In Downs's "Teaching First-Year Writers to Use Texts," he argues that teachers of FYW ought to assign scholarly readings, but in so doing, they shouldn't require them to read them correctly and/or at a high level of expertise. Instead, we should treat students as temporary apprentices to a community of practice, namely, Writing Studies. But the point of apprenticing students to Writing Studies like this isn't to train them for academia; the point is to give them the occasion to become a better writer. To do this, teachers have to treat scholarly readings like tools.
However, what is meant by "tool" needs some specifying. Momentarily, I was tempted to oppose tool to container, then I thought about opposing a tool in context to one out of context. But it's not like students of FYW are out of context to articles in Writing Studies per se; it's just that they're not the intended audience. In fact, students are partly the subject of those articles, so, in a way, students are supposed to understand the articles as somehow about or to them. While Downs doesn't use this language, I think the move is topological; that is, a Writing about Writing pedagogy gets scholarly texts to do something they weren't designed to do (see Boyle; Latour; Sayre & Brown), that is, offer students of FYW an introduction to writing in the disciplines.
I say "topological" also because using texts in this way is ostensibly meant to solve a problem inherent to writing to learn in the disciplines--that problem being a circularity of knowing where to appropriately place the manicules on a complex, disciplinary text (Horning; Nowacek & James, 2017, p. 301). That is, you need the right background knowledge in order to know where to place the manicules, but, in order to acquire the right background knowledge, you need to read the passages that the manicules ought to be placed on. Downs's trick is to only focus on Writing Studies articles that students can relate to. That way, he doesn't have to scaffold the readings like Horning does (see her use of Harold Herber). And that he wouldn't have to scaffold the readings makes sense: he chooses articles that are on topics that students are intimately familiar with--topics like writer's block and procrastination. What's more, he chooses older articles, which tend to contain much more accessible language. But the point is, Downs changes the nature of the problem by ceasing to treat students at outsiders; instead, he treats them as exceptional subjects: by being able to relate to and work with these articles on a personal level, students are both insiders and outsiders at the same time.
In part, I understand Downs to be responding to folks like Gogan and Horning, both of whom try to develop a theory of reading. However, Downs's main interlocutor is Horning (2011), who theorizes expert literacy as
... as the psycholinguistic processes of getting meaning from or putting meaning into print and/or sound, images, and movement, on a page or screen, used for the purposes of analysis, synthesis, evaluation and application; these processes develop through formal schooling and beyond it, at home and at work, in childhood and across the lifespan and are essential to human functioning in a democratic society. (p. 4)As Downs (2010) himself says, "To name categories of cognitive operations simply begs the question, what kind of analysis, synthesis, or evaluation is it that we intend to teach - the kind used in literary criticism, in political science, in chemistry, in music?" (n. pg). Downs derives this line of thinking (that there is no such thing as reading in general) from his theoretical framework, which is based on communities of practice (Lave and Wenger) and activity theory (Russell). Here, then, we ought to note a diametrical opposition to not only Horning, but also Carillo, the latter who try to teach reading as a kind of general skill (Carillo, 2015, p. 15). It is therefore interesting to note how Carillo
... call[s] for teaching students how to learn to read rather than arguing for a particular reading approach. This call is modeled on Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs’s theory that, rather than teaching students “how to write,” we should teach them “ ‘how to learn’ to write” (2011: 21). One of the foundational arguments for their writing about writing pedagogy is that it fosters the transfer of learning by generalizing principles of writing rather than expecting students to develop mastery in one. Rather than thinking about which type of reading to teach in first-year composition, we would be wise to reframe the question altogether, following the lead of Wardle and Downs. They are interested in how they can help students construct knowledge about writing in order to prepare students to effectively use this knowledge to make determinations about their writing in various and future contexts. Similarly, mindful reading offers the framework for supporting students’ construction of knowledge about reading. (p. 12)I'm not really going anywhere with this. But I will point out that you can really hear Carillo talking back to Downs when she says, "Rather than thinking about which type of reading to teach in first-year composition, we would be wise to reframe the question altogether" (p. 12).
