a call to action

In commemoration of my fields anniversary (i.e., it was three years ago today that I took and passed my special fields exam), I elected to spend the day reading an odds-and-ends assortment of workshop reports, reviews (mainly for new media and multi-media textbooks), and articles published in CCC and CE during the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Crowley’s 1977 “Components of the Composing Process” brought to mind yesterday's 486/686 (not surprising since we talked about a couple chapters of her Composition in the University). More specifically, the 1977 piece brought to mind a question raised at the end of that class. That is, if we recognize and find at all troubling the amount of time, effort and talk that is being (or has been) spent devising ways of “beating” or “circumventing the system,” so to speak, what does this suggest about the system currently in place? What other options do we have or might we imagine, work toward, etc.?

In “Components” Crowley reports on the results of an admittedly informal, three-semester long study. In an attempt to learn more about the processes students employed while completing papers for her class, Crowley asked her students to keep “composition diaries” detailing what they did, when, why, how, etc. Of these process accounts Crowley writes: “The sense of self-satisfaction seems to be what is chiefly lacking in my students’ accounts of their own process. When they write, they simply recount what they already know—which is why so many of them cannot bear to reread drafts of papers they’ve just written. They are not interested in, or even bored by, their own work. The composition diaries show that students take very little time or care in completing writing assignments, chiefly because they feel no real commitment to the writing beyond the need to finish a chore. They perceive the completion of a writing assignment in much the same way as they perceive an assignment requiring them to answer questions 1 through 5—one begins at the beginning and forges through to the end.”

In accordance with yesterday’s discussion about revision and draft-dodging, it seems likely the students involved in the study would have known how to beat this particular system. Insofar the diaries could count for course credit (i.e., Crowley notes that the diaries were “not required but could be submitted for extra points or as substitutions for other work”) I’m left wondering why students didn’t use the series of questions she provided them with and reverse engineer a series of process entries that might more closely resemble what the teacher-researcher expected or hoped to find?

As pertinent to yesterday’s discussion was the following call to action that just so happens to appear in the space beneath what i consider to be Crowley’s call to action. I was initially drawn to the last line of the invite, “We hope to be more on the side of action than suffering,” but the juxtaposition of these texts has come to interest me more than the final line of the invite. It seems to me that what was lacking in the process diaries—a kind of investment, interest, enthusiasm, pride, a sense of writing as more-than-chore—is assumed, if not required, with the second call to action. It is able to say (in ways that assignments don’t/can’t), “Hey, those who aren’t invested, worried, puzzled, wrestling, aware (whatever) need not apply.

While cognizant that there is a difference between the stuff one feels one has to do, is more-or-less compelled if not forced to do (i.e., writing for a grade, for tenure, to ensure a meeting takes place at the right day and time, to ensure that they don’t forget something at the grocery store) and the stuff one gets to do, is allowed the opportunity to do, and would do even if they weren’t required to (i.e., writing for a grade, for tenure, to ensure a meeting takes place at the right day and time, to ensure that they don’t forget something at the grocery store), I’m left wondering about other options and potentials for creating contexts for learning, for action, and (re)action, where “having to” and “getting to” aren’t treated as mutually exclusive terms.