Kathleen Blake Yancey and Networked Composition Pedagogy

As all of the authors in this week’s readings have shown (and which is evident in the slashed nature of its title), the field of rhetoric/composition/writing studies is inseparable from its struggle over a variety of epistemological, administrative, and pedagogical issues. As a result, RCWS is rather unique in its disciplinary status as a field which, in many ways, can be defined by the way in it continually seeks to (re)define itself as field. In other words, the circuitous, messy, and revisionary nature of the disciplinary debates surrounding the role of RCWS are constitutively bound to its focus on writing, a phenomenon which RCWS itself was integral in exposing as circuitous, messy, and revisionary.

Although I aligned at certain points with all of the pedagogies I encountered this week, I most identify with the claims put forth by Kathleen Blake Yancey in “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key.” I appreciated Yancey’s approach to composition in this article because she considers the current culture of writing (the proliferation of multimodal/social/networked communication) as a vital “moment” with which composition should partner rather than a divergence that should be analyzed and resisted.

Yancey articulates a composition pedagogy grounded in a notion of writing which considers circulation within a network of other writers and readers as one of the constitutive characteristics of writing in the 21st century (300). Yancey also claims that composition pedagogies that engage with writing communities outside of the classroom not only encourage a focused rhetorical purpose in student writing but potentially supply students with a readership that can critically engage with their writing in a manner beyond that of the teacher (310-11). For Yancey, writing is a deictic activity, and its meaning is inseparable from the localized, rhetorical contexts through which its effects play out.

Finally, I appreciated Yancey’s article because it strikes a balance between critical and instrumental pedagogies that I find lacking in a pedagogy like Berlin’s. Because Berlin’s pedagogy emphasizes the liberation of student consciousness, it subordinates the instrumental (teaching students how to communicate in a variety of cultural discourses) to the critical (resistance to hegemonic cultural discourses) in ways that our counterproductive to both (“Rhetoric and Ideology,” 490). Yancey, on the other hand, seems to operate under a notion (which is one that I agree with) that although composition pedagogies should encourage students to grapple with the ways in which power and ideology are produced in a society through a variety of discursive modes and contexts, this critical subjectivity is more effectively evoked by pedagogies that encourage students to become co-producers of those very discourses (imagistic, textual, auditory, etc.) rather than passive consumers who analytically resist it.