I have, in the bottom right-hand drawer of the desk in my office, a neatly bound dissertation chock full of optimistic theory about what a postmodern writing class, inside a postmodern writing program, with/in a postmodern world would look like. I came to this dissertation by way of a failed attempt at literary scholarship and the discovery along the way that I really liked teaching composition. The excitement of discovery of ideas from the likes of James Berlin, John Schilb, Sharon Crowley, Lester Faigley, Henry Giroux, etc. made a great deal of sense to me at the time. My move from the stolid center of literary studies to the outer fringe of composition studies gave me energy and passion. Then I got a job.

Currently I am the only person in our eight-person English department with a degree in rhetoric and composition. I direct the writing center, the writing across the curriculum program, summer placement and assessment, as well as teach a good cross section of rhetoric, composition, and cultural studies courses.

I talk, in my capacity as administrator, on a near daily basis, with many of the stakeholders in our campus writing program--students, teachers, administrators. Coming to grips with the way people write in their disciplines has been as revelatory to me as any piece of theory ever has been. I have worked closely with mathematicians, biologists, sociologists, historians, and musicians toward improving the writing that goes on in their classes, and in many instances, their own work as academics. Many of my preconceived ideas about writing and the purpose of a freshman writing course were influenced by what I see as an intense humanities/rhetoric/composition bias toward one kind of writing/process (for the lack of anything better to call it, academic expository discourse seems adequate) and one kind of result/product (the move toward agency/resistance in the general "discovery" type essay). The postmodern classroom doesn't really seem to fit within the larger relationship between the composition class and the college. The idea that the composition might just be a skills course for students who enter college inadequately prepared, while anathema to some, is the cold reality of our program. To ask, as we do, instructors from across the disciplines to teach writing in their courses, and not to prepare students to receive such instruction is, as I mentioned above, arrogant.

In the essay "Writing in a Post-Berlinian Landscape," Michelle Sidler and Richard Morris offer one potential for what kinds of writing might go on in a postmodern writing course. Sidler and Morris write that their intention in their composition course(s) is "to implode the rhetorical divisions of invention and post-invention, interpretation and composing, or 'brainstorming' and organizing" (278). How does one do this? They give the following example:

For example, a student who critiques the lyrics of a rock group might find that she/he wants to communicate this message to the group's fans who have web sites. The student might choose to construct a web page or might decide to send an e-mail message to site owners who list their addresses. He/she may even compose lyrics and music that stand as an alternate text to the song.

This, of course, despite a well-reasoned rationalization for what students might gain from this activity, begs the question: How is this helping the students with their writing? Although this assignment might help them to become a citizen/agent in late twentieth-century America, how does it help them with the kinds of writing they will have to do outside of the writing classroom? How, I wonder, are students going to be able to operate with/in current political and economic conditions--get and maintain a fulfilling job, be part of a family or other social network, have hobbies, and so on--if they can't work with/in the current expectations of capitalism? Having students rewrite song lyrics or create web pages, while fun and entertaining and certainly far easier to respond to than student papers, seems largely counterproductive to a composition course in a writing program that has any sort of institutional mission beyond the theory/practice issues of its instructors. The postmodern writing course, at least as Berlin, Sosnoski, and Sidler and Morris have fashioned it, means very little beyond itself. I would argue that a first-year composition course and the writing program that it is housed in has a responsibility to something beyond the ephemeral ideal that students can, in fifteen weeks, confront their own racist, sexist, classist, imperialist, and capitalist ideological preconceptions while at the same time learn the skills to help them eventually become better writers of lab reports, art history essays, business letters, case studies, essay exams, newspaper articles, and advertisements, to name only some of the writing they'll be expected to do in college and after they leave. Oh yes, and students are expected, in freshman composition, to become social critics of others' writing, as well as of television, film, music/lyrics, and the ever ubiquitous advertisements. 

I hear the argument loud and clear that students can't/shouldn't be taught the dominant discourse because it's (potentially) damaging to them because they will never have access to the dominant culture/class. The argument, for instance, that a student shouldn't be taught how to write good memos because they'll never be in a position to write one is, on the surface, a powerful one. Of course, this seems to deny two particular impulses--the first one is simply that students want to learn the dominant discourse and who are teachers to deny them that? The driving impulse for most college students is that college is a gateway to the dominant culture. 

The second impulse seems more complex--that teaching students to resist the dominant hegemony can, and often does, run counter to the mission of the college and/or the mission of writing as a part of the larger college community. Let me offer an example.