1998 Convention of the Midwest Modern Language Association
Conference Review
by Paul Morris, Pittsburg State University
Recently I've been rereading Stephen North's opus on the making of knowledge in the field of Composition for an independent study I'm doing with one of our graduate students. I first read The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field in a graduate seminar on composition theory. I can still remember my own and my classmates' reaction to the dark vision North poses for the future of Composition. There was a lot of discussion about the validity of North's claims, but in the end many of us left that class wondering if we were in the wrong field. If Composition was destined to either "essentially disappear" or "break its institutional ties with . . . English departments" (373), then, we decided, we must be on a fairly tenuous career track. It has now been twelve years since North's dire predictions, and within that time "Practitioners," "Scholars," and "Researchers" have continued to make knowledge in Composition. As a field it is still very much alive; further, it is a valid (albeit, sometimes neglected) component of the English department. Unfortunately, people are still arguing about whether there has been a paradigm shift in composition knowledge making (see Crowley) as well as whether the field should exist at all (see Bartholomae), let alone whether it deserves to be called a discipline.
Unlike North, I came to the field of Composition/Rhetoric almost by accident through creative writing (an even less appreciated component of English departments) and a career in private industry. I hold no illusions as to our perceived purposes, and maybe this allows me to accept the good along with the bad in our field. Furthermore, I'm still very excited about what is happening in the field of Composition/Rhetoric. Most of what excites me is happening not in the big national conventions but in the smaller regional conventions. The national conventions highlight big names and issues (such as whether Composition/Rhetoric will survive the millennium). At the 4C and MLA conventions that I attended I felt lost, insignificant, and very uncomfortable. To add to my discomfort there were those surreptitious glances at my name tag to check out who I was and what school I had attended. Later, when I attended these same conventions as a job candidate, the MLA interview room's cattle call atmosphere was quite possibly the most degrading experience I've ever been through. Never, never ask the person next to you how many interviews they have, unless of course you're one of the lucky ones with six or eight.
Now I finally have a job, and I attended my first regional MLA convention in St. Louis last year. I had heard about the convention from a faculty member who assured me that the regional conventions were nothing like their big, impersonal counterparts. I was even more encouraged after I phoned my mentor and he urged me not just to attend but to become a member and participate. He had begun his academic career at a large Midwestern university and had been a member of the MMLA. Since part of my job at Pittsburg State University includes coordinating Computer-Assisted Instruction (CAI) for the English department, I wrote up a proposal for computers and collaboration and sent it off to James Inman, the Chairperson for the panel on Computer Research. James accepted my idea for an essay on bridging the gap between schoolhouse literacy and workplace literacy, and I joined a panel of motivated and innovative teacher/researchers in the field of computers and composition. The emphasis for our panel was to be collaboration and computers.
I live in the southeast corner of Kansas, so my wife and I drove to the convention. We stayed in the Regal Riverfront Hotel, right next to the Arch and the Mississippi River. In fact, I could see both from the window of my room. The convention was held in the Regal Riverfront, and unlike the convention hotels where I have stayed in such places as Washington D.C. and Cincinnati, the Regal was not overrun with English and foreign language teachers or composition specialists. Instead, there was a pleasant mix of tourists, business people, and convention attendees.
In contrast to the impersonal atmosphere of the larger conventions, the 40th Annual Convention of the MMLA was congenial and relaxed. There were no furtive glances at my name tag at this convention. While waiting for the Computer Research panel to convene, my wife and I sat down at a table outside the session room. Several people joined us at our table for conversations about such topics as the job situation in our profession and the influence of composition and computers on English departments. I would compare the ambience at the St. Louis MMLA convention to an NCTE gathering I attended a few years earlier in San Diego, where teachers K-12 and college teachers and graduate students mingled amiably.
The session on computer research that I participated in consisted of two panels of presenters and had approximately six or seven audience members. (Of course those session participants not presenting their papers could also be considered members of the audience, allowing for a stimulating exchange of ideas among panelists.) The first panel offered three presentations. Nancy Knowles and M. Wendy Hennequin from the University of Connecticut started us off with "Technology Through Collaboration: Integrating Computer Resources into 'Literature and Composition'." Using the successes and failures of their own collaborative teaching experience in a Literature and Composition class, Nancy and Wendy attempted to show how the use of technology in their classroom "became the vehicle for teaching and collaboration both in [their] hands and in [their] students'." After adapting for classroom use a range of communication technologies, including e-mail, the Web, and discussion lists, they concluded not only that their "classroom experience demonstrates the potential for technology to encourage collaboration by providing a variety of opportunities...for communication among equals" but that "technology can also necessitate collaboration" (original emphasis). Next Dagmar Corrigan from the University of Houston and Simone Gers from Pima Community College presented "Across the Cyber Divide: Connecting Freshman Composition Students to the Twenty-First Century." Dagmar and Simone developed a "cyberfriends" project in which students "were required to write a profile based solely on the series of email exchanges between themselves and their cyberfriends." The intimacy of these exchanges was not without its problems (for example, issues of sexual harassment and privacy had to be addressed); however, Dagmar and Simone defended their project, claiming that "it built on [student] cultural literacies, expanded their academic literacies, and developed their critical thinking and writing skills." Finally, I presented my paper, "Critical and Dynamic Literacy in the Computer Classroom: Bridging the Gap between School Literacy and Workplace Literacy." In my presentation I offered a definition of literacy that takes into account its basic, critical, and dynamic components. I argued that since computers are so essential to business and industry, they can be important tools for helping educators to make the teaching of literacy more real for their students. Within my presentation I offered several practical ways for teachers to use computers to create real contexts for literacy instruction.
