Claude Hurlbert is a professor of composition theory and practice at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. His books include Letters for the Living: Teaching Writing in a Violent Age (coauthored with Michael Blitz); Composition and Resistance (coedited with Michael Blitz) and Beyond English, Inc.: Curricular Reform for a Global Economy (coedited with David Downing and Paula Mathieu).

NATIONAL HEALING

Race, State, and the Teaching of CompositionBy CLAUDE HURLBERT

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2012 University Press of Colorado
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-835-0

Contents

Acknowledgments………………………………………………….xiNew Orleans: A Prayer…………………………………………….xiiiLearning New Ways #1……………………………………………..3Making a Past a Past and a Life a Life……………………………..61975……………………………………………………………12The Most Important Class………………………………………….161980……………………………………………………………20Speaking of Love…………………………………………………24″It Had Better Be Worth It”……………………………………….27The Use and Abuse of History………………………………………29A New Beginning………………………………………………….33The Babel Effect…………………………………………………36A Question of Service…………………………………………….43More Than One……………………………………………………48International Composition #1………………………………………51No New Colonialism, Then………………………………………….54Transcending Transnationalism?…………………………………….56International Composition #2………………………………………71And to Go Beyond the Words………………………………………..74The Styles………………………………………………………80Rhetorical Boundaries and Agency…………………………………..84Part of the Story………………………………………………..86Rhetorical Traditions: A Statement about Methodology…………………93For Instance, a Mindful Rhetoric…………………………………..98Voices from the Dark; Voices from the Light…………………………101Museum Pieces……………………………………………………107Oh, Multicultural America…………………………………………110A Recent History, a Decent Future………………………………….113What Will the Yard Sales Say?……………………………………..116Why Ezra?……………………………………………………….119Nationalism……………………………………………………..129Is It Patriotism or Is It Nationalism?……………………………..133Critical Literacy………………………………………………..136A Decent Nation………………………………………………….143A Nation’s Cultural Centrism………………………………………147When You Do the Research………………………………………….155The Global Nothing……………………………………………….164And So?…………………………………………………………172In Other Words, It Carries Over……………………………………178Exhibit A……………………………………………………….181What Are You Burning to Tell the World?…………………………….182The Class Workshop……………………………………………….185Books…………………………………………………………..188Why a Book?……………………………………………………..193Forewords……………………………………………………….196Ubuntu: Rhetorical Principles at Work………………………………198Mindful Teaching…………………………………………………202When We Compose………………………………………………….206National Recalcitrance……………………………………………208There Is No Rhetoric, but There Is Hope…………………………….211The International Sustainable Literacy Project………………………215Mistakes and Beyond………………………………………………221International Composition #3………………………………………223On the Road with International Composition………………………….226World Englishes; World Compositions………………………………..230Securing Composition; Saving the Planet…………………………….234Learning New Ways #2……………………………………………..238Coda……………………………………………………………239References………………………………………………………255Index…………………………………………………………..277

Chapter One

PART ONE

Cage The Provincial Composition

LEARNING NEW WAYS #1

It’s an early New Orleans Sunday morning. I sit at my usual table in a Marigny coffee shop as a circle of neighbors forms at a table near the front window. They laugh as they talk over each other. One says, “He lives in a different world—that’s what I told him.”

We are all living in different worlds, and we are all here together. As Jelly Roll Morton once said, “We had all nations in New Orleans.” Despite Jelly Roll’s propensity for exaggeration, New Orleans had, and still has, people from around the world. And in New Orleans, the people have blended together, kept apart, and through it all—the floods and homicides, the singing and parades—created cultural expressions unique and vital enough to fire a land’s imagination for alternatives.

