Short Paper #1, A Paradox in the Paradigm: The Right Writing Teacher

Imagine you’ve recently graduated from medical school and finished your residency; now you have been preparing to start a new job. You arrive to your first day of work and are promptly thrown in a room and told to perform open heart surgery on a patient, but your specialty was in dermatology. I think that this is a very apt metaphor to what has been happening to English teachers over the past several decades. They earn their degrees and have studied literature, language, grammar and the like for countless hours. They arrive ready and eager to teach their first classes and are told that they must teach a First Year Composition class.

Douglas Downs and Elizabeth Wardle discuss this problem in Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning “First Year Composition” as “Introduction to Writing Studies”. Downs and Wardle discuss how despite “more than twenty years of research” (552) and the consensus within the field of writing studies that there is a large “public misconception of writing and our discipline” (553), there has been little real effort to bring any real change to the way First Year Composition classes are taught. I do not think that Downs and Wardle are being too harsh when they say that the field is actually “complicit in reinforcing outsiders’ views of writing studies as a trivial, skill-teaching nondiscipline” by “supporting the misconceptions that writing is not a real subject, that writing courses do not require expert instructors, and that rhetoric and composition are not genuine research areas or legitimate intellectual pursuits” (553). As long as first year composition classes are being assigned to teachers who were never trained to teach writing, and treated as merely a skill building class to get the students through their other college writing, the field will never be able to really advance or break students away from the same five paragraph, each starting with a topic sentence mold. I find it a very logical question to ask, if so many other fields of study have introduction classes, why is there not simply an Introduction to Writing class? When I write a report on a book read for my history class it is in a very different style then when I write one for one of my English classes. Academic writing is so varied from course to course that it is ridiculous to expect teachers solely trained in the mechanics of English to be able to teach a broad enough course to cover all these different genres of writing within two semesters. When you create a class of mixed majors and have it taught “mostly by adjuncts and graduate students” (Downs and Wardle 557) attempting to teach academic writing seems a nonplus, however “teaching realistic and useful conceptions of writing”, one that understands “features of good writing vary from one situation to another” (qtd Downs and Wardle 558) makes much more sense. The freshman composition teacher I had was also still working on finishing her ph D, and that class did little to make me feel as though I had furthered myself as a writer or gained any real knowledge about writing. Downs and Wardle point out these classes must then be taught by qualified instructors, going directly against “the typical assumption that first-year writing can be about anything, that somehow the content is irrelevant to an instructor’s ability to respond to the writing” (559).

The problem of writing classes being taught by unqualified instructors is far from a new problem. Janice Lauer discusses the issue as one of the fundamental problems within English studies in her essay “Composition Studies: Dappled Discipline”. Lauer discusses the “pioneer efforts in the early sixties” of teachers who “experienced a powerful sense of dissonance between their responsibility for teaching writing and the inadequacy of their understanding and training for doing so” (21). It is her claim that Composition Studies came to being as a recognized field by the efforts of these frustrated teachers. I wonder why it is then that we continue to place unqualified teachers in charge of writing after having struggled against this very problem to help Composition become a recognized and respected discipline.

Downs and Wardle seem to be echoing the concerns discussed by so many of their counterparts in the sixties, such as Peter Elbow or Donald Murray. In his essay, “Finding Your Own Voice: Teaching Composition in an Age of Dissent”, Donald Murray discusses student and teacher responsibilities in the writing classroom. Though his paper is aimed more at the complete restructuring of the writing classroom is does highlight how many of the issues are by the way these classes are being taught. Murray writes that the teacher “gives an assignment; he lists sources; he dictates the form; and, by irresponsibly conscientious correcting, he actually revises his students’ papers” (118). It is my belief that teachers taught, and still teach, this way not simply because it has been the traditionally accepted pedagogical approach but because they are not skilled enough as writers themselves to approach it in any other way. They are teaching what they know, grammar, structure, syntax, form – all of which does not really boil down to teaching writing.
Again the question is how does this continue to happen, why do Universities not hire qualified writing teachers to fill these positions? Maxine Cousins Hairston offers some explanation in her article “The Winds of Change: Thomas Kuhn and the Revolution in the Teaching of Writing”. Hairston discusses what she refers to the “paradigm that has been the basis of composition teaching for several decades” (440). Hairston notes that “the overwhelming majority of college writing teachers in the United States are not professional writing teachers”, they are those “trained as literary critics first and as teachers of literature second, yet out of necessity most of them are doing half or more of their teaching in composition”. What is the pressing necessity? According to Hairston many of the administrators of English departments “may believe that they have so many writing classes to staff that they could not possibly hire well-qualified professionals to teach them… [and that]…most departmental chairpersons don’t believe that an English instructor needs special qualifications to teach writing.” (442). She even illustrates this with a perfect example from one of her colleagues, that “[their English] department wouldn’t think of letting her teach Chaucer courses because she is not qualified; yet the chairman is delighted for her to teach advanced composition, for which she is far more unqualified. The assumption is that anyone with a Ph. D. in English is an expert writing teacher” (Hairston 442). Any student who has given serious attention to writing or the writing process knows that this assumption is a dangerous one that has been ongoing for far too many decades. I find it more chilling that Hairston’s essay, while full of hope and examples of a major change in the accepted paradigm of writing already in motion, was written in 1982 and, at least from my own experience, there has been little change in administrators’ way of thinking about who can teach composition classes.

I do not believe the fault of the teachers, in fact not one of the articles I have read place blame on the individual teachers, but more of on the system as a whole. What I have yet to understand is that same reoccurring question, why does this continue to happen when so many have objected to it and recognized it as a problem for so many decades. All those individuals make up an integral part of the system, and must all come together to force the “paradigm shift” (439) Hairston has been awaiting for almost three decades. I am reminded of Ani Difranco lyrics, from her song Paradigm, that I must “teach myself it's never really one or the other there's a paradox in every paradigm”. The problem of unqualified teachers teaching composition is just one of several problems that have continued to plague this every shifting field. Until a greater majority of those within the field can come to some consensus of what the motives of composition are and how they should best be taught within the field it is unrealistic to expect any administration to accept facts and hire only qualified writing professionals to teach writing.

Works Cited
Downs, Douglas, and Elizabeth Wardle. Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions:
(Re)Envisioning “First-Year Composition” as “Introduction to Writing Studies.” College Composition and Communication. 58 (2007): 552-584.
Hairston, Maxine Cousins. “The Winds of Change: Thomas Kuhn and the Revolution in the
Teaching of Writing.” Norton. 439-450.
Lauer, Janice M. “Composition Studies: Dappled Discipline.” Rhetoric Review. 3.1 (1984): 20-
29. Taylor & Francis, Ltd. JSTOR. Texas Wesleyan U, West Lib. 28 Jan. 2010
< http://www.jstor.org/stable/465725 >
Murray, Donald. “Finding Your Own Voice: Teaching Composition in the Age of Dissent.”
College Composition and Communication. 20.2 (1969): 118-123. National Council
Of Teachers of English. JSTOR. Texas Wesleyan U, West Lib. 12 Feb 2010
< http://www.jstor.org/stable/354178 >