This will likely be my last post for a short while, and so I wanted to leave off on a bit of a hopeful note, related to the tried and true nature of certain methodological approaches in writing instruction. In the latter half of my World Rhetorics seminar paper, which will ultimately be my doctoral writing sample, I used a piece by David Rothgery, in which he seeks to answer a tough question related to student writing that can be deemed offensive.

The piece, ‘”So What Do We Do Now?”‘ Necessary Directionality as the Writing Teacher’s Response to Racist, Sexist, Homophobic Papers,” starts with a scenario where Rothgery asks a high school English teacher what she would do when reading a paper that was blatantly racist (241). It is a situation that no writing tutor or instructor wants to be in, however, it is an important one to know how to navigate. Do we impose our own perceived, universal truths and morality upon students who write these pieces, or do we seek to justify this rhetoric according to situational ethics. While the value of situational ethics is undoubtedly important, Rothgery states that in some cases both approaches cannot coexist. In other words, he suggests that there are some universal truths that are so “fundamental,” they no longer fit within the idea of situatedness. He specifically lists rather extreme issues like forced domesticity for women, lynching for miscegenation, etc., (243) in order to illustrate that there are some opinions that are beyond a doubt, morally reprehensible and need to be treated as such when seen in student writing, if not with the purpose of changing the student attitudes, then with the purpose of making students more aware of the academic and social implications of such backwards, terrible rhetoric.

Rothgery seems to suggest that the best way to go about challenging situational approaches to “Transcendent Truths” is to open up a dialogic exchange of sorts with the students, one that does not impose values, but rather gets the students thinking about alternative ways of thought, thus allowing the possibility of gradual change. I realized that I had been following a similar strategy in these scenarios during tutoring sessions. What struck me the most was that this piece was published in 1993, and so it did not address greater issues at hand like the academic requirement for students to be aware of globalization and transnational changes. However, the piece suggested a very reasonable approach to rather unpleasant situations, one that can easily be applied to class room and writing center settings today, 20 years later.

I realized that despite the vast changes that have fairly recently occurred in pedagogical discourse and theory, certain methodological strategies are timeless. The piece reaffirmed my belief that the best way to see improvement in a student’s writing, other than adequate, valid praise, is to simply have a guided conversation with them, a Socratic exchange of sorts where we ask him or her to deconstruct their own logic and rhetoric and then help them tailor it according to their rhetorical situation. Perhaps this strategy is among those “fundamentals” that Rothgery argues for.