Durst, Collision Course: Conflict, Negotiation, and Learning in College Composition
Durst points out that “the first-year college writing course has been a site of conflict since its very inception at Harvard in the late nineteenth century” (1). His book focuses on one particular conflict: the one between students’ goals, which tend to be very pragmatic, and their teachers’ goals. Durst finds that most students “are career-oriented pragmatists who view writing as a difficult but potentially useful technology. These students would generally prefer to learn a way of writing that is simple, quick, and efficient; applicable in all or most situations . . .” (2-3). While most of the students Durst studied wanted to improve their writing skills, they tended to not associate thinking skills with writing, so their instructors’ attempts to engage them in critical thinking seemed merely to be complicating matters to them. The most dramatic conflict between student goals and instructor goals seems to be about writing processes. “Nowhere are students’ goals more greatly opposed to those of the curriculum,” report Durst, “than where writing processes are concerned. The program seeks to extend, enrich, and broaden students’ writing processes, to build in greater opportunities for reflection, interpretation, and development. However, students appear to want the opposite: shorter, more streamlined, and more efficient processes” (59). While the program asks students to develop skills in pre-writing and revision, students are wary of both these processes.
Durst follows closely the class of one teacher, Sherry Danforth Cook, who obviously puts a tremendous amount of thought and planning into her classes. Several of the class activities Durs describes ask students to think about commonplaces in new ways. In every case, the students resist this type of thinking and claim to be bored. Durst found that most of the students preferred to summarize readings rather than analyze or critique them. One student expressed a concern that analyzing “would involve hard work, [and] that it could lead to unpleasant disagreements with the teacher that she would rather avoid” (130). After some students in the class seemed unwilling to consider affirmative action as a valid policy, the university’s affirmative action director came to speak to the class. Although the students had expressed concerns about the policy, none were willing to engage the director or ask questions of him.
He suggests that ground rules would help, “defin[ing] ground rules here not as rules or requirements in the traditional prescriptive sense of the term—due dates, length limits, homework assignments—but rather as teachers’ more tacit or underlying expectations of what students need to know and do in order to successfully carry out an academic task” (66). But this is not enough. Durst recommends that we adopt a policy he calls reflective instrumentalism, which takes into account students’ pragmatism and writing programs’ and teachers’ desire to teach critical thinking. He points out that “we create a large gulf between ourselves and our students by not respecting their goals” and we lose their cooperation (176). He describes a course built around the concept of reflective instrumentalism in which students explore their educational and career goals through “reading, thinking, talking, and writing” (178). Durst argues for writing courses to be places of negotiation between student and teacher expectations.
Durst only spends the last few pages of the book describing reflective instrumentalism, but through a quick Google search, I discovered that Clemson University’s Professional Communication program has revised its Master’s reading list based on Durst’s concept.
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