Composition as a Thermostatic Activity

Composition as a Thermostatic ActivityAuthor(s): Paul LynchSource: College Composition and Communication, Vol. 60, No. 4 (JUNE 2009), pp. 728-745Published by: National Council of Teachers of EnglishStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40593427 .

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Paul Lynch

Composition as a Thermostatic Activity

This essay offers Neil Postman's thermostatic metaphor as a model for critical teaching. In this model, the role of the composition teacher is that of a thermostat that responds to a changing ideological environment by offering counterbalance. Such a stance is an anti-stance since it requires the teachers to enact philosophies and pedagogies, rather than holding them.

I / do not mean to say that there is a "correct" metaphor of the mind or of learning. Neither do I say that a well-thought-out

philosophy of education confines itself to a single one. lam saying that a conversation about education cannot extend beyond

two or three sentences before a metaphor is invoked which

provides structure, authority, or explanation for a certain belief. Or sometimes confuses the issue entirely.

Neil Postman, Teaching as a Conserving Activity

Τ A he question I want to consider in this essay is one that has perplexed composition for the last twenty years: How can a teacher who embraces critical pedagogy raise questions about authority without imposing authority in order to raise those very questions? In other words, how do we make English a subversive activity without making it a coercive activity? As my sentence structure suggests, the problem is often stated as an either-or opposition:

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either we impose authority in order to question it (and so reestablish it), or we forgo authority in order to avoid imposing it (and it reestablishes itself). This dilemma is so thoroughly recognized within composition that scholars tend to repeat this kind of antithetical structure in their own sentences. In "Power, Authority, and Critical Pedagogy," for example, Patricia Bizzell writes:

On the one hand, we wish to serve politically left-oriented or liberatory goals in our teaching, while on the other, we do not see how we can do so without com- mitting the theoretically totalizing and pedagogically oppressive sins we have inveighed against in the systems we want to resist. Another way to describe this impasse would be to say that we want to serve the common good with the power we possess by virtue of our position as teachers, and yet we are deeply suspicious of any exercise of power in the classroom. (54)

In "The Dilemma of Oppositional Pedagogy," Gerald Graff describes what he calls the "double bind":

On the one hand, the oppositional teacher declares an aggressive political agenda that supposedly goes far beyond mere liberal pluralism with its ideologically suspect defense of "open debate" and a "free marketplace of ideas." On the other hand, in order to avoid the authoritarianism entailed by enforcing any such agenda without open debate, the oppositional teacher inevitably has to reinstate the very pluralism that has supposedly been repudiated. (275)

Graff also captures this sense of push and pull in "Teaching Politically without Political Correctness," in which he writes, "What we've seen, I think, is that liberatory educators vacillate between a rhetoric of democratic 'dialogue' and uncoerced classroom outcomes on the one hand, and a rhetoric that assumes predetermined political outcomes on the other" (29). In Changing the Subject in English Class, Marshall Alcorn writes, "Insisting that students show preferences for correct' political beliefs threatens democratic processes. On the other hand, if teachers make no attempt to impose their political beliefs on students, they risk being charged with cowardice in their avowed desire to make the world better" (31). It seems, then, that "socially concerned teachers [...] must choose between taking confrontational stands against arguments they disagree with, or conversely, effacing their own beliefs in hopes of ensuring a fuller play of voices in the writing class" (Anderson 197). Confronted by this conundrum, critical teachers feel trapped. But they may be trapped by a false choice. As Karen Kopelson suggests, "Since composition's turn to critical pedagogy, we have often been presented - have often presented ourselves - with only simplistic, reductive, and falsely dualistic options: we either foreground our politics

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or irresponsibly negate them" (140). In this essay, then, I suggest that we can find a way out of this double bind by imagining the role of the teacher (and of a pedagogy) through the metaphor of a thermostat, which I borrow from Neil Postman's 1979 Teaching as a Conserving Activity.

