LeFevre, Tenure, Collaborative Writing

It's revealing that when rhet/comp scholars took on the study of invention, they had to look beyond the "borders" of their own English departments. In her introduction, LeFevre discusses a first exigency for studying invention across the curriculum (i.e. "investigating the interelationships of rhetorical invention and invention as a generic study would . . .focus on invention as it occurs in and across various fields. . .to see what the modes of inventing [in those often scientific fields] may show us that would benefit the study. . .of rhetorical invention"), but much later (pg. 124), she reveals another reason (4-5). "While collaboration is more common in some areas of science, medicine, and engineering," LeFevre confesses, "English professors are uneasy about dealing with the issues collaborative invention raises" (124). I have known assistant profs, upon coming up for third year review, having to justify every co-authored item on their C.V. in terms of how much they individually authored or "created." A friend of mine was told she didn't provide sufficient evidence for her contributions to a co-edited anthology (I remember her worrying that her picture, name and bio appeared second on the jacket), but that this could be overlooked since she did have a single authored manuscript conditionally accepted (or however we term the "preliminary negotiation" phase of publication).

The point being: this was a university that fostered the same 90's era rhetoric of collaborative learning, alternative means of assessing ("The evaluation should take into account a student's ability to interact constructively with others. . ."), and, in particular, a "push toward interdisciplinarity" while still holding to its Old Skool emphasis on single authorship as pages toward tenure (132-133). I guess an added irony, then and now, is that tenure is not commonly awarded for "single authored" creations published in non-peer-reviewed journals; instead, a network of colleagues must be brought into the dialogue of a text (i.e. "here's where the scholarly dialogue has gone to date" as an opening move) and must weigh in on--offer editorial advice for--the same text before it can be published.

Relatedly, I agreed in principle with LeFevre's broad suggestions for how we might grade collaboratively ("socially"?) constructed writing, but I remained cynical about the paradigm shift needed (from the top down in university structures, English departments, etc.) to actually foster "a classroom climate in which it is in a student's interest to cooperate rather than compete" (132). I began teaching comp in what now seems like the heyday of collaborative writing and the social turn that is our focus. As such, I persisted with different approaches and assignments that sometimes worked and sometimes failed based on group dynamics and, often, students' desire for really specific, atomistic sorts of evaluations (the rubric as social contract?). Many desire assurances that they won't ever be individually blamed for the least of their members, for The Dude They Already Know Will Screw Up Their Group. I was hit and miss on the ideal rubric (not being a fan of translating "everything worth knowing" into "point totals"), but I remember having some luck turning their concerns into discussion about individual vs. collaborative achievement, about "creating in groups" as an invaluable (unavoidable?) life skill.

Maybe in class we can share a few examples of bringing LeFevre's view of invention into the comp classroom; my guess is that we've all tried something like it whether we had read LeFevre or not. I'll see everyone later. . .