I happened to keep it in the mail directory -- here it is again.
-- Russ
======================================
Although I realize most of the interest on our composition list is
concerned with the recent referendum, I thought I would bring up to
date those of you interested in the evolution of the thread I began
two or so weeks ago. In fact, ironically -- black irony, at that,
the situation in my writing class with students who wish to compose
essays with unacceptable value assumptions is perhaps just a
microcosm of what I am hearing about racism in the current analyses
of the political situation in Quebec.
Since Mary-louise suggested she might want to do something with this
issue in the next Inkshed, I thought I might summarize the advice I
received and then explain how matters are progressing in the
experimental crucible of my composition class.
Here's the problem I raised: what do we, as writing instructors, do
when competent students insist on writing essays that espouse values
and/or strategies that are repugnant to the core of the academic
community (what I would call the liberal-humanist tradition)? In my
case, a good student insists on writing a paper in which he defends a
plan that amounts to population control through premeditated,
genocidal starvation.
Now the advice:
1. Audience (suggested by Marcy Bauman, Susan Dobra, Jean Sanborn,
Catherine Schryer) -- either get the student to imagine an audience
for the essay that would vigorously debate the issues and reasoning
in the argument and/or use the rest of the class as a mixed audience,
some of whom will challenge this writer's approach. Or simply admit
that I am the audience and I am offended by the views expressed.
I tried these approaches, probably more by reflex than planning, but
without too much success. Most of my students figure out that I, as
instructor, am the audience for their writing and see any other
discussion of audience as a bit of game that they only reluctantly
and rather deviously play; this student knows my values -- this is
the second composition course he's taken from me -- and he knows that
his essay is posing a serious dilemma for me and, by implication, for
other teachers. He is enjoying the power of his revenge against the
establishment, and could care less if I don't like his values: if I
were to give him a low mark on his essay only and simply because of
these values, I suspect I could find myself in a Grievance, and I'm
not at all convinced the administration would support me.
Unfortunately, when we came to sharing papers in class, this
student's position was by no means unique -- at least two other
students had written much the same argument with the same conclusion.
Interestingly enough, those students on his side were all male,
whereas the (rather mild) opposition to his position came from the
women in the class, who, sadly, were somewhat intimidated or
reluctant to engage in dismantling his reasoning.
2. Modelling (Susan Dobra, Anthony Pare): that we model as
instructors the best of our liberal-humanist values and
assume/hope/pray that they will influence the values, decisions, and
behaviours of our students at some point in the future is probably a
given for most of us. After all, all of us have changed considerably
since we were undergraduates (haven't we?).
Well, in any case we all model behaviour-based values throughout our
time in the classroom whether we like it or not, and students know
how to read these deep messages perhaps better than what comes out of
our mouths; whether this modeling is a seed that will eventually bear
palatable fruit I'm not sure. To some students our modeling may
simply solidify their opinions of us as wimps, whose ideas can be
easily dismissed. But when we are pushed to the wall, as I feel I am
in this case, modeling may be all we really can do.
Anthony added the idea that what I am hearing from the student may be
"unopened baggage" and the student may simply be trying to find out
if the received opinions in the suitcase need washing; he may appear
to be intransigent at this point only to save face.
I suspect this is true for many of our students -- the classroom is
an arena for testing opinions that have been inculcated by the media,
politicians, etc. This student, however, is a 28-yr old who works at
a bank; I'm not sure how plastic his deep schema are.
3. Examine alternatives. Mieke Tucker, for example, suggested that
some third-world countries want to get away from depending on the
economic dictates of the first world, and reducing or removing
debilitating aid might be a step in that direction.
The student and I have, indeed, examined in private consultation and
in class discussion the implications and options involved in the
current problem. After sorting through the misapplication of
Darwin's theories, the racist implications of selective starvation,
the abject poverty caused by international financial institutions,
the devastating legacy of colonialism, the fact that 20% of the world
consumes 80% of its resources, the demands for exploitation and
oppression connected to the extraction of huge profits by
transnational corporations, the excesses of military expenditure, the
hypothesis supported by Oxfam and Unesco that 25-40 billion a year
could feed all the hungry, and the observation made repeatedly by
NGO's that fertility rates plummet for peoples who reach a life-style
platform of some stability (I even factored in most of the wonderful
ideas provided by Lahoucine Ouzgane from Shiva & Mies _Ecofeminism_) -
- but even after all this, my nemesis student was unmoved.
