This month’s post, the second in Teacher-Scholar-Activist and Spark’s 12-part series “A Year of Activism: Perspectives on the 2020 U.S. Elections,” comes from James Chase Sanchez (Middlebury College). In his post, James addresses the need for anti-racist strategies to come to the fore in the upcoming presidential election.

In the coming months, this series will feature critical perspectives on the elections, issues related to them, and thoughts about how scholar-activists (teachers and students) can intervene. We encourage readers to share these posts and to discuss the ideas with people in your communities, classrooms, and workplaces.

Liz Lane & Don Unger, Managing Editors—Spark

Darin Jensen, Editor—Teacher, Scholar, Activist

White Supremacy, Anti-Racism, and the U.S. Presidency

By James Chase Sanchez

“It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true—his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power.” –Ta-Nehisi Coates

White supremacy has always been embedded within the White House.

From the “founding fathers” disregarding people of color as citizens, to the original Birth of a Nation screening at the White House in 1915 (the first film ever broadcast there), to Trump-era politics inciting racial violence, white supremacy—or the feelings and actions that promote white superiority and racial hierarchies—has persisted.

Yet, Trump’s rhetoric and his White House feel different.

Trump’s white supremacy feels more overt, and, of course, more immediate.

Much has been made about the Trump presidency’s explicit white supremacy. Trump has defended white supremacists who held a rally in Charlottesville. He employs well-known white supremacists, such as Stephen Miller and formerly Steve Bannon. He enacts white supremacist policies that separate Brown families on the border and enforces what many call a “white supremacist immigration policy.” Many cultural critics, including Ta-Nehisi Coates and Charles Blow, have referred to Trump as the first openly white supremacist president. The list goes on and on. Even well-known racist organizations, such as the Ku Klux Klan, claim that their organization has been revitalized thanks to Trump and his racist rhetoric. For many people around the country, there is no doubt what Trump represents, and this is why his presidency causes us so much pain.

What can we do? Many of us deal with this inner turmoil on a daily basis: we see a terrible world in front of us, something we want to help change, but we have no idea where to begin. Though there aren’t many concrete solutions, there are answers we should consider. It’s the same thing I tell students at Middlebury College anytime they want to fight for change but are caught in despair: we need to promulgate. In their textbook, The Rhetoric of Agitation and Control, Bowers et al. state, “Promulgation is a strategy where agitators publicly proclaim their goals, and it includes tactics designed to win public support for the agitators’ position….Promulgation is the stage when agitators attempt to recruit the members necessary to mount a successful movement” (23). In a seemingly endless fight against white supremacy, we need to promulgate anti-racism as an answer to our problems.

In the face of overt white supremacy, white supremacy that is endangering our democracy even as it has always shaped our character as a nation, we have to make anti-racism be seen, heard, and felt. So often, it is easy to stay on the sidelines and say nothing. We can let others decide our direction. Different people can command the ship. Yet, that’s what gets us into this problem in the first place. So many of us have been quiet in the face of racism. We have seen our friends, our loved ones, our family do and say racist things, and we have stayed out of it. Maybe we thought this was a way of maintaining peace. Maybe we thought that by saying something we would add more heartache. Maybe…a lot of things. But, that’s not how we should react. We are complicit in keeping racism intact when we are quiet; by saying nothing, we allow racist ideologies to control the people dear to us, to diminish their experience of the world and of others. But preventing the small heartache might prepare us for a greater loss. We need to risk those small heartaches if we want to avoid a greater loss in November.

2020 needs to be the year of proactive anti-racism.

We need to openly identify as anti-racist. This means consistently telling friends, family, and others that we actively practice anti-racism, and it means pushing against normative, racist structures. In his book How to be an Antiracist, Ibrham Kendi writes, “One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist. There is no in-between safe space of ‘not racist.’ The claim of ‘not racist’ neutrality is a mask for racism” (9). We need people to see that anti-racism is a position, and it is resolute; it is something every single being should strive for. And this begins with publicly acknowledging what we stand for and why.

Yet, for many, race and racism are nonstarters. People want to be polite by not mentioning race or even when they hear something racist. Why start a fight with loved ones if it won’t lead anywhere? But by publicly promoting anti-racism in our own communities, we let people know that we will confront them when they say something racist. We won’t let anything slide. And we must handle these conversations with love and care, not anger and spite. Though there is no guarantee that our communities will treat us well when we challenge them, we must illustrate that anti-racism is about caring for each other.

And this helps get conversations about anti-racism—conversations that often only exist in rarified spaces within the academy or online—into the mainstream: into our social spaces and even into our homes.

Most people, I hope and truly believe, want to be anti-racist. Yet contemporary discourse in this country makes many conservatives feel that most of the time they are the ones being called racist. Conservatives often say that the label “racist” is used as an ad hominem attack and often completely shut down or troll when said descriptions are applied to their arguments.

We have to try to move past this.

This begins with some acknowledgment of our own: we all have racist tendencies. I was raised in one of the most notoriously racist towns in Texas and have been writing about white supremacy, racism, and anti-racism for years now, and I still have racist tendencies. Anti-black racism is systemic and institutionalized, and the tendencies we develop from engaging in this system and these institutions don’t disappear overnight. We have to persistently fight them, and acknowledging this process to other people is a step in combating the “not all conservatives” or “not all white people” platitudes that often follow conversations about race and politics. We have to show the ways that racism affects us all.

In considering this strategy, it is also important to frame the upcoming elections as a referendum on racism in the United States. We want to tell society that a vote for the Democratic candidate is a vote for anti-racism, while a vote for Trump is a vote for racism. This isn’t about policies as much as it is about the perception of Trump as a person. I debate people about Trump and racism ad nauseam on social media (because I am a masochist, I guess) and am constantly surprised by how much they gloss over his racism and other acts of bigotry. But if we can change this conversation from being about political affiliation to being about what is right and what is wrong on an everyday basis, then we have a chance.

Of course, this is all great in theory and seems very impractical. I wholeheartedly agree.

But, this is what at stake in this election—a President who will keep openly fanning the flames of racism in the United States versus a Democratic candidate who we might bend against those flames (of course, some are more anti-racist than others, but that’s an entirely different blog). This approach won’t change everything, but it can change some people.

Recently, students in my “Race, Rhetoric, and Protest” course wanted to put together a protest of solidarity in support of increasing staff wages. We talked about how important it was to get the message out to students, faculty, and administration that staff wages were an issue that needed to be addressed, and the protest they organized drew in over 200 students, staff, and faculty and focused intently on why this is a problem and what administration could do to fix the problem.

After the protest, one student asked me, “Will this change anything?”

I honestly didn’t know, but I told him it might. And if it didn’t, we would escalate past the promulgating stage.

While writing this blog post I received good news: Middlebury’s Human Resource Office sent an email telling all Middlebury community members that staff wages had been increased (with some caveats). It may not be the full solution that students and staff want, but it’s a start.

Returning to my argument about Trump’s white supremacy and our need to promulgate anti-racism in this election cycle: we might think it seems pointless; we might not want to organize; we might not want to put in the effort if it leads nowhere. But, we never know how our actions might affect others.

Every protest and act for change looks like a failure until it succeeds. We have to dare to seek change even when the odds are stacked against us.

James Chase Sanchez is an assistant professor of writing and rhetoric at Middlebury College in Vermont. He teaches courses on cultural rhetorics, public memory, and race and protest and has published in College Composition and Communication, Pedagogy, Present Tense, and Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric. He recently produced a documentary, Man on Fire, which won an International Documentary Association Award in 2017 and premiered on PBS as a part of Independent Lens in 2018.

Works Cited

Blow, Charles M. “The Rot you Smell is a Racist Potus.” The New York Times, 28 Jul. 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/28/opinion/trump-racist-baltimore.html.

Bowers, John W. et al. The Rhetoric of Agitation and Control 3^rd ed. Waveland P, 2009.

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “Donald Trump is the First White President.” The Atlantic, Oct. 2017. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/.

Eaton, Joshua. “Exclusive: Steve Bannon Candidly Talks about Race and Gender in Deleted Documentary Scene.” Think Progress, 4 Jun. 2019. https://thinkprogress.org/exclusive-steve-bannon-admits-that-he-doesnt-believe-in-racism-in-deleted-documentary-scene-the-brink-alison-klayman-af804f5c3308/.

Gore, D’Angelo. “More Family Separation Spin.” FactCheck.org, 10 Apr. 2019. https://www.factcheck.org/2019/04/more-family-separation-spin/.

Hayden, Michael Edison. “Stephen Miller’s Affinity for White Nationalism Revealed in Leaked Emails.” SPLC, 12 Nov. 2019. https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2019/11/12/stephen-millers-affinity-white-nationalism-revealed-leaked-emails?gclid=CjwKCAiAuK3vBRBOEiwA1IMhusH_Uip87MxEQv2IJYmeZ8qtxXOWWvjP24MlcTUkKaU3CW9YcJeqNBoC57YQAvD_BwE.

Kendi, Ibram X. How to be an Antiracist. One World, 2019.

@MiddCampus. “The college’s Human Resource Office announced in an all-school email this morning it will grant pay increases to “certain employees who hold benefits-eligible entry-level positions,” many of whom work in Facilities and Dining Services. (1/3).” Twitter, 7 Jan. 2019. https://twitter.com/middcampus/status/1214609394283040769.

Politico Staff. “Full Text: Trump’s Comments on White Supremacists, ‘Alt-Left’ in Charlottesville.” Politico, 15 Aug. 2017. https://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/15/full-text-trump-comments-white-supremacists-alt-left-transcript-241662.

Shugerman, Emily. “KKK Leader Claims Hate Group has Grown at Record Pace since Trump became President.” Independent, 23 Aug. 2017. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/kkk-trump-membership-rise-grown-record-pace-says-leader-chris-barker-a7905811.html.

Srikantiah, Jayashir, and Shirin Sinnar. “White Nationalism as Immigration Policy.” Stanford Law Review, March 2019. https://www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/white-nationalism-as-immigration-policy/.

Today, 18 December 2019, Donald Trump may be impeached. Last night, thousands of people across the United States—from Times Square to Doral, FL and beyond—held rallies supporting a House of Representatives vote for impeachment. These activists took to the streets to demand impeachment and, in some cases, removal from office. Twitter blew up with the hashtags #ImpeachmentMarch and #MerryImpeachmas. “No one is above the law” served as a constant refrain on protestors’ signs and in social-media posts. While this mantra may be emotionally satisfying for some people, it covers over the ways in which the Trump administration has simultaneously violated laws and rewritten them in order to push a white supremacist agenda and to dismantle hundreds of years of progress made by various social movements in the US and abroad. It also covers over the ways in which social movements fought to change laws in order to win rights.

This moment is so heavily weighted down with the machinations of impeachment, and with kleptocratic plutocracy and festering racism—all amid a climate of austerity, anti-intellectualism, and rising authoritarianism that it is hard to imagine moving forward. How do we respond? How do we survive? How do we fight back?

