Writing About Violence and Other Ways to Introduce Controversy with Research Into The

Kimball 1

Kate Kimball

Writing about Violence and Other Ways to Introduce Controversy with Research Into the Composition Classroom: A Case Study Analysis

I had been teaching freshmen composition for about eight years and had grown to dread, and even resent, introducing the concept of controversy and research into the classroom. I had mixed experience—teaching at a research-one university, several community colleges, a for-profit college, and even within the prison system and the groans of apathy and disdain for research were all too common place. When I would go through my course evaluations at the end of the semester, I was struck by the staggering amount of anxiety that research seemed to purport to students. What was even more shocking was the amount of students who wrote comments such as, “I don’t think citations should matter” or “I don’t know why I am coming to college to find out what everybody else thinks. Doesn’t what I think matter?”

But, even though my students had a general sense of apathy when it came to research, I was very comfortable with teaching it and in fact, I far preferred the second semester class of college composition because of the research methodologies that I was able to introduce within my classroom. At Florida State, graduate students are given the opportunity to create their own second course of college composition and to integrate research however they see fit. This was an exciting prospect for me and as I pondered what I could formulate a class about, I kept coming back to my own scholarly interest in the rhetoric of violence. Violence, in fact, gendered violence was something that I am not only curious about, but it is something that I have enough passion for that I felt this would be a good topic for me to create my Freshmen Research Composition class around. In this paper, I am going to analyze what I learned about the rhetoric of violence while teaching ENC 1145 Writing about Violence at Florida State University. In addition, I will offer a practical application approach that will hopefully allow you to consider ways of introducing research, MLA, and intellectual curiosity inside your own classrooms, wherever they may be.

Part of what to consider when I was creating a “Writing about Violence” class was what my student’s prior knowledge would be on this topic. I wondered if it was going to be possible for my students to be able to make transfers of knowledge not only around the writing assignments, but also in regards to reading assignments, research projects, and basic matters of developing critical thinking and curiosity. In “Notes Toward a Theory of Prior Knowledge and Its Role in College Composers’ Transfer of Knowledge and Practice” by Liane Robertson, Kara Taczak, and Kathleen Blake Yancey, the writers start with, “[…]it’s a truism that students draw on prior knowledge when facing new tasks, and when that acquired knowledge doesn’t fit the new situation, successful transfer is less likely to occur; this is so in writing generally, but it’s especially so as students enter first-year composition classrooms in college. At the same time, whether students are guarding or crossing, they share a common high school background. Moreover, what this seems to mean for virtually all first-year college composition students, as the research literature documents but as we also learned from our students, is that as students enter college writing classes. There’s not only prior knowledge, but also an absence of prior knowledge, and in two important areas: (1) key writing concepts and (2) non-fiction texts that serve as models.”

What Robertson, Taczak, and Yancey show is that there is a “lack of prior knowledge” and that this lack surrounds basic concepts, which I would definitely argue surround research and MLA. However, I had a hard time believing that students would have a complete lack of knowledge when it came to the topic of violence. The newspapers and news feeds in general have been populated with disturbing events such as school shootings, domestic violence, and war. This could be my own bias because since I attended Virginia Tech for my MFA in 2007, it seemed like I came across shooting after shooting in the months that followed April 16, 2007. I saw them everywhere.

To begin an investigation into the rhetoric of violence, I began class constructing research-based questions. I invited students to join in this process—even if they were shy or didn’t care much for engaging within the classroom—I still called on each one and asked for a contribution. Some of the questions we began with were: What is violence? Does it have a stereotype? Is it always destructive? How does society both embrace and disdain violence and how is this contradictory and dialectical relationship shown in media? How is violence gendered? What is the difference between masculine and feminine forms of violence?

Beginning with questions worked with not only bringing us together in the research process as a class, but it helped invite curiosity. Why did the faces of school shooters generally belong to men? How was social media being used—as in the Island Vista Killings—to invite grandiose plans for destruction and how had violence grown as a competition? Working together as a class demonstrated the importance of forming strong questions. When a weak one was given, such as “Is violence bad?”—I would ask the class to rearrange the thinking. For example, this question could be rearranged to ask, “Is violence always destructive?”

