Those oh-so-overbearing Leftists

Wow – what a reading! To me, “Cultural Studies and Composition” was even more dense than “Rhetorical Pedagogy” and almost as ambivalent owing to the deluge of references and the disparate relationship between and among its theories and practices.

Most interesting to me are the reactions to the Cultural Studies approach, including the contending positions regarding Berlin’s ideas. Hairston includes Berlin in the group of scholars whom she accuses of “forcing leftist ideology on vulnerable young people instead of teaching writing” like Miller who describes the approach as “teaching ‘texts rather than their making,’ ‘awareness rather than rhetoric,’ and ‘the power of meanings rather than the making of statements’” (84). I found all this very confusing because, earlier in this same article, George and Trimbur tell us that for Berlin, “cultural studies offered a way to address such privileging of poetics by restoring rhetoric to the center of the curriculum, as an integrative method that emphasized both textual interpretation and production” (80). Hairston and Miller’s statements here border on alarmist, from both the expressive and current-traditional sides. Out of curiosity, I did a little research on both Hairston and Miller.

Maxine Hairston is a highly celebrated figure in the teaching community, is memorialized in a number of awards, and spent her career fighting for the ‘professionalization’ of teaching writing. She wrote the article quoted above just one year before her retirement, and it incited more response than any other that had appeared in the journal of College Composition and Communication. Interestingly, in her highly celebrated article “The Winds of Change,” she pushes writing teachers forward and offers twelve aspects of what she sees as a new emerging paradigm, the second of which is to teach “strategies for invention and discovery,” where “instructors help students to generate content and discover purpose.” So it would seem she encourages cultural diversity and urges instructors to get students thinking as long as it’s not about anything ‘political’ – good luck finding that combination.

Susan Miller has written a number of award-winning books and articles regarding composition pedagogy and related areas, one of which makes her statement quoted above especially surprising. In Assuming the Positions: Cultural Pedagogy and the Politics of Ordinary Writing in Early America (which won not one but two outstanding book awards), she examines ‘ordinary’ writing from a time when Americans “had access to literacy” but not to “national mass schooling” in order to present “how ordinary acts of writing simultaneously appropriate and mutate an expanding range of human identities that become available in specific cultures over time.” If that’s not cultural studies, I don’t know what is. Specifically, it sounds like Berlin’s social epistemic rhetoric which he describes in "Social-Epistemic Rhetoric, Ideology, and English Studies" as “the study and critique of signifying practices in their relation to subject formation within the framework of economic, social, and political conditions.”

While both Hairston and Miller have certainly done a great deal to assist in the evolution of writing pedagogies, it seems to me that they fail to grasp the goals and purpose of the application of cultural studies, foremost, empowering the student’s perspective and expanding the scope of study to include the types of writing with which students have familiarity. Although a cultural studies pedagogy could by no means stand alone (like any other pedagogy), it does not ask to. Awareness and inspiration are necessary for invention, without which writing cannot take place. This method descends from its high place to meet students where they are, demonstrate the value of their insights, and encourage intellectual curiosity, all of which I am sure Hairston and Miller would applaud.