An Alternate Pragmatism for Going Public

Jim Webber

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781607326533
• eBook ISBN: 9781607326540
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

An Alternate Pragmatism for Going Public interrogates composition's most prominent responses to contemporary K–16 education reform. By "going public," teachers, scholars, and administrators rightfully reassert their expertise against corporate-political standards and assessments like the Common Core, Complete College America, and the Collegiate Learning Assessment. However, author Jim Webber shows that composition's professional imperative for self-defense only partly fulfils the broader aims of "going public," which include fostering public participation that can assess and potentially affirm the public good of professional judgment.

Drawing on the pragmatic/democratic tradition, Webber envisions an alternate rhetoric of professionalism, one that not only reasserts compositionists' expertise but also expands opportunities for publics to authorize this expertise. While this public inquiry and engagement may not safeguard professional standing against neoliberal reform, it reorients composition toward an equally important goal, enabling publics to gauge the adequacy of the educational standardization so often advocated by contemporary reform.

An Alternate Pragmatism for Going Public shows how public engagement can serve composition's efforts related to "going public."

Chapter 1

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“Is Strategic Instrumentalism the Best We Can Do?”

During a recent Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) presentation, I summarized the central appeal of contemporary K–16 articulation reforms: in the globally competitive present, only common standards and assessments can improve all students’ access to opportunity. From this perspective, writing teachers’, scholars’, and administrators’ rejection of standardization should not be understood as a public defense of professional judgment. Rather, this rejection should be understood as an admission of failure to recognize the way the world is. Such a failure requires transformative change, for when composition expertise no longer serves the public good, professionals can no longer deserve their privileged standing to define the goals and measures of public education in literacy. A competitive world requires a competitive marketplace of expertise, for only good markets can make for good democracy.

This appeal is rarely stated quite so flatly. The Common Core claims that increasing students’ access to college and careers requires internationally benchmarked standards and assessments. Likewise, Complete College America insists that underprepared students can “complete to compete” only when “remediation” (basic writing) has been eliminated. And the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) maintains that standardized outcomes assessments alone can ensure that college graduates are adequately prepared for the global workplace. But the political-economic stakes of these reform proposals are clear. Since policies based in professional judgment offer poor returns on investment, educational expertise itself must become competitive. Only then can expertise serve democracy.

I argued that the success of this appeal, demonstrated by corporate-political platforms becoming policy at the institution and state levels, suggests that we in composition need to reconsider how access works in public debate. What was once “our” term is now part of the lexicon of reform, and our conventional appeal, that professional judgment in context ensures the democratic representation of our diverse publics, is being displaced by another vision, in which increasing access requires a policy marketplace that invites public choice among competing providers of expertise.¹ In such a marketplace, it doesn’t matter whether professionals or testing companies and political think thanks define the goals and measures of public education in literacy; it only matters who can codify the skills students need for success in the globally competitive scene. If choice among service providers displaces teachers’, scholars’, and administrators’ professional standing, that is simply democratic participation in action.

In discussion after the panel, an audience member asked a question tinged with resignation: “is strategic instrumentalism the best we can do?” In other words, if the link between democratic ends and professional judgment is being eroded, must we abandon our conventional appeals to pluralism and counter reform’s claims of skills and results with the promise of more skills and better results? Rather than reappropriating the discourse of reform, I suggested, we might begin to counter groups like Complete College America (CCA) by renewing composition’s longstanding efforts to represent basic writers’ experiences (Adler-Kassner and Harrington 2002; Horner and Lu 1999; Lu 1992; Rose 1985; Rose 1988). Inviting our publics’ inquiry into current students’ experiences, I argued, could foster alternatives to CCA’s images of basic writing as waste and futility. Moreover, such images could dramatize “access” in ways that our conventional appeal to professionalism as the bulwark of democracy might not. But I couldn’t say more at the time about how we might innovate on going public amid the constraints of contemporary K–16 reform.

Since that discussion, I have attempted to unravel the thicket of issues implied in the audience member’s question, and this book is the result of that inquiry. If our rhetoric of professionalism is being displaced by the rhetoric of standardization-for-competition-for-democracy, how should we innovate on the ways we go public? Specifically, as the audience member wondered, should we reappropriate and redirect the rhetoric(s) of reform in the hope of steering the development of corporate-political standards and assessments? Or, as the weary tone of the audience member suggested, should we reassert our professional judgment in our preferred terms despite the limits of our appeals in the contemporary scene? Or should we envision an alternate rhetoric of professionalism?

In the following chapters, I explore and engage with scholars’ responses to these questions. Following Joseph Harris (2012), my aim is a “sympathetic counterstatement” (xi) to the disciplinary conversation about going public. I recognize the redirection of reform and the reassertion of professionalism as composition’s primary rhetorical means of advancing our pluralistic judgment, and I appreciate these strategies as nuanced negotiations amid profound constraints. But I also explore how these strategies can limit our pursuit of an equally important aim, building professionals’ potential to foster democratic public participation in reform. I trace this limit to pragmatism, the value that scholars frequently invoke to guide their innovations on going public. For example, pragmatism authorizes scholars’ calls to reappropriate the discourses of institutional standardization (e.g., R. Miller 1998a) and redirect neoliberal reforms as a means of advancing composition’s democratic aims (e.g., Adler-Kassner 2008; Adler-Kassner and Harrington 2010; Adler-Kassner and O’Neill 2010; Fleckenstein 2008). These scholars open critical inquiry into the consequences of going public and call for an alternate response to the political economy of reform. And, as I explore in the following chapters, such responses can claim demonstrable policy outcomes. However, I argue that these pragmatic innovations can also minimize our attention to the public consequences of reappropriating and redirecting reform discourses that construe democratic participation as assent to management or consumer choice.

