Stuart C. Brown

A master's student comes into my office near the end of her first semester teaching. All semester I have watched her enthusiasm for teaching first-year writing grow; in her graduate seminars she has been relating what she is studying and learning to what her own students are encountering. But now she is in tears. Her advisor, a literature professor, has just informed her that minoring in rhetoric and composition is a bad idea, that the teaching of composition is "beneath" her, and that scholarly attention to it will assuredly hurt her chances for getting into a real Ph.D. program. Ours is one of the very few schools that has a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and not one in literature. I counsel, I explain. I bite my tongue.

I'm the Associate Department Head of the largest department in a middlesized (15,000 students) Carnegie Class I research university and must be politic even when confronted with the pettiness of some of my so-called colleagues. English is the largest department because seventy some graduate assistants teach nearly 100 sections of five different General Education writing courses each semester. I am also the Writing Program Administrator. My program is larger than most departments on campus and offers courses that satisfy two universal undergraduate requirements. That literature professor owes her job to this program; if I thought it would actually make a difference, I would point out to her that she is able to teach her graduate seminar and her majors course because composition and its graduate student teachers carry the department. In fact, Robert Scholes claims, many literature faculty have no incentive to change: "The more economically you can teach those writing courses--which is to say, the more students you can cram into them and the worse you pay the teachers--the better off the literature faculty is" ( Schneider A14). Annette Kolodney, as Dean at the University of Arizona, once proposed that faculty could lecture on composition to hundreds of students and graduate-teaching assistants could grade the papers. Jeffrey Walker, on the other hand, offers a countering point of view. He notes on a listserv discussing the possible consequences of downplaying or abolishing the first year writing requirement: "English would become a backwater in the twenty-first century university organized around business, engineering and biotech. Where English has any status, it will have the sort of ornamental status that classics and philosophy have." Some days this seems a tempting scenario.

I have no say in who those seventy or so graduate student teachers are, although I am responsible for their teaching. The Graduate Studies Committee evaluates applications for each of our four emphases at the masters level (creative writing, literature, rhetoric, and technical communication) while another committee determines admittance into the Ph.D. program in Rhetoric and Professional Communication. Students are selected based on a committee's evaluation of a letter of intent, writing samples, transcripts, and letters of recommendation. The more favorable the impression of an applicant as a good student, the more likely the offer of an assistantship. It's not intentional, but student interest in and potential for teaching rarely come up in the discussions. The assistantship is seen as financial support for the student's graduate education. This is necessary to attract the best students. Once the student has arrived, teaching composition is seen as a by-product and, at times, an interference. I overstate the case to make a point, but I've been on those committees and have done the same thing. This was before I became responsible for the nearly 6,000 students each year who take the classes these graduate students teach.

In fairness to most of my colleagues, when I've raised the issue that I'd like justification for who will teach and who will not, they've been receptive. They wait for a proposal from me on what form it will take. I am still deliberating; I confess a reluctance to tinker with what, at least on first glance, seems to work. Every semester I read every student evaluation of those graduate-teaching assistants. Every semester I am startled at how positive they are, especially given the lack of training and supervision beyond the first semester we provide our teaching assistants. Our department offers the not uncommon week-long orientation followed by a semester-long required course in composition theory and pedagogy. I was trained in a similar fashion and perpetuate the same model now. Yet, in a recent Internet Colloquy, initiated by Robin Wilson "Chronicle" article on shortages of composition teachers, the question was raised: What other profession would dream of allowing the untrained and uninitiated to teach fundamental--and purportedly essential--courses. Most professions, including some in English studies, require years of preparation before a teacher is assigned a class. Evidently, anyone can teach writing. Is it a wonder the teaching of composition is denigrated?

I won't analyze how we have gotten to this juncture of what I would call the deprofessionalization of composition. Robert Connors, Sharon Crowley, and Thomas Miller have each thoroughly explored the historical antecedents and have noted the relatively recent happenstance of surrendering the teaching of writing to novices. One has only to look at who was teaching writing before the enormous growth in graduate literature programs. One has only to note the implications of open admissions and the rise in college enrollments. The teaching of writing, one could argue, has been determined almost exclusively by expedience. Its disciplinary existence the result of exigence rather than any legitimate scholarly enterprise. Our very service orientation, while justifying our existence to the rest of the university and our constituent communities, relegates the profession to that of support staff. We might protest otherwise with our finger pointing at doctoral programs and research, conferences and academic journals, but are we talking only to ourselves?

