The Hidden Ethos Inside Process Pedagogy (Peary)

KEY POINT: One issue I take with Peary is that she is trying to identify his sense of ethos, but what I am interested in doing is examining the role of change in his arguments over time...how the arguments he made changed, how he changed his persuasive tactics, and perhaps adjusted his ethos over time... My assertion is that it changed over time...

On Rhetorical Analysis of Disciplinary Texts

In the field of composition studies, a strange paradox occurs: while we teach rhetorical analysis to our students and publish rhetorical inspections of the discourse of others, we seldom turn that type of attention on ourselves, on our own books and articles. (289)

Meanwhile, the texts of our discipline, its seminal articles and books, seemingly operate in a rhetorical vacuum in which linguistic maneuvers, deployments of ethos and connotative language, and other suasive components can pass unobserved. At this point, fifty-plus years into a discipline, we are beginning to collect texts that can readily function as archaeological evidence for the growth and the future of composition studies. What I am proposing in this article is that we adopt the practice of systematic and sustained discourse analysis of the documents of composition studies that have significantly impacted the pedagogy of the field. (289)

Examining rhetorical strategies used in established composition theory can provide opportunities to reflect upon pedagogy—both that in the field and that which we use in our own class- rooms. Analysis of the ethos of the process movement helps illuminate the power of this rhetorical appeal to influence a body of teaching practices seminal to historic composition studies and to younger generations of teachers. (290)

Times have changed since Jim Corder (1994: 98) pointed out, “Often as not, we don’t see our own rhetoric; it is already normality, already truth, already the way to see existence. When we remark, as we have become accus- tomed to remark, that all discourse is ideological, we probably exclude our own” (290)

…the close examination of a full-length text by a single author who is a composition scholar established in the field—or, indeed, who helped establish the field (290)

On Building Teacherly Ethos

For my section on Iowa, I could think about how I was shaping a teacherly ethos and shaped by the ethos of others, Murray primarily…

In the classroom, as Marshall Gregory (2001: 78; 77) has suggested, ethos ranks as a powerful rhetorical force with students: it is “an existential invitation to, an existential reason for, learning” because “without using the word ethos, ethos is the primary concern of students.” In “Embracing Contraries in the Teaching Process” (1983), Peter Elbow makes a similar claim, using “stance” for ethos: “For it is one’s spirit or stance that is at issue here, not the mechanics of how to organize a course in semester units or how to deal in tests, grading, or credits” (338). It is possible to pick up teaching strategies, including ones that help shape a teacherly ethos, through a text of pedagogy. Whenever we read a convincing book of pedagogy, we are pro- vided a one-way window into another instructor’s classroom in the sense that the author-as-instructor’s suasive dynamic with students becomes visible to us—whether through the author’s account of interactions with students or more implicitly manifested through assignments and curricula. (291)

Rhetorical analysis can heighten our awareness of the ethotic appeals that stand behind (any) curriculum and pedagogy. If we overlook ethos (not to mention other rhetorical components) contained in discourse about pedagogy, we are doing ourselves and potentially our classrooms a disservice. As Nancy Welch (1999: 117–18, 130–31) has pointed out, writing specialists routinely make arguments about their profession through teaching narratives, all the while failing to critically notice their own rhetoric. (291-292)

Argument

Moreover, ethos is crucial to the process movement—arguably the bedrock pedagogy of composition studies as a discipline. The process movement was in no small measure steered by the complex ethical appeals made by its pioneering proponents Ken Macrorie, Peter Elbow, and Donald Murray. The main legacy of the process movement is the way in which it changed how instructors position themselves and students in relation to the writing experience, creating a more student-centered, less mechanistic classroom—and ethos made that change happen. In essence, to understand the significance of the process movement is to understand the power of ethos.

In this article, I closely examine the ethos utilized by these three process theorists in their earliest book-length composition publications: Ken Macrorie’s Telling Writing (1970), Peter Elbow’s Writing without Teachers (1973), and Donald Murray’s A Writer Teaches Writing (1968). In order to give advice on writing and to position themselves in a nontraditional way with learners, Elbow, Macrorie, and Murray develop complex ethical appeals that value the outsider’s perspective—Macrorie as iconoclast, Elbow as wounded empath, and Murray as consultant-coach. It is my proposal that, in order to understand process theory, one needs to examine the outsider ethos of these seminal texts since that outsider ethos essentially drives the pedagogy that became known as process pedagogy. In what follows, I present a close textual analysis of these three theorists’ ethos. (293)

It is my hope that this type of rhetorical analysis becomes a form of awareness that is applied to our teacherly and writerly activities in the field. (293)

The outsider stances of Elbow and Murray, however, take a different form than that of Macrorie. While Macrorie positions himself as an outsider to the system through his rebelliousness, he nevertheless remains the colleague and the writing instructor. On the other hand, Elbow and Murray approach writing as partially a matter of the extracurriculum and therefore cast learning how to write and their own identities outside the walls of academia. (294)

Reform

…both Elbow’s and Murray’s early book-length publications began as an attempt to fight for educational reform (293-94).

