Wade quotes Rosenblatt saying, “If you find things you like in a student’s work, and celebrate them, then the things you don’t like — the really awful parts — will seem anomalous mistakes uncharacteristic of the writer, ones they can correct. The students will side with you against their own weaknesses. If, on the other hand, they begin to think they can’t do anything right, they will get worse and worse.”

Inside the Workshop
­By Stephanie Wade

(January 13, 2011)    Writing a review of Roger Rosenblatt’s new book on writing and teaching makes me feel like a farmer commenting on M.F.K. Fisher’s “The Art of Eating.” I know these ingredients — students, writing, teaching — but I know them in somewhat rougher forms.

Like Roger Rosenblatt, I teach writing. Unlike him, I teach writing to first-year college students who, in stark contrast to the graduate students in Mr. Rosenblatt’s book, generally disdain writing, and who, for the most part, take my classes because they must. In fact, some of my students were Mr. Rosenblatt’s students because, for a short time, we both taught at Stony Brook Southampton.

“Unless It Moves the Human Heart,” which is set in a seminar room on the Stony Brook Southampton campus, made me miss the students I knew and made me wish I had known the others. His book made me wish I had been a student in his class.

What makes good writing? What makes a good writing teacher? These two questions occupy much of the book. His answers are delicate and pointed. He has specific ideas about good writing, yet he humbly acknowledges that his aesthetics could, perhaps, deter future Michael Chabons.

On teaching, Mr. Rosenblatt offers stories, not recipes. He questions his students, but, unlike practitioners of Socratic dialogue, who trick students by engaging them in seemingly open questions that lead to predetermined answers, he is interested in his students’ unique answers. In this way, he is more like M.M. Bakhtin, the Russian philosopher known for his study of dialogic knowledge.

Of course Mr. Rosenblatt leads his class with his rich knowledge of literature, but he also makes meaning together with his students. Because he offers the voices of his students — writers who care deeply in diverse ways about writing and literature — along with his own, readers gain multiple perspectives on craft in addition to a fine example of dialogic pedagogy.

This book offers lessons for a variety of readers. Potential M.F.A. students will get a glimpse of a famous workshop. Writers who cannot participate in writing workshops will get a heady substitute.

What teachers will get is more complicated. I am lucky; I can consider myself a farmer. Many writing teachers work under conditions more like that of day laborers or migrant workers. They have large classes, small salaries, and negligible job security. A recent study by the Modern Language Association found that approximately half of the college teachers in the humanities are part-time, adjunct instructors, who may teach more than 100 students a semester, often on geographically distant campuses. These conditions mitigate their ability to give their students the deep attention that Mr. Rosenblatt models.

For example, reading students’ papers twice is an important practice. It helps teachers see what is good about students’ writing. As Mr. Rosenblatt writes: “If you find things you like in a student’s work, and celebrate them, then the things you don’t like — the really awful parts — will seem anomalous mistakes uncharacteristic of the writer, ones they can correct. The students will side with you against their own weaknesses. If, on the other hand, they begin to think they can’t do anything right, they will get worse and worse.” [emphasis mine]

Finding and celebrating students’ accomplishments takes time, especially when one has 60 or 100 underprepared students, students who often think they can’t do anything right because, perhaps, they don’t do well on tests, or, maybe, they are learning English as a second language, or, in cases, they simply haven’t had practice writing.

This brings me to the audience who I most wish would read this book: college presidents, deans, provosts, school board members, and taxpayers. Were they to get the lesson with which Mr. Rosenblatt concludes his book, perhaps they would work to improve the working conditions of the vast number of writing teachers, who labor in fields much rougher than the M.F.A. program in Southampton.

Because the ultimate lesson of this book is that writing offers power. As Mr. Rosenblatt writes: “The trouble with much writing today is that it has been fertilized and nourished in classrooms like ours, where the elements of effective writing have been isolated and studied in parts. No teacher of writing, myself included, dares speak of the subterranean power available to every writer, if that writer will but take the time to brood on the matter and unearth it.”

