I wrote this on this bus this morning, inspired by Frederik DeBoer's piece " We Don't, In Fact, Know What Works in Composition."
While a large portion of my teaching and research involves
the teaching, learning, and practice of academic writing (much of it at the
undergraduate level), I do not or cannot primarily consider myself a “compositionist.”
There are a two major reasons for this that I can discern:
1)
My academic
training. I have an undergraduate degree in English literature and “creative”
writing, and an MA in English, but after that I made a fairly clean break with “English”
as a discipline. (I’ve talked about thisbefore, but like many people who plant their flag in a vague territory called
“writing,” I’m obsessed with disciplinarity.) Even while I was in my MA
program, I aligned myself mainly with applied linguists even as I enjoyed
reading and writing things for more rhetoric and composition oriented courses.
Doing a PhD in language and literacy education and becoming firmly ensconced in
the world of scholarly applied linguistics and English language teaching (even
though, again, I primarily have taught writing
across my career) has made me feel more acutely the gap between what I know about
and what people who work in English departments know about. I went to MLA precisely one time, and even though there were people whose work I’ve read and
who you could say are somewhat “in my field” there, overall I felt alienated
and bemused. I will attend my first CCCC this year; I have a feeling I’ll feel
a little more at home there, but not as much as I would at AAAL, TESOL, or
(especially) SSLW. I commented at SSLW two years ago that identifying as a
second language writing scholar actually makes me feel more confident about
being able to fall in with various crews at different conferences. I don’t know
if I feel equally at home in all the conferences I go to, but I could imagine
continuing to rotate between, say, AAAL, TESOL, CCCC, and SSLW (with a side of
IAWE) for some time without feeling too out of place. (The ability to do this
is probably largely thanks to Paul Matsuda, who is active in all those organizations,
as far as I know. Matsuda is probably an unconscious model for many young L2
writing scholars, his prolific output and late-night hours notwithstanding.)
2)
My
location in Canada. I’m only now, after 6 years of PhDing at UBC and 1 1/2
years into my first job at a Canadian university, coming to terms with the
blessing (not curse) of working on writing in the Canadian milieu. At first I
was frustrated that in Canada there is not much of a tradition of “college
writing” in the way there is in the US, and that scholarship from Canadian universities
is rarely recognized by those in the US who teach writing to university
students. However, as I start to take another look at US-based composition
studies – which I remember thinking was remarkably myopic and US-focused, even
when I was an MA student 10 years ago – I’m thankful that I can do “writing
stuff” in Canada without getting mired in the kinds of political and cultural issues that US composition does. Not that they don’t do good or interesting work – many of them do – but many (not all) US comp teachers, when I encounter them at conferences, seem to have an interest in doing something that doesn't look all that much like the work I’ve been doing at
Canadian universities for the last 8 years. That said, work on academic writing
in Canada is – or can be – a small community under a big tent. There are people who do political and cultural studies work under this tent, and there are teachers of technical writing, and people who run writing centers, and applied linguistics, and so on. It’s my hope – through my recently begun co-editorship of the Canadian Journal for Studies in Discourse& Writing/Redactologie—to bring as many people under this tent together
as possible. I don’t know what this means for our relationship to US composition
– and I’m reluctant to use a word like “our” there or to even suggest that I
know what it would mean for “Canada” and “America” to have a “relationship” in
this field – but I hope to be able to play some part in building a small but
broad community of scholars who care about, among other things, writing in
higher education.
