Arrested Pulse

As Eli Goldblatt makes clear in Because We Live Here: Sponsoring Literacy Beyond the College Curriculum, there are many factors and pressures that lead to this disparate writing curricula at high schools, community colleges, and universities. Chief among them are what he identifies as “different sponsoring notions of literacy” resulting from each institution’s affiliations, economic conditions, and students’ history (114). These different sponsorships contribute to a “profound difference in orientation, in focus, a basic attitude toward the task of writing” (111) not only between institutions, but between departments within institutions.

Community colleges tend to subscribe to what Brian Street calls an autonomous model of literacy — a literacy that has “a separate, reified set of ‘neutral’ competencies, autonomous of social context” (qtd 106). Goldblatt notes the “directive and intervening relationship” that English teachers take toward students, prescribing activities that literally spell out assignments and give priority to “getting the shape of the essay right” (106).

Such an approach makes sense, given what Kevin Dougherty identifies as the “contradictory” nature of community colleges, a condition which stems from their manifold purposes—serving, for example, as both a “doorway to educational opportunity” and “a vendor of vocational training” (qtd 85). Goldblatt notes that this approach to writing isn’t confined to high schools and community colleges; many professors and departments outside Temple’s writing program still value thesis-driven assignments, presenting yet “another set of contradictions” (117).

In Temple University’s writing program, instructors are encouraged to be less directive in their assignments and to value, in place of form, “theoretical sophistication” — “a kind of interplay between theory and practice” (117). Assignment descriptions are generally long, asking students to make connections between (often challenging) texts and posing questions designed to make them think critically of the assumptions they encounter in their readings.

Different sponsoring notions of literacy shape the objectives embedded in various writing curricula.

Goldblatt distinguishes between curricula based on “control” (which he associates with Somerset) and “continuity” (which he sees in Fields). He posits that poor and working-class schools link literacy to controlled classroom environments that “give students a specific and limited mastery over a small amount of material” (118). This approach to teaching is evident in the class taught by Somerset’s George, in which students “are posited as individual agents who will succeed if they work hard” (79). The Somerset curriculum reflects a concern to have students write in line with rhetorical modes (like comparison and contrast), to summarize readings, and produce a portfolio which displays familiarity through “real-world” genres like letters of application and business plans (64).

A curriculum with continuity is seen as a stable curriculum, one which preserves American and English literary traditions, content knowledge central to passing the SAT, and assignments that reflect “the sort of writing middle-class students have done in high school for 40 or more years” (118). Goldblatt sees continuity in the curriculum taught by Kate, an English teacher at Fields, which emphasizes traditional analysis of literary texts (like Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales) and other staples of academic skills, including “research methods, avoiding plagiarism, proper paraphrasing, and thesis writing” (70). Observing her class makes him recall the curriculum he encountered as a high school student (and the boredom he felt as well).

The Trouble with Tracking

Disparate writing curricula within high schools may be attributed to “tracking,” a system which places students at different levels based on their academic performance. The curricula designated for some of these tracks reflect institutionalized assumptions about the skills and competencies universities expect of incoming freshman.

At Fields, the “spector of college” hangs over the heads of students in college-prep or AP tracks; theirs is a more rigorous curriculum because “college is figured as rigorous” (76). Their English classes tend to place an inordinate emphasis on literature, with writing relegated to short analyses of literary texts—a result, no doubt, of the assumption that literature is still the dominant field of study in university English departments. A less rigorous curriculum is prescribed for students in the career-prep track (which Goldblatt describes as being "below college prep”) and who are felt to be in need more individual attention and guidance (68). Writing assignments in these “lower” tracks tend to be informed by business practices; students’ written work often emulates genres associated with the work force.

The barriers and difficulties for teachers who try to collaborate across institutions

One major difficulty Goldblatt discusses at length is the lack of sustained commitment to collaborative work on the part of all institutions to address issues of literacy (sometimes in the guise of institutional concerns, like ensuring a smooth transition for transfer students). He calls this sustained collaborative relationship deep alignment and establishing it is fraught with obstacles. “Temple has not been a particularly good neighbor,” he writes of a situation in which promises to work together were made with little follow-up.

When he and Bob Schneider, the associate vice provost for general education, organized a conference to establish deep alignment between these institutions, “too few Temple faculty took part” and the conference concluded with a sense that the effort would continue in a meaningful way (96). Conditions like this has helped fuel skepticism by some about the purposes of his visits. The principal of North, for example, “had no confidence that my visits would do anything for the school but publicize its faults and gain me professional advantage” (54). However, the desire to collaborate was strong among many high school faculty, especially if they believed Goldblatt’s visits would continue after the publication of his book (56).

