Re-imagining Students' Writerly Authority

by Amy Robillard
Illinois State University

All my life I've felt the desire to write. I attribute that desire in part to the approval with which my literacy habits were met at school. I also attribute that desire in part to my need for control, my need to establish—on paper, at least—some sense of agency for myself. And I would be lying if I said that there wasn't a part of me—a part of me that has since been suitably tempered—that wanted to be a writer in order to reap the benefits of literary fame and fortune.

As I began teaching writing and immersing myself in the scholarship of composition studies, I began to wonder about the field's representations of students as “authors.” Isn't an author by definition one who wants to write , I found myself asking. How can composition studies represent students in required writing courses as authors if, given the choice, many of those students would opt out of first-year writing? Add to this a suspicion that students probably have a hard time seeing the first-year required writing course as a site for authorship as it is defined in American culture, and the questions of desire multiply. Do students— can students—desire authorship in a first-year required writing course, one that has its roots in remediation? Where does the field's recent desire to represent students as authors come from?

My preoccupation with what it means to claim that students in our classes write with authority is a response to at least three separate yet related threads in the scholarship of composition studies. First, the process movement established as commonplace the belief that all students have a writer within, that, given the right instruction and encouragement, all students are capable of creating meaningful prose. Second, a more recent manifestation of this belief is composition studies' impulse to affirm students' status not just as writers but as authors . Compositionists as varied as Wendy Bishop, Stuart Greene, Rebecca Moore Howard, Ann Penrose and Cheryl Geisler, and Patricia A. Sullivan suggest pedagogical strategies for affirming students' status as authors in the writing classroom. The new undergraduate journal, Young Scholars in Writing, founded by Laurie Grobman and Candace Spigelman, goes one step further in its request that compositionists read student writing as “scholarship.” And third, despite these scholars' apparent desire to position students as “authors,” recent work in authorship theory highlights the pervasiveness of an author/student binary on the discourse of composition studies (see, e.g., Horner). Like any other binary, the first term, author , holds the elevated position of dominance, while the second term, student , holds the position of dominated. Where authors are required to be original, students who write are often required “ not to be original. A student's job is to comprehend and repeat the ideas of others. Yet paradoxically, students are required to be autonomous in their writing” (Howard, “Binaries” 2). Where authors are assumed to own the fruits of their labor, students turn their writing over to teachers for grades; sometimes, that writing is appropriated in their teachers' own writing, often without the acknowledgement that would, as a matter of course, accompany the appropriation of authors' texts.

So, on the one hand, composition studies as a field possesses a historical impulse to authorize students as writers and, more recently, as authors. Yet, on the other hand, compositionists working to authorize students in the classroom, in published scholarship, and now, in an undergraduate journal of research in writing and rhetoric, are working within a discourse premised in large part on an author/student binary. Students are defined by their student-ness, by what they lack (see Helmers; Miller; Ohmann). Add to this the restrictions placed on student writing by the role of first-year composition, often one of the only required courses college students across the country hold in common. How does a writing teacher decide that a student is “authorized”? How does a writing teacher decide to label a student an “author” rather than a “writer”? What is the nature of this writerly authority that can be transferred from teacher to student?

While many in composition studies have explored the significance of teachers' institutional authority on classroom relations (e.g., Gale; Bizzell), nobody has considered the significance of disciplinary representations of authority as property— capital —that can be transferred from one person to another. Authority, according to Pierre Bourdieu, is a form of cultural capital, and, unlike economic capital, cultural capital cannot be readily transferred from one person to another. Institutional authority grants teachers certain privileges, privileges necessary to classroom functioning, but institutional authority does not give teachers the power to confer writerly authority on students. Authority is not economic capital and thus cannot be transferred from teacher to student.

What might it mean, then, to re-imagine students' writerly authority? I believe that the publication of Young Scholars in Writing: Undergraduate Research in Writing and Rhetoric raises significant questions about what it means to approach student writing as “scholarship.” I believe, too, that we must begin exploring these questions with our students . Do students consider themselves writers? How would they define an “author,” and how do they react to composition studies' representations of students as “authors” in the scholarship? To engage in such questions with our students, we need to share the work of composition studies with students. This might mean sharing single articles with students or revising the first-year course as an introduction to the field of composition studies. How comfortable are we with sharing our work with the group of people who are the subject of so much of that work? How might students' responses to our representations of them shape our future scholarship? How might such co-investigations help to redefine what it means for a student to write with authority in the university?

I'm including with this module two assignments. The first, what I call a “conversation assignment,” asks students to literally engage in conversation with published compositionists on the issue of plagiarism. The second assignment asks students to "reflect on the ways that theories of authorship and plagiarism have affected their plans for revising the autobiographies" they had written earlier in the semester. I used both of these assignments in a first-year required writing course at Syracuse University in Fall 2003. That course helped me reimagine students' writerly authority.

Discussion Questions

1. How do you define students' writerly authority?
2. Do you refer to your students as authors or as writers or as something else? Why?
3. How realistic is the goal of granting students authority?
4. What pedagogical methods have you used to work toward the goal of granting students authority?
5. What is the relationship between authority and empowerment?
6. What is the relationship between students' writerly authority and teachers' institutional authority? Teachers' writerly authority?
7. Do you share composition scholarship with your students? If so, which pieces, and why? What function does this scholarship serve in your courses?
8. Do you remember any of your experiences as an undergraduate writer? Would you have claimed authority as a writer? Would you have called yourself an “author”?

References

Teaching Composition