Good discussion last week on Enoch. I have yet to make my contribution but will. I know you're all now working on projects and presentations. But do take a look at Gold--same plan. Read his intro and then choose a chapter.
I read chapter 3 on East Texas Normal College (and am skimming the others for helpful ideas for my project). But first…some business and a fun factoid:
I never reported in on the textbook I adopted. I checked the archives of the blog, and nobody else has mentioned this book yet: Practical Rhetoric For Instruction in English Composition and Revision in Colleges and Intermediate Schools by J. Scott Clark, A.M., published in1893. After discovering via the ancient UNM catalogs that this book was required for students in the 2nd year at UNM at the turn of the century, I found it through Libros and paged it. (which took less than a day to receive, by the way).
Fun fact about UNM: In a history student’s MA thesis from the 20’s, I found out that our second president, Herrick, spent almost all of his time in New Mexico (from about 1897-1904) living in a covered wagon and cooking his meals with a camp kit. A far cry from the lifestyles of today’s upper administration, for sure!
Which brings me to chapter 3 of Gold, which also looks at an institution with a bit of a rugged, (forgive me for using this word:) mavericky, unconventional history. Gold uses East Texas Normal College’s founder’s own story as a framework for piecing together the traditions and practices in rhetoric and composition at this school. Mayo eschewed so-called standard practices—the school’s catalog (excerpted on page 114) shows its disdain for the traditional governing practices by proudly proclaiming to have no board of regents, board of trustees, or board of directors, but only a board of visitors which includes anyone and everyone. The down to earth practices of the normal institution that Mayo attended shunned rote memorization, lofty speeches, and dry lectures. Instead, a hands on method was used, calling on the students to educate each other. The normal method also emphasized shorter sessions which were extremely practical for the working students it served. These institutions organically adapted to the communities they served. I’m getting the sense that there was possibly a tension at UNM between sticking with traditional methods and adapting to the community. Mayo had a firm background already in the normal tradition, as well as a commitment to his students and the community. This isn’t to say that East Texas Normal College’s instructional practices were completely non-traditional (Mayo was a total grammar nut, apparently, which became a strong focus of instruction at the school), there is still a sense of flexibility and experimentation with the instructional methods used there.
Umm….there’s lots more to say about this chapter but I’ll close here and look forward to reading others’ thoughts.
I also read Gold’s chapter on Mayo and found it highly engaging and thought provoking in terms of my own pedagogy. But first a few words about the introduction. I really enjoyed Gold’s work particularly for challenging current scholarly views on current-traditional rhetoric and the supposed belief that no real critical thinking took place with this type of instruction (3). He states his skepticism of “hegemonic determinism of institutional practices and dominant-class ideology” believing, as he notes Susan Miller does, that there exists “agency and dignity” among the students and teachers involved in rhetorical instruction during this time (8). Likewise he questions the “sometimes tacit assumption in the field that institutional and social hierarchies in themselves are de facto problematic or that our first job as English and composition instructors is to liberate our students from false, capitalistic, or masculinist ideologies” (8). Gold’s position certainly runs counter to positions held by so many in academia that any iota of hierarchy or authority is inherently debilitating and somehow “bad” for students. Because he’s more reluctant to draw boundaries “between conservative practices and conservative ideology” (8), I feel he is able to provide a more realistic (if one can say such a thing about historical inquiry) and complex view of education a century or so ago.
Related to his observation regarding the belief that our job as instructors is to dispel certain ideologies from students is his point in the chapter on the East Texas Normal School about student interests and needs. He argues that many parents (minority or working-class) “insist upon rigorous instruction in Standard English” for their children knowing that such instruction will give them more advantage in finding work (150). While I acknowledge the often problematic nature of such conservative practices, I also think it is important to recognize, as Gold does, that “if we wish to truly liberate or empower our students, we need to respectfully address these concerns” (150). I think we are all too often guilty of believing that we know exactly what students want or need to believe and do our best to push our own ideologies on them. While a liberal education is about being exposed to and challenging a variety of perspectives and ideas, we can’t loose sight of what the students really need. Indoctrinating them to adopt our special view on the world does them a disservice. Perhaps we need more Mayos (without the beatings of course) who “[insist] that students had a right to their own lives” and who use rhetorical education and its access to “language of power” to “ensure them control over their future” (151).
I read Chapter 2 in the David Gold book. Victorian values were still quite alive in America in 1907 (the year my dad was born) as the Houston School superintendent in his commencement address at TWU scolded women who set out to make careers for themselves. The belief that women should be “humble paving stones on the streets of humanity” was still prevalent. As suggested by Katherine Adams, the experiences of women such as Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir seem not to have been duplicated in American women. The reason for this is education of women in the American sector. Notable percentages of women were enrolled in college courses. I was surprised that women comprised 47% of college students in the US in 1920. Because of lingering Victorian ideologies, the writings of these women were widely circumscribed. A great battle was still at hand for the women in America. Those who wrote could not “write themselves” in the sense of the work of the Helene Cixous. Elocution was widely prescribed for women, while rhetoric itself remained on the sidelines. Thus, the “parlor training” continued. Women’s journalistic endeavors were limited, in most cases, to literary and theatre criticism. Gold’s study of TWU offers a overview of the education of the Southern woman, who may have been more conservative in her views, than women attending perhaps the Seven Sisters colleges. Gold points out that TWU was not producing suffragettes or radicals, it was educating women who manifested a sense of dignity and equality, women who could be independent if they so wished.
