Change Doesn't Necessarily Mean "Crisis"

Wrapping Up…

2007-12-11T17:33:00.001-06:00

TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
Cathy Blackwell

As an English teacher, my goal is to foster strong reading and writing skills. I approach this undertaking with humor, enthusiasm, and a recognition that learning centers on curiosity and enjoyment. My philosophy is that my students retain the beliefs I convey most passionately, which are:

Strong reading skills are essential. Good readers interact with texts rather than merely accepting them. Interactive reading involves reading the words, understanding and evaluating their purpose and meaning, and reacting to both. Students must learn to absorb, consider, and question what they read. My role is to help students develop these skills and to demonstrate interactive reading in my own responses to student work as well as to course materials.
Strong writing skills are essential. Good writers produce logical, convincing, and engaging texts. Cogent writing begins with comprehensive reading and thorough consideration, and it ends with a purposeful and confident product. Students must learn to write in a variety of formats, to modulate written voice as appropriate, to consider and revise what they have written, and to benefit from responses generated by their writing. My role is to help students develop these skills and to model them in my own writing, including my responses to student work.
Strong learning experiences are respectful, dynamic, and interactive. Good teaching takes place in physical or virtual classrooms, student-teacher conferences, responses to student work, and electronic communications. Whatever the venue, good learning experiences are based upon a foundation of mutual respect among students and teachers. The best learning experiences are enjoyable; and the most evocative classroom experiences are often characterized by a delicate blend of student and teacher authority. My role includes modeling respectful behavior, exhibiting enthusiasm for course materials and activities, encouraging all students to participate in classroom discussions and group projects, and demonstrating my own willingness to learn from our joint experiences.

I believe that teaching is a privilege and a responsibility. My ultimate goal is to see students leave my courses with a love for reading and writing, a belief in their own powers of evaluation, and an enhanced desire to learn.

"Writing Minus Reading?" (a/k/a my research paper in final)

2007-12-11T17:30:00.001-06:00

Writing composition courses have acquired curious hybrid syllabi in the twenty-first century. The average college freshman no longer reads literary texts and produces a series of increasingly difficult responsive essays. Instead, freshman composition appears to concern itself with critical thinking, writing in or across curricula, and completing writing projects which many students perceive as discrete, unrelated assignments. Some of the writing courses described below require literary reading, while others do not; in fact, some do not appear to require reading (aside from a student's own texts) at all. Moreover, some of the courses follow fairly traditional composition practices, while others are for more creative. In other words, all composition programs are not created equal, which fact begs a series of questions. Has reading fallen out of favor as writing's companion? Can students learn to write—and write well—if they are not given high-quality examples to emulate? Will they develop strong reading and critical thinking skills if they are not provided appropriate foundations in their beginning composition courses? This paper argues that of the courses described below, those which emphasize reading are most likely to produce successful students.

In 1980, Charles Bazerman lamented a mounting disregard for the "interplay between reading and writing" in language studies (656). He argued that students ultimately require writing skills they can transfer to their other college coursework and, later, to their chosen professions—arenas for which learning to write "purely from their selves" might not prepare them (Bazerman 661). Notwithstanding composition theorists' desire to produce motivated writers, other educators will still expect students to master and emulate relevant "disciplinary literature" (Bazerman 656-657). Students can write in particular disciplines only after becoming fluent in those discourses, Bazerman warned; therefore, writing instructors should nurture such fluency by cultivating "various techniques of absorbing, reformulating, commenting on, and using reading" (Bazerman 657-658).

Apparently striving for a palatable compromise between traditional and modern theories (primarily the then-current emphasis on authorial voice), Bazerman turned to James Britton's suggestion that writings might be viewed as individual contributions to "ongoing, written conversations" (Bazerman 657). For example, a spoken discussion develops as participants offer ideas and respond to those of others. Accordingly, those wishing to enter a conversation must listen to and reflect upon what is being said before they can contribute meaningful comments of their own. Because listeners' knowledge and unique experiences both determine which concepts will interest them and color their interpretations of those concepts, their responses are inherently individual; and the discussion's flow will be guided by personal reactions to specific statements or conversational threads. The richness of any conversation thus relies on original ideas as well as thoughtful reflection and response. In much the same way, entering a written conversation requires participants to first read ("hear") and consider what others have written ("said"), and then respond to various writings ("conversational threads"). Written conversation, like spoken conversation, includes everything from fragments (notes and marginalia, for instance) through fully-developed bodies of written work.

Bazerman's approach is compellingly straightforward. Using Britton's model as his foundation, he identifies a series of skills student must develop before entering the "conversation" and offers correlative skill-building exercises. Teachers have their own assignments, for they must be able to "interpret the model through those conversations that are most familiar and important to students" (Bazerman 658). In other words, teachers must function as translators between academic and student forms of discourse.

For students to develop the art of "intelligent response," Bazerman contends, they must learn to interpret both factual content and authorial intent of existing writings ("prior comments"), react meaningfully to what they have read, and formally evaluate what they have read (658-659). Structured tasks guide students' progress through these phases. For example, specific writing assignments help strengthen reading skills: paraphrasing requires a student to understand exactly what a writer has "said" and then rephrase it, while summarizing forces a student to identify the most important concepts in and technical components of a writing (Bazerman 658). Moreover, exercises in which students analyze the techniques used in specialized forms of writing (ranging in difficulty from propaganda to scientific research reports) will foster an awareness of writing's "purposive nature" (Bazerman 659).

Teaching students to react to what they read involves encouraging them to recognize their existing "assumptions and frameworks of thought" and to question the written materials they study (659). Bazerman suggests three means by which students can develop their ability to articulate their reading responses: "marginal comments on reading, reading journals and informal reaction essays" (659). Because students often lack sufficient confidence in their own voices, they sometimes believe they have responded to a writing when in fact they have merely restated an author's words. Therefore, structuring assignments to differentiate between summary and reactionary notes may be necessary. Bazerman suggests requiring that summary notes be made on the inner margins and reactionary notes on the outer) (Bazerman 659). Further, informal reaction exercises should be designed in such a way that student response "retains contact" with the text rather than becoming "purely a rhapsody on a personal theme unrelated to the reading" (Bazerman 659). Finally, more formal evaluative exercises (assessment of authorial aims versus results, book or article comparisons, and more data-oriented evaluations designed to "measure the claims of the reading against observable reality") may be broken into smaller steps (Bazerman 660).

Essentially, these latter steps constitute critical analysis; and Bazerman anticipates that students will learn to train their newly-developed critical gaze upon their own "contributions to the discussions" (660-661). While he identifies pinpointed assignments to help students build the other foundational skills, however, Bazerman does not precisely describe how pupils might be guided toward that all-important analysis of their own writing. He merely seems to assume that this skill will naturally follow. Having read many student "rhapsodies on personal themes unrelated to readings," teachers of basic writers may suspect self-analysis will not develop independently and may wonder how best to foster students' assessment of their own work.

Enter Ann Berthoff and the "double-entry notebook" (41). Berthoff's approach offers a clever way for students to "interpret [their] interpretations" and "know [their] knowledge" (44). Somewhat similar to Bazerman's inner- and outer-marginalia, the double-entry notebook more fully develops the concepts of viewing and reviewing or reacting. Instead of being limited to summary in one space and reaction in another, students are taught to record their "reading notes, direct quotations, observational notes, fragments, lists, images—verbal and visual" on the right side of the page; on the left, they will examine what they have written and why (Berthoff 45).

This exercise inverts Bazerman's marginalia process, in a sense, because students' original records are at once more comprehensive and more visceral than mere summary. Rather than recording summaries for later review, students are asked to record both quasi-structured summaries (such as reading notes) and more elemental reactions (observations, sudden ideas, and the fragmentary "flashes" of insight which are so quickly lost). Later, they will react to and synthesize their quasi-structured and elemental responses and, in effect, to summarize them. Study of their own responses to texts will help students move beyond a grasp of technical "meaning" to the more important "message"—a kind of knowing which moves beyond Bazerman's required understanding of fact and authorial intent (Berthoff 44).

