Bartholomae's style of communication has always been pretty off-putting to me, maybe because I get the sense that he's incredibly full of himself. It's true that he's an academic who has earned his place in that sort of high brow discourse, but the way he talks about student writers really rubs me the wrong way.
I appreciate this idea he's putting out there about how students ought to feel welcome to shape discourse by participating in it -- it's actually a pretty cool thought -- but all the talk of correct vs. incorrect sentences makes me grind my teeth a little bit. That might be kind of petty, but as a writing center person, I'm more inclined to overlook "errors" in writing, in favor of ideas and clarity. I think that Bartholomae ultimately comes around to a similar point by saying that the "errors" don't matter as much as the depth of thought, but I still can't help but interpret his tone as fairly judgmental.
Maybe I'm being unfair, and still holding a grudge on behalf of Peter Elbow, but the idea that academic discourse is up here and regular donkey discourse is down there seems inherently classist and exclusionary to me. This opinion is also shaped by the fact that secondary education is so expensive in the US; Bartholomae's stance, in the context of my staggering student debt, seems grossly gate-keepy. While it's true that folks who go to school for writing are probably going to receive more advanced training, practice and growth as writers than what Bartholomae refers to as "basic" writers, I'm extremely wary of the idea that any writer ought to adhere to what he calls "our peculiar
ways of reading, writing, speaking, and thinking" (11).
I don't know if I'm eloquently stating why, because maybe it's just a feeling of the heart that can't be put into words, but I just want to shake Bartholomae and tell him to get over himself. If it's true that students invent the university, then maybe he should sit back and allow that to happen, rather than trying to mold students into his ideal version of what an academic looks like. If writing is a mode of learning rather than just a way to express one's knowledge or understanding, if higher learning is about becoming a better thinker, then how is "personal writing" anything to scoff at?
Hi Elise,
ReplyDeleteWhat's interesting about Bartholomae is that he devoted considerable time to working with basic writers, which seems at odds with the characterization that he's an elitist (lots of people find him as you did in this article, kind of "full of himself").
Isn't he also totally on your side when it comes to policing error in student writing? On page 18, we writes that we mistakenly work from "the assumption that the key distinguishing feature of a basic writer is the presence of sentence-level error," which he says misses the fact that error may not be "a constant feature," but part of a writer's development. The whole issue of class is important (we don't talk about it enough). I suppose that Bartholomae might argue that this is exactly why basic writers deserve to know how academic discourse works, so that they, too, can overcome their outsider status.
At the same time, I wonder if students, many of whom (especially if they're basic writers) are alienated from writing might be more so after experiencing Bartholomae's pedagogy? What do you all think?
I'm with you Elise.. he's so spot-on and detailed, yet winded and witty in his showing explanations that it makes me wonder if i'm actually getting it. I think Bartholomae makes some great points though, but I wonder if I should be a bit suspicious of is long-drawn opinions. Your comment about wanting to shake him and tell him to get over himself is a nice thought. He touches heavily on students being wary of being up to the task of taking-on analysis and research, which is interesting. I wonder how we might incorporate scholarly research into our own non-fiction stories. I've researched specific things before in order to make arguments in both non-fiction, as well as fiction. I see my non fiction as having two components - the true and factual component of what went down (the story), and then my now-narrator present-day analysis of what it meant, how I or others felt or feel and research can play a part in analyzing our own story, if that makes sense.
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