Since I seem to be on a writing binge today I wanted to tangentially join a discussion happening at some of the places I read. Over at Culture Cat, Clancy is participating in a carnival about Karen Kopelson's recent CCC article "Sp(l)itting Images; or, Back to the Future of (Rhetoric and?) Composition" I’m still pretty unsure of what a carnival is or whether it is considered rude to pick up the topic elsewhere, but here I go anyway.
Clancy's posts made me think about how I came to Rhet/Comp, the pedagogical imperative, and sent me to the bookshelf to dig out the most recent CCC with the article. Since this was the first time I'd heard the term "pedagogical imperative" I was impressed without exactly it fit the way I felt (and sometimes still feel) about trying to find a dissertation project. During an advising meeting with Dr. Helpful in the spring of 2007 she asked what I thought my dissertation would be about. I told her I had no idea. In fact what I really said was something pretty close to:"I don't know because I'm having a hard time relating any of the stuff I'm really interested in to the classroom. I don't know what my 'comp' aspect would be."
Dr. Helpful just looked at me and said, "You don't have to have a comp aspect. You can write a rhetoric dissertation."
My incredibly intelligent response was, "Really?"
It didn't even occur to me that my dissertation didn't have to have a composition/classroom aspect to it. So, while I don't recall any overt pressure to conform to a pedagogical imperative, I had clearly internalized it somewhere during my course work.
Actually my sense of the pedagogical imperative stems mostly from my understanding of the job market. Like Paul in Kopelson's article there is a sense that my ability to get a job "[depends] upon [my] ability to articulate [my] work's connections to pedagogy."(755) Kopelson says that job market pressures shouldn't be dismissed, but those pressures are clearly not the focus of her article. As nebulous as my dissertation topic is at the moment, I can guarantee there is not going to be a pedagogical aspect to it. And, frankly, that scares me a little. Growing up through grad school at Dr. Snarky's severely jaded knee I heard plenty of stories about how choosing to focus on rhetoric, and particularly on rhetorical theory, made it difficult for her to get a job. One result of those stories are the ways I've taken on positions in the department that will speak to my more practical/sell-able skills. Graduate Assistant Director of the Writing Center, Co-Editor of the in-house Composition Manual, Assistant to the Director of Composition all of these positions, all of the skills I've learned in these positions represent an attempt to ensure that future employers look past my theory-based dissertation to see that I also do the work of composition. Because, while the overall theory that I use could have applications to the classroom, that is not what interests me about the theory. I could easily have set out to create a dissertation that was "A Rhetoric of ___________: Issues in the Composition Classroom," but that is not what I want to do. At least not now. As Clancy points out, "Sometimes it takes TIME to figure out the connections of research and theory to pedagogy." And, frankly, I don't have that time in this program.
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