Collaboration
Development in fields of study, such as cultural studies, feminism, environmentalism, multiculturalism, and postcolonialism, have sought to broaden the field of English in order to include a fuller range of issues that students can write about. These changes have offered positive results for teaching classroom methods, but have "neglected essential connections among curricular, disciplinary, and institutional issues" (Downing 2). It is ironic that the discipline of composition has been adapted to serve precisely the forces it was supposed to protect against. David Downing further analyzes the corporate model of education:
One of the most significant consequences of these academic appropriations of corporate models was that teaching became subordinated to research because it was easier to commodify and manage by standardizing and quantifying disciplinary knowledge production than the quality of teaching. (27-28)
Downing hopes that by making the range of "professional practices more flexible than the focus on disciplinary criteria might otherwise allow," professors will gain some of the autonomy that would enable them to heal the class differences within the profession (34). Some practical implications of what Downing asserts include restructuring the way professors within the department view their coworkers. Academic autobiographies are one manner in which coworkers can see commonalities between their work and others. Rhonda Grego asserts:
...having colleagues recall their particular writing/learning experiences (their frustrations and successes) as students, undergraduate and graduate, perhaps also as young professors, might enable us to better see that the issues Russell relegates to the purely parenthetical--institutional matters of governance, academic freedom, promotion criteria, etc.--are themselves the residue of submerged personal/interpersonal relationships, feelings, and values that provide the powerful (though largely unrecognized and undiscussed) common ground of our lives as academics. Unearthing and collaboratively reconstructing these underlying relationships might lead us to "ways of resolving the history and geography of our lives" that have been ignored by the standard histories of our specialized disciplines. (217)
This collaborative learning would lead to important guidelines on how to treat one another (governance), a blurring between opinion and knowledge (academic freedom), and how members in the department value each other (tenure and promotion). Another collaborative experiment that professors could implement within their department would be collaborative journals in which composition professors would have a mediator between the idea-driven world of academia and the world of direct experiences and reflections. They could freely write down thoughts without worrying about being published and share new insights with fellow colleagues. This collaboration exercise would de-emphasize the hierarchy of the department and encourage a fundamental change with the structure od education within composition studies. These departmental, collaborative exercises could even be used within the classroom to draw the focus away from grades and emphasize writing in relation to communities and how they realities.
In order to fully develop my thoughts regarding these collaborative implications, I would want to do more research on scholars, such as Sharyn Lowenstein, Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater, Cinthia Gannett, Rhonda Grego, and Victor Villanueva (in regards to portfolio standards for composition students).