Though Postman's work focuses on a few different themes- education, language, media, and technology - metaphor is central to all his thinking. Indeed, Postman is certain that one could not think at all without metaphor: "All subjects are based on powerful metaphors that direct and organize the way we will do our thinking. In history, economics, physics, biology, linguistics, metaphors, like questions, are organs of perception. Through our metaphors, we see the world as one thing or another" (Conscientious 29). "Nowhere," he continues, "is this more so than in education" (29). In Teaching as a Conserving Activity, Postman offers a metaphor through which he hoped schools could be reimagined: "Education is best conceived of as a thermostatic activity" (19; emphasis in the original). Though Postman applies his metaphor to education as a whole, I argue that it can be usefully applied to the composition course. Moreover, I want to suggest that this metaphor perhaps can undo the double bind (while not simply hacking apart the Gordian knot). I do not have a specific pedagogy to propose, but through Postman's metaphor I hope to offer a posture from which pedagogies can be deployed. Like the double bind it seeks to address, this posture offers another splendid paradox: only by loosening our grip on our own ideologies can we position ourselves to challenge our students' ideologies.

II

Your taste in music is excellent. It coincides exactly with my own.

Henry VIII to Thomas More in Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons

In my second year of graduate school, I got the chance to team-teach a course as part of a Freshman Learning Community. Like most such courses, the class consisted of a freshman English course and a "content" course. In this case, I was teamed with two professors from the College of Education; their course was entitled "Introduction to Education," and it was for freshmen who had expressed an interest in teaching as a career. The pairing was perfect for me: I had taught high school for several years before entering graduate school, and I was fortunate enough to be teamed with two excellent professors who treated me like a colleague rather than a correction service. They stuck around for my

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half of the class meeting just as I showed up for theirs. We had, moreover, many of the same notions about education, and we were able to complement each others classes without forcing it. The students seemed to learn; if our evalua- tions are any indication, they agreed that the course was a success.

During that semester, Postman died, and because he is one of my heroes, I wanted somehow to commemorate him. I devised a lesson that I thought reflected some of his central concerns: education, media, and metaphor. Near the time of his death, the New Yorker published a couple of pieces that seemed ripe for a "Postmanian" analysis (which might, I suppose, just as easily be named for many other theorists of metaphor, but Postman is where I heard it first). The first was written by Malcom Gladwell, and the second was the response written by Rod Paige, then the secretary of education. Their subject was the No Child Left Behind Act. In his piece, Gladwell argues that the changes ushered in by NCLB "resemble, in language and philosophy, the industrial-efficiency movement of the early twentieth century" (31). As he suggests, "In those years, engineers argued that efficiency and productivity were things that could be measured and managed, and, if you had the right inventory and manufacturing controls in place, no widget could be left behind" (31). This "Fordist vision," as Gladwell calls it, in which the classroom becomes "a brightly lit assembly line," where "fresh-scrubbed, defect-free students come bouncing out at the other end" (31), has been around nearly as long as the Fordist vision of business. Gladwell goes on: "The only problem, of course- and its not a trivial one- is that children aren't widgets" (31). When I showed this piece to my students, who would soon be trying to meet the demands of NCLB, they responded in just the ways I hoped they would: they pointed out that, unlike widgets, children get confused and get sick and get ornery just because they feel like it. Occasionally, in spite of all our systems, they fall behind.

We then read Secretary Paige's response, in which he celebrates the very industrial metaphor that Gladwell critiques. "Good schools," he writes, "do operate like a business" (12). He goes on, "They care about outcomes, routinely assess quality, and measure the needs of the children they serve" (12). He accuses our public education system of being a monopoly and writes, "Like all monopolies, it has been insulated from the changes that the market brings and hasn't had to respond to the needs of consumers" (12). Again, my students responded in the way I had hoped they would. They picked up on the word consumer and all of its connotations and followed them to their absurd conclusions. And they were doing all of this without too much prodding from

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me. I got the impression- with all the caveats that come with my vantage point as classroom authority - that they were critiquing under their own power. I did not encounter any of the resistance that sometimes seems embedded in the freshman English experience, nor did I get the sense that they were telling me what I wanted to hear.1 Yes, I brought the artifacts to them, and yes, I asked the questions that jump-started the conversation. But once they were revved, they ran on their own.

