Abstract

Thirty-seven years after its initial publication, David Bartholomae's essay “Inventing the University” ([1986] 2005) remains indelible in the contemporary project and continual reinvention of composition studies. Indeed, the collected essays and vignettes featured in Inventing the Discipline: Student Work in Composition Studies—its title echoing Bartholomae's piece—pay deliberate homage to Bartholomae by reverently calling his piece “seminal,” “pivotal,” and “long studied” even as the authors by turns complicate, disagree, and expand his initial concepts.The constant among these fifteen full-length chapters and eight vignettes is a deep, abiding respect for student writing, including the varied, nonlinear processes, outputs, and modes of exploration that students experience in our classes. As coeditor Stacey Waite situates the project in the introduction, “In our current political moment, how do students and scholars ‘invent the university’ now? What are the structures of universities in/against which students make work in our courses? How have our students helped us to create, shape, disrupt, and revise our field?” While these questions are equal parts vital and esoteric, the pieces in this anthology approach these lines of inquiry via a range of methods and theoretical positionings. Amid this diversity of perspectives, Ashanka Kumari's chapter, “Inventing Happens in Perpetuity,” might well function as a high-level overview of the issues raised across the anthology. Discussing the importance of continually checking our own perceptions about students’ writing, Kumari offers, “I often ask students to ask ‘Why’ whenever we complete an activity—why on Earth might I have made us do the thing we just did? Through this practice, I think with students about writing practices, about the histories informing what is deemed as a concept to spend time on in our classroom space.” As such, these chapters and vignettes reinvigorate Karen L. Lowenstein's (2009) concept of a “parallel practice” in higher education, wherein the ways we hope our students will write and move through the world after taking our courses must necessarily parallel the ways we ourselves teach them. In this spirit, Inventing the Discipline walks the walk of accessibility in its open-source, digital format that is fully available for any interested reader online.While the anthology's contents are not grouped by subheadings—a move I interpret as inviting readers to draw their own connections and patterns among the chapters—I have organized my review into three loose themes: the explicit rejection of student writing as somehow “less than” other forms of writing, the pedagogical and rhetorical centering of student writing in composition classrooms and in formal writing projects, and an explication of the sticky moral and linguistic issues involved in centering student writing both in the academy and, from a metaphysical standpoint, in anthologies such as this one. My grouping of these themes is not indicative of any particular authority I have in this field; rather, I offer these as one possible framework of many that readers may use as they dive into this spirited and essential collection.Fittingly, many of the early essays in Inventing the Discipline grapple with the central problem of labeling anything student writing. In “Pedagogical Genealogies,” the opening chapter of the anthology, Peter Wayne Moe traces the pedagogical genealogies he has inherited through Bartholomae, William E. Coles, Jr., and Theodore Baird, and questions how these genealogies sit differently in his particular person—how they work (or don't) in his context and to what extent these genealogies may or may not be appropriate for an ever-diversifying composition classroom. “Every teacher must, at some point, come to terms with such pedagogical genealogies, locating ourselves within? alongside? outside? against? the traditions that make our own work possible,” writes Moe. Because these genealogies inform our own positionalities as instructors, embedded within them are particular—if sometimes subconscious—orientations to the students we teach.Bruce Horner, in his chapter “Student Writing,” takes up the dialectal student-teacher relationship and calls out the deficit-based views inherent in many discussions of student writing: “ ‘Student,’ when used as a modifier—as in student work, student writing, student housing, student government, student life—typically serves to demean what it modifies by signaling its character as somehow lesser in quality than what is modified: less authentic, valuable, lasting, real, valid, substantive.” Student writing is not taken seriously in this formulation and is in fact often positioned as “not real” as a result. Horner, however, rejects this conception, and the “autonomous” view of literacy and language it contains, in favor of an epistemology that emphasizes the embeddedness of the social world in every utterance. Student and teacher alike are thus “fellow reworkers of language and knowledge,” so that, rather than dismissing student work as of low value out of hand, or fetishizing it as some immaculate artifact, the solution is “to behave . . . [as if] all of us, and all writing, remain in that same, incomplete condition.”Of course, student writing is only one element of the teacher-student dialectic. Michael Bunn, in “Undervaluing Student Writing in Composition Courses: A Reading Problem,” suggests that more attention ought to be given to how students read and, more broadly, how we in the field read student writing. Where writing pedagogies are numerous and well integrated into composition programs, Bunn urges compositionists “to pay more attention to reading.” As a means of troubling a differential valuation of writing by the professional-academic class and that of students, Bunn argues that “students are best served when they are taught to read both published and student-produced texts in the same ways.” This is, he cautions, not to say that published texts and our students’ paper submissions are of the same quality; rather, they are merely “at different stages in the writing and professionalization