Kathryn
Alexander
Simon Fraser University
kalexand@sfu.ca |
Those
of us taking up these roles occupy an unstable niche that is neither
outside nor genuinely inside the academic
power structure but mixes features of both. More truly marginal than
in the feminist sense, we are like animals of the tidal zone, neither
sea nor land creatures. This is not feminization as we have known it,
is the liminal condition we live in.…” (Louise Wetherbee
Phelps, 1995, Becoming a Warrior: Lessons of the Feminist Workplace)
This paper briefly
explores how becoming described as a “writing
lady” at the university can make the politics of gender relations,
disciplinarity and textual mediation in the academy visible as a site
for critical analysis . I will argue that certain junctions of our relationships
to being a “knower” or one who “professes” has
a great deal to do with how we are institutionally positioned in the
power relations of the University. The term “writing lady” also
provides a means to explore how emergent speech genres concerning the
roles of those involved in the implementation of writing-intensive learning
in my institution revealed the “gender technologies” of identity
formation and the marginalization of teaching and writing specialists
as non-skilled contingent labour within the academy. My analysis is informed
by questions from a range of theoretical frameworks: the institutional
ethnography methodology of feminist sociologist Dorothy E. Smith (i.e.
what kind of work does the social text and discursive relations of “writing-lady” accomplish?);
new rhetoric and genre theory analysis as modeled by Bazerman, Russell,
and Prior among others (i.e. how are selves/communities of practice mediated
by genre systems?); feminist rhetorical studies on gender roles in composition
studies (i.e. who does the work of teaching composition and what is their
status in the academy?) (Schell, 1999; Enos 1996, Wetherbee Phelps, 1995,
Schell and Lambert-Stock, 2004), and finally the emergent field of the
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, (how do we make the scholarship
embodied in good teaching visible to the academy?) (Boyer, 1990; Huber
and Taylor, 2005; Bazerman, 2002).
In 2002, I was hired as Limited term Faculty in the newly established
Centre for Writing-Intensive Learning or CWIL. The mandate of our Centre
was as follows:
The purpose of the
Centre for Writing-Intensive Learning is to naturalize the use of writing
as constitutive of the teaching and learning culture
in the university and to foster students' knowledge and skills as
writers. … The
Centre will collaborate with faculty and departments to assess the
implementation of new or modified approaches to the uses and teaching
of writing. Information
from such assessment will be used to influence future instruction,
develop new strategies and propose new outcomes. (italics my emphasis)
As a newly minted
PhD, with a specialization in curriculum and implementation, genre
theory and academic writing, I experienced a brief interval
of being referred to as “Dr.” after I began to work
at CWIL but soon noticed the disappearance of the “Dr.” salutation.
For example, in our first year, during a public forum introducing
the “W” implementation
process to the University community, all of the faculty members
serving on committees such as the writing support group and the
university implementation
task force were identified on the program as Professor’s
or Dr.’s
so and so from their respective departments. However, my colleague
and myself were identified on the written agenda by our first names
and as
being from the “Writing Centre.” Curiously, we did
not work in a writing centre; our Centre was located in the Faculty
of
Arts, where
we had departmental appointments and we had the same alphabet letters
after our names as the other people.
Over the following
year, I began to notice in the post- course surveys and course evaluations,
and in emails, students began to
refer to
us by our first names, or as the “writing ladies” or “the
CWIL ladies.” Finally, when a good (female) colleague from the
natural sciences jokingly referred to us in her class as “the writing
ladies,” I knew that I was onto to a peculiar kind of phenomenon.
The term “writing ladies” had become common-place, signifying
that a new speech genre was emerging around the implementation of writing-intensive
learning curriculum across the university community. Obviously it didn’t
help that all three faculty in the Centre were women, and if we had a
male colleague perhaps we would not have been called the ‘writing
ladies.” However, Louise Wetherbee Phelps suggests that
even men and women in leadership roles as Directors, Chairs or
Writing Program
Administrators face the same problem as representatives of a
feminized discipline (Phelps, 1995, 291).
Taking up the methodology
of institutional ethnography, it is useful to look at the language
in use that a particular discourse
or a
social text accomplishes in an institutional space. A central
feature of
institutional ethnography is its orientation of inquiry around
issues, concerns or
problems that are real for people, “from the standpoint of their
experience in and of the actualities of their everyday living” (Smith,
2002, 18). What does becoming described as “a writing lady” imply
for a non-tenured female academic working for a trans-disciplinary
service mandate?
