century.” CCC 56.4
(2005): 654-87.
Holdstein, Deborah H. “Guidelines for Writers.” CCC 57.3 (2006): 552-4.
“Interchanges.” CCC 57.1 (2005): 142-68.
“Interchanges: Is the English Department Disappearing?” CCC 57.2 (2005): 358-63.
Kinloch, Valerie Felita. “Revisiting the Promise of Students’ Right to Their Own
Language: Pedagogical Strategies.” CCC 57.1 (2005): 83-113.
Marzluf, Phillip P. “Diversity Writing: Natural Languages, Authentic Voices.” CCC 57.3
(2006): 503-22.
McLeod, Susan, Heather Horn, and Richard H. Haswell. “Accelerated Classes and the
Writers at the Bottom: A Local Assessment Story.” CCC 56.4 (2005): 556-80.
Moskovitz, Cary and David Kellogg. “Primary Science Communication in the First-Year
Writing Course.” CCC 57.2 (2005): 307-34.
“Revisions: Rethinking Hairston’s ‘Breaking our Bonds’.” CCC 57.3 (2006): 523-42.
Shipka, Jody. “A Multimodal Task-Based Framework for Composing.” CCC 57.2
(2005): 277-306.
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Thelin, William H. “Understanding Problems in Critical Classrooms.” CCC 57.1 (2005):
114-41.
White, Edward M. “The Scoring of Writing Portfolios: Phase 2.” CCC 56.4 (2005): 581600.
Wible, Scott. “Pedagogies of the ‘Students’ Right’ Era: The Language Curriculum
Research Group’s Project for Linguistic Diversity.” CCC 57.3 (2006): 442-78.
You, Xiaoye. “Ideology, Textbooks, and the Rhetoric of Production in China.” CCC 56.4
(2005): 632-53.