So I should have been happy. I had managed to help students see that metaphor is always the screen through which they see, or the sea in which they swim. I got to slam a prominent government official without ever having to use the word conservative or liberal I got my students to "think critically." And, best of all, my students' thinking was the same as my own. Like Paolo Freire, I would like to believe that students in my classrooms are free to think whatever they want, though I was very happy that they had decided to think what I wanted.2 But, of course, it was all too easy. Picking apart Rod Paige s rhetoric is like shooting fish in a barrel. And I had a sympathetic audience of recent high school graduates who, after a few rounds of college entrance tests, were probably a little resentful of bubble sheets and number two pencils. Moreover, they all wanted to be teachers and looked with suspicion on anything that might dehumanize the students they would one day serve. I have no idea what I would have done (at the risk of gross generalization) had my classroom been filled with twenty future members of the local chamber of commerce. What might I have done in order to make the lesson "work" for proponents of No Child Left Behind, whom I have already stereotyped, by implication, as business people with no sensitivity either to a humanizing or to a critical mission for education? This last question reveals thinking still caught in the double bind. If you fail to see the stupidity of NCLB, I can either overpower your beliefs through my authority as teacher (if I've got the energy to do it) or allow everyone to "agree to disagree" (if I don't). In this kind of reductive scheme, there is not much hope that anyone will change anyone else's mind. As I pondered this lesson during the weeks after, a far more important question emerged: What rationale could I offer for having wanted to change anyone's mind in the first place?

Like many who would make composition their full-time work, I hold a few

things to be true, yet these beliefs lock me into the double bind. I believe that there are sociopolitical ramifications to what I do in the classroom because there is no escaping ideology (a situation that is neither good nor bad, but just is). Because it is inescapable, it should be foregrounded. To these questions- "Is criticism an appropriate point of entry into the college curriculum (and is the

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Freshman English course appropriately conceived as a point of entry into the

college curriculum)? Is it the job of college English to teach students to learn to resist and be suspicious of writing and the text?" (Bartholomae 85)- I answer

yes. I also reject Maxine Hairstons oversimplification of critical pedagogy as "a model that puts dogma before diversity, politics before craft, ideology before critical thinking, and the social goals of the teacher before the educational needs to the student" (180). Certainly I want a "student-centered classroom in which the teacher doesn't assume, as our would-be forcers of conscience do, that he or she owns the truth" (192), but I cannot escape drawing the same conclusion as David Bartholomae, who insists that there is no writing without teachers. "[S]ince the point of criticism is to ask questions of the things that seem beyond question, to ask students to see the natural as artificial, it cannot come from within. It will not happen on its own, but only when prompted. That is how I

imagine the writing teacher" (87). I imagine the writing teacher in the same

way, though I fear my lesson, personally pleasing as it was, failed (as far as I can tell) to cast the natural as artificial. (To me, it appears natural for them to have resisted Paige s reasoning and to have favored Gladwells. To question the natural would have been to question Gladwell.) If I am to cast the natural as artificial, the only way I can do it is by stepping in, or by directing the process.

And there lies the rub. To intervene, the teacher must direct. Into what

position does the metaphor of "direction" cast my students? Sure, direction seems harmless enough, but other metaphors are not so benign. It is a very short leap from positioning teachers as missionaries to positioning students as benighted natives. "One simply cannot think of oneself as superior to others without at the same time thinking of those others as inferior and- at least in some small way - less truly realized and less truly real than oneself" (Neel 31). If teachers take their metaphors seriously, they may find themselves trapped by them. Again, Postman: "In a fundamental sense, all arguments about how education ought to be conducted are arguments about the validity of com-

peting metaphors. If you believe that the mind is like a dark cavern, you will suggest activities that are quite different from those suggested by people who believe the mind is like a muscle or an empty vessel" (157). Thus, the double bind might also be defined in the following way: in addition to there being no writing without teachers, there is no teaching without metaphors. These metaphors cast both instructor and instructed into certain roles. Since these "role-casting" metaphors cannot be avoided, the question then becomes the best metaphor for what we want to do in the composition classroom. In his thermostat metaphor, Postman offers an educational principle that would cast

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teachers and students in roles that could subvert the simplistic and corrosive binaries of teacher versus student (knowing versus ignorant, empowered versus disempowered, missionary versus native) and teacher versus teacher (liberator versus gatekeeper). In the thermostatic model, the teacher would play a role that would neither fall into these false choices nor pretend toward a utopia in which teacher and student are precisely equal.

