Wherein the student blogs through Hairston's ******

The issue that Hairston raises seems to come up in any comp pedagogy discussion that I've been able to attend. Particularly in our department where there's much freedom in terms of course design, the "theme" vs. "no theme" debates have been fairly prevalent. Where she ends up, however, is strange to me, and seems to be so to several of the responders as well.

The idea that "we teach composition" has been something that I've struggled with for a while now. How do you do that? How does a teacher, "powerful" or not, facilitate the learning that needs to happen without content to do so? Her response seems to be, "yes". Then she proceeds with the multi cultural classroom where everyone is from a different continent and can write what appear to be personal essays about their traumatic upbringing. While she defends herself immediately on page 191, with "the teacher can easily design writing assignments..." in order to keep it academic as it were, I'm not sure that this really works as a defense. Yes of course, I'll be the first one to say, after Faith, that personal writing is important to the course. But the way that Hairston presents it seems so....not right.

My synopsis at this point is that, rather than having a preconceived notion of "we'll talk about a give cultural studies issue", the students have their share time, and then "we talk about how that illustrates a given cultural studies issue". Again, while I'm all in favor of showing the students more about who they are--that's how I tend to conceptualize my course, sort of a hippie-drenched composition as life--she seems to simply be doing the same thing that she says comp shouldn't do, only in reverse order. It's not that it's a bad idea, it just SEEMS underhanded, and I just can't get with it.

Some of the reviews take her to task for these things...she DOES seem to figure that the students can't handle topics to begin with, but rather have to be suckered in by their own experiences. While this may be true for some, this, to me, tends to show off her ability to generalize...again....same goes for the teachers that she takes to task. It appears to me that what she describes are not bad IDEAS, but bad pedagogy. GOOD teachers just don't shove feminism down their student's necks, they present it in a way that is useful, even valuable to the children...the same idea goes for any other topic, be it politics, rhetoric, technology, or culture....she could have been far more succint by saying, "don't be bad teachers."


*sigh* Have I said anything here? I should note that I used "blog" in the title as opposed to "slog" in order to include some sort of humorous bent....which seems like acceptable the thing to do when blogging. More later.