As a sidebar, I will contest the use of the term apprenticeship. The Association of American Universities Committee on Graduate Education reports "Graduate students learn to teach and to conduct research by performing these activities under faculty mentorship. Apprenticeship teaching experiences at progressively more advanced levels, augmented by workshops and other pedagogical training programs, are extremely effective ways to teach prospective teachers how to teach" (12). Perhaps so. Is this a practice followed in the teaching of writing? Anywhere in English studies? The report also notes "Having graduate students serve as teaching assistants for extended periods without [their] advancing in pedagogical development is unfair to graduate students" (12). Obviously, it may also be unfair to the students these students teach. An apprentice cabinetmaker, for example, works with a master cabinetmaker learning to build cabinets, whereas composition teaching assistants rarely work with master teachers and rarely intend to teach composition for the rest of their lives.

I am not optimistic. I fear that even as composition develops as a discipline, its status will devolve further. I maintain a file of clippings and photocopies pertaining to graduate education in the humanities, mostly from The Chronicle of Higher Education and The ADE Bulletin. I pay close attention to articles portraying the dismal state of employment for Ph.D.s in English. These calls, such as the recent "The Final Report of the MLA Committee on Professional Employment," suggest "a new emphasis in graduate training on teaching" (3) (A60). Calls for reform in graduate education in English dominate these discussions. What I find disturbing, however, is that teaching (especially the so-called "service courses" of which first-year writing is by far the most common) has apparently been subsumed in favor of getting a job as the dominating construct in these suggested reforms.

Job market pressures, as Leonard Cassuto notes, have led to "the most highly professionalized and accomplished graduate students and incoming faculty members that anyone has ever seen" (B4). He proposes that English studies can be vastly improved by initiating the use of teaching portfolios and asserts that "those of us who teach graduate students need to set an example" by developing our own teaching (B5). The ironist in me wants to direct Professor Cassuto to some of what has been going on in composition studies for at least the last twenty years. But I will laud his effort because, after all, he is teaching at Fordham and he is referring to literary studies. Now that the Literary Studies component of the profession is officially acknowledging the job market in crisis again, the one predominant solution suggested is that overproduction of specialists will be cured if those "surplus" Ph.D.'s are construed as teachers rather than scholars. I have not seen any proposals on what training will actually take place or what students actually make of this. Sander Gilman has, for example, proposed in the 1995 Presidential Address to the MLA the creation of postdoctoral teaching fellowships that extend student subsidy to improve marketability (my emphasis). Doing is learning, we can assume. Elaine Showalter does call attention to teaching by raising the questions "Are great teachers born or made? How do we learn to teach, and how can we prepare graduate students to do it?" (3). She then goes on to profile her experience with a program in Great Britain as a possible model. She seems willing to import a training program of mentor teaching and ignore, it seems, the existence of a rich tradition of training in the teaching of composition at nearly every doctoral and most MA granting programs in America. Again, we presume she is referring to literary studies and the need to train graduate assistants in the teaching of literature. Perhaps she is also calling for a continuing training and one that is preparing graduate assistants for their lives after graduation.I am troubled by how graduate education in English and the proposed reforms ignore the role of graduate assistants in the teaching of undergraduates, especially those in first-year writing courses. In fact, I see a number of issues around this topic with which I am uncomfortable, although in all honesty, I have no real solutions for any of them. These concerns stem from the facts that: 

            Many graduate students rarely receive training beyond an introductory course or a few days of orientation before entering the classroom.

            Formal and effective evaluation/assessment of graduate teaching assistants is problematic, as is any sort of remediation for ineffectual teaching. We seem to embrace a strident skepticism toward standards, on one hand, while professing the need for exemplary teaching on the other with little attention on how to get to this point.

            Trained compositionists, even as graduate students, are likely to spend much more professional time as administrators than as teachers. Given the scope and funding levels of most of the first-year writing programs, graduate assistants who express any interest in administrative work are quickly co-opted and are consumed as cheap resources (see Fontaine, for example, on the ethical implications of this practice).

            There is increasing schism amongst composition people themselves (the theorists, practitioners, and historians of writing) that is reflected in the graduate education that writing specialists receive. It is not uncommon for graduate programs in rhetoric to offer few, if any, actual course work in pedagogy as their faculty present more history, theory, and faculty research-oriented curriculums (see Brown, Enos, and Lauer; Brown, Meyer, and Enos). If this is not enough, then consider adding to these issues that affect the teaching of writing: the use and abuse of part-time instructors and adjuncts; the difficulties of many entry-level composition faculty in getting tenure recognition for teaching and/or administering the "service" level courses; and the failure of the academy to justify, or at least to explain, its use of resources. That is, do we, in fact educate our students? Do our students write better than they have in the past? "Things," as one American sage is reputed to have said, "are more like they are now than they have ever been."