Although such a tool does not replace the kinds of structured writing assignments envisioned by Bazerman (paraphrasing, summarizing, reaction essay-writing, and the like), it lays the groundwork for them. Moreover, it both fulfills and expands the marginalia and writing journal requirements. In the observation column, for example, a student might jot more instinctive notes than he or she might include in a more formal journal; notes about (and marginalia from) numerous sources could be added to this column. This, in turn, would permit the student to see connections and parallels which might otherwise go unnoticed. As these conclusions are recorded in the left column, the student is provided extraordinarily visual evidence of his or her own thought processes. Such a record lends itself to the creation of either a more formal summary or a reactionary piece. By "offering the chance to practice interpreting in such a way that whatever is learned about reading is something learned about writing," Berthoff asserts, "[the double-entry notebook] can teach that how we construe is how we construct. Languaging, as some like to say, is our means of making meaning" (45, emphasis original).

The double-entry notebook also teaches a fundamentally transferrable method that students might use to facilitate their reading and writing (indeed, all forms of learning) in other curricular areas. As an inherently scientific approach, in fact, it is particularly adaptable to science courses, and may uniquely prepare students to carry composition skills into those fields. In short, while it does not necessarily satisfy Bazerman's tripartite skill requirement, the double-entry notebook provides a universally-practical research, reading, and writing tool that will help bridge the gap between the composition classroom and the rest of the university. Further, it develops a more comprehensive way of "reading" that extends beyond words alone, and its use more richly enhances interpretation and reaction skills.

For those who find the double-entry notebook too visual and solitary, Donald Murray offers a writing metaphor in which the solitary act of writing becomes a conversation between the writer and him- or herself:

The act of writing might be described as a conversation between two workmen muttering to each other at the workbench. The self speaks, the other self listens and responds. The self proposes, the other self considers. The self makes, the other self evaluates. The two selves collaborate: a problem is spotted, discussed, defined; solutions are proposed, rejected, suggested, attempted, tested, discarded, accepted. (Murray 140)

At first blush, Murray's metaphor seems to reflect precisely the sort of environment which greatly worries Bazerman—one in which the student learns to write from within him- or herself (Bazerman 661). But the workbench is a "place" student writers reach with help from instructors; moreover, it is meant to address the fact that writing is an essentially solitary process, in most cases, one in which the writer must learn to function as both "workmen." As Murray observes, "[study] this activity at the workbench within the skull and you might say that the self writes, the other self reads. But it is. . .a sophisticated reading that monitors writing before it is made, as it is made, and after it is made" (141)

Clearly, this is a collaboration in which the writer's other self (or "monitor") reads the writing before, during, and after it has reached the page or other medium, such as a computer screen (Murray 141). First and foremost, it is an "explorer" who maps out as-yet unformed thoughts and "traces the trail that will get the writer from. . .meaning identified to meaning clarified"; the more technical order and language concerns must be deferred until this process has been completed (Murray 141). Like most skills, this one must be honed through the student's own practice. The teacher is not meant to interfere but to merely "[point] out alternatives only at the moment of panic," acknowledging that the student must make "the trip from meaning intended to meaning realized" before he or she learns to trust the other self (Murray 142).

As the writer writes, the other self engages in "recursive scanning" and assists the self through a series of critical activities—tracking the changes made and their success or failure, and "providing the writer with an engineering history of the developing text" (Murray 142). Now the teacher's role changes: he or she must interact with the other self (of which the writer may be wholly unaware), forcing the other self to articulate what has been done and why (Murray 143). As Murray observes, a student who produces an incomprehensible text may be able to orally explain his or her decisions, which in turn allows the teacher to interpret where things have gone awry ("when the writer tells me what the writer was doing, when the other self is allowed to speak, I find that the text was produced rationally") (Murray 144).

Whereas Bazerman (following Britton) discusses "written conversations," Murray seems to envision the reverse—at least in the learning stages (Bazerman 657). In Murray's model, spoken conversation is part of the written conversation, for the teacher must evoke the "other self" by speaking to it through the student; this spoken dialogue between student and teacher will eventually become the internal dialogue represented by the workmen on the bench. Simultaneously, this discussion bridges the gap between student and teacher, allowing the teacher to understand writing concerns the student may not yet be able to fully articulate in any meaningful way. In Murray's words, "[when] the student speaks and the student and the teacher listen, they are both informed about the nature of the writing process that produced the draft. This is the point at which the teacher knows what needs to be taught or reinforced [and] the student knows what needs to be done in the next draft" (143, emphasis original).

The teacher must read the text, accept the student's progress as it develops, listen, respond, and provide delicately-balanced support. Clearly this is a process in which teachers and students alike must practice understanding what is being "said" (either by reading or by listening), reacting, and evaluating—much like Bazerman's fundamental requirements, after all. Furthermore, in much the same way that Berthoff's double-entry notebook encourages the interaction of two selves on paper, Murray's process ultimately enables students to engage in their own inner dialogues and self-evaluation. This is, as Murray claims, "nothing less than teaching the act of critical thinking" (Murray 144-145).

Murray's muttering workmen, explorers, and monitors have a rather male quality; but his theory is similar in some respects to Sherrie Gradin's expansion of the much more feminine "metaphor of the web" propounded by Mary Field Belenky, Blythe McVicker Clinch, Nancy Rule Goldberger, and Jill Mattuck Tarule (14). While the web metaphor originally stemmed from empowerment theory, it is also a model which examines the roles of students as readers and writers of their own—and their classmates'—work. In the web, "students and teachers are both word spinners, the teachers simply a [sic] more polished design-maker" (Gradin 16). Students are "creating meaning together, and when one spinner speaks. . .the impact of that voice is felt at every place within the parts of the whole" (18).

Despite certain similarities between Murray and the "web theorists," Gradin's model ultimately departs from the concept of the writer as a solitary figure. Both Bazerman and Murray describe the interaction between teacher and student (and arguably, between peers) as mode of communication designed to eventually enable the writer to read, react, and evaluate on a primarily individual basis. Bazerman, for example, details the steps for developing a student's comfort in his or her own ability to read and understand a text, react to it, and successfully evaluate it—all of which are activities the student will be expected perform alone as his or her college career advances. By contrast, Murray seeks to encourage the student to embrace his or her "inner dichotomy," to argue from both sides of the workbench so that the critical discourse occurs "inside the skull" and the writing monitor's responsibility is shifted from an external assistant (teacher) to the other self. Berthoff's double-entry notebook seems designed to nurture self-sufficiency at an even earlier stage. In each of these other theories, actual speech plays a somewhat transitory role.

Gradin's web, however, seemingly remains a community endeavor. This construct has a decidedly psychological "feel," but essentially it returns to the interaction of reading and writing: the "voice" which impacts the web may be a "flimsy reading, an inadequate response, a less than strong argument" (18). However, it may also be a literal voice. Here, presumably, students rely upon their other selves, their peers, and their teachers to help them interpret both process and product; and Gradin notes that the web is most useful for "those students who are the least adept at academic discourse, and who are actually debilitated by the system or other extenuating circumstances" (17). Yet Gradin's theory fails to explain how these at-risk students will transfer their skills when they are forced to leave the "safety net" to which they cannot, after all, cling forever (17). Gradin acknowledges the "limiting and constraining aspects of this model," but she stops short of describing ways for weaning students from their reliance upon the web community. Given their presumably weak individual skills, this system may hamper their success rather than ensure it.