To extend these conversations beyond impeachment, Spark and TSA, are joining together in the months leading up to the 2020 U.S. elections. Each month, from December 2019 to November 2020, we will feature a blog post written by a different scholar. We have asked scholars from various disciplines, institutions, and ranks to discuss their work and contextualize it within the high stakes of our current moment. Blog posts might address:

• How these elections reflect a particular political, cultural, or social context and history
• Where particular politicians who are running in these elections stand and the implications of their proposed policies
• Background on issues in national, state, or local elections that need more attention
• Problems that the 2020 elections will and won’t resolve
• What academics can or are doing beyond voting

Each month, a different scholar will share their perspectives and describe how to pursue activist interventions.

The perspectives serve to inspire discussion and action; some provide hopeful examples of the local, regional, and national activism in which we can engage. Even though this moment is heavy and ugly, and likely to be uglier and more painful, we want these posts to show the possibilities for courageous work that resists and reframes this moment.

The series begins with a post from Holly Hassel, professor at North Dakota State University. She has a long history working toward shared governance during the assault on two-year colleges and higher education perpetuated by the Walker administration in Wisconsin. In her post, Hassel provides a framework for activism within academic institutions. This framework connects social change to struggles over everyday issues. In the coming months, the series will feature other contributors who address this moment from a number of critical perspectives, e.g., how the 2020 US elections relate to white supremacy and how to combat neoliberal politics in higher education through and beyond the election process. We encourage readers to share these posts and to discuss the ideas with people in your communities, classrooms, and workplaces.

Liz Lane & Don Unger, Managing Editors—Spark

Darin Jensen, Editor—Teacher, Scholar, Activist

Service, Activism, and Writing Teachers

By Holly Hassel

“Though our culture celebrates innovation, at times it encourages and rewards compliance. When we look across our schools, it can seem that the people who move forward are the ones whose loyalty to mandate outlasts their bonds to creativity. We talk about entrepreneurial spirit while worshipping at the altar of status quo.”

–Cornelius Minor, We Got This: Equity Access, and the Question to Be Who Our Students Need Us To Be, p. 123

When I was first introduced to the concept of the “teacher-scholar-activist,” coined by Patrick Sullivan, a two-year college teacher scholar I have long admired, it resonated with me. A lifelong two-year college English teacher, Sullivan invites readers of his 2015 article to “theorize activism as a foundational part of the two-year college English teacher’s professional identity and philosophical orientation,” connecting this work to writing program administrators as change agents (McLeod) and to marshal our “vision, knowledge, and ethos to alter institutional philosophies and practices (quoted in Sullivan 331). I want to use this post as an opportunity to reflect on what teacher-scholar-activism means in writing studies. In kicking off this new and exciting blog series, I invite readers to reflect on, and strategize about, what teacher-scholar-activism and Spark’s mission—activist work taking place within writing studies spaces—seeks to accomplish, and how they can find ways into that work in their own places and spaces.

 Here, I offer my thinking on two terms this series is framed around: activism, which is central, and service, which is absent. This is because my own professional identity is deeply connected to the idea and practice of service, and because the term “activism” can be a signifier that has a range of meanings. Reflecting on these two ideas, I hope, will help my writing studies colleagues see avenues into their own teacher-scholar-activism.

 Considering Service

We know that the impact of our work in higher education looks different in the various components of our jobs–teaching is an immediate avenue toward increasing good in the world in that our classrooms can be spaces that are exciting, generative, and where student success and growth are central. Those students go forward–largely to futures that we won’t and can’t track or see the outcomes of, but if we have done our jobs, they have more skills, knowledge, and focus than they did before they arrived at college.  Scholarship, likewise, we can imagine having a long-lasting impact, on unforeseen audiences now and in the future, across time and spaces, which can feel rewarding because publications, in theory, endure beyond us.

 Service, however, is undervalued in the range of academic activities that we undertake (not to mention disproportionately distributed)—and its impact on the shape of our professional environments is similarly underestimated. The work we do in task forces, committees, senates, boards—these are spaces that can fundamentally shape how we experience those spaces. Whether it’s revising the general education program, launching new degrees, undertaking an exploration of curricular change or adjusting policies for degree programs that offer greater flexibility and respond to students’ needs—the work that happens in meetings and committees changes our work lives. It is essential to transforming our classrooms, and to do creating ethical and equitable educational spaces.

 What I wish is that we would and could do two thing—define our service work more broadly, not just committees and shared governance, but also activist efforts that seek to build a sustainable, ethical infrastructure (for example, fair evaluation and assessment practices, support services and curriculum, and professional resources that support our best work); that include developing (and challenging) policies, practices, and structures that are transparent and equitable, and second, to see that work as valuable, to make it visible, and to reward it. Our service—often seen as a kind of drudgery work in academia—is as important as our teaching and research, and it has the capacity to extend values of social justice, equity, and ethical conduct. What would it look like to embrace our service to students, colleagues, and the profession as activist work?

 Advocacting, Acting, and Risk-Taking

In volume 1 of Spark, Berte Reyes writes “Activism requires a means of using a moment to build momentum, then coordinating the resulting movement—both in terms of movement toward the next moment and in developing and sustaining a social justice movement.” What stands out to me about Reyes’ guidance is that effective activism is strategic—it is forward-thinking, and it is purposeful.

 I see a model for this kind of forward-thinking and purposeful service work in the profession—where colleagues on various Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) and other organizational committees are working on developing strategies: for example, the Committee for Change (convened by CCCC chair Asao Inoue and led by Janelle Jennings-Alexander and Bernice Olivas), is working to challenge policies, practices, and unwritten rules within CCCC that reinforce hegemonic and exclusionary practices. The newly approved “CCCC Statement of Professional Guidance for Mentoring Graduate Students” and the Writing Program Administrators-Graduate Organization (WPA-GO) led “Report on Graduate Student Instructor Labor Conditions in Writing Programs” are examples of efforts emerging from professional service seek to change problematic and inequitable cultures in the field. I saw this service activism as a member of the WPA-List Reimagining Working Group, led by Iris Ruiz (UC Merced), in which I participated in difficult conversations and time-intensive reading and writing tasks. I had to practice listening and learned from group members about what changes were possible, what change would make a difference to them, as well as the reservations, disappointments, and cynicism about the list as a professional space. This was service that I not only participated in but also learned from. Every service activity I engage in, I learn more about the profession, if I am willing to listen.

 Listening in Order to Act

Cornelius Minor’s book, quoted at the start of this post, is aimed primarily at K-12 teachers and introduces the concept of authentic listening that I find applicable not just to our classrooms but to our service work in higher education. Minor writes, “I pose authentic listening and the actions that result from it as the most radical of all teacher behaviors. When we seek to create better realities for our students and our peers, our listening has to be informed by what we know, by what we are learning, and by our desire to actually hear what our students, communities, and partners are telling us” (14-15). I see authentic listening as one part of the equation in making sure that the organizations that we are part of—whether our academic departments, our professional organizations, or the larger profession of postsecondary teaching—change work. But I also want to argue for a process of asking. We can hear when students, colleagues, or constituent groups are expressing their views—but responsive service-leadership also means asking. We have to listen, and we have to ask.

 Transparent efforts that ask about people’s experiences who are different from ours (which is to say everyone) is the way that we have transparency. This is the most visible to me in my work in shared governance—as a faculty senate chair, senator, member of the CCCC and the Two-Year College English Association (TYCA) executive committees, and now an elected officer in CCCC. A responsive organization doesn’t just wait to hear complaints. So often the burden is placed on people with less power in the hierarchy (whichever one—students in a classroom, constituents in an organization) to “voice concerns” or “just ask for what they need” Why aren’t we asking people what they need and want? Why aren’t we asking students what their experience is in our programs and classrooms, and figuring out how to meet them? When students or colleagues tell us about their experience—through course evaluations, through letters or requests, through emails, conversations, and reports, through surveys—this is an opportunity not to communicate but to hear and act.  

 In this moment, acting can feel challenging. In the wake of public policy efforts that strip rights and resources from marginalized populations and communities, and the privatization of the public structures that have built engines of opportunity and mobility for generations (e.g., public institutions with low tuition; stable employment for college faculty; loan forgiveness programs; commitments to accessibility; Title IX protections for victims of assault; pathways to college for DREAMers) efforts to resist such political moves, let alone take care of ourselves and those we care about—students, colleagues, families, communities—can seem overwhelming.

 I also recognize that service and activism, and the time available to engage in them, is limited, and inequitably distributed. Our labor conditions differ, and responsibilities outside of the profession differ. Yet, I have seen how labor efforts, particularly in states without union representation, largely take place through our committee and governance work—my experience has included senate recommendations to rectify compensation inequity that affected non-tenure track faculty, and most recently departmental support for compensating instructors for service work that is outside their contractual obligations, allowing them to have a voice and participation in department decision making. These took place through committees, senates, and faculty commitment to equity. 

 I hope that through valuing service and using it as an opportunity to strategically and intentionally move work forward that truly serves the interests of stakeholders rather than the agendas of the powerful, we can find meaning in this work in ways that are possible within our other responsibilities.

 I am grateful to Darin, Liz, and Don for leading this new collaboration. I amplify Carolyn Calhoon-Dillahunt’s February 2019 TSA post, “NCTE/CCCC/TYCA: A Community of Advocacy”  where she invites readers to consider several questions: “Where are your spheres of influence? What problems can you convert into possibilities? How can we, your professional community, help?”, and I would add, how can your service—to students, colleagues, and communities—be a place of effecting change? How can you hear what those who you serve are saying? How can you invite their voices into the conversation, and use it to advocate for change in support of justice?

Holly Hassel teaches at North Dakota State University, and previously taught at the University of Wisconsin-Marathon County, an open-admissions two-year college, for 16 years. She is completing her term as editor of Teaching English in the Two-Year College. She begins her service as CCCC assistant chair this month.

Works Cited 

Calhoon-Dillahunt, Carolyn. “NCTE/CCCC/TYCA: A Community of Advocacy.” Teacher-Scholar-Activist. https://teacher-scholar-activist.org/2019/02/22/ncte-cccc-tyca-a-community-of-advocacy/. 22 February 2019.

Minor, Cornelius. We Got This: Equity, Access, and the Question to Be Who our Students Need to Be. Heinemann, 2019.

Reyes, Berte. “Moments and Movements: On Scholar-Activists Considering the Connection between Activism and Organizing.” Spark: A 4c4Equality Journal. March 2019. https://sparkactivism.com/volume-1-intro/moments-and-movements-on-scholar-activists-considering-the-connection-between-activism-and-organizing/

Sullivan, Patrick. “The Two-Year College Teacher-Scholar-Activist.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College. Vol. 42, no. 4, pp. 327-350.

