Weighing in on the Bartholomae/Elbow debate, I find, happily, that I can encompass both of these intelligent thinkers into my teaching philosophy.

 

Elbow’s emphasis is audience and the importance of being a real reader.  He wants teachers to throw out the image they hold of the “perfect paper” to which they compare each student’s composition and stop pretending that objectivity is possible.  He urges us to, “Tell me what you were perceiving and how you were experiencing that passage you subjectively label unclear.  … Tell me how you were reacting and what you were seeing and where.  … Give me some first-hand data I can trust, not a lot of second-hand conclusions based on hidden date and false hypotheses.  (141).

 

We can, in the end, help writers best by offering our true response as readers so writers experience that connection to an audience that is so often lost in academic writing.  Even grammar, Elbow argues, will improve once students have found their voices and want to get their message across.  They will learn how to produce grammatically correct writing if they know their audience needs it and they want to reach their audience (136-138).

 

Bartholomae, not in direct opposition to Elbow, but with a different focus, moves to define academic writing.  He argues that its defining feature is that it is situated in the context of history.  He states:

 

Thinking of writing as academic writing makes us think of the page as crowded with others … that our writing is not our own, nor are the stories we tell when we tell the stories of our lives-they belong to TV, to Books, to Culture and History. To offer academic writing as something else is to keep this knowledge from our students … to keep them from confronting the particular representations of power, tradition and authority reproduced whenever one writes” (63-64).

 

In Bartholomae’s eyes, we do students a grave disservice if we stick with “independent, self-creative, self-expressive subjectivity” (65) instead of helping them enter into the dialogue to “negotiate with the professional literature” (67).

 

In the end, Bartholomae calls for a new direction in composition.  He feels he has to choose, and he chooses “critical writing” over narrative, personal writing of “traditional humanism” (71).  Why should I choose one over the other?  I’m not ready to give up having students “write as though they were not the products of their time, politics and culture, not our products, as though they could be … the owners of all that they say” (70).  I want students to feel that, if only for a while. 

 

Ironically, I think Bartholomae has the answer when he states, “The danger is assuming that one genre is more real than the other, … in assuming that one is real writing and the other is only a kind of game academics play” (68).  Surely we can balance the two.  We can help our student enter the academic dialogue of our discipline and broaden our notion of academic writing beyond the “stuffy, lifeless prose or for mechanical (or dutiful) imitations of standard thoughts and forms” (63) that Bartholomae fears it’s become identified with.  And surely we can still make room for individuals to find the author inside by being a real audience for a moment, stretching to separate our own personal response from “teacherly” expectations and the literary canon that came before.

 

 

Works Cited

 

Bartholomae, David.  “Writing with Teachers: A Conversation with Peter Elbow”

 

Elbow, Peter.  Thoughts on the Teacherless Writing Class