Like the other theorists discussed, Mariolina Salvatori argues for what she calls the "interconnectedness of reading and writing," but notes that this approach "requires teachers' and students' relentless attention and reflexivity" (446). Salvatori, who acknowledges Berthoff's influence on her teaching methods, trades the double-entry notebook for formal classroom assignments in which students must record their responses to texts, reflect upon their reading strategies and the purposes behind their use, and then evaluate their own reading assessments (446-447). "By means of this "triadic (and recursive) sequence," Salvatori explains, "I try to teach readers to become conscious of their mental moves, to see what such moves produce, and to learn to revise or to complicate those moves as they return to them in light of their newly constructed awareness" (447). In this regard, she adheres to a requirement system similar to Bazerman's but, by requiring students to assess their own work, she completes the step he leaves half-taken.

Like Berthoff and Murray, Salvatori requires student writers to recognize (and make full use of) their other selves. And in Bazerman-like fashion, she acknowledges the ways their "'presuppositions of knowledge'" will affect their readings of texts—effects of which students themselves are often initially unaware but must learn to consider (Salvatori 447). Unlike these theorists, however, she specifically notes that her assignments frequently "generate considerable resistance. . .mainly because [students] are not accustomed to performing this kind of introspective reading" (Salvatori 447).

Salvatori recognizes student highlighting and marginalia as a key to understanding why pupils interpret texts in a particular way. She discusses these practices in class, hoping to turn a "rather mechanical 'study habit'. . .into a strategy, one that can make 'visible' the number and intricacy of strands in a text's argument" and to demonstrate how "the selection, connection, and weaving of those strands affects the structuring of the argument a reader constructs" (447-448). In this sense, Salvatori appears to carry students and their other selves, armed with their texts and their journals, into the web—fostering a kind of "group introspection." By simultaneously requiring individual introspection, however, she helps students develop reading and writing skills which will enable them to succeed without the support of the group when the time comes for them to leave the composition classroom.

As opposed to Bazerman's traditional methods of fostering reading comprehension (paraphrasing and summarizing exercises), Salvatori's practice of focusing on highlighting and margin notes examines the reading process before the student attempts to write a paraphrase, summary, or other interpretation. This is, in a sense, similar to Murray's concept of the other self reading a writer's text before it is actually written, but it is an even earlier form of prewriting intercession. Although Salvatori reports discussing student "marking" habits at "appropriate moments"—such as when a student appears to have derived textual meanings which bear no relationship to the interpretations of his or her classmates, such a discussion could easily be introduced at an initial class meeting. Clearly, an instructor delivering guidelines of this sort would need to tread carefully (to avoid the impression that a literary text offers only one correct interpretation, for instance); but a textbook-driven course might lend itself to an early-semester "marking discussion."

Borrowing from Bartholomae and Petrovsky, Salvatori also assigns a "difficulty paper," in which students are required to identify what makes a particular text difficult for them. Her exercise makes students explain as well as identify their problem areas, a practice which in turn forces them to examine whether poor reading habits or preconceived notions underlie the difficulty; as their instructor, Salvatori reads these explanations and questions their authors (448-449). "What is significant about these strategies," Salvatori adds, "is that they function simultaneously as heuristic devices for students. . .and as constant reminders to me that as a teacher I must demonstrate in my reading of my students' words the responsiveness and the responsibility with which I expect them to engage texts" (449). This emphasis on the teachers' close reading of student work is key, for it hones her skills while allowing her to model desired behavior. In this regard, she pushes her students to evaluate their reading and herself to evaluate their writing in a written facsimile of Murray's student-other self-teacher conference. Her observation about demonstrating solid reading skills closely follows Murray's similar statement about modeling the ideal other self.

Alison Cook-Sather describes an even more complex reading-and-writing course at Bryn Mawr College. "Finding the Bias: Tracing the Self Across Contexts" relies heavily on the metaphor of translation; students read and critically analyze texts selected by "teams of faculty from different disciplinary fields who collaborate to produce a common syllabus" (92). In this course, students must "define and redefine their understandings of narratives and of selves that constitute and are constituted by different biases"—an idea loosely borrowed from Linda Brodkey (93). This description evokes Dawn Skorczewski's culturally-diverse students (discussed below) defiantly wrapping themselves in clichés, for in Cook-Sather's course differences are the point: they are to be embraced rather than ignored.

In particular, Cook-Sather explains, students are asked "not to separate and distance themselves from what they study and who they are but, rather, to recognize, name, and trace a variety of biases along which they and we live, think, and write" (93). By acknowledging their cultural diversities, students recognize the ways in which those differences affect their interpretations of texts; by acknowledging their increasing maturity, they recognize the mutability of the written source. More importantly, perhaps, they recognize their own changeable natures and their multiple roles: they "must be at once characters, authors, and critics; they must be text, translator, and reader [. . .] students themselves are both the translators and the translated" (Cook-Sather 94). The sort of introspection and self-study required in this course is not unlike that evoked by proper use of the double-entry notebook (and indeed, is imbued with a social science perspective evocative of Berthoff's own).

In this course, as in others discussed above, students must read recursively to make sense of texts, and they must be able to articulate their reading strategies in cogent written form (Cook-Sather 95). But in Cook-Sather's course, they must also "transform themselves" through a "multiple-perspectives assignment" (95, 97). The assignment is deceptively simple: students must write about a personal event from their first-hand perspectives. Next, they must rewrite the story from two other participants' points of view. Finally, they must write a reflective essay detailing the process and describing their growth (Cook-Sather 97-99). Not surprisingly, most students find their own perspectives easy to describe; it is the process of adopting another participant's bias that creates difficulty (Cook-Sather 99-100).

Many students write about situations in which they are certain a specific fellow-participant will share their own view—only to find that this is not the case. For some, the struggle to identify another's perspective and then reexamine their own is apparently liberating. One student reported, "'Because I felt confident that my own story was my own personal "truth," I was no longer afraid of finding a story that was different than my own interpretation because my story was already strongly established and I believe in its validity'" (Cook-Sather 100-101). For others, this process is much more painful because they find they cannot believe in their own truth's validity. All must face an inevitable fact, however: "the search for truth in narrative and in life. . .the belief that such a thing as truth with a capital T even exists, is problematic" (Cook-Sather 101).

The "life points" of this assignment are obvious, but the essential elements of reading and writing must not be overlooked. A student's other self maps the field and guides her into the writing; it monitors her progress, reading recursively; it cheers her on. But then the writer's "real" self must consciously read the writing from others' perspectives. This process often provides a previously-lacking grasp of a loved-one's "truth"—and forces the writer to reexamine her own. The writer must fully immerse herself if she is to successfully complete this process of translation, recursive reading, rewriting, and reflecting (Cook-Sather 102-103).

The Cook-Sather model, of course, far exceeds the requirement that students acknowledge their own presuppositions expressed by Bazerman and Salvatori. But in a very real sense, the Bryn Mawr students are provided a unique advantage:

As students become conscious of the choices they must make in composing the different perspectives for this assignment, they begin to gain insights in two directions: toward the perspectives of the others they are trying to represent and toward their own selves. It's as though the translation process holds up an interpretive lens in two directions. (Cook-Sather 104-105)

Such a process greatly expands the definitions of "reading" and "interpretation," and this course clearly develops skills from which students will benefit in their academic careers. Borrowing from and paraphrasing Juanita Comfort, Cook-Sather states: "we as instructors of reading and writing must offer students opportunities to develop 'complex and versatile writerly selves who are able to place their extra-academic worlds into carefully constructed relationship' with the academic discourse communities into which they are entering" (Cook-Sather 111).

