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The Contrubitons of Geoffrey Sirc

Geoffrey Sirc and Pedagogy: “Hey Babe, Take a Walk on the Wild Side”

Geoffrey Sirc strives to shake these foundations into representing contemporary culture through restructuring Composition’s texts, contexts, classrooms, language, and media. He examines the historical development of Composition and its shift away from liberal pedagogies, like expressivism, towards an emphasis on functional processes in attempts to “establish Composition as a respectable discipline” (Happenings 6–7). Problems with traditional Composition models include distancing students from writing and creating division. Sirc advocates blurring the distinctions separating students’ natural writing from the conventional standards of academic writing. He believes artistic processes, such as painting and musical composition, and artists’ workshops provide examples of contemporary environments which benefit Composition. Sirc promotes using punk music and “gangsta” rap as texts for inspiring students to write and utilizes technology to enrich a student’s identification, voice, and language in writing. Finding new media in which students create and write blurs the divisions between the academic and real world. Students learn to identify with texts and communicate through a language more accessible and useful than the writing resulting from functional processes. Geoffrey Sirc and Pedagogy: “Hey Babe, Take a Walk on the Wild Side”

expressivist ideologies in association with the “Happening Movement.” Sirc characterizes this movement as a liberal atmosphere conducive to artists and new artistic movements, adopts the creative processes of several artists (musicians, painters, and writers), and translates them into writing activities for his students. He references William Lutz’s 1969 writing class as creating a happening space which allows students to experience a sense of the sublime making the classroom a space no one wants to leave (Happening 1). Lutz’s classroom utilizes principles of unsettling the traditional classroom space via light, sound, and arrangement, so students feel freer to explore meaning and significance of writing in a less stringent, conventional environment. Sirc points to Lutz’s example to show how more liberal forms of presenting Composition to students exist early in the field’s development; however, Sirc then relates the movement away from this “happening” ideology in order to validate Composition’s place as a legitimate department. He believes Composition abandons the liberal transformations and renovations occurring during these times to achieve professionalism: “To establish Composition as a respectable discipline, we took on all the trappings of traditional academia – canonicity, scientism, empiricism, formalism, high theory, axioms, arrogance, and acceptance of the standard university department-divisions” (Happening 6–7). Sirc’s purpose in referencing a more liberal time of growth and development for Composition is to undermine the validity of current more traditional modes of teaching and assert that formalism is not the only option (nor has it ever been) for teaching. By showing changing trends in the field, Sirc illustrates alternative methods for teaching, and some of those methods are part of Composition’s heritage. Referencing the time period alongside the politics of change in America prompts Sirc to focus on a medium which captures and records these changes in what he considers a more natural presentation of language: song lyrics. Sirc seeks to amend the wrongs done by an approval-seeking department by reexamining Composition on four fronts: texts and contexts, the structure of the classroom, the dynamics of language and communication, and technology.

proposes discovering and utilizing a contemporary medium more accessible to students. This new text giving context to Composition, Sirc asserts, is music. Sirc initially chooses punk due to its correlation with rebellion, reforms, and reversal of models in the late 1970s; however, to reach a more contemporary audience (his students), Sirc utilizes “gangsta” rap because the ground rules echo those of Composition: “always bring your A game, regard any occasion to make verbal meaning as a battle for your right to the mic, and prize the local as the most important cultural geography” (“Proust” 393). According to Sirc, music and lyrics (more appropriately “gangsta” rap) provide a new text and context for teaching Composition because they are a direct change from the traditional canon and more exciting for students to address.

the activities in and structure of the college classroom: stiff seating arrangements, formal writing techniques involving only pen and paper, and the authoritative position of the instructor as the focal point. Sirc examines the creative processes of artists such as Marcel Proust, Andy Warhol, and Jackson Pollock. He believes the Composition classroom should parallel the artist’s studio insofar as space, chaos, and freedom. Sirc perceives any attempt to disrupt the norm of the class environment as a step in the right direction. This theme of “deregularization” of Composition carries into Sirc’s analysis of natural language and communication patterns. He contrasts virtual academic (“textuality whose form and content fuse together [creating] stilted academic prose as the ideal medium to represent this image of university pomposity”) with virtual urbanism (actual humans with needs, fears, desires, memories, drift through the important spaces of their lives, encountering other humans similarly engaged in the ongoing mystery of existence”) (12). Sirc, in essence, believes alternative forms of writing and literature now exist for teachers to utilize in Composition courses, and this “virtual urbanity” shows a preference for and belief in natural language patterns while refuting the regularization of language Composition texts and editors, like Diana Hacker, promote.

Sirc resists using the computer for evaluating and grading student texts but advocates it as a medium through which students communicate and explore ideas in a less formal manner. According to Sirc, technology presents an alternative to the traditionally stifling classroom discussion and environment. The Internet allows students not only greater informal communication possibilities, but access to images, forms, and inspiration for developing texts and contexts of their own as opposed to sources and texts academia repeatedly utilizes. Sirc views technology in the classroom as a beneficial tool so long as it is not a substitute for those elements in Composition that do assist students, such as feedback and evaluation.

addresses language and communication, his objective is less about rhetoric and persuasion than using media to which students relate and in which they feel natural. He changes the classroom environment, texts, and contexts to stimulate students’ creativity. He seeks to utilize a medium and language more natural for students to compel them to interact and identify with the writing class. Sirc’s purpose is to break away from the modes Composition adopts to validate itself early in development, reexamine some lost methods for teaching Composition, and institute more modern texts and artistic forms to stimulate students causing them to engage with Composition.

“negative” comments convey the dedication Sirc has to his students: “…he is a really hard grader, not really on final papers cause you can always do rewrites, but very tough on rough drafts grades, etc…” This student’s comment reveals that while Sirc enforces the “rules” of Composition, he allows students to ceaselessly perfect their final product as he shapes their process. Student response to music as a central focus in his Composition course is 50/50 which illustrates the conflict students feel about either submitting to traditional modes or investigating new strategies, and comments about Sirc’s teaching speak towards the conflict occurring in Composition as an old system evolves into a new. Sirc’s areas of expertise include Composition Theory and Pedagogy, Technology/Writing, Visual Arts and Art Theory, Hip-hop, and the Modernist Era. He conducts seminars in Language, Rhetoric, Literacy, and Composition.