Graduate Composition and Rhetoric

Talk about pedagogy is simultaneously talk about the details of what students and others might do together and the cultural politics such practices support. To propose a pedagogy is to propose a political vision. In this perspective, we cannot talk about teaching practice without talking about politics.

—Roger Simon

This course will ask you to take up your own teaching as a question and to explore your pedagogies (in theory and in practice) throughout the semester. For our purposes, composition theory and pedagogical practice will have a cyclical relationship whereby theory applies to practice, and (perhaps more importantly) your teaching practice produces theory. Paulo Freire called this mutually informing and dialogic relationship: praxis. Praxis not only illuminates the dynamic relationship between theory and practice, but it also troubles the very idea that theory and practice are distinct from one another in the first place. Lastly, as the epigraph here suggests, one’s teaching has everything to do with one’s political vision. Some instructors might consider themselves apolitical, or even neutral. But the field of composition (among others) has grappled, time and time again, with the impossibility of pedagogy without politics.

This semester you will be asked to think carefully about your teaching decisions and about your engagement with your teaching as part of your own political vision. You will be invited to consider the political implications of your teaching moves in the same way we might ask students to reflect on their writing moves. It is my hope that what you will learn to do in this course will be something you continue to challenge yourself to do throughout your years of teaching. Just as the courses you are teaching this fall focus on writing as having significant dimensions of inquiry, this course will take up both writing and teaching as inquiry. In the description for my own first-year writing course, inquiry is described this way: “The goal of inquiry is not to answer questions but to raise questions. Inquiry is an intellectual activity, one that is about thinking-in-process perhaps more than it is about taking a stance. But, it is not impractical. Inquiry is the ability to explore the dimensions of a problem in ways that do not erase or ignore the unknown. In a practical sense, our solutions to a problem are always approximations, guesses. Because answers are always temporary, then, inquiry does not offer definitive answers. Inquiry is a way of thinking about a problem, not solving it.” In this course, you will have the strange and wonderfully contradictory experience of approaching your teaching as both a question you cannot answer and a question you must answer each time you make a decision about what you will do in your classroom, about what your comments on a student paper will be, about which books you will use, and so on. And, of course, this contradictory experience is the very nature of good teaching—self-reflexive, uncertain, curious. In this sense, writing and teaching never exist outside the realm of inquiry.