It is interesting that while Cook-Sather discusses the wide-ranging advantages to students who take the course, she remains silent on the benefits to be gained by teachers. Such a program, with its interdisciplinary team, would seem to afford composition instructors far greater access to the colleges of their students' choices. Access of this nature would eliminate the kind of worries expressed by Bazerman as he tries to prepare his students for other professors' expectations. More importantly, it would seem foster more comprehensive, institution-wide writing standards, benefitting students and teachers alike.

Dawn Skorczewski, by contrast, builds upon the notion of teacher-as-reader in her examination of her own responses to students' use of cliché. Describing her frustration over well-argued student essays which conclude with such expressions as "everybody can do it if they try," Skorczewski asks, "'What is wrong with them. . .? What is wrong with me?'" (221). She provides a surprising answer to the latter question: she claims to have relied too heavily on David Bartholomae's assertion that first-year composition should force students out of their own "common sense" comfort zones and into the language of the academy (Skorczewski 221). Whereas she had "believed that [students'] critical thinking stopped when they reached their concluding paragraphs," she has realized that perhaps they were instead "going as far as possible into the realm of critical thinking without finally and completely selling out by asserting themselves in the most privileged space of the essay—the ending" (224). In this sense, she adds, students' clichéd endings become written syntheses of "safe house" and "contact zone"—places in which students can reject the unfamiliar language of the academy while indulging in clichés which may, in fact, represent (rebellious) cultural commonplaces (225-227).

Furthermore, Skorczewski adds, students' use of commonplaces and clichés ironically may represent an attempt to do exactly what they've been asked to do: state their own opinions and draw their own conclusions. Perhaps a student employs a particular expression to identify "an 'I' who is also part of a 'we'"; perhaps he or she is addressing "competing external and internal audiences in the struggle to articulate what it means to have an identity in contemporary America"; perhaps he or she is "not just a student negotiating a space for [herself or himself] in academic discourse [but is] a person with a history. . .an active social agent in a field of competing claims" (226-229). These are all compelling examples which argue for teachers' close reading and careful interpretation of their students' work, rather than a simplistic focus on mechanical errors. . .or perceived errors.

Skorczewski's observations about the importance of teachers' close reading are very similar to Salvatori's comments about reviewing student "difficulty papers." Moreover, they share some theoretical ground with Murray, who emphasizes the importance of listening carefully when students describe the scheme of the seemingly-incomprehensible paper. In each situation, the teacher models the desired behavior for the student's benefit. Yet the teacher benefits as well: he or she gains insight not only into the writing (or reading) of a particular student but into the writing trends of a broader age group or cultural segment. This form of teacher education helps the instructor to return to the group, or to carry forward to a future group, with a more complete understanding of its learning difficulties, language barriers, or peculiar generational "speak." What could better prepare a teacher to confront the mechanical writing problems faced by the "text-message generation," for instance, than to read the occasional "textism"?

While Skorczewski (like Gradin) devotes much attention to empowerment, she directly acknowledges what Gradin avoids: that "this gap between our students and ourselves, like the gap between every writer and reader, can never fully be bridged. This is the nature of human communication—the fact that language writes us as much as we write it" (235). She also echoes Salvatori's commitment to holding herself to critical standards at least as high as those to which she holds her students. Most importantly, teachers must monitor their own written reader-responses—this responsibility does not lapse when one crosses the threshold dividing student and teacher. "Our challenge," she concludes, "is to learn to recognize our own clichés. . .and the habits of thought embedded in them that have become so familiar to us that we think of them as common sense" (Skorczewski 236).

Significantly, Skorczewski's study of student cliché and her efforts to help students discover more academically-appropriate ways of retaining personal voice seem to build upon Bazerman's concept of the teacher as a translator between academic and student "language." And her theory offers an interesting twist on Bazerman's/Britton's "written conversations":

If we imagine that the textual relationship between the student and his/her teacher proceeds in the same way as a human conversation, the teacher who acknowledges the beliefs she brings to the conversation is equipped to listen to her students more carefully than the teacher who holds her beliefs so closely that she can no longer see them as beliefs. And the best indicators of these beliefs, if we can bear to examine them, exist in our responses to students' most irksome utterances. (Skorczewski 236)

Yet Skorczewski's article focuses much more on teachers' reading than on that of students. Therefore, it is difficult to know whether or not the texts to which her students are being exposed help them develop their writing styles.

Common to all of these essays is the idea that reading and writing are complementary activities—to a greater or lesser degree. The authors do not provide demographic information about their student bodies, and thus it is generally impossible to assess any ways in which the institutions they represent must accommodate special circumstances. While Skorczewski describes a culturally-diverse student body, Gradin alone appears to focus on students who are particularly fragile or somehow apt to become "lost" within the academic community. As noted above, her web-themed composition theory appears unlikely to elevate its students beyond such at-risk status. Murray's theory, while engaging, is somewhat disturbing in its blithe disregard for external texts. While it is certainly true that writers must master the art of "inner dialogue," it seems probable that students who master only the art of reading their own writing or that of peers (or even written instructor commentary) will exit their composition courses ill-prepared to segue easily into the discourses of their respective colleges.

Bazerman offers strong, traditional theory and appears committed to equipping students for the kinds of writing they will be expected to produce; still, his theory may not teach them to perform the kinds of self-assessment which is so vital in good writing. Absent an ability to evaluate their own writing, it may be difficult for students to determine why their attempts to enter the discourses of their chosen fields may be clumsy or flawed. Skorczewski raises interesting and provocative points on the subject of student cliché. However, she has relatively little to say about reading beyond her reading of student work; and while this is an important way to model close attention to reading materials for her pupils, it is not enough for students to generate texts rather than reading them (in fairness, though, it must be noted that Skorczewski's article focused on the cliché phenomenon and may not accurately convey the depth of her recommended reading assignments).

Berthoff's article, while brief, provides excellent suggestions for developing students' reading and writing skills. One can easily assess her theory as beneficial to students in their future classes of any kind. Berthoff's model, along with those of Cook-Sather and Salvatori, seem most likely to produce strong readers and writers who can transfer their skills to future coursework. But while the Cook-Sather "Finding the Bias" course is intriguing, it is a model which almost certainly would flounder in a larger institution, at least if the interdisciplinary component were to be retained. The difficulties of scheduling regular interdisciplinary team meetings could be prohibitive on a very populous campus.

Therefore, of all the models reviewed, Salvatori's is the most powerful and practical. Salvatori seems to have combined the best attributes of the other theories, and her focus on reading and writing (particularly as the two functions intersect), as well as on effective study habits, makes this program an exciting one which seems likely to foster excellent skills among her students.

Can students exit less comprehensive reading and writing courses as well-prepared as those who participate in courses such as Salvatori's? Unfortunately, they probably cannot.

Works Cited

Bazerman, Charles. "A Relationship Between Reading and Writing: The Conversational Model. College English 41 (1980): 656-661.

Berthoff, Ann E. "A Curious Triangle and the Double-Entry Notebook; or, How Theory Can Help Us Teach Reading and Writing". The Making of Meaning. Upper Montclair: Boynton/Cook, 1981. 41-47.

Cook-Sather, Alison. "Education as Translation: Students Transforming Notions of Narrative and Self." College Composition and Communication 55 (2003): 91-114.

Gradin, Sherrie L. "English Studies and the Metaphors We Live By." Empowering Students and Ourselves in an Interdependent World. Conf. on Coll. Composition and Communication. Seattle. Mar. 1989.

Murray, Donald M. "Teaching the Other Self: The Writer's First Reader." College Composition and Communication 33 (1982): 140-147.

Salvatori, Marjolina. "Conversations with Texts: Reading in the Teaching of Composition. College English 58 (1996): 440-454.

Skorczewski, Dawn. "'Everybody Has Their Own Ideas': Responding to Cliché in Student Writing." College Composition and Communication 52 (2000): 220-239.