Firstly, I love how he works under the assumption that the prestigious universities are not the be-all, end-all of research and progression, particularly in the humanities. The whole idea that schools that are not listed among the elite can and do have something valid and new to teach scholars is refreshing. His premise also indicates that students coming from these institutions can be prepared jsut as well as, if not better than, graduates from more prestigious institutes. (I think maybe it makes me feel better about my own humble beginnings, actually ;). )
I read chapter 3 about TWU. One thing I noticed right off was the quote from Susan Cobb from 1915, which indicates a severe dissatisfaction regarding the composition preparation of the women entering C.I.A. She says that fully 30% of them cannot write a "clear, forceful English sentence." This statement, along with Gold's description of the "literacy crisis" of the 1890s, indicates that teachers have always been and will alwayys be frustrated with the students whom they are expected to instruct in rhetoric and composition. It seems to me that we as a nation are constantly in a state of concern over the preparedness of our students entering colleges, and I wonder if the notion that people "used to be more learned" is just a kind of nostalgic mentality people have, kind of like "people used to have better morals," etc. Maybe when we become teachers we just get less tolerant because we see more and more examples of student errors? I'm not sure, but either this explanation works (or some other, perhaps semi-positive one) or the inadequacy of preparedness among entering students means that our country is slipping into a state of rampant illiteracy. I've got to hope for the first option.
Another issue thati mpressed me with the college was their notion of home economics training. At first I immediately got my feminst hackles up at the first mention of the college's home ec courses, but then as I continued to read, I was pretty impressed. The students weren't being taught how to set a fancy place setting, but rather how to take proper care of milk products and to use proper canning techniques. In the days before refrigeration and antibacterial products, those skills were really important to know. Also, the approach taken to teaching these skills at the college was through means of instructing the women in bacteriology and chemistry so they'd know the "why" as well as the "how" of these techniques. I think this approach is one that should be taken in all subjects, particularly in writing; students need to know the reasoning behind their instruction so that they will better absorb and retain this knowledge.
I didn't get a chance to join the conversation on Enoch--so am posting a couple of thoughts now/here:
I’m so glad Beth asked for your responses to Enoch’s statement about her own teaching and that many of you responded. Enoch commits to teaching composition and considers the role an opportunity to enact ideology—this without bracketing the exploitative resonances that Connors too has noted. Enoch argues (perhaps not as overtly as I’m putting it) that one can accept the charge of the dominant institution—the mission, the narrative—even participate in it--and at the same time object, divert, resist, subvert this mission by all sorts of other imperfect means, which she elaborates in her 3 middle chapters. Here are some of the things these teachers do:
# 1—Teach differently/revise pedagogy at the micro, classroom level. This is what Valerie misses seeing in the Zitkala-Sa piece—a good healthy look at what Sa did in the classroom. Connors, argues, does he not that textbooks do not tell all--practice does.
# 2—Write and distribute teaching materials. Child revised dominant pedagogy by her selection of readings and went on to disseminate this new pedagogy by subsidizing the publication of her book and finagling to get it taught by AMA-and ATA-sponsored schools. This is not a small act if you believe that what students read and write is exactly how ideologies come into conflict, which is the premise of Child's work--that they should come into conflict. But note that despite the positive reception of the Freedmen’s Book and Child's innovative promotion/dissemination plans, the book ceased to circulate. So we are left without the ability to track its influence (why does Connors not mention it?)
# 3—Write about education in public venues. All three sets of women did this. Today, you have another kind of opportunity to enact pedagogical change or changes in how we conceptualize teaching writing: professional journals and conferences, which give the opportunity to air your views and practices before like professionals. Writing to the Atlantic Monthly or local newspapers accesses a different kind of public than that addressed by Child, Sa, Idar, Villegas, and Idar. Their publics addressed the non-educator public imaginary—or in the case of the chicanas-- the counterpublic imaginary--Spanish language newspapers.
Yet as your teaching stories indicate, it’s hard to push your ideas and ideals in your own here-and-now situations, hard to "resist"—and I’m thinking here of your getting constructed as the “mother-teacher” or your selecting readings that do NOT engage students as you had planned or that seem unable to challenge/accommodate the variety of student cultures that public institutions serve—all in the same classroom.