Ill

/ cannot leave the students to themselves because I am trying to be a liberating educator. Laissez-faire! I cannot fall into laissez- faire. On the other hand, I cannot be authoritarian. I have to be

radically democratic and responsible and directive. Not directive of the students, but directive of the process, in which the students are with me. As director of the process, the liberating teacher is

not doing something to the students but with the students. Paolo Freire to Ira Shor, in A Pedagogy for Liberation

In this section, I want to explicate Postman's thermostat metaphor and then address how it might help us reconceive teachers' authority. In Teaching as a

Conserving Activity, Postman argues that a culture is like an ecosystem, with checks and balances to provide homeostasis. If a given force were allowed to dominate without check or balance, then the ecosystem, or the culture, would

surely be damaged. In Postman's scheme, schools would not decide on a given stance and stick with it no matter what; rather, they would act as one of the checks on the prevailing cultural winds:

From this point of view, and stated far too grossly, education tries to conserve tradition when the rest of the environment is innovative. Or it is innovative when the rest of the society is tradition-bound. It is a matter of indifference whether the society be volatile or static. The function of education is always to offer the counter- argument, the other side of the picture. The thermostatic view of education is, then, not ideology-centered. It is balance-centered. It is not so much a philosophy as it is a metaphilosophy- a philosophy about philosophies. Its aim at all times is to make visible the prevailing biases of a culture, and then, by employing whatever philosophies of education are available, to oppose them. In the thermostatic view of education, you do not "hold" philosophies. You deploy them. (19-20)

In order to enact this thermostatic curriculum and pedagogy, Postman would ask three questions: "The first is, What specific cultural biases, if left unchecked, will leave our youth with incompetent intellects and distorted personalities?

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The second is, To what extent is formal education competent to deal with such biases? The third is, How may education oppose, both emphatically and constructively, such biases as the school can hope to address?" (25). Postman also offers more specific examples: "Is the development of individual autonomy desirable? Only to the extent that it is modulated by the constraints of social norms. Is the exercise of political power good? Only where there exist opposing forces to hold it in check" (18). Obviously, these kinds of questions do not result in easy answers, and critical pedagogues and traditional pedagogues would disagree on many of the answers (though they might also agree on more than they expect). Most importantly, such questions can move the conversation past the double bind. The thermostat metaphor here engenders a stance-- or an "anti-stance"- that demands that teachers be ready to reposition themselves in response to the ecology that they confront.

The thermostat is also a challenge to those- whatever their ideology- who happen to find themselves teaching like-minded students. According to the thermostatic curriculum, my lesson in the metaphors of NCLB was a failure, even from the perspective of those who might applaud the results. The central shortcoming of my method lay in my failure to play the role of counterbalance. I might have posed this question: If school shouldn't be a factory, then what should it be? Given the historical relationship of gender and primary education - in which primary education has often been cast as a "nurturing" activity that is "natural" for women- and given that most of my students were women who had expressed interest in primary education, it might not have been sur- prising if the metaphor of "family" had been suggested. In this situation, surely both Postman's three questions and Bartholomae s three questions would have led me to the thermostatic curriculum that my students needed, rather than the one that Rod Paige needed. I might have asked them some questions about their choice of that particular metaphor and its implications for their future students. I might have asked them about the relationship between their gender and their choice of metaphor, and I might have pointed out the relationships between the values assigned to primary education and the values assigned to women in our society. If they were suspicious of Paiges reasoning, I might have offered better reasoning. Why shouldn't schools "care about outcomes, routinely assess quality, and measure the needs of the children they serve"? I might have argued that the phrases in and of themselves do not appear to be dangerous. Put simply, I might have played Chester Finn to their Alfie Kohn in order to provide the counterbalance of a thermostat.

