In this article, Hairston reacts against a shift in pedagogy, namely that some FYC teachers are designing courses around ideology and politics. These instructors argue that they need to teach their students to recognize dominant ideologies in an attempt to keep students from acting ignorantly under those ideologies. Hairston believes that these instructors are doing a disservice to their students and to Composition as a whole. She asserts that this pedagogy shifts the curriculum away from the students’ interests and voices and focuses on the instructor’s own political agenda. Hairston also argues that this new shift is occurring because Composition has not yet detached itself from English departments; because literary criticism (which includes subjects like feminism, deconstructionism, and post-structuralism) is highly valued in the English department, she claims, some Composition teachers feel they must also teach criticism. To continue in a process, student-centered pedagogy while still acknowledging diversity and multiculturalism in the classroom, Hairston maintains that we should “focus…on the experiences of our students. They are our greatest multicultural resources, one that is authentic, rich, and truly diverse…Real diversity emerges from the students themselves and flourishes in a collaborative classroom in which they work together to develop their ideas and test them out on each other” (190-1). She asserts, however, that “not all writing should be personal, expressive writing. Students need a broader range of discourse as their introduction to writing in college. The teacher can easily design the kinds of writing assignments that involve argument and exposition and suggest options that encourage cross-cultural awareness” (191).
Responses to Hairston, Maxine. “Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing.” College Composition Communication 44 (1993): 248-56.
Several scholars write counterstatements to Hairston’s article. Hairston writes a “reply” in which she evades all criticisms against her article.
John Trimbur
Tribur states that, though Hairston argues that a liberatory pedagogy is “about racism and sexism instead of writing,” the course is, in fact, very much about writing. The course is “devoted…to how arguments – forensic and deliberative – are framed to adjudicate problematical situations of social and cultural discrimination. Far from being outside the competence of writing teachers or novices teachers in training, the course is resolutely rhetorical in its design because it asks students to consider – and it offers them some tools to do so… - how people argue public issues of central important to our society” (248). More, Hairston’s “‘low-risk classroom is just that: a serious underestimation of the social and intellectual resources students bring with them into the freshman course and a refusal to ask students to mobilize these resources in order to find out how and why they differ with their peers” (249).
Robert G. Wood
Wood argues that Hairston “suggest[s] that those who teach from a liberatory perspective are the only ones teaching ideology, while those who teach expressionism are ideologically neutral” and that this suggestion “is to risk the further mystification of our students” (249). Instead, “the best way to avoid the trappings of the ideological dogmatism that can manifest itself in either the political left or the political right is to foreground out ideological, to make them knowledge first to ourselves, then to our students” (250).
Ron Strickland
Strickland first states that “Hairston’s criticisms of radicalism and theory are ill-informed and underdeveloped” (250-1). He then goes on to argue that in Hairston’s suggested curriculum “the communal interests of the topics is never specified or demonstrated – it is always subsumed under or overwhelmed by the taken-for-granted, self-evident value of personal experience. The rich variety of life experiences among these writers somehow gets reduced to the stereotypes of other cultures which circulate in the dominant American culture” (251). More, her curriculum limits “students’ development of critical thinking and rhetorical skills” (252).
William H. Thelin
Thelin first points to the fact that Hairston argues mostly with emotion as opposed to intellect. More, she is underselling her students when she “characterizes [them] as apprehensive and timid” and in this “patronizing predisposition towards students [she] will forever keep them in the role of the timid student” (252). Thelin also emphasizes that Hairston’s pedagogy is “anything by depoliticized” (252). “As most classrooms are, hers is merely one where the politics are kept covert and where the criteria for assignments and assessment are maintained through unquestioned norm” (252).
William J. Rouster
Rouster argues that, despite Hariston’s claims that teachers of Composition are not prepared or trained to teach critical pedagogy, these teachers are actually very prepared. “Indeed, many of us do receive an education in literary criticism which does teach us how to examine literary texts using the heuristic of a literary theory. We learn how to read texts, read critical theory, and apply theory to texts in order to ferret out meanings of texts. In addition, an education in rhetorical theory gives many of us the basis for examining texts for their rhetorical elements…Other texts become appropriate objects of student such as, among others, student writing. Cultural critics have recognized another type of text has become a legitimate object of study of their examination in English departments – that of culture” (253).
Toni Mester
Mester composes a parody of a song from Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta The Mikado. The song emphasizes that Hairston is attempting to kill off all pedagogies (and ideologies) other than her own.
Reply by Maxine Hairston
Hairston returns with a “reply,” though she responds to very little of the criticism against her article. She writes that she is happy that her article is creating conversation, ironically states that the conversational tone is emotion which she says is “unfortunate” and then avoids responding to her critics by writing “I see little point in trying to rebut the criticisms of those who disagree with me so sharply because I am not in a rhetorical situation with them. We differ so radically about basic premises – about teaching, about our society, about the purpose of education – that we have little foundation on which to base a useful discussion that is likely to change any of out minds” (255). She also states that this article “will almost certainly be my last major professional article” and that she is “out of the classroom, ready to exit the conversation” (255).