On March 11, I spoke at a symposium on “Undergraduate Education in the Public University,” at Berkeley. The symposium mainly featured high-level level university administrators and policy leaders, people like University of Michigan President Mark Schlissel and Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks. I was the only speaker talking about a specific subject area. (The other two professors discussed higher education policy.) My talk, “Scaling Writing in Large Public Universities,” was filmed, and Berkeley plans to release a video of it. Whether I have the courage to watch myself, given my known speaking tics, is another matter entirely. But I’ll post any link that materializes.
For a few paragraphs here, I want to think about a remark that Schlissel made during his keynote. He characterized the 20th Century model of the university as one driven by disciplines, and he characterized the 21st Century model as one driven by problems. My takeaway was that, in terms of undergraduate education, a university driven by disciplines takes its primary orientation as systematically (or, often in the case of fields like English, unsystematically) inculcating students in the particular body of knowledge and ways of thinking as defined by one or more majors. The impetus is covering the major field, which is ultimately a conservative one. That is, conserving the discipline—its content and practices—is the paramount goal, even if a given discipline has a forward-looking element of making new knowledge.
A problem-driven university takes its primary orientation as addressing current issues and problems, whether practical or philosophical. The goal is to move toward resolution or solution, using whatever available bodies of knowledge and practices might be applied. Certain large problems—poverty, racism, gender inequality—are intractable, of course, so my sense of “moving toward” is important. The key thing is that studying texts, ideas, and techniques is ultimately grounded in how the knowledge gained from them might be used.
I think this orientation has important implications for the still fairly nascent field of Writing Studies in the American university. I’ve been a little wary of the rush to disciplinarity in composition studies, especially when some would configure writing departments that seem centered on conserving the field. Schlissel’s observations resonate with my sense that the timing is all wrong: claiming disciplinarity/departmentality in 2016 doesn’t get you what it did in 1986. (I’ve got an article under review somewhere on this topic.)
Putting my musings aside (and putting aside the obvious value of disinterested learning: learning uncoupled from a current issue or problem), I wonder how writing looks in a problem-driven university.
One form could be the themed writing courses that are currently again in ascendancy. Whether writing courses should have a theme has long been controversial. A traditional concern is that themed courses become less about developing student writing abilities than about understanding the course topic; it’s a concern similar to one leveled at literature-based writing courses, where one fear has long been that professors more interested in Emily Dickinson than Aristotle, let alone the writing education of Jennifer Student, would go all in with Dickinson, teaching little writing.
Still, at least some affinities with theme-based writing in the problem-driven university are clear. A challenge would be insuring that there’s a problem component to the theme: an actual open issue needing engaging through writing. Among other things, this might entail readings being left open. Who knows what a writer might need to access in pursuit of a problem? Too, genres may need to be left open, too. Perhaps I’m putting too much emphasis on “authentic” problems, ones still open. Perhaps it’s enough to have “casebook rhetoric” kinds of issues: a theme, some questions, a rhetorical exigency, even if they’re no longer quite live. Thirty years ago I taught from Behrens and Rosen’s Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum, which gathered handfuls of articles on various topics and took students through a variety of writing tasks.
Somehow, though, such an approach seems more in the spirit of “the problem-driven course” than the “problem driven university.” Until we find some radically different way of organizing learning—a way that gets around credit by specialized courses delivered by a disciplinary faculty—perhaps what we can best imagine is problem-driven courses, a shift in both curriculum and pedagogy.
Still, writing courses will face a particular challenge. People expect such courses to develop particular transferrable writing skills and strategies. Even if we know that universal and general writing techniques operate at such a high level of abstraction as to be doomed to fail expectations (for example, “write to your audience,” or “discern and follow target genre conventions” or “writing is revision”), we nonetheless feel some responsibility to teach strategies and techniques. We feel the need to teach a vocabulary and set of analytic lenses about writing, practiced through well-designed tasks with feedback. The problem of problem-driving writing is the problem of writing itself. In a certain respect, writing courses as traditionally practiced are like studio art courses or music composition, where the “problem” is how to create a well-made artifact, with some faith and hope that this experience carries forward to future experiences.
Of course, there’s an entirely different way into this: writing as an aspect of problem confrontations rather than as a class per se. This is the venerable terrain of writing across the curriculum, for which we have plenty of theory and practice. The question is whether those of us in writing studies are willing to abandon writing courses on their current large scale (just keeping a few elective ones) to go all-in with writing as an aspect of any learning, problem-driven enterprise in the university. In order for us to be comfortable doing so, I think we’d need to feel that we’d be equal partners in the enterprise. We’d need to feel that other faculty members and institutional structures were configured and committed to problem-driven learning and we weren’t just the handmaidens and stable boys ancillary to Disciplines Triumphant. I suspect we worry about unilaterally disarming ourselves as a discipline precisely at the moment we’re on the verge of recognition as one.