No More Learning

In the context of contemporary composition studies, unease about the inauthenticity of school can be seen in our field's continuing embarrassment about "current-traditional rhetoric," the small-minded writing pedagogy that most of the public still associates with what we do. The classic account of such pedagogy remains Janet Emig's 1971 study of twelfth-grade writers in Chicago- area public schools, which portrays school writing in this country as a thor- oughly stultifying, even "neurotic," activity. 5 In the book, no one discerns more acutely the shortcomings of current-traditional rhetoric than the students themselves, one of whom says of her teachers, "They seem to have this thing about spelling. "6
The problem with school writing from Emig's point of view was not the students--it was their teachers, who were "interested chiefly in a product [they] can criticize rather than in a process [they] can help initiate through imagi- nation and sustain through empathy and support. "7 Emig complained, in fact, of widespread "teacher illiteracy" in U. S. high schools and described edu- cators who did not themselves write and who thus "underconceptualize and oversimplify" the process of composing so that "planning degenerates into out- lining, reformulating becomes the correction of minor infelicities. "8 Through such devices as the five-paragraph theme--"so indigenously American," Emig writes, "that it might be called the Fifty-Star Theme"--teachers set rigid parameters for writing that "students find difficult to make more supple. "9 The result? "Outward conformity but inward cynicism and hostility. "10 It is no wonder that, in devising a more authentic educational experience in writing
A Place for School in Rhetoric's Public Turn 213
and rhetoric, one that can help our students develop into more self-actualized, engaged citizens and individuals, school is often the last place we look.
Of course, in many contemporary writing classrooms, students are allowed to pick topics about which they care and write papers that seem at least to reflect genuine purposes, genres, and audiences--a letter to one's representa- tive about gun control, for example. But even this attempt to make school writing more like "real world" public discourse ultimately fails, according to Susan Wells: "in such assignments, students inscribe their positions in a vac- uum since there is no place within the culture where student writing on gun control is held to be of general interest, no matter how persuasive the student or how intimate their acquaintance with guns. 'Public writing' in such a con- text means 'writing for no audience at all. '"11
In a penetrating essay published a few years ago, Joseph Petraglia called this kind of writing "pseudotransactional," discourse that, rather than actu- ally transacting business with the world--informing, persuading, instructing others--only appears to do so, discourse in which any authentic purpose is an illusion. 12 According to Petraglia, pseudotransactionality is a function of school itself and has its origins in the teacher's role as evaluator rather than reader. The purpose of rhetoric in school, according to this argument, is not, and cannot be, to actually get something done, make things happen, alter an attitude. It is to get a grade.
A second, equally devastating problem with traditional school from the point of view of its critics is that it reproduces the unequal socioeconomic structure of the surrounding society and is thus both symptom and cause of economic and cultural hegemony. What students learn in school from this point of view is their place in the stratified order of the "real world," which thus does not change through education but is instead perpetuated by it. Emig saw forty years ago that school's obsession with trivialities like spelling did not prevent it from having enormous social power. She does not dwell on this in her critique, but she clearly shows that schools reward students who are willing to play by the schools' inane rules.
Of course, the connection between the language of school and the levers of power is not just a modern phenomenon. Roland Barthes, in fact, defined rhetoric in general as "that privileged technique (since one must pay in order to acquire it) which permits the ruling classes to gain ownership of speech" and noted how, as a metalanguage and thus an object of schooling, rhetoric was born in legal conflicts surrounding property. 13 It emerged "from the baldest sociality, affirmed in its fundamental brutality, that of earthly possession: we began to reflect upon language in order to defend our own. "14
Today, ideological analyses of schooling are common, and they have shown us how our classrooms perpetuate the status quo by teaching children and young adults to assume their predetermined subject positions. 15 But, accord- ing to this critique, the curriculum not only stratifies young speakers and
214 David Fleming
writers socioeconomically; it obscures that that is what it does, disempower- ing critique of unequal education, mystifying and distracting students and their guardians from the "real" power of language to effect change in the world.
In a sense the two critiques just summarized contradict one another: the first portrays school as essentially "busy work," a simulation of real activity that is a waste of resources for all concerned; the second, by contrast, depicts school as extraordinarily effective at what it does, reproducing the social order "outside" without making it at all obvious that that is what it is doing, training students to take on their preassigned roles with astonishing efficiency. But the two critiques are actually closely related, different interpretations of the same phenomenon: school's failure to promote students' self-actualization and improve the world in any appreciable way. It is just that one sees that situ- ation as a case of ineptness; the other, as the design of the ruling classes.
