Teaching Composition

During its tenure in college composition studies, the writing process movement shifted from a negative dialectic against the evils of the current-traditional rhetoric to a more positive articulation of its own goals and strategies. And in this shift, the writing process movement became more and more associated with expressivist approaches to teaching composition. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, this burgeoning expressivist writing process movement took hold of the college composition studies scene and became the "standard" for effective writing instruction.

Thus, "the writing process," as a rubric for studying and teaching composition, is not the sole province of expressivist and cognitivist rhetorics, and the "social turn" in composition studies, which Trimbur labels "post-process," does not constitute, in practice or theory, a rejection of the process movement, but rather its extension into the social world of discourse.

These beginning teachers often hold, consequently, very contradictory notions of elitism and confusion. "How," they wonder, "could students arrive at college without knowing what a sentence is?" On the other hand, they question their own abilities: "How can I be a graduate student in English and not know the first thing about teaching composition?" They quickly develop strong opinions about the appropriateness of college-level developmental writing courses. Initially, they pooh-pooh the very idea of a university's offering remedial instruction. Gradually, as they get to know their students, they realize the innate intelligence that such Basic Writers have; soon, graduate students develop cynicism that schools, or teachers, or parents, have allowed such bright individuals to arrive at college without a proper introduction to academic reading and writing.

English programs must help administrators become aware of the importance of our programs-a goal unreachable until we ourselves come to an agreement about what composition courses mean financially, politically, and theoretically-and then present a united front with administrators about what and how much we do and have been doing for all these years.We must be proactive in working with university administrators by publicizing successes, strengthening assessments, and developing creative solutions to both fiscal and physical problems. Few administrators realize either the labor intensity of teaching composition or how the addition of two to three students per section compounds that workload. Stronger connections with other departments, specifically education departments, and with the media must be forged. What we do is important, and we should actively seek to get that work acknowledged and understood.

One of Hairston's purposes seems to have been to codify this new model so that it might be passed along as the new mode of instruction, as her final sentence suggests. There she identifies the challenge to "today's community of composition and rhetoric scholars: to refine the new paradigm for teaching composition writing for the nonspecialists who do most of the composition teaching in our colleges and universities" (88). A decade later, from a much more defensive position, Hairston again summarized what she saw as progress in the new field of composition and rhetoric and its concomitant new paradigm for teaching that was "focused on process and on writing as a way of learning."

The move from the traditional English department should include only those who have been trained in composition, or those who are willing to join such a department and take part in monthly training workshops. Professionals in literary fields who disdain teaching composition should not teach it. They should remain in the English Department and hope that students will flock to take their courses.