These lines made me stand up, walk around my apartment, and pump my fists in the air as I chanted “Yes, yes, yes.” All students — those in my classes, in the developmental classes that some of Mr. Rosenblatt’s students teach, in M.F.A. programs, and in community literacy centers — can use writing to speak truth to power. But, as Mr. Rosenblatt points out, many writing classes discourage this, focusing on disembodied formal aspects of writing, rather than delving into the messiness of making meaning.

We — as voters, writing teachers, parents, students, administrators — can address this problem. We could introduce a greater range of writers to the power of the word by calling for improved working conditions for writing teachers and by resisting standards-based education, which relies too heavily on testing and high-stakes assessment. These tests are like the pesticides employed by commercial farmers. They are like fast food. They destroy the creativity, diversity, and vision that teachers such as Mr. Rosenblatt cultivate. And we need creativity, diversity, and vision to navigate the challenges of the 21st century.

—

Roger Rosenblatt is the author of, most recently, the memoir “Making Toast.” He lives in Quogue.

Stephanie Wade is an assistant professor in the department of writing arts at Rowan University in Glassboro, N.J. She divides her time between New Jersey and East Hampton.

My new banner image is from Garner Valley, California. Beautiful, huh. Taken August 30, 2010.

We need to admit that faith is like a fire – it can warm a home or burn it down. It’s not the fire; it’s how it is used. We need to simultaneously call out those who use their faiths as destructive fires and also remind people that just because terror is an expression of some people’s faith, it is not the only expression of that faith, or even an essential part of it.

Reading this got me thinking about my English 101 religion theme (that I’ve taught twice — last Winter and Spring). In the last essay, students are to write a persuasive essay on the question, “What is the value of religion to society?”  The majority end up picking an aspect of religion and using that to argue that religion helps or hinders society. I want to find a way to get them thinking more of the complexity of the topic. I haven’t emphasized that enough in class before. I’ve focused on the rhetorical “moves” academic writes make (using They Say, I Say by Graff and Birkenstein).

I’ll probably use Elbow’s “Believing and Doubting Game(s)” as a way to help them deepen their understanding by doubting what they believe and believing what they doubt.

But, overall, need to do some more thinking.

– Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination 149.

Susan K. Smith, “When ideology trumps theology.”

Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, “Wallis is right on the money”

Woman: without her, man is nothing.
Woman, without her man, is nothing.

What about talking in class about “what’s natural” and “what’s artificial” about writing?

Natural:

We speak already, we think already

Artificial:

We don’t speak naturally only on one topic (we ramble, our minds are fertile with ideas, so one thing reminds us of another)

We don’t speak in coherent order, necessarily. We get ideas the order we get them. We have to go back and artifically impose an order, depending on our audience.

Might help students 1) understand writing in general, and 2) understand why some things come more easily to them and others not.

It is, however, the canon of invention that gives rhetoric its substance; without it, rhetoric merely arranges, clothes, and dispatches the arguments and observations other disciplines have discovered. Without invention, rhetoric is not an epistemic activity, and as such it can never hold anything but a secondary place in the English department (to say nothing of the academy at large).

George L. Pullman,  “Rhetoric and Hermeneutics: Composition, Invention, and Literature,” JAC 14.2 (Winter 1994)

Yes, yes, yes. Invention is the juiciest, funnest, deepest part of writing and teaching to write.

The doubting muscle’s sensitivity to dissonance is not so trustworthy till you work out the rules of logic, transform assertions logically into as many forms as possible, extricate the self, doubt particularly those assertions that seem reasonable, and get opposing propositions to fight each other. Similarly, the believing muscle’s ability to project isn’t so trustworthy till you build its use into an orderly game and follow the rules: never argue; believe everything, particularly what seems strange or unpleasant; try to put yourself into the skin of people with other perceptions; make metaphorical transformations of assertions to help you enter into them. Most important of all, you must get other people to do it with you, and do it for a long time.

– Peter Elbow, from “Believing and Doubting as Dialectics” (Writing Without Teachers, pp. 169-170)

I am a little bit in awe of how simply-stated but true to reality these sentences are. I especially like the parts about the need to practice believing “what seems strange or unpleasant” and making “metaphorical transformations of assertions to help you enter them.” It’s almost as if I could take these sentences and expand them into steps for my students to follow while researching or thinking about something.

That’s almost common sense (or should be), but I’d be curious to see if she has specific scientific research to back it up. That would be exciting.