Given these problems with traditional schooling--pseudotransactionality, on the one hand; reproduction, on the other--any turn from the traditional classroom would seem to be a welcome development for rhetorical education. But in which direction should we turn? After all, nearly everyone acknowl- edges the continuing need for education of the young in speaking and writ- ing, especially given the complexity of such practices, the important role they play in our communities, and the long immaturity of our offspring. The ques- tion is, what should such education look like?
At a theoretical level, if the problem of traditional composition pedagogy has been its reliance on what Petraglia has termed "General Writing Skills Instruction," which involves explicit instruction in decontextualized reading and writing skills, the solution would seem therefore to involve the educa- tional dispersal, particularization, and implicitization of writing. 16 From this point of view, "real world" written discourse is irreducibly diverse, inextrica- bly situated, and always already interested; the way to effectively, and ethi- cally, develop fluency in a given writing practice is thus to immerse oneself in a world where that practice makes sense.
A pedagogy based on such a belief would involve a literal (and not just a conceptual or metaphoric) move away from school and toward society, away from the classroom and toward the community, away from solitary, imprac- tical exercise in decontextualized skills and toward situated, collaborative, concrete, human action. It would involve, that is, a new dedication to prac- tice, whether that is seen as culturally embedded, inescapably ethical action;17 insistently reflective engagement with the materials of the world;18 or "free, universal, creative and self-creative activity through which man creates (makes, produces) and changes (shapes) his historical, human world and himself. "19
The public turn in rhetoric and composition studies is clearly aligned with such a recasting of education. Recent work in service learning, activist research, community literacy, and public discourse studies has helped the field reclaim
A Place for School in Rhetoric's Public Turn 215
an outward-looking profile, making learning both more authentic--because it is oriented to the particular, local, and embedded--and more radical--be- cause it encourages students to question and change the world rather than merely reproduce it.
But I worry that in turning so definitively toward "society" and away from "school," we may be neglecting aspects of classroom education that are not necessarily antithetical to a genuinely practical mission for rhetoric and com- position, aspects of schooling that, in fact, could contribute in important ways to a public turn in the field. The problems of school are many and obvi- ous. But there are virtues as well, virtues that might be especially pertinent for rhetoricians of public life.
The Virtues of School
Let us take two prototypical features of traditional schooling--its emphasis on factual knowledge and its preference for theoretical abstraction--and ask whether they might harbor learning opportunities for a praxis-oriented rhet- orical education. My goal here is not to mount a comprehensive defense of school but to suggest that we reconsider the easy denigration of the class- room that has sometimes accompanied rhetoric's public turn.
In Defense of Facts
We are accustomed now to malign traditional schooling's emphasis on--or obsession with--the transmission of "inert" facts, and with good reason. But even a writing pedagogy focused on "real world" activity, on authentic, socially embedded, potentially transgressive practices, needs to reserve a place for the development of substantive knowledge in its students. In fact, it could be argued that a truly civic rhetorical education in a complex society like ours can- not work without some kind of common schooling in the shared histories, beliefs, and values of the various worlds to which its students will graduate.
Since the late 1960s, of course, conventional wisdom has held that formal education plays an insignificant role in the development of good citizens. But political scientist William Galston has summarized a compelling body of recent research that supports an important role for traditional, classroom- based education in fostering democratic attitudes and habits in young peo- ple. 20 These studies, writes Galston, have shown surprisingly positive effects for coursework in political life and classroom-based discussion about politics; political scientists now increasingly acknowledge that, though citizens do not need to be policy experts to be engaged in their community's affairs, they do need basic political knowledge to be effective in and fulfilled by public life, knowledge that is perhaps best transmitted in school. The evidence shows, according to Galston, that substantive political knowledge affects acceptance of democratic principles, attitudes about politics, and political participation rates. Controlling for race, class, and other variables, he argues, citizens with
216 David Fleming
more knowledge have less fear of immigrants, are less likely to feel mistrust and alienation, more likely to participate in politics, less likely to vote on the basis of their own circumstances and interests, and more likely to express tol- erance for unpopular groups. There appears to be, in other words, a link be- tween years of formal education and prodemocracy attitudes. Though Galston also admits that the results of other kinds of civic education--service learn- ing, for example--remain mixed, he does not conclude from his summary that we should simply return to a political pedagogy based on rote learning of facts and principles. The evidence shows instead that traditional formal education in politics needs to be combined with regular discussion by stu- dents of current events, opportunities to practice democratic skills in school governance, exposure to social science methods and findings about political life, training in such practical skills as the decoding of charts and tables, and treatment of non-American political structures.
