Argument in Composition. John Ramage
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of it and minimizes some of its more controversial aspects. In setting out to define critical literacy it seems fair to say that we know more about what it is not than we do about what it is. What it most assuredly is not is whatever was being done in the name of the current-traditional writing curriculum with its emphasis on pre-fabricated forms and dumb readers. The current-traditional curriculum not only did not encourage students to think outside the box, it actively encouraged them to think of everything as a box, even the inherently chaotic, idiosyncratic business of writing. Its apparent goal was literacy in its older sense of minimal competency, albeit ratcheted up to the college level. It did not encourage personal engagement or reflection. It certainly did not offer students much in the way of skills and understandings that might travel with them elsewhere in the curriculum. Few philosophy courses in the university required “process” papers and fewer sociology courses stressed the “description” paper. (Some in our profession in fact favor the abolition of first year writing requirements precisely because they believe that the current-traditional model or some variant thereof remains the dominant model of writing in the profession. If one agrees that they are right about the currency of that model, they have a point.)
Perhaps the key distinguishing characteristic of critical literacy as we understand that term and the one that most clearly distinguishes it from its older, minimalist version, is its emphasis on reflective knowledge, the capacity Coleridge referred to as “knowing your knowledge” versus merely possessing it. In contrast to the demands placed on students writing a sound process paper, consider the challenges facing students setting out to construct a sound argument. They must be able to imagine counter-arguments, anticipate audience response, particularly skepticism and ignorance, and move deftly between claims of truth, reasons that warrant those claims, and evidence that supports the reasons. They must assess the adequacy of the support for their claim and qualify it accordingly. They must learn how to evaluate evidence and how to fairly summarize and question authorities with differing points of view. Perhaps most importantly, students must be prepared to risk their beliefs and assumptions about the world. It is not possible in the arena of argument simply to “plug [in a formula] and chug [out an answer].” Students have to understand issues in the context of an ongoing conversation about those issues, accepting at the outset that, as Stanley Fish suggests above, not all parties to that conversation will accept their beliefs and assumptions at face value.
In the interest of further clarifying critical literacy it might be helpful to contrast it to yet another approach to the teaching of composition that succeeds the current-traditional model. The critical thinking movement in composition was led by people like psychologist Dick Hayes and composition theorist Linda Flower who teamed up to show how problem solving methods could be imported into the writing classroom. They were among the first in the field of composition who, in Janet Emig’s famous phrase, treated writing in a fully developed way as a “mode of thinking” and helped people see how the acquisition of writing ability entails higher order reasoning. But while the critical thinking movement was useful in helping the discipline move past current-traditional approaches, it did not cultivate reflective understanding in the same way that critical literacy sets out to do. Moreover, the problem-solving skills it focused attention on were taught as if they were value free, a set of skills not unlike those required to solve puzzles. Their value-free assumptions limited their applicability to argument, a genre that often takes us far afield into issues that are value laden and emotionally charged.
One of the easiest ways to distinguish a critical thinking approach to teaching writing from a critical literacy approach is to focus on the notion of problem-solving. Simply put, critical thinking proponents focus on how to solve problems, while critical literacy proponents focus on how to discover problems. One of the most important figures in the critical literacy movement in the 1980s, Brazilian philosopher Paolo Freire, coined the term “problematize” to describe what he set out to do with his educational program in South America. Friere’s work with peasant populations proved to be so controversial that the government felt compelled to shut it down eventually. In the process of teaching basic literacy, Freire was teaching revolutionary politics by causing pre-literate “mythic” thinking to give way to critical literacy. The power of naming situations, as Freire’s peasants soon discovered, contains the seeds for challenging and redefining those situations. At one level, Freire’s pedagogical experiments confirmed one of Kenneth Burke’s most important insights: that proverbs, which comprise a sort of linguistic shorthand for naming recurrent situations, constitute “strategies for dealing with situations” (Philosophy 296). For Burke as for Freire, names are never neutral. Before we can name anything, we must first size it up, “discern ‘the general behind the particular’ (301), and the name that we choose in turn implies an attitude toward it. Insofar as an attitude is an incipient act, language and politics are inextricably linked.
Educators have been reluctant to embrace the political dimension of critical literacy for obvious reasons. As witnessed by John Leo’s antipathy toward the “therapeutic,” “multiculturalist” political sympathies of college faculty, there is already a great deal of fear about the possibility that schools are indoctrinating instead of educating students. The fact that critical literacy belongs to an ancient tradition of education stressing that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” and that it encourages such non-partisan virtues as self-reflection and self-questioning has not dissuaded some conservative critics from denouncing it as little more than a propaganda tool. While some of the more ardent proponents of critical literacy, like the truest believers in any cause, appear sometimes to believe that theirs is the one true faith and that non-believers are in league with the John Leo’s of the world, many of our most thoughtful practitioners and innovative teachers profess allegiance to critical literacy on largely pedagogical grounds.
Moreover, those who may be tempted to believe that by teaching students to challenge the status quo, question tradition and authority and think dialectically about the world they ensure a generation of students committed to progressive politics flatter themselves. Critical literacy is simply too complex an instrument to serve as a reliable tool of indoctrination. Its emphasis on how to think, on foregrounding processes and tacit understanding, combined with its skeptical attitude toward content and coverage, leaves entirely open the question of what students might do with their education. The very qualities of critical literacy that allow it to transfer so readily to other courses, that make it so adaptable to history, economics and sociology courses, are the very qualities that render it a flawed vessel of indoctrination. As Michael Berube reminds us, citing what he calls the principle of “reversibility,” there is no way to ensure that training students in advanced literacy can be “a unidirectional vehicle for political change” (145 Employment). Our most reflective thinkers may turn out to be hedge fund wizards as surely as they turn out to be political revolutionaries.
But beyond the fear of appearing partisan in our approach to teaching writing, there is a deeper animus toward the teaching of reflection that is not on the surface political. Philosopher Hans Blumenberg, for example, takes note of the increasing pressure on educators to set aside the goal of the examined life and to “abandon the idea . . . that is governed by the norm that man must know what he is doing” (446) in the name of finding ever more parsimonious means for solving problems. In response, Blumenberg calls for a turn to rhetoric, on the grounds that it represents “a consummate embodiment of retardation [of time]. Circumstantiality, procedural inventiveness, ritualization imply a doubt as to whether the shortest way of connecting two points is also the humane route from one to another” (446).
Blumenberg’s motive for turning to rhetoric here resonates with a theme that runs throughout Burke, who frequently expresses a skeptical attitude toward the Law of Parsimony and the “Occamite nonsense” (e.g., behaviorism and monetarism) that may arise from it: “For if much of service has been got by following Occam’s law to the effect that ‘entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity,’ equally much of disservice has arisen through ignoring a contrary law, which we could phrase correspondingly: ‘entities should not be reduced beyond necessity” (Grammar 324). For Burke, the modern age is characterized far more by crimes against the second law than against the first. If critical thinking implies an ability to solve problems efficiently through simplification, critical literacy implies an ability to generate complexity through reflection. Moreover, it also entails an ability not only to write clearly when