THE CEA FORUM - Winter/Spring 2014 - On Writer’s Block: A Study of Disciplinary Negotiations in the Faculty Office and Classroom

Oct 15, 2026

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THE CEA FORUM (Winter/Spring 2014) presents Andrea Scott’s study on disciplinary negotiations that affect writing productivity in composition contexts. Scott describes the tension between teaching writing and publishing research, drawing on her experiences as a compositionist and on scholarship including Maxine Hairston’s “When Writing Teachers Don’t Write.” The essay examines how anxiety, institutional undervaluing, and limited scholarly mentorship impede disciplinary authority and peer-reviewed writing.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLiterature

FormatPDF

Pages20

Reading Time31 min

AccessFree to download

On Writer’s Block: A Study of Disciplinary Negotiations in the Faculty Office and Classroom

Teaching Writing Without Writing: Scott’s Paradox

Hairston’s Account of Anxiety and Institutional Context

Expertise, Authority, and the Shift Toward Evidence

THE CEA FORUM Winter/Spring 2014 On Writer’s Block: A Study of Disciplinary Negotiations in the Faculty Office and Classroom Andrea Scott Pitzer College When I transitioned into a full-time career as a compositionist, I found myself grappling with a paradox: I taught writing, but didn’t write. Well, that isn’t true. I did a lot of writing, just not the kind that brought much professional recognition in my new field. I ’d like to think I had good reasons not to write: keeping my previous position wasn’t contingent on publishing in the discipline and there were many institutional obstacles to integrating writing into my day. Like most writing program administrators, I juggled teaching and programmatic responsibilities that kept me busy, if not frantic, during the year. But lately I ’ve been asking myself why I had difficulty protecting this research from the incursion of other responsibilities. I wanted to write, taught writing at a respected research university, considered writing studies my new disciplinary home, and had written over a thousand pages of comments on student essays, yet still hadn’t published a peer-reviewed article in the field. I knew I ’d cultivated insights into the study and teaching of writing, yet had a difficult time envisioning where to begin and to whom I would write. Of course, writing studies scholars have been concerned with versions of this topic since the discipline’s founding. In 1986, Maxine Hairston argued in “When Writing Teachers Don’t Write” that instructors are stymied by the “fear of making one’s self vulnerable by putting something down on paper for others to examine and evaluate”(63), a claim that now seems outdated given how so many of us regularly put ourselves in public contexts where our THE CEA FORUM Winter/Spring 2014 perspectives may be controversial—advocating for resources for our instructors and articulating visions for our programs sometimes in tension with the beliefs of influential members of our institutions. Further in the essay, Hairston’s assessment hits closer to home. Anxiety about writing is exacerbated among composition teachers, she argues, because we’re more likely as a group to have strong commitments to the risks and rewards of writing, yet often teach in institutional contexts where writing productivity is undervalued and scholarly mentors less accessible (63-66). Hairston speaks to a collective form of guilt when she claims that “[t]eachers who do not engage in the writing process themselves cannot adequately understand the complex dynamics ofthe process, cannot empathize with their students ’problems, and are in no position either to challenge or to endorse the recommendations and admonitions ofthe textbooks they are using”(62) . While I consider myself fortunate to have had access to supportive mentors and resources along the way, I saw not writing as a form of disenfranchisement, a disavowal of the scholar’s commitment to wrestle with complex ideas in a community invested in the truthfulness of claims. Writing, for me, has always been a means of stepping away from the narrow confines of urgent tasks to ask the unanswerable questions that sustain our work. Good writing translates paralysis into curiosity, the commonplace into the strange; it ’s also the stage where we return to the roots of our disciplinary training and participate in a conversation that ’s larger than our offices or classrooms. But here the question of expertise becomes tricky, particularly for those of us who have migrated to the field of rhetoric and composition from the once (and in some departments still) adjacent field of literary studies. I developed an interest in writing studies at the University of Chicago, where I completed my doctoral degree in comparative literature. Early in my studies, I THE CEA FORUM Winter/Spring 2014 began attending workshops with the late Wayne Booth and was trained in the teaching of writing by the Little Red Schoolhouse, a prod

FAQs

What paradox does Andrea Scott describe about teaching writing and not writing?

Scott taught writing while struggling to publish peer-reviewed work in the field, despite doing extensive writing through teaching and feedback.

How does Maxine Hairston’s argument relate to Scott’s experience?

Hairston links anxiety about writing to composition teachers’ commitments and to institutional settings that undervalue writing productivity and reduce access to scholarly mentors.

What challenges arise around expertise when moving into writing studies from other disciplines?

Scott raises questions about when a practitioner-scholar becomes expert enough to enter scholarly conversations, noting concerns about belated arrival and shifting methodologies toward data-driven approaches.

Oct 15, 2026

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