By Shannon Carter, Deborah Mutnick, Stephen Parks, and Jessica Pauszek

The publication of our coedited volume Writing Democracy: The Political Turn in and Beyond the Trump Era (Routledge 2019) coincided roughly with the third biannual Conference on Community Writing in October 2019. Interestingly, the issue of Donald Trump’s presidency, which resonated powerfully across panels and dinner tables at the last CCW in 2017 was barely mentioned this year, except in relation to impeachment—at least not in what we heard. This sea change can be interpreted as a sign of hope that the 2020 presidential elections are around the corner and the Trump era is soon to end; inurement to and exhaustion from the incessant barrage of Trump’s criminal, immoral policies and outrageous tweets, including his most recent betrayal of the Kurds in Syria; and/or proof of entry into a new, even more troubling stage of neoliberal capitalism that Trump may have hastened but will outlast him and pose even greater threats to the country and the planet.

Writing Democracy is our attempt to intervene in this conversation and argue for a “political turn” in and beyond the field of composition and rhetoric that can help address disciplinary, theoretical, pedagogical, and activist questions about the current conjuncture and to join with a coalition of forces in and outside higher education to “make our own history” in what Laurence Cox and Alf Gunvald Nilsen call “the twilight of neoliberalism.” Contributors to the collection address the history of radical projects within composition and rhetoric, the ethics of the political turn, the pedagogy of the political turn, union organizing strategies, the political turn and two-year colleges, student movements, Islamophobia, dismantling the Trumpian “wall” in light of Naomi Klein’s theory of the “shock doctrine,” historical lessons from the civil rights movement, and border politics and education. Interviews with Angela Davis and Dana Cloud mark continuations and new insights into the work of expanding this conversation beyond the borders of our own field (see complete Table of Contents here).

The intent of the collection is to join existing and inspire new conversations about the field, its pedagogical, research, and theoretical priorities, as well as how writing functions as a tool for liberation across diverse communities. This collection is also rooted in the sense of crisis that we so vividly remember in the period leading up to and following the 2016 election of Donald Trump as we bore witness to the rise of fascism and the acceleration of global accumulation, dispossession, and ecological destruction. At the 2019 CCW, for example, it is precisely the sort of question raised by Carmen Kynard in her keynote address, asking us to examine what we read, write, and teach in light of how it does the “work” of revolutionary transformation, particularly anti-racist and anti-capitalist work, that we agree is critical to advancing what we call the “political turn.” Rather than see the Trump era as anomalous, we see it as a sudden, sharp deepening of the multiple crises that preceded and will follow the Trump era even in the most hopeful view of a future recovered by radical mass mobilization for democratic social change: gross inequality, rising racism, nationalism, xenophobia, and fascism, mass incarceration, a mounting war and climate refugee crisis, and present and looming ecological disasters.

Rather than a unified position, the collection reflects how a diverse group of rhetoric and composition scholars are working to illuminate the present through analysis aimed at reclaiming our collective futures, especially those most vulnerable to current assaults on human rights, dignity, and material needs—people of color, white working-class/poor, women, LGBTQ communities, immigrants, displaced refugees, victims of war, incarcerated people, and so on—and of the world’s children, whose fate is more uncertain than any other generation in human history. And yet, even the four of us have fairly significant political disagreements, not about the dehumanizing, catastrophic effects of neoliberal capitalism but about historicizing, theorizing, and transforming it. The contributors likewise focus on a variety of concerns from diverse perspectives that, while rooted in the ethical and political values of social and economic justice scholarship, teaching, and activism. To quote from our introduction, we aim to show how progressive academics in composition and rhetoric and across disciplines can contribute to creating conditions for genuine democratic dialogue and critical, historically, and scientifically grounded pursuit of just solutions to local and global problems. We argue that historical exigencies call on us to enact a “political turn” that embraces yet goes beyond more celebrated cultural, public, and social turns to ask critical questions about our political economy and our field’s potential response(s) to them: How are social class and race interpolated in American—and global—history? What is the future of education in this era of austerity, privatization, and corporatization? What sort of future is in store for the world’s children and their children? What are the underlying structures of U.S. and global capitalism? Whose interests does capitalism serve? Who benefits? Who suffers? What can be done about it? These are key questions we take with us in and beyond the Trump era. (20)

Again, we hope the book will spark discussion and debate, inviting not only a political turn in our classrooms, campuses, communities, conferences, and journals, but also commitment to the doubly hard work of activist engagement in local, global, and national struggles, and deep study of history, theory, and practice or strategy as we catapult into the third decade of the 21^st century. Two other observations in closing: First, teachers and faculty across the country in our own and other disciplines were already taking a “political turn” as this book was in production, with wildcat strikes, critical interrogation of language, literacy, race, and identity, resistance to sexual harassment and male domination, and involvement in transgender and other sexual politics, prison abolition work, immigrant rights, the rapidly growing climate change movement, and so on. We hope this provides additional examples and naming of such moments and enacting of a political turn. Second, that mercurial, frustrating aspect of radical history, never static, and thus impossible to capture in any time-driven publication, is also what gives us hope that we can unify our forces to fight for a just world. As John Trimbur writes in the book:

…political consciousness moves in ebbs and flows, not in a straight line; it is subject to fits and starts, intense struggles alternating with hiatuses, defeats, distraction, quietude and periods of repression and reaction. What this means, to put a positive spin on it, is that even at the bleakest moments…reactionary forces cannot permanently cancel the prospects of the left. (36)

It is this “struggle for revolutionary consciousness” (Trimbur 27-50) that we are hoping the book will precipitate, deepen, and broaden in us all as we enter what will, we think without question, be a tumultuous, transformative period—one in which the movements from below, the global 99 percent, must organize to win.

Writing Democracy includes contributions by John Trimbur, LaToya Lydia Sawyer and Ben Kuebrich interviewing Angela Davis, Nancy Welch, Deborah Mutnick, Stephen Parks interviewing Dana L. Cloud, Seth Kahn, Vani Kannan, Paul Feigenbaum, Geoffrey Clegg, Darin L. Jensen, Tamara Issak, Steven Alvarez, Shannon Carter, and Tamera Marko.

Works Cited

Carter, Shannon, Deborah Mutnick, Stephen Parks, and Jessica Pauszek. Writing Democracy: The Political Turn in and Beyond the Trump Era. Routledge, 2019.

Cox, Laurence, and Alf Gunvald Nilsen. We Make Our Own History: Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight of Neoliberalism. Pluto Press, 2014.

Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Random House of Canada, 2007.

Kynard, Carmen, “‘All I Need is One Mic’: A Black Feminist Community Meditation on the Work, the Job, and the Hustle (and Why So Many of Yall Confuse This Stuff).” Keynote Address, Conference on Community Writing, 2019. bit.ly/kynard-ccw.

Trimbur, John, “Composition’s Left and the Struggle for Revolutionary Consciousness.”

Writing Democracy: The Political Turn in and Beyond the Trump Era, edited by Shannon Carter, Deborah Mutnick, Stephen Parks, and Jessica Pauszek, Routledge, 2019, pp. 27-51.

Shannon Carter is Professor of English at Texas A&M-Commerce, where she teaches courses in community writing and digital storytelling. Her publications include articles in College English, CCC, and Community Literacy Journal, and The Way Literacy Lives: Rhetorical Dexterity and the “Basic” Writer (SUNY Press, 2008). With Deborah Mutnick in 2012, she edited a special issue of Community Literacy Journal emerging from the first Writing Democracy conference in 2011, which won the 2012 Best Public Intellectual Special Issue from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. Her current book project project traces the history of community writing alternatively designed to reify and resist racial injustice in her conservative, relatively isolated university town, which is also the subject of a digital humanities project funded, in part, by NEH.

Deborah Mutnick is Professor of English at Long Island University Brooklyn and author of Writing in an Alien World: Basic Writing and the Struggle for Equality in Higher Education. Other publications appear in a range of journals and edited collections. She is currently researching Richard Wright’s relevance and political, intellectual, and literacy development.

Steve Parks is author of Class Politics: The Movement for a Students Right go Their Own Language and Gravyland: Writing Beyond the Curriculum in the City of Brotherly Love, as well as a textbook, Writing Communities. He is founder of New City Community Press; Co-Founder/Board Chair of Syrians for Truth and Justice; and Editor of Studies in Writing and Rhetoric as well as Working and Writing for Change, Parlor Press

​Jessica Pauszek is Assistant Professor of English and Director of Writing at Texas A&M University-Commerce. Her work has appeared in CCC, Community Literacy Journal, Literacy in Composition Studies, and Reflections. She is the co-editor of Best of the Journals in Rhetoric and Composition and Writing and Working for Change series. Her current book project explores working-class community literacy practices of the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers as well as examines an archival curation project alongside community members in the context of precarity.

By Howard Tinberg

How you construe is how you construct. (Berthoff 10)

After four decades of teaching first-year composition, I have belatedly come to this conclusion:  we have a moral and civic obligation to teach reading in our writing classroom.

This change in my own thinking seems hardly a new idea in Writing Studies.  Scholars of reading like Alice Horning,  Mariolina Salvatori, and David Joliffe have urged us for years to pay more attention to reading in our writing classes.  More recently, Patrick Sullivan, Sheridan Blau, Ellen Carillo and others have taken up the refrain.  Louise Rosenblatt, a genuine pioneer in the field of reading, bravely took of the theme in “Literature as Exploration,” initially published in 1933.   And, within literary studies,  the New Critics and others instructed us back in the day on how to read for nuance.

But note the difference in what I am asking from what our field and related disciplines have urged in the past:  I am urging us to commit ourselves to reading INSTRUCTION, and I wish us to view reading itself a MORAL and CIVIC act.   In other words, we must know how to teach reading not simply engage in it or even model it,  and we must regard the act of reading—reading deeply, I will assert—as a civic responsibility.   All citizens must acquire and routinely re-enact the practice of curating the information that comes their way.  It is our solemn responsibility as literacy educators to enable these best practices in citizenship.

For myself, as for many in our field, the misinformation that pervaded the 2016 Presidential campaign seemed like a stinging rebuke and a call to action.  This moment is no mere “literacy crisis,” Carillo reminds us (4).   The perfect storm of political polarization, infusion of social media, and foreign interference has us staring at a “post-truth culture” that threatens the existence of fact itself.

Years ago I wrote a piece on “reading as if your life depended on it,” placing the act of reading within the context of teaching Holocaust literature (Tinberg).  I had made the argument that teaching and reading Holocaust literature carries a special burden:  it demands that we turn to “face the Gorgon,” as Primo Levi puts it, and that in reading we must assume the responsibility of bearing witness when encountering those who by word or deed seek to do harm to others.  I have come to believe, since 2016, that we all must take up this burden, as citizen-, and, yes,–reading-activists.

It seems odd, does it not, to describe readers as “activists.” After all, reading is a private act, done mostly in silence and apart from others.  Years ago, while I was still a doctoral candidate working in Romantic Studies, Ann E. Berthoff encouraged me and others to consider the act of composing as an act of forming, of “constructing,” driven by the awesome power of imagination.  Berthoff, a proponent of I. A. Richards’ view of reading as active exploration, knew full well that reading, like writing, amounts to an act of “constructing,” a creative act of the mind.

