Students Who Teach Us

Note: Sorry again that I'm behind on the blogs. Hoping to catch up in a chunk this week while on spring break from my teaching job. Been thinking a lot about all of this material -- just haven't had a chance to get it all down. So, here goes.

I found the chapter on "Students Who Teach Us" to be alternately inspiring and infuriating. As a teacher, most of what I was "taught" by reading this chapter is the confirmation of an idea I have been harboring for a long time. Not every student -- not even every intelligent, talented student -- needs to be bound for a traditional academic college or university. What ever happenend to acknowledging that some people have talent for things other than what a traditional college education can bring them? If "David's" story teaches us nothing else, it is that a student like him has the talent and ambition to "make it" and become successful using the talent he is most interested in honing -- in his case -- web design. What would have been so wrong with steering a student like him to a school like, for instance, DeVry Technical University? I don't know much about a school like that, but I am hoping a traditional freshman comp. English class would not be part of the curriculum to succeed there. Why can't students go on to hone professional skills without someone attempting to make academics or academic writers out of them if they are just not interested in honing those types of skills? Shouldn't a person choose the kind of education that suits them best once they get out of the public school rat race? I've heard even from a few students at the "college prep" school where I teach that some of them wonder why they are being pushed to go to college when they really don't want to go. Why is it that we, as composition teachers, have to become all things to all students? Shouldn't there be classes geared toward different kinds of literacy and communication depending on the kind of field or interest that students have and want to participate in?

Cynthia L. Selfe points out that "to make it possible for students to practice, value, and understand a full range of literacies -- emerging, competing, and fading -- English composition teachers have got to be willing to expand their own understanding of composing beyond conventional bounds of the alphabetic. And we have to do so quickly or risk having composition studies become increasingly irrelevant" (54). While I can appreciate her point and her urgency, I also wonder how much we as composition teachers have to accept that written language is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Is it? Or are we just expanding our boundaries of "composition" to include other forms of communication. While I agree that non-alphabetic communication is compelling and more relevant to some students, I do feel that until that time that the written word and conventional forms of composition disappear all together (which is hopefully never), it is still the job of the composition teacher to teach students to think well on the page using the written word. We can and should expand our knowledge and acknowledge that some students have more talent in other forms of communication, but that is where "differentiated" instruction comes into play. If we teach to all forms of communicators -- the visual, the verbal, the tactile, and anything in between -- hopefully we can cover all bases and all learn from each other.

Which again begs the question: What is so wrong with taking what you "need" from education and leaving the rest? As Selfe states through David's case, that he does not "subscribe -- at least in the same way his teachers do -- to the print literacy values and practices that many faculty at his university still hold up as standards; he has found them, frankly, of limited relevance in his life, in his attempts to get an education and to enter a sphere of economic success and personal fulfillment . . .And, I suspect that if forced to choose between the traditional authority associated with a college degree -- based on the standards of and allegiance to -- print literacy -- and an opportunity to make a living as a Web designer . . . there would be little to sway him toward the degree" (54). Why does he need to make a choice? If he can gain "economic success and personal fulfillment" without the college degree, why does he need it? Is it society's guilty conscience that says he does? Why can't he attend a technical university instead that doesn't care if he can write a literary analysis or other traditionally academic paper? Or, is it that traditional universities, for fear of becoming obsolete or being accused of being "elitist" now feel that a college degree should be reinvented to acommodate a less academic kind of student? Is our point of embracing new literacies truly to keep up with the times or to acommodate students who are too distracted by the times to keep up with traditional methods of academic curriculum? Either way, the writing is on the wall. Students are different now than they ever were before and new forms of literacy do need to be embraced in the classroom. But, in embracing the new, we will hopefully continue to teach what is good about the old, or risk alienating students who still thrive by communicating with "traditional" forms of the written word. The key might be in finding the right balance to accomodate all.