Instead of a unified post this week I’d like to just toss out several short reactions to the readings, and if I’m lucky I’ll try to work in some thoughts on technology that might find their way into the final. (Actually, after writing the whole thing I realize the ideas fit together pretty well. Hmm - there might be a lesson there.)

The Miller & Shepherd piece first made me realize I need to do more reading on genre theory as it might fit well with my overall research focus. More to the point for this class, though, was their comment that one of the two self-expressed themes of bloggers was “self expression.” M & S link this to Elbow and Foucault (is there anything that doesn’t link to Foucault?), but what struck me was how this fits perfectly with the process model discussed by (among others) Hairston, in which writing is invention. Blogs aren’t about recording ideas; they are about creating ideas. This also ties in with Macrorie’s suggestion that freewriting is an excellent means of getting to an authentic self (though I kind of hate this emphasis on authenticity (how does a teacher have any right to grade on this?) so I’d change it to an original or well-considered idea).

Atkinson offers a tiny snippet of a comment that challenges this process-is-everything approach. He argues that one of the key objections to process instruction is that the assumption that all students will intuitively get things might unfairly favor those with stronger educational backgrounds. As I see it, the question is if we as instructors are just pretending there is no customary structure and so choosing not to teach it, while still expecting the product to adhere to conventions (conventions we haven’t taught). I would note that there is a strongly Socratic element to this approach—a belief that the answers are already in all students, and it’s our job as instructors to draw them out. I like process instruction, but this objection succinctly explains my resistance to giving up all traditional-formalist teaching of structure. I wonder if some happy medium might be found in offering students lots of sample writing and seeing if they could pull the structure out themselves.

Finally, Durst is loaded with information, but I’ll just focus on two small points. First, he discusses early research in collaborative work that “stressed the benefits of paired and group discussion in helping writers figure out what they wanted to say and how best to say it” (p. 1669). This is a lovely pairing with Miller and Shepherd, I think, and suggests to me that the prewriting period of my class should be dramatically expanded, and during this time students should develop and complicate their ideas through writing and through discussion of that writing. However, they quote Nelson (1993) who points out that students want a compact writing process and so tend to subvert or avoid process-oriented steps designed to require more complex thinking (p. 1659). (There’s that underlife again.) What this suggests to me is that these complicating process steps should (must?) occur in class, and indeed this should be the purpose or pre-drafting classes. This also ties in to the dual nature of writing: it is a lonely process that involves (for me) a lot of silent time in front of a computer, but the product is innately social and designed for others’ eyes. And, of course, the stuff I write about is social as well, arising from my interaction with other people (either directly or through their writing). So perhaps the class can serve as a place for the social aspect of writing to be emphasized.

On Usability Testing and Not Finding a Silver Bullet in Haswell

Two years ago at Mayinar, Joyce made an offhand comment to our usability class to the effect that someone ought to do (or maybe had done—I can't remember; it was Mayinar after all) usability testing on instructor feedback to student writing. Apparently the results have been in for a while, says Haswell, and the news isn't good. Of course I've known that for a while, and his comments that students tend to follow only surface, directive, negative comments and ignore global non-directive and positive comments were exactly in line with my experience. So when I saw the title of Haswell's piece, I was ready for The Answer; I wanted to hear the definitively perfect way to comment on essays that would prompts deep thought, stunning insight, and a startling increase in work ethic. But, while I didn't get that, I did get an article that forced me to consider my own "teacher culture" as manifest in my comments. I think here the four instructional types could be linked back to Haswell's discussion of Du Gay's circuit of culture, and in particular to regulation, what Haswell calls "The Epicenter of Response." (Perhaps I'm messing up my Du Gay here, as the four types also echo Haswell's discussion of the 12 types of representation). In any case, my takeaway here is that I need to comment in accordance with the type of instruction I want to do (discipline specific feedback), which seems pretty obvious but I think often doesn't happen. In particular, if I teach process and rhetoric, but I spend my time marking up grammar, then I'm really a traditional/formalist. So how will this change my procedures? Well, tentatively, I think I need to separate feedback. I do still believe that final drafts should be largely error free, but I think it's far more important that they be effective arguments representing real insight. So maybe I just need to have multiple drafts with comments on each geared toward the level of completion (early drafts ignoring surface stuff entirely, etc). Of course this would mean at least doubling my grading load, which would mean abandoning my family and dropping out of TTU (and going entirely batty), so I need a way to do this that doesn't involve stacks of papers and hours at Starbucks.

