teaching as replication

Last week I finished up my second summer co-teaching a graduate course called 'The Teaching of Writing' for my local Writing Project site. The Writing Project is an initiative that reaches out to K-12 language arts teachers, providing continuing education and graduate credit and supporting best practices in the teaching of writing. The key to Writing Project philosophy is the notion that teachers of writing should be writers. Hence, the course is one part writing pedagogy and two parts writing workshop. Easily one of the most rewarding teaching experiences of my nine years in the classroom.

Obviously I'm on board with the whole teachers-as-writers component of the program. I'm struck by how expressivist the Project is. I don't disagree per se with the Elbow-informed nature of instruction. Expressivism (emphasis on writing-as-self-discovery) is not necessarily what guides my teaching of first-year college students, but for the Writing Project audience (teachers coming to recognize how their own experiences with language might shape how they teach), journal writing and memory-to-insight pieces are remarkably productive.

Still, I wonder if the project limits what it means to be "a writer." I worry that the teachers in my class left the workshop with a monolithic idea of "writer" (person who discovers authentic voice by writing poems and narratives in a journal), instead of seeing a "writer" as one of various types of multivalent agents moving in and out of various discourse communities. I mean, I spent time during the four-week talking about rhetoric and civic engagement and affect and so forth, but the primary emphasis was clearly on expressivism.

Since class got out last week, I've been thinking about how Writing Project alum tend to hope above all else that their students will find their voices and recognize the value of (again, a particular version of...) the writing life. Not necessarily a bad thing--and this line of thinking leads to some great teachers (I wish I had English teachers as a kid who loved language as much as these dedicated pedagogues). But the rub, for me, is that replication is the goal. Write about yourself and your life experiences, just like me. But this is no less true of other pedagogies. Become proficient in ideological critique, just like me. Understand writing as a rhetorical act, just like me. Engage social issues through public debate fora, just like me. Teaching as replication.