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At first glance, the kind of devils advocacy for which I have been arguing may seem to risk simply reinscribing the rituals of teachers' authority: Students bring an ideology, and once teachers have identified it, they offer a different ideology in order to challenge it. In order to offer the counter-ideology, the teachers impose their authority. How can they do this without coercing their students into false agreement or resentful silence? How can they present a counter-argument while keeping all other arguments in play? Fortunately, composition scholarship offers a conception of authority in which teachers can wield it in the service of questioning it. There is a way out of the double bind of "one the one hand, on the other" and a way toward a thermostatic teaching, and in the next section I argue for a paradox that can produce the ends for which critical pedagogues aim.

IV

We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it "excludes" it "represses

" it "censors" it "abstracts" it "masks" it "conceals" In fact, power produces; it

produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth.

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish

We have learned in composition that the answer to the conflicts of authority is not simply to relinquish authority. In their examination of student resistance to feminism, for example, Dale Bauer and Katherine Rhoades have found that "the early models of feminist decentering of power in the classroom have [. . .] failed. Feminist teachers who decentered all authority found that they were

undermining themselves: students had trouble granting authority to women when their education had not generally shown women as authorities" (101-2). Karen Kopelson agrees; in "Rhetoric on the Edge of Cunning," she argues that if teachers marked by difference in race, gender, or sexuality engage in more student-centered approaches, their students, focusing on their pedagogical performance, often see them as inexperienced or unprepared (127). While Kopelson s essay, like that of Bauer and Rhoades, deals specifically with teachers marked by difference, I would suggest that her argument can also apply to unmarked teachers who would challenge their students' ideologies. Even if white males "dress down," they may have no more success in democratizing their classrooms than their marked colleagues. This is not to say that unmarked

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teachers do not have more latitude in this area. Given the authority that students implicitly ascribe to them, white males probably will have an easier time with decentering. As with their marked colleagues, however, decentering will not always and automatically result in a dialogic classroom.

If decentering will not work, how are would-be critical pedagogues to engage in critical pedagogy at all? Kopelson argues that teachers should offer students a "performance of neutrality," in which teachers marked by difference reappropriate "traditional academic postures, such as authority, objectivity, and neutrality" (118) in order to challenge those very ideas and students' assumptions about them. In other words, the teacher presents herself as an authority in order to engage in "a deliberate, reflective, self-conscious masquerade that serves an overarching and more insurgent political agenda than does human- ist individualism" (123). The performance of neutrality "is never a stance that believes in or celebrates its own legitimacy but, rather, feigns itself, perverts itself, in the service of other- disturbing and disruptive-goals" (123). In this approach, the teacher self-consciously performs the traditional rituals of authority not for her own sake but for the sake of subverting the assumptions that underlie those very rituals. Queer teachers, then, might present themselves in ways that makes their sexuality harder to read. Their purpose would not be to deny who they are so as to avoid the issue entirely; rather, their purpose would to deny their students the possibility of letting themselves off the intel- lectual hook by assuming that the teacher is pushing an agenda (129). Once students read them as "normal," Kopelson argues, they are more likely to open themselves up to what the teacher has to teach. In this way, the performance is "unabashedly opportunistic, using students' assumptions about education, and any prevailing classroom and political attitudes, as resources to achieve desired and opposing ends [. . . it] succeeds by working with these powerful forces or encompassing elements" (132). In this conception of authority, the students' attitudes are not obstacles to be overcome but resources to be used.

