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Dialogic Feelings:
Feeling in Composition and Culture

John Paul Tassoni
Francis Marion University

Tobin, Lad. Writing Relationships: What Really Happens in the Composition Class. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Heinemann, 1993. 156pp. Paper $17.00

Purely logical discourse is a myth; if we as teachers of composition are to examine the fullest possible context in which writing skills are negotiated and developed, we need to account for feelings--those of our students as well as our own. As writing theorists like Susan McLeod and Alice G. Brand have indicated, composition teachers need to ask questions about the various ways students' anxieties over, their motivations for, and their beliefs about writing affect their composing processes. The answers to such questions not only can tell us much more about our students than can quantitative analyses, they can also tell us more about the dialectical relationship between the composition classroom or writing conference and the broader cultural concerns with which novice (as well as experienced) writers must negotiate. Feelings are, as cultural anthropologists like Michelle Z. Rosaldo have shown, "culturally ordered" (137), and therefore indicate the plurality of concerns that enter into our classrooms and tutorials.

Feelings represent a complexity of personal, cultural, and institutional concerns, and their intensities can facilitate or curtail dialogic situations. In dialogic situations, students' and teachers' experiences can work to reorganize or complicate writing conventions, as opposed to tutorials wherein students and teachers allow conventions to organize experience for them (Gillam 6). When students write to reorganize or complicate conventions, they operate within contexts that facilitate creativity and critical thought. On the other hand, when students assume a passive role in regard to convention, they no longer act as producers of knowledge, but react within narratives their instructors prefabricate and control. For their part, writing instructors, as Alice M. Gillam might say,

are responsible for authoring a social discourse that remains perpetually open, continually turning; a social discourse that addresses and answers to many divergent audiences . . . and that recognizes the dialogical relationship between the centripetal and centrifugal forces in language. (10)

Two recently published books, Writing Relationships: What Really Happens in the Composition Class by Lad Tobin and Dynamics of the Writing Conference: Social and Cognitive Interaction edited by Thomas Flynn and Mary King, exhibit awareness of the extents to which emotions determine critical thought. The contributors to Flynn and King's text mark emotional elements of student/teacher conferences to highlight the role of cognitive and social factors in successful tutorials. Tobin, too, stresses emotional factors, and in addition, makes use of them as a critical discourse to demystify current principles of composition pedagogy. Both texts indicate the unavoidable presence of emotionality in writing instruction, and in this sense provide a context with which we can examine the directions and transformations that feeling can bring to our individual conferences with students, to our classrooms, and even to our culture.

Flynn and King's anthology complements the study of conferencing that Muriel Harris undertakes in her Teaching One-To-One: The Writing Conference. Dynamics' contribution, however, is not at first glance apparent. Indeed, the essays in this anthology reiterate many of the same points that Harris raises in her work. Both studies, for instance, discuss conversation activities and conference formats, and both consider cultural elements that may undermine otherwise productive sessions. Scholars will also find Harris's Teaching better researched, a characteristic that makes her text more valuable than Dynamics to readers seeking an overview of scholarship in the field.

What Flynn and King's anthology adds to the field is a series of particular histories, small narratives that remind us that teaching is always culturally and historically specific. The contributors to Dynamics remind us that we as teachers interact with real people with real feelings, not a mass of homogeneous bodies and vacuous minds.

Considering the social consequences of their interactions, the writers in this collection establish writing conferences, particularly those which occur in writing centers, as locations where beginning writers can experience their texts as sites of personal and cultural significance.

Introducing the first section of essays, "Social Strategies: Building a Collaborative Relationship," King writes, "The social relations established in formal schooling are unfaithful to the true nature of human learning, which is founded in emotional and social ties to other members of the culture" (18). King identifies ways that teachers have concentrated on the information-processing function of language to the exclusion of some of the complex means in which language establishes social relations and distributes power. Remarking on strategies resistant to such processes, David Taylor, in "A Counseling Approach to Writing Conferences," argues that unfair power relations between students and teachers can be destabilized in contexts wherein students believe they "can express feelings and attitudes freely" (27). A method detrimental to this context, JoAnn B. Johnson indicates, is questioning on the part of instructors, whose inquiries "can jeopardize the mood of empathy, trust, and respect that . . . we should try to establish" (34). The restrictive context imposed by teachers' questions, Johnson continues, is antagonistic to students' "necessary felt need for learning involvement" (36). For David C. Fletcher, the felt need for involvement is undermined by teachers' unnecessary assertions of authority, particularly when instructors privilege their own "expert social strategies" over dialogue in tutorials (42). Together, the essays in this section of Dynamics identify the emotional texture of the tutorial and the rhetorical strategies and hierarchical relations that frequently curtail their success.

