Conflict, Transformation, and Composition Pedagogy

by Lauren DiPaula
 

In The Peaceable Classroom, Mary Rose O’Reilley touts the transformative nature of the writing group. It is a transformation based in conflict:

Rather like a relentless Bronson Alcott, I try each Monday to set up utopian communities of reflection, acceptance, and useful work . . . On Tuesday, lines form outside my office door. Tempers have flared in a writing group. Jane feels “put down.” Paul has been mocked. Will I please intervene? (28)

O’Reilley does not intervene, and her group solidifies in the end. Although “tempers had run high,” O’Reilley ends her anecdote with a hopeful final student evaluation: “Everyone was linked by a common bond which allowed them to speak freely and ultimately resulted in a higher level of learning because of the idea pool” (29). Later, O’Reilley reflects that “when we let people fix themselves . . . we allow them their inborn power.” Intervention, she says, takes power from the group; in fact, she tells us, “natural systems tend to be self-correcting” (109, 110).

Although I agree that natural systems may correct themselves, I would contend that natural systems—be they writing groups or larger class dynamics—may correct themselves in ways we didn’t intend and would rather avoid, ways that result in the perpetuation of destructive hegemonic ideals and the silencing of dissenting voices. Mary Louise Pratt brought this predicament to our attention with her theory of the contact zone. These “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other” altered the notion of the tranquil classroom community to a potentially vicious place, a place where “no one was safe” (4, 17). In exchange for safety, voices who had been silenced could be heard. In Pratt’s contact zone classroom, “no one was excluded”: “All the students…had the experience of hearing their cultures discussed and objectified in ways that horrified them” (17). But just because cultures meet does not necessarily mean they will grapple, and Pratt has been criticized for not taking her theories one step further to address this. As Joseph Harris tells us, “at no point does [Pratt] speak of how she tries to get students to articulate or negotiate the differences among themselves” or of “how the competing views of students in their courses are acknowledged, criticized, and negotiated” (118, 121). Harris also contends that this lack of articulation “points to a legitimate worry about the micropolitics of teaching—about whose voices get heard in what classrooms and why” (121).

If part of becoming critical thinkers and citizens in a heterogeneous society entails learning how to listen to, grapple with, and negotiate competing perspectives, then how do we set up conditions that allow for this to happen? Or rather, how might the conditions, beliefs, and perspectives we have about the writing classroom impact how it does happen?

In her book, Deliberative Conflict, Patricia Roberts-Miller connects the way we theorize the community of the classroom and the teaching of argument within it to the way we theorize the larger political community. Her conceptual framework of political spheres has led to my own thinking on how we can use conflict productively.  Though I agree with much of her stance, I am convinced that the ability to negotiate has little to do with whether we teach argument or not, or whether students, as Roberts-Miller suggests, “engage in deliberation as a group” (194). I believe that classroom dynamics and our theories of learning to write impinge upon our students’ ability to transform conflict productively in a composition course. Borrowing from conflict theory rather than political theory, I therefore propose three visions of classroom community—cooperative, agonistic, and collaborative.

Roberts-Miller has recently recounted the story of a cooperative classroom where the system had apparently repaired itself. She writes of a situation recounted by Delores Schriner and William Rice in 1989 in which a student posted “an extremely homophobic message on a class mailing list—advocating the death penalty for homosexuals,” which addresses the issue of what prizing a peaceful community and working around conflict does for us. Schriner and Rice say that their students “clearly had learned to negotiate among starkly different sets of values in their community” in the end (qtd. in Roberts-Miller 536). But Roberts-Miller points out that a civil resolution does not mean that students actually “negotiated” for the better.

The community which Schriner and Rice had developed is a space where students do not engage productively in conflict because they have no sense of interdependence. Rather, their goal is to gain acceptance into another discourse community. Kenneth Bruffee describes this type of community in telling us that students must “learn to negotiate . . . entry” into an “existing knowledge community” (429). Coming into the community requires learning how conversation happens in that community and changing to fit that conversation. Conflict necessarily prevents fitting into the conversation. As Roberts-Miller explains,

The metaphor of negotiation recurs frequently in articles concerning communities of discourse, and it points to a central tension in the concept—the relation we imagine students have to the conventions of the community of discourse they are trying to enter. Bruffee has students negotiating ‘the rocks and shoals of social relations’ (403) whereas Trimbur has students negotiating ‘differences’ (607). When a boat negotiates rocks and shoals, the boat does all the accommodating—the rocks and shoals will remain exactly where they began. This is essentially the liberal view of education and politics, that students are neophytes who must themselves change in order to enter a world of more or less stable judgments (Deliberative 157).

Civility and accommodation are important because students need to use each other to grow: as they work together to gain entry, they work against each other. They are in a sense climbing over each other to enter into the community. Such a community learning situation is built on Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development, the theory that learning takes place more quickly “through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers” (86). Because the larger goal is not that they achieve as a group, but that they achieve individually, they properly use the group believing that in the end they will have no more use for the group, and so they do not work together to ferret out and build on their differences. The problem is, as Roberts-Miller tells us, “if the public sphere is to be measured a success only if the interlocutors reach agreement (rather than, for instance, learn from the debate), success in the presence of difference is unlikely” (548).

