Bawarshi, Anis. Genre and the Invention of the Writer. Logan, Utah: Utah State UP, 2003.
Blau, Sheridan. The Literature Workshop: Teaching Texts and Their Readers. Portsmouth, New
Hampshire. Heinemann, 2003. Print.
Downs, Douglas and Elizabeth Wardle. “Teaching about Writing, Right Misconceptions:
(Re)Envisioning ‘First-Year Composition’ as ‘Introduction to Writing Studies.’”
College Composition and Communication. 58.4 (Jun., 2007): 552-84. JSTOR. Web.
Edbauer, Jenny. “Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to
Rhetorical Ecologies.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly. 35.4 (2005): 5-24. Proquest. Web.
Hill Collins, Patricia.“Shifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing about
Motherhood.” Representations of Motherhood. Bassin, Donna, Margaret Honey, and
Meryle Mahrer, eds. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Print. 56-74.
Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: Norton,
1986. Print.
All of these questions are ones that I have struggled with during the composition of this project. I have navigated these issues by returning to texts that were influential to my thinking throughout this program and also by seeking out new texts. I hope that I will be able to apply the reading and thinking I have done to create a classroom environment where my students recognize the connection between composition, identity, and motherhood. I believe that reading women's writing as they define, resist, and debate about what it means to be a mother will encourage my students to see writing as a powerful tool in shaping identity. I also hope my students will recognize how writing can shape political and social change and see their own writing as something that matters to them. After reading this review, I expect readers will also recognize the important role that genre and reflection will play in the classroom.
The following review is divided into three thematic sections: genre and rhetoric, practical pedagogies, and motherhood. Although I have clearly delineated each section, I believe that the debates surrounding motherhood and composition may both be productively viewed through the lens of identity: How does the writing classroom position students as subjects? How do mothers assert their subjectivity through writing? Although I do not think "mothering" would be a constructive way to run a composition classroom, the debates surrounding motherhood and composition can inform each other. As a final note, the texts within each section are ordered chronologically.
How can I design a writing classroom where writing matters to my students? How can I encourage students to reflect on their writing process? How can the writing classroom help students engage with the current social, political, and academic representations of motherhood?
As universities add programs in the field of Composition and Rhetoric the amount of literature available about the writing classroom has increased rapidly. The backlash against current-traditional instruction and the movement towards genre theory and digital media are changing the shape of the writing classroom. Anis Bawarshi’s book Genre and the Invention of the Writer (2003) discusses genres as dynamic, social, and intentional sites of action and reaction. His work is especially interesting viewed within the context of the current proliferation of online forms--blogs, tumblrs, social networking sites--where writers constantly navigate the boundaries of genre and 'push against' them as they perform online identities. Bawarshi is particularly concerned with the ways in which genres “invent” writers. He provides a critique of the process movement as entirely “modernist” because it emphasizes the individual, contained self instead of the social, interactive self of genre theory (55). Bawarshi instead views “writing subjects” as always already enmeshed in the “desires” of a genre (91), that is the societal, cultural, and socialexpectations for particular genres which writing subjects adapt and resist. Indeed, Bawarshi's work informs my assignment sequence where I ask students to think critically about the genre of the review and its role in current social conversations. After exploring the writing subject, Bawarshi spends two chapters analyzing various genres in the writing classroom including syllabi, writing prompts, and student essays and suggesting alternatives. Bawarshi's astute analysis of the importance of these texts, and particularly his thinking about the contractual nature of the syllabus, helped me understand negotiate the new genre of the community college syllabus.
Although Bawarshi’s text touches briefly on rhetorical ecologies, or what he terms “rhetorical ecosystems” (80), Jenny Edbauers Rice's article “Unframing Models of Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies” focuses and expands Bawarshi’s somewhat cursory analysis. Whereas Bawarshi's interest lies in a broad overview of the many possibilities for genre in the classroom and beyond, Edbauer Rice's text is much more focused as she seeks to re-conceptualize important rhetorical terms such as “audience,” “public,” and “situation.” Running through a series of frameworks that she finds inadequate, Edbauer Rice proposes that instead of looking at “rhetorical situations” we should consider “rhetorical ecologies” a more appropriate framework because these ecologies “recontextualiz[e] rhetorics in their temporal, historical, and lived fluxes” (9). Using the example of the “Keep Austin Weird” movement, Edbauer Rice “reads” the city and the movement as a complex and evolving rhetorical situation with various publics and genres influencing the movement, reshaping it, and in some cases resisting it. Edbauer Rice's text is particularly valuable in conjunction with Bawarshi's--where Bawarshi's examples are fairly static in nature, her analysis of the vital, shifting, and unwieldy ecology of the "Keep Austin Weird" movement is invaluable for understanding the difficulties inherent in genre-based analysis. Using key terms like “distribution,” “concatenation,” and “encounter” (19) Edbauer convincingly argues for a new rhetorical model. She also applies her model pedagogically, suggesting that “generative research,” that is, research that is creative and rhetorically motivated, provides a better learning experience to students (22-23). Taken in conjunction, Edbauer and Bawarshi provide a strong case for the rhetorical classroom and provide many interesting avenues to explore when designing rhetorically motivated assignments.