Some other important points to take away from Enoch: a) that the pedagogical work of teachers like Child, Sa, Pena, Idar, and Villegas does not appear in larger narratives on education and rhetorical instruction, which tend to be upbeat and self-congratulatory, b) that these teachers are not “pure,” uninterpolated revolutionaries. They accept in part the very constructions and instructions they then go on resist and revise AND that they return to the very constructions they have resisted. Sa sends her own child to a boarding school, for example, and Child uses the voice of the Northern white mother-teacher. In other words, they are, like us, complex creatures with complex allegiances to variant discourses. Maybe it’s their ability act fearlessly on this self-complexity that matters.
More on Lydia Marie Child’s Freedmen’s Book that may prove useful for your textbook projects (with apologies for lateness):
Enoch is clear that Child’s White Northern Teacher’s voice is not muted in this collection of readings. So her presence is not erased. Yet the mechanism by which students are invited to identify with authors and texts is precisely the provision of variety—-texts working at cross purposes and composed by different kinds of participants in public discourse—white, black, male, female, religious, secular and so on-—making different kinds of arguments. This “competing” arguments or “competing discourses” model is arguably the strongest inheritance from the classical tradition. Some will remember your English 542 studies—the dissoi logoi—where students of rhetoric had to take opposing positions on a given question (and these questions seemed trivial—but consider instead the method). Another example: Erasmus’s famous Encomium on Marriage, where he subtly or not so subtly attacks clerical celibacy was defended from mounting attacks by the argument that the essay was merely a “school exercise”—and hence safely innocuous (which it wasn’t). I love this story.
My point, however, is that historically rhetoricians have treasured the school space as that space where people practice engaging with alternative viewpoints. The Freedmen’s Book is much in that tradition although I would be surprised to hear that Lydia Maria Child studied the dissoi logoi. Maybe I sell her short.
In contemporary times, the study of argumentation (here English 102) serves this purpose. There has been a fairly strong movement here at UNM English to eliminate argumentation from the curriculum or offer it as optional—one of many ways to fulfill the university writing requirement. I feel quite strongly that English 102 IS the heart of the rhetoric curriculum. It’s just that “argument” is often construed by students as stuffing a paragraph with library evidence. Erasmus’s encomium is clever clever—as he devices a debate between a young man wishing to forego marriage and his interlocutors—so the arguments are embedded in dialogue and are worked through one by one.
So---as you peruse your textbooks, think about a couple of things in addition to the Connors’ lenses on textbooks, which we discussed in class: 1.How does the author address the student? Who appears to be speaking? How are students figured in relationship to the textbook author? How much social distance is created (how are authority structures figured?). Enoch, for example, claims that Child presents herself as the angel of mercy—that mother figure-- but we don’t see the actual text. 2.What other voices are present (say, via readings or examples)? 3.What are students asked to do that may be derived from the classical tradition? 4.What cultural assumptions govern the writing? 5.What issues in contemporaneous public discourse find their way into the texts?
Beth, What you say needs to go into a letter to the editor of the Daily Lobo or the ABQ Journal!
Fun fact about UNM: In a history student’s MA thesis from the 20’s, I found out that our second president, Herrick, spent almost all of his time in New Mexico (from about 1897-1904) living in a covered wagon and cooking his meals with a camp kit. A far cry from the lifestyles of today’s upper administration, for sure!
Paul, You're putting Gold in conversation with Enoch in a way that makes me productively (I hope) uncomfortable. I'm thinking about what Calinda (I think) said last week (or Annarose) about directing 101 students to write about their proposed professional interests as a way to circumvent the mother-teacher construct. So I see two strands of educational philosophy at work (and I'm certainly not the first to discern these): 1- Writing instruction for material needs--to be determined by the students' own agendas and serving their uplift aspirations, and 2 - Writing instruction in the tradition of civic engagement (which takes on its own character in a given era--currently involves intersections of race, class, gender, economy, green, politics, disability and so forth). I think Gold argues that these ARE compatible but I can't put my finger on where he says this.
Round two--lost the first message. I hope it didn't come across that I was saying we don't need to teach what we believe is important to foster a liberal education. I just recognize in my own teaching a need to be a better listener of what students feel they need to learn rather than my own imposition of what I feel is important. A healthy balance is needed.
I share Calinda's sentiments whole heartedly regarding Gold's view of more "prestigious" universities. As a matter of fact, I was in Boston last week and spend some time walking around Harvard. It is very easy to be enamored by the history, architecture, tradition, etc. But as Gold points out, there is a lot of good things happening on the state level and I certainly see lots of opportunities for us here at UNM than at other places.
On a side note, I also visited Fanueil (?) Hall and found it especially interesting in light of the readings we've done this semester about suffrage and abolition. Couldn't help but think of people like Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Stanton. A very neat place to be.
I apologize for being a complete flake and posting extremely late, and I realize that none of you will probably be able to read this before class today. Not sure how this happened, but in the midst of working on my rhetor presentation and other end of semester projects, I completely forgot about Gold until yesterday afternoon.