My solutions here are as yet unformed. Way back when I began I used to have 30 minute conferences with three students where they'd read their papers out loud and we'd have a quick discussion. I'd really love to get peer reviews working well, not only as a time saver but because (and much more importantly) teaching is the best way to learn, and that's a possibility. But the final idea came from Haswell mentioning the teacher doing a think-aloud protocol. In fact, I remember Joyce talking about a conversation she'd had with a rejected applicant to the online program. Apparently she read through his application and simply talked through the mental process that led her to reject him, and he was both a bit stunned and quite grateful. What I love about that is the way it demystifies what is normally such a secret process. We don't want our grading process to be a secret (just the opposite, in fact, right? Isn't that the whole point of teaching?), and we try to write enough to clarify it, but really we can never get it all down on paper, and anyway the act of writing it down is itself an act of invention and revision so we're already removed from the original. So perhaps to get the peer review process going, and to demystify the reality of me as the audience for my students' writing, what I really need to do is talk through the grading process and reveal my thoughts, warts and all.

Is Grad School the Perfect Classroom Environment?

My musings this week begin with a pretty simple observation: graduate classes are incredibly different than upper division undergraduate classes, which are in turn different than intro classes, which are finally different than high school classes. (Incidentally, I don’t think high school is really much different than any previous education, right down to first grade.) The reasons for this are no doubt complex, and so I’ll list a few likely components: student motivation, student skill, teacher motivation, teacher skill. All play a part, I think, though certainly not to the same degree (I suspect student motivation to be the biggest factor, and coupled with student skill it would make the social experience of grad classes into a rather ideal form of collaborative learning). But this week’s readings made me wonder if there might be two other issues at work. First, Brooke’s discussion of underlife made me reconsider my grad experience. For the most part, I think, grad students have less of an urge to defy the “grad student” role. He writes, “the self is formed in the distance one takes from the roles one is assigned” (724), and lists the four most common types of underlife stances taken by students (which by the way is a great encapsulation of the behaviors I see in my classes all the time). Certainly grad students do play information games in an attempt to demonstrate that we are more than just students, but I think the stances we take are much closer to the role the institution assigns. No doubt we complain about instructors or assignments on occasion, but I’ve more often heard praise. In fact, the most common conversation I’ve heard is students discussing which instructor could most help their research. So I suppose grad students are much more comfortable with a very contained underlife that doesn’t so much subvert as supplement our student role, which I think largely creates an atmosphere where success is valued. (That said, it may also mean that instructors who wish to disrupt the students’ acceptance of the role may actually face a much tougher time doing so.)

The other thing I’d bring up is that grad school (at least the two I’ve experienced) in an environment that contains far smaller power differentials. One factor seems to me to essentially undermine all attempts to create a classroom community: grades. No matter how much instructors try to get students to “participate in the conversation” or engage in collaborative learning that creates knowledge, the class will almost always end up being reduced to a letter on a transcript. And frankly, this isn’t really the case in grad school. I’ve heard of a few B’s being handed out, and maybe a C to students who are being quietly asked to leave, but I’d guess that most classes result in 90% or more A’s. So with the letter essentially taken out of the equation, what remains? I think it’s learning. Students who care only about the grade might be happy to take a class that taught them nothing but ended with an A, but without the letter grade the only reason we’re doing all these readings and writing all these papers is because we believe they’ll help us. (And to those worried about a glut of ignorant TCR Ph.D.s, I’d suggest the TTU online model, where selectivity is largely handled in admission rather than in weed-out classes seems to do the trick. Plus, there’s that whole dissertation and defense process.)

So the big question is if we could replicate the graduate school experience in lower level classes. I’d suggest that while it may not be entirely possible, we could get a lot closer by getting rid of many presumed-necessary features of education.