I will suggest that
the received perception about the value of the teaching of writing
is an inherent contradiction about
the way writing
actually
functions within the institution. Writing is the core activity
of the academy. Academic writing is intimately tied to the
dissemination of
disciplinary knowledge, the educating and apprenticeship
of novice scholars into the cultural ways of knowing, and is
the primary
vehicle
for obtaining
funding and credentialing students, graduates, researchers
and faculty alike.
The institutional
documentary writing of the University provides the material means by
which we are all “text trade workers” in
the knowledge economy. Thus, the invisibility of the everyday actuality
of the organizing capacities of textual practices at the university is
enormously significant when we examine who does the work of teaching
writing, how writing in the disciplines is understood, and how that work
is valued. Recently, there has been a galvanized effort from within the
field of rhetoric and composition to reclaim the work of teaching writing,
the textual dynamics of institutions, and the study of writing as “intellectual
work.” Charles Bazerman observes
In short, the study
of writing is a major subset of the study of human consciousness, institutions,
practice,
and development
over
the last
five millennia: and composition – the learning
and teaching of writing—is in the middle of all
that. It appears, then, that composition is a serious
intellectual endeavor
(Bazerman,
20002, 35).
Institutional Ethnography:
Tracing the work of “writing-ladies”
Feminist institutional
ethnography as described by Dorothy Smith always asks us to start from
the standpoint
of our experience. When I started
to work in CWIL, I thought that it would be difficult to “not explicitly
profess” my own research, or teach in my own classroom, but I didn’t
think that my identity as a “scholar” would be virtually
erased. I did not anticipate the degree that the social hierarchy of
the University would construct our work as skill-based, transparent,
and belonging in the realm of the maternal domestic labour of the academy.
Interestingly, I do not teach writing. Most of my work consists of a
kind of faculty development and curriculum inquiry based on consultation
with faculty members in the site of their teaching practices. Nevertheless,
I’ve acquired an institutional identity as a non-disciplinary practitioner,
in other words, a “writing lady.”
In their recent text
Moving A Mountain: Transforming The Role Of Contingent Faculty
In Composition Studies And Higher Education (2002), Eileen E. Schell
and Patricia Lambert Stock have described this phenomenon in larger systemic
terms as the “trifurcation” of higher education with a core tenured/tenure
track faculty, the off-track full-time faculty, and the part-time/adjunct faculty
(2002, 5). They suggest that it is ironic that just as higher education has
become increasingly democratic, admitting “millions of minorities, women,
older students, low-income persons, the handicapped, and other non-traditional
students”….academic hiring practices have become increasingly
undemocratic (Bowen and Shuster, 1986 , 9, cited in Enos and Lambert-Stock,
2002, 5).
I will develop three
plausible strands of analysis to discuss the discursive work that such
an identity reveals. First, being identified
as “a writing
lady” may have occurred because we are non-tenured faculty in an
ad-hoc centre that did not belong to a specified academic department and
this may
have contributed to the perception that we were not engaged in scholarly
research or teaching when we worked with faculty members. Our consultative
collaborations
with faculty necessitated that our collective PhD’s were sublimated
when we were in the contact zones of their classrooms where it was NOT
our role
to be the content experts. However, the valence of gender relations in
the feminized fields of teaching (education) and writing (composition)
may have
amplified the perception that we were helping out with the domestic labour
of teaching writing.
Eileen Schell’s
text, Gypsy Academics and Mother-Teachers (1999) discusses at length
the metaphor of teaching and writing instruction as the domestic
work of the academy, as well as reasons for the disproportionate numbers
of women who comprise the ranks of non-tenured, temporary writing instructors.
Citing Sue Ellen Holbrook who wrote a landmark article “Women’s
Work: The Feminizing of Composition” (1991), Schell writes, “writing
instruction has been referred to as “women’s work” because
it fits the criteria for occupations traditionally defined as “female”:
It employs a disproportionate number of women; it has a service ethos;
it pays less than teaching literature, “it is devalued” (8).