A recent essay in CCC by David Coogan would seem to support just such an integration of classroom- and community-based methods in writing and rhetoric education. 21 Coogan recounts a two-semester service-learning course he taught in 2002 at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, in which a dozen undergraduate students worked with a Bronzeville-area nonprofit organization called Urban Matters to increase parent involvement in the lo- cal school councils (LSCs), which help govern neighborhood schools in the Chicago public school system. Unfortunately, despite the effort and resources put into the yearlong course, the students' work had limited impact: they were unable to significantly increase attendance at the parent meetings they organized, the brochures they painstakingly produced went largely unread, and the advocacy they tried to sponsor among their clients was practically ineffective.
Coogan uses this "rhetorical failure" to argue for a new approach to ser- vice learning that pays as much attention to "rhetorical scholarship" as to "rhetorical activism. "22 "What really went wrong in the project," he writes, "was that the students and staff were thrust into rhetorical production . . . before they had done any rhetorical analysis. "23 They did not know enough about the history of the school reform movement in Chicago, were unfamil- iar with the "style and substance" of parent involvement in schools, and mis- read the dominant "ideographs" of the rhetorical environment around them, failing to understand, for example, the historical shift in local discourses about education that now privileged "local responsibility" and "accountabil- ity" over "local control. "
Coogan advocates here a greater role for relatively formal, even classroom- based instruction and analysis within service-learning projects, an integra- tion of school and society, an oscillation between classroom and community, that may well turn out to be a pronounced feature of the next generation of community literacy initiatives. And he proposes an educational sequence that
A Place for School in Rhetoric's Public Turn 217
would move students from discovery to analysis to production to assessment, in which really only the third step--admittedly the heart of any such proj- ect--would be nontraditional in the terms I have been using here. 24
In Praise of the Abstract
Another feature of traditional schooling that deserves reconsideration is the focus on abstract, theoretical knowledge. Since at least the rise of the "situ- ated learning" movement of the 1980s, there has been a concerted move in educational circles away from the teaching of general, abstract knowledge and toward contextualized, embodied, concrete learning, especially apprentice- ship-style projects in which explicit instruction in general knowledge is re- placed by immersion in particular communities of practice.
But in turning toward such informal education, is it possible that we have overlooked the continuing practical possibilities of theoretical abstraction? In a persuasive defense of such knowledge, and the relatively traditional peda- gogies by which it is usually transmitted, John R. Anderson, Lynn M. Reder, and Herbert A. Simon concede that "much of what is learned is specific to the situation in which it is learned" and that there is often a "mismatch" between school situations and "real world" situations such as the workplace. 25 They cite such well-known studies as the one that portrays Orange County home- makers doing poorly at schoollike mathematics problems but well at super- market "best-buy" calculations. They dispute, however, the conclusions usually reached on the basis of this research: that all learning is context-bound and that the abstract knowledge that school often emphasizes is largely useless. They suggest instead that knowledge gained in school can transfer across con- texts in powerful ways if the learning situation is well designed. For example, knowledge taught in multiple contexts turns out to be less context-bound than knowledge not so taught.
The authors also contest the claim of the situated learning movement that "training by abstraction" is of little use, an argument that has been used to support projects like apprenticeship programs that turn their back completely on the classroom. 26 The alleged irrelevance of school-based "theory" is sup- ported by stories like that of Los Angeles police officers who are told, upon leaving the police academy, to "now forget everything you learned. " Though there is obviously some justification for this advice, the real problem, accord- ing to Anderson, Reder, and Simon, is not school but our tendency--on both the Left and Right--to belittle what school in fact does well. What police recruits learn in the classroom about not violating subjects' civil rights, for example--education that is hard to imagine outside of a classroom context-- needs to be not "forgotten" but constantly reinforced. In this case, the better advice would be "now remember everything you learned! "
Research on writing acquisition has sometimes found similarly large effects for explicit instruction, despite the manifest superiority in many cases
218 David Fleming
of practice over theory and implicit over explicit instruction. 27 Students have been shown to revise better, for example, when explicitly instructed to do so. In one study, young writers improved their performance significantly when told "Add five things to your essay to improve it," rather than simply "revise your essay to improve it. "28 Though they do not deal specifically with writing instruction, it is for reasons such as these that Anderson, Reder, and Simon argue for a more nuanced approach to the relative role of situated and abstract knowledge in pedagogical design. "Numerous experiments show combining abstract instruction with specific concrete examples is better than either one alone. "29
Finally, the authors deal with the claim of situated learning advocates that learning should always take place in complex, social environments, those that mimic the "real world," rather than the simplified, often solitary contexts of school. Again, there is often good reason for reforming school to make it more like society in these ways. But Anderson, Reder, and Simon find ample evi- dence for the usefulness of solitary learning methods and the decomposition of tasks into parts. A student learning to play violin in an orchestra, for exam- ple, requires training both inside and outside of that context.
