Re: one's own students and everyone else's too

[Margaret Clark <clark@uhdux2.dt.uh.edu>]

On Tue, 5 Nov 1996 diepenbrock@UHCL4.cl.uh.edu wrote:

> Hello Margaret and Chari!  I thought it would be appropriate for another 
> UH type to jump in on this conversation.  Here at UH Clear Lake most 
> professors do not require WC visits, but some say that if students want 
> to revise an essay for a higher grade, they must take it to the WC.  In 
> those cases, we have copies of their assignments and an on-going 
> discussion/relationship with them.  One history professor has also 
> supplied us with a guide to writing history.  I have required my Advanced 
> Writing students to visit the center in the past and received just the 
> kind of complaints Chari is speaking of: too little time, too far away, 
> etc.  For the *most* part they come to me afterwards and say "I had no 
> idea how much this would help me!"  I now strongly recommend attendance 
> and require it for those who are really in need of additional help.  

dI envy you your relationship with professors. We are rarely so 
fortunate. I think you are saying that even with the complaints, the 
required visit does more good than no visit at all; if I am reading you 
correctly, I couldn't agree more. If I'm not reading correctly, will you 
fine tune a little?
 
> RE: whether there is such a thing as academic writing, Margaret.  I 
> really like what Patricia Bizzell has to say about the academic discourse 
> community in her essay "What is a Discourse Community?" (_Academic 
> Discourse and Critical Consciousness_).  "We [compositionists] want to be an 
> academic discipline, yet we want to be unlike any other academic discipline in 
> that we neither rule out nor require any form of knowledge or 
> methodology." She explains this "eclecticism" as the result of 
> compositionists' desires to avoid the dominating nature of canonical 
> knowledge.  Yet, as writing instructors, we do hold the metaphoric "keys" to 
> the gate of the academy, a position that Bruce Herzberg characterizes as 
> a mythical one.  In other words, we do not simply offer the means to 
> accessing any type of academic discourse (as we may wish); instead we 
> do, in fact, indoctrinate students into certain ways of thinking about and
> producing knowledge.  Those ways of thinking can be classified as 
> academic and most of them cross disciplines, though some disciplines 
> focus on particular intellectual activities to the exclusion of others.
> Bizzell does an excellent job of classifying the intellectual practices that 
> academics have in common, while providing the slightly critical and 
> seemingly detached point of view she seems to bring to most of her 
> discussions.  (The quintessential feature of academic discourse?)

Sounds like required reading, Chloe, with the same benefits as required 
lab visits..... Is Herzberg saying that this indoctrination is mythical? 
I've always thought that that indoctrination, the training in the 
critical process is what we're supposed to do -- it's what distinguishes 
us from secondary schools and maybe from 2-year programs that focus on 
professional certification. 

> Well--I'd love to hear what others think about this issue.

Yeah, me too.

> Chloe Diepenbrock
> UH-Clear Lake
> Houston, Texas

Margaret Clark
clark@dt.uh.edu