Kerri Morris

My interest in discussing composition and the myth of the "service" course arises from years of frustration with teaching, theorizing about, and determining curricular goals for the freshman composition course. A former director of composition at a university where I once taught confessed that he no longer teaches the first-year course because he has no idea what he's supposed to do in it. I came to sympathize with him more fully than I thought possible after serving at another university on a committee to review the written objectives for our firstyear course. We reviewed syllabi of every departmental member because each of us taught the course. The disparity among these documents--in fact the conflict among teaching methods, course descriptions, and course materials--seemed to suggest that we were teaching ten different courses. We were not teaching composition ten different ways, but teaching different disciplines. I doubt anyone--with course name removed from the syllabus--could have grouped all ten into a pile named English 111. Let me hasten to add that my respect for my former colleagues is immense. Each is intelligent; most are kind and dedicated, conscientious, and capable. As a group we were a microcosm of the lived experience of composition in higher education--chaos joined by a course number.

This chaos is systemic. As a discipline, composition has a variegated countenance, seeking to address disparate issues ranging from collaborative learning to the cognitive processes of writers and nature of the composing process, to pedagogical theories and taxonomies governing the universe of discourse. We have long been fascinated by our genealogy and our role in the academy, and have perennial interest in discussing composition's status as a skill or a content course. Recently, discussions of cultural theory, Marxism, and other critical theoretical approaches have filled our journals and syllabi. We write and discuss assessment, portfolio grading, grammar, learning disabilities, writing as therapy, and writing as self-discovery. The sheer variety of the uses of the term "composition," our tacit agreement to avoid defining it, and the lack of any common themes suggest an undisciplined discipline. It is unclear what we are talking about when we speak of the "discipline" of composition.This chapter concerns the very nature of composition itself, to answer the question, "What is composition?" The answer is frequently that composition is all of these things. I hope to illustrate why that answer is insufficient, and, if true, reduces us to the status of a nondiscipline, to little more than a large gathering of interest groups paying dues to the same professional organization. First, I will explicate the problem, which finds its roots in the political, economic, institutional, and curricular arenas. Second, I will argue that this "diversity" is evidence that we have not become a discipline, lacking the necessary rules that shape such intellectual enterprises. Third, and finally, I will speculate both about ways to begin solving this problem and suggest some rules that might earn us disciplinary status.

THE PROBLEM OF "COMPOSITION" AND SERVICE

Because these three traits so deftly determine the course, many departments have developed an "anything goes" policy of overseeing it. While many institutions have an "optional" syllabus or even a "required" syllabus, and most large institutions have adopted required textbooks, none with which I have been acquainted has imposed order on the course or incorporated substance into the course description. As a practical matter, the sheer number of people teaching the course defies this imposition, and as a personnel matter, respect for individuals--particularly the underpaid nontenure track--encourages acceptance of mushy policies. The familiar chant is: As long as you have a theory and your course is consistent with that theory, then all is well, the "I'm OK, You're OK" method of writing program administration.

We have a broad mission and a heavy mantle as teachers of all students in the university community, that is, if we teach first-year composition. Viewing the course from a service mentality is enabling, but offers only a wobbly foundation for the institutions where we serve and for our discipline. We do a job no one else wants to do when we put freshman composition at the center of our discipline. We have built up a mythology of its importance and worth and either really believe or convince ourselves of its value. And we're probably teaching the course better as a result. But we also wield power by doing the job. If it is in part what "housewives'" power ( Grego and Thompson67) of being needed that "empowers" us, it is also real power. As long as the course remains required for virtually every student in every institution, we ensure ourselves jobs, create ways to fund graduate programs, and become self-perpetuating. While others in the humanities have had to suffer enrollment variability, overflowing first-year courses offer stability in English departments and provide cover for teaching upper division courses. As Sharon Crowley argued at the 1998 CCCC, tenure-track members of the English department depend on this course and upon the adjuncts and students who teach it for the survival of their way of life: "I ask you to remember who it is that puts the bread on our table: the absent multitudes whose labor we exploit, whose labor allows us to enjoy positions as WPAS, researchers, and scholars" (A 14 ). She estimates that 40 percent of lower division instruction is dependent on this workforce, a figure that must soar when focusing on the first-year course (A 12 ).

