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Sue McLeod and Tim Fountaine Re Elizabeth Wardle‹ Dennis Ciesielski re Elizabeth Wardle | ContentofComposition.HomePage | Doug Downs-Kathy Fitch › From: Susan McLeod One way to think about our disciplinary position is to locate ourselves with the arts. I’m in a Division of Humanities and Fine Arts, and I have found it useful to talk to administrators about our similarities to art, music, dance, and drama (especially since no one denies that the plastic and performing arts need small studio classes to facilitate individual instruction). I emphasize that writing is an art as well as a skill. This gets me out of the comparison to humanities courses in which content is all (and where large lecture classes are common). I realize that there are dangers in this, of course; historians argue that Adams Sherman Hill did us all a disservice by defining writing as an art rather than as a science (and therefore something that could not be researched). So it’s also useful to trot out the comparison to the lab in science classes—where students learn by doing. When I think about our discipline, I find it most useful to think of other “area studies” disciplines now forming. So I like to think of us as “Writing Studies,” analogous to, say, “Women’s Studies.” No one would argue that there’s only one research method that is useful in the latter; faculty I know in Women’s Studies have degrees from a number of different disciplinary traditions, and bring varied research methods to their scholarship. From: Tim Fountaine Elizabeth Ann Wardle writes that comp/rhet people who teach composition seem to be making mistakes by “refusing a center, remaining unable to see ourselves as a unified group with a core focus and shared methods.” (See quote in context. Opens in new browser window.) I think there’s a value to refusing a center and a core focus and shared methods. My feeling is connected to the experience of having been in the vicinity of so many academics exploring gender issues while I was learning about composition and rhetoric in graduate school. I can only imagine how different the importance and developments of feminist studies, research and pedagogy might have been if the folks committed to this area of intellectual (and material) endeavor insisted upon a “unified” identity within their ranks. Part of what has amazed me is the extent to which people within feminist circles have eschewed demands to pursue goals associated with achieving “disciplinary power” that would be contingent on drawing fixed disciplinary boundaries. I’d like to continue believing the same possibilities might be available to compositionists and composition teachers. ‹ Dennis Ciesielski re Elizabeth Wardle | ContentofComposition.HomePage | Doug Downs-Kathy Fitch › |