Criticism of conventional, traditional, academic literacies, including academic essays

Many criticisms of the conventional, traditional academic essay genre focus on the assumption of self-evident rigor; on the culture-bound assumptions for writing and making meaning via this largley alphabetic-text arrangement that focuses on form and correctness.

According to Street, autonomous models of literacy are based on essay-text forms of literacy rooted in Western academic circles and represents a culturally specific model that is masked in claims of universalism. In this autonomous model, school-based concepts of literacy are held as a standard definition of literate competence across contexts. Street argues that universalistic conceptions of literacy put forward in autonomous models do not “lift those who learn it out of their socially embedded context” but rather can suppress students under the ideology and social control of the teacher’s class. By positioning students as subjugated learners, critical analysis of their social and political context is prevented. Thus, if literacy is represented as a context-neutral skill, then it fulfills the political purposes of those in power to maintain a position of superiority by marginalizing other forms of literate knowledge. 

“The Schooling of Literacy" [chapter five in Social Literacies: Critical Approaches to Literacy in Development, Ethnography and Education] examines how one form of literacy, defined by a conservative middle class discourse of power and knowledge, has come to dominate literacy practices in contemporary schooling. The authors argue that through the "pedagogization of literacy" objectified conceptions of literacy are naturalized in practice. Pedagogization is defined as the socially constructed link between institutionalized processes of teaching and learning and literacy.

By reducing literacy to a "neutral" set of reading and writing skills, literacy is defined apart from social context and becomes, then, a "content to be taught through authority structures whereby pupils learned the proper roles and identities they were to carry into the wider world." This is a particularly relevant definition of literacy in today’s conservative political climate in the U.S. As mentioned, African-American and Latino students, currently labeled as "at risk" or "inner city," are particularly targeted for these skills oriented pedagogues held as exemplary practices by "back-to-basics" advocates.

Larson, Joanne. "Challenging Autonomous Models of Literacy: Street’s Call to Action." Linguistics and Education. 8(1996): 439-445.

Street, Brian. Social Literacies: Critical Approaches to Literacy in Development, Ethnography and Education. Routledge, 1995. 

Criticism of multimodal composing:

At stake is how composing for the self-sponsored and largely ludic purposes that Selfe aptly celebrates might connect to purposes and environments that are, instead, obliged and sanctioned. The hope seems that student engagement will make them responsive to our "offer" (which, I assume, they can decline) of "new ways of making meaning," ways that I trust can include writing extended connective prose.

The question of whose interests the course ought to serve ultimately is an ethical one. Part of it involves "what’s good for the student"—but the student as worker, citizen, friend, soul? Part of it is "what’s good for the various cultures and subcultures" in which decisions are made, resources distributed, and ideas championed.

Doug Hesse, in response to Cindy Selfe's "The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing."

Hesse, Doug. Response to Cynthia L. Selfe’s “The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing.” CCC. 61(2010): 602-05.

Selfe, Cynthia. “The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing.” CCC. 60(2009): 616–63.

• In many instantiations of multimodal composing projects, we lose linguistic and textual complexity
• Time and labor: do we have the resources? 

So What?

I propose that, as a teaching community -- as a shared inquiry -- we consider this possibility: that we can no longer advocate for, defend, or assume that the traditional, conventional academic essay is necessarily more "rigorous" than newer, emerging literacy practices. If proponents of multimodal composing practices are obligated to defend their pedagogical aspirations and rhetorical claims, shouldn't proponents of the traditional, conventional academic essay be willing to do the same?

Such a process could lead to productive and generative insights into why we teach the traditional, conventional academic essay, and whose interests are served. 

To be "rigorous" now includes the need to be self-aware about these choices and why we make them.

Wouldn't it be interesting to be able to say, down the road a bit, that in First Year Writing at DePaul, we explored the claims, possibilities, and challenges of multimodal composing and, as a result, we came away with new understandings of the academic essay; that we have new insights into the contemporary academic essay, why we teach it, and what it should look like?