Introduction to McCarthy’s “A Stranger in Strange Lands”
Dave Garrison, a college junior and the focus of the present study, was asked how he would advise incoming freshmen about writing for their college courses. His answer was both homely and familiar.
“I’d tell them,” he said, “first you’ve got to figure out what your teachers want. And then you’ve got to give it to them if you’re gonna’ get the grade.” He paused a moment and added, “And that’s not always so easy.”
No matter how we teachers may feel about Dave’s response, it does reflect his sensitivity to school writing as a social affair. Successful students are those who can, in their interactions with teachers during the semester, determine what constitutes appropriate texts in each classroom: the content, structures, language, ways of thinking, and types of evidence required in that discipline and by that teacher. They can then produce such a text. Students who cannot do this, for whatever reason – cultural, intellectual, motivational – are those who fail, deemed incompetent communicators in that particular setting. They are unable to follow what Britton calls the “rules of the game” in each class (1975, p. 76). As students go from one classroom to another they must play a wide range of games, the rules for which, Britton points out, include many conventions and presuppositions that are not explicitly articulated…
In this article, writing in college is viewed as a process of assessing and adapting to the requirements in unfamiliar academic settings. Specifically, the study examined how students figured out what constituted appropriate texts in their various courses and how they went about producing them. And, further, it examined what characterized the classroom contexts which enhanced or denied students’ success in this process…
As I followed Dave from one classroom writing situation to another, I came to see him, as he made his journey from one discipline to another, as a stranger in strange lands. In each new class Dave believed that the writing he was doing was totally unlike anything he had ever done before. This metaphor of a newcomer in a foreign country proved to be a powerful way of looking at Dave’s behaviors as he worked to use the new languages in unfamiliar academic territories. Robert Heinlein’s (1961) science fiction novel suggested this metaphor originally. But Heinlein’s title is slightly different; his stranger is in a single strange land. Dave perceived himself to be in one strange land after another. (pp. 233-34)
Citation: Introduction to McCarthy’s “A Stranger in Strange Lands”: Research in the Teaching of English, 1987