Here’s the context of the quote [begins about 4:00 in the video]:

[...] as you enjoy your life, you actually become more intelligent. They’ve proved it scientifically. That[‘s why] one of my detox steps is play and laugh a lot. And it’s part of that whole process, your attitude, the state of your mind, the state of your neurological trees needs to be detoxed. You need to be in a happy, positive attitude because that causes a release of chemicals that will actually make you function in a more healthy way. So it’s a very real thing.

[… ]the minute that you release your gifting, the minute you get into your gifting and you start releasing intelligence through applying the principles of God, through enjoying your life, through all the chemicals flow, and you’re going to become brilliant. If you’re intelligent, you can think; if you can think, you’ll go back to the Word. You’ll have more tolerance for people. People, the isms, come from a lack of using your mind correctly. The minute you use your mind correctly and you think more deeply, those will go away.

Losing My Religion, November 1, 2009

MAJORING in the humanities and social sciences puts a damper on religiosity. Thank (or blame) postmodernism, the staple of humanities classes, with its notions of relative truth (opposed to religion’s absolute truth) and questioning authority. “These are arguments that students find persuasive,” says Miles Kimball, an economics professor at the University of Michigan. He and three colleagues analyzed data on the religious attitudes and observance of some 26,000 students across the country over six years.

How important do students think religion is in their lives? For scale, Miles Kimball says, if the difference between the religiosity of people living in the Bible Belt and those in the rest of the country equals 100, then the effect of majoring in a particular subject would be:

-47 Social science
-28 Humanities
-24 Physical science/math
-14 Engineering
-13 Biology
0 No college
+2 Business
+10 Other
+16 Vocational
+23 Education

Not surprising, though I didn’t realize majoring in social science made SUCH a difference (as opposed to humanities). Yep, if you take a postmodern perspective, you’re more likely to focus on social structures as ways of improving the world than on the divine or the spirit.

Also — no matter how many times I read it, I don’t get the thing about “if the difference between the religiosity of people living in the Bible Belt and those in the rest of the country equals 100, then the effect of majoring in a particular subject would be.”  It would seem that would mean that majoring in social science makes a person 47 points closer (i.e., further away from “100″) to the non-Bible Belt population. Anyway, doens’t matter — the scale works without that scale.

What does a swimming tiger suggest about public policy, or a pricked finger say about your goals? The Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University is showing applicants two dozen conceptual photos, and giving them the option of basing an essay on one of them.

The following photo album was created by the Center for Creative Leadership, a nonprofit group that produces visual tools to prompt conversations at leadership training seminars. Wagner is putting the concept to unusual use as an admissions tool. “It allows us to get a deeper sense of the applicant’s passion for/commitment to an issue, and unlocks the depth of interest in a way that is not always achievable in a standard admissions essay,” says Tracey Gardner, Wagner’s chief of staff.

Another benefit: no more essays rehashed from other applications. About 970 applicants for this fall’s class, more than half, wrote on an image.

Here’s the slideshow, showing a sampling of the images and examples of what students chose to write about.

There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all argument, which cannot fail to keep man in everlasting ignorance. That principle is condemnation before investigation.
– Edmund Spenser

He who gives an answer before he hears, it is folly and shame to him.
–Proverbs 18:13

Sullivan, Dale. “Beyond Discourse Communities: Orthodoxies and the Rhetoric of Sectarianism.” Rhetoric Review 18 (1991): 148-164.

PN 171.4

Cancel that — found a pdf online :)

If you’re majoring in English, you’re learning a lot about how to read.  Not just words on the page (you knocked that down in elementary school, no?).  You’re learning how to read for sense and meaning.  You’re learning how not to be thrown by long sentences or unfamiliar vocabulary.  You’re learning to follow an idea from the top of the chapter to its end.  You’re reading for style and to know what it adds to sense.  You’re reading between the lines because you know there’s something to be found there.

We’re living in complicated times, and I can’t help but think they’re going to get more complicated and more difficult before some light shines in the distance.  Getting some idea what it all means depends, in part, on learning from people who have some idea (not “pundits,” by the way).  The ability to read, really read, undaunted by complexity, turn of phrase or length of thought, puts you in a position of making some sense of convoluted, technical and controversial ideas and events.

