Class Ethos and the Politics of Inquiry: What the Barroom Can Teach Us about the Classroom

Abstract

Before I was an English teacher, I was a bartender. When I tell my first-year composition students this as we take turns exchanging getting-to-know-you trivia during the first class session, they laugh-some, I suspect, struck by the improbability of the leap from one profession into the other; others, I know, amused by the irony of ending up with an ex-bartender for a teacher. For these others, sons and daughters of iron workers and auto mechanics and waitresses, my move from barroom to classroom traces the trajectory of their own lives. When I first began teaching, I thought-or, I have to say, I hoped-that the university was the farthest point from the local tavern, and that teaching writing to college students was the furthest thing from opening bottles of Bud for laborers. So I was surprised to find myself, after three years of teaching writing, feeling compelled to return to the bar where I'd worked for several years to do community research into local rhetorical practices. In the ethnographic tale that was to grow out of this research, I wanted to map out connections between class, culture, and rhetoric by investigating how rhetorical genres-and in particular, arguments about politics-participated in the public construction of knowledge in, and ultimately in the production of, working-class culture. I was not, of course, surprised to see my data confirm what I'd already suspected: that this small blue-collar society at the bar differed significantly from the cultures of middle-class academics in orientations to word, work, and world. What did come as something of a surprise, however, were what I have come to recognize as