Tricks of the trade

Posted on | May 5, 2005 |

Today I get to do something I’ve always wanted, and I’m sure will always want to do: give a seminar on writing. Oooh and I get to teach a night class for the first time, so I’m feeling all Workers’ Education vibe-y (alas yes, I know it’s really just another way for universities to make money by getting mature-age students on campus after work). Anyway, going over some notes I took from Bourdieu’s Academic Discourse, I realise I never got around to posting them. And remembering an earlier discussion here about the attractions of dilettantism, in this passage Bourdieu describes the paradoxical relationship between teacher and student which is based on an agreed disagreement:

By refusing any real measure of the quality of communication between them, teachers and students enter into an agreement, and this does not presuppose some kind of contract, even an unconscious one. Each individual stands in a relationship of bad faith towards the role he plays. He knows there is misunderstanding, and also that he must carry on as if there were not. For otherwise he would be compelled to abandon the benefits of maintaining it. Thus teacher and student find in the relationship of their partner to the environment of misunderstanding the best way of perpetuating the relationship that each has with himself.

Professor and student, even when their demands on the teaching relationship clash, can therefore only acquiesce in a system of deep expectations in which the desire to maximize output refuses to pay the price of abandoning security. The professor, to take just one example, can retain the comfort and the gratifications of prestige which come from delivering lectures ex cathedra, and at the same time exhort his students to be more active; while, for their part, students can retain, as his complicit adversaries, the security of anonymity and the satisfactions of dilettantism, all the while vehemently demanding a total revolution in teaching.

It’s a fascinating argument: teachers complain about how bad their students are, but do nothing to change the power structures that contribute to their students’ dissatisfaction - namely, a fear of appearing the fool by revealing their misunderstanding and their insufficiently developed ability to replicate appropriate academic speech. Meanwhile, the students complain to each other that they can’t understand their lecturers, yet still go about trying to emulate a style they ostensibly don’t like.

In a later chapter of the same book, Christian Baudelot provides a study of ‘Student Rhetoric in Exams’. This sheds more light on the strategies students employ as they struggle through the painful process of initiation into the school institution, which is to say a middle-class mode of writing and valuing. Baudelot concludes:

School is able to make the manipulation of the language of ideas the unquestionable sign of human and personal qualities, and the essay can be this dramatic enterprise of gambling a future on words; but all the while teachers and students never cease to share their contempt for the art of rhetoric. Their scorn may be simply a mask against self-contempt; perhaps by concealing the true criteria of academic judgement from themselves, along with the particular cultural qualities which these sanction, they may succeed in forgetting just what the concepts of ‘eloquence’, ‘ease’ and ‘richness’ (even philosophical) owe to the echoes of a class.

Baudelot calls the ‘prophylactic technique’ that method whereby students ‘conjure up spells’ by the ‘multiplication of gestures of prudence’:

… deliberated attention is given to diverting the examiner by depriving him of every opportunity of detecting true error in the web of rhetorical language. The student ensures that each affirmation is qualified by the possibility of its negation, and situates the discussion at such a great distance from concrete example that while he, for his part, would find it difficult to prove the necessity of any proposition, it becomes impossible for the examiner to prove that anything is false.

These are the top 10 student strategies he’s talking about. I left out the examples, but I’m sure those of you in marking hell are encountering plenty.

a) The use of indefinite expressions
b) Attenuations
c) Timid approximations
d) False particularization
e) False exemplification
f) Absence of examples
g) ‘Purple’ truths
h) Empty abstraction
i) Peremptory tone
j) Prophylactic relativism

I think there’s a link to be made between these writing styles and the modes of academic performance Eve Sedgwick attacks in her essay, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You.’ But that’s a task I’ll leave for my book.

Category: Teaching

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