Calinda, I wholeheartedly agree with you about Gold's bringing out less prominent universities and the value they hold in what they've done for teaching work. Having come from one of the well-known universities on the east coast myself, I've found that sometimes the idea of "prestige" can actually hinder the growth of improved teaching practices. There's an underlying assumption that if you come from a "great" school, you should automatically know what you're doing, because you are good enough to teach at the "great" school. And if students can't adjust to your teaching practices (I definitely had an equal share of terrible as well as wonderful teachers), then the students shouldn't be at "Ivy-clad U" in the first place. When you graduate and go into teaching, organizations like Teach for America often prioritize the prestige of the school in their selection process over the applicants' teaching experiences or accomplishments. A diploma from Columbia could not make up for the emotionally draining environment of at-risk public schools, or the lack of actual teaching experience and training. I was shocked by my former employers' lack of concern regarding my own small amount of teaching experience when they hired me for their high school. My training consisted of the English department chair saying, "Here's your textbook. You went to a great college, you'll be fine."
As an alumna of a Seven Sisters college, it was impossible for me not to read Chapter 2 on a very personal level in terms of my own experience as to how much has changed since the founding of women’s colleges in the United States. I thought it was helpful and important that Gold noted our tendency to universalize women’s experience at the turn of the century with literary icons like Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf, while we forget that college education was more readily available to more women in America (64). Nevertheless, notions of women’s proper sphere pervaded curriculum goals and teaching philosophies at women’s colleges. The quote from Wellesley that instructed a young woman to be “a lady first and a college girl afterwards” reminded me of a 1928 yearbook I have from Barnard, which contains a good number of ads for secretarial work in the back. I was surprised to find that college-educated women were expected to seek work that would have been available to them regardless of their diplomas. (Incidentally, my college friends and I were shocked and enraged a few years ago to find that the idea of Seven Sisters colleges as finishing schools still holds even in the NY Times, which referred to Barnard as “one of the last ‘girls with pearls’ bastions.” This could not be father from the truth, but I digress…)
Gold discussion of the influential social networking at TWU resonated with me as well. While at Barnard, professors and advisors constantly stressed the importance of networking, as a way to combat the “old boys’ network” that had kept women of my mother’s and grandmother’s generation from the best opportunities. Even now, my inbox receives at least two notices of women’s “networking” receptions a week, for a variety of careers, and in many cases for older and younger alumnae (i.e., a “Women in Finance” luncheon specifically for the class of ’68 and the class of ’05.) Ultimately, forming connections with other women was and still is what fuels political and social change. As I'm reading women's periodicals for my project, I'm noticing that lack of ability of women's groups to unite for a larger cause definitely affected the delay in getting suffrage.
I, too, apologize for arriving extremely late to the Gold conversation. I'm pleased to report (at the very least) that I read Chapter 1, "Integrating Traditions." Gold sets up this chapter by stating that at the tail end of the period he's exploring at Wiley, a private HBC in Marshall, TX, the University of Texas was caught up in an anti-Roosevelt "Red Scare." His point, I think, is to jar our thinking a bit about our 21st century (and late 20th century) misconceptions about colleges and universities -- 1- all important "interesting" innovations transpire at the ivy league schools (a myth we've discussed already, 2-- flagship state universities are liberal (I can't think "Austin" without picturing a little blue dot in a sea of red), 3 -- that teaching practices (like ideologies) are monolithic and easily categorized.
Gold in this chapter focuses on a charismatic, charming, gutsy, artist-teacher, Melvin Tolson. Tolson is still a widely read and regarded AA poet, who is developed in loving detail in this chapter. Tolson was a strange mix -- a southerner who wrote about Harlem, a scholar who never completed his advanced degree from Columbia, a fiercely proud American who was a committed, vocal activist and social critic, a strict grammarian absent-minded enough to lose smoldering cigars and forget to wear shoes, an atheist who quoted the bible and defended Jesus' politics...in general, his students were terrified of him (he cajoled, teased, argued with, challenged, called out students constantly) and loved him for the profound interest he took in their preparation and education.
Gold spends a lot of time talking about the ways that many private, HB colleges kept the latin/greek courses well into the 20th century, and continued to teach a typically classical education. Tolson was of this school, and was himself a proud, expert orator and debater, who led the Wiley College team to national prominence. While "mainstream" white colleges reoriented their missions to reflect the needs of industry, Wiley (and its peer schools) saw itself as preparing a class of elite AA students who faculty recognized would either 1-- go back to their communities and be THE leaders, or 2 -- enter mixed society and have to be that much more educated, refined, tested, prepared than their white counterparts.
Interestingly, the atmosphere at Wiley (again, located in a small Texas town and largely isolated from the Marshall population) seems, in some strange way, akin to the "cinematic" atmosphere in small, coed eastern schools...the students were protected, faculty were extremely involved in student life, the dynamic seemed to create an atmosphere of intellectual vigor and collaboration , and to return to Gold's point at the beginning of this post, Wiley enjoyed a great deal of intellectual freedom where faculty, like Tolson, were able to organize and engage in activist discourse without threat of losing their posts.