process.”Taken together, Moe, Horner, and Bunn remind us to question the pedagogical genealogies we've inherited, to tweak and/or dismantle them as necessary in our unique institutional contexts, and to take great care as we continue to work with students and their writing—which, like our own writing, is always already in a state of becoming. The pieces I've included in the following section are largely concerned with how we might merge these ideas within the composition classroom.A second theme I noted concerned the pedagogical possibilities presented by student writing. As one might anticipate, an anthology dedicated to the radical (re)examination of student writing features a fair amount of writing by students throughout its pages. Indeed, most of the book's chapters and vignettes fall into this broad category, though the overlaps and tensions among the approaches described are important to name. As such, I've opted to take a page from Eric A. House, who asks in his vignette, “ ‘It's Not about You,’ or, Getting out of My Own Way to Better Perceive Composition,” “I'm wondering how often instructors get out of our own way, admit that maybe the flow of the class isn't necessarily about us, and allow ourselves to be moved by students?” As a means of “getting out of the way,” a pedagogical concept I first encountered through literary scholar Marcelle M. Haddix (2018), I have opted to center actual students’ writing as much as possible in this part of the review.Consider Michael, a student of author Gina Tranisi's described in her contribution, “Respectfully Michael: A Narrative Exploration of Student Writing and What We Might Make of Its Beautiful Disruptions.” As Michael, a white, cisgender undergraduate in a midwestern university, grapples with stepping out of his comfort zone to research the stigma faced by transgender communities, he reaches a moment of struggle in the drafting process in which he confesses, “I feel like my paper is boring to read . . . I wasn't very creative with this one at least so far. My only creativity is the beginning letter of each paragraph spells out the words stigmas and distress which I feel are really important to understand with this topic.” Tranisi draws on Michael's words both to acknowledge the creative writerly choices our students make that we often miss and to lobby the rest of us to consider “the people behind the papers.”Where Michael's example hinted at the potential for worldview change through writing, Chanon Adsanatham describes how his communication students in Bangkok blended conventions of English-language business correspondence with Thai communication practices. While initially disappointed by his students’ “failure” to grasp the content, Adsanatham later realized this happenstance was a “rhetorical clash,” or “a moment in which knowledge, familiarity, and expectations about discursive arrangement, conventions, and practices from a tradition or curriculum creates questions or doubts about appropriate composing moves in a writing assignment in an intercultural rhetorical situation.” These clashes are inherently generative and productive if embraced as such. Of course, part of the work of embracing these opportunities requires a commitment to reflective practice, or an “after pedagogy,” as Paul Lynch (2011) has called it.Donna Qualley and Matthew Sorlien put this “after pedagogy” into practice in their chapter, “Our (Students’) Work (and Play) Can Make Us Smarter Next Time.” Building on the twenty-first-century literate practice of content curation, Donna asks how students and teachers can embark on writing and reading through new media literacies when both teacher and student are nonexperts in these genres, while Matthew dives head first into the Prezi Classic platform to create a presentation of over two hundred slides, complete with multiple “What I'm Thinking” slides that he notes “allowed me to present myself authentically within the work—not as a disembodied voice faking expertise, objectivity, or even comfort, but as a writer still trying to make something out of the material, even though they aren't sure what that something is.” This theme of playfulness finds a nice complement in Derek Tanios Imad Mkhaiel and Jacqueline Rhodes's vignette, “Messiness Matters: A Story of Writing in One Act,” in which the virtues of messiness, nonlinearity, and spontaneity are celebrated as thinking tools that generate powerful writing. Mkhaiel, a student in Rhodes's graduate seminar, underscores this point: Messy moments feel like moments of creative intellectual endeavor—my WRA 101 students and I are trying to write thought. Run-ons are excited ideas that don't know when to quit; fragments are dramatic brevity, not mistake. One time I had a student who used an excessive (I thought) number of commas; when I commented on the punctuation, I learned that she was trying to teach me how to breathe while reading her thoughts.In “Disrupting Hierarchies of Knowledge: Student Writing in the Digital Transgender Archive(?),” authors Mariel Aleman, Alice Galvinhill, Keith Plummer, and K. J. Rawson depict reflections gleaned from their work with the Digital Transgender Archive (DTA) housed at the College of the Holy Cross, where Rawson led the project and Aleman, Galvinhill, and Plummer were undergraduate student workers and archivists. The authors describe the immense value and responsibility of working for the project, ensuring the accessibility and accuracy of artifacts, as well as the role of scholar-activism in fighting for the visibility of minoritized communities. As Plummer writes, “Working for the DTA showed me the importance of scholarly activism to unearth stories made invisible by our culture, how a mission is a much more meaningful motivator than a grade, and how a scholarly intervention can become an empowering space that's impact reaches far beyond the confines of a lab.”Just as Aleman et al. challenge the kind of writing that counts as “writing”—and who that writing does and does not typically center—Rachael Shah's vignette “Writing with Students to Make an Academia with More Room” discusses the challenges she has encountered with cowriting research with high school students. Though this sort of writing creates more space, or “more room,” as she puts it, in academia, “the message we were receiving about who writes research—and who does not—was crystal clear. It was a message I found myself constantly trying to counter, both for the students I was writing with and for academics who encountered their work.” In a similar vein, Cory Holding's vignette, “The Field and the Force: Notes from Prison Teaching” critiques the practice of writing about student writing in favor of writing with students in a variety of settings, including prisons. This shift “means not only quoting from students’ work, or even co-writing, but working together to form the research question, to think through research methods, to process critical feedback, and to imagine interventions, implications, and next steps,” writes Holding.