According to the last three announcements of national testing scores by the National Center for Education Statistics in 1998, 2002, and 2007, only one in four or five high school seniors (depending on how you look at the figures) can write well enough-“Proficiently” or better-to succeed in college˳
NCW’s Call for a Writing Revoliution
Because of the alarming 2002 statistics of writing deficiencies (same as 1998), The College Board created the National Commission on Writing (NCW) in 2002˳ The very next year, on April 25, 2003, the NCW issued a national press release that called “for the immediate launch of an implementation of a [five-year] campaign, the Writing Challenge to the Nation˳”
Here’s my translation of what the NCW was saying:
- We call for a writing revolution because there’s a crisis in the teaching of writing in American schools-far too many of our students write too poorly to do college work˳
In their 40-page document, The Neglected “R”: The Need for a Writing Revolution, the NCW strongly recommended that schools-
- hire more teachers
- train and certify teachers to teach writing
- standardize assessments of writing & train teachers in it
- hire more assistants to teachers
- have students spend much more time writing (minimum: double)
- throw a lot more money, equipment, time, & people at the teaching and practice of writing
In other words, KEEP DOING THE SAME THINGS, BUT DO A LOT MORE OF IT, spend a lot more money on it, and hope all that quantity somehow turns into quality˳
As they say on Sesame Street, What’s wrong with this picture?
One thing’s for sure-we shouldn’t just keep doing what we’ve been doing so unsuccessfully all along, and we shouldn’t start doing it on a larger, even more expensive scale!
Wouldn’t you agree?
Before these demands (“recommendations”) for more people, more equipment, and more money were made by the NCW, what were scholars and teachers doing to improve writing and the teaching of writing in American schools?
The answer to that gives us a fascinating historical perspective on failed scholarship pertaining to writing–
Cycles of Crisis and Panacea
In 1994, composition scholar Robert J˳ Connors published an essay about a broad pattern he recognized in writing scholarship˳ He pointed out in his essay, “Crisis and Panacea in Composition Studies: A History” (included in the book Composition in Context: Essays in Honor of Donald C˳ Stewart, 1994), that scholarship and intellectual activity had grown by leaps and bounds in the field of teaching writing during the past thirty years (now, forty-five years)˳
But Connors feels progress has been largely limited to a series of crises followed by temporary panaceas-all of which were temporary and none of which were turned into permanent, lasting solutions˳
In other words, Connors documents a recurring cycle: Someone hollers “Crisis!” in writing circles, and then someone comes up with a new way to combat the problem˳ Everyone then focuses on that approach for ten to fifteen years, and then interest lags or money for the project runs out, things quiet down, everyone goes their own way again, and the crisis is forgotten˳ In a few more years, someone else hollers “Crisis!” and the cycle repeats itself˳
Here is a list of panaceas or ‘solution movements’ Connors identified, from 1840 up until 1990, when he began writing his essay:
- literacy
- classroom conditions
- social aims and duties
- communications (linguistics, semantics)
- Rhetoric (traditional, generative, tagmemic, stylistic, inventional, syntactic)
- process writing
- writers’ experience
- back to basics (sentence combining, controlled composition)
Connors believes that further temporary crises, accompanied by their temporary panaceas, will continue to shape the discipline of the teaching of writing˳ What have teachers learned from all these crises and panaceas? Connors declares that all the failures of the past-“profitless exercises” (his terminology in the final sentence of his essay)-can be used as standards for judging all future crises in writing˳
Connors optimistically proclaims-for no particular reason, it seems, since he gives none-that teachers of writing won’t repeat the mistakes of the temporary crises, the temporary excitements and panics, and the temporary panaceas that are the history of teaching writing in America that he has taken so much trouble to trace and to document˳
That historical accumulation of failures is somewhat akin to Thomas Edison’s view of his 2,000 failed experiments in making a light bulb˳ Edison is reported to have said, ‘I didn’t fail 2,000 times, I just figured out 2,000 ways that it didn’t work˳’ For Connors, the discipline of teaching writing has not failed innumerable times-teachers have just found innumerable ways that are not the best ways to teach writing˳
Now, I can accept that Edison remembered all his failures or had access to his own records of them, keeping them handy as archived references˳ But who is going to do that record keeping, that monitoring, for teachers of writing all across America?
