Blog Response #10: Of Students and Authors and What the Heck Do I Assign?

I really appreciate what the author is trying to say. In a way, I agree completely. Recently—I’ve discussed this with a few people—I have been trying to get my students to see their education as empowering. I want them to take control of their educations, to see themselves as agents unto themselves, not just to be acted upon. I want them to use their education here not to merely float on by and get a degree (although, if the statistics hold true, most of the “floaters” probably won’t get a degree). I want them to, in the language of the article, become authors, those people who are active.

Of course, this is harder than it sounds. I have great sympathy for students who, having spent most of their formative years in classes—junior high classes, high school classes, etc.—that simply tell them the “correct” thing to do (rather than teaching them how to think), now struggle to think for themselves. They are so concerned with what’s correct that they don’t stop to think about what’s right, if that makes any sense at all. I know that, in high school, our teachers just wanted us to take the proper steps to get into good colleges so that we could make lots of money. It got really old.

And, for me, I know that my life got much better once I became an author, once I started determining—for myself—what was best, what constructs applied to me. That’s what I want my students to do.

However, the author brings up an excellent point:

Paradoxically, if pursued, such strategies can lead to the same “hypocrisy or despair” as the others, since a failure to acknowledge the social pressures on writers precludes any resistance to them. As Bartholomae has argued in his long debate with Elbow, expressivism (which Bartholomae describes as “part of a much larger project to preserve and reproduce the figure of the author as an independent, selfcreative, self-expressive subjectivity” [“Writing” 651) is wrong both because it is inaccurate and because it makes students “suckers and […] powerless, at least to the degree that it makes them blind to tradition, power and authority as they are present in language and culture” (“Reply” 128-29). When students ultimately come to recognize the degree to which they have thus been made “blind,” they may well rage not at “tradition, power, and authority” as present in culture but at the teachers who have failed to equip them to confront those forces. The problem of the “process” or expressivist pedagogies thus lies in their denial of the material, social, and historical operating not only within and outside the classroom, but also, and more significantly, within as well as outside student consciousness. (10)

I also understand this argument—boy, do I ever. Even though many of my teachers were trying to get me to the “correct” thing (to keep my vocabulary choices rolling), there were some who tried to broaden my horizons with very, very, very creative assignments—assignments, I felt, that had no bearing on the so-called real world. Indeed, these assignments were often introduced as “the kind of thing that universities love,” and so I persevered.

However, after reaching—and graduating from—a university, upon reaching the real world, guess what? Those assignments hadn’t done squat for me. (I remember one assignment in high school where, after reading a novel, we had to draw a giant head on a large piece of butcher paper and then draw pictures inside the head to represent what was going on in the protagonist’s mind throughout the novel. One group didn’t draw anything—they were being lazy, really—but they got credit, because—even though the teacher kinda saw through it—it looked like they were being creative. Now, tell me where in the real world that would happen. “Uh, sir, I didn’t design the logo for the client because the best, uh, logo is, uh, no logo.” No, it wouldn’t happen.) Thus, I can imagine my students raging, just like I raged, if their assignments aren’t in some way relevant.

How do we walk this thin line? I don’t know. I confess that I’ve seen many students in the Writing Center with the “discuss how you acquired literacy” assignment that’s popular in Eng 099—which, incidentally, is also mentioned in the article—and, while I applaud what that assignment is trying to do, I don’t know if it’s really doing anything for the students. By and large, I think they see it as just another busy-work assignment. Of course, I’m seeing the students that come in to the Writing Center; maybe there are many more students who value the assignment; I really, really hope so, because I think that the assignment can be beneficial. However, I do worry.

Thus, I am still where I began: how do I empower my students? How do I make them authors? Much is still up in the air. One thing, though, is clear: they must want it.