Writing ladies are definitely not knowledge makers even though we are
visibly engaging the
discourses of the discipline alongside the faculty member, TA’s
and students. The incompatibility of a multi-disciplinary collaborative
and egalitarian model
of instruction in the typical university classroom or lecture hall contributes
to the “physics law” of traditional professing – there
can only be one authoritative voice in an instructional space. Further
taking up
the analysis suggested by the epigraph by Louise Wetherbee Phelps, I
realized that many students and faculty lacked an understanding of our
roles in a larger
institutional context – we were liminal “neither outside
nor genuinely inside the academic power structures.” If we were
simply not “professing,” what
were we doing?
Figure 1. Writing-Intensive Learning Activity System: meta-genres, micro-genres,
students, Faculty and CWIL
(See Figure 1.) This
figure demonstrates the web of textual, inter-textual, discursive and
genre
activities systems that attend the activity of implementing
writing-intensive learning in a course. I developed this schematic to
make sense of how my Centre was situated in the textual dynamics of the
new “W” implementation process. As this figure suggests,
we are working in the contact zones between the activity systems of Faculty,
students and the larger meta-genre systems of the University. Mary Louis
Pratt’s well cited concept suggests that a contact zone is a “social
space where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often
in contexts of high asymmetrical relations of power” (34) and in
particular, that the “idea of the contact zone is intended in part
to contrast with the ideas of the community that underlie much of the
thinking that gets done in the academy” (37).
In figure 1, the
balloons labeled meta-genres illustrate that while we are informed
by our individualized disciplinary backgrounds
and the micro-context
of a particular course curriculum – the larger institutional
structures such as university policy, faculty governance, promotion
and tenure intersect
and mediate how we can articulate our authority because of our roles
and activities in the service, teaching and research continuum of academic
labour. Our scholarly and pedagogical interventions in other faculty
members’ disciplinary spaces are realised through collaboratively
negotiated micro-genres such as writing-intensive course assignments,
informal writing assignments, shifts in classroom discourse about the
teaching and learning of writing in the discipline, and the acquisition
of new practices and speech genres about writing, teaching and learning.
These in turn are mediated somewhat invisibly by the larger meta-genres
of the University (University undergraduate curriculum taskforce policy,
department guidelines, disciplinary histories, proscriptions and beliefs
about writing and teaching). Beyond this drawing, are the larger social
discursive networks that shape social life in institutional contexts,
the individual and collective identities of students and faculty members
and the purported role of the comprehensive university in the development
of democratic citizenry.
Liminality and working language: the fine print
When I began
research for my original presentation on the role of women in the academy
I
went to the Centre’s web site and re-read the
fine print of the mandate that we had carefully crafted and made
a list of the verbs that described our activities in the larger university
community.
The verbs in the mandate of our Schedule A Centre read: meet, mentor,
train, provide, offer, offer, offer, house, document, assess, offer,
offer, conduct, publish, provide, coordinate, collaborate, research,
develop, provide.
I was surprised to
see how much of the language that described our Centre’s
activities obscured the intellectual and research expertise
of the Centre. The verbs of the published mandate mainly suggest the
provision of resources
and assistance and they are collocates of service, not research
or inquiry. Inside the Centre, we interpreted our role as primarily
focused on cross-disciplinary
pedagogical research and collaboration; consultation and faculty
development, research about writing, assessment and implementation
of new curricula
and pedagogies in the various departments. ‘Consult,
teach, research and assess;’ these were the academic
practices that I had been trained to do and be as a PhD. The
helping and facilitative metaphors
that described our activities modulated the inherently transformative
social action of our mandate. The active social science verbs
of academic agency such as implement, test, inquire, deconstruct,
reconceptualize,
investigate, explore, interrogate, critique were absent or
minimized. Rather, the work as described and the language in
use obliterated an
authoritative traditional academic institutional identity,
one that could have been assigned to the trans-disciplinary
university curriculum implementation
process that we were mandated to develop but wasn’t.
In subsequent years, during debates about the long-term academic
positioning
of the faculty of the Centre in the University, we have been
pressured to move
into the professional union, identify with service and management
roles, or to defend how our work justifies ongoing academic
appointments. The
language in use does indeed mediate academic positioning and
instantiates the intentions of the institutional relations
of ruling (Smith,
1999).
Liminal positions: teaching writing and gendered roles
A second strand
of analysis concerns the function of gender roles in the academy where
women dominate the lower rungs
of the teaching
professions
in writing, composition and rhetoric studies. Theresa
Enos’s comprehensive
study Gender Roles and Faculty Lives In Composition describes how the
intellectual work of teaching in the field of composition and writing
program administration is obscured by the administrative categories of “mere-work
activities” and “service”:
While other departmental
faculty agree that the WPA (writing program administrator) works very
hard, they are not
sure she does “real
work”; indeed, they have difficulty specifying
exactly what she does, although they agree she is an
excellent writing program director….