12 comments:
I read chapter 3 on East Texas Normal College (and am skimming the others for helpful ideas for my project). But first…some business and a fun factoid:
I never reported in on the textbook I adopted. I checked the archives of the blog, and nobody else has mentioned this book yet: Practical Rhetoric For Instruction in English Composition and Revision in Colleges and Intermediate Schools by J. Scott Clark, A.M., published in1893. After discovering via the ancient UNM catalogs that this book was required for students in the 2nd year at UNM at the turn of the century, I found it through Libros and paged it. (which took less than a day to receive, by the way).
Fun fact about UNM: In a history student’s MA thesis from the 20’s, I found out that our second president, Herrick, spent almost all of his time in New Mexico (from about 1897-1904) living in a covered wagon and cooking his meals with a camp kit. A far cry from the lifestyles of today’s upper administration, for sure!
Which brings me to chapter 3 of Gold, which also looks at an institution with a bit of a rugged, (forgive me for using this word:) mavericky, unconventional history. Gold uses East Texas Normal College’s founder’s own story as a framework for piecing together the traditions and practices in rhetoric and composition at this school. Mayo eschewed so-called standard practices—the school’s catalog (excerpted on page 114) shows its disdain for the traditional governing practices by proudly proclaiming to have no board of regents, board of trustees, or board of directors, but only a board of visitors which includes anyone and everyone. The down to earth practices of the normal institution that Mayo attended shunned rote memorization, lofty speeches, and dry lectures. Instead, a hands on method was used, calling on the students to educate each other. The normal method also emphasized shorter sessions which were extremely practical for the working students it served. These institutions organically adapted to the communities they served. I’m getting the sense that there was possibly a tension at UNM between sticking with traditional methods and adapting to the community. Mayo had a firm background already in the normal tradition, as well as a commitment to his students and the community. This isn’t to say that East Texas Normal College’s instructional practices were completely non-traditional (Mayo was a total grammar nut, apparently, which became a strong focus of instruction at the school), there is still a sense of flexibility and experimentation with the instructional methods used there.
Umm….there’s lots more to say about this chapter but I’ll close here and look forward to reading others’ thoughts.
I also read Gold’s chapter on Mayo and found it highly engaging and thought provoking in terms of my own pedagogy. But first a few words about the introduction. I really enjoyed Gold’s work particularly for challenging current scholarly views on current-traditional rhetoric and the supposed belief that no real critical thinking took place with this type of instruction (3). He states his skepticism of “hegemonic determinism of institutional practices and dominant-class ideology” believing, as he notes Susan Miller does, that there exists “agency and dignity” among the students and teachers involved in rhetorical instruction during this time (8). Likewise he questions the “sometimes tacit assumption in the field that institutional and social hierarchies in themselves are de facto problematic or that our first job as English and composition instructors is to liberate our students from false, capitalistic, or masculinist ideologies” (8). Gold’s position certainly runs counter to positions held by so many in academia that any iota of hierarchy or authority is inherently debilitating and somehow “bad” for students. Because he’s more reluctant to draw boundaries “between conservative practices and conservative ideology” (8), I feel he is able to provide a more realistic (if one can say such a thing about historical inquiry) and complex view of education a century or so ago.
Related to his observation regarding the belief that our job as instructors is to dispel certain ideologies from students is his point in the chapter on the East Texas Normal School about student interests and needs. He argues that many parents (minority or working-class) “insist upon rigorous instruction in Standard English” for their children knowing that such instruction will give them more advantage in finding work (150). While I acknowledge the often problematic nature of such conservative practices, I also think it is important to recognize, as Gold does, that “if we wish to truly liberate or empower our students, we need to respectfully address these concerns” (150). I think we are all too often guilty of believing that we know exactly what students want or need to believe and do our best to push our own ideologies on them. While a liberal education is about being exposed to and challenging a variety of perspectives and ideas, we can’t loose sight of what the students really need. Indoctrinating them to adopt our special view on the world does them a disservice. Perhaps we need more Mayos (without the beatings of course) who “[insist] that students had a right to their own lives” and who use rhetorical education and its access to “language of power” to “ensure them control over their future” (151).
I read Chapter 2 in the David Gold book. Victorian values were still quite alive in America in 1907 (the year my dad was born) as the Houston School superintendent in his commencement address at TWU scolded women who set out to make careers for themselves. The belief that women should be “humble paving stones on the streets of humanity” was still prevalent. As suggested by Katherine Adams, the experiences of women such as Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir seem not to have been duplicated in American women. The reason for this is education of women in the American sector. Notable percentages of women were enrolled in college courses. I was surprised that women comprised 47% of college students in the US in 1920. Because of lingering Victorian ideologies, the writings of these women were widely circumscribed. A great battle was still at hand for the women in America. Those who wrote could not “write themselves” in the sense of the work of the Helene Cixous. Elocution was widely prescribed for women, while rhetoric itself remained on the sidelines. Thus, the “parlor training” continued. Women’s journalistic endeavors were limited, in most cases, to literary and theatre criticism.