Negotiation itself takes a sinister turn. Roberts-Miller explains that although “evading conflict contributes to social harmony and can even facilitate an effective public sphere,” that public sphere or classroom is only effective as long as people are not “deeply unhappy with the system itself” (552). And Thomas A. West writes that negotiation “has often been advocated by culturally dominant groups in order to manage difference” (8). Together with Gary Olson, West maintains that the current notion of negotiation can “act as a strategy of colonization disguised as civil interaction” and “is a sure prescription for depoliticizing the political, for continuing to prevent those without power from participating productively in political discourse” (241, 242). Negotiation is thus generally seen as successful if it calms the nerves of the those in power and therefore may only serve to reproduce hierarchies and oppression, especially in the writing classroom where, because “language and thought are inextricably linked, language instruction becomes a key site where dominant ideology is reproduced—or disrupted” (George 97). If, as James Berlin writes, teaching literacy is also “teaching students a way of experiencing the world,” then moving toward civility at the price of silencing dissenting voices works against a socially just vision of it (110). To change systems of injustice, confrontation rather than avoidance must occur on some level.

One model of classroom community in which dissent is prized is Harris’s “community of strangers” (116). Harris envisions “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). Unlike the community of cooperation, students are completely independent. They fight against consensus as they position and re-position themselves against competing perspectives. He explains that his aim is for his students “not to reach a consensus about the meaning or value of the text, but to enter into a critical, sustained, and public interchange of views about it” (115). In Harris’s “community of strangers,” the movement is not to consensus but to a dissensus, to “the level of a wrangle,” which he differentiates from a peaceful conception of “dialogue” (114).

What I think Harris overlooks is that it is possible to have wrangle in dialogue—that a real dialogue requires a wrangle and a real transformation is built upon opposition. But this requires a different kind of community, one in which students are—according to communication theorists Johnson and Johnson—positively interdependent (9). Strangers are by definition not interdependent. They may be working toward some distant, common goal, but they have little sense that they need each other to have those goals accomplished. An example is Linda Flower’s commendable attempt to bridge the gap between students and authorities in Pittsburgh. She tried to get people to talk together across difference and build on it. Her strategy was to uncover and transform silent, situated knowledge “into a generous interpretative resource” by having people “reveal more of the richly contextualized stories behind the story at work in their own meaning making” (42). She had her community center students choose a problem (the curfew), investigate and write about it, and then present their ideas and opinions in a town hall-like forum to the authorities. The authorities heard the students out, then expressed their concern and sometimes anger. But in the end, the student requests fell on deaf ears. Although Flower ends her depiction on a hopeful note, it is mixed with the bitter sense of not being able to change the way people are: “Ultimately, I am convinced, talking across difference depends on an ability to listen, to question, and to stand ‘ready to pursue’ the complexities of other people’s readings of the world” (64). I think that part of the reason that her students’ voices were silenced in the end had to do with the investment of the authorities in hearing them; that is, the lack thereof. There was no positive interdependence. But what we can take from Flower is the usefulness of delving into “the story at work in their own meaning making,” of looking for the story behind the story (42). 

I believe that people need to be interdependent and free to create their own meanings and therefore their own language if they are to work through their competing and intersecting interests productively. I admit that getting students to become collaborators might collapse on itself if not properly done. That is, even though they would be invested in each other’s perspectives, they would also have only cultivated group-dependent skills. Just because O’Reilley’s group in my introduction pulled together at the end does not mean that they will individually be able to do the same with the next group. They also know that they must collaborate only for the time being, which places them once again in the position of using each other to get to an expected end; that is, unless we allow them to create their own community language, if we allow that there is no discourse community to enter, only one to forge. If we subscribe to the notion that the purpose of the community is to create its own common knowledge and language—to transform itself into a hybrid of its groups’ differences—then we have a much different picture, one that encourages the use of difference. Such a group fulfills a goal of critical pedagogy in that it inspires or empowers students “to assume the responsibility for collectively recreating society” (George 97).

What creating a collaborative group does guarantee is that students for the time being get to step into each other’s shoes—at least as far as that is possible. They would have to. They engage with each other’s perspectives and work together to forge new meanings and new possibilities, rather than something the teacher or society has designed in advance. I realize I am attacking what some compositionists consider the very reason for composition, but I hold tightly to O’Reilley’s words when she writes, “to teach beginning students to write a formal, academic dialect is to disable them not only emotionally but also politically” (60). I hold to these words because reintegrating emotion lets us do what the authorities in Flower’s story fail to do: listen.

