Composition Forum 40, Fall 2018
http://compositionforum.com/issue/40/

Review of Genesea M. Carter and William H. Thelin’s Class in the Composition Classroom: Pedagogy and the Working Class

Sheri Rysdam

Carter, Genesea M., and William H. Thelin, editors. Class in the Composition Classroom: Pedagogy and the Working Class. Utah State University Press, 2017. 370 pp.

For those of us interested in issues of social class as they relate to the teaching of composition, there simply is not enough scholarship in the area. That’s why I was eager to read Class in the Composition Classroom: Pedagogy and the Working Class, edited by Genesea M. Carter and William H. Thelin. This book is a compilation of essays by some of the leading scholars on social class in the field of rhetoric and composition, who wrestle with various questions about “working-class” students as they relate to teaching college composition. The book succeeds at doing what it promises—to “help writing instructors inside and outside the classroom prepare all their students for personal, academic, and professional communication.”

Because grades and other measures of college success are so closely tied to students’ social class, the issues addressed in this book are of universal importance for all composition instruction. One cannot engage in the teaching of writing without simultaneously engaging a system that at once aims to empower and educate, while also employing a system of values that tends to adhere to strict social codes and which promotes a middle-class aesthetic.

Of particular interest to me, and I think to the larger composition community, is Jacqueline Preston’s article entitled The Writing Space as Dialectical Space: Disrupting the Pedagogical Imperative to Prepare the ‘Underprepared.’ I will confess that Preston is a colleague of mine at Utah Valley University (UVU), and so I am quite familiar with her work, and the assemblage approach to teaching composition is one we use in the department of Literacies and Composition at UVU. Still, I had not yet read a draft of her article, and I was curious to see how she would “disrupt the pedagogical imperative to prepare the “underprepared,” while also integrating assemblage as a pedagogical approach, and how she would use the “dialectical space” to illustrate that approach. Preston starts by convincingly demonstrating how pervasive the “deficit” model (88) still is even to contemporary composition practices. Focusing on preparedness is central to a deficit model. For example, it assumes that students in first-year writing classes are not yet ready to engage in meaningful academic discourse. Instead, students in first-year writing courses are being prepared for future writing situations that will be meaningful, opposed to finding meaning and value in the literacies and writing students produce in real time. The pressure also comes from other disciplines as instructors of writing are implored to teach students to “write” (usually meaning a focus on grammar and usage), so they can then go on to do real, meaningful writing in other disciplines. Preston writes of “models that creep below the service of even our most liberatory approaches” (88). It’s a model that “works mightily to restrict access rather than extend it” (Preston 89). This message is still most pervasive in first-year composition, where frequently students are considered not yet “prepared” for “real” college writing.

In her research, Preston interviews six college students and takes a close look at what they have to say about their experiences in higher education. By looking closely at these perspectives, Preston illustrates how these students interact with their education, as it informs, conflicts with, contradicts, and empowers these students. In doing so, she shows the reader a pedagogical practice that can be “a dialectical space of continuity and change and not merely a space that functions to represent ideas” (101). Preston’s article demonstrates how teachers can support students in a more dialectical space.

I was also particularly compelled by Cori Brewster’s article entitled Social Economies of Literacy in Rural Oregon: Accounting for Diverse Sponsorship Histories of Working-Class Students in and out of School. In her article, Brewster also takes a close look at the voices and perspectives of working-class college students from various areas in rural Oregon. Here too I will confess that I grew up in rural Oregon and was therefore particularly fascinated with this article. Beyond my own identification with these students, Brewster’s article is also one that—influenced by the likes of Deborah Brandt’s “literacy sponsorship” and “literacy opportunity” (212) and Kim Donehower, Charlotte Hogg, and Eileen Schell’s “rhetoric of lack” (211)—effectively demonstrates the complex literacies of working-class students from rural backgrounds.

For example, one student’s journey is particularly fascinating as she copes with tragedy, homelessness, or near homelessness, but also has a powerful literacy that she developed by reading because of “boredom” (216). She has used her literacy effectively to overcome obstacles, gain entrance, and advocate powerfully for herself by using writing to gain scholarships and entry into programs. Another student has incredible access to school-sponsored groups such as 4-H and FFA to develop his literacy for his own personal gain. The reader can clearly see that the student has developed a powerful literacy for his own advantage not despite of his rural background, but because of the access to programs he had as a rural student. However, Brewster is not falsely optimistic. The reader also hears from a student who, like many of my own students from varieties of backgrounds, is not interested in literacy, reading, or writing and is not a particularly great or inspiring student. In a field that may want to romanticize the struggle or emphasize the deficit, Brewster’s student interviews reveal a more complete story. These students are diverse in their abilities, backgrounds, and personal interests. Both the Brewster and Preston articles model a way of learning about working-class students in ways that are empowering to those students and also informative for those teaching these students.

Taking a different tact, Brett Griffiths and Christie Toth, in their article Rethinking Class: Poverty, Pedagogy, and Two-Year College Writing Programs, do the very challenging work of conducting research beyond their own institutions, studying the impact of poverty in writing programs at several community colleges. In this article, the focus is on what the authors call “poverty effects” (231). I was particularly interested in the perspectives of the community college teachers in this article. The reader sees these teachers navigate course policies and expectations, while also trying to encourage and support students who seem most likely to fail to show up, to meet deadlines, to pass the class. Griffiths and Toth acknowledge “the kinds of emotional labor and commitment of personal resources demanded of instructors” (250), and eventually “suggest departments establish open and ongoing dialogue about their constructions of ‘academic standards’ and the tensions they experience between upholding those standards and responding with empathy to students’ material circumstances” (255). If other essays in the book celebrate the literacies and perspectives that working-class students bring to the composition classroom, essays like Griffiths’ and Toth’s paint a somewhat more dire picture, one of pedagogical challenges, personal difficulties, and failure.

Meanwhile, Nancy Mack’s Emotional Labor as Imposters: Working-Class Literacy Narratives and Academic Identities offers a more complex take at the “literacy narrative” genre, which is so frequently taught in college composition classes. Although the genre has profound potential, I personally have given it up and returned to it many times as a teacher. I tire of the contrived narratives of triumph that students submit. Yet, I am heartened when students use the writing to genuinely explore their histories and identities as writers. I found Mack’s approach to the genre to be helpful. She suggests developing a writing task that has students “critically analyze their responses to past language conflicts” (141). This approach struck me as one that might illicit useful analysis and continued dialogue. However, in Mack’s approach, working-class students are viewed as struggling. Given the very real poverty and challenges mentioned in the Griffiths and Toth essay, perhaps this is simply reality. However, as a reader and teacher, I found myself hoping to see how these students might not be struggling, but might already be thriving in Mack’s class, while writing their literacy narratives (like the thriving readers witness in Brewster’s and Preston’s essays).

Perhaps the main challenge of a book like this is the conflict between an approach to studying working-class students in a way that views them as unfairly marginalized and in need of extra support and extra preparation, and an approach that sees working-class students as part of the university—in many cases they are the university. Their literacies are complex and interesting. They are not in need of additional saving or changing or fixing. Sometimes these two views seem to contradict each other, and that’s evident in this book. However, the articles also effectively speak to each other as teachers of writing seek to improve the college composition experience for students.

Another important challenge the book faces is in its definition of working-class. Although the title indicates a specific focus on the “working-class,” the contributors seem to have interpreted the call as social class more generally. Students are likely to identify as middle-class even if they are working-class. Poor students are likely to identify as working-class. Even the scholars in the book seem to address students and the issue of social class from a variety of perspectives that does not always seem consistent. Some articles are about poverty. Some are about steadily employed blue-collar workers. Given the inconsistency of the definition of “working-class” in general, perhaps it is an inevitability of the conversation in this kind of book.

Of course, Class in the Composition Classroom offers more than I can mention in this review—from regionality to identity, from rural to urban, from four-year state colleges to community colleges, from alienation to imposter syndrome, from performance to representation—this book covers serious ground, but it has to. Social class as it relates to college writing is complex, and teacher, student, and program perspectives on the matter are deeply influential to student success.

Finally, as I read this book, my thoughts frequently turned to the current political climate. James T. Zebroski begins to acknowledge the political in his afterward, An Afterward to Class in the Composition Classroom: First-Year Writing as a Social Class Enterprise. Published in 2017, many of these essays were probably drafted before Donald Trump was elected as the president of the United States. Much of this writing likely happened while many thought his candidacy was a joke, an empty pipe dream. However, Trump did win and that win has largely been attributed to working-class and rural voters. I wonder now how many of the students described and interviewed in the articles are viewed in light of “Trump’s America.” Perhaps there is more distrust of these students than before. Perhaps the belief that these students need to be saved, changed, or fixed has resurfaced among academics teaching writing. If some of this scholarship took us one step forward in pedagogies that genuinely include working-class students in meaningful ways, the political climate in which we work no doubt has the capacity to push us a step back in understanding these students and their place in the university. My hope is that this book, and these conversations, keep those digressions from happening.