When Concepts Collide:

Negotiating Ideas of Literacy Inside and Outside the First-year Writing Classroom

Organizer: Deborah Holdstein, Columbia College, Chicago
Participants: Jennie Fauls and Jean Petrolle, Columbia College, Chicago

In the December 2007 issue of CCC, the "From the Editor" column quotes Joseph Harris, who remarks “[T]here is a difference between teaching well and making a convincing public argument for what we believe.  And while the research of the last thirty years has indeed powerfully changed how many of us teach writing, we have in that same time largely failed to make a convincing case beyond the classroom for the new view of literacy that we profess inside it.” Perhaps this is why there is sometimes a gap between what first-year writing instructors consider acceptable academic writing and what colleagues in other disciplines expect.  For some compositionists, the traditional research paper is an obsolete form; websites, hypertext, ethnography, multimedia projects and creative non-fiction have become acceptable products in research writing courses. However, students are still expected to produce conventional research papers in history, sociology, and literature classes: and our colleagues in those classes expect first-year writing courses to teach students how to produce them. Traditional research papers teach students different forms of discipline and practice than other genres.  As we expand our concepts of what constitute acceptable forms for research writing, how do we make room for all forms of literacy?

Forms of literacy valued most in high school may differ from forms of literacy valued most in college writing.  Many high school writing teachers either teach literature appreciation instead of writing, or teach the five-paragraph essay as the gold standard of academic writing.  No wonder so many first-year writing students besiege their instructors (or WPAs) with the cognitive dissonance they feel upon being asked to use writing as an open-ended tool for thinking, learning, discovering and generating ideas.  No Child Left Behind, which has all public high school teachers teaching to the SAT or ACT test to keep their funding and stay off blacklists, makes the concept of writing as a multimodal, recursive process of thinking even more untenable in secondary education.  How should compositionists address the growing gaps between concepts about literacy current in composition theory and the concepts of literacy still dominant in the rest of the college curriculum and in high schools?

As multiplying concepts of literacy complicate the first-year writing classroom, many first-year writing teachers are engaging the question of how students strengthen the literacies needed for effective citizenship. The practice of civic engagement in the writing classroom further complicates the first-year writing course. At some point, we must ask ourselves: How much is too much?  Considering all the strategies by which we can engage students and all the literacies we can mobilize, at what point have we complicated our work to the point that our pedagogies over-complicate rather than enhance student experience?

The entire December 2007 issue of CCC grapples with this question, as do the participants on this panel, which includes first-year writing teachers, WPAs, a high school English teacher, and the Editor of CCC.