Joining the (proposed) CCCarnival on Sirc's "Resisting Entropy"

I want to begin by saying that I haven’t read the Miller book with which Sirc begins his lament. Nor have I read Teaching with Student Texts. I have, however, read both Hawk’s and Shipka’s books, and I think both of these texts point to a movement in composition studies toward Postpedagogy, a term coined by Greg Ulmer and explored by these texts as well as by Thomas Rickert’s 2007 Acts of Enjoyment. Like Sirc, I love the heart of these texts, which I think is exactly the “’seduction’” Sirc quotes from Shipka (513). Hawk and Shipka, like Ulmer, Rickert, Sarah Arroyo and others, offer an alternative motivation for composition: pleasure, jouissance. Sirc’s delight with these authors reflects, I think, a dissatisfaction many of us feel with the now standard critical pedagogy. (This, however, should take nothing away from the important, challenging work of critical pedagogues like Berlin, Friere, Shor. These thinkers changed the field, and their lessons, especially in terms of the need to rethink key ideas, especially teacher authority, are vital to the work offered by writers like Shipka and Rickert.)

Personally, I find Rickert’s work instructive here as Rickert argues not for a new pedagogy as we currently understand the term (an ideology that leads to a particular set of aims and inventive practices) but as an ethics of sorts. Rickert, like Hawk, I think, implores us to re-inhabit our pedagogy; for Rickert, this means teaching writing as an act with an eye toward pleasure. (In fact, his argument for why cultural studies pedagogies don’t work has nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with pleasure. He argues that students continue to be “duped” by consumerism not because they are blind to the problems but because continuing to take part in this consumerism yields its own pleasure. ) Sirc’s goal, like Shipka , Hawk, Rickert and Ulmer, is radical: to unseat process pedagogy as we currently know it (revision of an argument in essay form) as the only appropriate method of teaching writing. (“I simply question the process model and curricular aims guiding most of the pedagogy represented here” (517).) What Sirc wants is a radical reconfiguration of pedagogy.

And I’m on board all the way through Sirc’s essay. (Though I can certainly understand the negative response to his tone.) With stinging, sometimes acerbic wit, he takes us to task for our reliance on “a curriculum of linear reproducibility” (517). (This last quote is in reference to the scholar/teachers represented by Teaching with Student Texts but could just as easily be used to describe the curriculums of the field that Sirc sometimes despairs for in this essay.) 

Though, I suppose I should say I am with Sirc nearly all the way through: in the last two pages of his review, Sirc indicts “the sham of this all-too-common editorial board/peer review practice” and “a strangely stilted discourse cued to the grading-rubric criteria students are given (or generate themselves—it hardly matters)” (517-8). Here’s where I tend to get frustrated with Sirc (and, frankly, with Rickert, Ulmer, and others who’ve called for a radical reimagining of composition pedagogies): peer review and rubrics are, at least in part, caught up in the material reality of teaching inside a discipline and an institution. I’m not against changing these practices, per se, but we have to begin offering viable alternatives. The kind of pedagogy Sirc wants is only possible if we begin the incredibly difficult work of changing the institutional pressures implicated by these practices. Great minds in the field are calling for a radical shift; young scholars are listening. What we need now is a set of tactics and strategies for making these changes. Without those, this will remain a purely academic conversation.

One other note: Sirc, like many calling for a return to seduction, jouissance, or pleasure in writing instruction, seems to dislike rubrics. And I understand why; it’s hard to write a set of expectations/grading schema for pleasure. But rubrics serve an important role (beyond being wielded as an institutional sieve): they give students access to the discourse with which their teachers discuss and evaluate their writing. And having access to this discourse community has important implications for whether or not students can ever really have power over their writing in a classroom setting. If you buy Gerard Hauser or Habermas' arguments about the discursive construction of publics, the notion of a shared vocabulary is essential. (There's nothing to say that this shared vocabulary has to contain words like "thesis" or "topic sentence"; the only requirement is that the participants share whatever vocabulary is established.) Furthermore, at present, grades are part of the material reality of institutions and disciplines; giving students rubrics that allow them access to the vocabulary of those grades may give them power in the process.