Gold’s study of TWU offers a overview of the education of the Southern woman, who may have been more conservative in her views, than women attending perhaps the Seven Sisters colleges. Gold points out that TWU was not producing suffragettes or radicals, it was educating women who manifested a sense of dignity and equality, women who could be independent if they so wished.
Firstly, I love how he works under the assumption that the prestigious universities are not the be-all, end-all of research and progression, particularly in the humanities. The whole idea that schools that are not listed among the elite can and do have something valid and new to teach scholars is refreshing. His premise also indicates that students coming from these institutions can be prepared jsut as well as, if not better than, graduates from more prestigious institutes. (I think maybe it makes me feel better about my own humble beginnings, actually ;). )
I read chapter 3 about TWU. One thing I noticed right off was the quote from Susan Cobb from 1915, which indicates a severe dissatisfaction regarding the composition preparation of the women entering C.I.A. She says that fully 30% of them cannot write a "clear, forceful English sentence." This statement, along with Gold's description of the "literacy crisis" of the 1890s, indicates that teachers have always been and will alwayys be frustrated with the students whom they are expected to instruct in rhetoric and composition. It seems to me that we as a nation are constantly in a state of concern over the preparedness of our students entering colleges, and I wonder if the notion that people "used to be more learned" is just a kind of nostalgic mentality people have, kind of like "people used to have better morals," etc. Maybe when we become teachers we just get less tolerant because we see more and more examples of student errors? I'm not sure, but either this explanation works (or some other, perhaps semi-positive one) or the inadequacy of preparedness among entering students means that our country is slipping into a state of rampant illiteracy. I've got to hope for the first option.
Another issue thati mpressed me with the college was their notion of home economics training. At first I immediately got my feminst hackles up at the first mention of the college's home ec courses, but then as I continued to read, I was pretty impressed. The students weren't being taught how to set a fancy place setting, but rather how to take proper care of milk products and to use proper canning techniques. In the days before refrigeration and antibacterial products, those skills were really important to know. Also, the approach taken to teaching these skills at the college was through means of instructing the women in bacteriology and chemistry so they'd know the "why" as well as the "how" of these techniques. I think this approach is one that should be taken in all subjects, particularly in writing; students need to know the reasoning behind their instruction so that they will better absorb and retain this knowledge.
I didn't get a chance to join the conversation on Enoch--so am posting a couple of thoughts now/here:
I’m so glad Beth asked for your responses to Enoch’s statement about her own teaching and that many of you responded. Enoch commits to teaching composition and considers the role an opportunity to enact ideology—this without bracketing the exploitative resonances that Connors too has noted. Enoch argues (perhaps not as overtly as I’m putting it) that one can accept the charge of the dominant institution—the mission, the narrative—even participate in it--and at the same time object, divert, resist, subvert this mission by all sorts of other imperfect means, which she elaborates in her 3 middle chapters. Here are some of the things these teachers do:
# 1—Teach differently/revise pedagogy at the micro, classroom level. This is what Valerie misses seeing in the Zitkala-Sa piece—a good healthy look at what Sa did in the classroom. Connors, argues, does he not that textbooks do not tell all--practice does.
# 2—Write and distribute teaching materials. Child revised dominant pedagogy by her selection of readings and went on to disseminate this new pedagogy by subsidizing the publication of her book and finagling to get it taught by AMA-and ATA-sponsored schools. This is not a small act if you believe that what students read and write is exactly how ideologies come into conflict, which is the premise of Child's work--that they should come into conflict. But note that despite the positive reception of the Freedmen’s Book and Child's innovative promotion/dissemination plans, the book ceased to circulate. So we are left without the ability to track its influence (why does Connors not mention it?)
# 3—Write about education in public venues. All three sets of women did this. Today, you have another kind of opportunity to enact pedagogical change or changes in how we conceptualize teaching writing: professional journals and conferences, which give the opportunity to air your views and practices before like professionals. Writing to the Atlantic Monthly or local newspapers accesses a different kind of public than that addressed by Child, Sa, Idar, Villegas, and Idar. Their publics addressed the non-educator public imaginary—or in the case of the chicanas-- the counterpublic imaginary--Spanish language newspapers.
Yet as your teaching stories indicate, it’s hard to push your ideas and ideals in your own here-and-now situations, hard to "resist"—and I’m thinking here of your getting constructed as the “mother-teacher” or your selecting readings that do NOT engage students as you had planned or that seem unable to challenge/accommodate the variety of student cultures that public institutions serve—all in the same classroom.
Some other important points to take away from Enoch: a) that the pedagogical work of teachers like Child, Sa, Pena, Idar, and Villegas does not appear in larger narratives on education and rhetorical instruction, which tend to be upbeat and self-congratulatory, b) that these teachers are not “pure,” uninterpolated revolutionaries. They accept in part the very constructions and instructions they then go on resist and revise AND that they return to the very constructions they have resisted. Sa sends her own child to a boarding school, for example, and Child uses the voice of the Northern white mother-teacher. In other words, they are, like us, complex creatures with complex allegiances to variant discourses. Maybe it’s their ability act fearlessly on this self-complexity that matters.