The authors of the third section of essays, "Cognitive Strategies: Engaging Students in the Activities of Expert Writers," suggest ways that experts who are attentive to feelings can facilitate productive dialogues to help students perceive the intricacy of their writing tasks and articulate their visions. For Thomas C. Schmitzer, one of the ways to facilitate dialogue that can transform the limited repertoire of novice writers is to encounter the anxieties many students experience about moving beyond composing strategies they learned in high school and to, among other things, be "on the alert for sudden switches in direction which may signal an impulse toward the creative" (59). In "Experts with Life, Novices with Writing," Marcia L. Hurlow looks at how, for older, nontraditional students, "this anxiety- producing situation is often heightened by the circumstances which brought them to college" (63), such as divorce, unemployment, or disability. Hurlow suggests tapping these students' areas of expertise through assignments explicitly transactional in nature so that the writers' confidence in content can displace, at least in part, their "anxiety about the writing itself" (66).

In "What Can Students Say about Poems? Reader Response in a Conference Setting," Mary King taps students' areas of expertise by asking them to convey their feelings about poems, a practice that teachers often talk about, but rarely practice in any diligent manner. King uses readers' responses to help them assume ownership of literary texts as well as ownership of their compositions. She believes that students should write first in response to their own feelings so that they are not forced to "overcome their habitual non-aesthetic stance" and so that they can "read their poem and . . . write their own paper--not the teacher's" (74). For Patrick J. Slattery, the supportive environment engendered by instructors who consider the ways that students feel provides teachers with the space to challenge students in regard to their beliefs and attitudes. Slattery believes in challenging students "to think in slightly more complex ways," but cautions that "Without sufficient support . . . the painful and risky process of intellectual growth can overwhelm students, perhaps even forcing them to retreat to a less complex orientation" (84). The assumption behind each of the essays in this section is that academic development is achieved through teachers' open dialogues with students, through dialogues that allow students adequate play of their feelings and needs, rather than through the imposition of a detached and unalterable curriculum.

In Section IV: "Students Emerge as Independent Writers," Cornelius Cosgrove shows the particular value of dialogue in the instruction of "learning-disabled" students. Cosgrove reviews literature pertaining to effective teaching of students labeled learning disabled and argues that "conferencing and process orientation are what some teachers of the learning-disabled are concluding their students ought to have when learning composition" (100).

Those labeled "learning disabled" benefit from the effects of dialogue, rather than the lessons of workbook exercises into which they are frequently plugged. For Susanna Horn, in "Fostering Spontaneous Dialect Shift in the Writing of African- American Students," the restrictions of grammatical correctness often imposed upon African-American students are seen as antagonistic toward productive dialogue. Horn argues that content originates first within the student's native idiom, and she shows that "[O]nce the student is sure about content, many dialect-associated errors are spontaneously eliminated from subsequent drafts" (103). Reinforcing Taylor's contention that "trust and empathy can play key roles in intellectual development" (112), Paul M. Oye in "Writing Problems beyond the Classroom: The Confidence Problem" values writing centers for their "pressure-free environment" (116), and sees them as facilitating the development of "working relationships based on trust, which . . . students need in order to develop a confidence reflected both in their writing and in their classroom participation" (111).

Over all, Dynamics' contributors reassess territory already well-charted. The collection achieves its notability, however, in the authors' devotion to the feelings of students, particularly as those feelings pertain to notions of difference, as defined by such characteristics as gender, race, disability, and age. The contributors to Flynn and King's anthology recognize the roles that feelings play in student/teacher interactions; in Writing Relationships, Lad Tobin examines other interactions in which the considerations of feelings are vital, and he shows how a consideration of feelings can be used to reevaluate elements of the English curriculum.