Those of us in this coffee shop, day after day, are connected through conversations about politics, observations about life, and laughter. But, it is New Orleans. An intoxicated man staggers past the window this morning. I have not lived his life, nor the life of the man, “Mr. Okra,” selling vegetables from his black pickup truck, covered with the names of fruits and vegetables painted in a rainbow of colors, music blaring from speakers and filling the street, even at this early hour, with funk or his voice, “We got grapes! We got bananas! We got broccoli!” And I have not lived the lives of these other coffee drinkers, nor, despite our connection, the life of the homeless man I met late one night in Jackson Square. He had been a student in the tiny high school where I had once taught in the central tier of New York State. Although I had left high school teaching before he made it to the ninth grade, where I would certainly have had him in class, I knew his grandparents who had raised him. In that rural school district, a teacher knew most families. And now he was here, homeless in New Orleans, in moments angry, in moments in tears, and, by his own description, crazy and broken-hearted.

Nor have I lived my college students’ lives back in Pennsylvania.

But I have lived, and I have put together some insights into the meaning and teaching of writing.

Two men sit at the table next to me. They are talking about returning to school, to Delgado Community College here in NOLA, and about their hope. At times, their voices seem tentative, even shaky. But always they speak without pretense in their assessments of themselves, their lives, and their abilities. They talk about their “track records,” their “relapses,” their desires, and their commitments. One of them says, “We are used to this,” as he makes a gesture of shooting up. “Now we have to learn a new way. We have to learn that things take time.”

After a pause, the other one says, “There is a beauty in people who have lived.”

Sitting at my table, I think—is that it? Is it beauty? Is that what living the hard stuff of life inspires in people? Certainly, there is beauty in making the decision to survive, and dignity. And these two men have each other with whom to share this truth; there is a beauty in that friendship, too. So, yes, maybe it is beauty.

The days pass. People come and go.

At another table on another day, a man and a woman plan a city tour about the history of African American experience in New Orleans. The tour will be for high school students. It will encourage them to learn about the meaning of standing up for one’s self and for others. When they take a work break, I ask them about their project and they ask about me.

The students in our college classrooms sometimes write texts about pain and beauty, because they, too, are trying to make a full accounting of having been here in the passing days. And sometimes they write about standing up to wrongs, how to address them, and how to find better ways of living. Our students are trying to learn new ways, even in their every days.

Sitting at my table, I think about my life.

My job as a compositionist is to encourage writers who are engaged in the human project of examining their lives. My goal is to help them use writing to explore the possibility of better lives and ways in a troubled world.

One semester I had a first year writing student come to my office immediately after the first class. She told me that she knew what she was burning to tell the world, in a short book she was going to write for my class. It was about her heroin addiction and how she was battling it. At the same time, she told me that everyone in her high school knew her as an addict. She related how much she had looked forward to going away to college so that she could be around people who did not know her past. She was looking forward to a new start. We discussed the legitimacy of her desire to tell her story, and also the legitimacy of wanting this new beginning for herself. After much talk, she decided to write about the positive role model her mother had always been for her, even though she had not always followed it. Through the several conferences we had during the course of the semester, we developed strategies for her to write her book without giving away information about her addiction. In this way, she learned to tell a story that dramatized the letting go of one part of the past in order to embrace the health of another. She learned a new way.

Take a personal choice such as this student’s decision and multiply it to the tens, the hundreds, the thousands, over the course of a thirty-year teaching career. Thousands of students pass through a writing teacher’s classroom. We make a difference—in real lives.

MAKING A PAST A PAST AND A LIFE A LIFE

As compositionists, we have unique contributions to make. We create various schools of composition theory and elaborate profound interpretations of rhetoric. We bring a variety of cultural and ethnic perspectives to our understanding of genre and academic writing. We develop pedagogies that influence teaching in other academic disciplines. My goal is to revisit the history of rhetoric to better understand why we think what we do and do what we do in our classrooms—so that we can make the past the past as we learn new ways.