Genre & Rhetoric
Bawarshi and Edbauer both want to change the way genre works in first year writing classroom—Douglas Downs and Elizabeth Wardle want to change the way educators conceive of the first year writing classroom entirely. Downs and Wardle assert that to legitimize writing as a more than a “basic skill," rhetorical and composition based readings and methods must be introduced into the classroom. They want students to see "writing studies" as “discipline with content knowledge to which students should be introduced, thereby changing their understandings about writing and thus changing the way they write” (553). Drawing on two courses which they taught separately but which were designed with this injunction in mind, Downs and Wardle suggest several specific steps which teachers in first year writing classrooms can take to make writing studies a more viable part of the academy (554). They discuss courses they have taught which they call “writing-about-writing” courses in which students “conduct writing research, conduct reading and writing auto-ethnographies, identify writing related problems that interest them […] and conduct their own primary research” (559).Using the examples of two students they have worked with, Downs and Wardle model the benefits and possible drawbacks of this approach. I believe that revealing the "man behind the curtain" in the writing classroom--that is, helping students to understand that they are participating in a complex and worthwhile activity that can be approached in a variety of ways--is extraordinarily important. I attempt to do so (in part) by having my students reflect on their writing (for a more complete description, see my Assignment Sequence). Although Downs and Wardle focus on the practical pedagogical strategies that will help students understand their own writing, their approach intersects with Bawarshi and Edbauer Rice's work in fascinating ways. Indeed, I would
Practical Pedagogies
argue that Downs and Wardle's article is an exercise in revealing to students the complex, ecological nature of the Rhetoric and Composition discipline (and of disciplines in general). Like Bawarshi, Downs and Wardle recognize that writing that matters to students will be motivated by the exigencies of genre and the need to shape their own identities. Placing Downs and Wardle in conversation with Bawarshi and Edbauer reveals the many different (but not unconnected) avenues to explore genre and student writing.
Sheridan Blau's book The Literature Workshop draws on his years of experience teaching literature in college classrooms. Blau argues that the lecture model for literature may not be the most effective way to engage students. This, of course, is not groundbreaking news. However, Blau’s work really grips the reader when he suggests that like the writing classroom, the literature course can move towards process pedagogy in order to help students learn how to read more astutely and become aware of their own reading practices. He writes, “the focus of the literature workshop […] is at least as much on the process of reading and producing discourse about literature as it is on the substance of the discourse produced” (13). While Bawarshi (and others) might resist a return to process pedagogy, I feel that Blau's book intersects nicely with the work done by Downs and Wardle. Like Downs and Wardle, Blau requires that his students think meta-cognitively about their own reading practices and process. How do they read? What do they focus on? How can they read more effectively? How can reading be made public? Questions similar to these fill Blau's text and I believe they gesture to the connection between reading and writing practices that will engage students and help them to think critically about their work in the classroom. In my own classroom I think the value of making reading public would greatly enhance classroom discussion. Using tools like Classroom Salon, where students can individually make notes on the reading and then have their highlighted and marked text viewed by others, allows the instructor to focus
discussion on the issues that are most interesting or difficult for students and makes classroom time more productive. Additionally, I feel that Blau's work minimizes the classroom model that often functions in literature classroom where students are simply vessels to be filled with the instructor's knowledge. Instead, he opens up the literature classroom to reflect the change the writing classroom has already experienced, thus hopefully allowing students to take more responsibility for their own learning. The Literature Workshop contains numerous concrete examples of how a workshop might run along with various writing prompts, suggestions, and examples, Blau’s book offers valuable insight into how a teacher might “flip” the literature classroom and give more weight to student contribution. The Literature Workshop has been a valuable part of my thinking process as I designed a syllabusand assignments. While the syllabus I designed is for a composition classroom, I expect that the requirements of high school and community college settings will require that I teach literature in the writing classroom. I hope that I can make it a productive experience for students and help them think meta-cognitively about their reading and their writing.
Reading Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution is a fascinating experience. Published in 1967, Rich was an early voice in the critical conversation about motherhood. Speaking from her personal experiences with motherhood, Rich observes the way motherhood and identity are inextricably linked. She also explores motherhood throughout the centuries, devoting hundreds of pages to an analysis of the systems and cycles that perpetuate patriarchy and wrest reproductive control from women. I believe that including Rich on my syllabus is important, not only to expose students to her writing but because so much of what has been written about motherhood since the publication of Of Woman Born stems from Rich's work. I hope to help students see how Rich's work opened up the space for current personal and political conversations about what it means to be a mother. Whether mommy bloggers realize it or not, they are participating in a conversation that started decades before them and will hopefully continue and change for generations to come. Of Woman Born asks women to think about their personal experiences in a social and political way. Rich used the tools of a certain genre to create a conversation. I hope that my course will show students how more 'formal' writing does not necessarily have to be divorced form topics they care deeply about but like Bawarshi and Edbauer Rice suggest can be part of a larger conversation.
Motherhood
Patricia Hill Collin's thesis in her article "Shifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing about Motherhood" is that feminism loses something when it considers motherhood as a monolithic whole without taking into account specific class and racial differences. Her essay focuses on the experiences of African American, Native American and Hispanic women as they challenge the strict dichotomy of the domestic and the public spheres through “motherwork” (61). "Motherwork" for Hill Collins includes the work that African American, Native American, and Asian women (as well as other women of color) must to do help their children survive physically, negotiate their relatively powerless status in society and negotiate their identities. Hill Collin's article is incredibly important for the work I hope to do with students in the class. Writing and thinking about how race, class, and gender influence women's experiences with motherhood (and the type of work they are involved in) is incredibly powerful. As human beings we tend to assume that those around us
experience life the way we do--Hill Collins problematizes this assumption and powerfully demonstrates how race and class change the experience of motherhood for many women. Her emphasis on how women shape identity speaks back to the work of Adrienne Rich but also has connections with Bawarshi or Downs and Wardle's work. Writing has the power to shape how an individual understands herself as a mother and an individual. The power for writing to shape an awareness of one's writing process also extends to shaping an awareness of oneself.
Works Cited