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| VOICES ON: Voices from the Field Retrospective Dawn Skorczewski is Director of Composition at Emerson College, where she teaches graduate courses in the teaching of writing, and supervises thirty instructors of composition per year. Her scholarship focuses on lessons to be learned from "failures" in the classroom. Teaching Writing a Moment at a Time, her current book project, analyzes teachers' failures from an intersubjective psychoanalytic perspective. The book works to develop a theory of teachers' self-analysis as a way to understand a vital source of knowledge-making in the composition classroom.  The history of Voices from the Field and what I have learned from my experiences as its editor:I came to Bedford/St. Martin's as a roving editor in 1998. Up to that point, I had directed a writing center and served as assistant director in the Rutgers Writing Program, directed the composition program at the University of Redlands, and taught expository writing at Harvard as well as a graduate course in the teaching of writing at Boston College. What an exciting opportunity it was when Chuck Christensen and Joan Feinberg, President and Editorial Director of Bedford/St Martin's, told me that they were interested in knowing what people in the field were thinking about. They asked me to go on the road and interview as many people as I could about the work they were doing. So I chose areas of the country to visit, took to the road with a laptop, and walked around a different department each day, writing down the answers to questions as they were told to me. Here are some of the questions: What texts do you use? What texts would you like to see in print that do not now exist? Who are the people who have helped form your ideas about composition? What directions are you moving in as a teacher and theorist? How did you come to do this work? Where do you see the field moving? What is the role of technology in your program? What could a publishing company do for you? As a former writing program director, I was stunned to find that the answers were not at all what I had imagined. In ways the field was so diverse it was hard to compare programs to one another. And in other ways, some programs were so similar that it seemed silly to try to make distinctions. At the many institutions where they use The St. Martin's Guide to Writing, for example, TAs receive remarkably similar training and use a set lesson plan as they make their way through the steps to writing in the text. At institutions where individual teachers choose their own texts and design their own courses, teachers might use the same books but with quite different methods. What I found most interesting, however, was the degree to which each compositionist I spoke to had crafted his or her own teaching and scholarly voice(s), and the ways that these voices resonated, but remained distinct, and the opportunities that these voices gave to the millions of students who take composition each year. I remember a comp director at a technical school in Indiana, for example, who told me that he uses Ways of Reading with the auto mechanics, machine workers, and other trade workers he teaches. "They love it," he said, "because it teaches them to think." Each of these writing program administrators and instructors invented his or her own sense of what it means to teach writing, why we do it, and how we might best go about our work. Their articulations of these ideas helped me to see the combination of lore, history, and personality that each writing teacher brings to the field of composition. Perhaps Voices from the Field is best thought of as a place to begin to map these seemingly infinite versions of our discipline? |
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