Add to your list of advantages:  Clarity and reasoning (about complicated subjects), logic, expression and patience (with long passages).  You don’t suppose we’d have any reason in work and in life to call on those abilities right about now, do you?

John Groppe, in his “The Writing Classroom as a Spiritual Site of Composing,” prefaces his remarks by saying that he came to this topic after attending the “Spiritual Site of Composing” session at the 1992 CCCC. One panel had discussed ways to help students write about “their religious experience and convictions” in an academic context, and Groppe had noticed that the audience members afterward had “tended to focus [their questions] on the students who were judged to be fundamentalists, members of the religious right” (2). Groppe adds / explains, “In the urban setting where the panelists worked, the so-called “fundamentalists” included Islamic students as well as students from a variety of Christian backgrounds. One member of the audience was there, he admitted, to learn about such students so that he might be able to help them break out of their fundamentalist restrictions” (2).  [Use in Cat 1 chapter?]

Groppe then transfers his discussion to the more broader category of religious student in general, those for whom “the academic atmosphere is, at best, not neutral but empty of teachers and classes that would encourage them to deepen their religious resources” (2).  Or academia is for them hostile. Groppe references Mark Schwen who “sees that the current academic climate is hostile to religion” and who traces that hostility back to the Englightenment (and its objectivism or foundationalism (Groppe says Schwen uses both terms)) and its desire to avoid violence.

LDM — this is interesting because 1) I just watched NT Wright (in a video of him at a Los Ranchos Presbytery retreat) in which he makes a very similar point: that religion was kicked out of academica, at least for one reason, in order to avoid war and conflict. (When was the 100 years’ war and all that?)… And because 2) this whole “religion causes conflict” idea comes up so often in my students’ synthesis papers (though that’s probably also because that is also what Rushdie and the Dalai Lama also talk about), and it comes up in, for example, Bill Maher’s Religulous. Steve (Marjorie’s Steve) was telling me Friday night (when I was there playing poker) that Maher actually asserts in that movie that without religion we wouldn’t have wars. (!)

Groppe goes on to summarize Schwen’s argument: “According to the objectivist tradition, religion is at best a group-think, an anti-intellectualism; at worst, it is a crusade seeking to become a moral majority by suppressing all opposition. Nonetheless, in the name of objectivity and the avoidance of suppression, some voices are suppressed” (3).

Groppe also brings in Martin Marty who asks academics to “recognize the genuine humanity of people in religious movements” (4).

In order to help religious students “put their experiences into a larger context without negating their experience,” we need to recognize 1) the “dynamics of religious experience” and 2) “the variety of verbal genres that embody those experienes” (4). And recognize 3) the correspondences between traditional religious modes of appropriation and expression of experience and secucular or non-religious experience” (4).

So Groppe wants to apply his thinking to both religious and non-religious students, because he believes “the same social-psychological dynamics are at work” and the “same variety of verbal forms is put to similar uses” (4) by both groups. But there’s an ADVANTAGE to studying these dynamics and forms in religious groups = “number, variety, and stability of such groups, the abundance of written sources for study, and the abundant opportunity to observe such groups in meetings of worship services and to see first hand the role of verbal forms in their communal life” (4-5).  LDM – So mainly study religious groups / students because it’s easy to?

Grope then provides an example of the variety of religious verbal forms in Benjamin Chavis’ experience becoming exposed to various religious verbal genres while he was serving time in jail. Chavis recorded his theological and ethical reflections in “several literary forms: prayers, laments, meditations, exaltations, critical interrogations, poetry, prophetic prose, doxology, and liturgy” (qtd in Groppe 5).

But then Groppe moves quickly to saying that the PROPHETIC UTTERANCE is probably the “most familiar” (5). – Shrill to many outsiders, but they forget it was the genre of the civil rights movement, as well as movements against Viet Nam and nuclear weapons (yes).  Groppe adds a nice point: “It is often the genre through which people learn of the destruction of the rain forest or the ozone hole or the dangers of population growth, sexual harassment and gender equality, or AIDS” (6).  Prophecy “has both a negative and postive side” (6).

Trick is to help students “get at [the prophetic form’s] origins and possiblities” (6).  It’s connected also to “personal testimonies or autobiographies, lyrical meditation, and songs…” … “epistles of encouragement, instruction, or admonition…” (MLK).