It is this notion of working with rather than upon that links the performance of neutrality to thermostatic teaching. Indeed, the performance of neutrality allows for thermostatic teaching "in the service of other - disturbing and disruptive - goals." To work with requires not that teachers simply relinquish all authority, but that they perform it in order to achieve their ultimate ends. Thus, the performance of neutrality can allow the instructor to deploy the thermostat without incurring defensive student resistance and without descending into a facile neutrality that simply allows student ideologies to

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re-coalesce. In the performance of neutrality, the thermostatic composition teacher does not appear to "push an agenda" and can therefore practice not "coercive advocacy [. . .] but counter advocacy" (Graff, "Teaching Politically" 27). It also engages the teacher in a "dialogic mode of authority" that "moves [students] from the monologic model of authoritative voice to an authority in flux" (Bauer and Rhoades 102). This is a paradoxical approach to authority, and one that can address the double bind. It requires that the critical teacher maintain "a sort of doubleness: an awareness that ones course is part of an ideological structure that keeps people from thinking about their situation, but also a belief that one can resist the structure and help students criticize it" (Myers 169). By remaining aware of this doubleness, critical teachers "perform as conservators and agents of change, as custodians of prevailing community values and as agents of social change and reacculturation" (Bruffee 650).

Finally, it needs mentioning that Kopelson bases her argument on the Greek notion of metis, which Marcel Détienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant explicate in Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society. Metis, they argue, is a certain type of cunning or crafty intelligence, one displayed perhaps most famously by Odysseus. The person of metis faces "forces too powerful to be controlled directly but which can be exploited despite themselves without ever being confronted head on" (47). The reason that these forces cannot be confronted head-on is that the person of metis usually is in a weaker position than his or her opponent. Détienne and Vernant write, "In every confrontation or competitive situation [. . .] success can be won by two means, either thanks to a superiority in 'power' in the particular sphere in which the contest is taking place [. . .] or by the use of methods of a different order whose effect is, precisely, to reverse the natural outcome of the encounter and to allow victory to fall to the party whose defeat had appeared inevitable" (13).

This aspect of metis, in which the teacher conceives of his position as weaker than his students', is crucial to thermostatic thinking about the classroom. In composition, we have assumed - rightly, I believe - that the "natural outcome of the encounter" between coercive pedagogy and students is either sullen silence or faked acquiescence, in which what is usually public and what is usually hidden remain so.3 In truth, we are simply unable to coerce assent. By embracing metis, however, the composition teacher avoids a contest of wills and works with rather than upon. The teacher of metis thus becomes a thermostatic composition teacher, who deploys ideologies based not on her own beliefs and experiences, but upon those of her students. In the final section of the essay, I argue that the same also holds true for pedagogies. While

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teachers may desire to describe themselves as "expressivist" or "post-process" or even "traditionalist," the pedagogies we actually deploy should depend not only on our own deeply held beliefs, theories, and philosophies, but also on those of our students.

V

Bereft of serious opposition, our ideals and truths lose their vitality and, eventually, their meaning.

Neil Postman, Teaching as a Conserving Activity

Certainly, being a thermostatic composition teacher would not be easy. Perfor- mance of unfamiliar or uncomfortable personae or ideologies will demand a great deal of teachers. Moreover, it is hard to imagine a classroom in which all students hold such similar ideologies that the teacher needs to find one and only one opposite to deploy:

In my own teaching, (and I don't think I'm atypical), I find myself being a Lenin- ist one day and a Milton Friedmanite on the next, depending on my sense of the ideological tilt of the students. And in classes where students themselves are politically divided (i.e., most classes I have taught), I often put on one party hat or the other by turns (as well as many intermediate positions), depending on the ebb and flow of the discussion. (Graff, "Teaching Politically" 26)

While I have thus far spoken of thermostatic teaching as though I assume we can easily type students, it would, of course, be impossible to know twenty or forty individual ideological "ecosystems"; nevertheless, thermostatic teaching would at least demand better conversations among teachers about who students are and what they need. Such conversations would rarely arrive at easy answers, but it would be the point of such conversations to move us past easy answers about "Republican," "conservative," "Catholic," "rural," "urban," "hippie," or "gra- nola" freshmen. Obviously these pieces of information are important if teachers are to know who those students are, but they should not allow us to slip into the stereotyping that positions our students as uncritical and unenlightened.

