Peter Elbow: Activism in the Classroom

I’m not sure if it’s because I’m currently teaching Orwell’s 1984 or because at heart I feel as though I am a rebel of some sort, but I love Peter Elbow’s perspective that when teaching writing, a teacher should make the writer’s voice the central concern of her pedagogy in order to support the idea that writing is a “form of political or social activism” (Burnham 24). In addition to “being the change we wish to see,” Elbow’s take on expressive pedagogy empowers students to write about their own understanding, which will hopefully lead to action (either by the writer or the reader).

My question for Elbow and other expressivists, as usual, is can we effectively put this into practice in a classroom? Undoubtedly, expressive theory of composition is possible in application, but the classroom changes the context of writing. Most students don’t think of their writing as social and political activism, particularly when they are forced to write. Teachers can offer the students choice of what they write about, but ultimately, students still view the writing as an assignment, something they will be graded on, something that will be good enough to please the teacher.

As a teacher who values expressive pedagogy, I want to find ways to get students to think about their writing this way, so I read Elbow’s article “Being a Writer vs. Being an Academic: A Conflict in Goals” on JSTOR. Elbow writes his article in more of an exploratory style rather than an academic-persuasive style, which seems appropriate. He begins by stating his goals for his first year students: to help them feel themselves as writers and feel themselves as academics. Elbow then reflects on the contrasting nature between writers’ and academics’ attitude toward reading and writing. He worries that progress toward one goal hinders progress toward the other. Elbow then explains why he chooses the goal of helping his students to feel themselves as writers rather than as academics in the remainder of his article.

I look to Elbow’s article for answers to my questions: how can we as teachers get students to see their writing as a venue for activism rather than as mere writing assignments? Is it what we assign? Is it about giving them a choice on what to write? Or is it the context itself that will always hinder students’ from believing that their writing is anything more than part of a grade?

Elbow’s analysis offers a place to start answering these questions. He writes that when students play the role of academics, they write their analysis of a text to a teacher who has already defined his own understanding as right and the student’s understanding as wrong. The writing process then becomes the student asking, “Is this okay?” In this sense, teachers transform the process of “writing” into the process of “being tested.” In contrast, when the students understand themselves as writers, their subtext is likely to be “Listen to me, I have something to tell you,” for writers can often tell us readers about things that they know better than we do.

While I hope that my students can eventually reach the point where they see themselves as writers who have something to offer their teachers, I am uncertain as to whether or not students, who feel pressure from their parents and society at-large to attend top universities, will ever be able to fully look past the context of a grading system.