After this exercise in forming questions, we worked to develop more of a foundation of knowledge. Because I could safely assume some knowledge on violence was limited, I worked to build discussion off of something common—such as the media. Maybe a freshmen student had somehow gotten through high school all the way to college without reading, but I doubted he or she would have made it this far without having watched violent movies or played violent videogames. Not only that—there were news programs and celebrity controversies to draw on. There were football scandals, mass media documenting all of the atrocities of ISIS. The controversy of violence was everywhere.

Because violence was everywhere, the topic was overwhelming. I had to think about my own interest in the topic so as not to overwhelm my students with all sorts of information. But, the more I studied the media, the more I became interested in the ways in which violence seemed to be “gendered.” Yet, the gender of violence could be too simple of a conversation. How many conversations have we had with freshmen where the obvious gender discrepancies in the media are evaluated? I wanted something more critical—and this brings the question of how to help develop knowledge transfers when it comes to research and the composition classroom.

In Robertson, Taczak, and Yancey’s article, they write, “In composition studies, several scholars have pursued ‘the transfer question.’ Michael Carter, Nancy Sommers and Laura Saltz, and Linda Bergmann and Janet Zepernick, for example, have theorized that students develop toward expertise, or “write into expertise”, when they understand the context in which the writing is situated and can make the abstractions that connect within a context, specifically the “activity system” in which the writing is situated, and that when students learn to make connections between contexts, they begin to develop toward expertise in understanding writing within any context, suggesting that transfer requires contextual knowledge.” Part of the key in investigating the rhetoric of violence was going to be using texts that provided a type of “contextual knowledge” and showcased some of the obvious, yet not simple, gender discrepancies within violence.

In order to discuss masculinity and violence, I chose to examine popular shows such as The Walking Dead and Breaking Bad and chose popular articles about those shows. Several writers have argued that the mass violence in The Walking Dead is obscene and not scary—that showing too much actually “kills” suspense…no pun intended. There is also the discussion of why this show is so popular. Not to sound like a killjoy—but how many times can you watch a rotting corpse get shot in the head?

This is where the discussion of rhetoric and audience becomes crucial. How does gender play a role here? The lead of The Walking Dead, Rick Grimes, is a male police officer and he embodies many of the Southern Masculine stereotypes—he is a family man, a moral figure, a gun owner and user. Perhaps there is also a gendering in audience. What are the claims that The Walking Dead seems to be making on its audience? How does it tend to demand a masculine ownership?

In addition, we narrowed our focus on masculinity and violence by reading about two-thirds of Dave Cullen’s Columbine. This was an important text to read—it is an important text to read—because it shows that research can make a topic much more interesting. Dave Cullen spent ten years researching high school shooters Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris before publishing this book and he managed to conduct a series of interviews with some of the victims, neighbors, and law enforcement officers. In addition, he went through the videotapes and journals that were left behind by the shooters.

Moving from The Walking Dead to Columbine was an interesting transition because it brought up the issue of competition. In The Walking Dead, there is constant competition over who is in charge. In a real-world school shooting, the killers of Columbine aimed to kill hundreds, even thousands. They wanted everyone to know their names and years later, in 2007, the Virginia Tech shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, would cite the Columbine High School shooting as being an inspiration to his attack.

In the classroom, we were able to dissect the rhetoric of masculinity, to pull in scholarly sources from writers like Michael Kimmel, and discuss the issue of competition and how violence was often grandiose, a matter of out-doing another, a bragging right. This is a stark contrast to femininity and violence. Men directed their violence outwards—and even though many shootings end in suicide, there is something grandiose and full of showmanship in these acts. For women, this is different.

We began by considering issues of self-violence that many women face and studied some of the rhetoric around self-loathing and violence. The text I drew on was Kelsey Osgood’s How to Disappear Completely, which is about her journey through anorexia. The debate about anorexia is often limited to a discussion and resulting blame for the media. But, Osgood talks about the pride that comes with standing out with having a disease and she illustrates many of the problems with being hospitalized and the competition that comes with being perceived as being “sicker” than the other patients. We also tied this discussion into articles that we read on self-mutilating and other forms of violence.