Like staff at the local diner, however, we serve our customer/students a casserole of expectations from the masters we also serve--our own departments, myriad other departments on campus, curricular goals, and the communities in which these students will eventually work. Even if we wanted to, we couldn't possibly meet these expectations. We must be brave about this and decide why or if every college student needs this course, and we must be accountable for that decision. If we argue the course is necessary and that we are the ones to teach it, then we need to produce results that our various communities can rely on.

These links to a service mentality put us in the unenviable position of having constantly to justify ourselves. We have become an ends-oriented, or teleological, field. In order to maintain integrity, we feel (and should feel) the need to demonstrate the success of our results. Many English departments sponsor computer centers and writing centers, where presumably students can "gas up" with some extra help from the staff. Lately we have become obsessed with assessment, and theories about "what works" have risen to disciplinary status.

I feel certain that assessment is unnecessary and confident in saying that we have failed. Miserably. Most students who pass through our first-year course (or courses in some cases) write no better after the course than they did before, especially if we wait a year or more to test them. Businesses, public schools, accounting and engineering firms all complain loudly about the writing skills of their employees. Law schools and other graduate or professional schools join the chorus. All of which leads us back to our role as servants and to discussions of how to serve better, or to what we professionally call "pedagogy."

The service mentality efficiently and unavoidably links us to pedagogy, with the most common conversation among both untrained and trained practitioners focusing on how we are teaching writing, or how we should be teaching writing, or how you will be teach writing. Even the professional journals are dominated by pedagogical discussions, the lore of our field turning individual experience into disciplinary truth. There is nothing wrong with pedagogical discussions and quite a bit right about them. But this topic dominates the conversation, turning our attention firmly away from the "what" and toward the "how."

In the midst of the confusion, composition has become a pedagogical "discipline." Denise David et al., for instance, describe the discipline as "adrift" and floundering, but they propose only expressivist theories and teaching methods as solutions (524). This pedagogical turn--common in our field--gives rise to a conviction that we as a group have conflated the matter of what we teach with the concern of how to teach. This reduction separates us from the rest of the academy. If we look at another discipline, literature, for instance, the problem becomes clearer.

How we teach literature is rarely conflated with what we teach in a literature course. If a colleague asks, "What will you do in the Brit Lit II course?" the immediate response will be a list of literary texts written by British authors after the eighteenth century. Within these boundaries, there is much room for debate and conversation, of course. However, if Norman Mailer Naked and the Dead is on the reading list, our colleague is likely to raise her eyebrows. If Copi Introduction to Logic text is on the list, our colleague is likely to protest, or at least worry.

While there is loud debate about canon, there is little confusion about the boundaries that define or principles that influence a British literature course. In addition, there are many theories about literature that inform the teaching, the reading, and the content of the course, but they exist within the obvious and acknowledged outlines of British literature. Perhaps these clear outlines explain why teachers of British literature, while not always tenured or tenure-track specialists, are usually specifically educated in British literature. Anything clearly does not "go" in the discipline of literature, nor can just anyone teach in the field. Of course, debate punctuates discussions of that discipline. In fact, the debates are more public, more rigorous, more volatile, and more important because the discipline has a clearly understood and accepted self-definition. It also has earned more scholarly, academic clout.

The neglect of the "what" and the edification of the "how" have defined composition for ourselves and for the academic community within which we work, much to our professional detriment. We are considered just slightly more erudite than our education colleagues down the hall who are rumored to teach courses in constructing bulletin boards and writing on the chalkboard. Worse still, because of curricular chaos, conversations about what freshman composition is or should be doing have ceased altogether at the institutions with which I have acquaintance. It is difficult even to know how to get the conversation going or to know what we will discuss. We have been rendered inarticulate because we are no longer confident what it is that we are talking about.

