Ethnographically Sensitive Composition
In his essay “Keeping Honest: Working Class Students, Difference, and Rethinking the Critical Agenda in Composition”, David Seitz argues that ethnographic research should be incorporated into developing critical composition pedagogies. It is because of a lack of consideration for the ways in which students’ class and cultural backgrounds can influence their response to the application of composition theory in the writing classroom that many writing instructors lack significant “persuasive authority for some of these students in the classroom, or more importantly, in the practice of their everyday lives” (65). Seitz calls for an increased effort, on the parts of composition teachers and theorists, to make considerations involving ethnographic research in all aspects of composition and the writing classroom, if they are to have any real impact on the students that enter these classrooms. It seems that Seitz’s theory is following in the tradition of most contemporary scholars in that he is forging a means beyond thinking about writing as some foreign practice that exists only in the composition classroom; instead, writing is being addressed as something that can have real civic implications.
Seitz makes the point that, not only do students miss out on effective instruction when their cultural and socio-economic circumstances are not considered during the implication of critical composition pedagogies, but the academic community as a whole loses out on “views from outside middle-class institutions that imply valuable critiques to these theories and their application in the writing class” (65). In order to place his discussion into a more concrete context, he evokes specific references to three individual students in order to prove the negative effects of leaving ethnographic considerations out of composition: Lilia, Diana, and Mike. Seitz claims that the school histories and differing community values individual students bring to their writing will help to determine their response to their writing and the writing classroom in general. He notes that, “As the situations of Diana, Mike, and Lilia show, these contexts and values will shape different students’ approaches to these calls for critical engagement” (77).
David Seitz’s essay succeeds in opening up a more wholistic discussion of composition and its place in reflecting and determining student identity. He concludes, of ethnographic research in looking at student demographics, “This research must continually try to understand the relations between their various ways of knowing and behaving in multiple domains” (78). His essay seems to be particularly relevant to a course focusing on research in that he is able to provide a new route for composition research and scholarship by integrating ethnographic concerns and concerns about writing pedagogy.