Research Draft

2007-10-30T05:27:00.000-05:00

Writing composition courses have acquired curious hybrid syllabi. The average college freshman no longer reads literary texts and produces a series of increasingly difficult responsive essays. Instead, freshman composition appears to concern itself with critical thinking, ethical argument, logical fallacy, technology, and completing writing projects which many perceive as discrete, unrelated assignments. The students read several short, fairly uncomplicated texts around which their writing exercises are designed. Some of these texts exemplify good writing; some do not. Where have the solid textual examples gone? Has reading fallen out of favor? Can students learn to write—and write well—if they are not given strong examples to model? Will they learn the arts of critical thinking and ethical analysis if the texts from which they draw demonstrate “what not to do” rather than “what to do”?

In 1980, Charles Bazerman lamented a mounting disregard for the “interplay between reading and writing” in language studies (656). Students could write in particular disciplines only if they became fluent in those discourses, he warned; and therefore writing instructors should aid this fluency by cultivating “various techniques of absorbing, reformulating, commenting on, and using reading (Bazerman 657-658). Apparently striving for a palatable compromise between traditional and modern theories (primarily a composition-studies emphasis on authorial voice), Bazerman turned to James Britton’s suggestion of “ongoing, written conversations” in which individual writings might be viewed as individual contributions (657). Bazerman’s approach is compellingly straightforward: using the conversation model as a foundation, he identifies a series of necessary skills and offers correlative skill-building exercises. Teachers have their assignments as well, for they must be able to “interpret the model through those conversations that are most familiar and important to students” (Bazerman 658). In other words, teachers must function as translators between academic and student discourses.

For students to develop the art of “intelligent response,” Bazerman contends, they must learn to interpret both factual content and authorial intent of existing writings (“prior comments”), react meaningfully to what they have read, and formally evaluate what they have read (658-659). Development of these skills will allow students to define issues for further research and formulate “informed views on those issues” (Bazerman 660). Essentially, these latter steps constitute critical analysis; and in Bazerman’s view students will learn to train the same critical gaze upon their own “contributions to the discussions” (660-661). While he identifies pinpointed assignments to help students build the other foundational skills, however, Bazerman does not precisely describe pupils might be guided toward that all-important analysis of their own writing. He merely seems to assume that this skill will naturally follow. Teachers of basic writers may suspect that it will not.

Bazerman advocates three means by which student might develop “more extensive and thoughtful reactions: marginal comments on reading, reading journals and informal reaction essays”; he also suggests that perhaps a system inner- and outer-margin notation would be helpful in some cases (659). But what system will help students evaluate their own reactions? Enter Ann Berthoff and the “double-entry notebook” In this approach, students will record their “reading notes, direct quotations, observational notes, fragments, lists, images—verbal and visual” on the right side of the page; on the left, they will examine what they have written and why (Berthoff 45). Study of their own responses to texts will help students move beyond a grasp of technical “meaning” to the more important “message”—a kind of knowing which moves beyond Bazerman’s required understanding of fact and authorial intent (Berthoff 44).

Although such a tool might not replace marginalia and reaction essays, it does fulfill and expand the writing journal requirement. In the observation column, for example, a student might jot more visceral notes than he or she might include in a more formal journal; notes about (and marginalia from) numerous sources could be added to this column. This, in turn, would permit the student to see connections and parallels which might otherwise go unnoticed. As these conclusions are recorded in the left column, the student is provided extraordinarily visual evidence of his or her own thought processes. By “offering the chance to practice interpreting in such a way that whatever is learned about reading is something learned about writing,” Berthoff asserts, “[the double-entry notebook] can teach that how we construe is how we construct. Languaging, as some like to say, is our means of making meaning” (45, emphasis original).

Too visual? Donald Murray offers a writing metaphor both conversational and visual: “two workmen muttering to each other at the workbench” (140). Here on the bench, the selves focus entirely on “their” writing rather than on some “prior comment”; as Murray astutely notes, “[you] can read without writing, but you can’t write without reading” (141). This is a process in which the “two selves collaborate: a problem is spotted, discussed, defined; solutions are proposed, rejected, suggested, attempted, tested, discarded, accepted” (140).

Clearly, this is a collaboration in which the writer’s other self (or “monitor”) reads the writing before, during, and after it has reached the page or other computer screen (Murray 141). First and foremost, it is an “explorer” who maps out as-yet unformed thoughts and “traces the trail that will get the writer from. . .meaning identified to meaning clarified”; order and language concerns must be deferred until this process has been completed (Murray 141). Like most skills, this one must be honed through the student’s own practice. The teacher is not meant to interfere but to merely “[point] out alternatives only at the moment of panic,” acknowledging that the student must make “the trip from meaning intended to meaning realized” before he or she learns to trust the other self (Murray 142).

As the writer writes, the other self engages in “recursive scanning” and assists the self through a series of critical activities—tracking the changes made and their success or failure, and “providing the writer with an engineering history of the developing text” (Murray 142). Now the teacher’s role changes: he or she must interact with the other self (of which the writer may be wholly unaware), forcing the other self to articulate what has been done and why (Murray 143). The teacher must read the text, accept the student’s progress as it develops, listen, respond, and provide delicately-balanced support; this is, Murray states, “nothing less than teaching the act of critical thinking” (Murray 144-145).

Murrays’s muttering workmen, explorers, and monitors have a rather male quality; but his theory is loosely echoed in Sherrie Gradin’s expansion of Belenky et al.’s metaphor of the web (14). While this is articulated primarily as an empowerment theory, it is also one which examines the roles of students as readers and writers of their own—and their classmates’—work. In the web metaphor, “students and teachers are both word spinners, the teachers simply a [sic] more polished design-maker” (Gradin 16). Students are “creating meaning together, and when one spinner speaks. . .the impact of that voice is felt at every place within the parts of the whole” (18). This expression has a decidedly psychological “feel,” but essentially it returns to the interaction of reading and writing: the “voice” which impacts the web may be a “flimsy reading, an inadequate response, a less than strong argument” (18). Here, presumably, students rely upon their other selves, their peers, and their teachers to help them interpret both process and product.

Mariolina Salvatori, too, argues for the “interconnectedness of reading and writing,” but notes that this approach “requires teachers’ and students’ relentless attention and reflexivity” (446). Salvatori trades Berthoff’s double-entry notebook for formal classroom assignments in which students must record their responses to texts, reflect upon their reading strategies and the purposes behind their use, and then evaluate their own reading assessments (446-447). “By means of this “triadic (and recursive) sequence,” Salvatori explains, “I try to teach readers to become conscious of their mental moves, to see what such moves produce, and to learn to revise or to complicate those moves as they return to them in light of their newly constructed awareness” (447). Like Berthoff and Murray, Salvatori requires student writers to recognize (and make full use of) their other selves. Unlike these theorists, however, she specifically notes that her “assignments generate considerable resistance. . .mainly because [students are not accustomed to performing this kind of introspective reading” (Salvatori 447).

Salvatori recognizes student highlighting and marginalia as a key to understanding why students interpret texts in a particular way. She discusses these practices in class, hoping to turn a “rather mechanical ‘study habit’. . .into a strategy, one that can make ‘visible’ the number and intricacy of strands in a text’s argument” and to demonstrate how “the selection, connection, and weaving of those strands affects the structuring of the argument a reader constructs” (447-448). In this sense, Salvatori appears to carry students and their other selves, armed with their texts and their journals, into the web—fostering a kind of “group introspection.”

Borrowing from Bartholomae and Petrovsky, Salvatori also assigns a “difficulty paper,” in which students are required to identify what makes a particular text difficult for them. This exercise makes students explain as well as identify their problem areas, a practice which in turn forces them to examine whether poor reading habits or preconceived notions underlie the difficulty; as their instructor, Salvatori reads these explanations and questions their authors (448-449). “What is significant about these strategies,” Salvatori adds, “is that they function simultaneously as heuristic devices for students. . .and as constant reminders to me that as a teacher I must demonstrate in my reading of my students’ words the responsiveness and the responsibility with which I expect them to engage texts” (449). This emphasis on the teachers’ close reading of student work is key, for it hones her skills while allowing her to model desired behavior.

