The living scholarship of composition studies: A case for students-as-scholarship

At the heart of the 1987 statement on the range of scholarship in composition is the interdisciplinarity of the scholarship that makes up our field. In their recent CCC article, Day, Delagrange, Palmquist, Pemberton, and Walker make a strong case for redefining some of the scholarly work many of us do, which includes activities like digital and new media publishing, editorial work, administration and leadership work, and mentoring. But I think our teaching is also part of our scholarship, even though I realize that usually we are judged separately on our teaching in hiring, tenure, and promotion venues. While teaching has always been seen as separate, I argue that our scholarship and teaching "inter-are," to use a Buddhist term (Nhat Hanh 145-46). They share in each other's essences, and because they do, perhaps future versions of the statement could reflect this.It is thrilling for me as a teacher of writing to design a new course, even when it's the same first-year writing course with the same course number. Each year there is a new theme or new practice to try. One year, the course is an exploration of masculinity in U.S. popular culture. The next year, students "compose" memes and vines and then reflect on the ways those compositions engage particular rhetorical issues. And the next year, the course is a self-conscious study of rhetoric, examining our daily speaking and writing practices at home, at work, and in other classes as rhetoric in communities. Most college courses and subjects don't have this flexibility, this interdisciplinarity. The writing classroom does because that is the nature of rhetoric, of writing, of language, of being wholly human. So in one sense what the writing class produces is more whole people.Teaching is an integral part of the way the field understands itself, and the teaching of writing itself is interdisciplinary scholarship. Certainly our teaching informs our scholarship. When we teach writing, we are always producing from that teaching, and that is scholarship, just not the same published kind that counts so much in the academy. The scholarship of bodies, of students-the living scholarship that is our students-seems so much more important to me than an article or book that eventually will collect dust on a library shelf. The living scholarship of our students goes out into the world and produces lives, and things, and joy, and pain, and connection. It's just not an item on our CVs, not like a publication is. And it cannot be.I am reminded of Plato's Phaedrus, a dialogue about rhetoric, the soul, and love, but given to us as a scene of a teacher and a student talking. In the best interpretation, it's a dialogue about learning together by studying language and words that lead to other interdisciplinary studies of the soul, of justice, of truth, of language. It's a story about a student who is becoming in front of a teacher (in all the ways that word can mean). As scholars and teachers, we haven't strayed very far from Plato, and that's good, I think.How might the CCCC statement represent the importance of the production of this kind of human(e) scholarship? Instead of books and articles, many (most) of us teach, not publish. We make citizen-scholars themselves. The position statement should demonstrate how important this kind of scholarship is to a more just and equitable world. The most important influence most of us will have is in the people we teach. How might the statement communicate to others that the writing classroom is almost always a backdrop, the scene of all scholarship in the field, but it is also the foreground, the real work we do? …