When the cure is worse than the disease . . .

A publisher that I have worked with before contacted me last week. She asked me to write a unit with activities that teach “voice” to middle school students. Yet, she added, “I don’t even think that voice can be taught in isolation, but this is what teachers keep asking for and I’d like to have something to give them.” Certainly, this was a strange request to write something for someone who doesn’t “believe” in what you are writing. It is also an interesting illustration about the way things get taught and published: Teachers feel pressured to teach something by test, administrators or standards. They beg publishers for helpful materials. Publishers create materials and then more people start teaching that same thing.

This interesting real-life scenario of teaching a piece of writing in isolation reminded me of Mike Rose’s essay “Language of Exclusion.” He explores the medical inspiration on the realm of remedial writing, which is based in the evolution of how learning disabilities were diagnosed and “treated” and the increasing access to education. Rose explains that the term “remedial” has its roots in the medical and can be “connected to disease and mental defect” (594). The word was initially used when talking about people with specific neurological issues and has widened to encompass those with learning disabilities to those who are regular students performing below average in content areas.

Beyond this etymological connection, there is also an historic association between the medical and educational fields. Rose suggests this was appealing to a scientifically minded society in the 1920s and 30s. To illustrate, Rose quotes a textbook, Modern Methods in Written Examinations: “Teaching bears a resemblance to the practice of medicine. Like a successful physician, the good teacher must be something of a diagnostician . . . after a careful diagnosis he is able to prescribe intelligently the best remedial or corrective measures” (595).

This diagnostic aura influenced (and still does) the teaching of writing. As Rose explains it, “The theoretical and pedagogical model that was available for ‘corrective teaching’ led educators to view writing problems within a medical paradigm. Thus they set out to diagnose as precisely as possible the errors (defects) in a student’s paper” (595). He even explains that in the 1930s that they used the label “sick sections” to highlight writing sections that needed work. This clinical approach to writing instruction seeks to isolate problems and cure them. Teachers are led to believe that they can fix writing by zeroing in on a problem, prescribing a curative work sheet on “voice” or “sentence fluency,” and voila! Thus, students and teachers believe that by improving the defective parts, they will construct a successful whole.

David Russell, in his essay “American Origins of the Writing-Across-the-Curriculum Movement,” questions this isolationist approach to writing instruction, “This narrow conception of writing and learning fit well with the industrial model American schools adopted. Progress could be measured in the number of errors reduced per dollar invested, and students could be tracked and taught according to their ‘deficiencies.’ Thus, writing instruction past the elementary school was viewed as mere remediation of deficiencies in skill rather than as a means of fostering a continuously developing intellectual and social attainment” (153-154). When we, as Russell suggests, emphasize the diagnosis of errors, we create the illusion that writing is merely an act of error reduction, rather than a means of communication and discovery and learning.

The investigative work done by Mina Shaughnessy illustrates that emerging writers view the act of writing through this narrow scope of reducing errors. Shaughnessy, in her “Introduction to Errors and Expectations,” writes that basic writers see, “academic writing as a trap, not a way of saying something to someone . . . exposing as it goes all that the writer doesn’t know . . . he is aware that he leaves a trail of error behind him when he writes. He can usually think of little else while writing” (391). When we view writing as something to be fixed, error becomes the obsessive focus of both student writer and writing teacher. And, ironically, the unintentional side-effects of such cures render the student “hopelessly tangled” (391). Shaughnessy provides an example of a basic writer whose sentence disintegrates from simple to incoherent, as the student is immobilized by an error-focused compulsion.

Working on problems in isolation creates an overemphasis on details at the expense of the larger picture—of ideas, content and communication. Nancy Sommers’s exploration of revision strategy in both emerging and experienced writers shows that students narrowly focus on the details and forget or feel overwhelmed by the broader scope of writing. She explains, in her essay on “Revision Strategies,” that students “concentrate on particular words apart from their role in the text” (326). She says that students “do what they have been taught in consistently narrow and predictable ways” and that “the students do not have strategies for handling the whole essay” (327).

These are the dangers that we face when we choose to teach writing in an isolated, prescriptive, clinical way. We risk an obsessive focus on error and details that distracts us from the bigger picture of writing as an act of discovery, communication and learning. Of course, this is exactly the solace I found in the promise of Progressive Education, as discussed last night in Erin’s presentation on John Dewey.

Now with all of this being said, am I’m going to write the unit on teaching voice? Of course I am. Getting paid to write is always a delightful proposition. But, in defense of my ideals, I am going to include an introduction that explains the contradictions of teaching “voice” in isolation.

**By the way, I know that the majority of class was skeptical about Progressive Education. Here is a link to the school my children attend (www.psas.ws). It is very much based on the ideals of Progressive Education, while still manages to be academically rigorous.