MLA’s Moment of Recognition
Finally, after 27 years, a few members of the Modern
Language Association have begun to recognize a “truth” promoted by The English
Coalition Conference: Democracy through Language, July 6-24, 1987.
The College Strand of the conference suggested
“All English
majors should practice writing in several modes and for different audiences and
purposes, with an awareness of the social implications and theoretical issues
these shifts raise. Classroom practice
should bring teachers and students to experience writing, reading, listening,
and speaking as integrated, mutually supporting exercises”(35).
The Secondary Strand produced an allied “truth.”
“The act of writing itself helps writers discover
relationships among pieces of information acquired from disparate sources. How one thinks is inevitably exposed in
writing, so fellow students and teachers (through discussion) can validate a
student’s ability to formulate ideas” (21)
The Elementary Strand inscribed a third “truth” as an
article of belief.
“Because language is integral to thinking and to human
interaction, we believe children should leave elementary school knowing about language
---
that is, knowing how to read, write, speak, and listen, and knowing why
language and literacy are so central to their lives” (3)
These quotations from The
English Coalition Conference: Democracy through Language (Urbana, IL: NCTE,
1989) edited by Richard Lloyd-Jones and Andrea A. Lunsford are refracted in
Jean Ferguson Carr’s “Composition, English, and the University” PMLA 129.3 (2014): 435-441. Carr concludes that English studies needs “to
remind the public at large of the value it offers students” and “to open a more
generous conversation with composition, a conversation that might help English
refigure the shape and trajectory of that advanced study”(440). The advanced study to which Carr refers is
the sophisticated scholarship prized by many MLA members, scholarship that
frequently regrets the need of elementary, secondary, and college students to
master the basics of reading, writing, and now computing by way of digital
humanities. Carr’s conclusion may be
preaching to the National Council of Teachers of English choir, but it promises
to wake up those MLA members who think themselves too good to dirty their hands
with the work of teaching writing
and with the actual needs of students and who believe they are entitled by
virtue of their doctoral degrees to be paid to indulge themselves in the
pleasures of obscurity.
Obscurity is out; labor is in. Life demands labor. The
sooner professors and graduate students in English at PWIs accept the “truths”
universally acknowledged by those who do the work of teaching writing at HBCUs,
the better. Since the nineteenth century, the
work associated with the teaching of composition and literature has been, to
use the prized scholarly cliché, always already foundational and fundamental
among HBCUs.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. August
6, 2014