This past summer, I and several colleagues , spent a good deal of time at the Institute for Reading and Writing Pedagogy, focusing on students  at access-oriented Institutions, funded by the Mellon Foundation and delivered under the auspices of the Modern Language Association (shout out to Paula Krebs, Executive Director of MLA, for being the prime mover of this project).  We all of us read complex materials,  wrote in response to what we read and engaged each other on the margins of the page in an active dialogue.  We enacted reading and writing pedagogies that were eminently portable to our classrooms.

This fall, I have taken up the challenge to bring reading instruction explicitly into my first-year composition classroom.  Instead of simply assuming that my students will do the required reading for the course, I asked them to “read a page”  of a difficult text in class aloud and then, in dialogue with other students and with my guidance, to highlight, annotate, and discuss their reasons for selecting key passages from the text.  The room was engaged in an act of collective reading and in response to the reading.  I can already see the difference in my students’ written projects, which draw from the readings:  evidence of genuine engagement, of deep reading.  I see less skimming and more deep diving into the reading.  And I see more wrestling for meaning, rather than a cursory and disinterested glance at a silent text.

After all, when all is said and done, reading and writing instruction aims to allow our students to find meaning, both in the text and in their own lives.   But it must do more:  it must give our students the means to engage as citizens.  Meaning-making is not merely a private matter.  It must be a collective good.

Howard Tinberg is a Professor of English at Bristol Community College, Fall River, Mass. He is former Chair of CCCC and the former editor of TETYC. He was the recipient of 2004 CASE/Carnegie US Community College Professor of the Year.

Works Cited

Berthoff, Ann E.  The Making of Meaning:  Metaphors, Models and Maxims for Writing Teachers. Upper Montclair, Boynton/Cook, 1981.

Blau, Sheridan. “Performative Literacy:  The Habits of Mind of Highly Literate Readers,” Voices from the Middle 10.3 (2003). 18-22.

Carillo, Ellen C. Teaching Readers in Post-Truth America. Logan:  Utah State UP, 2018.

Horning, Alice, and Elizabeth W. Kraemer.  Reconnecting Reading and Writing.  Anderson: Parlor P, 2013.

Joliffe, David.  “Review Essay:  Learning to Read as Continuing Education.” College Composition and Communication 58.3 (2007):  470-94.

Levi, Primo. “Shame.” In Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology.” Ed. Lawrence L. Langer. New York:  Oxford UP, 1995.

Rosenblatt, Louise.  Literature as Exploration. 4^th ed. New York:  Modern Language Association, 1983.

Salvatori, Mariolina, and Patricia Donahue.  “What is College English?  Stories about Reading:  Appearance, Disappearance, Morphing and Revival.” College English 75.2 (2012):  199-217.

Sullivan, Patrick. “`Deep Reading’ as a Threshold Concept in Composition Studies.” In  Deep Reading:  Teaching Reading in the Writing Classroom.  Ed. Patrick Sullivan, Howard Tinberg, and Sheridan Blau. Urbana:  NCTE. 2017. 143-71

Tinberg, Howard. `Read as If For Life’:  What Happens When Students Encounter the Literature of the Shoah.” College Composition and Communication 60:3 ( 2009).

By Mike Rose

Prefatory note to essay on Guided Pathways:

In 2015, Thomas Bailey, Shanna Smith Jaggars and Davis Jenkins of the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College, published what would become a hugely influential book, Redesigning America’s Community Colleges. Most of the readers of this blog in some way have been affected by it. In a nutshell, Bailey and his co-authors propose a more structured community college curriculum with a limited number of disciplinary and occupational pathways through it. This redesign —generally known as “Guided Pathways” — is intended to improve student retention and completion rates which at the majority of community colleges are distressingly low. (Many of you reading this have been involved in efforts to improve the quality of students’ education —likely before 2015.) The Guided Pathways Model has been taken up by a large number at colleges across the country; in my home state of California, the entire system is in the midst of a five-year implementation plan.

Bailey and company identify real problems with institutional structure, advising, student course-taking patterns, and more, and I think some of their recommendations have merit. But as the Guided Pathways Model was gaining influence, I began to worry about some broader issues that weren’t covered or were covered inadequately to my mind in the authors’ book. This was 2016, and I ended up writing an article for Inside Higher Ed, which is reprinted below. As you’ll see, I was concerned about a thin treatment of power and ideology —the political and social dimension of institutional change— and also about the complex reality of the lives of the wide range of students who come to the community college.

I certainly don’t claim to know what is going on with implementation of Guided Pathways around the country —readers can provide detail from their regions— but what I understand from those folks I know in Southern California suggests that the concerns I raise have been emerging as people try to implement some version of the model—and administrators and faculty are trying to respond accordingly.

What I did not address in the 2016 article because of limitations of space are some of the broader conceptual and philosophical issues that run through the Guided Pathways model and that I treat in Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education. These issues include the purpose of education, the conceptualization and representation of the “community college student,” and the increasing reliance on schooling in a shrinking welfare state to solve our social problems.

Reassessing a Redesign of America’s Community Colleges

Originally published in Inside Higher Ed June 23 2016

Reprinted with the permission of the author.

A much-discussed, comprehensive reform plan for improving community colleges and their low rates of student persistence and completion is the “guided pathways” model put forth by Thomas Bailey, Shanna Smith Jaggars and Davis Jenkins in their book, Redesigning America’s Community Colleges​. Published last year, the book condenses and focuses years of research — a fair amount of which comes out of the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College, which Bailey directs.

I support the reforms laid out in the book. But I also have some concerns — maybe “cautions” is a better word — about the social and political dynamics of establishing the guided-pathways model, and about the complex nature of the typical community college student population.

In the book, Bailey and his co-authors locate the fundamental problem with the community college in the structure of its curriculum and the institutional assumptions that undergird that structure. In its attempt to serve all members of an area, the typical community college has allowed to proliferate a wide range of academic, occupational, general interest and service courses and programs. Though some type of orientation, counseling and advising is typically available, quality and effectiveness vary, and counselors’ caseloads — 1,000 students per counselor is not uncommon — work against any substantial contact. Many students don’t use these services at all.

The authors label this arrangement the cafeteria-style, self-service model. Students, many of whom are the first in their families to go to college, might enroll without a clear goal, get inadequate or incomplete advising, and take courses that don’t lead to a specified outcome, are out of sequence or that they’ve already taken.

As a remedy, the authors suggest a basic redesign, arguing that community colleges “need to engage faculty and student services professionals in creating more clearly structured, educationally coherent program pathways that lead to students’ end goals, and in rethinking instruction and student support services in ways that facilitate students’ learning and success as they progress along these paths.”

The authors acknowledge the laudable reforms attempted recently, such as improving the curriculum for remedial courses and streamlining them or creating programs at the front end of college to better orient and guide new students. But these reforms have had limited impact on completion, the authors claim, because the large macrostructure of the cafeteria model remained in place.

To realize the guided-pathways model, faculty and staff would create sequences of courses that lead to clearly defined outcomes. And this major restructuring of the curriculum would provide direction for other significant institutional reforms that will aid in retention and completion. Faculty members who work within a particular pathway will together define the skills, concepts and habits of mind they want students to develop through the pathway “and map out how students will build those learning outcomes across courses.” At the front end, increased effort will go to helping students clarify goals and choose a major or “metamajor,” which would reflect broad areas of interest. Orientation to college will be beefed up, and students will be enrolled in courses that provide ongoing information and guidance about college life. Through the increased integration of technology into advising, students will receive timely feedback on their progress, and instructors and counselors will be alerted when something goes awry — when a student drops a course, for example.

In addition, the authors adopt various promising reforms to remedial education, such as sequences featuring fewer, more intensive courses, and the use of additional instruction and tutoring. Their assumption is that improved remedial courses will function more effectively as part of a pathways model, resulting in greater numbers of students moving into a college-level course of study.

 Enacting the Model

The pathways idea is a good one. I have known so many students who would have benefited tremendously from it — who would have taken fewer courses that were extraneous to their goals, used up less financial aid money, moved more quickly toward completion of a certificate or degree or toward transfer to a four-year school. And the suggested reforms that follow, especially related to orientation and advising, are long overdue. I raise similar suggestions in my 2012 book, Back to School. As for rethinking remediation, I’ve been on that boat for more than 35 years.

To achieve this restructuring will require collaborative engagement on the part of faculty and staff, both within departments and across them. The authors realize the challenges of effecting such engagement and devote a chapter to the topic. They wisely begin the chapter by noting some of the difficulties, including the possible lack of trust among administrators and faculty and staff members, the divide between faculty and student services, and the disruptive role played by dissenters.

The book then suggests strategies to work through these problems. For example, its authors suggest including dissenters in program planning, creating planning teams that combine faculty with student services personnel, the use of data to question current practices and so on. Though this is a legitimate way to structure such a chapter, the structure implies that the barriers to change listed at the beginning of the chapter can be overcome with the management and group facilitation techniques presented in the remainder of the chapter — an impression reinforced by the lack of any examples or discussion of what to do when the techniques fail.

The authors have a wealth of experience studying two- and four-year colleges, so they surely know how messy and unpredictable the process of reform can be. Perhaps they (or their editor) decided that it was best to present their model and a process to achieve it, and not to overly complicate things with extended discussion of potential pitfalls and blunders. Fair enough. And perhaps the authors’ disciplinary backgrounds in economics, public policy and quantitative methodologies limit their treatment of politics, ideology and the tangled day-to-day dynamics of status, power and turf — which, depending on the institution, can include everything from budgets to racial tensions to contentious personal histories.

To limit treatment of all this is a legitimate choice, but should be stated and underscored, for my worry is that individual colleges attempting the reforms suggested by Bailey, Jaggars and Jenkins will encounter more of a mess than anticipated and possibly scrap or significantly weaken the implementation of ideas that have real merit.

The organizational compartmentalizing and the administrative hierarchies that exist in the community college are not only structural features; they are electric with power and status. The various methods suggested by the authors to bring people together to work through these dynamics toward the common goal of creating guided pathways are good ones, tried and true in the tool kit of management consultants. But they also can be foiled by genuine ideological differences about the purpose of a particular area of study or of education in general. They can also be foiled by turf protection, administrative power struggles and pure and simple personal animosity.

To be sure, change happens. I’ve witnessed several successful programs take shape over the past few years as a core of energetic and creative faculty are given the resources to run with their ideas. But during that same time I’ve also seen such groups — inspired, seemingly tireless people — be stonewalled or shut down by larger groups of faculty within their subject area, by their department heads or by middle managers.

Bailey and his co-authors suggest arriving at shared values as a starting place for examining current practices and changing them. For example, the authors write, “In our experience, faculty and staff choose to work at community colleges because they believe in the open-access mission and are passionate about improving students’ lives.” This is generally true in my experience as well, but with two qualifications — which illustrate how arriving at shared values can be more complicated than it seems.