Reintegrating emotion is one of the key tenants to a new definition of negotiation put forth by Olson and West. They propose a theory of “critical negotiation”—“an understanding of negotiation that more consciously evokes its Latin roots: to create a sense of unease” (243). Their model does propose a sense of unease, as it suggests that negotiation is more than a maneuvering—that is, it is “a process of translation and rearticulation, a rewriting or reinscribing” in which “subjects and meanings in part emerge in enuciative, co-constitutive moments” (246). Emotion, they say, “plays a vital role in the formation and transformation of social relations—as both an impetus for change and as a factor that influences political and rhetorical interaction along and across lines of age, race, class, gender, nationality, ethnicity, race, and sexuality” (247). One could say, therefore, that Mary Rose O’Reilley was moving toward such a theory when she wrote that her peaceable classroom was a place “where there are tears for things” (82).

Moreover, our ability to listen to competing perspectives can be hampered by our adherence to academic abstraction. Gwen Gorzelsky explains that our “capacities to abstract and to sacrifice self-awareness for environment awareness” can harm our perception of the situation as well as of our perception of how we are reacting in the situation. This, in turn, can escalate conflict and dampen our ability to “see and respect vulnerabilities increased by race, class, and other factors” (407). By ignoring our emotional responses, we may not only exacerbate the misunderstandings at hand, but we may also cut off our opportunity to see things from another perspective.  Gorzelsky advocates developing a greater awareness of an individual’s own emotional response as well as an awareness of the way that response can distort communication. She writes,

An embodied approach to the relations between sensation and abstraction, self and environment—self and other—can help us, as teachers and theorists, to use conceptual systems to grow viable praxes. Both phenomenological and poststructuralist theories stress the impossibility of knowing an other’s (sic) experience, emphasizing that the problem of negotiating with others is fundamentally a problem of projections. (422)

Gorzelsky suggests that “in shifting our language use practices, we can shift our classroom systems’ dynamics as well” (423). Interacting with difference can cause strong negative emotions. Borrowing from communication theory, we learn that  “we tend to dislike people whose values and attitudes are quite different from our own, and we may even express hostility toward people who confront or upset our well-organized images of the world” (Schmuck and Schmuck 128). Students who feel hostile toward difference will likely move away from the difference rather than engage with it, without even realizing they are doing so.

Because right now I see a definitive solution as both impossible and the impetus for a life’s work, I propose instead a complicated beginning, a pedagogy that might begin with Pratt and O’Reilley together. Pratt writes that “pedagogical arts of the contact zone” might include, among other things, two suggestions which I feel are important in our discussion here: “exercises in storytelling and in identifying with the ideas, interests, histories, and attitudes of others” and “ground rules for communication across lines of differences and hierarchy that go beyond politeness but maintain mutual respect” (17). And O’Reilley describes a classroom where as she wanders “among the small groups reading to each other, [she sees] that many people are crying. Odysseus says he wants to go back to Ithaca because it’s a place ‘where there are tears for things.’ That would be another good definition of the peaceable classroom” (82). Peaceable practices must be built on a sense of collaborative community where students do not see themselves as positioned but, as Flower writes, “ready to pursue the complexities of other people’s readings of the world” (64). Only then will they work together to use conflict for transformation. And getting to that point may mean confronting difference ourselves.

Works Cited

Berlin, James. Rhetoric, Poetics, and Cultures. West Lafayette: Parlor Press, 2003.
 

Bruffee, Kenneth A. “Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation of Mankind.’” Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader. 2^nd ed. Ed. Victor Villanueva. Urbana: NCTE, 2003. 415-436.
 

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

Flower, Linda. “Talking Across Difference: Intercultural Rhetoric and the Search for Situated Knowledge.” College Composition and Communication 55.1 (2003): 38-64.
 

George, Ann. “Critical Pedagogy: Dreaming of Democracy.” ­A Guide to Composition Pedagogies. Eds. Gary Tate, Amy Rupiper, and Kurt Schick. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 92-112.
 

Gorzelsky, Gwen. “Making Contact: Experience, Representation, and Difference.” JAC: Journal of Advanced Composition 23.2 (2003): 397-427.
 

Johnson, David W. and Frank P. Johnson.  Joining Together: Group Theory and Group Skills. 6^th Ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon., 1997.
 

O’Reilley, Mary Rose. The Peaceable Classroom. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1993.
 

Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone” Professing in the Contact Zone: Bringing Theory and Practice Together. Ed. Janice Wolff. Urbana: NCTE, 2002. 1-20.
 

Roberts-Miller, Patricia. Deliberative Conflict: Argument, Political Theory, and Composition Classes. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2004.
 

---. “Discursive Conflict in Communities and Classrooms.” College Composition and Communication 54.4 (2003): 536-557.
 

Schmuck, Richard A. and Patricia A. Group Processes in the Classroom. 8^th Ed. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2000.
 

Vygotsky, L.S. “Interaction Between Learning and Development.” Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Ed. Michael Cole, Vera John-Steiner, Sylvia Scribner, and Ellen Souberman. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978. 79-91.
 

West, Thomas. “Differencing Negotiation.” Composition Studies 25.2 (1997): 7-18.
 

West, Thomas and Gary A. Olson. “Rethinking Negotiation in Composition Studies.” JAC: Journal of Advanced Composition 19.2 (1999): 241-251.

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