I identify a similar selection and deflection of attention in the reassertion of professionalism. Scholars emphasize the need for our contextual inquiry into diverse contexts of literacy teaching, learning, and assessment to inform education policy (e.g., Gallagher 2011). Since we perform this inquiry, the policy implication of “being there” is clear: only our professional judgment can be counted on to serve the public good. Here, pragmatism authorizes us to claim our professional inquiry as a form of public representation. This claim rightly reasserts our epistemic advantage over the acontextual standardization-for-competition of neoliberal reform. But this pragmatic innovation, I argue, can also minimize our attention to the democratic consequences of our claim to possess an expertise that we alone can exercise in the name of the public.

My concern with these pragmatic innovations is that while they attend to the professional consequences of going public, they also limit our attention to the public consequences of our rhetorical judgment. This is not to say that public goods are unimportant to the scholars cited above; indeed, the stated aims of bureaucracy, reframing, and public engagement are to increase students’ democratic access to opportunity. Rather, I am arguing that these pragmatic innovations are working from limited rhetorical resources. These resources are the primary rhetorics of reform: namely, appeals to bureaucratic standardization, market competition, and professionalism. These appeals tend to minimize roles for our publics in debate over how to improve K–16 literacy teaching, learning, and assessment.² Instead, these rhetorics construe public voice as a choice among predetermined, politically secured options in the political economy: governmental standardization for the sake of efficiency, market choice for the sake of competition, or professional judgment for the sake of public representation. Minimized in such a choice, however, is a role for our publics in assessing and potentially authorizing our contextual judgment as responsiveness to public experience with writing. To foster such public participation in reform, I argue, entails expanding composition’s efforts at redirecting reform or reasserting professionalism. Rather than defending our professionalism by narrowing the role of public participation in reform, an alternate response would seek to enlarge it.

To pursue this aim, I recover an alternate pragmatism for going public. I explore composition’s innovations genealogically by reading the pragmatism invoked against the pragmatism enacted. Like contemporary proposals to reappropriate the rhetoric of bureaucracy (e.g., Graff and Birkenstein 2008), I heed William James’s (1907) call to attend to consequences. I recognize the need for a rhetoric of professionalism that can secure material benefits for all students amid the neoliberal energy of contemporary reform. But in addition to recognizing the material consequences of going public, I call equal attention to the experiential consequences of our rhetoric—how it might form non-expert publics around the questions of reform. Based on this broadened conception of consequences, I reimagine pragmatism not only as a warrant for professionals to reappropriate the discourse of standardization but also as a prompt to renew our inquiry into public experiences with literacy, experiences that can qualify reform’s calls to eliminate “remediation.” Like proposals to redirect the market-driven rhetoric of contemporary reform (e.g., Adler-Kassner 2008), I find common cause with Cornel West’s (1989) “prophetic pragmatism”: I recognize the need for professionals to do more than denounce reform. But my reading of West suggests not only the limits but also the potential of professional critiques to sponsor public participation in discussions of key reform proposals like machine scoring. And, like proposals to reassert professional judgment (e.g., Gallagher 2011), I draw on John Dewey’s (1927) vision of public professionalism. I recognize the need for our local judgment to scale up to the political economy of reform. But in addition to claiming our privileged standing to make judgments on behalf of our publics, I also envision a rhetorical means of sponsoring critical public participation that can authorize our contextual judgment (and not externally-imposed outcomes assessments) as responsiveness to public experiences with literacy.

The aim of this recovery and reinscription of pragmatism is to forward a goad and resource for composition’s efforts at going public. An alternate pragmatism prompts us to tell a different story about our professionalism, one that resists the tendency of reform debate to reduce our judgment to the conventional political-economic grounds of standardization, competition, or expertise. But while such a story disrupts our conventions of going public, it also offers us a resource for innovation focused on our unique potential in contemporary reform debate. Unlike bureaucratic standardization and market competition as models for public policy, an alternate pragmatism recognizes composition professionals’ capacity to foster critical public participation in national discussions about the teaching, learning, and assessment of writing. The point of sponsoring this participation is not only to promote our contextual judgment as superior to the standardization forwarded by proponents of bureaucracy or markets, although I imagine few professionals would object to that aim. Rather, the larger goal of sponsoring engagement is to enable our local publics to assess the adequacy of contemporary standardization-for-competition to reflect their experiences with writing. The hope of such engagement is that it can reshape broader public discussions of re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 “Is Strategic Instrumentalism the Best We Can Do?”
• 2 Bureaucracy, “Lightness,” and Discontent
• 3 Reframing, Prophetic Pragmatism, and Artful Critique
• 4 Being There, Going Public, and “The Problem of the Public”
• 5 An Ethics of Dissent
• References
• About the Author
• Index