Imagining Pedagogical Agency: Shifting from Students and Teachers to Elements and Relations

Abstract

Recent scholarship in rhetoric and composition studies theorizes agency as irreducible to human cause-and-effect. While this theory infiltrates many disciplinary conversations, however, our reliance on the terms students and teachers within pedagogical discourses manages our rhetorical imagination of pedagogical agency by committing us to individual, human agents every time we invoke these terms. Rather than expel these terms and the important work they underwrite, we can draw on social systems terminology of elements and relations in order to account for the ways that students and teachers emerge as agents and to imagine alternative conceptualizations of pedagogical agency.

Notes

¹ I thank RR reviewers Jay Dolmage and Brooke Rollins for their thoughtful feedback on this work. I also thank Julie Jung, whose courses and mentorship made this work possible, and Lynn Worsham, who inspires me to try to think big about pedagogy.

² A notable exception to this is Horner’s Terms of Work for Composition, which contains a chapter on students. The chapter does not, however, define student, which again suggests that the term is not up for debate, needs no definition.

³ See Jung for an explanation of how the complex and oppositional dynamics of pride and shame allocate scholarly identities to members of the field, such that those identities become “fixed.”

⁴ For discussions of rhetoric and composition’s ties to first-year writing and pedagogy see, for example, Berlin; Bishop; Connors; Crowley; Harris; Jung; Kopelson; R. Miller; North; Olson; Shaughnessy.

⁵ Sharp-Hoskins and Robillard argue that within discourses of rhetoric and composition studies, teachers must narrate their teaching Good, lest they should not teach at all.

⁶ For a helpful articulation of how agency is metaphorized through possession, see Lundberg and Gunn.

⁷ See, for example, C. Brooke; Cooper; Coulmas; DiPardo; Dobrin; Dryer; Hamilton; Hawk; Lindgren; Prior; Roderick; Sanchez; Wardle and Roozen.

⁸ While an argument could be made that pedagogy acts as a social system, Luhmann implicitly cautions against such a hasty comparison when he suggests that “[w]hen one introduces the concept of system into sociological analysis without further clarification, then an illusory precision arises that lacks any basis” (1). Without the space to develop the argument that pedagogy is itself a social system, I will thus refrain from making any such claims.

⁹ Systems theorist Gregory Bateson might clarify that number or quantity are not even in themselves simple: “[T]he names of the numbers and of the quantities are the surfacing of formal ideas” (49).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kellie Sharp-Hoskins

Kellie Sharp-Hoskins is an assistant professor of rhetoric in the Department of English at New Mexico State University. Her research centers on relationships among language and bodies, which she investigates through feminist, material, and cultural rhetorics. She can be contacted via email: [email protected].