Is Composition Student-Centered?

When I started college, there were a number of things I would have liked to write about--literature, history, language, culture--specific literature, languages, cultures. . . As it turns out, the university I attended had a few Great-Books-y dinosaurs on the faculty, and the Honors program coupled a course on the Literature and Thought of Ancient Greece (team taught by rotating faculty members) with writing courses appropriate to the level of the incoming students. Had you asked me to list all possible writing topics, this would have been close to the top. Though I debated in high school, raw politics (not political ideas, mind you, but "issues" and actual things people voted on) would be somewhere near the bottom, below bacteriology somewhere. In fact, I was that mixture of idealism and cynicism who didn't want her literature "polluted" by politics, in part because I had not been introduced to the idea that literary works may be considered as responses to the social and political contexts, as well as the intellectual currents, of the time period in which they were produced. (I was all over intellectual currents--which weren't the same as politics, mind you!)

So I wonder. . . If we asked the incoming Freshmen at a given college or university what topics they would prefer to write about, what answers do you think we would get? If we asked them what topics they expected to write about in first-year composition, do you think the answers would be different? And what if we said, "According to your goals for your education, what topics do you think you would like to write about in first-year composition?" What then? I suspect that some students in the first batch might answer politics--mostly those who already had some kind of cause to fight for. The problem, then, becomes that these students already have a set agenda, and they would not be writing to learn. They would be learning to write, however, which is presumably the goal of first-year composition. I'm not sure what the expectation of students entering first-year composition would be. Maybe I'll survey my own students this semester and see. If they have purchased the text, that will define their answers, surely. But if we asked the third question, the answers would not only be more varied, they would have more depth and be the product of real thought and consideration--that is, if taken seriously. And serious answers to this serious question would be more valuable to the student and to the instructor or those who designed the curriculum.

The question of "what students want" in a writing course is as difficult to answer as "what children want" from children's literature. They want to learn to write--we hope. They don't want to be bored. Not only will the answer vary from student to student, the answer, if proposed by a professor of English, is based on a generalization of students--we define what "the student" is, then we attempt to fulfill the needs of that theoretical student. Or, we start from what "the student" should be, then we design our classes according to that conception of the potential student. We generalize from what students have done in the past, and we try to shape the future students to avoid what we see as the shortcomings of those previous students. All of this is very dehumanizing. The question of "what students (or children) need" is even worse than the "want" question, since we are imposing some kind of lack, and forgetting to articulate the rest of the equation: "What do children need in order to become X" "What do students need in order to become X" and "X" remains the unknown--or the unarticulated variable.

Some colleges and universities articulate the "X." Their goal is to educate the whole student and produce well-rounded citizens. Sometimes it is even articulated further, according to the school's guiding worldview. There is still room for interpretation, but at least you can use this to guide curriculum development. The question then becomes the method by which we produce well-rounded citizens.

I have represented it in broad caricature in the past, but I think that the rationale behind the composition class "themes" that focus on political "hot button" issues is the idea that while we're teaching writing, we should be 1) keeping them from being bored by introducing controversy and 2) educating them into better/more responsible citizens by forcing them to confront votable issues. #2 is particularly relevant to college students, who will be voting for the first time. (As an aside, I was not voting age until 6 semesters into my college career, including summers--so there's that. . .) So the answer to "what they need" is "engagement with current controversies" and the answer to "what develops students into better citizens" is "ability to vote responsibly." There are other possible variations on this, and other possible answers that also involve social/political issues: they need to be taught about prejudice in order to avoid it and so be better citizens or repair the wrongs done in the past, etc. These are top-down conclusions. They do not derive from the students themselves. And that is why composition courses, or courses that address X in this manner, are considered by many outside of academia, and some within, to be indoctrination, especially in the cases when "voting responsibly" is conflated with voting according to a certain worldview. It is a fundamental disagreement on the role of college coursework in the formation of the student. Whether the student is being formed into a good citizen, a good scholar, a well-rounded human being, whatever the term of choice might be, there is plenty of room for disagreement on how to get from point A to point "X."

What about students themselves? Do they come to college to be "formed into better citizens"? I doubt that many would articulate that as a goal of education. We have moved a long way in the student-centeredness of the classroom. There are few courses in college that allow for student-centeredness in subject matter, except that there can be consideration of what knowledge within the discipline will serve "the student"--generalized, stereotyped, idealized or caricatured--best. Composition does allow for student-centeredness in subject matter, as it is very difficult to write about nothing, unless you are Edward Lear, or unless "nothingess" itself is your subject, which would make you a philosopher. Given that fact, one could either tend to the less substantial, to the "entertainment value" of the subject, though that could be made substantial if the entertaining subject were made the subject of serious academic inquiry in the context of the course, or the more substantial, focusing on what education on the college level is about. I like having students reflect on education itself, actually, as it is something that is very real to them, but that's not what I mean. What are their goals? Often, to get a job--or a better job--or whatever. That's fine. But in order to do so, they have chosen to learn, and learn in a particular direction, following their interests, or their perception of what is practical, or their parents' mandates. So we should either allow them to learn in their chosen direction from the beginning, allowing them to write about the subjects they have chosen to pursue academically, or we should bring them in our direction, showing them what our discipline has to offer and teaching them to write about aspects of language and literature. Some will argue that that's what rhetoric does, and on a higher level, I would agree. But not many first-year composition papers take rhetoric as a subject, and teaching students to employ rhetoric in writing about politics? I don't see it happening in 15 weeks. Especially when the heated nature of the topic obscures the techniques being taught, and alienates the students who did not come to college to write about politics--not to mention the instructors who feel the same.