In some cases, members of other departments have entered the conversation for us, making up committees to assess the course, determining the content of the course, and stating its objectives for us. Without a clear disciplinary sense of what constitutes "composition," questions about first-year composition will drive the discipline further into a corner. Our conversations will remain stuck in a defensive mode as a response to "comp-bashing," as John Schilb describes it at the beginning of a recent review of books about pedagogy (340-41). Meanwhile our own disciplinary discourse will continue to be of the tail-chasing variety, rehearsing the same debates, which are typically grounded in the "evidence" of experience.

THE RULES OF DISCIPLINE

The philosopher John Rawls clarifies the nature of the problem in his 1955 essay, "Two Concepts of Rules." Rawls proposes two types of rules: summary rules and rules of practice. In the Summary Conception, rules follow action and are "rules of thumb," maxims, general guidelines. Each person in this view "is always entitled to reconsider the correctness of a rule and to question whether or not it is proper to follow it in a particular case" (285). In the Practice Conception, rules are prior to practice, offering a system or pattern of rules that define the practice. People come under the authority of the rules in the Practice Conception:

It is the mark of a practice that being taught how to engage in it involves being instructed in the rules which define it, and that appeal is made to those rules to correct the behavior of those engaged in it . . . . Thus it is essential to the notion of a practice that the rules are publicly known and understood as definitive, and it is essential also that the rule of practice can be taught and can be acted upon to yield a coherent practice. (286)

It seems to me that we are operating within a Summary Conception of Rules when we reduce our discipline to a pedagogical one. "How we teach," what Stephen M. North has called practitioner lore ( 21 - 55 ), is a process by which we determine rules after the experience of walking into a classroom, deciding what method will "work" best. Because each person may develop her own "rules of thumb," determining the correctness of past rules for current situations, she may determine her own actions subjectively--for instance, that the study of grammatical principles followed by drills has helped her composition students write better.

The teleological force of being defined by summary rules--where ends justify means--undermines our disciplinary status and transforms us into what "they" have wanted us to be from the beginning: utilitarian and itinerant teachers of skills. As such, we are left floundering, attempting to "prove" that the portfolio method improves student writing or that Marxist cultural theories improve critical thinking and writing. We are forced to demonstrate what few others in the humanities are asked to. While philosophers probably hope that teaching ethics will strengthen their students' ethical behaviors, no one argues for the course on those grounds. Instead, ethics is seen as important for the curriculum on disciplinary grounds. Meanwhile we have become what Richard Marius calls "practical" because of the "death of rhetoric as a discipline" (466, 471).

A further trouble with summary rules in composition is that the "success" or perceived success of a method and the method itself is left up to the teacher and not governed by or even necessarily informed by prior rules. Rules have no force. In fact, each time a person questions a rule or changes a rule, she also challenges the nature of the discipline itself. Every question becomes metadisciplinary. For "disciplines" operating under a Summary Conception, it's a new world every morning.

In contrast, when we operate under a Practice Conception of Rules, we legitimize ourselves through public self-definition of a practice whose rules have force and whose nature is acknowledged by all participants. To be a participant in this kind of practice is, in fact, to be knowledgeable of and proficient in its rules. The rules of practice proceed our walking into the classroom. The Practice Conception of rules offers many advantages: its participants must be specifically educated about the practice; the authority of the rules themselves determine actions, causing consistency and predictability; the rules are public and definitive, allowing competing theories within the practice to enrich rather than threaten it.

