In his book Saints and Scamps: Ethics in Academia (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman & Littlefield, 1986), Steven M. Cahn espouses a traditional view of the professor as an expert who is responsible to “lead students to master appropriate subject matter” (10). Cahn criticizes teachers who “minimize their own importance and emphasize how much they have learned from the insight and imagination of their students” (9). Instructors who abandon their authority in favor of more “egalitarian” classroom practices, he argues, are shirking their responsibility.
Communications pedagogy seems to embrace much of what Cahn criticizes, probably because Writing Across the Curriculum and similar programs have their roots in the egalitarian movements of the 1960s. The peer review process common in many composition courses, for example, directly counters the hierarchy of the master-pupil relationship: here students can learn from one another without a great deal of intervention from the “expert,” at least on peer-review days.
I’m wondering if there is any dialogue going on regarding this issue, and if not, whether there should be. Are most writing instructors on the same page about this, or are there voices out there who would restore the preachers to their pulpits, so to speak? I ask because I hear students complaining from time to time that they get little out of such things as the peer review process. Their colleagues aren’t proficient enough to offer any meaningful guidance, they say. I confess wondering sometimes whether the older pedagogical model is perhaps more beneficial to students than we tend to assume.
Anthony, In my experience most peer feedback is at best unhelpful UNLESS students are specifically taught how to offer advice. I always recommend Peter Elbow’s *Sharing & Responding,* in which he advocates a step-by-step approach to teaching students how to respond to each other. I’ve had good success with this approach, and of course the other huge benefit of peer response is encouraging the writer to look at a paper through the eyes of a reader–very helpful, of course, when returning to the writer’s own paper.
To your larger point, I too struggle with these issues, at least to some extent. I find that most students like authoritative teachers (often male?), and I suspect they tend to give them higher evaluations. So I try to balance a nurturing persona with an authoritative one, which I must admit doesn’t always work very well, especially since an overly authoritative approach doesn’t fit in with my broader politics.
Reply to Bonnie
As in most ideological battles, the real action is to be found somewhere in the middle of the two camps.
As a teacher of writing, I reject the older vision of the teacher/professor as fount of all knowledge, but I do think that the egalitarians can go too far in ceding authority.
Personally, I rarely, if ever, use peer writing reviews in the classroom, though I will have students talk together in small groups about the writing process itself (in order to share tips, strategies, approaches, and questions). In discussions, I tend to split time between group work and guided discussions, striving to mix it up as much as possible. I think it’s important for Professors to be able to lecture when historical background or theoretical framing is needed, but also important to give students space to discuss issues among themselves.
Reply to Matt