"Sorry to hear that, but those are my mentors."

I walked in to Dr. Eskew's office thinking we would have to interview him about all aspects of his academic career and professional life to find the people he had interacted with and who had provided the most influence for him. That turned out not to be necessary. Doug was very definite about who had made the biggest contributions for him: his dissertation directors. He had even done some research of his own to discover who their mentors had been, and he presented us with his findings based on acknowledgments in published works by his dissertation directors. It was anticlimactic really, as we'd expected to have to begin this on the basis of our own research. Oh, but that was coming. It became clear early on that there were seemingly infinite ways to go, just based off of two people. The research was complicated by the fact that you had to infer whether someone was merely in the same sphere as your subject, or if that person had made a significant enough contribution to be another link in your chain. Toward the end of the chain, around the 1700s, it became an exercise just to find someone who had been in the same physical space at the same time.

What does that say about influence? It's clear to me that we are influenced academically in many ways by many different people, not just those we consider to be our direct mentors. The books we read for papers, the emails we send to prominent or not so prominent theorists, our classmates, our professors, our class interaction all have the power to provide ideas and theories that influence our pedagogies. I do admire Dr. Eskew's conviction on his own influences, though. At one point we contacted him for additional names as the ones we had were looking like dead ends stuck in turn of the century Czechoslovakia. His response was, "Sorry to hear that, Erin, but those are my mentors." That is a man who knows where his ideas came from.

It was pleasure working with Jennifer and kimi on the project, though we did most of our work independently and only then came together to discuss and plan. I suspect that my attitude about the project was more linear in that I wanted to find one clear line with prominent names and stick with it. Jennifer and Kimi came with many more names and directions and wanted to incorporate them in the final project. As it turned out, that would have possible and would have shown all the extra work. It was a good lesson for me in the limitations of linear thinking on a project like. This project had the potential to shoot off in many different directions, interconnected and highly collaborative. We achieved some of that, though I think we had to tone down or discard much of the work we did due to time and space restrictions. We could have spent a whole semester doing this project and still had things to add.

Thank you, Dr. Souder, for the opportunity to see the communities we are a part of!

The Questioning

The Elbow/Bartholomae debate packs an awful lot of debated pedagogy in a few pages: the role of the author, authority in the classroom, the merits of expressive writing vs. academic writing, writing "space," and still others. These particular articles, summing up the arguments on both sides of the issues, have enormous relevance for our pedagogy statements and our current and future careers regarding how to teach composition and what you teach. I particularly appreciate the actual questioning that both men pursue, not only of their opponent's position, but also their own. Too often scholars seem married to their position and unwilling to examine the merits of their opponent's argument. In this debate, Elbow and Bartholomae attempt to answer questions Wayne Booth sees as central to rhetoric: "How can I change your mind?" and, perhaps more importantly, "When should I change my mind?" Neither seems willing to give up their positions in the end, though the attempt to see both sides serves them well.

It seems clear, though, that their theories have the same goals: to teach students to exercise control over their writing, to make them aware of the impact of culture on their writing, to think critically about their own and others' writing. The central question of their debate comes down to the method of teaching composition students. Are beginning writers best served by allowing them to immerse themselves in their writing and make it authentically personal, or by enabling them to see culture's influence and the difficulties of achieving authenticity? In the first method, the writer must be made to see the culture's influence and encounter doubt in their own authenticity, in the second, the writer must fight distrust of language and attempt to achieve authenticity in spite of the culture. Either way, the student writer must confront the same issues, just in a different sequence.

The question is, as Elbow puts it, "whether I should invite my first year students to be self-absorbed and see themselves at the center of the discourse - in a sense, credulous; or whether I should invite them to be personally modest and intellectually scrupulous and to see themselves as at the periphery - in a sense, skeptical and distrustful." And Bartholomae asks, "Are freshmen ready to think first and primarily about the problems of writing when they write?" and "Is it the job of college English to teach students to learn to resist and be suspicious of writing and the text?" Elbow worries about crushing the spirit of the beginning writer, about instilling distrust too early before the writer has had a change to gain confidence in their writing. Bartholomae questions the wisdom of allowing students to believe in their authentic voice, when that voice is actually the product of culturally produced language and situation.

There is no winner here, but also no loser. There is no right answer to this question. There can't be, because writing is not a black and white, mechanical process that works the same for every writer. In reality, some student will respond better to Elbow's method, some to Barholomae's. The important thing is to keep asking these questions, to keep seeking the answers. And perhaps we can ask our students these questions and have them weigh in as well. This is a discourse in which the more voices that participate, the better chance we have at discovering how writing works and how it should be taught to achieve the best results.

Saussure! No, seriously, Saussure!

Today we connected Dr. Doug Eskew to Ferdinand de Saussure. The elation I felt at that point was ridiculous in its quantity and object, of course, but that's the beauty of being an English graduate student. It's not our stopping point, I hope. And it wasn't the direction we first started in either. At one point we were lost in turn of the century Czechoslovakia, which is never a good place to be. So we retraced our steps and looked for another name. And there are many of them, as I'm sure you're all finding in your own research. To imagine that there is only one line of learning is outrageous hubris or naivete, but I must say I rather saw it that way when first imagining how this project would turn out. We would find out Doug's mentor then connect him to this one guy who in turn connects this other specific guy. But there are many influences on a single person's academic and personal growth. Influence is also such a nebulous term, including people you've had direct contact with and others you've read or heard, and still others who influenced those you've read or heard. There are literally infinite ways we could trace this project.

What I think we will learn, at the end of this, is that we are not so far removed from major theorists we read about every day. That we are connected to each other and every person who has even begun to think critically about the broad and bloated field of English. That through us, our students are and will be connected. That the ideas of these people we are researching are connected just as the physical bodies are connected, passed on, carried down, growing and evolving. That literature theorists are connected to linguists are connected to rhetoricians. That learning, knowledge, and ideas are viral. But we already knew that. I'm interested to see if and how we manage to coherently connect all this.

As McLuhan said, the medium is the message, so what form will this project ultimately take? I still do like the traditional tree, for its simplicity and inherent metaphor, but I also appreciated all of my classmates' suggestions on spider webs, celestial constellations, etc. The constellations especially would be interesting to see depicted. As for multi-media, I think incorporating on the board would be impractical. But I like the idea of creating video and uploading it to a facebook page, as Autumn suggests on her blog, and other locations. It's an excellent idea to connect this class, as well as future Dr. Souder classes who might participate. If we're going to be a part of this connection, let's start now by creating new media forms to celebrate it.