The problem has been that it’s the WPA’s
responsibility to be able to specify exactly what it
is she does. Most typically the WPA
has to list administrative duties under “service,” a
category “distinguished
by its lack of clear definitions in contrast to the
detailed subcategories under “research” (books,
articles, chapters, reviews, presentations, and grants)
and “teaching” (student evaluations,
supervisory reports, curriculum development, presentations,
and publications).
(Enos, 1996, 76).
Our Centre’s role in the “W” implementation process
may have inadvertently re-inscribed the gendered power relations of the “feminized” composition/education
field onto our mandate (Schell, 1999, 2002; Wetherbee Phelps, 1995, Jarratt
and Worsham, 1998, Enos 1996). Thus we inherited the historical gendered
politics and practices of a marginalized discipline just as we were charged
with the task of transforming the writing and teaching culture of an
entire university. What does that mean for academic identity formation?
Louise Wetherbee Phelps in Feminine Principles and Women’s Experience
In American Composition and Rhetoric writes about the discipline of composition
in the following manner:
….we are a field dominated in numbers by women, concerned with
a subject and a teaching practice perceived by many academics and the
public as low-status, elementary, service-oriented, menial “women’s
work.” As such, composition has suffered from minimal resources,
intellectual invisibility to other’s fields, subordination to other’s
interests and goals, and a lack of institutional authority and control.” (Whetherbee
Phelps, 1995, 289 – 290).
Phelps suggests “composition’s gendering is not immutably
fixed but is susceptible to transformation …(where institutional
circumstances (not necessarily or even likely feminist in origins) create
occasions for composition, though programmatic action, to join in and
affect the broader policies and pragmatics of higher education.” (290-91).
It seems that a central challenge for the success of those of implementing
the writing-intensive mandate will be to consciously dis-identify, resist
and reject the gendered institutional positioning that is currently emerging
from the tacit naturalized discourses circulating at the University and
to re-articulate them within more valued spheres of academic activity
- more on this point will follow later.
Upon reflection,
I recognize that I colluded in my own construction as a ‘writing
lady’ because I had also internalized the hierarchical
and disciplinary values of the University. As a new PhD, I initially
found my footing as a “professor” to be difficult because
of positioning outside of the discursive territory of my own classroom,
courses or disciplinary departmental structure. I took up the “joke” and
ventriloquated the phrase “writing lady” and could not
provide alternative language when others used it in flippant ways because
I could
not legitimately articulate the speech genres of critique in the different
discursive occasions of other faculty members’ classrooms. My
colleagues have diplomatically pointed out that an ironic uttering
of the label “writing
lady” complicates my narrative. Thus I discursively accept the
separation of my critical scholar self from the institutional projection
of a feminized nurturing helping figure. Our work at pilot phase of
the project with “early-adopter” faculty members was relational
and voluntary, and the collaborative nature of the pilot courses required
a tremendous balance of diplomacy, collegiality and cooperation on
the behalf of all parties. When tensions, resistance or difficulties
arise
around writing-intensive curriculum implementation and pedagogy in
another person’s course, there was not a typical academic context
to work through differences such as debate, argument, analysis or publications,
because of how our work was positioned and our role.
Liminal practices: the invisibility of textual practices in the academy
The third strand
concerns what I call the ‘writing up - writing
down” problem, where the production of writing as an organizing
discursive and material practice in the academy is not well understood.
Ignoring the constitutive role of writing as the material mode of production
for the workplace, learning, scholarly production and teaching obviates
the discomfort that direct attention to social dynamics and ideology
of literacy, meritocracy and cultural difference might otherwise provoke.
A writing intensive-learning initiative has the potential to be student-centered
and to advocate for discursive difference and multi-literacies. It
also has the potential to validate the scholarship of teaching and
learning
for faculty, reframing the values of academic production as it relates
to teaching. For instance, the institution may see the implementation
of writing-intensive learning as an opportunity for reflective practice
and professional growth. If so, the scholarship of teaching in the
disciplines could regain some of the same value as producing and publishing
research.
