Rochelle Harris: Encouraging Emergent Moments Essay (Article Review)

The primary concern of Rochelle Harris’ article “Encouraging Emergent Moments: The Personal, Critical and Rhetorical in the Writing Classroom” (2004) is to explore a new approach to teaching composition classes to students. She introduces this approach as an imperfect fusion of three different literary disciplines – nonfiction literature, rhetoric and composition and critical pedagogy. Throughout the article, she makes the argument that creative writing, using the less-restricted language and approach of nonfiction writing, can be the key to teaching students the important elements of critical pedagogy, rhetoric and composition.

The author acknowledges some limitations from the beginning, pointing out the need for individualized attention and the ability to point students to a variety of samples within their interest field, but she spends the rest of the article illustrating the vast degree to which these efforts are more effective, both short and long term, for student learning. “I am arguing that a critical writing pedagogy with a primary goal of having students claim their own agency and become active participants in critiquing and transforming unjust social institutions happens at the intersections of the personal-critical-rhetorical” (402). In making this argument, the author creates two new terms to refer to her ideas – the personal-critical-rhetorical by which is meant the combination of individual experiences, critical thinking skills and rhetorical ability; and the emergent moment by which is meant the convergence in the student’s text of these various perspectives.

The author’s argument is then supported on a building framework of reason beginning with the theories that have been brought forward by educators, moving to a study of the importance of narrative in discovering the critical voice and then applying this to an individual case study of one of her students, finally bringing the whole thing together by considering classroom implications of such an approach. In her discussion of critical pedagogy as defined by theorist-practitioners, the author leans heavily on the ideas of Peter McLaren and Ellen Cushman as well as several others to first define the practice and then reveal how her approach meets these criteria better than other forms of essay-writing assignments. Having shown that the personal narrative is already an essential element of critical pedagogy, the author then pulls on the work of creative authors Lynn Bloom and Wendy Bishop to prove that the narrative is necessary to tease out the connections between the disciplines. With this background, the author then reveals her own emergent moment when she was working with an individual student and realized the importance of this new approach to teaching writing. This experience with her student enabled the author to adjust her own approach to teaching and she turns now to discussing how this approach can be implemented within the traditional classroom.

By ending her article with practical examples of how to implement her approach into the traditional writing classroom, the author makes a very strong argument for change in the way writing teachers approach their subject. Her proofs as to the desirability both for the student and for the community at large are strong and well-researched while her emphasis on application makes it easier for the reader to ‘see’ how the results happen. This is a well-written article, well organized and convincing in its content.

Works Cited

Harris, Rochelle. “Encouraging Emergent Moments: The Personal, Critical and Rhetorical in the Writing Classroom.” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition and Culture. Duke University Press: Vol. 4, N. 3, (2004).