But what does any of this have to do with the kind of political or civic goals associated with the public turn in rhetorical education? Well, one of those goals is usually to help develop in students a more critical sensibility about their society, an oppositional stance toward socioeconomic inequality, for example. While it is true, as I argued above, that school is often a place where the status quo is naturalized and reinforced, and while "extracurricu- lar" organizations and activities can be fruitful sites for learning and prac- ticing counterhegemonic discourses, it is also true, as scholars of service learning like Bruce Herzberg have shown, that classroom work--reading, writing, analysis, discussion, and so forth--can edify practical action by help- ing students question the theories with which they operate in their daily lives and which can distort their interpretations of what they see and hear outside of school. 30 Coursework in women's studies programs has demonstrated for more than thirty years now the transformative power of relatively traditional classroom work.
It may be, in fact, that counterintuitive knowledge, that which goes against students' prior beliefs, can only reliably be acquired through overt instruc- tion, the way effective textbooks often teach new concepts by first explicitly refuting students' misconceptions. In fact, one of the hallmarks of expertise is the prominence of abstract knowledge that is not readily accessible in "everyday" life. Cheryl Geisler describes how novices studying physics tend to rely on concepts close to everyday, literal understanding; experts, on the other hand, use discipline-specific understandings that are more abstract, non- literal, specialized, and learned. Clearly, expert knowledge comes, in part, from long immersion in a community of practice; but it also comes from study,
A Place for School in Rhetoric's Public Turn 219
often of a fairly traditional kind. The very power of that kind of expertise-- its practical effectivity in the world--is further reason to reappraise our ten- dency to denigrate classroom-based education. 31
We might see in both of these features of traditional schooling--the em- phasis on factual knowledge and the preference for theoretical abstraction-- a defensible role for explicitness in progressive education. In fact, though we often associate explicitness with legalism, authoritarianism, even repression, compelling arguments have been raised in recent years about the liberatory potential of some kinds of explicit instruction. In writing studies, this reap- praisal has been most persuasively advanced by Lisa Delpit, who has argued that there are rules for participating in power, and "if you're not already a par- ticipant in the culture of power, being told explicitly the rules of that culture makes acquiring power easier. "32
I have focused so far on the potential role of traditional educational content--facts and theories--in authentic, even counterhegemonic, learning. But what about the structure of traditional education, the prototypical organi- zation of classroom life itself? Is there something there that a public turn in rhetoric might take advantage of? By structure, I mean the way school is usu- ally so dramatically set off from the rest of society: the way it segregates and isolates aged cohorts of children and young adults in institutional settings, often under compulsion of some kind; the way it organizes their time to- gether into artificial chunks, like the "courses" of postsecondary education; the way such chunks are conceived on a narrative basis, each with a begin- ning, middle, and end through which students move and, ideally, become transformed; the way participants--teachers and students alike--are asked constantly to reflect on that movement, to imagine, represent, contemplate, and assess their progress, or lack thereof, in the story of learning. If education can take many forms, school itself is hard to imagine, even in the early twenty- first century, without calling up such specific spatial and temporal images.
These images also point, of course, to what makes traditional schooling so susceptible to the critiques I summarized at the beginning of this essay. The segregation of students by age, class, "ability," and so forth deprives young learners of the "real world" diversity they need to grow as thinkers and citi- zens; the physical arrangement of the typical classroom encourages docility among students and authoritarianism among teachers; the isolation of school from everyday life makes student learning so often irrelevant and ineffective; the division of educational time into units like the semester, as Mathieu has shown, gives students an artificial and solipsistic view of the phenomena they are studying; and so forth. 33
But the classroom, as a classroom, can also be a site of genuine discovery and enlightenment, with transformative potential not readily or reliably avail- able anywhere else. Outside of school, after all, people rarely have the chance to gather with unfamiliar peers, in dedicated spaces, at regular intervals, and
220 David Fleming
devote themselves to courses of study meant to facilitate their individual and collective growth.
To illustrate what I mean by these structural possibilities of formal educa- tion, I want to end this essay by looking at an example of educational reform during a period of dramatic cultural crisis, when a group of energetic young teachers at a large public university in the United States, teaching freshman composition, tried to reimagine school in terms of freedom, growth, and change. What is most crucial about this example, I believe, is the teachers' refusal to give up on the classroom even as they sought to imbue their stu- dents' experience with a radically new set of methods and goals.