First, regarding the embrace of the open-access mission of the community college, a percentage of faculty at most institutions believe some of the students they teach should not be in college, and certainly not in their classrooms. These faculty align themselves with the universities that educated them, want to teach students who have some affinity with their discipline and are not at all trained to work with students who are academically underprepared. In some cases, they are younger and work at the community college because that was the only position available in a tight job market. In other cases, these are older faculty who have been at the college for decades and lived through a significant shift in student demographics. They look back at a golden age — one that most likely did not exist as they remember it.

Furthermore, faculty can have quite different beliefs about concepts like “improving students’ lives.” And some of these differing beliefs can present resilient barriers to change. One faculty member believes that to change methods of instruction will compromise standards and lead to subpar education. Another believes that students — particularly those with poor academic backgrounds — need to have positive experiences in school, so avoids challenging them intellectually. And yet another operates with racial, class or gender biases that limit what he or she thinks is realistic for some students in school or career.

Another assumption in the book is that when faced with data about student, instructor or program performance, faculty and staff with guidance will engage in reflection and behavioral change. Some people will respond thus — and thank goodness for them. But other responses are also possible. People don’t believe the data — especially in institutions where there is a high level of distrust between faculty and administrators. People question the way the data were obtained. People blame the students. This last response is a big one where test data or pass/fail rates are concerned. When faced with data demonstrating the low pass rates in remedial English or math, some faculty respond by stating that those students don’t belong here. As one community college staff member said to me, “It’s hard to admit we’ve been doing something wrong.”

For all its merits, the book’s implementation plan is sometimes thin on the political and social dynamics of institutional change. To work amid a complex human landscape, the plan might well need to be combined with savvy, perhaps even Machiavellian leadership, with horse trading, with both symbolic and financial incentives, with the strategic use of personal relationships, and, unfortunately, at times, with reassignment or marginalization of obstructionist personnel.

 Pathways and Students’ Lives

The structural fix Bailey and his co-authors offer makes sense given the evidence that the status quo creates a host of barriers to student success. Still, like all structural remedies, this one runs the risk of reducing nuanced and layered human dilemmas to a technical problem, and thus being unresponsive to or missing entirely the particular life circumstances of students. So, yes, make the college curriculum more coherent, but realize that other human and material resources also will be needed to meet the needs of many students, and, as well, build into your structural changes the flexibility needed to honor the range of life circumstances your students bring to college. Otherwise, the fix may create unintended negative consequences.

A significant number of people who go to community college are adults with family and other responsibilities. They can only go part time. They can’t go every semester. They sometimes quit in midsemester because of family emergencies or changes in employment. They go to two or three different institutions. A guided-pathways model could help them in some ways — at the least lend coherence to their course selection — but not necessarily speed up their progress through college. For them, evening or weekend classes, good online courses, legitimate competency-based options, and counseling and advising in off hours, weekends or online also would be necessary.

A different kind of problem lies at the other end of the college-a continuum. We don’t have in our country many avenues to help young people develop after high school. We don’t, for example, have a robust system of occupational apprenticeships or of national service. Young people who are not on the academic fast track and do not have a clear college goal have few options: entry-level, low-skilled, low-paying work or the military. Or they can enroll in the local community college hoping some career path will reveal itself. Many such students don’t stay long, but those who do typically change their areas of study several times, shift between full-time and part-time attendance, start classes they don’t complete, stop out, and return to school. Eventually some find their way. A guided-pathways model could help these students by more clearly delineating curricular and career options at a critical stage of early-adult development.

But there are some powerful developmental dynamics going on here that lie beyond a structural fix in the curriculum. In interviewing such students, I’m taken by the simple but powerful fact that this process of discovery takes time. A lot of growing up happens: cutting back on partying and frivolous entertainments, changing one’s understanding of the purpose of school, bringing one’s fantasies in line with one’s abilities, learning how to manage time and to study. In some cases, students arrive at the big questions: Who am I? What kind of work do I want to do? What is meaningful work for me? Why am I on this Earth? It certainly could be argued that the community college is not the place to work all this out, but if our society provides limited transitional institutions or spaces, young people are left with few other options.

Then there is the issue of the burdens students carry. I am continually struck by the hardship experienced by so many community college students. To be sure, middle-class students from stable and secure backgrounds attend community college, but, depending on the location of the college, many students come from low-income to destitute families; have to work 30 or more hours a week; live in cramped housing, some of which is substandard; are food insecure; and have health problems that are inadequately treated. For some, there are worries about immigration. Some must contend with prior involvement in the criminal justice system while others struggle with addiction.

In the book After Admission, sociologist James Rosenbaum and his colleagues make the critical point that a structural analysis of the problem with community college student success takes us “beyond individual blame” and focuses our attention on institutional factors that create barriers to academic progress. Bailey and his co-authors offer a corrective to these problematic structural features. I do not intend to refocus blame on students, but I think it would be a mistake to not attend to the details of their lives while conducting this structural analysis. Otherwise the structural remedy might promise more than it can deliver — thus threatening its longevity — and also inadvertently contribute to the barriers students face by diverting attention from other remedies they need.

I do not want the issues raised here to be used as an excuse for maintaining the status quo. But even with the most coherent and streamlined curricular pathways, there will still be a number of students who enroll in one course at a time, who stop out, who take years to find their academic or occupational path, whose past blunders and transgressions continue to exact a material and psychological price, whose personal history of neglect and even trauma can cripple their performance. All this and more require institutional responses beyond guided pathways (though the model could enhance these responses) as well as extra-institutional social services. The needs of the community college population require a range of programs and accommodations to make “the people’s college” more fully the uniquely American institution it, at its best, can be.

Mike Rose is a Research Professor in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. He has taught in a wide range of educational settings —from elementary school to adult literacy and job training programs— and has directed an EOP tutorial center. He is a member of the National Academy of Education. His books include Lives on the Boundary: The Struggles and Achievements of America’s Educationally Underprepared, Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in America, The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker, Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us, and Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education.

by Shane A. Wood

Pedagogue is a podcast about teachers talking writing.

Pedagogue is about building a supportive community.

Pedagogue is committed to facilitating conversations that move across institutions and positions.

Pedagogue is designed to celebrate the labor teachers do inside and outside the classroom.

The purpose of Pedagogue is to promote diverse voices and help foster community. Each episode is a conversation with a teacher (or multiple teachers) about their experiences teaching writing. Teachers at diverse institutions talking teaching. Teachers sharing assignments, best practices, materials, assessments, classroom challenges, and successes. Each episode is an opportunity for listeners to be encouraged and inspired by great work being done elsewhere. From graduate students to distinguished scholars. From large public universities to community colleges. From high schools to elementary schools. From Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) to Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs). The podcast is an opportunity for us to come together as teachers – a space where we can listen and learn from different perspectives and experiences.

For the first and second episode, I had the privilege to talk with Mike Rose, a teacher-scholar who has taught for fifty years in a wide range of settings: from kindergarten to adult literacy programs to the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. Rose, author of Lives on the Boundary: The Struggles and Achievements of America’s Educationally Underprepared, has been influential to research in education and writing studies. In those episodes, we talk about his first experience teaching sixth graders in a working-class White and Latino community in California, how his teaching has changed, how interdisciplinarity plays a part in his classroom, and how he responds to student writing.

In Episode 1, Rose says, “There’s something profoundly special it seems to me about having the good fortune to teach because you really are participating with other people in their development. I mean, what other kinds of work allows you to do that?” Pedagogue attempts to show the profoundly special nature of teaching and writing.

Most of my favorite conversations happen inside the classroom with students. The classroom is where local communities happen; where people come together and diverse perspectives are heard, where we listen to one another and grow together. The writing classroom is an incredibly special place. Dynamic, too. Perhaps one of the most fascinating parts is how that classroom community changes each quarter, semester, or year as new students come and as our theories and pedagogical practices progress. The conversations that happen in the classroom change – identities, knowledge, perspectives, and experiences are always shifting.

There’s also another space I find extremely generative and transformational – and that’s when we come together as teachers and colleagues to talk about teaching. You know, when we sit around the same table and ask questions: what are you doing in class? what’s working? what’s not working? what’s it like teaching this type of writing task or engaging with that type of reading? how are students responding? how are you being an advocate for students and their labor? Pedagogue has the potential to make these localized table conversations larger, which can hopefully serve as a resource for teachers.

I think the podcast has a chance to be a resource for all teachers. Ultimately, my hope is that these conversations are practical and accessible and that they can help all of us. Some episodes might be used to help mentor graduate students teaching writing, perhaps in a teaching practicum classroom setting. Other episodes could help more experienced teachers interested in incorporating new pedagogies, or new writing tasks and material. Some episodes might help college writing program administrators re-imagine program curriculum and faculty/professional development, while other episodes will focus on teaching writing at the secondary level. Some episodes might be dedicated to specific topics: assessment, technology, responding to student writing, social justice, writing across the curriculum, community partnerships. There are a lot of possibilities for us to consider writing knowledge and practices.

The heart of Pedagogue is teaching and writing.

 Follow along and subscribe to get Pedagogue episodes on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or SoundCloud – or listen to episodes on the site: pedagoguepodcast.com

Shane A. Wood is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi. He taught at California State University, Fresno and the University of Kansas as a graduate student, and Haskell Indian Nations University as an adjunct. His research interests include writing assessment, rhetorical genre studies, and responding to student writing.

by Steve Straight

On the way in from the parking lot
I see a student with a big Bruins shirt over shorts
on a cold day in March, headphones, backpack
slung over one shoulder, gangling toward class.
Almost past a trash can whose plastic lid
with swinging door has blown off in the stiff wind,
to my astonishment he stops, and then replaces it,
fitting the lid securely all around the circumference.

As I approach the main entrance I hang back
and study the behavior of the students:
six in a row hold the door for the next person,
who lets it close behind her just as another
gets to it; he holds it for the next, who then
totally ignores the heavy set woman
carrying two bags, a pocketbook, and holding
the hand of a toddler. I race for the door,
she thanks me heartily, and I hold it
for the next student, who says nothing.

Like the binary foretelling of daisy petals
in my youth, I think:

There is hope. There is no hope.
There is hope. There is no hope.

Intro to Lit, opening day prompt:
“Talk about yourself and reading,
perhaps a favorite book.”
Three of twenty-five begin,
the ones who’ve brought books
they’re reading: a Stephen King,
a sci-fi series I don’t know,
and one––god bless him––
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Then about six in, a young man, with tie,
admits, “I don’t really like to read.”
As if a giant permission switch were flipped,
hands shoot up around the room.
“Yeah, I hate reading.” “Oh, me too.”
Too many nods to count.

There is hope. There is no hope.
There is hope. There is no hope.

After a morning when I discover most of my students
don’t know how many senators New York has,
can’t tell me one thing about Gandhi, cannot name
the date of the Declaration of Independence––
“1876?” “1920s?” and one belligerent shrug,
between classes I see a young woman
swinging her red-tipped cane down the hall
approach a giant clot of young students
she may not sense how dense, lost in their cells
or shouting random things to each other––
but all at once they part and give her a wide berth.
All eyes follow her down the hall
and I hear someone say, hushed:
“She’s memorized the school, man.”