In this way, we may work between the institutional and discursive interests
of the academy and the everyday agency of faculty and students. Developing
a meta-discursive awareness about writing and the heterogeneity of
academic literacies across a University community intersects with ideologies
about
teaching as service work and interrupts beliefs about the nature of
scholarship, unitary writing standards, and problems of linguistic
diversity, student
literacy levels and other god-tricks of academic privilege. A writing-intensive
learning approach across the curriculum helps to develop a shared understanding
across the university community that becoming educated in a discipline
and its writing conventions involves a long apprenticeship into a contextual
set of values, ways of seeing and skills, across varied communities
of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991, Dias, Freedman, Medway and Paré,
1999).
Constructing our
professional and academic activity as the care-taking labour service
of helpful ‘writing ladies’ not only keeps
our interventions as trans-disciplinary knowers invisible, it maintains
the separation of teaching and writing from the content of the course
and allows the transmission of curriculum to remain transparent and
unproblematic in the University classroom. From this perspective, knowledge-making
is understood mainly through exchange or vehicle metaphors. Writing
thus
understood remains a technique for facilitating the transmission
of information by the instructor, or a vehicle for demonstrating evidence
of acquisition
of the information by students. It preserves the inherent commodification
of post-secondary education as a means for credentialing and guaranteeing
educational “products” such as graduates who can seamlessly
function in their professional fields or workplaces. Writing disappears
as a social, political and culturally mediated activity; and learning
is not tied to the formation and construction of students’ identities
as situated knowers along a continuum of legitimate peripheral participatory
structures (Lave and Wenger, 1988).
From “writing ladies” to
reflective practice from the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
As previously
mentioned, we do not directly teach writing to students; we work primarily
with
faculty members in the context of their
courses where we attend carefully to surfacing the meta-discursive
instructions
that hold important clues for students as to what counts as meaningful
writing and thinking in the discipline. An important aspect of
this work is to also identify these moments and intersections
for the
faculty member
so that they become more aware of the tacit features of their
disciplinary underpinnings thus making them more explicitly visible
for students.
If our work is successful, the effects of the interventions seem
to disappear and enhance the learning and teaching experience
of faculty
and students.
The social action of the new emergent speech genres developed
in the classroom are absorbed into the engagement of everyday activities
of
the classroom practice, more successful student papers, and a
transformed
course curriculum. Unlike typical academic modes of production,
the products of our scholarly and pedagogical work do not “ belong” to
us, as they are jointly constructed with faculty, students and TAs. So
we are left without the explicit products of academic activity such as
individual research papers, teaching evaluations, curriculum artifacts
that we can point to as evidence of our scholarship, research and teaching.
As Lee Shulman notes, teaching will not be valued in the academic community
until it becomes community property. His well cited metaphor about the
private nature of teaching being as ephemeral as dry ice unless it is
discussed and evaluated in reference to the disciplines whose canons
and standards of quality we value…it will lack the potency of other
forms of scholarship” provides support for the meta-discursive
and professional development that can occur in writing-intensive
collaborations (Lee Shulman, 1991, Stanford University New Release,
05/07/91).
However, like dry
ice, our interventions in the curriculum, pedagogy and improved teaching
and learning of other’s classrooms are difficult
to trace. If we return to diagram Figure 1, the idealized
outcome of our activity is a more dialogic curriculum where faculty
observes the
successful emergence and acquisition of disciplinary genres
on behalf of students (better teaching). Students seem to be learning
the content
of the course through deeper understanding and facility with
the written speech genres of the discipline (improved writing). The
locus of activity
is funneled through the micro genres of the course assignments,
with better scaffolding of disciplinary conventions and expectations
situated
learning is enacted and students report that they enjoyed
the course (successful instructional design). Thus the work of implementing
writing-intensive
learning is to “facilitate” learning and so requires
that the autonomous agency of the WIL faculty members remain
repressed. Thus
co-opted into a service model– our work is not visible
unless the products of our work (successful student writers)
are deemed
flawed,
problematic, or interfere with the seamless flow and exchange
of information. It is a bit of a double bind unless we adopt
new discursive
frameworks
to describe our professional work.