Like the contributors to Dynamics, Tobin emphasizes the "subtle, emotionally charged interactions of composition classes" and writing conferences (5). His book, containing many personal narratives, examines those instances in which students look away from their professors in nervousness or hate, instances that Strunk and White's Elements of Style or Linda Flower's protocol analyses do not engage (see Brand 439-40). Tobin writes:

[T]raditionally we have considered the quality of the relationships in a writing classroom to be an effect of a student's success or failure as a writer; I think that it is often the other way around, that writing students succeed when teachers establish productive relationships with--and between--their students. (6)

Tobin calls for teachers to construct honest relationships with their students. He focuses on honesty and the feelings it generates to challenge the role that most process teachers have adopted, which he sees in many cases to be "as narrow and rigid" as older roles based on banking approaches to knowledge (20; see Freire 58). Teachers who describe themselves as facilitators or as just other members of the classroom overlook a more dialectical definition of the teacher's role: "Until," writes Tobin, "we have a clearer and more realistic notion of how we shape and influence student writing and how, in return, that writing shapes and influences us, we will continue to limit our student's potential development" (20). His advice is that we "be honest about our biases and limitations" (21). Such honesty helps students to demystify the writing and the classroom experience and to participate more fully in the creation and critique of knowledge; teachers who uncritically facilitate or act as other members of the classroom ("as if they have no agenda of their own") may be overlooking the ways "their tremendous authority" affects and is affected by classroom dynamics (20). Ignoring such dynamics, teachers may perpetuate the very hierarchical and antagonistic relationships they seek to resist.

By ignoring the manner in which our feelings and actions might sustain unfair power relations in our classrooms, we risk producing situations in which students seek only to uncover the ideal or secret texts they assume are inside our heads. Resisting these situations, students and teachers may take part in active exchanges in which their own attitudes and beliefs and those of others can be identified, discussed, developed, and even transformed--not passively received or uncritically rejected (see Murphy 164). Self-analysis and self-recognition, as Tobin writes, "gives us the potential to respond differently" (66), especially in regard to those antagonistic feelings (like those of vengeance, which Tobin candidly describes) disruptive to dialogic and democratic relations between teachers and students. Readers might find the implications of Tobin's thinking here much in line with the theories of liberating educators like Ira Shor and Henry Giroux, who views "higher education, especially the liberal arts, as primary to the formation of a critical and engaged citizenry" (309-10). Tobin's pedagogy suggests an approach to knowledge as something other than an unalterable set of truths and norms, as something in which class members can have (and feel they should have) a stake.

Tobin also uses his focus on feelings to examine and challenge some current beliefs regarding student/student relationships. He believes that recent writings about student/student relationships "have romanticized and reified the notion of a decentered, supportive, collaborative writing group without paying enough attention to what sorts of peer relationships inhibit writing and what sorts foster it" (90). Acknowledging that "college exists within a political, economic, and cultural system that generally accepts the notion that individuals must compete for scarce and limited resources" (99), he also discovers that many students in peer groups--adhering to competitive urges--hold back to protect their own interests (109). Going against the grain of many current views on classroom dynamics and their socio-political implications, Tobin takes a particularly critical position on the competitive urges that often affect peer relationships. Rather than dismiss these urges as altogether hostile to dialogic and democratic intentions, he explores the ways feelings of competition can be used productively in the classroom. "[C]ompetition and cooperation are not mutually exclusive or even necessarily conflictual" (90), he argues; and with respect to feminists and other theorists interested in creating classrooms that represent alternatives to hegemonic values, politics, and discourse, he calls for teachers to maintain productive levels of competition in their classrooms, levels "not so high that writers give up in frustration but not so low that they ignore it as an incentive" (110). Focusing on feelings, Tobin is able to discern the ways that contemporary theorists have described some of the abuses of competition as if they were its essence, and he restores to critical consideration feelings of competition that foster productive peer relations.