LDM – makes me think that really “prophetic utterance” in Groppe’s definition is like polemic, but more acceptable because 1) it’s less strident, and 2) can often be productive / encouraging.  Prophecy as light polemic? Prophecy as constructive polemic?

PROBLEM, Groppe points out, is the academics tend to privilege 1) academic discourse, or 2) creative writing (6-7).  Groppe then gives a further example of the advantage of working off campus (gains more diversity of genres, etc).  RESULT OF THIS PROBLEM: 1) Limited discourse genres. 2) We teach students to “treat pieces of discourse discretely, atomistically” (7).

By way of example, Groppe says something that really struck me: “For instance, we ask students to writer persuasive discourse and then criticize what they have produced because they have only preached to the converted and have not persuaded anybody; we critique the students because they have not found an audience” (8).  LDM Ouch. Wow, true.

Aristotle etc: Effective persuasion is based on premises between rhetor and audience.  “Effective persuasion is based on some degree of solidarity, or identification with the audience. We ask students to write persuasively, but we do not help them find community or bring more fully to mind the communities they belong to. Instead we ask them to persuade the class, with whom, from their perspective, they have only accidental relationship. We put them in a situation which can provide them no premises on which to base their arguments” (8).

Okay, then Groppe moves on to say that the “mother lode of premises” is “expressive discourse” [manifestoes, testimonies, prayers, etc] (8).  He goes with James Kinneavy’s view that “expressive discourse is, in a very important sense, psychologically prior to all the other uses of language” (qtd in Groppe 8).  Groppe then asserts that “referential and persuasive forms depend on expressive forms of discourse” (8). LDM – simply because the expressive aspect is where the connection is? the premises are? between rhetor and audience?

So, Groppe continues, we should…
1)    Not avoid prophetic utterances from our students
2)    encourage students to “recover the symbols, ideas, and experiences that underlie” their prophetic utterances (9). LDM – at least one other scholar is saying something similar to this, but can’t think of who it is. I keep thinking of Dively’s thing about getting religious students to examine their “subjectivities.”
3)    NEXT encourage students to “explore the variety of written resources within the tradition of their communities – the meditations, prayers, songs, testimonies and autobiographies, manifestoes, the full range” (9).  They get a better grasp of their own experience and confidence.  LDM – Cf. Montesano and Roen p 87 in Vander Lei.  Cf my own Mdiv experience.

ADVANTAGES TO this pedagogical strategy:
1) All students need “to find and to express the solidarity that they need to write well” and to “explore new situations” (9).
2) BUT ALSO cognitive and intellectual growth: by exploring their own “spiritual roots” (9). LDM AH HA yes.  Cf my MDiv!  Students will discover: a) “exemplary figures” (who lived their faith differently), b) “rich dialectics” – e.g., between apostolic and contemporary. “They will discover history, contingency, and divergence in a non-alienating way that will help them begin to manage the divergence and contingency” (10). YES NICE. Cf Edler.

Groppe concludes:
Religious students  their own rich and varied tradition  1) they explore and write from strength, and 2)they see “similar social-psychological, mythological, intellectual dynamics in new settings”, and 3) the classrooms “may begin to become communites of choice” (10).  LDM – which brings Groppe back to his intro where he talked about religious students expriencing a hostile environment (like Israelites in Babylon).

Marjorie wants more commonplace-booking (love these verbalized nouns), so I’ll start with a quote. Maybe the verb should be “commonplacing.”

By affirming the “extraordinary” call of lay men and women to speak for God, John Wesley expanded the set of available rhetors. By teaching that the preacher must love the listeners as well as persuade them, he transformed pathos from an audience appeal to a requirement for speaking, potentially expanding both ethos and the speaker-audience relationship.

– from Vicki Tolar Burton’s conclusion to her Spiritual Literacy in John Wesley’s Methodism: Reading, Writing, and Speaking to Believe (p. 299).