The discussion that followed this panel was lively, especially among the presenters themselves. For my part, I was impressed with my co-panelists willingness to discuss their failures along with their successes. It seemed obvious that the collaborative nature of our projects inspired an atmosphere of cooperation within the session itself. During the intermission between the first and second panels, Nancy, Dagmar, Wendy, Simone, and myself talked excitedly about the possibilities that computers presented for new collaborations in the classroom.
The second panel began with Jami Carlacio from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. In "What's So Democratic About CMC?: The Rhetoric of Techno-Literacy in the New Millennium," Jami worried about the unequal access to computers in our society and "considerations of the real race, class, and gender inequalities that do not necessarily disappear with the creation of an online community." In her conclusion she called for a "rhetorical critique of technology" in order to "expose the ideologies of capitalism that support rhetorics of democracy and technology and that allow them to flourish." Jami's critical assessment of computers and their use in the composition classroom forced some of us to question our motivations for promoting collaboration and literacy through new technologies, but I'll return to that discussion later in my review. The next panelist, Donna Sewell from Valdosta State University, presented her essay "Accessing community: Technology as the Tie that Binds Teaching and Research." Donna discussed the advantages she receives as both a teacher and a researcher from access to online communities. For Donna, online communities act as a network of researchers and teachers who support her advocacy of computer technology in her own English department. Peter Sands from the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee was the last presenter for this panel. His essay, "Current and Future Research in Humanities Computing: Bridging Our Own 'Two Cultures' with Integrated, Empirical Studies," was a call "for more empirical research in computers and composition." Peter asked us to imagine classrooms in which computers are used by students for "empirical analysis of texts," and then he suggested that these same classrooms could provide excellent opportunities for quantitative and qualitative analysis.
At the end of the session, Jami's critical assessment of computer technology sparked quite a bit of debate about the future of computers and composition. A few of us, myself included, argued that the inequities created by these new technologies could be overcome, and that the advantages computers offered for new literacy techniques seemed to outweigh the disadvantages. In the end we realized, however, that Jami's call for caution was a reminder that computers are not a panacea for complex social and economic problems in our communities or our schools.
As is obvious from my enthusiastic comments about this convention, I really enjoyed myself in St. Louis. Still, it would not be a proper review unless I had at least one thing to complain about. As it happens I did recognize one rather serious problem. In the whole program I counted only eight sessions out of almost one hundred and sixty that had anything to do with composition or the teaching of writing. Given the emphasis on writing as a learning tool in all disciplines, the convention program's overemphasis on literary scholarship seemed a tad self-indulgent and uninformed. I hope next year that there are more sessions on writing pedagogy and research. I, for one, don't ever want to see Stephen North's dark predictions about the field of Composition come true.
Works Cited
Bartholomae, David. "What Is Composition and (if you know what that is) Why Do We Teach It?" Composition in the Twenty-First Century: Crisis and Change. Eds. Lynn Bloom, Donald Daiker, & Edward White. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 1996. 11- 28.
Crowley, Sharon. "Around 1971: Current-Traditional Rhetoric and Process Models of Composing." Composition in the Twenty-First Century: Crisis and Change. Eds. Lynn Bloom, Donald Daiker, & Edward White. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 1996. 64-74.
Carlacio, Jami. "What's So Democratic About CMC?: The Rhetoric of Techno-Literacy in the New Millennium." Paper presented at The Fortieth Annual Convention of the Midwest Modern Language Association. St. Louis, November 6, 1998.
Corrigan, Dagmar, and Simone Gers. "Across the Cyber Divide: Connecting Freshman Composition Students to the Twenty-First Century." Paper presented at The Fortieth Annual Convention of the Midwest Modern Language Association. St. Louis, November 6, 1998.
Inman, James and Donna Sewell. A proposal for a new co-edited essay collection entitled humanities.team@edu: Exploring Electronic Collaboration in the Humanities. 1998.
Knowles, Nancy, and Wendy Hennequin. "Technology Through Collaboration: Integrating Computer Resources into 'Literature and Composition'." Paper presented at The Fortieth Annual Convention of the Midwest Modern Language Association. St. Louis, November 6, 1998.
Morris, Paul. "Critical and Dynamic Literacy in the Computer Classroom: Bridging the Gap between School Literacy and Workplace Literacy." Paper presented at The Fortieth Annual Convention of the Midwest Modern Language Association. St. Louis, November 6, 1998.
North, Stephen. The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1987.
Sands, Peter. "Current and Future Research in Humanities Computing: Bridging Our Own 'Two Cultures' with Integrated, Empirical Studies." Paper presented at The Fortieth Annual Convention of the Midwest Modern Language Association. St. Louis, November 6, 1998.
vol. 4 Iss. 1 Fall 1999