The scholarship of Teaching and Learning or SoTL is such
a framework that may assist in articulating how the contributions
of those of
us who work in the liminal contact zones between faculty
members, writing
and students can be understood as engaging in the scholarship
of teaching and learning. In a nutshell, the four fundamental
principles
of SoTL
involve:
…
..the scholarship of discovery (work that adds to human knowledge and
to the intellectual life of the academy), the scholarship of integration
(work that makes connections between and among knowledge developed within
disciplinary communities and that places that knowledge in broader contexts),
the scholarship of application (work that emerges when academics’ theories
and practices inter-animate one another), and the scholarship
of teaching (work that transmits, transforms, and extends
knowledge to others, some
of whom may themselves become scholars ( Boyer E. 1990,
Scholarship Reconsidered in Lambert, Brown, Franke, and
Starkweather, 2005,
288).
The problem with such a move is that it displaces the inherent value
of the teaching of academic writing in and of itself, as a legitimate
locus of expertise. Another strategy might be to forge stronger alliances
with other marginalized disciplinary communities that have been more
successful in opening up new ways of understanding theory, social dynamics
and practices in the academy.
Teaching writing-intensive learning and the social text: textual
relations of ruling
For example, as this
paper has explored, I now realize that our Centre unconsciously intersected
with twenty years of gender roles in the
treatment of contingent faculty in the field of teaching writing
across the disciplines.
Our Centre was commissioned to fast-track implementation of a writing-intensive
learning curriculum under the rubric of an academically endorsed
comprehensive policy change, and the method of delivery occurs
primarily through
a faculty development approach. Our university had little prior history
with the politics or problems accompanying the teaching of writing
with
the freshman composition model, yet the familiar ideologies and perspectives
endemic to the field of composition still arose. As institutionally
mediated identities, we found ourselves positioned in a nexus between
our former
scholarly and pedagogical identities and the instrumental needs of
the institution to turn its writing faculty into writing ladies.
Interrupting those desires through feminist critique or demands
for different faculty
hiring models calls into question the ways we had simply become as
Smith
suggests, “a means through which these objectified modes of
ruling were passed on, through which, therefore, ruling got done.” (Smith,
48).
The point I am trying
to raise here is whether the proximity to the teaching of writing in
academe, is currently inherently disempowering.
As with earlier
social feminists’ analysis that the exchange of women’s bodies
comprised the material conduit for the exchange of discursive power and
social relations in society, do we now need to pay closer attention to
the gendered
and economic power relations accompanying the teaching of writing across
our respective fields? And as with other historical issues of equity,
will ameliorating
current institutional treatment and attitudes towards the teaching of
writing require some rigorous critique and consciousness-raising from
within and across
the academy by those who are in positions of privilege?
Writing is the means
of acquiring an academic identity, but teaching it is also the means
by which we can institutionally made invisible.
We lecture,
argue, publish, assess and are evaluated through writing - and we call
this
research, scholarship, thinking, talking to one another, teaching,
marking or responding to papers. We name these activities as
academic scholarship
but we don’t name them as textual practices. Charles Baseman
(2002) suggests that it is time to recognize “that writing provides
some of the fundamental mechanisms that make our world work, and it
is time to assert that writing
needs to be taken seriously along with the other major matters of inquiry
supported by institutional structures” (34).
Dorothy Smith has
stated repeatedly that we must look at the work that is accomplished
through discursive utterances, speech genres
and documentary
networks in order
to comprehend the organizing capacity of the social text (1990a,
1990b, 1999,
2002). So simply put, we become our social texts and if we are to
resist the academy’s insistence on separating the writing/
teaching/ research continuum, in particular for faculty working
in so called feminized fields in the academy,
then we must reframe our work in terms of that identification.
Conclusion: counter practice and liminality as a site for intervention
Writing is
a technology that mediates social meaning in cultural, political
and economic discourse of the University. And
yet, even though writing
is the core social and cultural practice of the academy, and “texts” are
the currency of our identity at the university, our understanding
of textuality often remains at best naïve and transparent, even
by those of us who are sophisticated in the creation of texts. The
power
relations that are encoded in the ways we are positioned as teachers,
writers, or researchers are expressions of the power relations of
gendered textuality in the academy, and they will continue to mediate
our identities
in terms of how we are understood and valued as academics, teachers
or researchers unless we construct a counter-practice about writing
at the University.
My recent experience
bears out as anecdotal evidence of the organizing capacity of the intersection
of institutional positioning and gender-role
socialization patterns in the disciplines that teach writing. Now
it looks like I am making an argument that will make my work
at the university
even more impossible, and chronically under-valued. However I believe
that one solution might be to actively demonstrate that genuine attention
to engagement with textual practices, discursive formation, and disciplinary
genres might mediate against the less empowering effects. For example,
the very rich field of feminist work in the area of rhetoric and
composition studies see feminisms, feminist pedagogy and composition
as complementary
disciplines, or as Susan C. Jarratt describes historical and political
metonymies (Jarratt, 1998, 6).
