In her 2008 article, Sp(l)itting Images; or, Back to the Future, Karen Kopelson talks about the "pedagogical imperitive" of Rhet/Comp programs. In other words, the idea that everything we do is in service of teaching. It's an eye-opening article....or, at least it was for me.
Teaching hasn't always been my focus. When asked how I decided I wanted to teach, I insist that (once upon a time), I wanted to be an actress or a singer or an author or a lawyer. Except that insistence ended in high school, when I finally realized that teaching was the one time that I could step outside myself and my job and focus on doing something that truly felt important, empowering, and engaging. So, aside from childhood dreams that could easily have (and probably did at least once) included marrying into royalty or traveling to the moon, teaching has truly been a constant presence in my life. It's no surprise, then, that my path back to graduate school ended with my joining a discipline that is heavily "teaching focused."
Yet however easily I fell into the pedagogical imperative (embraced it, even), the centrality of teaching to rhet/comp programs is something that needs to be questioned. It's not that I think that pedagogy isn't of vital importance. Teaching is my life and my joy (however trite that sounds) and I wouldn't trade it for the world. But one of the reasons I embraced college teaching as opposed to staying at the middle school level is due to the academic rigor I could find here. Teaching is pragmatics. As St. Augustine mentions in his On Christian Doctrine, we use different "levels" or styles of speaking depending on our purpose. Teaching is given the simplest level...not because of its lack of importance, but because its success hinges on the audience understanding what is being said. Technical jargon or "proper" niceties give way to communication. But pragmatics cease to be pragmatic if they aren't aiming towards a larger goal. Which, of course, begs the question that Rhetoric & Composition is still trying to answer: What is our larger goal?
Janice Lauer (the founder of Purdue's Rhet/Comp department), points out that one of rhetoric and composition's defining features is its ability to be "multidisciplinary, not only in [rhet/comp's] theoretical bases but also in [its] modes of inquiry. Of course, its that very diversity that leaves people questioning whether it should count as a discipline at all. Are we solely a "teaching" discipline? Are we defined by our lore (North, 1987), or our focus on process and post-process (Carlton, 1995), or our "feminized" style of discourse (Lauer, 1995)? Or can we, as Kopelson asks, embrace all of it?
Theory has never been my favorite focus. Like the teachers Louise Phelps comments on in Practical Wisdom, I too can be "impatient with [theory's] abstractions and irrelevance" (863). But, however my own personal opinion falls, I think we are doing ourselves a vast disservice if we limit the field only to people who share that view.
We are the field of rhetoric. We live in words and conversations and debates...sometimes over the most trivial of matters, it's true, but the point is that everything matters. Nothing exists in a vacuum. While philosophy might seek the "ultimate truth" and the sciences attempt to catalogue and demystify the laws of nature, we stumble into the amorphous fog in all its shades of grey (just so long as there aren't 50 of them). We dissect. We discuss. We debate. We disagree.
And that's okay.
I can insist on theory that has practical application. My passion is teaching, my mindset is pragmatic, and I have greater interest in the here and now than in the larger mysteries of the universe. But it is the discussions with others who do trouble themselves about ethics and history and culture and society and abstraction that allows me to keep pushing myself and my students to new levels. It is those conversations that help me to find my footing and establish myself within the discourse. And while one particular vein of theory might have no relevance to me or my research or my classroom, it is supremely selfish and egocentric to then jump to the conclusion that it is of no relevance to anyone. Or, even, to assume it needs relevance.
Perhaps what defines us as a group is our unending examination of the complexities of language and discourse. How that takes form will be different for each of us (research would be awfully useless if it didn't), but I don't think our disagreements make those conversations any less valuable.
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