Marilyn M. Cooper
Michigan Technological University
Conference on College Composition and Communication
Chicago, April 1998

Like Pat Bizzell, I came to social consciousness in the political protests of the 1960s. I think the lesson I took then from the marches on Washington and the sit-ins in university administration buildings was that we really did know something that those in power didn't know or were ignoring and that we could not should not depend on them to make decisions and tell us what to learn and what to believe. One of the ironies for those of us in this cohort who went on to be college professors is that now we lament over students who think they know better than we do what is important and who are reluctant to simply believe us.

I now understand better the attraction of simply teaching students knowledge and abilities I know they will need. But on many levels I really don't believe I have the best answers for them. Though I know more about the contexts of many of the social problems that face our society than they do, I am under no illusion that I know the best way to resolve them. Though I know a lot more about traditional language use and genres of writing and rhetorical and hermeneutic strategies than they do, I am uncertain about how useful some of these usages, genres, and strategies will be for them in the new global electronic world they face.

There are, however, three things I strongly believe are important for them to learn in writing classes. I believe that every member of a society has a responsibility to participate to the best of their abilities in the ongoing decision-making that structures a society. I believe that responsible participation means carefully thinking through the reasons, experiences, and evidence that underpins the positions you take. And I believe that good decision-making involves seriously listening to and considering the perspectives of various others in discussion. These three things ground the kind of writing -- or rhetoric, given that such modes of language use can as well be oral as written -- I think it is important that they learn how to do. At the same time, I remember too well how I felt in the 60s to simply tell students "trust me, this will be good for you," and I try to explain to them why these practices and this kind of writing will be useful to them in their other classes, in their future employment, and in their lives as members of a society.

How you teach writing for social change depends a lot, obviously, on the particular social, economic, and political context of the time; on the culture of the particular institution you teach in and the experiences of the students you teach; and on your own experiences and commitments. I have just been reading Robin Varnum's account of the English 1-2 course designed and taught by Theodore Baird at Amherst College in the 50s and 60s, and in some ways, especially given the context of the 50s and the particular students at Amherst and Baird's intellectual commitments, I can see this course, designed to unsettle these elite young men's assumptions of the rightness of received knowledge and to teach them to examine what they truly believed, as a course devoted to teaching writing for social change. At the same time, in the context of the 90s the course seems frightfully authoritarian and irresponsibly naive in its assumptions about the individual's control of language and belief.

So I claim only that my version of teaching writing for social change makes sense in the social context of the 90s (and maybe the 00s) and might only make sense in the contexts of the experiences of the students at Michigan Tech and my own experiences and commitments. Though still predominantly white, male, middle-class, and 18 years old, the first-year students at MTU nevertheless are not -- and do not see themselves as -- the group in our society who are naturally dominant. They are worried (rightly) about whether they will be able to attain stable, good-paying jobs; they are confused and often frightened by the variety of cultural values they encounter; and they feel helpless to participate in any meaningful way in decisions being made about social and political issues that affect them. These attitudes, and the social and political contexts they are a real response to, account for why I want to teach them how to be problem-solving thinkers who can create jobs for themselves within changing employment situations, how to overcome their fears so that they can see differences in values and beliefs as a resource, and how they can responsibly participate in decision-making. And my own experience of being an academic brat and a scholar of language use accounts for my commitment to writing and intellectual work as a good (if not the best) mode of participating in decision-making in our society.

In the back of my mind I hear a voice complaining, "all you're teaching them is how to cope, not how to make changes that will benefit our society." But it's my own voice, and now it sounds to me as naive as do Baird's goals for his Amherst students. It's been 30 years since the marches on Washington, and the focus of social action has changed. The question is no longer how to change the structures of our society so that they will be more fair and just. Social justice is not ensured by finding the right leader, or passing the right laws; it results from commitments built up in the ongoing social process of decision-making that is continually changing our society. Looking back, the lesson I take now from the 60s is not that we knew better than our professors or political leaders but that we knew something different, and in the streets we learned the power -- and the limitations -- of participating in the discussion and having our different perspectives listened to. For me, teaching writing for social change means enabling students to participate in the discussion, getting them to listen seriously to each other, and listening myself for the different perspectives they can reveal to us.