His response was this: the idea of changing anything in the network
of institutions that create poverty and hunger is a fantasy -- the
forces in power will not make any changes in their condition of elite
dominance even for the sake of one hungry child; therefore, since
these children will die anyway, a relatively swift death for many
(withdrawal of aid) is preferable to a slow death for many
(continuing the pittance of aid).
When pushed, he -- and his cohorts -- admitted that they would not
support any changes in "the System" because they wanted to have a
monster home with two Mercedes in driveway, and they saw tampering
with the system as a threat to this goal. When I played the empathy
card (remember Stalin: one person's death is a tragedy; the death of
a million is a statistic) and asked them whether they could remove
the bowl of milk from a starving child's mouth so they could have
their toys, they all said "yes". Well, this is Alberta, you know.
Judy Kalman suggested having students write an assignment "in which
they must state and argue a view diametrically opposed to their own."
This is an approach I like very much, and it works well for most
students in getting them to shift extreme positions to compromises or
at least in getting them to sharpen their own arguments by examining
them for weaknesses. I haven't been able to apply this idea in this
instance yet, but perhaps I can get my student to speculate on how
"the System" might be changed so that the hungry can eat and he can
have most, if not all, of his toys --
Make it all less threatening, as it were, by making it hypothetical.
4. Supply the student with published articles that subvert his
assumptions and argument (Catherine Schryer and one respondent whose
name unfortunately was lost). As well, a number of professional
articles dealing with this issue of our value- obligation as writing
teachers were mentioned. Laurence Steven also suggested, among many
other delightful comments, that a teacher might suggest to a student
that the vast majority of sage authorities in the history of ideas
agree with position X, but not with his. The danger here, of course,
is that this approach could, as Anthony Pare, has suggested "harden
rather than soften [his] position": he could feel outnumbered and
ganged up on. My student said simply and quite perceptively that
times had changed drastically from when most of the wise sages had
lived, and their ideas no longer apply in a global village/economy.
I looked up all the materials suggested and photocopied the essays
that appeared as if they might help; I also included a copy of
Swift's "A Modest Proposal". Well, all this reading certainly helped
me clarify my ideas, but the student remained unmoved: he agreed
that the points made were valuable and that ethically he agreed with
them, but ultimately they had for him no pragmatic suasion: he was
not going to risk his toys. I'm not at all sure he thought Swift was
being ironic.
Most of the advice under #3 and #4 assumes that our students come to
us with open and inquiring minds, the counterpart, in effect, of our
own liberal humanism. For the most part, I suspect this is true,
even though the openness may be camouflaged, but it is certainly not
true for them all; and I seem to sense a decrease in openness: "Just
give me the facts, test me, train me, and get me out of here,
anything, but don't ask me to entertain threatening ideas."
There's my summary -- my apologies for allowing it to be so lengthy.
I do want to thank again all of you who responded -- I very much
appreciate your help. I hope this review will be of some assistance
to all of you.
The outcome of my particular situation still hangs, as you may have
gathered, in the balance: I have given the student the rest of
semester to read, think, and revise, and I have stated in all
seriousness that I wish I could grant him the rest of his life to
think through these value issues; I have also absolved him from
several other writing tasks so that he can concentrate on preparing
this current essay; I have suggested to him that his task is to solve
the contradiction between his needs/fears and the ethical weight of
the humanist tradition; and I have promised him that I will be
scrupulously fair in assessing his final draft when it arrives on my
desk.
Hope springs eternal!
All the best.
Richard Collier __|~_
Russell A. Hunt __|~_)_ __)_|~_ HOMEPAGE: www.StThomasU
Department of English )_ __)_|_)__ __) .ca/Faculty/hunt.htm
St. Thomas University | )____) | EMAIL: [log in to unmask]
Fredericton, New Brunswick___|____|____|____/ FAX: (506) 450-9615
E3B 5G3 CANADA \ / PHONE: (506) 363-3891
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