Autonomous Writing Groups and Radical Equality: An Innovative Approach to University Writing

This paper presents a program for a university writing group, ran as a trial in Germany, that differs from common writing groups by allowing writers a high level of autonomy and choice. To theoretically frame this writing group model, we draw on the French philosopher Jacques Rancière and his presupposition of a radical equality of intelligence. Findings suggest that the use of these writing groups provide a foundation for students to experience academic writing in ways that are more playful, creative, and joyful, without feeling inferior and increasing students’ awareness of their own intelligence, capacity and creativity. By coupling grounded analysis with theoretical reflections, and a set of questions to guide practice, this paper outlines how this program could be relevant for writing educators, curriculum developers, and other faculties in higher educational institutions across global contexts.


Introduction
writing for agreed purposes" (2014, p. 7, emphasis added), the core activities become doing, discussing and sharing writing. Sarah Haas (2014) has expanded these three activities into a complex typology of writing groups, with eleven categories and numerous sub-categories, thus highlighting the diversity of approaches to writing groups.
Although we agree with Haas that no one writing group will be the same as any other, it is nevertheless our aim in this paper to suggest that a shared set of (theoretical) presuppositions lead to writing groups operating (in practice) in certain ways. For example, observing the field of writing pedagogy in higher education, the in-meeting activities of most writing groups in university contexts focus on discussing or sharing writing. If they include the doing of writing, they often use self-directed writing, in which each student writes on their own text with the goal of getting the writing (on class assignments, dissertations, etc.) done in the motivating company of other writers. In the initiative that we present here, the main differentiating feature is that the students themselves create their own writing prompts. Their goal is to generate and collect diverse writing experiences. The group then reacts in writing to these prompts during their sessions and immediately share their texts and discuss their experiences. In this sense, they not only "do, discuss and share" writing, but they also design and shape the writing experience, a task usually reserved for teachers in positions of formalized/institutionalized authority. We will analyze the practices of these autonomous writing groups in more detail below (Section 3), after first outlining the theoretical framework and concepts with which we will read the observations on how this program unfolded in practice.

Thinking with Theory: Rancière and the Equality of Intelligence
As hinted above, this paper picks up on an ongoing discussion in educational research on how empirical research might provide insights into pedagogical practices without reducing the observable to overly simplistic models, which "tidy up" the "messiness" of social interaction, teaching and learning (Lather, 2017;Law, 2004;Adams St. Pierre, 2011). A recent intervention recommends scholars to "think with theory" as a mode of data analysis, that is, to "plug in" data to theoretical reflections and concepts to find a "language and way of thinking methodologically and philosophically together" (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. vii). The overall goal is to describe what we observe in our data as complex and multilayered, and to recall that we are observing eminently political practices. The goal of thinking with theory is also to interrogate the epistemologies and presuppositions underlying the methodologies as well as the pedagogical programs and models in the field of writing composition (see, for instance, Masny & Cole, 2009).

Canadian Journal for Studies in Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie
Volume 28, 2018 http://journals.sfu.ca/cjsdw 85 To this end, in this paper we draw on a set of concepts from Rancière's work, and "plug in" data which emerged in previous research by the first author. Our hope is that our reading of Rancière can add a fresh perspective on the question of authority, equality and autonomy in student-teacher relations in composition studies. While we do not mean to imply that the program we will describe here is the only approach to writing pedagogy which offers a useful reflection on these issues, we do hope that thinking this concrete example of a successful program will illustrate the pedagogic possibilities of Rancière's work in today's writing curricula.
When Rancière wrote The Ignorant Schoolmaster in France in the late 1980s (Rancière, 1991), it seemed to many a somewhat bizarre intervention into the educational debates of the time. The book tells the story of Jacotot; how he taught at the University of Leuven without speaking Flemish, with students who spoke no French; how he developed an unusual method of teaching in this particular situation; how he gave his students copies of a bilingual volume of Fénelon's Télémaque and had them read, recite and repeat over and over until they had finished the book; how he was astonished at their ability to write essays in French about the book. The Ignorant Schoolmaster tells of Jacotot's unusual teaching method, of his growing conviction that the teacher need not know more than the student, and of the fate of this method at the hands of institutional administrations of the time.
What relevance did the story of Joseph Jacotot, a French teacher driven into exile in Flanders in 1818, have for the daily concerns of teachers in France teaching immigrant children, or for educationalists trying to understand and counteract how the educational system reproduced social inequalities? As Kristin Ross writes in her introduction to the English translation, only a few French reviewers of Rancière's book in the late 1980s interpreted it as she invites American and British readers to read it after the legacies of Reaganism and Thatcherism (or, one could add today, in the Trump era): "as an essay, or perhaps a fable or parable, that enacts an extraordinary philosophical meditation on equality" (Rancière, 1991, p. ix). Indeed, the radical understanding of equality that Rancière formulates in this book can be seen as one of the defining features of his (political) theory which he developed further in later work (see, for example, Rancière 1991Rancière , 1999Rancière , 2007. We see the following three aspects of Rancière's intervention into educational debates as particularly relevant to writing pedagogy: (i) the current governing presupposition of intellectual inequality and the role of explanation in enacting this stultifying presupposition, (ii)

Intellectual (in)equality
It seems almost a common-sense assertion to state that current educational systems across the globe reproduce social inequalities. A common conclusion drawn by educationalists is thus that "those who know," that is, teachers or sociologists, must do something to educate and emancipate "those who do not know," that is, students or students' parents. Rancière's strongest intervention into this self-evident conclusion is to reflect on the logic of the pedagogical relationship. The very aim to reduce the distance between teacher and student is, he suggests, what constructs a distance and a hierarchy between the two. The teacher creates lessons (readings, tasks, assignments) to reduce the gulf between her knowledge and the ignorance of the student. To do this, she must, however, always remain one step ahead of the student. Why?
The reason is simple, according to Rancière: in a pedagogical logic, the "ignoramus" (he uses the word ironically) is not simply someone who does not yet know what the schoolmaster (sic) knows-she is the one who does not know what she does not know and does not know how to begin to know it. For his part, the schoolmaster is not only the one who possesses the knowledge unknown by the allegedly ignorant learner. He is also the one who knows that he knows it; he knows how to make it an object of knowledge, at what point and in accordance with what protocol (see Rancière, 2007, p. 8).
The teacher, in other words, is thought to have the methodological competence to create structured lessons in accordance with particular curricula. The teacher-or the policy, curriculum or writing program-decides in what order which content and which competencies are to be addressed; they decide which learning outcomes are appropriate for this particular the autonomous writing groups as presented here can lay the groundwork for students in institutions of higher education to experience writing with fewer feelings of inferiority and with more verification and awareness of their own intelligence, capacity, and creativity. The presuppositions which undergird the program presented here can be explicitly enacted while developing and/or implementing programs tailored to specific institutions.

Endnotes
1. Correspondence may be addressed to girgensohn@europa-uni.de 2. As the second section in this paper will describe in more detail, we do not refer to "intelligence" here in the psychological sense of a testable intelligence quotient, nor to theories of emotional intelligence or multiple intelligences, each of which assume that some individuals are "more capable" in certain spheres and others are "less capable" Instead, we draw on Jacque Rancière's quite unusual take, in which IQ scores are only different "manifestations" of intelligence (Rancière 1991, p. 27). Intelligence itself, on the other hand, is something we all share: Each of us "observes, selects, compares, interprets" (Rancière 2009, p. 13), and each of us, in this sense, is equally capable of observing, selecting, comparing and interpreting.