More on Lydia Marie Child’s Freedmen’s Book that may prove useful for your textbook projects (with apologies for lateness):
Enoch is clear that Child’s White Northern Teacher’s voice is not muted in this collection of readings. So her presence is not erased. Yet the mechanism by which students are invited to identify with authors and texts is precisely the provision of variety—-texts working at cross purposes and composed by different kinds of participants in public discourse—white, black, male, female, religious, secular and so on-—making different kinds of arguments. This “competing” arguments or “competing discourses” model is arguably the strongest inheritance from the classical tradition. Some will remember your English 542 studies—the dissoi logoi—where students of rhetoric had to take opposing positions on a given question (and these questions seemed trivial—but consider instead the method). Another example: Erasmus’s famous Encomium on Marriage, where he subtly or not so subtly attacks clerical celibacy was defended from mounting attacks by the argument that the essay was merely a “school exercise”—and hence safely innocuous (which it wasn’t). I love this story.
My point, however, is that historically rhetoricians have treasured the school space as that space where people practice engaging with alternative viewpoints. The Freedmen’s Book is much in that tradition although I would be surprised to hear that Lydia Maria Child studied the dissoi logoi. Maybe I sell her short.
In contemporary times, the study of argumentation (here English 102) serves this purpose. There has been a fairly strong movement here at UNM English to eliminate argumentation from the curriculum or offer it as optional—one of many ways to fulfill the university writing requirement. I feel quite strongly that English 102 IS the heart of the rhetoric curriculum. It’s just that “argument” is often construed by students as stuffing a paragraph with library evidence. Erasmus’s encomium is clever clever—as he devices a debate between a young man wishing to forego marriage and his interlocutors—so the arguments are embedded in dialogue and are worked through one by one.
So---as you peruse your textbooks, think about a couple of things in addition to the Connors’ lenses on textbooks, which we discussed in class:
1.How does the author address the student? Who appears to be speaking? How are students figured in relationship to the textbook author? How much social distance is created (how are authority structures figured?). Enoch, for example, claims that Child presents herself as the angel of mercy—that mother figure-- but we don’t see the actual text.
2.What other voices are present (say, via readings or examples)?
3.What are students asked to do that may be derived from the classical tradition?
4.What cultural assumptions govern the writing?
5.What issues in contemporaneous public discourse find their way into the texts?
Beth--What a terrific find!
English Composition and Revision in Colleges and Intermediate Schools by J. Scott Clark--taught at UNM!
Beth, What you say needs to go into a letter to the editor of the Daily Lobo or the ABQ Journal!
Fun fact about UNM: In a history student’s MA thesis from the 20’s, I found out that our second president, Herrick, spent almost all of his time in New Mexico (from about 1897-1904) living in a covered wagon and cooking his meals with a camp kit. A far cry from the lifestyles of today’s upper administration, for sure!
Paul, You're putting Gold in conversation with Enoch in a way that makes me productively (I hope) uncomfortable. I'm thinking about what Calinda (I think) said last week (or Annarose) about directing 101 students to write about their proposed professional interests as a way to circumvent the mother-teacher construct. So I see two strands of educational philosophy at work (and I'm certainly not the first to discern these): 1- Writing instruction for material needs--to be determined by the students' own agendas and serving their uplift aspirations, and 2 - Writing instruction in the tradition of civic engagement (which takes on its own character in a given era--currently involves intersections of race, class, gender, economy, green, politics, disability and so forth). I think Gold argues that these ARE compatible but I can't put my finger on where he says this.
Round two--lost the first message. I hope it didn't come across that I was saying we don't need to teach what we believe is important to foster a liberal education. I just recognize in my own teaching a need to be a better listener of what students feel they need to learn rather than my own imposition of what I feel is important. A healthy balance is needed.
I share Calinda's sentiments whole heartedly regarding Gold's view of more "prestigious" universities. As a matter of fact, I was in Boston last week and spend some time walking around Harvard. It is very easy to be enamored by the history, architecture, tradition, etc. But as Gold points out, there is a lot of good things happening on the state level and I certainly see lots of opportunities for us here at UNM than at other places.
On a side note, I also visited Fanueil (?) Hall and found it especially interesting in light of the readings we've done this semester about suffrage and abolition. Couldn't help but think of people like Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Stanton. A very neat place to be.
I apologize for being a complete flake and posting extremely late, and I realize that none of you will probably be able to read this before class today. Not sure how this happened, but in the midst of working on my rhetor presentation and other end of semester projects, I completely forgot about Gold until yesterday afternoon.