Tobin's observations and arguments in his book's first two sections act as incentives toward more productive teacher/teacher relationships as well. Although much too brief, Writing's third section is particularly notable in its mention of the ways our colleagues intrude upon our classrooms: "[W]e are almost always aware of their presence, aware of how our attitude and our approach, our goals and our grades, compare with theirs" (141). Tobin points to the lack of scholarship pertaining to teacher/teacher interaction, and how what is said in conference and coffee rooms translates into the ways we interact with our students. "[W]e need," Tobin accurately concludes, "to start . . . carefully examining, analyzing, and telling stories about the peer relationships that currently exist in our departments and in our discipline" (142). Such research indeed holds much promise, but readers may feel disappointed, given Tobin's honesty in earlier chapters, that he does not include some of his own stories and analyses of particular teacher/teacher relations in this section.

In general, however, readers will find Tobin's candor noteworthy. Discussing "What Really Happens in the Composition Class," he expands the contexts through which writing relationships should be explored and opens dialogue on elements of the curriculum rarely expressed in composition research: the jealous peer, the vengeful instructor, even the sexually charged tutorial (Tobin is, oftentimes, downright courageous). Like Flynn and King's text, Writing Relationships focuses on small histories, the emotional encounters of students and teachers (as well as students and students, and teachers and teachers), to explore the personal, professional, and cultural elements that constitute writing instruction. Together, these books suggest approaches to composition that have ramifications much beyond their expressed scopes.

In this respect, these books speak not only to particular encounters in classrooms and faculty lounges, but also to the cultural work of English Studies itself. Allowing feelings to enter into and, in the case of Tobin, challenge elements of the curriculum, the authors of these works also permit a myriad of cultural and social concerns to enter academic discourse, concerns previously excluded through elitist and positivist approaches to knowledge. More responsive to the diversity of students entering the academy, the writers of Writing Relationships and Dynamics, along with Lila Abu-Lughod and Catherine A. Lutz, look at feelings as "form[s] of social actions[s] that create . . . effects in the world, effects that are read in . . . culturally informed way[s]" (12, Italics mine). A consideration of the cultural import of feelings opens the doors for pedagogical situations in which conventions cannot only be critically examined, but also changed in ways responsive to the demands of a multi-cultural curriculum.

What's left for the authors of these books is to explore the changes that their pedagogies enable. They provide for situations in which culturally informed feelings can enter into discourse and do so in dialogic classrooms functioning as democratic public spheres. Although neither work takes up these matters directly, both Dynamics and Writing Relationships describe tutorial and classroom situations in which students can engage issues of critical importance to their social, political, and academic lives and contribute to an ever- widening canon of cultural texts. In the tutorials and classrooms that these books advocate, students can learn that writing and reading are not static mediums, but the products and producers of cultural forces of which students themselves are vital components. Given the array of affective discourses that Tobin and the contributors to Dynamics allow to enter such engagements, one need only imagine the multiple forms of knowledge that their writing classes and tutorials involve to understand the cultural significance of their claims.

Works Cited

Abu-Lughod, Lila and Catherine A. Lutz. "Introduction: Emotion, Discourse, and the Politics of Everyday Life." Language and the Politics of Emotion. Ed. Catherine A. Lutz and Lila Abu- Lughod. New York: Cambridge UP, 1990. 1-23.

Brand, Alice G. "The Why of Cognition: Emotion and the Writing Process." College Composition and Communication 38.4 (1987): 436-43.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum, 1970.

Gillam, Alice M. "Writing Center Ecology: A Bakhtinian Perspective." The Writing Center Journal 11.2 (1991): 3-11.

Giroux, Henry. "Textual Authority and the Role of Teachers as Public Intellectuals." Social Issues in the English Classroom. Eds. C. Mark Hurlbert and Samuel Totten. Urbana: NCTE, 1992. 304-21.

Harris, Muriel. Teaching One-to-One: The Writing Conference. Urbana: NCTE, 1986.

McLeod, Susan. "Some Thoughts about Feelings: The Affective Domain and the Writing Process." College Composition and Communication 38.4 (1987): 426-35.

Murphy, Patrick D. "Coyote Midwife in the Classroom: Introducing Literature with Feminist Dialogics." Practicing Theory in Introductory College Literature Courses. Eds. James M. Cahalan and David B. Downing. Urbana: NCTE, 1991. 161-74.

Rosaldo, Michelle Z. "Toward an Anthropology of Self and Feeling." Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion. Ed. Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. LeVine. New York: Cambridge UP, 1984.