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| VOICES ON: Personal Experiences in the Classroom and "The Forming Imagination" Keith Rhodes is an assistant professor and director of developmental writing and placement at Missouri Western State College. He coordinated the composition program at Northwest Missouri State University from 1994-1999. Rhodes earned his Ph.D. at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His dissertation addresses the uses of personal writing in the composition classroom, arguing that the connections students can explore among their personal experiences are richer than those they can find in new and unfamiliar subjects.  How would you address
concerns teachers have about the ethical issues raised when they bring students' personal experiences into the classroom?I would argue that the ethical balance — pedagogical advantages versus risks — is no worse for personal writing in composition than it is for writing about other subject matters. There is not only the ethical problem created by excluding this vital part of all meaning-making, but there is the additional issue of having material available that novice college students can use in complex ways. The one subject into which students can immediately make productively rich inquiry is their own experience. So without at all minimizing the care with which personal writing needs to be addressed, we can say that excluding it raises ethical problems of its own. We have to learn instead how to handle this volatile material, to avoid coercion of any particular content, to discourage the most inflammatory, to make very clear that we are evaluating the material on grounds other than its emotional jolt. In other words, we mainly just have to do what all good writing teachers should do: teach "environmentally," build writing through moderately controlled sequences, and evaluate according to well-understood key traits. What
have you learned from your research into neurobiological
studies and language use?These studies have suggested that there are so many ways to make meaning that pedagogies need to be individualized and contextualized socially. We can do this by figuring out how people actually think. Brain biology can assist us in figuring this out. How has Ann Berthoff
influenced your understanding of composition?I understand composition as a profession in relation to what Berthoff calls "the forming imagination" and her assertion that we have this particular kind of forming mind (which is akin to what neurobiologists say). The only major criticism people to tend to make of Berthoff is that she may be politically or socially naïve. I find this ridiculous. I would argue that if you look at what anybody else is doing well in composition you can explain it in terms of what Berthoff has written. I cannot find a better explanation of the making of meaning than Berthoff offers. How do you see
composition and rhetoric as a discipline?The discipline as a whole tends not to move very quickly. It is hard to change something once it is in place. We should try to push our focus towards hermeneutics, development, invention, and the rhetorical moves people make. I'd like to see more writing departments concentrate on these things. What other changes do you
see in writing departments, or what would you like to
see?I can imagine students taking a writing minor in college that focuses on rhetoric and composition, rather than only having composition so closely tied to first year general education requirements. The Boyer Commission [on Educating Undergraduates in the Research University] put out a report on the Web, and they recommended . . . de-emphasizing writing as a prerequisite and simply teaching it in the disciplines. You still would need some specialists who really see rhetoric again as the center of the liberal arts, as it deserves to be. I don't know why more people don't want us to teach rhetoric as a more complete subject. This is how you get people to learn better grammar, for example. And that is only a small part of what it means to learn to write. What are your future
scholarly plans?I am working to show connections between Berthoff's theory of composing and a thorough articulation of what the field of composition really wants from students, especially developmental or basic writers. |
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