To be effective, such reimagining of students should happen not only at the level of the individual classroom, but also at the level of the writing program. Though I have imagined the thermostat applying primarily to the individual teacher in the individual classroom, Postman did not limit his metaphor to individual teachers. Instead, he saw the metaphor as a potential meta-philosophy for schools in general. To limit the discussion to an individual teacher, or even

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to a single course, may simply rehearse the problem we have now. The double bind cannot finally be escaped "as long as pedagogical thinking remains fixated at the level of the individual course at the expense of the organization and inter- relation of courses in the curriculum - that is, as long as teaching is assumed to be an activity that is just naturally performed by a lone teacher in a classroom without any dialogical relation to other courses and classrooms" (Graff, "Dilemma" 275). Though the thermostat can successfully operate in a single classroom, it will operate more successfully if we think about thermostatic activity across entire writing programs. Teacher orientations and composition practica might be places where programs could begin to discuss where their students are and what the program - and the individual teachers - should stress in response. Surely such conversations would first reveal that composition teachers- including professors, lecturers, and grad students- hold political views of far greater diversity than we often think. Moreover, such conversations might also move us beyond the public transcript that occurs among "faculty" of varying rank and power.

Teacher training could provide not only a site for deciding which philosophies or ideologies to deploy, but also which pedagogies. Given the theoretical discussion of recent years, the thermostatic metaphor might prove useful as the discipline moves forward. In the last decade or so, scholarly conversation has shifted from process to post-process. While scholars such as George Pull- man and Lee-Ann M. Kastman Breuch have argued that pedagogical distinc- tions-especially those made between current-traditional and process- are often more rhetorical than "factual," scholars do see differences between the pedagogies that go by "current-traditional" and "process." However, the present shift presents complications that previous shifts did not. While scholarship has confidently distinguished current-traditional from process and social- epistemic theory (see, e.g., Berlin), "[p]ost-process theorists hold [. . .] that writing is a practice that cannot be captured by a generalized process or a Big Theory" (Kent 1). Other than insisting that writing is public, interpretive, and situated (1), post-process theorists resist general claims. Likewise, they resist what Lynn Worsham has called the "pedagogical imperative," which, she argues, requires "every theory of writing to translate into a pedagogical practice or at least some specific advice for teachers" (96). Sidney I. Dobrin insists, "in order for scholars in composition and rhetoric to responsibly pursue inquiry into all facets of discourse study, particular theories, lines of thought, inquiries may not

necessarily lead to immediate classroom application" (63). If writing teachers

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and theorists take these cautions seriously, then this most recent paradigm shift thrusts writing teachers into unfamiliar territory: while we may be less confident of the pedagogies we currently (and traditionally) hold, we do not have a new one to grasp.

If left grasping, it seems likely writing teachers will work with established pedagogies, perhaps subscribing to a single system, perhaps cobbling together bits and pieces into idiosyncratic systems. This is perhaps as it should be. As Dobrin suggests, "Composition has embraced and rejected multiple theories, but while many have sought the one panacea theory or practice, composition has become a complicated field that cannot rely on a single theory or a com- prehensive pedagogy to answer all of the questions that arise in classrooms or in scholarly inquiry as to the nature of discourse" (150). The question, then, is how teachers decide among the possibilities. Certainly, the answer will depend on the experience and ideology of the given teacher. Thermostatic teaching, however, would also insist that the answer should depend on the experience and ideology of the given students. If we cannot theorize writing sufficiently in order to discover universal criteria for "better" and "more efficient" pedagogies, then perhaps the local criteria should be our students' present needs. If post-process tells us that there are no answers to the question "What's the right pedagogy?" perhaps we need to ask a better question, such as "What's the right pedagogy for the students I have?"