Both feminist inquiry
and post-current traditional composition studies, in other words seek
to transform styles of thinking, teaching and
learning rather than to reproduce stultifying traditions. They
share a suspicion
of authoritarian pedagogy, emphasizing instead collaborative or
interactive learning and teaching. They resist purity of approach
and the reduction
of their scope by moving in and around many contemporary critical
theories and disciplines (Jarratt, 1998, 3).
Jarratt describes
both as feminism and composition as trans-disciplinary fields – where feminist academic projects seek to transform disciplinary
knowledge by pointing out its ideological investments, and composition
as described by Patricia Harkin is a “post-disciplinary lore - “a
knowledge whose primary function is to help us to see ways of construing
relations … to which our ideology has made us blind [and to see
that] disciplinary inquiries can be strategies of containment” (Jarratt,
2).
As Wetherbee Phelps,
Schell, Jarratt, Smith and others suggest, those I describe as “writing
ladies” are located in a double
bind between the disciplinary discourses, gender roles and the mediating
social
and textual practices that interrupt our agency. Gender analysis is
largely missing from broader discussions of this phenomenon and there
is a genuine
need to intercept the conceptions of ruling that persistently structure
inequity through professional positioning and academic practices (Smith,
1999). Early in November the business section of my local newspaper
featured an extensive article about ‘academic gypsies” as
an employment/economic problem for Canadian Universities. Experienced
female university teachers
who received their degrees in middle-age are more likely to be members
of this ‘academic gypsy” or “roads scholars” subgroup
(Kubacki, Maria, Nov. 9, 2005, Ottawa Citizen). Other strategies, as
previously mentioned, will be to identify the liminal role of teaching
faculty, and to draw the active attention of our faculty associations
to the inequity, professional and economic problems such positioning
creates. The issues of contingent academic labour has also been more
recently taken up by CAUT, so there is a national vehicle for such
discussions now too.
The publication of
this article is another example of counter-practice. In its former
context, the utterance “writing ladies” functioned
as a socially organizing way of seeing the work of the teaching of
writing within a negative gendered framework. It enabled the structuring
of particular
institutional identities and disciplinary work. In its new published
context, potentially read by an inter- disciplinary academic community
of practice, the phrase is reclaimed and re-accented with new intentions.
The new situational context of the utterance “writing ladies” has
been in Bahktin terms, “re-populated by the intentions of the
speaker/writer and it now “exists in other people’s mouths,
in other people’s
contexts, serving other people’s intentions…” (Bakhtin,
1981, 294).
As mentioned earlier,
another strategic approach is to align our work with newer and more
academically prestigious frameworks that
link teaching,
writing-intensive learning, or the study of writing in the disciplines
more closely to scholarship on or in the disciplines. For instance,
our unit was recently publicly acknowledged at an international
conference as providing cutting-edge models for the Scholarship
of Teaching
and Learning. Finally, at an individual level, in order to raise
our individual
and collective profiles as scholars within our institution, we
have decided
to list our scholarly publications and disciplinary credentials
on our Centre’s web-pages.
This need for active
re-writing of our positioning suggests that the struggle over the meaning
and value of teaching, researching
and implementing
writing in the academy is problematic, leaving much room for
exploration and redefinition. However, there has been a decided
shift in public
awareness and discourse about writing at the university since
our inception in
Fall 2002, and we have successfully met a four year mandate to
develop enough writing-intensive courses across all faculties
and departments
to meet the needs of all incoming students for Fall 2006. The
sheer numbers of students, faculty members and courses engaged
with writing
and pedagogy
in new ways will also bring about institutional changes, new
speech genres, and shifts in discourse about the role and value
of writing.
In summary, a critical
engagement with the inter-disciplinary frameworks made possible through
a comprehensive writing-intensive
learning
initiative in an institution can become one that vigorously
take writing a focal
point for critical, social, and disciplinary inquiry. In this
manner, reclaiming writing as a site for identity and institutional
formation
renegotiates the power relations inherent in the tensions between
our obligations to teach/research and recuperates the construction
of teaching
as the domestic labour in the academy.
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Editors' note: This article has been peer-reviewed and revised.
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