Calinda, I wholeheartedly agree with you about Gold's bringing out less prominent universities and the value they hold in what they've done for teaching work. Having come from one of the well-known universities on the east coast myself, I've found that sometimes the idea of "prestige" can actually hinder the growth of improved teaching practices. There's an underlying assumption that if you come from a "great" school, you should automatically know what you're doing, because you are good enough to teach at the "great" school. And if students can't adjust to your teaching practices (I definitely had an equal share of terrible as well as wonderful teachers), then the students shouldn't be at "Ivy-clad U" in the first place.
When you graduate and go into teaching, organizations like Teach for America often prioritize the prestige of the school in their selection process over the applicants' teaching experiences or accomplishments. A diploma from Columbia could not make up for the emotionally draining environment of at-risk public schools, or the lack of actual teaching experience and training. I was shocked by my former employers' lack of concern regarding my own small amount of teaching experience when they hired me for their high school. My training consisted of the English department chair saying, "Here's your textbook. You went to a great college, you'll be fine."
As an alumna of a Seven Sisters college, it was impossible for me not to read Chapter 2 on a very personal level in terms of my own experience as to how much has changed since the founding of women’s colleges in the United States. I thought it was helpful and important that Gold noted our tendency to universalize women’s experience at the turn of the century with literary icons like Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf, while we forget that college education was more readily available to more women in America (64). Nevertheless, notions of women’s proper sphere pervaded curriculum goals and teaching philosophies at women’s colleges. The quote from Wellesley that instructed a young woman to be “a lady first and a college girl afterwards” reminded me of a 1928 yearbook I have from Barnard, which contains a good number of ads for secretarial work in the back. I was surprised to find that college-educated women were expected to seek work that would have been available to them regardless of their diplomas. (Incidentally, my college friends and I were shocked and enraged a few years ago to find that the idea of Seven Sisters colleges as finishing schools still holds even in the NY Times, which referred to Barnard as “one of the last ‘girls with pearls’ bastions.” This could not be father from the truth, but I digress…)
Gold discussion of the influential social networking at TWU resonated with me as well. While at Barnard, professors and advisors constantly stressed the importance of networking, as a way to combat the “old boys’ network” that had kept women of my mother’s and grandmother’s generation from the best opportunities. Even now, my inbox receives at least two notices of women’s “networking” receptions a week, for a variety of careers, and in many cases for older and younger alumnae (i.e., a “Women in Finance” luncheon specifically for the class of ’68 and the class of ’05.) Ultimately, forming connections with other women was and still is what fuels political and social change. As I'm reading women's periodicals for my project, I'm noticing that lack of ability of women's groups to unite for a larger cause definitely affected the delay in getting suffrage.
Greetings!
I, too, apologize for arriving extremely late to the Gold conversation. I'm pleased to report (at the very least) that I read Chapter 1, "Integrating Traditions." Gold sets up this chapter by stating that at the tail end of the period he's exploring at Wiley, a private HBC in Marshall, TX, the University of Texas was caught up in an anti-Roosevelt "Red Scare." His point, I think, is to jar our thinking a bit about our 21st century (and late 20th century) misconceptions about colleges and universities -- 1- all important "interesting" innovations transpire at the ivy league schools (a myth we've discussed already, 2-- flagship state universities are liberal (I can't think "Austin" without picturing a little blue dot in a sea of red), 3 -- that teaching practices (like ideologies) are monolithic and easily categorized.
Gold in this chapter focuses on a charismatic, charming, gutsy, artist-teacher, Melvin Tolson. Tolson is still a widely read and regarded AA poet, who is developed in loving detail in this chapter. Tolson was a strange mix -- a southerner who wrote about Harlem, a scholar who never completed his advanced degree from Columbia, a fiercely proud American who was a committed, vocal activist and social critic, a strict grammarian absent-minded enough to lose smoldering cigars and forget to wear shoes, an atheist who quoted the bible and defended Jesus' politics...in general, his students were terrified of him (he cajoled, teased, argued with, challenged, called out students constantly) and loved him for the profound interest he took in their preparation and education.
Gold spends a lot of time talking about the ways that many private, HB colleges kept the latin/greek courses well into the 20th century, and continued to teach a typically classical education. Tolson was of this school, and was himself a proud, expert orator and debater, who led the Wiley College team to national prominence. While "mainstream" white colleges reoriented their missions to reflect the needs of industry, Wiley (and its peer schools) saw itself as preparing a class of elite AA students who faculty recognized would either 1-- go back to their communities and be THE leaders, or 2 -- enter mixed society and have to be that much more educated, refined, tested, prepared than their white counterparts.
Interestingly, the atmosphere at Wiley (again, located in a small Texas town and largely isolated from the Marshall population) seems, in some strange way, akin to the "cinematic" atmosphere in small, coed eastern schools...the students were protected, faculty were extremely involved in student life, the dynamic seemed to create an atmosphere of intellectual vigor and collaboration , and to return to Gold's point at the beginning of this post, Wiley enjoyed a great deal of intellectual freedom where faculty, like Tolson, were able to organize and engage in activist discourse without threat of losing their posts.
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