Reimagining the Classroom
On November 18, 1969, after two months of stormy meetings and impassioned memos, during one of the most turbulent periods in local and national his- tory, the faculty of the English Department at the University of Wisconsin (UW) in Madison voted twenty-seven to twelve to cease offering English 102, the second semester of its required Freshman Composition program. Coupled with a 1968 decision to remedialize the first-semester course (English 101), the move effectively abolished the university's seventy-five-year-old first-year writ- ing program for the next quarter of a century.
The official reasons given by the faculty for this decision were first, that first-year students' writing skills at UW no longer warranted a universally required general composition course; and, second, that whatever writing instruction students still needed was better provided by their major depart- ments. 34 The unofficial reason, however, was that senior faculty in the depart- ment had lost confidence in their own graduate teaching assistants (TAs), believing them to be more interested in politically indoctrinating students and disrupting the university than in teaching writing. This explanation can be heard in taped interviews with English faculty collected over a thirty-year period by the UW-Madison Oral History Project. 35 Former chair Walter Ride- out argued in 1976, for example, that the main reason English 102 was abol- ished in 1969 was that "the TAs were not teaching the course as it was intended to be taught. . . . They felt that it was more important to liberate the students from old fashioned ideas, to argue against the war than to proceed with . . . writing as such. "36
Minutes of departmental meetings at the time confirm this explanation. At a meeting two weeks before the vote to eliminate English 102, Freshman English director William Lenehan argued that TA misconduct was resulting in too much variation in the course, "ultimately destroying" its value. 37 He gave two examples of deviation from the approved syllabus, "one of which involved a TA's shuffling cards for grades, another involving a TA's discussing the 'pigs' for three solid lectures, causing some of the students to become very
A Place for School in Rhetoric's Public Turn 221
upset. " Lenehan noted, however, that "usually the deviation was the result of sheer incompetence, the TAs not knowing how to teach composition. "38
In 1999 this TA-centered explanation for the abolition of Freshman En- glish at UW received scholarly imprimatur when the fourth volume of the History of the University of Wisconsin was published. According to its authors, the "unstated" reason for the decision to drop English 102 in 1969 was that "senior members of the department believed they had lost control of the Freshman English course to . . . radicalized . . . TAs staffing [its] numerous sec- tions. Most of the tenured . . . faculty objected to unauthorized grading experi- ments and indications that . . . freshmen were getting more exposure to Karl Marx and Che Guevara than to the writers and poets . . . specified in the departmentally approved reading lists. "39 Clearly, it was a time of stark ideo- logical conflict and dramatic cultural confrontation. And, in fact, what seemed to have most impressed, and disturbed, many of the TAs at UW, what moti- vated them to work so hard toward change, was the gulf they perceived be- tween the world outside of school--a world of injustice, repression, and war, on the one hand; youthful freedom, experimentation, and protest, on the other--and the staid nature of the course they were assigned to teach, con- cerned as it was with formalisms and trivialities and completely disconnected from the world described above.
Now, one place where direct engagement by these teachers in life outside their classrooms can be found was in their persistent call for more "relevant" classroom materials, reading and writing assignments pertinent to the press- ing issues of the day. Though the faculty at the time often read "relevance" as code for lack of standards and loss of control, the TAs believed that "the demand for relevance [was] a mortal challenge to [the] imagination . . . to ensure that knowledge [was] related to human fulfillment rather than human destruction," as an "Anonymous" English TA put it in the fall 1969 issue of Critical Teaching, a journal written, edited, and published by UW TAs in the late 1960s. 40
Former UW TA Ira Shor was especially intent at the time on transforming the course into a space where social and political problems in the real world could bear directly on students' thinking and writing in school. "We were tossing [the syllabus] aside," Shor commented in an interview. "For example, I was trying to figure out a way to raise the issue of social inequality and to pose it as a thinking problem. So I remember bringing in the Gross National Product of America at that time. And then I asked students to divide it by the number of Americans living in the country and come out with a per capita figure. So . . . then I said, okay, now here's the median family income in Amer- ica, which I got from some census source, and I put it on the board. It was very low, . . . and so I asked them to write, or something like that, to give a context to inequality and base it in data. "41 There is other evidence of TAs at
222 David Fleming
the time incorporating problems from the outside world in their Freshman English classrooms. 42
But if devising relevant reading and writing assignments was key for these TAs, they also tried to reform Freshman English by taking seriously its inter- nal logic: this low-enrollment, content-less, activity-oriented course, required of all students at the university, taken at the beginning of their college careers, taught by teachers who were themselves still students, all embarking together on a journey of individual and social discovery through reading, writing, thinking, and talking.