My intention here is to provoke. The points I've raised aim to question fundamental assumptions underlying graduate education, not only in English studies at large, but specifically within the discipline of rhetoric and composition. What I wish to generate is a discussion of how graduate studies are formulated, the costs of that formulation (economic and scholarly among others) to beginning college writers, and some considerations for rectifying these problems. In doing so, I would caution the profession to consider Crowley's observation that "if you work in a corrupt system, you have to face the fact that making things better for people working in one part of the system may make things worse for people who work in another part of it" (240). Fine cabinets, after all, usually represent deforestation.

Lil Brannon argues that we must "challenge the skills model--the idea that writing is essentially a technology rather than a social practice, that is 'comes' in discrete mechanical parts that people learn to assemble" (241). This model essentially mirrors the idea that if one can write, one can teach writing. Or, as Ed White notes on a listserv discussion, an obstetrician friend claims that 90 percent of what he does could be done by most anyone with rudimentary medical training; it is the other 10 percent of his work time where the years of training and experience come into play. If we are to follow Brannon's model, we will need to make a similar argument for teaching, especially the teaching of writing.

We might also better represent both our own professional attitudes and our own practices in our teaching of the teachers of those courses. Our designation of those teachers, for example, as graduate assistant or graduate teaching assistant or teaching assistant sends a strong signal to the teachers themselves, their students, their administrators, their teachers, those who fund them, and the public at large. How very unpostmodern of us not to attend to the obvious here. How, for example, are we using the term assistant? Most graduate students teaching writing courses are very much on their own in the classroom, especially beyond whatever initial training they might have received. The designation of assistant is, by implication, demeaning, and inaccurate--particularly if there are no actual professors available to be assisted. TAs are signified not by what they do, but how they are named. Administrators are delighted because graduate assistant teaching credits accrue to a department while the graduate students themselves generate credits from their own course work as a condition of employment. And statusconscious faculty are kept complacent because there is a large population of teachers with lower status than they themselves have. As Crowley notes, the teaching of composition in an English department makes for an interesting use of metaphors. She extracts terms from our literature and our lore that colonial studies has so effectively problematized: "children, serfs, prisoners, and slaves" (127).

Justifiably, we bemoan the plight of part-timers and adjuncts as described by Joseph Berger in The New York Times, when he chronicles the travails of Wendy Scribner, an adjunct writing teacher, who teaches sixteen credits a semester, has no office, no benefits, and a minimal income. This is an unfortunate commonplace with which most of us already are too familiar. But I am also disturbed by the lead to this article: " Wendy Scribner spent ten years writing her dissertation, typing it at night in a railroad flat on East Ninth Street while her two small boys were growing up in a windowless middle room. It was the pinched, obsessed life of an underground character in a novel by Dostoevsky." During this time, I want to know who her students were and how she was teaching them. What was the effect of this kind of life on her teaching? How has it carried over to her current situation? The Chronicle of Higher Education creates another flurry of electronic buzz on my e-mail lists by publishing "Universities Scramble to Find Teachers of Composition" ( Wilson). In this article, the author finds one Mark R. Kelley, incoming president of the Graduate Student Caucus of the Modern Language Association, who puts the question bluntly: "If anyone can teach writing, why have an English Department?" (my emphasis, 2). Why, indeed, when it has never been formally established that people in English studies know how to teach--or to write for that matter--any better than anyone else? The article chronicles the commonplace: "Many graduate students who teach composition at Illinois say they feel qualified to do so because they are good writers themselves, a skill many of them say they learned as undergraduates. None of the TAs interviewed for this story, however, had received any formal training in how to teach writing beyond what Illinois offers. And some hadn't even had that" (3). I would like a nickel for every undergraduate student who denied a need for first-year composition because "I'm already a good writer."

David Bartholomae recognizes that "growth in composition has been accompanied by a growth in the size of graduate programs, programs of literature and theory and cultural studies. It is not unusual to find a department, at least in large universities, where the faculty teaches only majors and graduate students . . . turning introductory courses and general education over to teaching assistants" (20). Michael Bérubé notes that "By AAUP's most recent count, part-time faculty now make up approximately 45 percent of the American professoriate; and at many large American universities, graduate students teach more than half the introductory undergraduate courses in all fields" (62). "In 1996-97," Phyllis Franklin of the MLA reports, "of first-year writing sections in the average English Program, 61% were taught by graduate-student teaching assistants, 20% were taught by part-time teachers, 14% were taught by full-time non-tenure-track faculty members, and 5% were taught by tenured or tenure-track teachers;" she proposes acceptable "Possible Standards" to raise the ratio of full-time faculty teaching to 70 percent in BA-granting colleges and 55 percent in Ph.D.-granting institutes (6). Maureen Goggin claims that "despite decades of scholarly focus on first-year composition, the institution has not been changed in any significant way during this century" (41). Again, there is little wonder that composition is dismissed by our colleagues, both within and outside English studies, and that our graduate students most commonly voice the desire to "anything but."