These days, pianissimo, under my breath,
I can’t stop counting my rosary:
There is hope. There is no hope.
There is hope. There is no hope.
There is hope. . . .

A teacher for thirty-nine years, Steve Straight is a professor of English and director of the poetry program at Manchester Community College.  His most recent book is The Almanac (Curbstone/Northwestern University Press).  His previous collection of poetry, The Water Carrier (Curbstone), was featured on the nationally syndicated radio program “The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor.” He has given workshops on writing and teaching throughout the eastern United States and in Ireland.

By John Duffy

One of the challenges facing teachers of writing in the twenty-first century United States is how best to teach practices of reasoned, fair-minded argument when contemporary public discourse is so polarized, strident, and deeply dishonest. The college writing course has many purposes, but widely accepted as one of those purposes is to prepare students to engage in the political and cultural conversations that will shape their personal futures and the future lives of their communities. To that end, we teachers of writing have promoted norms of argument that privilege habits and dispositions of truthfulness, accountability, open-mindedness, intellectual generosity, intellectual courage, and other such qualities. We have promoted, to say it another way, norms of ethical argument.

Yet we now inhabit a rhetorical moment in which those norms have been destabilized by powerful political and media discourses that have treated truth as transactional, dismissed evidence-based reasoning, and normalized arguments grounded in racism, misogyny, and religious hatred.

How do we respond?  More to the point, how do we prepare our students to respond? Which of our classroom practices—our questions, readings, and writing prompts—will most effectively enable our students to resist the toxic currents of contemporary discourse and argue in ways that strengthen the bonds of community and civic life?

My purpose in this brief essay is to suggest, proceeding cautiously and with humility, how we might encourage practices of ethical argument in our classrooms. I invoke caution and humility in this undertaking because the teaching of rhetorical ethics, as I have noted elsewhere (Duffy 2019), does not lend itself to off-the-rack lesson plans or syllabi that can be applied in all classes, for all students, at all times. Rather, such lessons are best worked out in the particulars of local contexts, accounting for the needs of students and families, the goals of teachers and programs, and the resources available to institutions and communities. Recommendations about how best to teach ethical argument, then, are offered in the understanding that readers of this essay already know a great deal about what is most likely to work in their classrooms, with their students.

In that spirit, I propose here five modest strategies for consideration by teachers seeking to promote practices of ethical argument in the writing classroom.[1]

Teach Situations, Not Rules

In his wonderful essay, “In Pursuit of Rhetorical Virtue,” John Gage argues that what makes for ethical argument, or argument that is “tolerant, judicious, and reasonable” (Gage 2005, 32) cannot be achieved through the formulation of abstract rules and precepts. Instead, Gage writes, students develop ethical sensibilities in response to situations that call for ethical judgments. Gage recommends that teachers of writing concern ourselves less with teaching rhetorical precepts—“all the rhetorician’s rules,” as Samuel Butler mockingly phrased it— and instead create situations that call for the exercise of those ethical habits and dispositions we wish to encourage.

Let us imagine, for example, the following scenario. The future of the football program at Big State University is on the line. Football is a revered tradition at Big State, beloved by students and alumni. On crisp fall Saturdays, the stadium is filled to raucous capacity by 80,000 cheering fans who cherish the excitement of game day.  Moreover, Big State football is lucrative; revenues brought in by the football program pay for non-revenue producing sports and fund student scholarships.

Nonetheless, let us imagine, several of the trustees at Big State are troubled by what they are learning about the relationship between football and concussions leading to brain damage. These trustees have come to believe football is inconsistent with the mission of a university, and they are preparing a motion recommending that Big State drop its football program.

The role of the teacher in this conception shifts from promoter of rules to creator of situations. The teacher might ask students to assume distinctive roles in the context of the situation—university president, faculty member, football coach, student—and compose arguments concerning the future of football at Big State. In their respective roles, students would be called upon to read about the issues, balance multiple perspectives, present their views to others, and eventually draft an opinion on the right, or ethical, decision about the future of football at Big State.

For her part, the teacher poses questions along the way related to ethical discourse practices. How would an ethical writer respond to this situation? What questions would she ask, what authorities would she consult, what kind of language might she use in making her argument, and what language might she refrain from using? What principles would guide her decisions?

The goal of such discussions would not be to reach consensus, which would be unlikely, but rather to engage students in reflection on what an ethical writer might say in that situation, how she might say it, and why it should be said in precisely that way.

Name the Behaviors You Want to See

Perhaps the most straightforward way we can introduce ethical discourse practices to students is to name the practices we want students to adopt. Let us suppose, for example, students in a first-year writing class are discussing newspaper editorials on the Trump administration policy of separating children and parents at the U.S. border. Some opinions defend the policy as a deterrent, while others see it as inhumane. As students discuss the essays, the teacher occasionally comments and raises questions phrased in the vocabulary of an ethical rhetoric:

“All right, so you disagree with the author’s perspective. But would you say it’s intellectually honest?”

“How does this writer communicate empathy for the families? How is the rhetoric of empathy communicated in this paragraph, this sentence, this metaphor?”

“How does this author address arguments that contradict her own? Does she seem open-minded?  Would you describe her as intellectually generous? What do we mean by such terms?”

“Consider the adjectives the writer uses in this paragraph. Does she seem angry? Is her anger justified, in your opinion? Under what circumstances, would you say, is justifiable anger or righteous indignation appropriate?”

What is common to such questions is the explicit naming of the ethical qualities we want our students to adopt. Students do not, of course, arrive in our classrooms unfamiliar with such language. They arrive, rather, as complex moral beings with their own conceptions of what it means to be honest, empathetic, justifiably angry, and the rest. Perhaps fewer of our students, however, come to our classes having learned to associate these qualities with acts of speaking and writing. Perhaps fewer arrive with the understanding that their rhetorical practices speak as much to their ethical commitments as to the messages they wish to convey. In this sense, the explicit naming of ethical qualities can make unfamiliar what was previously familiar, and so suggest to students new and potentially generative ways to think about the activities of speaking and writing.

Model the Practices You Wish to Teach

Stephen D. Brookfield and Stephen Preskill, authors of Discussion as a Way of Teaching: Tools and Techniques for Democratic Classrooms, write that one of the mistakes they have often made as teachers is to announce on the first day of class that they believe in class discussion, tell students why such discussion is good for them, and then place students into small groups to begin discussing. “The trouble with this scenario,” the authors suggest, “is that it omits a crucial element: we have neglected to model for students how to engage in the activity we are urging on them . . .” (41). If we are committed to teaching students to speak and write truthfully, generously, and courageously, Brookfield and Preskill’s self-evaluation suggests, we ought to model these behaviors ourselves.

So, for example, when students ask questions, or make comments on classroom readings, we can demonstrate attentiveness by listening carefully and thoughtfully. If a student offers an opinion that seems to us naïve or poorly reasoned, we can model tolerance and respectfulness by withholding criticism and hearing out that student. Should conflicts between students in a writing group become heated, we can model diplomacy by addressing differences calmly and tactfully.

We can also model ethical discourse in interactions with colleagues. Brookfield and Preskill recommend inviting colleagues into our classrooms to engage in unrehearsed conversations about a contentious issue. As students look on, Brookfield and Preskill advise faculty to “listen attentively to each other’s comments, reframe and rephrase what you’ve heard, and check with colleagues to make sure you’ve caught their meaning accurately” (52). Such conversations offer opportunities to demonstrate how ideas may be clarified and new perspectives gained through respectful disagreement.

Exemplars, Exemplars, Exemplars!

The philosopher Linda Zagzebski defines the exemplar as “a paradigmatically good person,” a person whose actions or life fills us with feelings of admiration, and whom we are moved to imitate (2010). “Exemplars are those persons who are most imitable,” Zagzebski writes, and they are most imitable because they are most admirable” (52). Just who should be regarded as an exemplar speaks to a complex blend of ideological, cultural, religious, and other commitments, but commonly cited as exemplary figures are spiritual leaders, such as Buddha and Jesus; historical actors, such as Dorothy Day and Nelson Mandela; and fictional characters, such as Hermione Granger, and Lisbeth Salander. We might introduce such figures in our classes, asking students to reflect on the ethics of their speeches and writings.

For example, when the heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali refused to be inducted into the US Army during the Vietnam War, stating, “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong,” (Hauser 1991, 144–145), he became for many a reviled public figure. Sportswriters rebuked Ali as an unworthy champion, and US senators and congressmen denounced him as a traitor. He was stripped of his title, his boxing license was revoked, and he was placed under FBI surveillance. Nonetheless, Ali continued to speak out, identifying resistance to the war with the civil rights struggle of African Americans. After a meeting with Martin Luther King Jr. in Louisville, in which Ali spoke in support of the struggle for fair housing practices in the city, he made the following statement to reporters:

Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years. (Hauser, 167).

Teachers can discuss with students whether Ali should be considered an exemplar, whether his words and actions were admirable, and whether his statement to the press offered examples of ethical rhetoric. Students might consider which ethical practices, if any, were enacted in Ali’s speech, and where in the text these are expressed. The teacher could ask how the ethical qualities of Ali’s speech, should students see any such qualities, might inform students’ own writings—which of Ali’s ethical practices might students imitate? Should students object to Ali’s speech, the teacher could discuss with them why they object to Ali’s rhetoric and which moments in the text—which paragraphs, sentences, or words—they find objectionable.

We might share other exemplary texts with students. Some we know well, such as King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” or Ronald Reagan’s eloquent address to the nation after the Shuttle Challenger disaster. Others are perhaps less known, such as Carrie Chapman Catt’s 1916 speech, “The Crisis,” on women’s suffrage, or Missouri Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson’s address to the congregation at the Greater Grace Church in Ferguson, Missouri, after the shooting of Michael Brown in 2014, a speech Newsweek described as “riveting” (Mejia 2014). Finally, we might invite students to bring to class examples of ethical discourse that speak to students’ own experiences, traditions, narratives, and histories. Should students be willing to share, they may further expand and enrich our understanding of ethical discourse practices.

Embrace Dissensus

The everyday work of the writing class often leads us, teachers and students, into discussions of difficult, controversial, even painful topics. The readings we assign and the topics students write about may involve questions of race, gender, or sexuality. Classroom discussions may consider such issues as economic inequality, immigration, or gun violence. In the diverse classrooms in which we teach, we may find it difficult to achieve consensus on such controversies. Nor should we try. Instead, we might be better off embracing dissensus.

By dissensus, I mean the practice of encouraging diverse perspectives, making space to explore those perspectives, and acknowledging that reconciliation of incommensurable points of view may not be productive, or even possible. Insisting on the resolution of difficult or provocative topics, were we to do so, risks imposing a false sense of unanimity upon students who may hold fundamentally different views. More, it risks silencing minority perspectives by creating a rhetorical environment in which students in the minority feel pressured to go along with the views of the majority.