PE1404 .B25 1991  AVAILABLE

Under subheading “Christian Identity and our theoretical assumptions,” (351) Rand discusses a few “questions being raised by religious scholars” (351) – their concerns about postmodern academy…
1)    James Calvin Shaap described the antogonism he experience toward religious faith when he was in grad school and argues that, in Rand’s words, “religion should be considered a difference along with identity markers such as race and sexual orientation” (351).
A)    Then Rand quotes George Marsden saying that attempts at diversity actually lead to “a dreary uniformity” (33, qtd 351).
2)    “Christian scholarship” discusses also concern that perspectivism [relativism] “has come to occupy a privileged and potentially dangerous place in contemporary culture” (351).
a.    Roger Lundin and others “fear that “construction” has replaced “discovery” as the key metaphor to describe the way we make meaning, that truth is no longer considered to be “found” but only “made” by our manipulation of language (and its manipulation of us). 352 […] Rand continues, “Postmodern self leaves no room for a religious conception of truth or ethics” (352). To this Rand simply points out that she agrees that Pmists have sometimes been dismissive but that Xtns have been overly defensive, adding that Lundin doesn’t take into account feminist studies or critical pedagogy – these movements show that we ARE defined by narratives (which Lundin had said we’re not), etc.
3)    Daniel Reynaud asserts an alternative to the either/or of religious belief and contemporary philosophy. 352.  Reynaud argues that “the problem with postmodern theories is that they become all-encompassing: “ 352.  Rand them quotes Reynaud as saying something I’ve often thought: that yes, of course, in the phenomenological world (“this world”), postmodern is right to say that human perception is limited, etc. But that PM misses the possiblity of something absolute beyond our experience. 353.
a.    Reynaud also points out that language isn’t as fluid and variable as PM want to say.
b.    Rand then lists a few questions writing instructors could ask their students, e.g., “How does the struggle to overcome sin affect your life and the decisions you make about yourself and others?” and I wrote in the margin, “Duh. this is an old theological question. It’s as if compositionists are simply asking their Xtn students to think more within their Christian tradition, to become better Christian intellectuals (to be more like ME basically!).

Christian identity and our profession (353)
1)    COMP STUDIES APPLIES EVOLUTIONARY THINKING TO ITS TREATMENT OF THEORIES. New is Good. Rand then discusses Roskelly and Ronald’s Reason to Believe: Romanticism, Pragmatism, and the Possiblity of Teaching (1998) in which “one of the main points of their argument is that because we have embraced evolutionary models of development and change in our theories of learning since the time of Darwin, we continue to take a linear, survival-of-the-fittest approach to the making of knowledge. This approach “relies on replaclement as necessary and desirabley, and on novelty as necessarily more complex, more ‘fit’ – and therefore better” (101)”. (353)  R and R “maintain that the privileging of what is different and somehow “new” always puts theories in competition rather than in conversation with one another” (353).
a)    All this is apparently to support Rand’s contention that composition studies has too often seen evangelical and other religious discourse from students as “outdated” and/or “naïve.” (354).

a)    EXAMPLES of this EVOLUTIONARY THINKING. Rand then describes the many ways in which compositionists have use evangelical language to villify theories it doesn’t like:
1)    HASHIMOTO  AGAINST EXPRESSIVISTS. His “Voice as Juice.” “probably the most vilified group in compo studies, the “expressivists,”…” 354. She discusses Hashimoto’s sarcastic article against expressivism – “Voice as Juice: Some Reservations about Evangelic Compositions” which “goes so far as to say that expressivist teachers are shameless soul-winners” (354).  LDM – Rand quotes Hashimoto as saying that these “voice evangelists” are against the “evils of complexity,” etc. I don’t get that, don’t get how those who emphasize voice and expression are against complexity. Seems they very much are.  Rand questions “whether [Hashimoto] has exmined his own attempts to convert us in his insistence that personal writing generates such a lack of intellectual depth” (354-55).
2)    JOHN CLIFFORD AGAINST CURRENT-TRADITIONALISTS. Clifford, like Hashimoto uses opposite-evangelical language to denigrade current-traditionalists.  He compares current trad teachers to God – “dispensing knowledge and wisdom from a position of absolute authority” (355).  Rand: “A Christian metaphor has been turned against itself, effectively trivalizing the language of born-again conviction and faith itself” (355).
3)    ELLEN CUSHMAN AGAINST the ASSUMPTIONS Of CRITICAL PEDAGOGY. Cushman is concerned about “the movement’s religious talk” and doesn’t want to be “anyone’s savior.” 356.  Rand points to the “Robin Hood” metaphor Cushman uses of activism.  Rand: “…perhaps if we tried to collapse the binary between “rebelliousness” and “religiosity” (even evangelical religiosity), we would find new ways of talking about faith” 356.
4)    LAD TOBIN IDENTIFIES as RELIGIOUS.  Teacher as preacher (or rabbi, in his case). But Tobin also trivializes / disdains evangelicalism: he is “as disdainful of evangelicalism as the next academician” (he says).   Rand: “the assumption that an academician would automatically be disdainful of evangelical faith puzzles me” (357).
a.    TO SUM UP… Rand continues, “I need to be clear that it is not our disapproval of oppressive Christian religious practices that I question: it is the way we call upon metaphors so precious to many devout people. We trivialize faith when we imply that to believe in sin or salvation just isn’t credible or that evangelicalism is so easily dismissed. Our options are then narrowed for thinking about this kind of religious expression in the classroom.”

