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Gerrardhannah2012etd.Pdf THE TEACHING OF WRITING AND THE PUBLIC WORK OF THE TRANSNATIONAL UNIVERSITY by Hannah Elizabeth Gerrard BA, University of Auckland, 2002 MA, University of Auckland, 2004 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2012 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH KENNETH P. DIETRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Hannah Elizabeth Gerrard It was defended on April 16, 2012 and approved by David Bartholomae, PhD, Professor of English and Charles Crow Chair Jamie “Skye” Bianco, PhD, Assistant Professor of English Amanda Godley, PhD, Associate Professor of English Education James Seitz, PhD, Associate Professor of English Dissertation Advisor: Stephen L. Carr, PhD, Associate Professor of English and Acting Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Research ii Copyright © by Hannah Elizabeth Gerrard 2012 iii THE TEACHING OF WRITING AND THE PUBLIC WORK OF THE TRANSNATIONAL UNIVERSITY Hannah Elizabeth Gerrard, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2012 This project enriches recent efforts to “transnationalize” the field of composition studies by examining the teaching of writing in the context of the university as a transnational institution. In so doing, I also question the association of composition instruction with a national public project concerned with rational argument in a democratic, deliberative public sphere; I argue that this straightforward association is disrupted by the imperatives of the transnational university, and hence “public writing” pedagogies must better take this context into account. I examine how civic purposes emerge in a range of writing classes – professional, public, and academic – as students negotiate the transnational university’s imperatives of flexibility and diversity. I draw on recent rhetorical scholarship that theorizes agency and situation in current contexts of circulation to reconsider the student’s agency in post-national civic spaces, and to propose how writing classes might offer micro-strategies towards potential civic action. In addition to this detailed pedagogical work, I examine how literacy instruction has been and is situated at an institutional level in relation to the changing formation of the university. In constructing a partial history of the teaching of “composition” in New Zealand, I examine how teachers have understood their work as having civic purposes, and how the increasingly global understanding of the university’s function reconfigures those civic purposes, as notions of access, research and teaching, and institutional responsibility change. I ultimately contextualize this work in New Zealand by looking broadly at recent developments in literacy instruction in iv the United Kingdom and Australia: I argue that attention to the positioning and the distribution of literacy work in the university across these national contexts makes evident both a transnational milieu of neoliberal reform and distinct national and local responses to such reform. I suggest these transnational negotiations should concern U.S. scholars and teachers committed to “public” rationales for their work, and to the increasingly compromised work of public education more broadly. In this manner, I question some of the attempts to “transnationalize” composition studies by aggregating pedagogies and research worldwide, rather than attending to what we might call a transnational “eduscape.” v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ....................................................................................................... IX INTRODUCTION......................................................................................................................... 1 I. REVISING THE CITIZEN-RHETOR ........................................................................... 5 II. PUBLIC RELATIONS – AND THE TRANSNATIONAL UNIVERSITY ............. 13 III. PLACES OF PUBLIC WORK ................................................................................... 21 1. WRITING CLASSROOM TO WORLD: CIVIC EDUCATION AND THE COMPOSITION CURRICULUM ............................................................................................ 29 I. PUBLIC FEELING AND PROFESSIONAL ACTION: “WRITTEN PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION” ....................................................................... 35 II. A PROBLEM OF ADDRESS: “WRITING FOR THE PUBLIC” ........................... 61 III. THE PUBLIC WORK OF ACADEMIC WRITING: “SEMINAR IN COMPOSITION” ............................................................................................................... 85 2. “THE VERY ANTIPODES OF THE CENTRES OF LEARNING”: COMPOSITION INSTRUCTION AND THE IDEA OF GENERAL EDUCATION IN THE NEW ZEALAND UNIVERSITY ....................................................................................................... 103 I. “RAW UNTRAINED MATERIAL IN THIS PIONEERING SETTLEMENT”: JOHN MACMILLAN BROWN AND “PRACTICAL” COMPOSITION ................ 119 II. “A UNIVERSITY WITHIN A UNIVERSITY” – OR WITHOUT?: JAMES SHELLEY, “GENERAL EDUCATION,” AND THE PROBLEM OF FIRST-YEAR STUDENTS ....................................................................................................................... 137 III. “EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES FOR ALL THOSE OF ABILITY TO SUCCEED”: WRITING STUDIES AND THE “WORLD-CLASS” UNIVERSITY ....................... 162 IV. CODA .......................................................................................................................... 195 3. WRITING IN THE VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY: TOWARDS A “TRANSNATIONAL” COMPOSITION STUDIES ..................................................................................................... 199 I. “ACADEMIC LITERACIES” AND CIVIC ASPIRATIONS .................................. 209 II. DISTRIBUTED COMPOSITION ............................................................................. 225 vi III. THE PUBLIC WORK OF THE TRANSNATIONAL UNIVERSITY................. 240 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................................... 250 vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Number of students enrolled in New Zealand tertiary education providers per 1,000 of the working-age population. ....................................................................................................... 133 viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My acknowledgements go first to my dissertation committee: Steve Carr, Dave Bartholomae, Jamie Bianco, Amanda Godley, and Jim Seitz. Their collective wisdom and their often impossible questions challenged and delighted me, and made this project much smarter than it might have been. Particular thanks go to Jamie for her theoretical insights and radical sensibility – both inspirational. And I especially thank Steve, who as chair of the committee was ever hospitable and generous. He had faith when I didn’t, and steered this project in countless ways that helped me help it grow. His wise, wily, irreverent way of being in the academy will always be a model for me. I am grateful for financial support from Fulbright New Zealand and the Lois Roth Endowment, and for the extensive research and writing time provided by the Andrew Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship and the Lillian B. Lawler Fellowship, both from the University of Pittsburgh. I also thank the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh for a travel grant that enabled my research in New Zealand, and Amanda Godley for generous assistance with the research design. My thanks go also to librarians and archivists at the University of Auckland Library, the John Macmillan Brown Library at the University of Canterbury, the National Library of New Zealand, and Archives New Zealand. I am immensely grateful to a number of colleagues who supported my research in New Zealand, and gave freely of time, expertise, and materials: Roger Nicholson, Stephen Turner, Mark Taylor, Mark Amsler, Mike Johnson, Claudia Marquis, Robert Neale, and Lisa Emerson. I especially thank Roger and Stephen for their guidance, generosity, and friendship over many years, and for helping me get to Pittsburgh in the first place – indeed, Roger is the one who ix dreamed up this profession for me and convinced me to believe in it. Their mentorship has been extraordinary and exemplary, and I hope that my work can one day live up to theirs. The Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh has been an amazing place to call home for these six years. In addition to my dissertation committee, many wonderful teachers, colleagues, and friends there have shaped my thinking about this project, and about teaching and scholarship more broadly: in particular, I thank Jean Bessette, Don Bialostosky, Troy Boone, Jean Ferguson Carr, Steph Ceraso, Jessica Enoch, Nancy Glazener, Paul Kameen, Danielle Koupf, Jennifer Lee, Beth Matway, Dahliani Reynolds, Mariolina Salvatori, Ryan Smith Madan, Annette Vee, Stacey Waite, Emily Wender, and Brenda Whitney. I also thank Connie Arelt for her encouragement, and for her patience with the endless international-student forms that inevitably accompanied me. I thank my students at Pitt, and the students who took part in my research at the University of Auckland, for sharing their writing with me. Jake Pollock’s good humour, good cooking, and general brilliance sustained and sustain me in more ways than I can name. I thank him for being him and for making a life with me, before, through it all, and after. I’d do it all again as
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