Dr. Harrington’s Blog

This article is a written version of Kathleen Blake Yancey’s Chair’s address to the annual gathering of college composition teachers.  She delivered her speech to an audience of thousands of college writing teachers, in an auditorium in San Antonio, Texas, with two power point presentations on either side of the stage.  The side bar quotations and photos you see throughout her text were part of the poweroint presentations, which served to illustrate or contextualize what she was saying.  It was an impressive morning!

She asks us to imagine a whole new curriculum for writing, a whole new way of thinking about writing in school.  Read this as a smart dream about the future, and think about your dreams for what school might be for you in the future.

You’re reading this piece as (under)graduate students–you’re not listening to it, and you’re not (all) coming from a classroom.  Try to imagine that you are.  Read, and listen for the spoken word.  It opens “Sometimes, you know, you have a moment.”   What does she mean, you may wonder.  So think about who she is, where she was, when she was preparing this talk.  Only once a year does the chair of our organization address the convention; probably only once in a lifetime does a teacher give a speech to thousands of people.  It’s a moment.  But it’s also, she will explain, a moment for all of us.  Because of the changes in literacy, all of us who care about writing are in a moment, a point in time where important things are changing.

Yancey starts , on 297-98, with looking at what the moment is for writing teachers, what the world is like right here, right now, for people teaching and practicing writing.  “Literacy today is in the midst of a tectonic change,” she notes, and she wants us to “note that no one is making anyone do any of this writing” that surrounds us (298).  The questions she raises sound a moment, a significant moment, for the field of composition, for those who teach composition and those who practice composition.  And in this talk, she looks at what this moment means.

Quartet 1 (focused on by Armato, Costello, and 412 students through Hartig), starts on 299.  It looks at the 19th century moment about reading.  Yancey says that the 19th century created a reading public, and she looks at the 19th century for what it teaches us about how public reading became widespread.  “And all of this happened outside of school,” she points out (300).  Today, “we are witnessing a parellel creation, that of a writing public…” (300), and she continues on 301 to explore what writers in the 21st century do as they organize themselves out of school.  on 302 she looks at how traditional English departments are (mostly not) responding to this and wonders whether English departments are becoming “anachronistic.”  On 302-305 she wonders what these changes mean for literacy instruction.

Quartet 2 (starting on 305) looks at first year composition and the first year of college.  What should be the future of composition in college, she wonders?  She looks at the way we are teaching, some of us, both digital and traditional composing. What composition means is changing, and this short quartet looks at some of those changes.

Quartet 3 ( this is the section Williams and Hockersmith through Roberson should read most carefully–you’ll start class talking about it) .  Yancey takes up the question of what should be a new curriculum for composition.  She notes the process movement was one of the biggest changes in our field in the last 30 years; one thing that has not changed at all is our focus on writers as school writers, in school writers.  On 311, she lists things students are not asked to do in school, but that she wishes were part of school.  She higlights three:

• circulation (312-316)
• canons of rhetoric (316-318)
• deicity of technology (318-320)

Yes, deicity is a hard word.  She defines it on 318. It’s pronounced day-I-city, emphasis on the second syllable. (click here for a longer discussion)

Quartet 4, the conclusion , wraps things up, asking us to consider the spaces between school and home, work and school.