In sum, from activity theory and communities of practice Downs derives a theory of what reading is--a theory that is somewhat opposed to Carillo's and Horning's. For Downs (2010), reading is a social use-act (n. pg). And what that means could be summed up in this quote: "...it is in using the texts - simultaneously the harder and easier thing to do - that the texts become read" (n. pg). That is, experts of a community of practice don't read texts per se, if what is meant by "reading" is sitting there trying to figure out what to do with this text--what is means, whether this reading is accurate or useful, etc. In a way, we see this lack of reading in Charney (1993), too, since the professors are the ones who are quick to dismiss a text on terms of validity. Still thinking in terms of Charney, can a theory of reading take into account both graduate students and faculty's reading practices? that is, since they are so different? Either way, Downs's point is that FYW students are more like the faculty in Charney's study than we give them credit for (a point echoed by Nowacek & James, 2017): if nothing else, both are highly critical of the articles they read. As Downs (2010) says, "Unlike what we see demonstrated in Homing's and similar reactions to students' reading, WAW teachers anticipate and accept the difficulties students have working with scholarly texts" (n. pg). Downs sees student resistances and hesitations as an asset. For example,
The notion of provisionality can be addressed straight out of students' frustrations with writers who refuse to "just answer the question" or draw a simple conclusion. When we've read, for example, Haas and Flower's article on rhetorical reading, students are quick to point out that the writers don't do what they say they want to, which is tell how to teach rhetorical reading. The writers' "failure" feeds conversations about writers' purposes, goals, and responsibilities to other scholars. (n. pg)In Downs, then, we can see a sort of continuous rhetoric (Boyle) in the way that the difficulty in question is mobilized for a teachable moment. In this case, Downs's goal is to teach students what counts as an argument at the university, and what better way to teach that idea than to get students to perceive an article's limitations! It would seem then that Downs's answer to the question, how do you get students to read critically? is to select the right articles, for it is only on the basis of selecting the right article that students will be able to make use of their own personal experience for the purposes of critique. As a kind of aside, I might also note how Downs's strategy is to adjust the situation itself so as to empower students (see Thévenot 2004; also refer to that Carillo block quote above).
Downs (2010) is emphatic about the need to select the right, disciplinary text: "...a general education course must teach transferable knowledge about reading and writing, but cannot do so without centering on disciplinary texts" (n. pg). Why do students have to read these specific texts, though? The answer lies with a theory of how learning takes place, which again he gets from communities of practice and activity theory. To learn, you have to do something authentic. If you want to learn how to weld, you don't necessarily read a book about welding; rather, you go hang out with a welder and actually practice welding. Backpedaling a little bit, I'm now inclined to say, maybe it's not that Downs doesn't scaffold his readings; it's that he scaffolds differently. I'm also tempted to say that Horning scaffolds for cognition, whereas Downs scaffolds for action. Downs's scaffolding seems more material and less epistemic. Either way, his arguments relies on two big steps. If we want students to learn, then we have to get them to do what experts actually do. But since what we're getting students to lean is reading, since since there is no such thing as reading in general, then we have to get real about our own disciplinarity. We can't pretend to be something we're not.
I used the word "material" a second ago. A word that doesn't get used in this article is "disposition." But I feel like the whole purpose of this reading pedagogy is to get students to change their disposition toward argumentation, if I can put it that way. The point is to dispose them differently towards argumentation, so that they approach argument as though it were plastic (recalling Haas and Flower's distinction between knowledge-getting and knowledge telling, not to mention Wardle's distinction between answer-getting and problem-setting dispositions). The battle to do this, though, is an uphill one, and Downs mentions seven "culture shocks"--one of which is that students aren't disposed to scholarly texts visually; they are de facto allergic to things like small print, dry language, long-winded and repetitious prose, technical jargon, etc. What's more, I take it that Downs's gripe with psycholinguistic theories of reading is that they don't take students' dispositions seriously enough. But to be fair to people like Horning, it's not like she teaches FYW. And Downs is trying to establish a role for the institution of FYW itself. The function of FYW is this: "we're teaching students how to learn to write (in specific sites of writing activity when they reach them)" (n. pg). In other words, universities need the institution of FYW, since it re-situates students to things like argument before they get to the disciplines proper:
Changing how students read - which most people focused on college students' reading are invested in - requires not simply teaching the comprehension-based general "skills" of analysis, evaluation, and synthesis that Horning imagines (par. 4), but rather entire new concepts of what reading is, why people read, why there is a text to begin with, and the work that texts do for the people they were written for and by. Trying to incorporate this teaching into disciplinary courses across campus would both create tremendous redundancy and a major "time-sink" as courses devoted to subject-matter instruction could get bogged down in these more general principles of textual communication; but in contrast, locating this instruction in first-year writing courses, which most university students encounter, both creates a "home" for this more general nondisciplinary reading instruction and centers the course on what it is already supposed to be about, aspects of written communication. (Downs, 2010, n. pg)And there you have it.
To end this, I merely want to note that I'm confused about how Downs teaches a number of articles on the rhetorical situation. I get that he's trying to get students to experience argument as conversation, but I don't see how this fits into his argument that texts need to be relatable.
And this is neither here nor there, but it's also interesting how both Downs and Carillo emphasize the need for the link between rhetoric and composition, despite how differently they think of those links.
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