I found Rearticulating Articulation by Russell and Foster a fascinating read.  A “cross-national perspective” really does shift the way one looks at oneself, one’s culture, and in this case, one’s educational system. 

I didn’t realize that the United States was basically alone historically in its separation of the teaching of writing from other disciplines.  In our educational system, “teachers in other disciplines [besides composition] sometimes assume that they themselves don’t ‘teach’ writing or even that their students don’t ‘write’ when they compose genres such as laboratory reports instead of composition or essays.”  According to the authors, in other countries, “Because writing is so deeply embedded in modern education … it tends to be transparent, an element that in many systems cannot be separated from the larger work of learning.”

In the U.S., we discuss writing in terms of the articulation (transition) from secondary to higher education, but mostly in a “deficit model” (see Fox).  According to Russell and Foster, other countries like China, Germany and France have discussed genres of writing necessary for students’ academic development to match changes in the economy while we in the U.S. tend to discuss the discrete skills students possess or lack. Our system of multiple choice exams and grade-point averages “[reduces] the need for extended writing and debate about [the content and direction of education].”  The authors seem to be saying that our qualitative system of evaluation silences meaningful debate about educational curriculum, including writing.

After reading this introduction, I got a new perspective on our tradition of teaching pedagogy, which apparently gets in the way as well.  The authors refer to a tradition still very much in evidence “of textbook recitation from the nineteenth century, when teachers with little training relied on textbook questions to structure the discourse of overcrowded classrooms” … and “a form of recitation designed to elicit the responses the teacher has in mind (sometimes erroneously called whole-class discussion, even though there is little open dialogue).”  Other countries’ systems, such as England, Germany, and France, apparently value students’ opinions more and “engage in a great deal of open dialogue and critical analysis before writing.”  Students are expected to share their views through verbal articulation and then in writing, whereas in our system, meaningful writing is sidelined for the privileged multiple choice exams. 

I can’t help but wonder if our teaching methods and our separation of writing from other subject matter is precisely why we end up in higher education with calls for “remediation” of skills that students were supposed to have gotten in elementary, middle, and high school.  If we haven’t taught students to write in a real way, connected to real meaning and academic subjects, if writing is seen as a set of discrete skills only, then writing will suffer.  If improving writing is left only to English teachers, we’re still divorcing writing from meaningful subjects across the curriculum.  I wonder what students’ writing is like in France, England, and Germany when they enter college, and I wonder if universities in those countries are calling for remediation in writing to the same extent that we are here. 

Hmmm…do I hear the call of a research question?

*Note:  Because there are no page numbers in our copy of this book’s introduction, I haven’t included any in my citations.

Works Cited

Russel, David and David Foster, ed.  “Introduction.” Writing and Learning in Cross-National Perspective.  NCTE/LEA 2002.

Fox, Tom.  “Basic Writing as Cultural Conflict.”  Journal of Education, Vol. 172, No. 1, 1990, 65-83.