Accommodation, Resistance and the Politics of Student Writing

Abstract

In the past fifteen years, we have watched the emphasis in composition studies swing from product to process, and much research during that time has focused on writing as a cognitive activity. Now, another shift seems to be underway, one toward an emphasis on discourse communities. Many scholars now argue that we need, in the first place, to understand more clearly the conventions of discourse communities and, in the second place, to teach those conventions to our students. Patricia Bizzell, for example, argues that politically oppressed students need to master academic discourse, while Lester Faigley and Kristine Hansen have pointed to the need for teachers of writing to adopt a rhetorical approach to the study of writing in the disciplines. Part of the impetus here is, as I see it, to place writing in a larger context and to highlight it as a social activity. I applaud this shift because it can lead us to focus on writing as a form of cultural production linked to the processes of self and social empowerment. However, if we conceive of writing in this way, as a form of cultural production, two key issues related to writing remain relatively unexamined and need to be considered. First, discourse communities are organized around the production and legitimation of particular forms of knowledge and social practices at the expense of others, and they are not ideologically innocent. They introduce students to particular ways of life through specific discourse as Janet Batsleer (Rewriting English: Cultural Politics of Gender and Class, 1985) and Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron (Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, 1977) have made clear. Thus, before we ask students to engage in a certain set of conventions, we need to know how those conventions operate on a larger, theoretical level, and the implications of those conventions for our students. We need to consider the relationship between the cultural forms we use and defend in the classroom and those that characterize the larger culture. It is the inclusion and/or absence of particular cultural values, processes, and dynamics that gives