Research by Rasha Diab, Mira Shimabukuro, and myself suggests that the English TAs at UW in 1968 and 1969 engaged especially vigorously in three kinds of pedagogical experimentation, all of which seemed designed to take advantage of freshman composition's inherent structure. 43 First, they tried to develop what we might call a teacherless writing class, in which authority was dramatically de-centered and the students' responsibility for their own read- ing, writing, and thinking--their own lives--radically heightened. One source of inspiration for such a teacherless class in the late 1960s was an article that appeared in the winter 1968 issue of Daedalus by Princeton history professor Martin Duberman, who in the fall of 1966 tried to empty one of his under- graduate seminars of all authoritarianism. 44 In the course, Duberman re- quired no readings, assigned no papers, held no exams, and gave no grades. Instead, he provided students with a list of topics and books and then turned the class over to them, letting them determine together what they would study, as well as how, when, where, and why. In its egalitarianism and stress on self-directed learning--"The young have their own interests and timetables," Duberman wrote--the essay is a classic story of 1960s pedagogical experimen- tation. 45
It clearly influenced UW Freshman English TA Bob Muehlenkamp, whose account of a student-run writing course, titled "Growing Free," appeared in the first (1968) issue of Critical Teaching. Muehlenkamp wrote that he had no problem with the official goal of English 102, "to develop skill in writing logi- cal and convincing essays," but he did have a problem with its methods: the focus on style, the analysis of models, the classification of essays by mode-- in short, the tyranny of form. "The development of 'effective' writing involves having something which you want to say and seeing the necessity of saying it in certain ways. "46 To accomplish this, Muehlenkamp turned the course over to the students themselves, asking them what they wanted from Freshman English. They then began to look for other subject matter and methods, fol- lowing the technique of "evolving ideas and alternatives" for all course matters and developing an attitude of maximum flexibility with regard to composi- tion itself. 47
This idea of "maximum flexibility" brings us to the second "structural" feature of the TAs' pedagogical experiments. They were interested not just in
A Place for School in Rhetoric's Public Turn 223
a democratic writing class but an emergent one as well, imagining a curriculum driven not by a prior and externally imposed syllabus but by the constantly evolving desires of its actual participants, reflecting day to day on the mean- ings they wanted to explore and construct, in conversation with one another and in dialogue with the surrounding world.
"Becoming a Radical Teacher," written by an anonymous English TA for the second (1969) issue of Critical Teaching, tells the story of a syllabus-less writing course at UW. The piece opens with a critique of the English 102 cur- riculum, including its very reliance on a syllabus, "this giving and receiving of lectures and grades, requiring attendance three times a week at a given hour, etc. " "We decided . . . that a syllabus and the lecture system taught submis- sion to authority, acceptance of an authority figure's decisions about topic, method, questions, and answers; that grades taught competitiveness, placed top value on measurable products, and atomized people from each other; and that the three lectures a week taught machine production mentality and sub- mission to bureaucracy. "48
But the best example of an "emergent" curriculum at UW in the late 1960s comes from English 101, the old first-semester course that was remedialized in spring 1968. In designing the new course, TAs asked that classrooms be made available five days a week at the appointed time so that they could have more flexibility in scheduling: meeting with their students daily at the begin- ning of the semester, for example, and less often later. The rooms could also be made available for individualized instruction and small group meetings. As for a course syllabus, the group wrote that "no common calendar is possi- ble since instruction must depend completely upon the needs of the students, which will vary widely. "49 Similarly, no specific texts were prescribed, so that TAs could be free to experiment in this area.
Hand in hand with their advocacy of decentered, emergent curricula was an insistence among English TAs at UW in the late 1960s that Freshman En- glish move away from formal evaluation of student writing by teachers and toward informal evaluation by the students themselves, who would thus--it was hoped--be internally motivated to write, and improve their writing, rather than be driven to do so by external compulsion and fear. Now, "de-grading" was a practical matter at this time: early in the Vietnam War, male students were at greater risk to be drafted if they had low or failing grades. In fact, the very birth of the Teaching Assistants' Association at UW, one of the first grad- uate student employee unions in the country, was connected to TAs' refusal there to participate in an educational system in which the evaluation of class- room performance was used in such a deadly manner. The tie between grades and the draft was eventually weakened, but opposition to traditional evalua- tion only increased during this period.
