Teaching Towards Authority

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Writing teachers, ourselves included, would be quick to describe Roger’s approach to this task as the more sophisticated of the two, but notice that Janet’s was by far the more difficult—she sought to extract truth on an issue that cannot be so reduced. Once this truth-reporting goal was set, Janet did not have the option of discussing these authors as individuals in her paper; she could not address the inconsistencies she noticed in the readings; she was not free to present an opinion or response of her own. Her view of the academic enterprise, and of her role in that enterprise, precludes all these options.

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At first glance it would seem that the solution, the way to help students like Janet enter these academic conversations, lies not in the writing curriculum but in the content areas. The traditional response to the problem of lack of authority is to try to increase the domain knowledge upon which authority is supposedly founded. Indeed, cognitive research has demonstrated the critical influence of domain knowledge on comprehension and recall (see Wilson and Anderson for a review) and on such components of writing performance as topic choice (Gradwohl and Schumacher), organization (Langer), and coherence (Newell and Winograd). Under the domain knowledge explanation, the novice’s poor command of the subject matter discourages him or her from adopting the sense of authority needed to question or respond to the texts of others. It is certainly the case that Roger’s knowledge of the domain afforded him great advantages in this situation. He was familiar with common assumptions and stock issues in the field of ethics and could easily draw analogies to related topics. But we oversimplify if we attribute all of the novice writer’s difficulties to a lack of domain knowledge. Simply teaching Janet more about the issue of paternalism or the field of ethics will not help her engage more productively with these texts. She is already sensitive to nuances in this discussion, as evidenced by her recognition of inconsistencies, and she already has a storehouse of relevant examples she could use to explore these issues. What she doesn’t have is an understanding of the academic enterprise in which this personal knowledge has value. When we argue that the remedy for students’ problems with authority is an increase in their domain knowledge, we implicitly accept their version of the information-transfer model, in which personal knowledge is denied.

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We would instead argue for the role of rhetorical knowledge in the development of authority. In order for Janet to take authority in this or any other situation, she needs to believe there is authority to spare—that there is room for many voices. She needs to understand the development of knowledge as a communal and continual process. Thus, an alternative to the information-transfer model would be to insist on more interactive models of education in which a genuine rhetorical perspective is not only taught but enacted. One such model aims to encourage and value students’ individual voices in class discussion, conferences, and written feedback, often restructuring the classroom to include peer interaction and group decision-making. The basic writing course developed by Bartholomae and Petrosky at the University of Pittsburgh, for example, explicitly aims to distribute authority more evenly in the classroom by having students decide on the topics to be explored, the concepts to be valued, even the terminology to be used—practices which require students to participate as insiders by creating the community around themselves, rather than trying to “break in” from the outside. Restructuring the environment in these or other ways seems essential if we are to help students come to see themselves as participants in, rather than observers of, the construction of knowledge.

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Students can also come to recognize that knowledge develops through conversation and debate by actively analyzing authors’ assumptions and motivations and the situations in which they work. Some pedagogies aim to develop this understanding through the rhetorical analysis of texts, others through self-conscious exploration of writers’ processes and contexts. Haas (“Facts”), for example, asks students to interview members of particular discourse communities about how they choose, read, evaluate and acknowledge other authors’ texts. Greene has students analyze citation practices, structural conventions, and other discourse features for clues to disciplinary patterns of inquiry, and encourages students to “mine” the texts they read for strategies they may in turn employ in their own writing. Grounded in both traditional rhetorical theory and recent sociocognitive research, such activities aim to create a context in which students see themselves as authors, reading and writing alongside other authors in the development of community knowledge and norms. In such a context we can build on Janet’s developing rhetorical awareness by asking her to look for places where authors are speaking to one another—that is, by placing value on those disagreements she has noticed in reading. Some recent instructional approaches offer explicit support for the complex task of negotiating multiple positions. Higgins has students study and practice the synthesizing strategies of experienced writers, which she demonstrates via think-aloud protocol transcripts of writers at work. The textbook by Kaufer, Geisler, and Neuwirth, based on the research program that includes these case studies, teaches students to construct tables of agreements and disagreements and then synthesis trees from which they develop their own contributions to the literature. We can build on Janet’s use of examples in this context too, by encouraging her to compare authors via a common set of examples or principles.

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Belenky and her colleagues report that the received knowledge perspective rarely persisted for long among their college-aged subjects, whose selective colleges provided the sort of “pluralistic and intellectually challenging environments” that tend to “dislodge” this perspective (43). The instructional approaches mentioned here are designed to create such environments in individual classrooms—to help students become aware of ongoing textual conversations and take part in those conversations. Helping students see themselves as insiders enables them to engage in types of thinking that are denied them under the information-transfer model. Only when a student such as Janet sees herself and others as authors negotiating meaning will she think to acknowledge and build upon the inconsistencies she notices, to use her store of examples generatively, to examine and value her own responses to the claims of others.