Christian identity and our classrooms. 357
Compositions have various negative responses to students who write about their Xtn experience: “embarrassment, anger, and a refusal to even consider an essay based on what is termed “dogmatic,” dualistic thought” (357)
1)    JANICE NEULEIB’s description of the AP essay readers, who were “appalled” by such “pious-sounding language” (357)
2)    CHRIS ANDERSON.  CA worries about the unexamined assumptions of his TA (which makes her position somewhat hypocritical); she needs to give religious rhetoric “its due” (13) because describing faith is very difficult.
a.    Rand’s critique: “…although defending the use of religious rhetoric, [CA] makes clear that it must be of a certain type in order to succeed in the secular classroom. According to him, the “testimonial,” “Guideposts magazine type” offered byt eh TA’s student Cathy will certainly fail: “It’s not just the simplicity and superficiality [of such writing] that bother me. I’m bothered more by Cathy’s assumption of authority, however mild, even sweet, which is what I think bothers all of us – not foolishness but foolishness that is unware of itself” (12). Anderson would seem to contradict himself when later he declares that “no kind of lnaguage should be seen as necessarily superior to any other” (13). Granted, he concedes that Cathy’s rhetoric is appropriate in other situations – “a church meeting, in prayer discussions, and so on” (13) – yet that admission seems to count for little. Her “sweet,” “foolish” discourse is good enough only for worship and prayer (and, one would suppose, for Guideposts readers). I understand that as composition instructors we want our students to become more critical and self-aware. But calling their religious expression “superficial” and “sweet” bothers me. Anderson is troubled by the TA’s inability to problematize her own position, yet he appears to repeat the same mistake. He claims to be open to the possiblity of faith-centered discourse but never stops to consider the rather condescending ways he constructs those who identify as Christian” (357-358).
3)    DESCRIPTION of BELIEVERS as “WITNESSES” 358ff
a.    Acts 1:8
b.    Php 2:3-7,9, 2:10-11
c.    Rand is intrigued by the term “witnesses” 359. “Witnessing talk” is the kind of faith-centered discourse about which writing instructors complain most frequently and is the location from which we borrow in our criticism of other theoretical positions within compo studies” 359.
d.    PARALLELS BETWEEN THIS WITNESSING TALK AND OUR OWN FIELD.
1)    SUBJECTIVITY. SELF. CS Lewis, The Problem of Pain. Xtns need to “die daily.” “This need to die daily is, in a manner of speaking, what we as comp scholars encourage in our own students. Social epistemic rhetoricians in particular posit that none of us are “unified subjects” or “autonomous beings” (Berlin, Bizzell, Faigley). They refute the idea of a rational, coherent self fully in control of its own destiny, though, as many theorists have pointed out, the ideology of capitalism promotes such a view of subjectivity: [quote]. (359) Cf Dively.  “Compositionists call for students to “lose” the notion of a unified self (ultimately oppressed because it is distracted from cultivating greater critical awareness) in order to “find” the multiple and partial self (ideally liberated because it is conscious of the reality of social construction): we act as witnesses hoping to convert others to the faith. Our testimonials suggest that we desperately want our students to “get saved” – to get outside themselves so that a life-changing transformation can occur.” 360
2)    PAULO FREIRE. AUGUSTINE. testimonials and bearing witness… to “ongoing struggles for social justice” 360. “For comp studies, evil results from a lack of critical consciousness. It is a remarkably similar conceptualization to that offered by fourth-century rhetorician St Augustine:” [quote from Augustine talking about  how evil takes away our agency.] Original sin = lack of true agency. “Compositionists who testify to the injustice of racism, sexism, and classism draw our attention to outward evils [cf to Aug’s emphasis on inward evils] created by human beings’ inward lack or poverty of imagination and spirit. This lack is strengthened when others are convinced of its logic or inevitability. We typically argue that agency cannot be assert until the self becomes  reflexive enough to gain a “sense of itself” as socially produced in and through language. Only then, it would follow, can one be set free or “born again” in some sense: empowered to resist cultural codes that create suffering and alienation” (361).

