Alt/Dis in the classroom

Many people have already done substantial summary work of Bizzell’s “Hybrid Academic Discourses: What, Why, How” and her later piece, “Basic Writing and the Issue of Correctness, or What to do with ‘Mixed’ Forms of Academic Discourse,” and so I am not going to. Instead I am going to try and contextualize her arguments in a few teaching. However, for the purpose of clarity let me say what I think Bizzell is ultimately claiming in her two pieces. Though a bit reductive, I think it is suffice to say that in her first piece Bizzell makes the claim that academic work can be performed using different discourses and the composition classroom should finds ways of allowing students the opportunity to practice making academic arguments using those different, or as she says, “hybrid,” discourses. In her second piece, she backs off a bit from using “hybrid” to label these new discursive pursuits, but still ultimately argues for their pedagogical place in the composition classroom.

When I first started to teach freshman composition, I truly struggled with the notion of allowing, encouraging, supporting, making way for alternative discourses. It was not that I didn’t see the value of the alternative discourses, or even that I thought that traditional academic discourse was some inherently the best way to make an argument. It was simply that I wanted to make sure I was preparing my students to “succeed” in what they might encounter in other college courses. In other words, I was uneasy with teaching students how and allowing students to use alternative discourses when the moment they left my class they would be expected to write papers using much more conservative discourses. I felt, as Bizzell writes in her “Hybrid Academic Discourse” essay, that as an instructor of writing it was my job to “help them develop their language-using abilities...to succeed in college” (8). However, I also felt, responding to Rochelle Brock’s claim that higher education dehumanizes and despiritualizes students, that I needed to ultimately treat me students with a true sense of humanity (Bizzell also says this). What I could not reconcile was how to encourage students to experiment with alternative discourses when they would be required to use traditional academic discourse in other courses; and additionally, I questioned how forcing academic discourse on them also was an act of humanity. What I settled on for my first semester of teaching was having four paper assignments that required traditional academic discourse and one paper that gave students the opportunity to use alternative discourses (I was very inspired by Carmen Kynard's "'New Life in This Dormant Creature': Notes on Social Consciousness, Language and Learning in a College Classroom"). This didn’t go so well. After three papers of traditional academic discourse, freeing the students to explore different ways of writing was ultimately confusing to them They had a hard time being creative and running out-of-bounds after 10 weeks of being forced to color in the lines (sorry for the stupid child hood metaphors). Then, asking them to return to traditional discourse for the final paper just confused them even more. I tried to find a balance of giving them tools to succeed in other classes and giving them the freedom to use other discourses.

After that semester, I dropped the alt/dis paper. It was too confusing for the students. Since then, I now always preface my composition classes with a discussion on academic discourse and its use at the university. I talk about power structures, and assure students that this kind of discourse is not necessarily the best way to write, just the most appropriate way to write in this context. In my heart of hearts I totally agree with Bizzell and I understand that academic discourse that is published often does not follow the rules of academic discourse taught at the university. But I also have not yet found a way to implement what Bizzell is talking about without feeling like I am not giving students the knowledge and skills that will need to succeed in other classes (classes which are not so open to new discourses).

Though I am not totally comfortable with this final statement, it is the thing I have continually stressed in my comp. classes: writing is a rhetorical exercise, know your audience, know your purpose. Though that doesn’t solve really anything., using it in class does allow us as a class to talk about the opportunity for other discourses and do exercises (like the summary exercise I talked about in the last class) that encourage other discourses, while grounding the formal papers (because they are rhetorical exercises) in traditional academic discourse.