Composition Pedagogy Discussion

• Assignment Requirements
1. Choose an article to report within your assigned pedagogy
2. Give a brief definition of the approach
3. Summarize/give an overview of the approach
4. An example assignment using the approach. This could be you own or an already existing assignment.
• "One, Two, Three," Richard A. Lanham (Ch 1 from Composition & Literature: Bridging the Gap by Winifred Bryan Horner
• One: What is the relationship between teaching literature and teaching composition?
• Two: Should English departments take an interest in teaching composition?
• Three: How does question one relate to question two?
• The American system of public education has broken down and in its place, the 50 hour television week has filled the void (1983).
• Society of Oxford English School of 1894: white, literate, at least middle class.
• Today society of English studies is not stictly upper or middle class, not strictly white, not reliably literate.
• Lanham discusses the conflict between those who want to teach literature and not composition and vice versa.
• English departments preoccupy themselves with the visionary moral order literature presents. Composition teaches effective communication. Thus, literature is aspirational while composition is practical.
• Lanham: "Teaching literature and teaching composition form different parts of the same activity."
• Lanham suggests a paradox: English departments must focus on composition to save themselves, but as they focus on composition, they lose English studies being a completely independent discipline.
• A simple, practical answer to question two: English departments have become composition departments.
• Teaching literature is self-renewing.
• Teaching composition is repetitive and routine, which causes burnout.
• Worse than burnout, teaching composition also leads to administration, as teaching composition requires liaison and planning.
• chacun a son gout - each to their own taste
• Undergraduate curriculum is completely disinitegrated. It has no legitimating premise except each to their own taste.
• Literature departments need to decide to join the new curriculum or paint themselves into their own corner like the classics.
• Literary studies should stand at the center of the humanist curriculum, and they should explain how and why they should, and they should not give stale cliches in their defense.
• English studies can choose a voice in the new humanism (instead of retreating to its old view of humanism) and choose a role in a multiracial and multilingual America.
• English departments should choose an active strategy that attempts to train the imagination of a multilingual society, and composition must play a fundamental part of that endeavor.
• "College students read and write like high-school sophomores, law students (if you are lucky) like freshman; a high-school principal crows with glee when his graduating seniors read at a ninth-grade level.
• The social breakdown of schools is profound and the intellectual breakdown is even worse.
• Teaching literature is an impossible task to the uncomprehending society, and teachers also are not properly trained to teach literature or composition.
• Teachers labor with incredible courage and devotion with an impossible task.
• English must combine language and literature studies.
• The fear of composition instruction in English departments is in part from the nonrenewing nature of teaching composition.
• Lanham gives three motives for research: practical purpose, competition, and pure play ("for its own sake"). Lanham suggests English departments should aim for all three, instead of just pure play.
• Composition practice can enrich and redeem literary theory.
• Our literacy crisis should be defended by English departments circling their wagons -- it would kill them. Instead, they should try to solve the crisis.
• Embracing composition might allow literary studies to regain its place at the center of modern humanism where it belongs.