Assignment for Wednesday, November 19

It’s fairly easy to make connections between the Berlin article and the Hairston article. Berlin is reacting to a situation he has observed—lack of ideological awareness in the composition classroom—so offers three approaches and analyzes the role ideology plays in those approaches. By the end of the essay, it is clear that Berlin favors a social-epistemic approach that encourages students to be aware of the forces that are acting upon them.

Hairston’s article is a fairly direct response, if not to Berlin in particular, then to articles that run in the same vein as Berlin’s. Hairston disagrees with Berlin’s advocacy of including a political approach in the classroom, arguing that Berlin and others are using the classroom as a political soapbox, to the detriment of what she deems more important goals like students working with their own writing.

Trimbur seems to be offering a story with a wider scope than either Berlin or Hairston’s: he’s giving us a picture of education as a field, rather than composition, though he does refer to composition. There is less practical classroom application in Trimbur’s piece. I agree with Jess that he offers a “middle ground,” although I hadn’t thought of it that way until I read her comment, seeing the Trimbur piece instead as something that offers a wider view than either the Hairtson or the Berlin piece

One thing I noticed among the readings for today was the current of the leftist collegiate faculty and their differing views on the writing classroom.  On one hand, you have Berlin explaining that all writing instruction must be steeped in ideology.  On the other you have Trimbur wanting to step away from some of the current moves and re-introduce what he calls “vulgar Marxism,” and then you have Hairston wanting to step away from ideology and stick to teaching writing, due to a lack of scholarly experience in the areas that Berlin and others discuss.  However, each writer seems to write in such a way as to address the leftist college faculty.  This struck me because I have, in my studies, run into several rightist™ faculty and graduate students, who have felt slighted by moves such as those made by our three authors.  What are these faculty to think, or do, with the views of Berlin and Trimbur?  Should they be left out? 

P.S. I will admit that I found Hairston’s argument that we have little expertise in social problems to be persuasive.  I remember the one time that I was almost having to teach a World Lit course that included extensive Asiatic cultural readings I had no experience with (or ability to pronounce) and feeling terror at my unpreparedness.  I find that many times the same can be said for those who are approached with teaching cultural critique.  It is one thing to talk about critical discourse analysis on the classroom pedagogy level, and another to truly understand it and its many forms on an academic level.

Berlin’s “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class” reviews the three different rhetorics that were popular in 1988.  To him both Cognitive Rhetoric and Expressionism can be used to forward capitalistic ideals, only the Social-Epistemic approach ensures that students will be empowered and liberated, not only from capitalism but from their own belief in authority and their helplessness to change the world for the better. 

Maxine Hairston’s “Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing” responds not only to Berlin but to a number of leftist scholars who like himself are asking for the classroom to become a place of political activism, not just a place of writing.  She feels that by forwarding our political platforms, no matter how enlightened these platforms may be, we’re compromising the students’ rights to express their own opinions and to have a course focused on writing as opposed to politics, which we’re not qualified to teach anyway.  She argues that an authoritarian classroom is an authoritarian classroom, no matter how well-meaning and ultimately liberating the reasons for having such a classroom are.

John Trimbur’s “The Politics of Radical Pedagogy:  A Plea for ‘A Dose of Vulgar Marxism’” could be seen as taking the middle ground between both views.  He’s asking for us not to get too lost on Postmodernism and Postmarxism and to remember that aspect of Marxism that emphasizes the material conditions of life.  He asks us to develop a vocationalism that sees students as part of a consumer society but also as producers of the material conditions of life.  This connection, though, may be a stretch.  While the first two articles are directly linked, this one seems to be part of a different narrative. 

One seemingly obvious observation that I couldn’t stop thinking about as I read these was about the construction of arguments in such as way as to render the opposition not just weaker, but inherently inferior. Although this is of course the nature of argumentation, I rarely find myself in a position to so thoroughly appreciate both sides.

Berlin’s account of ideology in the writing classroom frames his preference for social-epistemic rhetoric as a natural progression for any intelligent person. It is more tempered than expressionist rhetoric and more practical than cognitive rhetoric. Although I found the expression “liberatory classroom” to be perhaps too optimistic a euphemism, his social-epistemic rhetoric, placing ideology at the core of the writing course, seemed nothing less than responsible and even-handed.

Hairston’s polemical reaction to Berlin is compelling for its vigor, among other things. Although I found myself often agreeing with Berlin, and was thus predisposed to be opposed to Hairston, she presents undeniably reasonable arguments in some of her less vitriolic passages – for instance, on page 184, “How easy for theorists who, by the nature of the dscipline they have chosen, already have a facile command of the prestige dialect to denigrate teaching that dialect to students.” Of course, if social-epistemic proponents truly live up to their own standards, they could appreciate Hairston’s apoliticized framework as an opportunity for deeper self evaluation.

In Trimbur’s review of five texts on “radical pedagogy,” his Marxist agenda is far from subtle, but by contextualizing his view against other specific examples, he permits the reader to glimpse some other views in a reasonably positive light. The presentation seems more moderate than the preceding pieces.

Berlin suggests that rhetoric "can never be a disinterested arbiter of the ideological claims of others because it is always already serving certain ideological claims" so that "instead of rhetoric acting as the transcendental recorder or arbiter of competing ideological claims, rhetoric is regarded as always already ideological" (Berlin 477). And while this is true, we are left to wonder about the transcendental nature of the study of ideology. I suspect we may find that instead of the study of ideology acting as the transcendental recorder of competing rhetorical claims, the study of ideology is always already rhetorical.

And herein emerges Hairston's critique which rails against the ideological turn as being blind to the full rhetorical implications of its ideological assertions.

And then Trimbur's analysis of a number of books strikes a bit of a balance between Berlin and Hairston. "Instead of assuming that these various pedagogies [asserted in these book] are political (as if to say the word is to perform the act), I want to ask what their respective politics actually consist of and how these teachers and theorists propose to intervene in the racialized and gendered realities of contemporary class society. In other words, I want to give a political account of radical pedagogy" (Trimbur 195). In a word, Trimbur is rhetoricizng these varied ideological approaches to rhetoric.

No rhetoric without ideology; no ideology without rhetoric.