Creating Student Experts for Collaborative Learning

As always, the readings were provocative and forced me to revisit my instruction, though this week I found myself mostly nodding in agreement. I was grateful to see Hartwell because I've long despised the notion of teaching grammar, and though I knew there was a theoretical foundation for my opposition, Hartwell spelled it out nicely. (In the interests of full disclosure, though, I should admit that I generally mark up at least one page of each student's assignment in the much-denigrated formalist approach, so while I hate teaching grammar, I also hate grammar errors.) What struck me most, though, was Bruffee's discussion of collaborative learning. I've long liked the idea of collaborative learning, and often try to add more of it to the class, but Bruffee's discussion of the socially-constructed nature of knowledge made me vow to be much more diligent. In particular I was struck by his idea that "reflective thought is public or social conversation internalized" (549). The old chestnut of instruction is that we are trying to teach critical thinking, but so often we (or at least I) imagine that such thinking can exist without the conversation--that students can think critically without having ever conversed critically. That said, I think one key component of such conversations is the notion that knowledge is not created by just any social interaction, but by communities of knowledgeable peers (per Kuhn). As such collaborative learning in the classroom needs not only to foster collaboration, but also to foster the students' sense that they are knowledgeable and worthy of critical participation in the conversation. I think this second point is why a lot of peer reviewing of student writing degenerates into either empty praise or minute discussions of misplaced commas. My most recent attempt at a solution is to work to change the concept of peer review utilizing a rhetorical approach. Instead of asking the students to act as writing experts, I would like them to act simply as an audience, and every rhetorical audience is automatically expert because moving the audience is the point of the rhetoric. Coupled with this might be a move to have the peer-review process take place over multiple drafts, with the first "drafts" being entirely oral. Students would simply make their case to their review group, and the group would respond, all in conversation. The major flaw in this approach is simply that students aren't idiots, and if I'm grading the paper then all the talk about their peer group being the audience is simply hot air, and they will know it. And that's a problem that still stumps me.

Ahhhh! Schema Theory and Shaughnessy

Just a very quick note on a moment of insight--

I was reading about schema theory (as discussed by Doug Brent, and also Richard Anderson, but as is rooted in Piaget) for another project, and all of a sudden it really clicked with Shaughnessy. Anderson suggests that teachers often view mistakes as mere "blemishes" when in fact they may be evidence that the student posesses a entirely different schemata.

I'm still not entirely sure what Shaughnessy's approach would look like in concrete practice, but it seems to me it would mandate a lot of conversation as a component of draft reviews.

Hairston's New Paradigm

Fulkerson’s article nicely revisited the four instructional models we’ve been discussing for a couple weeks, pointing out their origin in lit crit. It was Hairston, however, who to me most clearly offered a way ahead. The problems with FYC, according to Hairston and others, seems to be that we don’t know the point of the course, and (perhaps partly as a consequence) we are using an ineffective and outdated method (current/traditional) that, as defined by Hairston, has the following characteristics:
• Stresses expository writing
• Posits an unchanging reality independent of writer (ignores rhetorical situation)
• Makes style central
• Believes writers know what they’re going to say before they write
• Believes composing process is linear
• Believes teaching editing is teaching writing

The use of this model, Hairston suggests, arises in part from a belief that writing is a skill, not a theory (belief in FYC as a service course), and from the fact that very few teachers of college-level writing have any academic training in the subject. Amen to this.

Hairston clearly advocates primarily the cognitive approach (writing as process), suggesting this is the new Kuhnian paradigm currently replacing the current/traditional approach. And I think she’s correct; I find this model—in conjunction with the rhetorical model—very appealing. I did, however, have some questions and a few concerns about how this would work in practice.

1. What is the place, if any, of formal structures and of proofreading/style in this model? Perhaps I’m clinging to the old paradigm (likely) but I think there are common structures of writing for various forms. In fact, she calls for writing to be “a disciplined creative activity that can be analyzed and described” (448). Presumably she means the process, rather than the product, can be analyzed, but is this certain? What I wonder is if the professional writers being observed have already internalized the common structures of their writing, and so if beginners might benefit from some feedback on structure. Also, while I agree that teaching grammar is worse than useless (even if improving grammar is your only goal!), I also agree with Shaughnessy that errors are undesirable intrusions on the intended communicative goal, and I think having a grammatically and stylistically clean final document helps authors succeed. And, I would add, that proofreading is one step of the professional writing process—not a central step, but it is there. So how do these two elements of the current/traditional mode fit with the process model?


2. Can this method work with 125 students/semester? My college has a 5/5 load, and among colleges of the type this is pretty common. Clearly this would require a lot of student-run review and feedback. In my experience students need a lot of work learning to offer any review that goes beyond grammar. Perhaps their lack of confidence in their own abilities could be overcome by making them the audience for other students’ writing. In other words, they could offer feedback not based on their writing expertise, but on their audience expertise. So perhaps I’ve addressed my own point here (writing really is an idea-generating process!).