Surely, no individual can do it˳ The National Council of the Teachers of English (NCTE)? The Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC)? Hardly˳ Even if they were able to do so, writing teachers don’t need a list of failures-they need a list of thorough successes built on a solid, proven, and widely accepted theoretical foundation˳
All the scholarship of writing teachers, all the back and forth of crises and panaceas, have not been enough to appease Professor Wayne C˳ Booth’s (noted authority on Rhetoric and writing) complaint about the deficiencies of scholarship on writing:
… where is the theory, where are the practical rules…?
For more than the last 150 years, that same question has been echoed by many other scholars actively writing about and looking for a ‘New Rhetoric˳’ That list of scholars includes such highly visible scholars as Herbert Spencer, I˳ A˳ Richards, Kenneth Burke, W˳ R˳ Winterowd, Francis Christensen, James L˳ Kinneavy, E˳ D˳ Hirsch Jr˳, Edward P˳ J˳ Corbett, Reed Way Dasenbrock, Andrea Lunsford, Richard Lanham, C˳ H˳ Knoblauch, and Lil Brannon˳
Nor have the crises, panaceas, and endless discussions of scholars looking for a ‘New Rhetoric of Writing’ provided any promise of a solution˳ A perspective of trial and error our writing scholars have got, but an insightful perspective they have not˳ Why?
Crisis, Again & Again
An article on education provides the answer, and not from within the ranks of those who philosophize about or teach writing-
In 2003, an article in The New York Times provided some light by which to judge Connor’s perception of the recurring pattern of crisis and panacea in teaching writing˳
In “ON EDUCATION; Discovering Crisis, Again and Again,” journalist Michael Winerip shares what he learned from Laura Haniford, a University of Michigan doctoral candidate who had presented a paper at an annual education convention that Winerip attended˳
Haniford’s paper focused on the news media’s coverage of a racial achievement gap in local schools-the difference between how whites and blacks scored on standardized tests, as covered by one small newspaper, The Ann Arbor News, from 1984 through 2001˳
Haniford noticed huge swings from year-to-year in the number of articles and the number of letters to the editor about the achievement gap issue, with nothing at all or in any way concrete happening to change things˳ And she was amazed that the achievement gap remained virtually unchanged, no matter how much attention was or wasn’t given to it˳
Haniford wondered how can such wildly fluctuating coverage by the news media be explained, despite no change in the achievement gap?
To answer this question, she used a research model developed in 1972 by Anthony Downs of the Brookings Institution, which looked very close to this:
Stage 1: A highly undesirable social or academic condition exists, but has not yet captured public attention˳
Stage 2: Alarmed discovery and euphoric enthusiasm by officials and interested parties˳
Stage 3: Public and news media realize the true cost of reform and the sacrifices required˳
Stage 4: Gradual decline of public interest˳
Stage 5: Post-problem˳ A twilight realm of little attention or spasmodic recurrences of interest˳ [This is where teachers and schools are now˳ The NCW’s five years of “Challenge to the Nation” have passed, Proficiency scores have not increased significantly, and very little is being said about the crisis in writing, as Stage 5 describes˳]
The steps of the cycle fit perfectly both the racial achievement gap issue that Haniford was documenting AND Connors’s description of constantly repeating cycles of “crisis and panacea” in the field of writing scholarship and teaching writing˳ And those cycles of crisis and panacea are nothing less than notations of failures of scholarship˳
Without a truly comprehensive general theory of writing—the lack of which Professor Wayne C˳ Booth complained about—writing scholars and writing teachers across America are doomed to repeating Connors’s ever-recurring cycle of crisis and panacea˳
Source by https://ezinearticles˳com/?Crises-in-Writing-and-Failures-in-Scholarship&id=5266252
