Teaching Discourse and Reproducing Culture: A Critique of Research and Pedagogy in Professional and Non-Academic Writing

Abstract

When Lester Faigley organized contemporary theory about composing process into expressive, cognitive, and social in Competing Theories of Process, he described the 'social view' of writing as a group of theories that include poststructuralist theories of language, sociology of science, ethnography, and Marxism (535). In doing so, he marked out theoretical position that supports most research in professional and nonacademic writing. But Faigley's taxonomy also allows us to see a troubling conflict between political commitments of work produced by this social view of writing. Faigley generally followed James Berlin's lead in organizing his taxonomy and identified epistemological assumptions of these theories as their unifying feature (Berlin 165-180). Some theorists make stronger and others make more limited claims, but to all of them, knowledge is socially constructed or legitimized (an important distinction) through language and rhetorical activity. While theories Faigley identifies as social view describe relations among rhetoric, knowledge, and society in similar ways, they have very different political commitments. More specifically, neo-Marxist movement known as radical pedagogy which Faigley included in his grouping has developed a critical analysis and political agenda that is largely missing from other branches of his social rhetoric. The studies of scientific and professional writing that emerge from this epistemic tradition are dominated by a research strategy that is descriptive and explanatory, rarely critical. That is, due largely to research methods and cultural pluralism we have inherited from anthropology, this research lends itself to a mode of reporting that reproduces dominant discourse of its research site and spends relatively little energy analyzing modes and possibilities for dissent, resistance, and revision-the very issues that lie at heart of radical pedagogy.