Instead of recreating a discipline each time we confront conflict, the Practice Conception demands that our questions and concerns fall clearly within the practice. The question, "Should I teach grammatical principles, followed by drills in my Brit Lit II course?" would not only lack sense in the discipline of literature, it would never be asked by an educated participant. More likely, an educated participant might ask, "Should I teach mostly women authors in my Brit Lit II course?" This question is not only sensible, but debate over it has enlarged and improved the discipline.For our own discipline, the question has been more troubling. "Should I teach grammar with drills in my freshman composition course?" is usually followed by the answer, "No, we've found that it interferes with improving students' writing." Or, among the adjuncts with whom I teach, more likely the answer will be, "How can you not teach grammar? They don't know what they're doing. It certainly helps my students." However, the question is much more sensibly debated over disciplinary rules or definitions. "Is grammar an intrinsic part of what we do in composition? If so, should it be introduced in the first year or later?" Surely no one doubts the importance and worth of grammar as a field of study. What many of us do doubt, however, is whether it needs to be formally taught to nonmajors, and especially to first-year composition students. The answer to that question simply must move beyond the subjective and utilitarian world that composition has become.If rules must be established prior to practice in order to have a legitimate discipline, and if those rules must be publicly known and understood as definitive, then composition is not a discipline. Instead we have a group open to anyone who teaches writing or has an interest in teaching writing, regardless of preparation or knowledge. We have no more or less disciplinary weight than Culinary Arts or Creative Writing--all I might add that have a value and lofty character of their own. Note, however, that if we are in the same category as these groups, which are also defined by the Summary Conception of Rules, then our hiring practices should change dramatically. Instead of scholars or specialists, we should hire successful writers, just as flute teachers must be accomplished in their art and instructors of chefs must be chefs themselves. We will become practitioners of an art rather than practitioners of a discipline.However, if we want to be a discipline--and I urge that we follow this path--then we must set about establishing a Practice Conception of Rules, with the authority and coherence that they afford.

NEEDED REFORM AND RULES OF PRACTICE

My recommendations for reform are not new and have been suggested by many others, but if put into practice would cause huge upheaval to English Departments, particularly at the graduate level, to textbook publishers, and to the academy in general:

The teaching of writing needs to be termed a skill for which every faculty member shares the responsibility of teaching. As the Boyer Commission suggested in 1998, all of us teaching in higher education should make writing "a central component" of our courses and writing "should be linked to course work" ( V, 1 ).

            Abolish the first-year writing course and any courses at the sophomore level that are really freshman composition delayed. If teaching writing is everyone's responsibility, then we must drive that point home by eliminating this course that suggests writing can be learned in one or two courses taught by English teachers.

            Move composition and rhetoric out of English departments. By doing this, we will eliminate with one stroke the second-class-citizen status we have come to endure and will be forced to obtain disciplinary status on our own terms.

            Establish a discipline-based first-year course that is a part of the general education requirement, but not a course that every student is required to take. The course should be an introduction to rhetoric and composition.

            Continue to associate the discipline of rhetoric and composition with serious attention to pedagogy. However, make clear that the discipline's basis is no more about how to teach than is any other discipline in the humanities.

            Encourage every colleague within the academic community to pay closer attention to pedagogy, sharing with them the treasure trove of riches that we have compiled over the past several decades, including collaborative learning, one-to-one conferencing, peer editing, process-based teaching, and portfolio grading.

            Eliminate the nomenclature of "writing teacher" as a description of someone whose discipline is rhetoric and composition.

The economic effect of making such changes is enough for most people to ignore them at first glance. But the time has come for us to suffer these consequences. We can no longer base graduate programs and their funding on unfair labor practices, which most part-time and untenured persons suffer under. We can no longer churn out graduates who will never get academic jobs and for whom teaching an ill-conceived course at less than minimum wage without benefits is not enough like the Peace Corps to satisfy, despite what a former MLA chair has suggested. We can no longer tolerate a textbook industry that profits from an ill-conceived course taught to many students in no economic position to support the industry. We can no longer claim that freshman English is accomplishing something when it neither represents our disciplinary interests nor accomplishes what it claims to do. Instead, we need to regroup and begin anew to clarify ourselves as a discipline.

More difficult, however, is the process of determining our Rules of Practice, though not impossible. By rules, I do not mean the handbook type of rules, with which we are all too familiar. Instead, I mean the rules that define us, in fact that preceded us, as a discipline. I suggest the following as a beginning: