Ede's "On Audience and Composition"

Ede, Lisa S. “On Audience and Composition.” College Composition and Communication 30.3 (1979): 291-5.

From my vantage point nearly 35 years later, this 1979 article sounds familiar yet also reads like an artifact of a time in composition that I often read about in histories of the field.  Ede seeks to draw attention to audience as an insufficiently addressed topic, asserting the instruction ignores audience in a way not justified by either theory or good sense.  Most of the article consists of a review of literature that notably addresses the role of audience or has been complicit in shutting audience-awareness out in favor of other concerns.  She begins with Aristotle and his awareness that people’s responses vary with their mindsets.  The next major figure she notes is Edward Tyrell Channing, a Harvard professor whose major influence on the teaching of composition led to the elision of audience as a major concern and the introduction of the concept of the “general audience.”   Ede observes a long pattern of practice similar to Channing’s, but she notes several important exceptions of textbook authors who address audience as a concern for the writer. 

This brings her to the time of her writing, about which she notes that “two of the most influential contemporary rhetorical theories, Kenneth Pike’s tagmemics and Kenneth Burke’s dramatistics, emphasize the necessity of establishing a bond between the rhetor and his or her audience” (292).  She also notes several other theorists active at the time who resist the current-traditional  emphasis on “product over process, style and usage over content, editing over invention” (292).  Next, Ede notes the role of psychologists in our concept of audience, including Flower’s study of Piaget and Vygotsky’s concepts of egocentric or inner speech, which Flower connects to students’ tendency to transcribe their inner speech instead of composing for an outside audience.

At this point, Ede begins making explicit connections to the way we craft writing assignments.  She notes that some attempts to create a genuine audience fail because they simply assign an audience (such as the student’s classmates or the instructor) without creating a rhetorical situation.  She cites two ways of designing assignments that offer more context.  First, she cites Field and Weiss’s elaborately described, imaginary rhetorical situations that help a students imagine an audience and a reason for addressing it.  Second, she describes her own choice to allow students to invent audiences and to require them to analyze their audiences and articulate the context for each paper.  Her only requirement for identifying an audience is that there must be a realistic way to address that audience; as a result, she has seen several papers actually make their way to the audience for whom the student wrote. 

Although parts of this article were certainly dated, it is a revealing window into an important time in our field, and Ede’s clear writing and practical views make it worth reading, especially in the context of our course reading on the application of theory in the writing classroom.

Evaluation as a Rhetorical Act: Accountability, Complexity, and the Role of the Composer

Presentation Abstract

In independent schools, the accountability movement has manifested primarily as teacher evaluations.  Thus, the question of how best to evaluate is on the minds of administrators, as demonstrated recently by an issue of Independent School dedicated entirely to evaluation and accountability.  Administrators see evaluation as vital to school quality, but it’s generally seen as not going well, just as other accountability measures are seen as not going well in public education.  Why not?

One way of pursuing an answer is to examine teacher evaluations not as disinterested conveyers of data but as compositions—rhetorical products.  Even a basic assessment of the role of speaker, kairos, subject, audience, and purpose reveals the complexities that may interfere with evaluations’ effectiveness as accountability measures.  In particular, dual audiences and purposes reduce evaluations’ effectiveness as tools for teacher growth because the evaluation cannot not be an argument in favor of material rewards, sanctions, or other accountability measures.  Thus, instead of a genuine act of inquiry, the evaluation process focuses on collecting data with a thesis already in mind, making it difficult for the evaluator not to be affected by concerns about how the evidence will be used.

Examining evaluations as rhetorically composed documents highlights their conflicted nature.  It also reveals the similarities between independent schools and higher education, as both need to demonstrate value to compete for tuition dollars while also responding to teachers’ expectations of autonomy.  Therefore, independent schools should look to institutions of higher education for ideas on evaluation.  As a next step, administrators in independent schools should pursue a new question, not “What are the public schools doing?” but “How do colleges and universities assess how well people are carrying out a complex activity and how much they are growing?”

Recommended Resources

Bazerman, Charles, and David Russell. “The Rhetorical Tradition and Specialized Discourses.” Introduction. Landmark Essays of Writing Across the Curriculum. Ed. Charles Bazerman and David Russell. Davis, CA: Hermagorus, 1994. xvii-xxxviii.

Carter, Michael. “Stasis and Kairos: Principles of Social Construction in Classical Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Review 7.1 (1988): 97-112.

Carter, Michael. “Ways of Knowing, Doing, and Writing in the Disciplines.” College Composition and Communication 58.3 (2007): 385-418.

Condon, William. "Accommodating Complexity: WAC Program Evaluation in the Age of Accountability." WAC for the New Millennium: Strategies for/of Continuing Writing Across the Curriculum Programs. Ed. Susan McLeod, Chris Thaiss, and Eric Miraglia. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2001. 28-51

Evans, Robert. “Be All You Can Be: Tackling the Accountability Dilemma.” Independent School 73.1 (2013): 30-38.

Gow, Peter. “Caveman Simple! How the Folio Collaborative is Redefining Professional Cultures.” Independent School 73.1 (2013): 74-80.

Hall, Catherine. “Building a Culture of Growth and Evaluation in Schools.” Independent School 73.1 (2013): 88-93.

Hamlin, Erica. “The Individualized Teacher Improvement Plan.” Independent School 73.1 (2013): 56-62.

Huisman, Jeroen, and Jan Currie. “Accountability in Higher Education: Bridge Over Troubled Water?” Higher Education 48.4 (2004): 529-51.

Murnane, Richard J. and David Cohen. “Merit Pay and the Evaluation Problem: Understanding Why Most Merit Pay Plans Fail and a Few Survive.” Harvard Educational Review 56.1 (Spring): 1-18.

Niels, Gary J. "Summative Evaluation Or Formative Development?" Independent School 72.1 (2012): 58-63.

Rutz, Carol, and Jacqulyn Lauer-Glebov.  Assessment and Innovation: One Darn Thing Leads to Another. Assessing Writing 10 (2005): 80-99.

Slevin, James F. “Engaging Intellectual Work: The Faculty’s Role in Assessment.” College English 63.3 (2001): 288-305.

Sneeden, Ralph. “The Classroom as Big Sur.” Independent School 73.1 (2013): 66-72.

Cherwitz and Daniel's "Rhetoric as Professional Development and Vice Versa"

Cherwitz, Richard A., and Sharan L. Daniel. “Rhetoric as Professional Development and Vice Versa.” JAC 22.4 (2002): 795-814.

Cherwitz and Daniel represent the graduate-level Intellectual Entrepreneurship program at UT Austin, which “offers courses, workshops, internships, and certificate programs” and as of 2002 “already [had] enrolled more than 2,500 students in nearly ninety different graduate disciplines” (797).  The program addresses five types of challenges facing graduate students: teaching, research and publishing for varied audiences, securing funding, speaking for one’s discipline to varied audiences, and effecting policy (798).  After initiating this program and watching it grow, the authors realized that what had developed was a rhetorically based WAC program at the graduate level.  While unplanned, the rhetoric bent emerged because the IE program aimed to nurture “citizen-scholars, equipped with the rhetorical resources to adapt to a variety of audiences and appreciating that the perhaps once clear lines between teaching/research, academic/nonacademic, and content/form are now fuzzy at best” (799).  Further, the program administrators believed that too much of graduate school is discipline-serving, designed to preserve established practices and values within the academy, and not student-serving, designed to address students’ needs as they move into professional roles.  In instituting IE, the authors found that students needed rhetorical skills that allow 1) those who take positions inside academia to interact with those outside it, and 2) those who go outside academia to apply their discipline-specific expertise in the public sphere.  The authors argue that by taking a rhetorical view of their own disciplines, graduate students “develop a greater philosophical sense of their own disciplines” and thus gain more facility in interacting with professionals in and outside the field (800).  Because it addresses the intersection of knowledge-generation within the academy and discourse in the public sphere, the authors see IE as essentially concerned with rhetoric.

The authors situate this program within the history of WAC, casting IE as a sort of next stage that takes WAC to the graduate level.  They make an understated call for more such programs.  In this call, they revisit their previous praise of the citizen-scholar and restate the need “for pedagogy that examines the rhetoric of professional discourses with the end of enabling students to participate critically in the various communities they will enter as educated citizens” (803).  They note the existence of discipline-specific rhetorics as well as broader academic rhetorics, which students in multiple disciplines share.  In discovering these through IE courses, students gain a better understanding of the “practices, products, and governing principles we use to advance our collective knowledge,” so that the IE courses become in some ways inductions into the cultural norms of scholarship (805).  Finally, the authors suggest that “this kind of rhetorical curriculum, which crosses disciplinary boundaries and melds the public and academic issues central to a scholar’s life, is the next step for rhetoric’s reinvention in the academy” (807).  Thus they seem to see this grad-level WAC program as not only part of a WAC progression but part of the progression of rhetoric as a field since its renaissance several decades ago.

This article’s usefulness is in its argument that WAC practices offer professional development because they build rhetorical skills and sensibilities.  This connection, though established through theoretical justification when I might have liked guiding principles for practice, is valuable to me as I seek to clarify the nebulous cloud of ideas surrounding WAC and professional development.

False Dichotomies in WAC

Kirscht, Judy, Rhonda Levine, and John Reiff. “Evolving Paradigms: WAC and the Rhetoric of Inquiry.” College Composition and Communication 45.3 (1994): 369-80.

McLeod, Susan and Elaine Maimon. “Clearing the Air: WAC Myths and Realities.” College English 62.5 (2000): 573-83.

This week, I read two articles that overlapped so much that they merit a single, synthesizing post.  McLeod and Maimon’s 2000 article began with their discomfort during a WPA talk that misrepresented WAC in terms of false dichotomies that had been circulating for years.  “Clearing the Air” takes issue with four myths they see propagated even by prominent voices in the field: that WAC programs as “grammar across the curriculum”; that WAC and WID are opposing camps, with only the former valuing “writing to learn”; that writing to learn is superior to learning to write in the disciplines because of the latter’s excessive focus on “technical correctness”; and that WAC uncritically reifies higher education’s existing values (574).  They then offer two accurate defining characteristics of WAC: that it offers an alternative, more student-centered pedagogy to the sage on the stage method; and that it “is a programmatic entity made up of…faculty development, curricular components, student support, assessment, and an administrative structure and budget” (580).

Just after reading this article, I picked up Kirscht, Levine, and Reiff’s article from six years earlier.  In it, the authors decry the false dichotomy often made between writing to learn and learning to write in the disciplines.  They accept the reality of such a conflict to a greater degree than do McLeod and Maimon, but like those writers, they object to the generalizations and reductive descriptions circulating in the WAC discourse community.  After offering a theoretical grounding in Basseches’ social constructivist view, the authors suggest a new way of thinking about both WAC practices that allows them to layer, interact, coexist, and even converge.  They argue that the conventions of disciplines should be taught through practice to show how those conventions emerge from and support the ways of thinking and doing that characterize the discipline.  In other words, to practice the conventions is to practice the discourse, and, more importantly, to practice the discipline-specific ways of thinking is also to practice the discipline-specific conventions of writing. 

The authors offer a case study in which the form of the empirical study report results from the thinking practices—from hypothesizing to developing methods to analyzing data and discussing results—of the discipline of psychology.  The authors show that rhetorical concepts, especially the relationship between ethos and discipline-specific audience or discourse community, are best learned from the inside out as students write and think their way through a field’s distinctive processes before attempting to enact the conventions of a field.  Once students had wrestled with the ways of thinking in the field, the conventions had meaning and were not difficult to enact.

The authors offer these observations as a rhetoric-based bridge between writing to learn and learning to write in the disciplines.  While the claims they make on this front are a bit grand considering the limited evidence found in one case study, this article offered a useful answer to the “so what?” a practitioner might ask after reading the McLeod and Maimon piece.

"Transforming WAC Through a Discourse-Based Approach to University Outcomes Assessment"

Bean, John C., David Carrithers, and Theresa Earenfight. “Transforming WAC Through  a Discourse-Based Approach to University Outcomes Assessment.” The WAC Journal 16 (2005): 5-21.

This article reflects on the intersection of two lines of development at Seattle University: a WAC movement that began in the late ‘80s but continued only through pockets of WAC “converts,” and a new call for assessment voiced by the board through a strategic plan.  The primary reason these two strands came together was the engagement of Barbara Walvoord, an assessment consultant with deep roots in WAC practices.  The authors, a WAC luminary, a history professor, and a finance professor, report on the ways that a focus on assessing student outcomes reinvigorated WAC at the university.

Walvoord’s notion of assessment centers on “the course-embedded assignment and on the professional expertise of the individual professor” (6-7).  In her model, professors design assessment rubrics that can be used to identify requisite skills, reveal patterns in student work, and generate material that departments  can use in refining their pedagogy and programs. At the college level, the most common types of assessments are papers or presentations, so her approach has a built-in connection to WAC. 

The article describes two cases in which Walvoord’s approach to outcomes assessment brought WAC principles to the forefront in the history and finance departments.  In these cases, the department identified important skills a student must have upon graduation (e.g., think and speak like a historian, negotiate an ill-defined problem such as retirement investment and offer a solution to lay clients) and then used written assessments to determine student abilities in these areas.  Both cases revealed gaps in regarding vital skills related to invention in the form of critical thinking, rhetorical moves such as discourse-appropriate language and purposeful visual composing, and so on.  In both cases, the department identified a need for additional instruction in rhetoric and composition skills in required courses within the major.  In other words, both assessments brought WAC to the center of the curriculum.

I found this article very useful because of its connections to my situation.  Seattle University’s independent status allowed it to avoid for many years the assessment movement that has swept the nation’s academic institutions, just as my independent school has done.  And just as occurred at SU, my school has been feeling its way toward assessment of student outcomes, but the faculty resists standardized tests as shallow and even harmful assessments of student learning.  Further, much of our faculty, like theirs, guards its autonomy, class time, and principles closely, perceiving standardized tests as threats to all of these.  And like SU, my school has at least the potential to be a culture in which faculty genuinely wants to know its own strengths and areas for growth and does not fear having its weaknesses revealed.  For these reasons the authors’ defense of “discourse-based” assessments as opposed to psychometric ones helps me see a path toward outcomes assessment that contributes to students’ learning and teachers’ development instead of interfering with what is really important in the classroom.  For these reasons, I recommend the article to academic leaders (especially those who value composition) looking for a value-added way to assess outcomes.