English TA Inez Martinez wrote in "The Degrading System," a short essay in the first (1968) issue of Critical Teach- ing, that grades stood in the way of a society of self-realized persons--they
224 David Fleming
reinforced a value scheme that equated acceptability of self with performing better than others. 50
What is clear from all this is the continuing attraction, in the late 1960s, of a decidedly modern belief in the possibilities of personal growth. As Mari- anne DeKoven has recently shown, even the most radical political and cul- tural movements of the 1960s were dependent on a narrative of the unified self, capable of resisting the alienations of modern society and progressing toward freedom. 51 This explains the rather remarkable faith in self-discovery, self-exploration, and self-generating inquiry that animates these pedagogical experiments, experiments less notable for what students read, wrote, and talked about than how they went about such activities. And it explains as well, I would argue, the rather remarkable faith that these teachers had in the class- room itself.
Freshman composition was especially amenable to these experiments be- cause of three features that it still possesses in North American higher educa- tion: universality, generality, and liminality. By "universality," I mean the way the course is typically designed to meets the needs of all students on campus, to be an experience common to all, one that brings together a diversity of stu- dents. And at UW in the late 1960s, it was a course whose universal require- ment, its teachers thought, could work against the fragmentation of the U. S. economy, the segregation of its social and physical landscape, the privatism of its society, and the vocationalism of its universities.
By "generality," I mean the way freshman composition is almost by design a course without "content" in the academic sense of that word, a course that practices students in processes, habits, and dispositions rather than transmit- ting substantive knowledge to them. It is a course, that is, based on activity-- and the trick has been to imagine an activity-based course that is not therefore empty, a course without content that is not therefore about nothing. In fact, the content-less nature of freshman composition, rightly understood, can be seen as its original and abiding genius. As Richard Ohmann once put it, the thinness of the first-year writing class is what makes it "socially useful. "52
Finally, by "liminality," I mean the way freshman composition seems to be always and everywhere on the border or threshold--a course suspended between other, better-known and better-understood educational states. In fact, it is hard to imagine a more "liminal" course in higher education: its students positioned between high school and the major, its instructors (at least when the course is staffed by graduate TAs) positioned between their own student- hood and their professional responsibility as teachers, the course itself cast midway between a tutorial and a seminar, oriented toward neither skill nor content but rather experience, passage, change.
My point in all this is not that freshman composition is the only educa- tional space harboring those possibilities, or that the TAs at UW in the late 1960s actually achieved in their classrooms the transformative potential they
A Place for School in Rhetoric's Public Turn 225
imagined there. But I do think the example highlights how the classroom can be redeemed even when school itself deserves criticism. The episode should remind us, in other words, that a public turn in rhetoric need not always involve denigration of school, that there are ways to think about formal edu- cation that are compatible with our goals for a just society and genuine learn- ing of discourse practices.
Finally, the episode suggests to me how rhetoricians might usefully engage with social movements by indirection, designing classrooms that are sensitive to the world outside, cognizant of and oriented to it, but also, in a sense, pro- tected from it. What was most powerful, and most dangerous, about Fresh- man English in the hands of radical TAs at UW in the late 1960s, after all, was not that their students were reading Karl Marx and Che Guevara, which in fact we never found any evidence of, or that those students were throwing down their textbooks and marching outside to live truly free and democratic lives, but that they were given the space, time, and encouragement to find their own voices.
Conclusion
Now, admittedly, the pictures of "school" and "society" I have presented in this essay have been painted with rather broad strokes. The latter has been portrayed as practical but unforgiving; the former, as inauthentic but thoughtful. Part of this has been purposeful: to make sure that those of us excited about the public turn guard against academic self-hatred. But I acknowledge that the exaggeration is potentially problematic. My hope, after all, is that we avoid all forms of binary thinking about school and society, regardless of which term we privilege. In making the public turn that this col- lection celebrates, in other words, I propose that we adopt a more Janus-faced attitude to school and society, focused on what each does best educationally.
But I have dwelled here mostly on problems associated with the denigra- tion of school. And I have tried to suggest that in our embarrassment about the bad things that school sometimes does, we should not blind ourselves to the good things that also happen there. Some types of traditional classroom activ- ity can serve the progressive purposes many of us have for rhetorical education.
What I hope to have done, then, is remind us that school need not be, in Jane Tompkins's words, the enemy of what we want to learn and teach. 53 In turning our gaze outward, in other words, we should not lose sight of what, as teachers, we do well and can do better. Because as much as we would like our classrooms to be more like our best publics, there are publics out there that we should wish were more like our best classrooms.
Notes
1. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric, 1-5.