As a profession, we ask continually for better writing teachers. And we should. Crowley, Miller, Brereton, Connors, and others scrutinize our past and complicate our views of the present. As in other disciplines, we propose reforms in our teaching because of our research and consequent theorizing. We have dramatically constructed a discipline in the last twenty years as evidenced by the growth in doctoral programs and number of Ph.D.s produced by those programs ( Brown, Meyer, and Enos; Miller, Brueggemann, Blue, and Shepard) and, we have reconceptualized the study of the teaching of writing, developing training programs, and supporting course work (see Raymond, for example). As Crowley observes, we posit a value for composition because everyone requires it, but we then staff it with graduate assistants (i.e., inexperienced teachers) or with parttime or temporary faculty because costs preclude doing otherwise (118). She recognizes some of the reasons why people are interested in teaching composition: they want to teach, they enjoy the intimacy and immediacy of teaching writing, and they recognize its value--both in the educational and the public sphere (119). As Joseph Harris suggests, public needs to become a keyword in the teaching of writing. Or does it? Do we want the public looking at who is teaching writing in America's colleges and universities?

We often scrutinize "the student," but how often do we look at "the student teacher," other than in their role as the subjects of initial, intensive (and too often minimal) teacher training? It is already frightening enough to recognize that the field of composition probably leads every other discipline on campus in preparing its graduate students to teach. How do we articulate our training of those teachers to the various stakeholders mentioned above? Despite recent strides in developing program evaluation and outcomes assessment, we remain vague about teaching evaluations. We reinforce Crowley's observation that "comp teachers speak of 'the classroom' as though this space is similarly constructed at Yale and at San Jose Community College" (221). Ray Wallace suggests that most composition graduate programs "do a fairly ineffective job in preparing graduates for the low and middle-to-low students most colleges and universities admit these days." He sees an increasing number of rhetoric and composition graduate students entering the field with strong theoretical and historical training in rhetoric and in literature. But he asks, "How will this get thirty badly prepared students from S. Texas and C. Louisiana through even the most basic developmental course, never mind English 101?" (e-mail).

What are our alternatives? Michael Bérubé, in support of graduate teaching assistant unionization, notes "As long as people are working as instructors or as teaching assistants and being paid for their work, I think it makes sense to consider them 'employed,' to consider their work 'employment,' and to admit, therefore, that they are in some sense 'employees'" (37-38). Bérubé argues for assigning an actual value to the work these people do. But as sympathetic as I am to this proposal, I wonder whether this movement does not spell the end for graduate assistantships in teaching. If graduate assistants should be treated as employees, then they must, of necessity, have the credentials to be employed. We may be left with the College of Education model that requires a series of pedagogy courses before allowing a student to teach, before allowing certification, and before providing a classroom full of beginning writers.  

Others, including Connors ( "New Abolitionism"), Crowley, and Charles Schuster, have suggested completely abolishing composition as a requirement. On too many days I can easily concur with Schuster's comment that either the required writing course needs "to matter to our departments, or we have to get rid of it, or get rid of our colleagues" (6). This proposal needs further scrutiny as does the trend toward separating writing courses from English departments. As composition studies becomes a more dominant discipline and begins to assert itself as that maturation takes place, we may find that just as we have chafed under the hegemony of literary studies, we are in danger of creating our own. On a more positive note, perhaps we will follow James Slevin's suggestion that we might "come at the notion of discipline as a system of instruction--a discipline not as the knowledge of a particular area of inquiry and not as the professional conversation about that knowledge but rather a discipline as the act of inviting and enabling others to join that conversation" (156). I would like to think so. I would like to capture the enthusiasm and energy I see in my training program every semester poured into first year-writing classrooms by brand new graduate assistants. They are excited and challenged and alive to possibilities. And something happens. By their third or fourth semester teaching, I hear "I get to go teach" replaced by "I have to go teach."

Personally, I am haunted by an incident from my adolescence in which my father, a career military officer, was inquiring about my "plans for the future." His questions concerned whether I intended to finish high school or not. After mumbling that high school didn't seem to be providing for my future, I stated--rather arrogantly--that I could "always join the Army." I have never asked him about that incident, but I can still see the surprise and the hurt in his face this comment caused. I suspect we may have created the same attitude in many of our graduate programs--"I can always teach composition."

NOTE