National Healing is a book about understanding the teaching of writing in the United States. It is an attempt to reorient composition so that it supports, literally, a healthier nation and state, so that the United States might better contribute to the health of the world. And even as I write out my topic, I hear how impossible it all sounds, the outrageous claim upon which my project rests. Perhaps you have heard compositionists say that they write to change the order of things, maybe even to improve the world in some way. Perhaps you have made your own promises, as I have. And perhaps you have been disappointed so many times that you can no longer quite bring yourself to believe such promises. Perhaps you are not sure you will ever believe again. If so, I understand. I have those feelings. I have read and listened. I have studied and written. And I have been discouraged. But, certainly, we also know that we cannot give up. Deep inside we know that not choosing to direct our teaching and writing to the highest challenges of our day will continue to yield its own results. No, we must begin, even if it means that we begin again, and again.

In National Healing, I am presenting a vision for an international composition studies, a discipline that investigates composing from various cultural perspectives from around the globe in an attempt to better serve our students—and the world. It is a vision that shifting demographics demands. It is a vision for national healing through international understanding—not to mention cooperation. It is an organic vision in which teachers learn to be conscious of the degree to which local, student-centered instruction and writing is connected to larger, world contexts. To this end, in National Healing, I demonstrate how I enact an internationalist perspective in my composition classes, and I explain how internationalism will impact graduate education in composition in the coming years.

I am aware and understand the now commonplace debate over terms in our discipline. Some say that “composition” refers to a course and that the discipline’s concerns have grown beyond it, especially in an age where writing programs are splitting off from English departments. The claim is that “writing studies” is a more accurately inclusive term. But I have chosen to stick with the term “composition” in National Healing for strategic reasons. “Composition” is still the designation for my discipline, for the major annual conference in my field, and for many key journals. I also adhere to the term “composition” to differentiate international composition studies from didactic writing studies in Europe. While current European studies of writing in the disciplines have much to offer us in composition, they are still, generally speaking, more objectivist and focused on argumentative writing as academic discourse than I would propose. (I wish to add, though, that because I value international dialogue, I would support changing terms as soon as it seems theoretically, historically and materially sound to do so.)

To begin to reach an internationalist perspective, we compositionists must study the nationalist ideology that keeps us tied within provincial concerns and discourses. To accomplish this, we must begin with racism. If we compositionists are to reach the social possibilities that multiculturalism once represented—or, better, reach beyond them—we will need to be honest about the vestiges of racism with which we continue to live and teach. If we are to find the healing we need in order to contribute to the end, finally, of racism, we will need to understand how the personal, political, and pedagogical realms of our lives are inextricably linked. As David Schaasfma and Ruth Vinz (2011, 1) write, “Narratives often reveal what has remained unsaid, what has been unspeakable.” It’s time to say it—it’s past time. And sometimes finding the words and the truth is best done through writing that dramatizes as well as explicates, writing that moves as well as enlightens. Indeed, in composition, theoretical discussions of politics enacted without something approaching artistry can be off-putting, cold, and didactic. The doctrinaire is, in the final analysis, too-easily dismissed; therefore, National Healing is a book of pedagogy, poetry, theory, and stories. I employ stories, for instance, because they are epistemic. Stories tell us who we are and who we want to be. They show us what we think and how we do things, and they point to new ways for thinking and doing them. They show us what we know and tell us what we still want to know; sometimes, even what we might wish we did not know—the unspeakable which circles, it sometimes seems, every story. Stories dramatize and illustrate our commitments. They help us see and feel the connections between the local and global scales of human experience. Stories contain history and are contained by history. They reflect and stimulate material reality. As Gian Pagnucci (2004, 1) eloquently writes, some people know—especially healthy people who do not try to project stories onto others—that the lessons they learn from writing, reading, and hearing stories are so necessary and profound that they commit themselves to “choosing stories as a way of life.”