3. Are the instructional types as distinct as people are making them out to be? Joseph’s blog this week points to substantial overlap, and I wonder if Hairston overstates her case when she suggests, for example, that current/traditionalists believe that teaching editing is teaching writing, or that they believe the writing process is linear. I have in the past taught structure, but like Joseph I’ve been careful to tell students that this is a suggestion and not a rule, and better writers can stray extremely far from the standard. I also have never taught grammar, have spent a lot of time on process, have insisted that ideas are formed or substantially refined through the process, have as a consequence always emphasized the recursive nature of process, and have worked hard to make revisions about content rather than style (though I do ask for a final revision that is proofreading and style). But I’ve also taught structure (I rely heavily on Toulmin). So what am I?
   

On a final note, I would add that Kuhn was basically a fan of paradigms and not merely of paradigm shifts, which I think is sometimes lost when people apply his ideas. He argued that the reason science progresses so quickly is precisely because of paradigms; they tell scientists what problems need to be solved and they prevent people from wasting time studying things that have already been settled. Frankly, the humanities haven’t ever really had paradigms and so there is little sense of progress; the basic assumptions seem to be argued again with every generation. In any case, if the cognitive/rhetorical model is the new paradigm, what problems does it suggest? How can we use it to move on rather than just to revisit the past?

A Quick(?) Review

In light of the statement that we aren’t thinking deeply enough or sufficiently considering the readings, I thought I’d try to do a quick review of what we’ve covered and see if I can’t synthesize the major points. I’ll try to add a second post this week on the new readings.

1. FYC is largely accidental and as a consequence is poorly defined, both in methods and in goals.

• Parker calls it, and English departments in general, the accidental and undefined child of speech and linguistics. Horner discusses the religious and political forces driving this accidental birth, and raises the point that the discipline, such as it is, was designed for the upper class. Schank makes a similar point, suggesting universities are really in the business of training professors, and ultimately arguing that this focus on being “academic” is an impediment to the more fundamental goal of being well-educated.


• Brereton and Kitzhaber look more specifically at what departments are doing. Brereton examines three major departments and finds a largely ineffective (according to the depts’ own reports) mixture of literature, linguistics, rhetoric, and speech that varies substantially by school. Interestingly, most folks from these departments (100 years ago!) complained about the quality of student writing and lack of time for grading. Kitzhaber, in one of my favorite critiques, suggests that the three key problems with the discipline are (1) it lacks clear aims and so there is no sense of progression (this prefigures Hairston’s suggestions to some extent), (2) there is little confidence in the expertise of the instructors, and (3) the texts are less rigorous. In all key problems include the “cult of literature” largely driven by class elitism, the focus on teaching math/science in the post-Sputnik time (though I would point out that math teaching has been, if anything, even less effective than FYC), and confusion about whether FYC is the first step in a lit major or a service course.

2. One key instructional mistake is focusing on style (and an unreal style at that) and structure over content. Plus some hints of solutions.

• Macrorie, though included in the second week of readings, begins to point the way forward with his discussion of “Engfish”—the pretentious style into which students are forced. Real writing, he suggests, is about telling truths and writing freely. Essentially he seems to be adopting the romantic/expressive position, in large part as a rejection of the older formalist approach. Crowly makes a similar point, suggesting that the push toward prescriptive instruction has minimized or eliminated invention and artificially elevated style and arrangement. D’Angelo obliquely references a similar trend toward prescription with his (welcome) attack on teaching the “modes.”


• Finally, Shaughnessy takes on the most fundamentally prescriptive methods, teaching grammar, by pointing out that this approach actively undermines writing instruction by enhancing the obstacles that prevent students both from writing and from having anything to write about. However, she does not suggest simply ignoring errors, stating that they “are unintentional and unprofitable intrusions upon the consciousness of the reader,” adding that “errors carry messages which writers can’t afford to send” (395). Instead, she argues that errors are more symptomatic than problematic, arising from the underlying logic of the writer and thus offering the opportunity for instruction. As such, she seems to reject both the formalist and the expressive approaches, leaning toward a rhetorical (and perhaps cognitive) approach instead.

So, to sum up, despite addressing a fundamentally different group of students than a century ago, FYC is clinging to methods that are not only ineffective, but destructive. In particular, the readings suggest the current traditional/formalist approach is the wrong way to teach, and instead we should move toward the cognitive and rhetorical models. They also suggest we need to settle, once and for all (or at least for a while) what FYC is actually trying to achieve.