Trees, Trujillo, and our Trabajo

In his article, "Recovering the Lost Art of Researching the History of Rhetoric," Richard Enos addresses "a serious problem that constrains the field today: the belief that research in rhetoric is retrospective or, at best, static" (8). When I read this quote and think of our hot-off-the-glue-gun board, I want to laugh. Retrospective? Static? Our primary research in rhetoric--weeks of digging through names, dates, universities, e-mails, books, CV's, resumes, etc.--has yielded a living, breathing, messy entity. It's as far from static as you can get.

Throughout these weeks, I've learned that primary research creates an opportunity to say something original. In writing our major research papers, we may be goaded by the goblin fear that someone, somewhere has written about this before, but we can pretty confidently say that no one has ever done research connecting Patricia Trujillo to Immanuel Kant. As Enos says, primary research is what "advanc[es] basic knowledge." Rather than getting stuck in the ruts of "critical posturing" and "speculative theory," we have, in our own small way, made progress in our field (12).

Working with Dr. Trujillo was certainly a major highlight of the project. She told us about both her academic influences and her personal influences. Dr. Trujillo’s academic contributions are impressive, but she has also been very socially active and involved in the life of her community. So she told us of talking with Meleah Powell from Michigan State University, who was the first person who inspired her to attend graduate school. She also told us of working with Estevan Rael-Galvez, state historian of New Mexico and executive director of the National Hispanic Cultural Center. And she told us how deeply inspired she was by the examples set by her mother and grandmother, who are both college graduates.

Another highlight of the project was hearing from Dr. Ben Olguin of UT Austin. When I asked him who his influences were, his response was brief and almost poetic. He replied, "My mother taught me how to read, Karl Marx taught me how to critique, and Mao Tse-tung taught me how to fight." Both his response and my work on this project have caused me to ponder my own influences. I wonder where my place will be on this family tree and who my strongest influences will prove to be.

Through this process, I was reminded of a quote from Kenneth Bruffee's article in Norton entitled, "Collaborative Learning and the 'Conversation of Mankind.'" Bruffee writes, "Collaborative learning provides the kind of social context, the kind of community, in which normal discourse occurs: a community of knowledgeable peers. [Students] converse about their own relationship and, in general, about relationships in an academic or intellectual context between students and teachers." This captures the essence of the family tree project. It is something we have done in collaboration, and it has centered on conversation and relationships. How are relationships formed between student and teacher? How do ideas travel from one generation to the next? These questions are crucial to establishing ourselves as teachers, scholars, and writers, because this is part of our kairos. When we write in an academic community, we write not only within our current context, but also within the context of those who have gone before us--our intellectual ancestors, so to speak. If we write without reference to them, we build a house with no foundation.

Perhaps the most important lesson I’ve learned from this project is that we are not only interconnected, but also interdependent. We rely on our teachers and mentors for guidance, ideas, criticism, and good sense, and we are indebted to them for their help just as they are indebted to others and just as others will one day be indebted to us (even Aristotle was indebted to the influences of his teachers!). We are helped, and we help others. And as we do, a little piece of our “ancestors” passes on to our “descendants,” keeping ideas flowing and thriving in lively conversation from one generation to the next.

The Academic vs. the Writer: Do We Really Have to Decide?

The Elbow/Bartholomae conversation may be the most valuable reading I've done all year. It made me aware of a debate of which I was an unconscious participant--the question of whether we as teachers should help our students see themselves as academics or as writers. Reading this article helped me realize two things: 1. I've been coming down squarely on the side of the academic, and 2. I like the writers' side better and I want to (mostly) live there. Not that you can't have it both ways; Elbow rightly states that "students should be able to inhabit both roles comfortably" (489). He also identifies areas of apparent conflict, such as deciding whether to read established works by well-known authors or to focus on students' writing, and demonstrates that no actual conflict need exist. I loved the idea he presented about using texts to "wrestle with, to bounce off of, to talk about and talk from, to write about and write from" (491). Texts kept under glass like museum pieces rarely teach us anything except our own inadequacies. Working with texts as dynamic entities rather than as static artifacts also empowers us to write in conversation with them rather than merely in imitation of them. And writing is, after all, "an act of finding and acknowledging one's place in an ongoing intellectual conversation..." (495).

I believe that Elbow's perspective can help provide solutions for a variety of tough situations in the composition classroom, including the problem presented in Lisa Delpit's article (from the Norton readings) entitled "The Politics of Teaching Literate Discourse." Delpit addresses the issue of teaching academic discourse to students whose familiar discourse is far removed from the academy. She answers critics who maintain that it is neither possible nor desirable to teach "literate discourse" to those outside the dominant group. She says that teaching the dominant discourse to "outsiders" can "provide a way both to turn the sorting system on its head and to make available one more voice for resisting and reshaping an oppressive system" (1320). The problem is that students who feel rejected and alienated by academic discourse tend to reject it in turn. Here's where Elbow comes in. If all we're doing is teaching academic discourse, it will probably only increase that sense of alienation. However, if we also provide opportunities for students to feel themselves as writers comfortable in their own voices, they will hopefully come to value writing as a means of expression rather than oppression.