Dissensus, in contrast, acknowledges that conflicting positions may frustrate compromise and elude the search for common ground. And while consensus implies closure—the group having agreed to a position is now free to move on—dissensus speaks to continuing conversation, ongoing negotiation, and, perhaps, evolving points of view over time. Finally, dissensus makes clear that ethical discourse can thrive in conditions of agreement and disagreement, harmony and dissonance, unity and division. The ethical writer operates in all such contexts.

* I offer the strategies in this essay, modest as they may be, as a starting point, a beginning, an invitation for reflection.  Should these strategies serve as intended, they will provide students and teachers with occasions to work toward deeper, richer, more fully realized understandings of what it means to be an ethical speaker and writer in these unethical times.

John Duffy teaches at the University of Notre Dame, where he is the O’Malley Director of the University Writing Program. He has published on the ethics of writing, the rhetoric of disability, and the historical development of literacy in cross-cultural contexts. In his recent book, Provocations of Virtue: Rhetoric, Ethics, and the Teaching of Writing, he examines the ethical dimensions of teaching writing in a post-truth world.

References

Brookfield, Stephen D., and Stephen Preskill. 1999. Discussion as a Way of Teaching:       Tools and Techniques for Democratic Classrooms. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Duffy, John. 2019. Provocations of Virtue: Ethics, Rhetoric, and the Teaching of Writing.    Logan, UT: Utah State University Press.

Gage, John. 2005. “In Pursuit of Rhetorical Virtue.” Lore: 29–37

Hauser, Thomas. 1991. Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times. New York: Simon and     Schuster.

Mejia, Paula. 2014. “Sharpton, Captain Johnson Give Moving Speeches at Ferguson   Memorial for Michael Brown.” Newsweek, August 17,   2014.http://www.newsweek.com/community-membersrally-ferguson-church-memorial-michael-brown-265148.

Zagzebski, Linda Trinkaus. 2010. “Exemplarist Virtue Theory.” Metaphilosophy 41(1-2):  41–57.

[1] The strategies discussed in this essay are adapted from Duffy, 2019.

By Jeffery Klausman

In the Symposium of the spring 2018 TETYC special issue on academic freedom, Annie Del Principe and Jacqueline Brady include this:

In this vein, Jeffrey Klausman asks us: “Can we say that a person with a Master of Arts in Imaginative Literature and little graduate training in composition, who is not current in the field and does not read the journals or attend the conferences, who relies upon lore primarily in his or her teaching, is a ‘professional’ in composition? It would be difficult to say so.” (244)

My gut reaction was, “Well, that’s an ugly quote.”

Even now, I feel some shame and trepidation that something I’d written so long ago was still out there (“Mapping” came out in 2008). After all, I try to be a nice guy (a secular Buddhist, practicing mattri, the principle of loving kindness), and here I am saying in print that the majority of composition faculty, contrary to what they might think and feel, are not professionals, at least by my definition.

But what gives me the right to say such a thing? Who the hell do I think I am?

In my own contribution to that special issue of TETYC, I go even further and clearly define academic freedom as grounded in disciplinary knowledge and practice, not simply in the fact of employment status at an academic institution (“Academic”). The right to speak freely as an academic employee, I argue, is protected under Constitutional rights of the freedom of speech, whereas academic freedom, I claim, following the AAUP, has to do with disciplinary “speech”: the right to determine curriculum and pedagogy based on disciplinary but only based on disciplinary knowledge, not “lore,” as we’ve come to define it.

Is that a harsh thing to say? Does it disrespect people? When a colleague of mine—contingent, involved in the field, a leader in our department—read my article, she came to me and asked, “Won’t people get mad when they read your article? You’re basically saying they’re not professionals.” I responded, “They would, if they read it. But no one does.” In fact, I’ve heard nothing from anyone in my department to indicate that anyone was even aware of the article.

Which, perhaps, proves the point.

Still, I admit that I am afraid of people’s reactions, of offending people, of disrespecting them. I have to think there’s fear in all of us who have privilege—tenure, the ethos that comes with active membership in our field—and attempt to shape a writing program. We do not want to come across as elitists, “knowing better,” forcing onto others what we think is better practice. (“You might think you know what you’re doing, but you’re wrong,” such an act says—another ugly quote.) We are all of us, to a fault, “democratic” and want to believe that we are all equal, that everyone has equally valuable knowledge because to do otherwise implies—what?

That some of our colleagues do not know as much? That some knowledge is better than other knowledge? That we, in the profession, do know better and they should listen to us? If they’re not willing or able or interested in becoming part of the discipline, they should teach what we tell them?

Yes, that’s exactly what we fear. We fear knowing and saying it, at least out loud. That would be a series of ugly quotes to be sure.

Still, we know we’re not necessarily to blame. Joe Janangelo and I wrote up our findings to a study that Joe, then president of the CWPA, spearheaded. We wrote,

Finally, the very idea of a single, underlying theoretical approach to teaching writing as a ground to a program is itself a contentious issue. One respondent put it bluntly about whether there was a shared philosophy to teaching writing expressed in something like a mission or vision statement: “We don’t have one. It seems that a number of English faculty are opposed” to such explicit statements. Another said that it was “hard to say how much [underlying theory] is shared, but [it’s] easier to talk about with full-time faculty.”

“We can only conclude that at these colleges, the notion itself of an underlying theoretical frame is clouded with fear—that is, we surmise based on our own experiences and the responses to our questions on assessment (see below) that a shared theoretical approach—or even discussion of one—may seem threatening to a faculty member’s sense of autonomy, professionalism, and competence. That the majority of composition faculty at two-year colleges are adjunct, and that adjunct faculty overwhelmingly do not feel appreciated nor valued by their institutions (see Klausman “Not”) and thus feel vulnerable; such concerns raised by any talk of “underlying theoretical frames” are understandable, and thus may be part of a larger cultural, economic, and labor issue fissure. (136 emphasis added).

And later, I wrote up a chapter for Joe’s book on institutional missions in which I go further. I argue that corporatized academic institution constructs a division in labor—the “faculty-manager” and the composition instructor (though not the infamous “comp-droid” that Cary Nelson so unfortunately invoked). This class structure is at odds with the democratic principles we want to believe in and which we don’t want to let go of, in spite of all the signs all around us that such principles do not really reflect reality (see “Out of the Ivory Tower and into the Brand”).

But even more disturbing: such an acknowledgment might also challenge our unspoken beliefs, or our hopes, about our labor structures, that they are at least to some degree meritocratic, and thus to our own sense of self: While we want to believe that we have worked hard to earn our disciplinary knowledge and thus our positions (of privilege), we also know how fortunate we are to have such positions in the first place, knowing as we do the hundreds if not thousands of qualified people who could just as easily have our tenure-track positions.

So what are we to do? Patrick Sullivan writes, “To be uninvolved—to teach our courses, grade our papers, and go home—is to help regressive forces do their work and to support bad ideas and bad public policy (Newkirk)” (349).

And most of us are involved (otherwise, why would we be reading this blog?). We work directly against economic models that create labor inequities.

But we also work indirectly to mitigate the effects of those inequities, by creating opportunities for contingent faculty to become involved in the field, to become “full members” of the academy, at least as much as that is possible given limitations of time and money.

To do otherwise, we recognize would be irresponsible to those positions of privilege we may hold, however fortuitously, because, I would argue, to allow our fear of offending people, of violating our shared principles of respect and democratic ideals, or even further, of challenging our own identities as agents of equality, would be to do a disservice to those students whose educational experiences we have at least partial responsibility for.

In other words, while we’re fighting on one front against the most pernicious effects of a corporatized academic labor structure, we’re also fighting another front to get the best teaching and knowledge to our most vulnerable students. We can’t let our students suffer as well from an unjust labor system, even if it means we must give voice to ugly quotes.

Jeffrey Klausman has taught at Whatcom Community College in Bellingham, Washington, since 1996, after earning a Doctor of Arts in English at Idaho State University. As a composition instructor and Writing Program Administrator (WPA), his main area of research is how programmatic reform can foster student success, especially for systemically non-dominant students. His textbook, Active Voices: The Language of College and Composition (Fountainhead Press 2019), seeks to provide instructors of composition, ALP-courses, and first-year experience courses a foundation to teach in a socially just way.

Works Cited

Del Principe, Annie, and Jacqueline Brady. “Academic Freedom and the Idea of a Writing Program.” Teaching English in the Two Year College 45.4 (2018): 351-360.

Janangelo, Joseph, and Jeffrey Klausman. “Rendering the Idea of a Writing Program: A Look at Six Two-Year Colleges.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College, 40.2, (2012): 131–44.

Hassel, Holly. “Symposium: Academic Freedom, Labor, and Teaching Two-Year College English.” TETYC 45:4  (2018): 29-46.

Jensen, Darin. “Freedom Requires a Place.” Teaching English in the Two Year College 45.4 (2018): 345-347.

Klausman, Jeffrey. “The Two-Year College Writing Program and Academic Freedom: Labor, Scholarship, and Compassion.” Teaching English in the Two Year College 45.4 (2018): 385-405.

—– . “Not Just a Matter of Fairness: Adjunct Faculty and Writing Programs in Two-Year Colleges.” TETYC 37:4 (2010): 363-371.

—–. “Out of the Ivory Tower and into the Brand: How the New Two-Year College Mission Shapes the Faculty-Manager.” Provocations and possibilities: A critical look at institutional mission (2016): 77-91.

Klausman, Jeffrey. “Mapping the Terrain: The Two-Year College Writing Program Administrator.” Teaching English in the Two Year College 35.3 (2008): 238-51.

Sullivan, Patrick. “Different Kinds of Freedom.” Teaching English in the Two Year College 45.4 (2018): 347-351.

By Carolyn Calhoon-Dillahunt

As I begin my year as CCCC Past Chair, the last year of my term in the CCCC officer’s rotation, I find myself increasingly reflective about the organization and my time in it. This is my third time serving on the CCCC Executive Committee, having previously served in ex officio roles in conjunction with my elected TYCA positions. This extended period of involvement in CCCC (and TYCA and NCTE) leadership has provided me with many opportunities as a teacher, scholar, and activist. It has also given me a unique perspective, most particularly in the policy and advocacy realm, which I believe is integral to our work as teachers and makes tangible our work as scholars.

I have long been attracted to education policy, likely due, at least in part, to my personal history as an educator. I began my career teaching in public schools at the middle school and high school levels and spent the majority of my career teaching at the two-year college, educational spaces that are both at the heart of democracy and the center of public critique and policy reform efforts. My leadership work in NCTE/CCCC/TYCA paralleled the organization’s formalized effort to extend its role beyond professional development and into policy work, to, as former NCTE Executive Director Kent Williamson put it, find its “external voice” (qtd. in Risolo 24). Kent believed such a shift was necessary to engage current members, attract new members, and deepen the organization’s influence by protecting and expanding literacy educators’ decision-making spaces (Risolo 24), and I, then and now, embrace the organization’s vision of serving its members through policy advocacy.