Dawn Skorczewski builds upon this notion of teacher-as-reader in her examination of her own responses to students’ use of cliché. Describing her frustration with well-argued student essays which conclude with such expressions as “everybody can do it if they try,” Skorczewski asks, “‘What is wrong with them. . .? What is wrong with me?’” (221). She provides a surprising answer to the latter question: she had relied too heavily on Bartholomae’s assertion that first-year composition should force students out of their own “common sense” comfort zones and into the language of the academy (Skorczewski 221). Whereas she had “believed that [students’] critical thinking stopped when they reached their concluding paragraphs,” she has realized that perhaps they were instead “going as far as possible into the realm of critical thinking without finally and completely selling out by asserting themselves in the most privileged space of the essay—the ending” (224). In this sense, she adds, students’ clichéd endings become written syntheses of “safe house” and “contact zone”—places in which students can reject the unfamiliar language of the academy while indulging in clichés which may, in fact, represent (rebellious) cultural commonplaces (225-227).

Furthermore, Skorczewski adds, students’ use of commonplaces and clichés ironically may represent an attempt to do exactly what they’ve been asked to do: state their own opinions and draw their own conclusion. Perhaps a student employs a particular expression to identify “an ‘I’ who is also part of a ‘we’”; perhaps he or she is addressing “competing external and internal audiences in the struggle to articulate what it means to have an identity in contemporary America”; perhaps he or she is “not just a student negotiating a space for [herself or himself] in academic discourse [but is] a person with a history. . .an active social agent in a field of competing claims” (226-229). These are all compelling examples which argue for a teachers’ close reading and careful interpretation of their students’ work, rather than a simplistic focus on mechanical errors. . .or perceived errors.

While Skorczewski (like Gradin) devotes much attention to empowerment, she directly acknowledges what Gradin avoids: that “this gap between our students and ourselves, like the gap between every writer and reader, can never fully be bridged. This is the nature of human communication—the fact that language writes us as much as we write it” (235). She also echoes Salvatori’s commitment to holding herself to a critical reading standard at least as high as that to which she holds her students. Most importantly, teachers must monitor their own written reader-responses—this responsibility does not lapse when one crosses the threshold dividing student and teacher. “Our challenge,” she concludes, “is to learn to recognize our own clichés. . .and the habits of thought embedded in them that have become so familiar to us that we think of them as common sense” (Skorczewski 236).

Alison Cook-Sather describes an even more complex reading-and-writing course at Bryn Mawr College. “Finding the Bias: Tracing the Self Across Contexts” relies heavily on the metaphor of translation; students read and critically analyze texts selected by interdisciplinary teams (92). In this course, students must “define and redefine their understandings of narratives and of selves that constitute and are constituted by different biases”—an idea loosely borrowed from Linda Brodkey (93). This description evokes Skorczewski’s culturally-diverse students defiantly wrapping themselves in cliché’s, for in Cook-Sather’s course differences are the point: they are to be embraced rather than ignored.

In particular, Cook-Sather explains, students are asked “not to separate and distance themselves from what they study and who they are but, rather, to recognize, name, and trace a variety of biases along which they and we live, think, and write” (93). By acknowledging their cultural diversities, students recognize the ways in which those differences affect their interpretations of texts; by acknowledging their increasing maturity, they recognize the mutability of the written source. More importantly, perhaps, they recognize their own changeable natures and their multiple roles: they “must be at once characters, authors, and critics; they must be text, translator, and reader [. . .] students themselves are both the translators and the translated” (Cook-Sather 94).

In this course, as in others discussed above, students must read recursively to make sense of texts and they must be able to articulate their reading strategies in cogent written form (Cook-Sather 95). But in Cook-Sather’s course, they must also “transform themselves” through a “multiple-perspectives assignment” (95, 97). The assignment is deceptively simple: students must write about a personal event from their first-hand perspectives. Next, they must rewrite the story from two other participants’ points of view. Finally, they must write a reflective essay detailing the process and describing their growth (Cook-Sather 97-99). Not surprisingly, most students find their own perspectives easy to describe; it is the process of adopting another participants’ bias that creates difficulty (Cook-Sather 99-100).

Many students write about situations about which they are certain a specific fellow-participant will share their own view—only to find that this is not the case. For some, the struggle to identify another’s perspective and then reexamine their own is apparently liberating. One student reported, “‘Because I felt confident that my own story was my own personal “truth,” I was no longer afraid of finding a story that was different than my own interpretation because my story was already strongly established and I believe in its validity’” (Cook-Sather 100-101). For others, this process is much more painful because they find they cannot believe in their own truth’s validity. All must face an inevitable fact, however: “the search for truth in narrative and in life. . .the belief that such a thing as truth with a capital T even exists, is problematic” (Cook-Sather 101).

The “life points” of this assignment are obvious, but the essential elements of reading and writing must not be overlooked. A student’s other self maps the field and guides her into the writing; it monitors her progress, reading recursively; it cheers her on. But then the writer’s “real” self must consciously read the writing from others’ perspectives. This process often provides a previously-lacking grasp of a loved-one’s “truth”—and forces the writer to reexamine her own. The writer must fully immerse herself if she is to successfully complete this process of translation, recursive reading, rewriting, and reflecting (Cook-Sather 102-103).

** ** **
Finis…for now.

Bazerman, Charles. “A Relationship Between Reading and Writing: The Conversational Model. College English 41 (1980): 656-661.

Berthoff, Ann E. “A Curious Triangle and the Double-Entry Notebook; or, How Theory Can Help Us Teach Reading and Writing”. The Making of Meaning. Upper Montclair: Boynton/Cook, 1981. 41-47.

Cook-Sather, Alison. “Education as Translation: Students Transforming Notions of Narrative and Self.” College Composition and Communication 55 (2003): 91-114.

Gradin, Sherrie L. “English Studies and the Metaphors We Live By.” Empowering Students and Ourselves in an Interdependent World. Conf. on Coll. Composition and Communication. Seattle. Mar. 1989.

Murray, Donald M. “Teaching the Other Self: The Writer’s First Reader.” College Composition and Communication 33 (1982): 140-147.

Salvatori, Marjolina. “Conversations with Texts: Reading in the Teaching of Composition. College English 58 (1996): 440-454.

Skorczewski, Dawn. “‘Everybody Has Their Own Ideas’: Responding to Cliché in Student Writing.” College Composition and Communication 52 (2000): 220-239.

Voice...resonating down the halls of the academy...

2007-10-21T23:40:00.000-05:00

[Subtitle: If I learned one thing last week, it's that my voice RESONATES!!]

I'm sure this will shock you all, but I believe that resonant voice has a very important role in the academy--in student writing, in teaching, and in grading. Seriously. . .when was the last time you read a formal text that was completely devoid of personality? Did you like it, or was it borrrrrring? Bartholomae can "write in the academy" until the cows come home, but we still recognize his voice. Think about it: how much of his writing doesn't include the occasional "I want to argue that..." or some other identifying phrase? That's his voice.

So I shall borrow from Elbow and Bartholomae, for just a few seconds, by "trying on" [Elbow] Bartholomae's voice. I want to argue that voice is perhaps more necessary to the academy now than in the past, because people today are more influenced by others' voices than ever before. We have TV in elevators of high-rise buildings; we have YouTube and other Internet sources coming at us from every direction; we have iPods, personal ringtones, PDAs...we are constantly surrounded by voices. Before we realize it, we've adopted pop-culture "isms" ("I'm so not going to go to class today," "Oh, no, you didn't just say that," "That was the most gynormous lie I ever heard!"). We are influenced by so many voices that we are at risk of losing our own...permanently.

