I found Elbow’s discussion of the “is this okay?” writing to be an interesting problem that I am starting to face in my class. I think, because it was my experience as an undergraduate, that at some point during college, students learn how to insert themselves into the critical conversations of readings and turn into the “listen to me” academic that Elbow mentions. The way I see this problem, however, is not that students are afraid or unable to see themselves as worthy of asserting control over their writing, it is that they have literally been trained during secondary education to never think this way. I think the mindset of secondary ed, due to standardization issues, is that students think they need to do what the teacher (or standardized test essay graders) wants from them, and there is a magical, true and perfect answer to the writings they do in school.
In the Responses article, Bartholomae claims that we need to allow students to consider why they made certain decisions regarding a source, and this will allow them to claim their own writing as a part of an academic conversation. I don’t agree with Bartholomae on this point, because usually, students are only choosing certain quotes because they seem to fit the ideas that they hope make sense in their paper. This is the problem I am facing with the current essay the students are writing. With only one source, Epstein, who essentially writes the answer to the prompt they are given, it will be impossible for students to insert themselves into conversation with her. Students will be forced to develop the most easily supported thesis, not the one that they actually believe or want to teach others about. Thus, they are forced into the “is this okay?” situation because of the restrictive prompt and forced into the same controlling situation that their secondary education created.