2. Woods, "Teaching"; Woods, "Among Men," 18.
226 David Fleming
3. Woods, "Among Men," 18.
4. Ibid.
5. Emig, Composing Processes, 99. 6. Ibid. , 70.
7. Ibid. , 98.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid. , 97, 93.
10. Ibid. , 93.
11. Wells, "Rogue Cops," 328.
12. Petraglia, "Spinning Like a Kite. " 13. Barthes, "Old Rhetoric," 14.
14. Ibid. , 17.
15. See Anyon, "Social Class"; Bloom, "Freshman Composition"; Heath, Ways with Words.
16. Smit, End of Composition. 17. MacIntyre, After Virtue.
18. Scho? n, Reflective Practitioner. 19. Petrovic, "Praxis," 435.
20. Galston, "Political Knowledge. " 21. Coogan, "Service Learning. "
22. Ibid. , 669-70.
23. Ibid. , 687.
24. Perhaps the best-known recent attempt to integrate traditional and praxis-ori-
ented pedagogies in literacy education is the 1996 proposal of the New London Group, which argues for a pedagogy comprised of four parts: situated practice, overt instruc- tion, critical framing, and transformed practice. See Cazden et al. , "Pedagogy of Multi- literacies. "
25. Anderson, Reder, and Simon, "Situated Learning. "
26. Ibid. , 8.
27. See Freedman, "Show and Tell? "
28. Hayes et al. , Reading Empirical Research, 355. See also Wallace and Hayes, "Redefin-
ing Revision. "
29. Anderson, Reder, and Simon, "Situated Learning," 8. 30. Herzberg, "Community Service. "
31. Geisler, Academic Literacy.
32. Delpit, "Silenced Dialogue. "
33. Mathieu, Tactics of Hope.
34. William T. Lenehan, Memo to English Department Teaching Assistants, Novem-
ber 19, 1969. Archived in the files of the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madi- son) English Department, Helen C. White Hall. Copies of this and other primary texts cited here are in the author's possession.
35. UW-Madison Oral History Project at http://archives. library. wisc. edu/oral-history/ overview. html.
36. Walter Rideout, interview by Laura Smail (Madison: Oral History Program of the UW-Madison Archives [#88, First Interview], 1976); see http://archives. library. wisc. edu/ oral-history/guide/1-100/81-90. html#rideout.
37. UW-Madison English Department, Minutes of the Departmental Committee, No- vember 4, 1969, 1.
38. Ibid. , 2.
A Place for School in Rhetoric's Public Turn 227
39. Cronon and Jenkins, University of Wisconsin, 290. 40. Anonymous, "Becoming a Radical Teacher," 51ff.
41. Ira Shor, interview by Mira Shimabukuro, July 13, 2005, transcript in author's pos- session.
42. Fleming, "On the Hinge of History. " 43. Ibid.
44. Duberman, "Experiment in Education. " 45. Ibid. , 321.
46. Muehlenkamp, "Growing Free," 44.
47. Ibid.
48. Anonymous, "Becoming a Radical Teacher. "
49. Thomas, Ednah, with Jeanie Peterson, John Pirri, Mary Richards, Michael Stroud,
and Sharon Wilson, Report on English 101 (Madison: University of Wisconsin English Department, February 5, 1969).
50. Martinez, "Degrading System. " 51. DeKoven, Utopia Limited.
52. Ohmann, English in America, 160. 53. Tompkins, Life in School.
Works Cited
Anderson, John R. , Lynne M. Reder, and Herbert A. Simon. "Situated Learning and Edu- cation. " Educational Researcher 25, no. 4 (1996): 5-11.
Anonymous [Sea Unido]. "Becoming a Radical Teacher. " Critical Teaching 2 (1969): 51ff. Anyon, Jean. "Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work. " Journal of Education
162 (1980): 67-92.
Barthes, Roland. "The Old Rhetoric: An Aide-Me? moire. " In The Semiotic Challenge. Trans-
lated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1988.
Bloom, Lynn Z. "Freshman Composition as a Middle Class Enterprise. " College English
58 (1996): 654-75.
Cazden, Courtney, Bill Cope, Norman Fairclough, James Gee, Mary Kalantzis, Gunther
Kress, Allan Luke, Carmen Luke, Sarah Michaels, and Martin Nakata (The New Lon- don Group). "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures. " Harvard Edu- cational Review 66 (1996): 60-93.
Coogan, David. "Service Learning and Social Change: The Case for Materialist Rhet- oric. " College Composition and Communication 57 (2006): 667-93.
Cronon, E. David, and John W. Jenkins. The University of Wisconsin: A History. Vol. 4, 1945-1971: Renewal to Revolution. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999.