Post-process theorists recognize implicitly that the latter question is the important one:

In short, despite our attempts to introduce alternative genres, to help students become more dialogic and less monologic, more sophistic and less Aristotelian, more explanatory and less argumentative, more personal and less academic, the Western, rationalist tradition of assertion and support is so entrenched in our epistemology and ways of understanding what is good writing' and 'thinking' are that this tradition, along with is concomitant assumptions, defies even our most concerted efforts to subvert it. (Olson 9)

Olson here recognizes that what is good for students is not fixed and immu- table, but rather changes in response to students' assumptions and ideologies. Even if we all were to agree that Olson's values provide the best response to the students who currently sit in our classes, the very tenets of post-process theory would caution us against imagining that these values can provide the best response once and for all. We must also imagine that at a given moment, we - whether the "we" is a single teacher or a writing program - may want to

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return to monologic, Aristotelian, argumentative, academic ways of writing as a counterbalance for our students' assumptions. We will recognize these future needs if we ask the thermostatic question, not "What do my students need?" but "What do my students need right now?" As I have suggested, not only should individual teachers ask such questions, but also writing programs. Rather than saying, "We believe in expressivism," writing programs might decide, "Our students need expressivism right now in order to counteract the tradition-bound, authoritarian education they have thus far received."4 Even if we recognize the shift from process to post-process theory as an overall paradigm shift, it is a paradoxical paradigm shift that urges us to maintain aspects of previous theories in order to deploy them when they are needed.

Ultimately, thermostatic teaching requires something that to critical teachers may seem counterintuitive: it requires that we hold our own ideology in abeyance while we discover what our students need most. Some critical teachers may argue that a thermostatic approach would change nothing about their stances. They may still argue, quite persuasively, that students need a curriculum that emphasizes anti-foundationalist and postmodern critique. Many critical pedagogues might still insist - as Bartholomae does to Elbow - that our students need to play the doubting game rather than the believing game.5 I would tend to agree. In answer to Postman's questions, I would argue that the cultural bias of "credulity toward metanarratives" (Lyotard) still may leave our youth with incompetent intellects and distorted personalities; that composition is competent to deal with such biases (or at least to put a dent into them in sixteen weeks); and that education can oppose such biases more thoroughly with better and greater rhetorical instruction. In other words, composition will best serve our students if we see it as a thermostatic activity.

Acknowledgments / would like to thank Deborah Holdstein and an anonymous reviewer for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay. lam also especially grateful to Irwin Weiser for his encouragement and advice.

Notes 1. Surely, my position as teacher compromises my judgment here to a certain extent. In Domination and the Arts of Resistance, fames C. Scott writes, "We can only begin to measure the influence of a teachers presence on a classroom of students once he or she leaves the room" (25). Fair enough. But he also writes, "the greater the disparity in power between the dominant and subordinate and the more arbi-

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trarily it is exercised, the more the public transcript of subordinates will take on a stereotyped, ritualistic cast. In other words, the more menacing the power, the thicker the mask" (3). Though I certainly do not deny my power over my students, it was not "menacing," and thus I think I can trust my reading of the classroom. Moreover, part of my point here is that critical teachers cannot bask in the warm glow of consensus simply because they have a room full of people who agree with them. In fact, they must do precisely the opposite. 2. For a critique of how Freires pedagogy can become a sort of self-fulfilling proph- ecy, see Richard E. Millers "The Arts of Complicity: Pragmatism and the Culture of Schooling." Gerald Graff also critiques Freires pedagogy in "Teaching Politically without Political Correctness." 3. While we may possess the brute force of grades, students possess power, too. They can either resist by saying what they are really thinking, revealing what James C. Scott calls the "public transcript" ("the open interaction between subordinates and those who dominate" [2]), or they can be more pragmatic and tell us what we want to hear, sticking with the "hidden transcript" ("the discourse that takes place offstage,' beyond direct observation by powerholders" [4]). Either way, they will have defeated our intentions. 4. Though it is clear that post-process offers a new paradigm for thinking about writing instruction, surely most would agree that process theory "helped us to theorize writing in more productive ways than previously and to devise pedagogies that familiarize students with the kinds of activities that writers often engage in when they write" (Olson 7). So while there are aspects of process theory that still can be useful, their usefulness depends far more on the students' needs than the teacher s. 5. See Elbow's Writing without Teachers and also Bartholomaes and Elbow's ex- changes in College Composition and Communication 46.1 (Feb. 1995): 72-92.

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Paul Lynch Paul Lynch is assistant professor of English at Saint Louis University. His work has also appeared in Rhetoric Review, KB Journal, and Studies in the Novel

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Documents

Composition as a Thermostatic Activity