Harris

Harris, Joseph. A Teaching Subject: Composition Since 1966. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall,
1997.

Harris attempts to offer a view of composition studies since 1966 by a cluster of 5 key terms: growth, voice, process, error, and community. These "keywords" help him to engage in critiques of prevailing views of composition, and to offer his own view that composition is a "teaching subject" (ix).

Key quotations:
"We have yet to find ways not only to have our teaching better informed by theory but to make our theories more responsive to the scene of teaching" (14).

"One way to help such students imagine themselves as intellectuals, then, is to ask them to look closely at how they already go about reading the many various texts they meet from day to day -- both in school and outside of it" (19). (JH's concl. w/ the "gap" between experience and academy).

"First, I want to argue against how the relations between theory and practice are usually imagined -- which is, to put it simply, that the one leads to the other, that first one figures out what the theory is, and then applies it in the classroom" (40).

"Second, I want to argue against the sort of narrative of progress that still informs many histories of composition" (40).

"My aim here instead is to try to get at what it might have meant to teach writing 'as process not product'. For while it seems clear to me that the process movement helped establish composition as a research field, I am not nearly so sure it ever transformed the actual teaching of writing as dramatically as its advocates have claimed" (55).

"It seems to me that a teacher can fairly quickly explain the various aspects of composing, schedule plenty of time in the semester for students to revise and edit their work thoughtfully, and then get on with the main business of the course: to help students articulate, extend, and perhaps rework the positions they take on in their writing" (57) --->Harris's argument.

"To really change the teaching of writing, then, it seems to me that a view of process must go beyond the text to include a sense of the ongoing conversations that texts enter into -- a sense, that is, of how writers draw on, respond to, and rework their own previous writings and those of others" (68).

"Both sides of this argument, in the end, rest their cases on the same suspect generalization: that we and our students belong to different and fairly distinct communities of discourse, that we have 'our' 'academic' dscourse and they have 'their own' 'common'(!) ones...similarly, our teaching will and should always be affected by a host of beliefs and values that are held regardless of our voices as academics" (105).

"...our goals as teachers need not be to initiate our students into the values and practices of some new community, but to offer them the chance to reflect critically on those discourses of home, school, work, the media, and the like -- to which they already belong" (105). ----> Ulmer!

"What I do want is a sort of teaching that aims more to keep the conversation going than to lead it toward a certain end, that tries to set up not a community of agreement but a community of strangers, a public space where students can begin to form their own voices as writers and intellectuals" (116).

I see Harris advocating for Elbow's "believing game" in many places, esp. 114-115. I like this as it helps me see the connections between the two. It also helps me solidify my reading of Elbow as being concerned with the socially constructed aspects of texts, writing, and processes.

Harris takes up the central debate of theory vs.practice in a way that places students first. He clearly advocates for a model of informed practice, that theory and practice should meld together in the classroom; perhaps that there's no real distinction between the two. I especially like the idea that Harris asks us to rethink teaching as a practice of critical reflection and engagement through this reflection; that is, students don't need to learn "academic discourse" as an abstract monolith but rather engage the discourse through their own communities, values, and discourses.