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Category Archives: Composition
Education’s Surveillance Arms Race
Paternalism is a hardy perennial in higher education. Perhaps for obvious reasons, once we begin thinking about our students as our children, or, better, as our customers, we stop thinking of them as adult learners. As children, we need a lot of guidance; as adults, we have to learn to set our own agendas and then follow it over an extended period of time. It's a difficult process and it's probably always to some extent a matter of trial and error. At key moments, then, we, as teachers, have to just stand back and watch.
That's why, as the cliche goes, failure is so important. Adult learners need to be independent learners, and independent learning is, well, learned. Some teachers...
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Concentration, Contemplation
I'm going to start a conference paper today-- really, I will!-- that focuses on the need for a stronger critique of consumerism in the study of computers and writing, in part to avoid a potential backlash against new communication technologies, and in part becuase without that sort of criticism our field risks intellectual and social irresponsibility. The backlash, as a recent Washington Post piece illustrates ("More colleges, professors shutting down laptops and other digital distractions"), continues to gain momentum.
In the liberal arts, a certain segment of the academy always believed that these new technologies are alienating, if not anathema to the traditional transformative goals of higher education. In computers and writing, we've long argued that this was both...
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Against the Student Grain
As a part of my job as an online teacher I'm required to attend a yearly conference with my fellow full-time faculty and to participate in several online workshops each year. I enjoy it; it's a chance to feel a bit more like a member of a department (not that I miss that too much!) and to think about what I love to do. Sometimes, though, it really makes me crabby and irritable, professionally and intellectually speaking. The problem has its roots in the rejection of the so-called sage on the stage.
Once upon a time, the legend goes, professors stood up at the front of the room, or lecture hall, and talked for the entire class. (I am...
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No Standard Children
My students always have a hard time writing criticism. The first complaint is that they don’t know enough; that’s not true, of course. They have the assignment, to start, which they can use as criteria. That’s plenty of material in itself, but they also have their own sense of language. It may be difficult to articulate your tastes in writing, but that’s the point. The more you struggle to put things into words, the more you will improve as a writer and a thinker.
Once I get them over that hurdle—sometimes before—their next complaint is that they don’t want to be negative. They want to affirm what’s right as well as explain what’s wrong. The practical-minded curmudgeon in me...
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Literary Studies Concedes Defeat
Perhaps they, the youngest generation, can labor with their teachers in putting together the house that has forfeited its sense of order. If they do, they can graduate with the knowledge that they possess something: a fundamental awareness of how a certain powerful literature was created over time, how its parts fit together, and how the process of creation has been renewed and changed through the centuries ... They can also convert what many of them now consider a liability and a second-rate activity into a sizable asset. They can teach their students to write well, to use rhetoric. They should place their courses in composition and rhetoric at the forefront of their activities. They should announce that the teaching of...
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Evolution or Revolution