Another factor complicating collaborative efforts is that each institution, like each department within each institution, has a distinctive culture. He notes how faculty at CCP are “deeply divided” on how to teach writing, with faculty forming camps around specific pedagogies (expressivist, current-traditional, etc.) which are often seen in “purely poltical terms” (100). Meanwhile, the departmental culture at Temple places a high premium on scholarship—at least among members of the professoriate—and tends to undervalue teaching. Many “shake their heads” at the prospect of teaching ESL or students from who have not been exposed to Sophocles (90).

This attitude is institutionalized, with the tenured faculty teaching upper-division undergraduate courses while teaching first-year composition falls to lower-ranked instructors, contingent faculty, and TAs. This latter group frequently doesn’t take part in cross-institutional conferences like that described by Goldblatt (“we knew we needed to hear more from year-to-year contract or part-time adjuncts”).

There are other factors: time and budgetary limitations on the part of faculty and administrators, and a kind of class-based consciousness that fosters distrust between different institutions (discussed above)—all serve to complicate attempts by people like Goldblatt to create collaborate partnerships between institutions that sponsor literacy in very different ways.

The benefits and difficulties of the kind of work Goldblatt is recommending — for students, for teachers, for writing research

One difficulty is “the design problem that all types of literacy instructors need to solve”—that is, the tendency to “parcel” literacy into levels, stages, tracks, time lines, terms and semesters. It is a system that figures literacy as cinder blocks; Goldblatt argues that it’s better to conceive of it as water: “the excitement and refreshment of literacy for learners comes when words and concepts flow and circulate even though blocks are easier to stack, store, and count” (173). The current “block” system relies on curricula of either control or continuity, placing a high premium on print documents over other forms of literacy and, as a result, stacking the cards in favor of middle-class and native speakers over low-income and non-native speakers of English.

Teachers in this system are by default positioned as arbiters of the correct use of the language, thereby limiting their roles as educators. Goldblatt, borrowing a concept from Kathleen Blake Yancey, offers a (somewhat complex vitalist) system of circulation as an alternative to this block system. A circulating system offers both students and teachers the “potential for both challenge and growth through the exchange of written, visual, virtual, or oral texts” which the block system has been structured to discourage. The benefits are the same for both teacher and student: “Investment in one place can have a profound effect elsewhere if the system is structured to allow for circulation of insights, techniques, or counter examples” (203).

He sees new media, expanded opportunities in community publications, and more engaged writing centers as central to a re-envisioning of literacy and the teaching of writing—one that invests students in ownership of their own writing and communication activities and teachers in the process that makes that ownership possible.

Another difficulty is the different sponsoring notions of literacy between institutions. Goldblatt argues that embedded in the sponsoring of literacy in academic institutions is a certain “attitude toward language” that has the effect of “separating us from other literacy sponsors” (189-90). Writing and literacy research needs to break free of academic discourse and its “attitude of rigid positivism” and seek out new methodologies, both qualitative and quantitative, at the same time embracing “a sense of creativity and pragmatism” (204).

The publish-or-perish environment creates the wrong kind of self-interest in people—one that stems mostly from the desire to acquire tenure. Overcoming this institutionalized obstacle isn’t easy, but Goldblatt looks beyond this system (which he implies is failing) to a new approach (at least for writing researchers) that inspires a kind of self-interest that will manifest itself in “crossover or transformational forms” of communication—“activist newsletters, radio interviews, press releases, web site texts.” This approach, he claims, “may make a stronger impact than academic publications can on the public view of a given college or department, and perhaps on the national rankings of schools with exceptional community engagement programs” (205).

There are numerous benefits to be wrought from the kind of work Goldblatt is recommending. One is the broadening effect bringing the margins to the center has on university writing programs and projects; confronting literacy through the eyes of those who are disabled or challenged, or for whom English is a second language, or who live in the lower-income neighborhoods surrounding universities, will help teachers and tutors to shed “preconceived notions” of who people are and what they need (141).

Circulating staff and teachers among institutions—writing centers, for instance—can help them communicate “on their own grounds” about their understandings of literacy, thereby allowing for opportunities to shape a common ground on how to address it as teachers, students, and sponsors. Through CALN, for example, “the struggles and visions of Chinatown and North Philadelphia” were brought into Temple writing; so were the arts (“drawing, dance, music”) and awareness of how new media will make “vital contributions” to writing programs both inside the university and without (207).