Brian Jackson’s (2010) “Teaching the Analytical Life” has been on my mind lately. I admit to stumbling upon this article just recently, about a month ago, although it’s been out for nearly three years now. Essentially, Jackson argues that teachers of FYC need to be more conscious–more deliberate–in how they teach analysis if they expect it to be a transferable skill.
Jackson does an excellent job bringing up the issues with teaching writing as a transferable skill–beginning with the fact that writing decontextualized is largely meaningless and thus cannot be transferred because it cannot be taught. Those who think writing can be taught in a vacuum are sorely mistaken, and teaching writing works best when students are already in their intended careers (yes, you heard me, careers, not majors because most of students’ learning about complex writing skills are career specific, meaning they learn on the job, not necessarily in school–which brings me to a side tangent about how, then, do academics learn to write if they are always writing in isolation and not being mentored? does reviewer feedback really count as mentoring? probably not). Compositionists like Elizabeth Wardle have taken up this argument and suggested that FYC stop being a “teach for college” course and start being an “introduction to writing studies” course, just like any other introductory level disciplinary course would be (I love this argument!). Now, that isn’t likely to happen on every campus across the nation any time soon. What can be done, then, if we can’t teach writing without context and FYC is largely void of context?
Many teach within subject content–take Princeton’s Writing Program, for example. There courses are subject specific, intro-level writing courses for FYC, but they also have a WAD program where writing–discipline-specific writing skills–is taught within different departments. I like these ideas, to an extent, but I also feel a little bit as Aristotle felt. Studying rhetoric is the content. That’s what we’re doing, isn’t it? We are teaching them to work with rhetorical skills to write in any situation they’ll ever write in. However, I wonder if students are capable of thinking this broadly–I mean en masse. The way most FYC programs and courses are set up, the college itself is trained to think of the course as one that “has” to be taught and students “must” take. The rhetoric is one of swallowing disgusting medicine, not coming into an interesting teaching and learning experience. That rhetoric has to change if we want student buy in–if the college and faculty teaching the course doesn’t buy in, why should students?
Further, Jackson’s main argument is about teaching analysis as a genre. Why do we teach it? Because it is, by and large, the most transferable genre our students will be exposed to and will be utilizing. Jackson has this great point though: teach the analysis in context. We tend to ask our students to step back when they analyze: find the “intended/target audience” and imagine how they would react to the piece; we don’t ask them to see themselves as the target audience and react from there, but Jackson’s point is that maybe we should. He offers an example of talking with students in class about an opinion piece in the school newspaper about facebook. He asks students to critically evaluate it, and they end up analyzing it! Imagine that! Then, I think, the next step is to say, “WOW, look, guys, you’re analyzing!” That’s how they get it.
One thing I can’t quite figure out, though. Is Jackson advocating that we stop having students write analyses and that we instead only have students engage in analytic discussions? I’m not sure how I feel about that, if he is indeed making that claim.
Jackson, B. (2010). Teaching the analytical life. Composition Studies, 38(2): 9-27.
Rhetor(ic) in the Land of Nod 