Download PDFTeaching Writing as Care Work
Due to the historical and ongoing feminization of composition, teaching writing has come to involve caring labor. Feminization refers to the association of composition with “women’s work,” which scholars trace to the creation of writing programs in the 20th century (Schell, 1992; Strickland, 2001). As Sue Ellen Holbrook (1991) explains, women’s work “has a disproportionate number of women workers; it is service-oriented; it pays less than men’s work; it is devalued” (p. 202). Although most precariously employed writing instructors do identify as women, the kind of work writing teachers do outweighs individual gender in this analysis. Multiple writing studies scholars (O’Donnell, 2019; Robinson, 2021; Schell, 1998) have labeled that work as care work. Heather Robinson (2021) provides a comprehensive definition of care work for writing studies, viewing it as “activities that academic staff undertake to support students’ learning, and to support students’ and other colleagues’ emotional health and academic advancement” (p. 5). While this interpretation of care may encompass all teaching, Robinson differentiates composition as “high-care teaching,” requiring “increased administrative expectations” and “‘student-centered’ learning” (2021, p. 12). Like care work outside of the university, teaching writing is labor-intensive but underpaid and undervalued.
Writing teachers continue to work despite this low pay because teaching writing often feels good. The rush of successfully helping a student improve may convince us to put more time and energy into teaching. Eileen Schell (1998) terms these “emotional rewards … a ‘psychic income’” that “keep[s] women invested in teaching” (p. 82). This becomes a problem, as Theresa Evans (2017) explains, when the psychic income justifies writing teachers’ low pay. Evans calls this “the myth of self-sacrifice,” or “the belief that unpaid or poorly compensated work is acceptable when it serves some greater civic or moral good—even in contexts when taking on such work subjects the worker to extreme hardship” (2017, p. 86). While the un(der)paid care work involved in teaching writing can feel very rewarding, it ultimately contributes to the precarious status of our labor.
Importantly, however, care work does not always require a caring affect. Schell (1998), Rachel O’Donnell (2019), and Robinson (2021) each categorize the teaching of writing as care work regardless of whether it is accompanied by the warm, fuzzy feelings we might commonly associate with care. Indeed, as Ersula Ore (2017) demonstrates, her care for students as a Black woman “is not comfortable” and can in fact appear “downright abrasive” (p. 24). The specific contours of care work vary according to individual instructors’ positionalities, with institutional structures calling on women of color to perform more care work for less recognition (O’Donnell, 2019; Robinson, 2021; Schell, 1998). Furthermore, care work in composition has historically and continues to uphold white supremacy (DeLong, 2020; Strickland, 2001) and patriarchy (Schell, 1998). Not only does care work contribute to the exploitation of writing instructors, but it can also—if unintentionally—reproduce systems of oppression. This is the fraught working environment GSIs enter.