First Year Composition Conundrums

This week I had a very depressing thought: As a fully qualified person with a Ph.D., I am teaching essentially the same courses that I was teaching my first year of graduate school, with only a B.A. to my name and a week of “boot camp” training. Sure, I get paid more, but I also have four sections instead of two now.

While my inclination is to label myself a failure for not doing something “more interesting” (mental health has not been great lately), more careful and rational thought has me wondering if what we have here is actually a problem in higher education in which we dismiss the value of first year composition courses. These are courses that most institutions foist off on their lowest level instructors, often graduate students. While my current department admirably has graduate students work with an experienced faculty member as well as take a pedagogy course for a full semester before turning them loose in the classroom, that’s the exception, not the rule.

And this is, for many students, their first college class ever. The first semester is very important for retention and ultimate student success, because that’s the chance to help students find their place on campus. It’s where students learn the vital literacy of how to “do college” and “be college students,” which, for many students, is a very steep learning curve. At some level having the graduate students and lower-ranked faculty teach the courses makes sense, because these are the people closest in experience to the students, but at another you would want the best pedagogy you can get in these classrooms because these are such vital courses to student success.

However, we would be remiss to assume that senior faculty make better teachers, too. A dirty little secret of higher education, which my students are appalled by when they find out, is that the only qualification you actually need to become a college professor is the Ph.D., which requires no pedagogical training. The pedagogy side of higher education, for many disciplines, is more of a folk training, a network of hedge mages trading lessons from experience, instead of any formal study that benefits from the extensive research that exists on learning and teaching. In fact, that was one of the ways I was recruited into higher education: my adviser, when I was an undergraduate, encouraged me to leave the pre-education track in the English major, saying “I need a master’s degree in education to teach K-12, but I only need graduate degrees in my own field to teach college.” And I admit, reader, I was persuaded. Fortunately, I wound up going into Rhetoric and Composition, which disabused me of my pedagogical naivete.

Rhetoric and Composition, as a field, is something of an exception; my graduate work was probably at least a third pedagogy-related courses. It is a field that is obsessed with teaching itself; it is as much concerned with how do we teach writing as it is with how does writing work. This makes first year composition courses the locus of a wide range of pedagogical skill and theory—ranging from the entirely unqualified and terrified graduate student to the extremely experienced and well-researched expert in the field.

But the overall effect of only some fields requiring pedagogical training for faculty is that pedagogy often becomes an afterthought, and sometimes even a subject of derision. This is how we get a culture that focuses on content and testing rather than on the messier, more effective work of active learning.

So while at some level I feel like maybe there’s a personal failure in my career (my problem) because I’m still teaching first-year courses, it seems more likely that there’s a systemic failure because more professors are not teaching basic first-year courses, and they aren’t thinking carefully about pedagogy because they’re about as trained as my own first-year-of-graduate-school past self was. Let the graduate students teach the upperclassmen who know how to college; let’s give the freshmen our best teachers, though, because the freshmen need good pedagogy the most.