Tyra O'Bryan

Exam Proposal

PROPOSAL FOR THE WRITTEN PORTIONS OF THE COMPREHENSIVE EXAMINATION IN COMPOSITION AND CULTURAL RHETORIC

Examination Committee Chair: Rebecca Moore Howard

Major Examination: Collaborative Composition Pedagogy

Composition Studies has long acknowledged that meaning-making is a collaborative process, examining such generative interactions as those between writers and readers, readers and texts, and texts and writers in a continual effort to better understand what it purports to teach. Composition pedagogy, on the other hand, has tended to define collaboration both narrowly and inconsistently, insisting practitioners provide opportunities for students to work in groups while measuring student success almost exclusively in terms of individual grades for autonomously-written texts.

This exam will focus on the intersection between theoretical considerations—of collaborative learning, collaborative writing, and the social nature of invention—and pedagogical responses. Acknowledging that all communicative action is inherently social, as LeFevre argues, does not preclude the individual decision-making required of writers; assessment and academic accreditation procedures are poorly designed to recognize or reward collaborative accomplishment; editing, co-writing, conversational brainstorming, draft-swapping, and other interactive writing activities commonly described as "collaborative" make different ideological and material demands on writers; as Bruffee's and Johnson's debate theorizes and Spigelman's work with writers confirms, sharing a writing task can be both generative and silencing.

In particular, this exam is concerned with the less overtly collaborative aspects of textual production in composition classrooms: the ways in which composition scholars, teachers, and students participate in the largely unacknowledged webs of influence—including such disparate sources of language-use as hallway conversations, assigned readings, and formal academic citation guidelines—that make everything they write and read multivocal and move, through their work, toward what Ede and Lunsford call a "heteroglossic understanding of language."

Minor Examination: Authority & Authorship

Definitions of authorship and the possession of textual authority are crucial areas of dispute in contemporarily Composition Studies; we contest old-fashioned ways of talking about the author as "solitary genius" while drilling our students in practices and plagiarism rules that reinforce this image; we ask students to "take ownership" of their own work while retaining the authority to evaluate—and reject—it; we encourage students and colleagues to share ideas, innovations, and responsibility, and then reserve tenure awards for single-author texts authorized by traditional committees.

Composition scholars and instructors alike struggle with ideals of empowerment and "the Author/student binary"—an inexact dividing line defining students' authorial status in terms of what it's not—seeking ways to grant students authority while acknowledging that their power as grantors automatically disempowers the grantees. We quarrel over whether authority exists or is only illusionary, whether it is possessed by all writers or only those vetted by particular social structures, whether it resides within its user or is only an externally-driven response to social motive, whether, like other ways of defining power, it is the purview of some but not others or something present, albeit in unequal means, in all creative interactions between all participants.

This exam is primarily focused on the definitions and implications of authorship as they inform current Composition scholarship and pedagogy, particularly in how these cultural beliefs shape classroom practices and curricular priorities.

Minor Examination: Genre Theory/Genre Studies

Our notions of genre—whether we think in terms of textual features or the rhetorical purposes communicative acts fulfill—influence and enable every aspect of communicative interaction, textual and otherwise, that we take part in. The validity of our textual creations is determined by how well they suit the generic expectations characterizing their situations, and, likewise, the success of our students' written work depends on their assessment of and adherence to the situated demands of each assignment.

The writing situation—or "rhetorical situation"—even for students in a particular course extends beyond their teacher's preferences and the prompt and page-limit of each task to include the temporal, geographical, political, and ideological location of the classroom, institution, and educational system, all of which participate in the formation of genres. In simplest terms, genre enables both readers and writers to make meaning with what they read and write; in its grandest characterizations, it is through the study of genre that scholars find possible an "integrated, unified theory of writing."

This exam will discuss genre's function as a means of social construction and meaning-making, particularly in terms of the expressed and hidden influences of genre on academic texts, student performance, and instructors' expectations. Specifically, this exam will focus on the pedagogical implications of genre theory as a means to evaluate Devitt's claim that developing and applying "a pedagogy of genre awareness" will "rescue" the first-year writing course.