Community Service and Critical Teaching

When I first started this class, my expectations were that I would be learning how better to teach students how to write through making their writing relevant by making student writing public. My hope was that I could find some strands of an argument to support what I have always felt, which is that academia should not be so self contained, and that what we learn here should be transferable to the outside world to make it a better place. My concern was that I would be learning only about pedagogy. I say this now, looking back, and it is possible my ideas about what the class is have changed my memories of this, but this is true as best as I can put it. (more after the jump!)

Then we started reading, and it I began to feel that what we are really learning is that the world is in crisis and there is no solution, only a bunch of people theorizing and perhaps some tactics of hope to practice, to maintain some sort of momentum for change. Composition studies seemed almost completely lost in Flower and Mathieu. Aren't we teaching students how to write at all?

Now I am reading Herzberg, who is suggesting learning about how literacy is defined disenfranchises certain groups will help students to understand why some people are illiterate, talking as though that is the lesson we must teach students in our composition classes. They are essentially learning what we have been learning. And as one of his students points out, it's an easy A if you have an epiphany and write about it. So, maybe the student did learn something. They learned how to be literate in the public turn in composition.

I started writing this post with a completely different idea in mind, now I'm getting a little annoyed with the patronizing tone Herzberg takes when talking about his students. When he writes about the difficulty his students have in reading the assigned texts, had a small epiphany of my own. It is so hard to read something that goes against your assumptions. Not that it goes against your beliefs, it goes against your assumptions. I wish I could know going into a text if I should look out for that or not, so I would know how to read it. Maybe this is why I am having trouble reading my texts this semester, because they are working off of completely different assumptions, using terms as if I and the author share the same meaning, that I know what the author means by invoking them.

(You know one thing that I am learning this semester, in addition to all the other great things, is how to write more precisely. I find that everything I say potentially has any number of highly nuanced meanings, so I find myself re-reading and editing more as I write.)