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I said in my web statement that it's obvious that how you teach writing for social change depends a lot on the particular social, economic, and political context in which you teach. Another point that follows from that which may be equally obvious but that I want to emphasize is that all writing classes have always been about social change. It's true that "social change" has been a code word of a liberal-left agenda, and that most people in composition who talk about teaching writing for social change are adherents to that agenda, but writing classes have always been the place where students confront the language practices they are told they need to succeed in whatever vision of society is current among the faculty designing the course. The new English faculty at Harvard in the 1870s who used a test of standard language to determine which students had the promise and character to be allowed access to the ranks of the "well-educated populace" and who saw literature as providing "a set of driving principles" for this elite class (Miller, p. 51) were teaching writing for social change. Theodore Baird teaching the young men at Amherst College in the 50s and 60s to examine what they truly believed was teaching writing for social change. Lynn Bloom, who sees the middle-class values embodied in traditional ways of teaching writing as "enabling the transformation and mobility of lives across boundaries, from the margins to the mainstreams of success and assimilation on middle-class terms" (668), certainly is teaching writing for social change. That some of these agendas look more like teaching writing for social stasis is merely a result of the conservative trick of casting their agenda in terms of a tradition that never was. It's like the slogan used by the state of Idaho --"Idaho is what America used to be" -- which Stephen Lyons critiques in a recent issue of High Country News, saying, "[This] slogan is true when you consider America used to be more sexist, racist, xenophobic and environmentally unaware." The argument in composition studies is not really over whether we should teach writing for social change, but what kind of society we are trying to participate in creating by the language practices we are instilling in students in our writing classes.

But if teaching writing for social change is not essentially an enactment of a left-liberal agenda, the ways to teach writing for social change the five of us are recommending are grounded in a vision of a progressive society. Pat speaks for us all, I think, when she argues that "the world becomes a better place when more people are motivated for egalitarian and democratic social change." This particular vision of the good society underlies my proposal that "teaching writing for social change means enabling students to participate in the discussion, getting them to listen seriously to each other, and listening myself for the different perspectives they reveal," and the kind of knowledge I am hoping will come out of such discussions is just what Gail and Harriet and Ellen are asking for, a knowledge that comes out of understanding how your beliefs arise out of your own history and that comes out of the discourse between different perspectives between vernacular and disciplinary knowledges, for example, and between that "well-educated" elite that higher education still strives to create and the rest of the members of the society.

I don't have any problem with acknowledging that the way of teaching writing I advocate serves a progressive agenda, and I am as reluctant to spend time in writing classes defending the value of different perspectives as conservative teachers are to spend time defending the value of standard English. As a teachers of required classes, classes that are designed to inculcate the values of the society, we all have the responsibility to teach the kind of writing we truly believe is valuable.

But I want to return now to the point with which I began. All of us who agree that teaching writing for social change means teaching writing that enables egalitarian and democratic decision making know that how you can best achieve this goal is entirely dependent on the context in which you teach. I have students who in response to a statement in our general education philosophy that we "value individual intellectual and cultural difference" say things like, "I don't value individual difference if the individual is a child molester and I don't value intellectual difference if the individual hasn't shown me an intellect," and students who would agree with a recent letter to the editor of the local paper responding to the Arkansas schoolyard shooting that says, "see what happens when the government interferes in the parents' right to raise and discipline their children the way they see fit." As a consequence, I find plenty of work to do right in the classroom and have not developed strategies to work across the curriculum or across the community. But, as Nick Carbone wrote in his response on the web, "happily our field is not monolithic," and others have developed writing programs that use different strategies in different contexts. My point here is simply that we need to recognize this tremendous variety in the contexts in which we teach writing in colleges and universities, and we need to concentrate on continuing to develop and promulgate a variety of strategies that teachers who join us in this progressive agenda can draw on.

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