I understand that many academics dismiss stories as childish or ancillary or supplemental, as something less than argumentative discourse. I suppose this has something to do with the fact that personal narrative is associated with the mistaken discrediting of expressivism or an allegiance to outmoded hierarchies of discourse. But I suspect that when academics dismiss narrative, it is also often an unconscious decision based in discursive taste (and a strange taste it is when English professors have novels and non-fiction in their offices, homes, and backpacks and on their bedside tables). I wonder sometimes if there isn’t more to our commitment to argumentation and denigration of narrative. I understand that some professors feel that they are doing their best for students when they teach argumentation because they see it as serious academic writing. But what of the many, many academics for whom narrative is a necessary genre of academic writing? Perhaps there is another deeper and darker reason for the academic commitment to argumentation. Truth be told, I wonder if many academics do not value narrative because they associate it not only with lesser discourses, but also with lesser cultures: those “ethnic” cultures from elsewhere. Never mind that story telling is the central epistemological mode of so many successful cultures around the world. Never mind that the architecture of a story is as beautiful and graceful as the architecture of any argument. Never mind that the beauty of story takes us beyond ourselves by taking us to the center of ourselves.

The sanctioning of a genre such as argumentative writing is a cultural matter; so is the demotion of a genre. I believe that the dismissing of narrative is just another form of disguised racism, and we need to speak out and get beyond it. The fact is that we need theory to understand composing and writing pedagogy. But the fact is also that we need stories because they achieve what theory cannot. Stories and poetry open up reality in dramatic ways. Indeed, so many scholars and writers have made eloquent claims for the importance and meaning of narrative that I cannot possibly rehearse them all here. As scholars Frankie Condon (2012) and Victor Villaneuva (1993)—to name only two of the numerous compositionists who work in the intersection of story and theory— have demonstrated, narrative helps us understand ourselves and our work and illuminates how we are bound to each other. Telling the stories of who we are sheds light on who we are, and this, in turn, helps us to critique who we are.

In National Healing, I include stories and poems, along with history and theory. I do so because stories and poems are as necessary to knowing and understanding, as is argumentative prose. We need every story and every poem as we search for the best in all of us. Indeed, opening composition to the aesthetic realm of experience could be one of the most direct routes to the development of our international discipline. Every culture demonstrates the poetic, whether in verse, song, chant, prayer, dance, or image. These genres open possibilities for recognizing the political realm in our lives. In fact, we should work harder to remember that the poetic and political realms are inseparable. As Ray Misson and Wendy Morgan (2006) remind us in Critical Literacy and the Aesthetic, aesthetic needs are also critical needs, just as personal concerns are also political concerns. James Berlin knew this. I remember one night in Cincinnati and the look in his eyes when I told him that I thought his greatest contribution to the profession was his work to reunite rhetoric and poetics. Perhaps if he had lived to continue his work, Berlin might have furthered the relationship for us. Still, he leads the way. In “Rhetoric, Poetic, and Culture,” he explains how economics has lead to a deepening of the chasm between rhetoric and poetics in English departments, how “changes in economic and social structures during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries led to a new conception of the nature of poetic, a conception that defines the aesthetic experience in class terms and isolates it from other spheres of human activity” (1991, 24). We teach lower class writers, in other words, not to compose works of art, but to produce items for consumption; the value of which are measured in capital or, as Berlin asserts, scientific terms. The painful result of teaching in this instrumentalist perspective is the further separation of the imagination from the lives of the people in our classrooms. In civic terms, failing to recognize the imagination in student writing suppresses agency in our students’ lifelong imagining of political and cultural alternatives. Berlin was right. We need to reunite rhetoric and poetics.

Lifelong imaginings. Sometimes they begin almost inexplicably in some distant time or place. Sometimes they begin with other people. Sometimes they speak of beginnings themselves, connections that do not make immediate sense. Sometimes they begin in a moment of past pain or love that speaks of present need.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from NATIONAL HEALINGby CLAUDE HURLBERT Copyright © 2012 by University Press of Colorado. Excerpted by permission of UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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