The circumstances between masculinity and femininity and violence were different, but the motives had some solidarity. There was competition, social media, and a hint of narcissism. Osgood rhetorically analyzes the documentary Thin, which is based on the Renfrew Eating Disorder Treatment Center in Florida. Drawing on media—we were able to watch part of this documentary and discuss what we noticed about the patients, who tended to embody a weak victim role that bordered on sainthood. There seemed to be something triumphant about not eating for days and then weeks and then months. Was it real commitment to go without food for so long that one needed a feeding tube? The women in the documentary tended to nit-pick at each other, to size each other up, and to pass judgment.

In class, our discussions revolved around the differences between the violence of men and women. There were men—if equipped with enough ammunition and the wrong mindset—could wreck devastation on entire communities. Then, there were women—who came with the same kind of commitment but tended to turn it inward, blaming themselves. The process of transferring research into a paper became interesting for students at this point because they had a controversy to try to form an opinion on. This issue was urgent and real—and it became even more that way towards the end of the semester.

Right before Thanksgiving Break, we had a shooting on campus in the Strozier Library. A student was critically injured and the shooter was killed by law enforcement. Not only that, the media was descending upon the incident in a way that felt all too familiar to me. The incident was made larger than life—I had friends in Ireland and Japan asking if I was okay, if school was safe. Not only that, I had students who had been in the library and had heard the shooting. Some of them wanted to leave for home immediately; others were not sure if they could return. This was a very difficult situation to navigate through. On the one hand, I did not want to discount the discomfort of my students. On the other hand, I did not want to give into fear, especially after watching what Virginia Tech had gone through and how school had to continue—even shortly after the shooting. But, the one thing I learned the most from this incident is the importance of never losing sight of a rhetorical teaching opportunity.

Part of the controversy with violence is the communication with the community of images and word choices that tend to “sensationalize” violence and tend to distance viewers from the events. The media tends to make the incident “larger-than-life,” but at the same time, it becomes cartoonish, difficult, distancing. At Virginia Tech, we quickly learned that we had to draw together and discuss what had happened on our campus. Even people who did not know any of the victims felt deeply affected by the incident and this became something important to discuss and explore. However, it was almost impossible to discuss feelings with those who had not been at Virginia Tech at the time of the shooting or who were not affiliated with the school at all. The rhetoric around the violence quickly became an issue of “insider” vs. “outsider” and the media was partly responsible for bringing this division about.

At Virginia Tech, the rhetoric became “We Are Virginia Tech: We Will Prevail,” a line taken from Professor Nikki Giovanni’s hopeful poem that was delivered shortly after the shooting. This piece of prose became listed on shop windows, on t-shirts, on bumper stickers and began to symbolize a community that was impacted by a masculine act of violence. It was a way to never forget what had happened—but it was a way to stop paying homage to the shooter. At Florida State, we also began to notice the rhetoric that began cropping up. “FSU United” and “United We Stand” became popular slogans found around campus. These signaled a demand for hope and a way to not live under the rhetoric of fear. Not only did it help to discuss the rhetorical moves that were happening on campus at the time, it also helped with assigning homework and group assignments in regards to research and analyzing violence.

In conclusion, while teaching research and developing writing assignments that can help assess knowledge transfer can pose difficulties, having a strong controversy to examine can assist an instructor with overcoming those difficulties. Violence is a current issue of our times, but it also is an issue that directly affects college students. The subject, therefore, invites curiosity and interest. The rhetoric of violence is gendered, where social media has become instrumental in making destruction look glamorous and alluring. Teaching Columbine allowed a thorough investigation into a difficult topic and aided our classroom discussions because of Dave Cullen’s strong use of research and intriguing prose. After teaching this text, I had several students tell me they recommended it to other friends and roommates. Likewise, Kelsey Osgood’s How to Disappear Completely offers critical insight into the competition that is found inside the world of eating disorders and it moves an audience away from a simplistic view of eating disorders as being caused by the media. Drawing on the rhetorical knowledge of scholars such as Kathleen Blake Yancey allows greater insight into the demands for knowledge transfer in the composition classroom. While students may never be “thrilled” to learn MLA or use other sources, it sometimes is simply a matter of finding the write topic, especially one that you as the instructor are interested in, to help bridge the gap.