“Writing for Change: Re-inventing the University” takes on Holding's and Shah's call to make “more room” in academe for a variety of writers in its assembling of twenty-two University of Pittsburgh undergraduate authors to ask, “What would your ideal university do?” In their employment of a Black feminist epistemology, these authors depict their ideal university as one with frequent opportunities for professionalization and with ample support for everyday financial tasks. They seek increased integration with the surrounding community and, fundamentally, an acknowledgment of difference as “an essential and permanent part of our society, making it crucial to work to celebrate that in the face of people who try to destroy it.” In so doing, they offer a powerful example of the “critical story-ing” called for in Sherita V. Roundtree's chapter, “(Re)Humanizing the Discipline: Students’ Critical Story-ing as a Resource Archive.” Roundtree, like Aleman et al., finds digital archives to be productive spaces that “help students actively see themselves as members of discourse communities within and outside of the university.”Where compositionists may well agree on a number of pedagogical principles (many of them outlined in the aforementioned chapters), there still exists a richness of tension and debate in the field. The final set of chapters and vignettes zeroes in on these tensions, many of them arising from Bartholomae's original essay. He argues of students, “They must learn to speak our language” (5), but more recently, scholars have taken issue with this dictum—do they? and to what end? Take, for a start, Pritha Prasad's chapter, “(Anti)Racist World-Making in the University: Reinventing Student Work,” which attends to the moral injury faced by BIPOC students as they attempt to “invent the university” amid harassment and assault, and asks, “How can we look at the theory-building and knowledge-creating work our BIPOC students—and particularly women of color and queer people of color—are already doing in the spaces in which they live and work as a basis for understanding how race and racism operate in our classrooms, universities, and beyond? Prasad ends the chapter by sounding an alarm regarding the use of “the master's tools,” in Audre Lorde's words, because a myopic focus on standard language forms suggests that BIPOC students only need to master the linguistic tools of what Lisa calls the of in to political Prasad's up College Students at the the of in the Composition in which she a focus on among her students, many of are and I to students the importance of different language forms for social and describe language as a of the importance of to in different and This the value of the language students already that the use of may not be appropriate for such as with and the use of language is not ideal for social such as a or in question raised for me among these two chapters is one that's the in our field for what like that Bartholomae's “Inventing the University” how much we students to their language and literacies to with the discourse community of the and how much we instructors, and in this the academy such that space for the variety of and that our students us of our with to the of institutional change on this in his vignette, with Composition Composition to seek to if this a when it . . . they just to I to as the for composition of because any field is made up of of a of scholars and and they be behind when they and is while this both in content and in author of While Inventing the this the of an as a crucial means of for minoritized students in higher In this way, “not only do students have to the university, but they need to the role of to in the L. and M. the to of the in and while out critical spaces for and Black of within the by their for final theme I noted in my reading of this concerned the of student writing in vignette, A at the that when we student writing from its original “I from essays that were and sometimes not that well and I used to make the I to she In to the Student The and E. by his not to any student writing in his that from student writing is a very he writes, “I to ask what on student writing might look like if not by the to from student the inherent differential in the of student to make one or something that vignette Though she is to and with students, the of which such have as I have to it, I've always had the most Indeed, I've the one positioned to do the she As a to this I to call out the work of L. and Cory In “Student Writing on Student Writing,” the authors that the university and the both will a about the structures which are particularly on they out the of and composition scholars the in this As they put it, who would write about student writing in terms of how it the to to with student writing less and student instructors and other instructors who would and to on ways to the of the are often from such As is in this the by Inventing the Discipline: Student Work in Composition is It is that anthology that the reader both with and and with vital questions about the and the role of student work within Waite notes in her that attention to student work is just as as it was in when Bartholomae's “Inventing the University” was first our field this radical all of its and the to