I just read Robert P. Yagelski’s review, “‘Radical to Many in the Educational Establishment’: The Writing Process Movement after the Hurricanes,“ in the May 2006 CE. Yagelski takes the stance that Elbow, Murray, and Freire are of the same vein and are all still considered radical. Yagelski takes on critics of both Elbow and Murray (attacks on expressivism) and Friere (critiques on Critical Pedagogy).
There are obvious ways in which the teaching of writing is problematic: “writing as defined by the new SAT is…organized, formulaic, rule-governed, and relatively straight-forward, if not always easy,“ and “writing, as defined in schools and sanctioned by tests like the SAT, is as narrow and circumscribed as ever“ (532). Murray and Elbow wrote against this rigidity in writing. To quote Murray: “We are free from an obligation to teach etiquette and forced to design a curriculum which trains students to accept the responsibilities of free speech through the experience of writing“ (534).
Yagelski sees Elbow and Murray as radical and “Freire’s brethren“ (533). James Berlin is correct, Yagelski argues, when he claims that “expressionistic rhetoric is easily co-opted,“ but it is still dialogic in a Freirian sense (538). Berlin’s social-epistemic rhetoric is also easily co-opted, and often, by putting ideology at the center of the classroom, “end[s] up replacing one circumscribed and sanctioned kind of intellectual work (critiquing model texts) with another (critiquing cultural texts), and student writing continues to be implicitly devalued or assigned value only in relation to sanctioned texts“ (538-539).
Macedo, in his preface to the new edition of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, writes about “the immeasurable hope that Paulo represented for those of us who are committed to imagine a world, in his own words, that is less ugly, more beautiful, less discriminatory, more democratic, less dehumanizing, and more humane“ (540). For Yagelski, humane is the key word, and he sees Friere, Elbow, and Murray connected by that word:
And in some ways, the deeply humane insistence of Murray and Elbow on the value of the individual writer has that same force: they refuse to accept excuses for ignoring the struggling student writer who they so completely believe has something more to say than ‘How long should this paper be?’ — who wants to give voice to experience, who wants to become less powerless. (543)
Yagelski’ ends his review by asking that we stop “dismissing them as radical“ because we should be listening to their insistence that we pay attention to students as individual writers (543).
What I get out of this is the need to be critical of both “expressionist“ and “social-epistemic“ rhetorics as groups and movements, and instead focus on their flaws and how they complement and can improve each other. I want a classroom that takes Elbow’s and Murray’s (as well as Macrorie’s and Sirc’s) focus on the individual writer (yes, it’s Romantic), as well as Berlin’s and Freire’s (as well as Bartholomae’s) focus on ideology and criticism. While some social-epistemic critiques of expressionist writing are correct in that they reinforce a false individualism, I don’t think they necessarily have to (though I don’t know yet how I certainly feel about that), and I believe they are fighting dominant ideology by humanizing students and their experiences.
Of course, as I read this, I am energized to read so much more, and I was in the library when I read it, so I, of course, wound up checking out seven more books and photocopying a journal article. I’m not sure how I will be able to write a thesis with so much that I want to read.
Yagelski, Robert P. “‘Radical to Many in the Educational Establishment’: The Writing Process Movement after the Hurricanes.“ CE 68.5 (May 2006): 531-544.