During this period (beginning in 2006), I had several opportunities to engage in developing NCTE’s federal policy recommendations as a member of the NCTE EC Policy and Advocacy Subcommittee and to participate in NCTE’s annual Policy Advocacy Day, now the Advocacy and Leadership Summit, in Washington, D.C. As a member of NCTE, TYCA, and CCCC Executive Committees, I collaborated with my EC colleagues to create 2020 vision statements for each respective group, all of which included language related to advancing public understanding of our work and advocating for the conditions needed to do our work effectively. Later, I presided over the approval of CCCC’s new mission statement, developed under the direction of Linda Adler-Kassner, a statement which defines advocacy as one of the core tenets of our work. I had the opportunity to serve on and, later, charge taskforces with the development of position statements representing important issues to our members–statements members could use to advocate in their local contexts. I also served two years as Washington State’s Higher Education Policy Analyst as part of NCTE’s inaugural Policy Analysis Initiative, providing regular updates on state policies and trends that may impact teaching and learning, especially as related to writing studies. All of these activities reflect the organization’s commitment to advocacy work.

In 2014-2015, I was appointed as the first (and only) CCCC Policy Fellow, a position designed to connect CCCC expertise to NCTE’s legislative efforts and relay relevant national policies and trends back to CCCC leadership and members. At that time, the Department of Education under President Obama had recently introduced the College Scorecard (or PIRS, Postsecondary Institution Rating System), a system intended to tie federal funding to institutional performance as rated by series of “value” metrics, mostly centered on economic and credential-based outcomes. This proposed rating system provoked much concern from a range of higher education groups, including our own, and became a priority for CCCC during my term of service as Policy Fellow. I attended a hearing and met with representatives of allied groups in DC, participated in several online public forums and informational webinars, and conducted research and wrote reports and responses to internal and external audiences. At the same time, I led a CCCC task force charged with developing an “alternative scorecard” for composition studies. By the time the task force developed its initial draft for CCCC EC feedback, the rating system portion of the College Scorecard was abandoned in favor of a consumer tool, also problematic (see Toth, Sullivan, and Calhoon-Dillahunt, “A Dubious Method” in TETYC), rendering our “alternative scorecard” obsolete. (Admittedly, the task force struggled with audience and purpose throughout its truncated process: Who would use–or even consider–this “alternative scorecard” and for what? How would it be used? Key questions to consider when trying to communicate with or influence public audiences!)

My experience as CCCC Policy Fellow, while positive and interesting, reinforced several lessons about organizational policy advocacy work: (1) that, as a non-profit disciplinary organization, NCTE/CCCC is not nimble enough to respond quickly and effectively to the ever-shifting dynamics of federal policymaking, (2) that the organization is also not large enough, broad enough, or monied enough to wield great influence on federal education legislation, especially given that federal higher education policies do not directly address our area of expertise, literacy education, and (3) that the national trends and federal legislation that impact literacy education most often manifest themselves in state and local policies.

This does not mean there is not a space for organizational policy advocacy at the federal level. In fact, under the direction of NCTE Executive Director Emily Kirkpatrick, NCTE has made some important strategy shifts in its policy advocacy work in recent years, both in forming alliances with groups who share our values and interests (e.g., its collaboration with 87 civil rights group this fall in sponsoring full-page newspaper ads in NYT and Pittsburg Gazette expressing solidarity with victims of gun violence) and, more importantly, in positioning the organization as a resource to federal policymakers, as a “trusted public voice” on matters related to literacy and writing in educational contexts (“About CCCC”). This position is proving productive as increasingly lawmakers are turning to NCTE and its constituencies for information and feedback, including a request for a definition of writing instruction, developed by NCTE, CCCC, and TYCA leaders, to inform the statutory language proposed in last year’s proposed Higher Education Act (HEA) Reauthorization. NCTE also provides regular “Action Alerts” on its website, with information about legislative issues that may impact members and steps for how to take action, often by writing or calling their respective senators and representatives.

However, the organization’s greatest power in the public sphere is rooted in its members, most especially its members’ expertise. NCTE, CCCC, and TYCA members have long produced and shared the knowledge that grounds our discipline and shapes our practice through publications, collaborative spaces (e.g, conventions and conferences), and sponsorship and recognition of research. As I argued in my Chair’s Address (see “Returning to Our Roots,” CCCC, Dec. 2018), CCCC’s (and TYCA’s) particular area of expertise is first-year writing, the whole of it–all iterations (including dual credit courses and AP tests); its support courses, resources, and programs; the courses and programs it supports (including graduate programs); and related assessments. First-year writing is also the space where we have expertise of value to policymakers and other public audiences. CCCC and TYCA members have already had some success influencing national policy in relation to first-year writing; for instance, Les Perelman is credited with bringing down the robo-scored SAT essay exam (Weiss), and Peter Adams and his County of Baltimore Community College colleagues developed a new approach to developmental writing, ALP, that has since been adopted as a best practice by higher educational reform groups (see “The Accelerated Learning Program: Throwing Open the Gates”).

But we have not consistently used our expertise toward achieving CCCC’s 2022 Vision of becoming “the leading voice in public discussions about what it means to be an effective writer and to deliver quality writing instruction” (“About CCCC”). Despite our expertise and our rhetorical skill, we have yet to change the public narrative about what writing is, how it develops, and why it matters. That is where, as an organization, NCTE/CCCC/TYCA can help. It can support its members’ advocacy work by providing the resources and support members need to affect change in their local contexts.

NCTE, CCCC, and TYCA have long contributed to member’s advocacy efforts through the development of position statements on a range of pedagogical, professional, ethical, and policy issues. CCCC has a process for regularly updating its position statements and guidelines for creating statements that can be used effectively with external audiences. In recent years, CCCC has made a concerted effort to provide professional development opportunities and resources for members interested in advocacy and activism work. For example, at the CCCC 2016 convention, Linda Adler-Kassner featured a series of “Taking Action” workshops–”Naming and Narrowing,” “Building Alliances,” “Framing Messages,” “Influencing Policy,” and “Making Action Plan–to help attendees develop strategies for taking action. She later referenced these principles in her April 2017 Teacher-Scholar-Activist blog post, “Taking What We Know to Make a Difference.” In recognition that the role of teachers is changing to include policy and advocacy work, Cathy Fleischer developed the Everyday Advocacy website as a toolkit for literacy educators at all levels. In response to CCCC members’ growing concerns with working conditions, CCCC appointed Holly Hassel to serve as its inaugural Labor Liaison in 2017, and she has developed a collection of resources and serves as a contact for members dealing with labor-related issues.

Most recently, the CCCC Strategic Action Task Force, chaired by Steve Parks, has unveiled its “Strategic Action Toolkit,” a comprehensive collection of resources designed to “allow graduate students, adjunct faculty, full-time faculty, and program administrators to speak effectively to the public on the value of their pedagogical, curricular, and civic work.” Task Force members John Duffy, Eli Goldblatt, Laura Gonzalez, Megan Faver Hartline, Alexandria Hildalgo, Veronica House, Darin Jensen, Seth Kahn, Paula Mathieu, Jessica Pauszek, Donnie Sackey, Stephanie Wheeler, and Megan Opperman lent their intellect, experience, and labor to developing a robust website of resources, including interviews, informational videos, and links. According to the site’s “About” page, “[t]he goal was to support faculty and administrators who actively work towards the success of all students across heritages, genders, classes, and legal status.” The site is organized around the concepts of building (getting started), expanding (networks of support), responding (changing the public narrative), and mentoring (connecting with experienced volunteers). In addition, the “Now” section of the website features case studies, which will be updated periodically, of members taking action in their local contexts. The first “Now” case study features responses to the Charlottesville “Unite the Right Rally,” and there is a link provided to suggest other events and local actions.

The role of the NCTE/CCCC/TYCA, then, is to create a community of advocacy: infrastructure, expertise, resources, and networks that support members’ efforts. Change is, after all, a collective responsibility, so our professional organization can and should play a critical role in promoting and sustaining such a community. Additionally, because advocacy and activism are crucial elements of the work we do, of being a professional in this field, they are critical parts of professional development, which has long been at the heart of the organization’s mission.

As I begin transitioning out of my leadership roles in the organization, I reflect on the many ways NCTE/CCCC/TYCA have provided me with an advocacy community to support my work in context. Reading recent scholarship, attending conference presentations, conversing with folks who are doing work I am interested in, and keeping abreast of state and national trends and policies have been the primary instigators of change in my own classroom and in my college’s writing program–from piloting labor contracts in my developmental classes (thanks, Asao Inoue!) to implementing an ALP program in our department (grounded in CBCC’s initial work, but shaped by the work of many others) to overhauling our college’s writing placement (informed by TYCA’s white paper, CCCC’s position statements, myriad scholarly presentations and articles related to placement reform, multiple discussions with TYCA and CCCC colleagues, and the various reform movements centered of placement and developmental education). These local changes are making a difference for me, my colleagues, and, most importantly, students. These changes have required me to embrace all aspects of my professional identity–teacher, scholar, and activist–and have been enabled by the community of advocacy I have in my professional organization.

Where are your spheres of influence? What problems can you convert into possibilities? How can we, your professional community, help?

Works Cited

“About CCCC.” Conference on College Composition and Communication, NCTE, 1998-2018, https://cccc.ncte.org/cccc-about/

Adams, Peter, et al. “The Accelerated Learning Program: Throwing Open the Gates.” Journal of Basic Writing, vol. 28, no. 2, 2009, pp. 50 – 69.

Calhoon-Dillahunt, Carolyn. “2018 CCCC Chair’s Address: Returning to Our Roots: Creating the Conditions and Capacity for Change” College Composition & Communication, vol. 70, no. 2, 2018, pp. 273 – 293.

Risolo, Donna. “The Paradox of Power.” The Language Arts Journal of Michigan, vol. 26, iss. 2, 2011, pp. 23 – 28. ScholarWorks@GVSU, https://doi.org/10.9707/2168-149X.1796.

Toth, Christie, Patrick Sullivan, et al. “A Dubious Method of Improving Educational Outcomes: Accountability and the Two-Year College.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College, vol. 43, no. 4, 2016, pp. 391–410.

Weiss, Joanna. “The Man Who Killed the SAT.” Boston Globe 14 Mar. 2014, https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/03/13/the-man-who-killed-sat-essay/L9v3dbPXewKq8oAvOUqONM/story.html.

Carolyn Calhoon-Dillahunt teaches writing at Yakima Valley College, a two-year college in Washington State. She has been a member of NCTE for more than two decades and has had the privilege of serving the organization in a variety of capacities and is a former TYCA Chair and a former CCCC Chair. She has authored or co-authored several articles in TETYC and CCC, including the forthcoming “Two-Year College Teacher-Scholar-Activism: Reconstructing the Disciplinary Matrix of Writing Studies” with Christie Toth and Patrick Sullivan, part of a CCC special issue. Her particular teaching, scholarly, and advocacy interests lie in developmental and first-year writing and the related areas of placement and assessment. Believing in the transformative potential of educational spaces for students and communities alike, she is now actively embracing her college’s “equity agenda” and looks forward to presenting her college’s preliminary work at CCCC 2019 . . . and perhaps discussing it in a future Teacher-Scholar-Activist blog post!