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November 17, 2004
De-skilling the Next Generation: The Truck Story and Graduate Education
Over the past several weeks, I have been talking with graduate students about the goals of their education. Many of them (but not all) have progressive beliefs and want to see their education as linked to efforts to create a more democratic and just public sphere. Many have imagined composition, literature, or the humanities as a site where such work can occur. The question I am left with is whether the graduate education they receive actually prepares them for such work. Having now been at three research-based institutions, I am increasingly pessimistic that they are being prepared for anything other than the most narrow visions of professionalism and scholarly production.
This led me to reconsider the “Truck Story� as related by Peter Levine on November 16th's entry. It is a story about universities and communities." Seems there was a large urban university that put together a meeting of community members and faculty. The goal was to link their expertise to community needs. When the community members stated that “trucks� were their major concern (traffic congestion, etc.), the faculty claimed to have “lacked the expertise� to take on such work. Levine then goes on consider what attitudes might have led the professors to take such a stance –he imagines everything from a professor’s humility about her own knowledge to a general sense the community might be able to correct this situation on their own.
His most compelling point, though, is that, in fact, “trucks� are easy to understand. The central issue in the “Truck story� is not street signs, but community power – creating the ability for the community to define the quality of their own life.
For many graduate students, the goal of their graduate work is to be able to be effective advocates and partners with the community at such moments – to see and engage effectively in the power struggle for community control. Yet they are given very little training in how to integrate their expertise into such concerns – how to see that the deeper questions of community power can be connected to their work in writing theory, criticism, or cultural study. (On a national scale, Rebecca Moore Howard has demonstrated some of these possibilities by linking her work “seemingly academic� work on plagiarism to the Bush Administration “documentation� about the Iraqi threat. See Plagarism and Fraud in George W. Bush's Foreign)
Speaking of my own sub-discipline, composition, I share the worry of many of my students, such as Derek Mueller, who state that graduate education simply does not create or foster the possibility of engaging in the “extra-curriculum�—the term Anne Ruggles Gere develops to speak of community-based non-academic writing – or to become worker-writers – a term used by the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers to indicate writing groups linked to attempts to change social practice. Instead, much of their time is devoted to learning “scholarly writing� as the ultimate goal and endpoint of their future writing careers. Classroom pedagogy subsumes other skills such as working across communities or developing coalitions which might impact actual community literacy practices. In short, they read stories about “trucks,� analyze student papers about “trucks,� but rarely stop traffic.
Perhaps it is time to reconsider the work students undertake. Is the academic-prose dissertation the endpoint today for graduate education when students themselves are imagining a much more varied readership? Are presentations to academic conferences the place to steer students, when they are imagining a much wider community? At least within composition, a field which has only just recently begun to imagine itself as a “full fledged� discipline, professional boundaries are not so established that a new type of professionalism might not yet emerge. (In fact, the only firm “professional boundary in composition seems to be that which separates part-time labor from the health, wage, and contract benefits of full-time faculty.)
Instead of continuing to professionalize in traditional ways and asking our students to take on such a straight jacket, perhaps something else is required. Perhaps, it is time to recognize the new generational mission of our graduate students. Living in a time of religious fundamentalism, economic elitism, and social intolerance, it might be time to provide them with the education that meets the unique historical situation of their generation – emerging progressives in an intolerant conservative world. We might consider refiguring graduate education so that it provides them with the tools to take on the work of social justice inside and outside the academy.
If as Collin Brooke argues, those who come to graduate school self-select into a field which leans toward the left (improperly biased, Nov. 11). What might it mean to restructure graduate professional education so that these leanings might turn into practices which not only link the university to the community, but professors to the larger work of social justice?
Posted by sparks at November 17, 2004 9:07 AM
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