We all have stories about favorite teachers (as well as the "not so much" variety). Of the tales we've heard from classmates, how many of them have centered on margin commentary? Don't we all have certain words (or even lines) permanently etched in our memories? "Nicely argued!" "Do that again!" "I can't even GUESS what that means!" "UGH!" That's resonant voice, pure and simple. Maybe we didn't like what we read, but we sure as heck remember it; and we derive something from it...even if that something is "I never want to be THAT teacher!"

So I want to argue that, yes, voice is important in teaching and grading. Am I going to be the favorite of all my students? No way. Are they going to remember something about me? Probably; and it will probably be something I've written.

And I want to argue that, yes, student voice is important, too. Have you had this experience? You're slogging along, grading the two zillionth brief assignment [fill in the blank] over the same lackluster text...and all of a sudden a voice resonates out of that little TTOPIC-window wilderness. Sure, it might be poorly written, but the kid has managed to allow his or her voice to shine through--while remaining entirely within assignment guidelines. Although I've enjoyed several such moments, my favorite example is probably still the pie chart from BA 1: kid after kids pointed out that female participants had rated "financial status" and "personal-psychological traits" as least important attributes in males (with a total of 3%). But one kid prefaced that statement with "Fortunately for male undergraduates,..." That's resonant voice, and I'll probably remember it for years to come. Did he undermine or the compete with "academic voice" there? I don't think so; I think he enhanced it.

How do we teach students to write with voice? Well, I think we model it, for one thing (and of course, that means we need to find our own). I think we encourage them to take risks while reminding them to choose their times and their degrees of resonance wisely. Several of my students write with voice--some more successfully than others. As might be expected, some are struggling to gauge how much is too much, while others are learning how much is too little. Mr. "Fortunately" has written a properly formal Draft 1.1, but that je ne sais quoi resonates here and there. How do we assess it? Well, I've noticed that both the first and second readers commented on Mr. F's "engaging" writing style. They may not realize they're commenting on his voice, but I do.

What about us as students? Can we/should we write with voice? You bet! How do you think I got here, old as I am? It sure wasn't those stellar GRE scores!

The Evolution of the Blackwell Philosophy

2007-10-13T13:13:00.000-05:00

(My students freewriting--most of them, anyway!)
I began this semester without any very clear teaching philosophies in mind. My work experience had taught me that even well-educated people often write poorly, and I wanted to help students learn basic skills. But I realize now that my background had supplied some unfortunate assumptions. My parents had college degrees, read incessantly, and demanded straight-A report cards. I attended strong public schools, as did my children. Consequently, some of the readings in this course originally puzzled me: how on earth could students born into the information age find writing truly challenging? After all, they frequently text each other instead of calling. Isn't that writing? Since so many of them have MySpace or FaceBook pages and/or blogs, aren't they ALWAYS writing? I thought the reticence described by the course readings was probably a thing of the past.

What I've learned is that it ISN'T a thing of the past. Yes, teenagers and young adults e-mail, text-message, and blog, but they don't view that as "writing." They consider it "talking." Some of them do find it extremely difficult to grasp that the work they are doing in 1301 is just a more formalized way of "talking" via the written word. They do fixate on details rather than seeing the larger picture; they can be crippled by an instructor's comments (however constructive); they don't understand how mastering basic reading and writing skills will play a part in their academic and professional lives.

I've discovered that I did begin with an underlying teaching philosophy, and I'm not sure that philosophy has changed, exactly. I think students must learn to read critically, process what they've read, and synthesize those ideas into a well-written, understandable product...all without abandoning their own voices. However, I've begun to think much more about how teaching styles impact those abilities. Whereas I started with a "grammar must be perfect" stance, I've realized that (a) "perfect grammar" is somewhat subjective, (b) trying to produce a grammatically-correct writing often stifles student voice, and (c) students are often unexpectedly inspired or crushed by instructor comments.

I've begun to understand that for many students, writing is risk-taking: they want to be "right" and their egos are on the line. In much the same way that children often consider their parents invulnerable or view the exercise of parental control as a form of sadistic entertainment, students tend to think of their instructors as know-it-alls who judge them and torture them for fun. Some want to be "right" because they are preprogrammed to strive, some want to be "right" to disprove teacher expectations, and some of them have given up hope of ever being "right." Many of them really believe that we instructors never struggle with writing and, for some, that triggers resentment. So I've begun to acknowledge those expectations by openly exposing myself to risk. Because my students love freewriting and hate the structured assignments I require of them, I've started "sharing their pain." I loathe freewriting, so I have agreed to freewrite and let them read it. The results have been startlingly positive: suddenly they view me as a fellow struggler, and that has made them far more receptive.

Perhaps what I'm trying to say is that my teaching philosophy hasn't so much changed as it has adapted to include those students who experience genuine fear of writing and "terror of error."

[Insert "deer in the headlights" expression here]

2007-10-08T00:05:00.000-05:00

What are your questions about the readings so far? What aspects of the readings are bothering you?

I have found much of what we have read intriguing and even exciting. There are so many approaches and debates to consider that I often find myself revisiting readings as I gain teaching experience.

I must admit, however, that while I am very interested in the more complex articles (cognitive theory, for example), I wonder how they truly apply to me in my current role. After all, I can't follow students around and study the way they write, and I probably won't know how much of what I've taught them will remain with them past semester's end. Unless Dr. Rice plans to tag freshmen before releasing them into the wild, they will be lost to me (us) forever.

Some of the other articles which interest me really aren't applicable to our 1301 and 1302 curricula. I find ideas I'd like to try...but I can't, because the syllabus doesn't provide much improvisational room. Take this week's reading, for example: I love Johnson's approach to peer critiquing. Anonymous, online peer critiques would be much more effective for one of my sections than face-to-face practice will be, at least initially. But could my students be lured into submitting writings on yet another website? I doubt it; and realistically speaking, I wouldn't have time to keep up with such a venue anyway.

Meanwhile, I often wonder why we don't study more recent materials. Keywords wasn't exactly published last week, and some of the concepts seem to be a bit passe. My research has led me to "fresher" material concerning these concepts, so I'm curious...should the absence of more recent articles from our syllabus be construed as a dismissal of newer scholarship? Since we seem to be so media-oriented in this course, why aren't we reading more articles about relevant tips we can use in the TOPIC-driven environment now?

I guess my broadest questions are: (1) if I become a literature professor when I grow up, how "transferable" will this course's lessons be? and (2) if (as seems likely) I become a literature professor with some composition courseload when I grow up, will this course's readings stand me in good stead, or will they be too outdated for the classrooms of the future?

Cathy

The End of Composition and How We Get There

2007-09-30T21:57:00.000-05:00

hi yall i hv 2 do ths blog b4 i go 2bd 2nite sup w u im sick of hmwk but tuff

As most of you know, Rob Hudson has weighed in on the question of communication ethics. He asks whether we can read his text-messagesque e-mails on the ICON LISTSERV and whether it alters our opinions of him. This throw-down, of course, follows the string of commentary about a student's Writing Concern. Clearly, we are not of one mind.

Of course I can read Rob's e-mails, and I am reasonably certain that just about anyone who bothers to review this blog can read my first "paragraph." My questions to you are "do you want to?" and "is that form of communication universally appropriate?" If I were to answer my own questions, I would say "it depends" and "no." For instance, I have no objection to reading text-speak if it comes from my son, who is on a 15-minute classroom break, or from Rob, who is typing furiously with his thumbs while simultaneously dousing seven technical "fires." If it comes from a student lodging a grade appeal, however, I am far less receptive. An plea for a higher English grade should be written in clear, grammatically-correct English. Period.

