Writing ethics: Person, proximity, and responsibility in a first-year composition classroom

This study investigates the ethical demands embedded in first-year composition pedagogies. The literature on composition courses, teaching, and purposes suggests that student change is an outcome, if not an objective, of composition pedagogics. Yet attention to the ways the pedagogical tasks deployed in these classrooms impacts students is almost non-existent. This study begins to fill this gap by considering the ethical nature of the classroom. By ethical I do not mean a standard of behavior, an ultimate Good, or even a mode of inquiry, but the concrete, continuous recognition of and response to an Other. I conduct both a theoretical and an empirical investigation to examine (1) the ethical demands involved in writing, responding, and arguing, (2) how these demands are taken up by students and to what effect, and (3) what significance these findings have for instructor training and pedagogical development.; To ground my study I conduct a theoretical investigation, which relies on the ethical writings of Mikhail M. Bakhtinand Emmanuel Levinas. These two philosophers view ethics as fundamental to the human condition, bound up with response and language, and enacted in concrete, historical moments. Consequently their work speaks to the unique nature of the composition classroom. I then supplement this theoretical investigation with an empirical one in which I observe a first-year writing classroom at a large, public, Midwestern university. For this empirical study, I collected oral data from classroom interactions as well as written work produced by the students, instructor, and program itself. I conclude that whether the pedagogy is expressivist, rhetorical, or critical literacy-based, it makes serious demands on students because of the very nature of the tasks implemented. These demands complicate any skill acquisition. Responding and writing to/for others involves the student in relationships with Others, perhaps competing Others, which challenge the Self's very existence and expose it to vulnerability, pain, and change. Thus instructors and writing program administrators must consider these demands when determining the tasks and outcomes imposed on students. Moreover, they must recognize their own responsibility to their students and be willing to engage them "without alibi."...