Christian identity and the rhetoric of resistance. 361 ff
Stephen Carter also points out that, as Rand says, “the refusal to surrender one’s moral beliefs to the authority of others is finally “a trait that liberal politics should value, not oppose, for it yields precisely the diversity that America needs” (174).
“Religion, rightfully understood, is a subversive force; thus, if writing instructors want to motivate evangelical students to reflect upon faith-centered identity, perhaps we should start from the premise that religious convictions (even those within conservative forms of Xty) are considered by many to be “radical,” and we should frame our questions in more evocative ways”“ (361)
Rand then quotes RUBIN as pointing out that “linguistic resistance does into arise from ignorance of standard forms; to the contrary, maintaining nonstandard forms often entails considerable language awareness” (Rubin 8).

When writing instructors try to makes Xtn students testimonials into something “more sophisticated,” they “failed to recognize that appealing to the transgressive nature of this kind of subjectivity might produce better results.
1)    Chris Anderson “suggests that it is possible to offer a model of a “better, because [it is] more sophisticated, understanding of religious experience” (15), which strikes me as not only somewhat presumptuous but also lacking respect for the deeply intimate and profoundly personal ways that human beings come to make meaning of what is sacred” 362
2)    Ronda Leathers Dively “also concludes that the dualistic quality of much of their discourse must be reshaped into a respectable academic form” 362  Rand wonders specifically about Dively’s assumptions when Dively says “Many [Christians] who have been fed [a] narrow view of subjectivity may perceive themselves as rigidly defined by belief in the tenets of holy scripture and of faith in the existence and saving power of Jesus Christ. …” [LDM I’m not even understanding what Dively is saying here.]  RAND: “I’m troubled by the lingering assumption that we’d naturally think it constrictive for God to be at the center of someone’s universe.” 362
a.    Dively and Anderson assume this submission of one’s will to X leads to a lack of critical thought. 362.  Rand: but this “kind of obedient rhetorical stance is also considered to be transgressive of the established order and therefore reflects people’s ability to think and act for themselves. Evil triumps when the self is compelled to follow worldly teachings that reflect the enslaved ego rather than the bold and daring ways of God” 363 [nice]. [Cf Romans 12]
b.    “Witnessing talk DOES involved a complex interrogation of the self: it can in fact be thought-provoking” 363
PEDAGOGICAL ADVICE
We should ask students…
“to explain how their resistance to mainstream values and culture has shaped their lives and how those outside their immediate faith communites respond to them” 363
Suggestions for writing assignments…
writing about their religious subculture [cf Dodie’s assignment like that]
ethnographic project, interviews…

CONCLUSION
“I do believe we can challenge students to think further about their religious identities.” 364 … to call upon a quote from [Thomas] Newkirk’s book [The Performance of Self in Student Writing], “the spirit of [the invitation that we offer to students remains] critical. It is one thing to demonstrate an alternative – to extend a repertoire; it is another to try to eradicate a ‘lower’ form of consciousness” (102)” 364.

“Comp studies itself preaches  a kind of born-again faith: we want students to get saved and to resist subject positions that discourage critical awarness. For that reason alone we should not view testimonial rhetoric as anti-intellectual or cliché. Perhaps we should invite students to explain why this kind of discourse has had such significance in their lives. We should promite further conversation about evangelical identity and its central importance to many people’s worldview.” 362