In a way, we are all chameleons: we adapt our attire, our behavior, and our language to suit current context. "Me" in church isn't exactly the same as "me" at Cricket's...and neither of those is "me" in the classroom. "Me" in the classroom is further shaped by which side of the table I'm occupying, so to speak. In much the same way, our writing adapts (or should adapt) to a given context. Even if I consider only correspondence, my writing style depends upon my audience; and I'm willing to bet yours does, too. The same is true of academic work: stuff I post on this blog differs substantially from the papers I submit in Dr. Hawkins's class, as well it should. Hey, I'm just writing across the curriculm.

I've made my position quite clear in class meetings, but I'll say it again: the end of composition pedagogy should be enhanced abilities to read critically, to write effectively, and to adapt one's writing style to suit particular purposes. How do we get there? By modeling it. As some of my classmates have noted, our acquaintances adjust their grammar when speaking to us--because they know "what we do." Those students who have received my gentle nudges about e-mail etiquette continue to e-mail me...they simply adapt their styles. I haven't closed the door on their communications; I've merely laid some ground rules. Isn't that my job?

It is evident to me that many teenagers are unable to extract relevant information from assignment descriptions (let alone the reading assignments themselves) and that they have difficulty communicating their many truly great ideas. Will they learn these skills all by themselves? I seriously doubt it. If they leave TTU without having developed these skills, will they fare as well as classmates who have mastered critical reading and writing? I doubt that, too. The young adult using "text-speak" to communicate with prospective employers may find himself or herself on the wrong side of the hiring decision. Why? Because said prospective employers may decide that said young adult is too uneducated--or too lazy--to be a good employee. The young adult who communicates more professionally while job hunting and then text-messages his or her buddies "gt jb!!! my crib 2nite-byob!" has successfully evaluated two very different environments and has written across real-world curricula. Bravo, Contestant No. 2!

Cathy

Facilitating? I'm not so sure...

2007-09-16T20:32:00.000-05:00

First, let me say that ICON provides a very good teacher-to-teacher interface. I've gotten many good tips from people whose faces I can't quite place, and I have seen questions being resolved extraordinarily quickly.

I'd like to think that ICON enables us to facilitate student learning, too, particularly by taking some of the personality out of the mix. That idea probably seems odd coming from someone like me (shy, reticent, hard to fathom), but "hear" me out.

Judging from my students' e-mails, office visits, and apparent desire to lope across fields to greet me, I'd say they like me and find me accessible. They know I'm quick on my feet and enjoy a good joke--even at my own expense. In other words, they respond to me; and that's great during class sessions. But if they are writing to me, they may be modulating their authorial voices to blend with their perception of mine. And that's not so great. . .because they should be developing their own. This is a great time for them to do that while learning to channel their voices in keeping with various course guidelines.

When my students submit an assignment to TOPIC, they don't know who might be grading it. In some ways, that's a good thing: because the reader/grader is anonymous, the students are less tempted to play to me and more likely to play it straight. On the other hand, students compare notes about grading feedback. . .and then the trouble begins. Student A receives "I see a number of sentence fragments and dangling modifiers in this assignment. Here are some examples [insert sample incriminating evidence here]. Please have a look at Handbook pages xx and yy." Meanwhile, Student B--whose work is of roughly equal quality--receives "Your assignment is littered with sentence fragments [insert each and every example here], dangling modifiers [again, every example], comma splices [evidence], run-on sentences [evidence], and numerous misplaced commas [damning evidence]. You need to review the following 85 pages in your Handbook, and why don't you buy a dictionary the next time you're out?" Both students' assignments have been awarded a 79. And then there's Student C, whose paper also receives a 79. . .supported by numerous "you're so great"-isms.

I exaggerate, of course, but you get my point. After talking amongst themselves, these students wonder why the heck one 79 gets a "great job" while another gets a "your writing needs serious work." Student A knows his/her assignment was graded by a genius, Student B thinks his/her assignment has been graded by the Grammar Gorgon, and Student C wonders why his/her work is graded by someone typing out of both sides of the keyboard (if you will).

Meanwhile, back in Document Instruction, we're left to wonder: Did we redirect Student A without crushing his/her spirit? Does Student B realize that we've marked every error so that he/she knows what to study, but that we haven't lowered the grade to reflect the full gamut of errors? Will Student C recognize that we care about him/her but would like to see greater effort? Are we helping them? I'm concerned that, in many cases, the answer is "no."

If we really can norm, then that "no" may change to "yes." But the message must be consistent: if we all say different things, we send mixed signals. And when a group includes CIs with widely-varied perspectives, norming will be difficult to achieve.

As for our document instruction simulating writing center instruction, I really don't know. I have no first-hand experience in that arena. Perhaps if the writing center is online, the effect is similar--but only if the student has a different tutor for each session. However, I would expect that face-to-face sessions would facilitate student and tutor reactions to nonverbal communication. . .the uncomfortable shift in the chair, the blank stare, the tightened lips, the big grin, the unmistakable "OH" on either side of the table. . .and adjust accordingly. Again, I have not worked in a writing center. What I can say with certainty is this: I met with one of my students on Friday concerning his Brief No. 1. All of those points he didn't get from my comments (via TOPIC) were perfectly clear to him when I could direct his attention back and forth between the article, the handbook, and his summary. What I said didn't change; but the visuals bridged the gap.

So how do we bridge the gap online? Hypermediate DI comments with links to articles and Handbook?

Thus spake the tyro.

Oh, boy...

2007-09-03T14:05:00.000-05:00

Reading my classmates' entries has truly made me realize how much I have to learn!

My composition philosophy

2007-09-02T20:48:00.000-05:00

For a person who always has plenty to say, I'm finding a response to "What are the three most important concepts in composition?" incredibly difficult to articulate. But here goes...

1. Master fear of writing by recognizing that writing as a simultaneous creative/learning process. I tend to take a "brainstorming" approach to writing: I simply jot down every idea, question, or concept (let's call them fragments). What the heck? Who's going to see it? Then I start looking for contrasts, parallels, combinations, complements: what fits together and what doesn't; can fragments, or groups of them, form an internal tension which will help shore up my thesis? As I write--and this, for me, can either be a linear activity or one which is conducted by fleshing out fragment combinations and then discovering the flow--I often find myself on the shore opposite my departure point. In this way, composition becomes a very exciting journey.

2. Say what you want to say the way you want to say it. Sure, there are often rules: you might have to stick to assignment parameters, for example, or keep yourself within a range of topics dictated by conference organizers; and of course, it's important to remain grammatically sound. But it's possible to be edgy within those guidelines...to sort of bend the rules while mostly obeying them. I like to push the envelope. I like to find a fresh angle (my motto tends to be "yes, but what about [fill in the blank]?) and a way to make it pop! "Voice" is extremely important to me. I want my writing to stand well apart from the average Jane's composition.

3. Channel the flow carefully. Sometimes I'll want to simply stack my arguments so that they build to a grand finale. Other times I will let an interior dichotomy work to my advantage. Every single thing I write (yes, even research papers) is designed to prove something. After having worked to discover that fresh angle and that edgy approach, I want to keep my readers anxious to find my ultimate point. Often that means I lull them into thinking my direction is predictable and then spring a surprise. Frequently that happens more than once in a paper. I want readers caught up in my journey, too. (I know: closet rhetorician!)

If you are now thinking I consider writing a game or a puzzle, I've successfully explained what I find important in composition: getting creative, having fun, challenging my readers, and convincing them to think about some old topic in a new way!

A first time for everything...

2007-08-19T14:59:00.000-05:00

I've heard of blogs but have never before published or even read one! My first blog has been established as part of a course requirement. Who says you can't teach an old dog new tricks?