Outsider

In order to effect change in the writing classroom, proponents of the process movement situated themselves as outsiders to the academic status quo—a repositioning that in some cases involved leaving academia for the extracurriculum of composition (learning about writing outside of school settings). The process movement was “decidedly antiestablishment, antiauthoritarian, anti-inauthenticity” and reflected the political zeitgeist (Tobin 2001: 4; see also Marshall 1994: xvi). Describing the outsider stance of the process movement, James Marshall (1994: 46) has said that “those of us who read and talk and write and teach about the writing process . . . have consistently and insistently represented ourselves as outsiders who doubt the validity, the truth, the value of what has traditionally gone on in writing classrooms.” Early process theory participated in authority displacement—epitomized in Elbow’s “writing without teachers” and Macrorie’s “Engfish”—and created a less mechanistic and more student-centered classroom. (294)

Murray

Murray’s persistent self-identification as a professional writer working inside composition studies—reflected in his book title A Writer Teaches Writing… (294)

Donald Murray in A Writer Teaches Writing is arguing that formal writing instruction has done an insufficient job of teaching people how to write. Murray’s ethos is similar to Elbow’s in its deconstruction of the figure of the writing teacher as master of correction, but Murray replaces conventional teacher authority with someone from outside academia—the professional creative writer. Murray’s ethical appeal is built more on a complex expertise rather than good will. (305)

Murray’s attempt to instate professional writers as best suited to help students learn how to write—and, in turn, establishing Murray, a self-identified professional writer, as an expert. (305) 

Murray’s ethos is that of a consultant and coach (305)

In Murray’s case, this consultant brings the working habits of someone who operates outside of school settings—the professional creative writer—to the curriculum. (305)

...he also adopts a protective stance for the student writer (305) 

Murray’s ethical appeal as an outsider suggests that it is more one’s professional identity, rather than one’s character, that gives one authority to speak about writing. (306)

While criticism of traditional writing education and educators is clearly evident in all three theorists, Murray is distinct in his displacement of the conventional teacher by a professional writer.3 In this setup, teach- ers seem to be mainly conduits for the professional writer’s expertise; the teacher’s function is to create a learning environment that conveys to students the practices and dispositions of a professional writer. (306)

THIS IS THE PART THAT I STRUGGLE WITH:

Murray, however, equalized the artful with the more prosaic, validating many types of writing and writing occasions, including transactional genres. According to Murray, his book can develop student writing ability in genres found both inside and outside the university, including “an essay test, a term paper, an examination, a book report; beyond school in a business letter, a scholarly paper, an engineering report, a news release, a corporate memo, a poem—whatever is appropriate to the student’s individual ability and need” (1968: xi; emphasis added). Murray also redefines a successful writer as someone not necessarily in academia, including “a salesman, a lawyer, a historian, a member of the League of Women Voters,” and that “the man [sic] who creates an effective memo is as much a writer as the man who produces an effective sonnet” (1). In his use of authors as examples and in his esteem for transactional writing, Murray draws the student nearer to his own ethos as a published author and away from the classroom instructor. (308) 

Although Murray’s consultant-coach figuration suggests a focus on individual student potential, a side effect is that his ethos can seem too forceful in its steering the student toward growth. Consultants and coaches are brought in to challenge others by overseeing a training regimen, identifying and curtailing weak habits and characteristics. While Elbow worked to establish commonality with readers, Murray maps out a workout program for the struggling student, employing sports (especially football) and battle metaphors (309)

Directly Relevant for Me

Instructors can work on constructing a teacherly ethos for themselves by studying the ethos inside process pedagogy (and any pedagogy, for that matter). Analyzing the ethotic appeals of theorists is an opportunity to think hard about one’s classroom activities (exercises, assignments, discussions) and one’s teacherly ethos. What sort of ethos is displayed in my own exercises? If I decide to use Elbow’s teaching strategies—for instance, free writing—do I necessarily have to use his ethos? An examination of ethos does not invariably lead to adoption of the process approach; rather, through such an analysis, we can better perceive the interconnection between our stance toward learners and our curricular choices. One consideration should be the extent to which the outsider stance of Macrorie, Elbow, and Murray from the late 1960s and early 1970s is appropriate in the twenty-first-century context. What does it mean to position oneself as an outsider in the extracurricular world of Web 2.0 with its manifold opportunities for audiences and feedback beyond the instructor? Conversely, lacking a critical view of ethos, we may remain unaware of the extent to which these seminal texts in composition studies influenced and continue to influence our teaching. (310)

 For those of us (I include myself here) who have perhaps utilized the process approach for decades without considering its ethotic source, rhetorical analysis is a way to illuminate dimensions of our teaching that have become naturalized. I am starting to understand the extent to which, in my case, I have internalized the ethos of the process movement. Why do I frequently self-define as primarily a writer when before my students? Why do I sometimes provide personal details about my daily writing practice and dealings with magazines and journals? Why do I endeavor to lower students’ anxiety around the act of writing by displacing myself as their central reader and arbitrator? Why do I steer students—even ones in a required first-year composition course—down the path of attempting “real-world” publication? It is because I am ethotically an Elbowian empath. Rhetorical design was crucial in shaping the discipline’s texts and new direction—and with an applied rhetorical consciousness, ethos can be crucial to the field’s future, to its pedagogy, and to its instructors as they contemplate the rhetorical practice of being a teacher. (311)