Challenging Disciplinarity in the Writing Class
The CFP for the collection I'm editing, entitled Writing Against the Currculum: Anti-disciplinarity in the Writing and Cultural Studies Classroom dropped a week or so ago. The collection grows out of an article I co-authored with Rachel Riedner last year for Enculturation.
Since the CFP's gone out, we've gotten a few nibbles of interest, and a few critiques: One, from someone at the imprint publishing the interested series on Cultural Studies, Pedagogy, and Activism, asked me to think in more complex terms about how we're using Foucault on discipline to think about "disciplines." OK, point taken, and I'm looking into it.
Another, from a colleague at GW for whom I have the higest of respect, suggested thinking about ways that anti-disciplinarity in the academy draws on a much wider history of non-disciplinary activism outside of the academy. And that's a great point, and perhaps explains some of the reason why teaching activist stances in the classroom draws so much fire--because activism not only cuts across disciplines, but frequently rejects them as limiting. I hope he will contribute something, ultimately.
Another, from someone I respect immensely here asked me via email how we could challenge disciplinarity and disciplinary conventions when our students can barely even define the terms. At first, I thought maybe he was just being playfully combatative, and while his question doesn't shake my commitment to the project of this book, it forced me to think about how this project might translate in very very practical terms.
Obviously, at the highest level, the notion of using the composition classroom as a space to challenge disciplinarity has plenty to do with syllabus and assignment design, with reading selection, and with how and how much we emphasize critical reading and writing. But when it comes to addressing the topic point-blank, what do we tell our students about the disciplines, about disciplinarity, and about how to think about it?
With this in the back of my mind, here's what I did today in class:
Today I introduced their final position paper, an 8-12 page argument that takes a stand on the issue they've been researching (in this semester, one on advertising and branding), and argue for a change. There's plenty of apparatus to the assignment, including the research bibliography and an audience analysis. But I also hand out a sheet called "Avenues for Critical Writing" (I mention it in the Enculturation article). In it, I describe five tasks, intellectual activities to apply to students' writing.
We start by defining critical thinking, which they had heard of, but had only an abstract grasp over. Then we talked about how critical thinking might translate into critical writing, and what that might look like. The had some great ideas about not taking sources at face value, about finding their own voice and thinking for themselves, but when we started to talk about questioning underlying assumptions in the discussion, a few faces started to go blank. So we discussed the five avenues. Here they are, as they appear on my handout:
Interdisciplinarity: Sometimes academic disciplines (engineering, English, business) are so bogged down in their own way of thinking that they cannot see the benefits of other ways of thinking.
• Can your argument work across some of these boundaries between disciplines?
• Can you attempt to make new knowledge by crossing their modes of thinking?
• Can you use a variety of texts that represent many different ways of thinking?
Self-awareness: It is important to be clear and critical of your own background and position when you make an argument; you appear to be more even-handed, and better informed about your own place in the discussion.
• Does your argument acknowledge your own identity and the position that you are arguing from?
• Do you pay attention to your honest motives even if they don’t always make the most forceful case?
• Can you question the rhetorical tactics and motives of other texts?
• Does your argument avoid a false sense of neutrality or objectivity?
Power Relations: One of the things that we can use powerful writing for is to help level the playing field for the disempowered voices in the discussion.
• Can you look beyond the positions established by the dominant players in the discussion?
• Can you critique the positions of those who abuse positions of power?
• Can you open up topics of discussion that may shake things up a bit?
• Can you wrestle with some of the grey areas of the discussion, and acknowledge the difficulty of coming to a single position?
Papers as Critical Interventions: Some of the best arguments actively try to make a change in the world, either arguing for a new way of looking at a problem, or encouraging a bold action to be taken.
• Can you move beyond straight reporting into intellectual analysis?
• Can you suggest changes in the present and encourage future possibilities?
• Can your argument make a real world impact beyond the page, the classroom, or the university?
Historicize: Strong arguments show some awareness that debates don’t exist in a historical vacuum, that ideas change over time, and that our approach to them is influenced by trends in thinking as much as by common sense.
• Can your argument take into account the specific historical moment that we’re living in?
• Can you see the historical factors, like publication modes, influencing your research?
• Can you point out ways that the ideas, the groups of people, and the organizations that you are examining are parts of larger trends in history?
With the Interdisciplinarity section (I wasn't ready to introduce anti-disciplinarity yet) we started by defining "disciplines" which for them roughly translated to "majors." We discussed what makes a discipline a discipline, and began to think about how they might be somewhat limiting ways of thinking. I told a story about a friend of mine who was taking an MBA course in something International Business Ethics something. I asked him how much of the course took into account ethics of the disenfranchised, ethical conduct on a larger scale, not just "are-you-breaking-the-law?" ethics. His answer was "We kind of leave that to you humanities folks." OK, so there's a case in point where disciplinary thinking is limiting, and may make the world a worse place.
I raised another example of a Princeton professor I heard on NPR the other day who is a professor, I think, of International Affairs and Geo-Sciences. We talked about how he was uniquely placed to think across some of the boundaries in debates about global warming and international environmental policy. This was interdisciplinarity.
They were with me. And then came, "But the fact that he's such a unique guys scares me, because this means that most of the people thinking about global warming and international policy are thinking often in one vocabulary or the other--few people can think across those lines of discipline." This is why disciplinarity as an organizing pronciple is dangerous, I think.
I asked them to jot down in their margins what disciplines might have a stake in their topic. Then they brainstormed ways that one or more of those disciplines might contribute to the discussion, and then ways they might be limited.
"What does your discussion need then to bring it all together?" They were shocked when the answer turned out to be them--someone still outside the disciplines, someone not yet inculcated into a specific way of thinking. Sure, their thinking isn't yet terribly disciplined (in the sense of rigor), but it's also not yet deeply disciplined (in the sense of limited epistemologies).
OK, so do I expect a set of 22 groundbreaking activist, anti-disciplinary papers? maybe not. Have I persuaded maybe one business major, or advertising major, or engineering major to keep other ways of thinking in mind when they write their senior thesis? maybe.
And in my own little way, this is how I teach anti-disciplinarity to students who barely know what disciplinarity is, let alone its conventions.