Thursday, May 6, 2010
Thoughts on creating anthonyguypatricia.com website
As a literary scholar, having to create a draft of a professional website ranks as my least favorite task of this semester. I enjoy looking at and using well-designed websites and, when I stop to think about it, I realize the skill, talent, and expertise involved on the part of the folks who put them together and get them on to the Internet. I also kind of feel that, as an employee of the university that, like in the corporate world, the university’s OIT folks or their agents should be responsible for the design of webpages, even for professors or graduate teaching assistants. Granted, in today’s world of shrinking budgets, that isn’t likely, but one can dream. I think, also, that my resistance to website design comes from the fact that working with the templates and software applications is not my area of expertise (specifically what comes to mind here is that I do not understand code, nor do I want to understand code in order to make sure a website “works” properly). To be a tad petulant about it, if I wanted to be a code reader/designer/ manipulator, I would have majored in some form of computer science rather than literature. That isn’t to say that I don’t understand that an individual’s professional website is a rhetorical construct with specific purposes and goals; I get that. Another part of my concern with website design comes from the DreamWeaver software application. I find DreamWeaver less than intuitive to use and, in my less charitable moments, downright cumbersome and irritating. Of course, this may be just my inexperience and/or lack of familiarity with DreamWeaver speaking than anything else—after all, I have almost three decades of working with MSWord and its predecessors, so word processing has long-since become second nature to me. Not so with DreamWeaver. But not all is doom and gloom. I was very happy with the template I chose to use to build my website from, perhaps mostly because of its cool gray color scheme. Not sure why that color scheme appealed to me so much, or what it “says” about my personality (like what the fact that the truck I drive is also a cool gray), but I thought it suited the online personality I wanted to create or give off to anyone who ever visits my site. I also think there is a lot of potential for developing and refining the site further as time goes on. I am frustrated (and this stems from my sense that DreamWeaver is not as intuitive and easy to work with as it could be) that the text and graphics on some of my pages does not align properly, as well as with all of the extra line spacing DreamWeaver seems to think is essential but is line spacing I did not put into the original docx and htm files I created in MSWord. Still, in the overall scheme of things, these are probably rather minor details that can be dealt with to my satisfaction later on.
Thursday, April 29, 2010
April 29th Readings
In “The Literature of Direct Writing Assessment: Major Concerns and Prevailing Trends,” Huot surveys the large body of literature on writing assessment in an attempt to determine what the major areas of focus and attention are in this field (as of 1990). As far as scoring essays, I was interested in Huot’s description of holistic scoring, which is how I feel I score my students’ essays. According to Huot, holistic scoring involves a “rater’s general impression of the quality of a piece of writing” (238). To me, holistic scoring of essays may involve elements of primary trait scoring and analytic scoring, but an overall determination of the quality of the writing is the goal with a holistic approach. And, particularly during this semester, I have found that grading World Lit essays based on my general impressions of them in their entirety is the most efficient way for me to go.
I was also interested in Huot’s section on raters of papers. I was intrigued by the idea that raters’ expectations about student essays plays a significant role in how those essays are scored in the assessment process. He note studies that determined essays known to be written by honors students were scored higher by raters than other kinds of students. I have found that when I’m grading essays, particularly later into a semester after I’ve had a chance to get to know my students and see what kind of work to do, that I find myself grading my best students at a higher level than those students who demonstrate less ability with writing. Perhaps I should figure out a way for my students to turn their papers in to me blindly so that I don’t know whose paper is whose and grade them that way?
White, in “The Scoring of Writing Portfolios: Phase 2,” argues that holistic scoring is a wholly inappropriate method for scoring writing portfolios. This is because holistic scoring was designed for limited and specific circumstances (1 or 2 essays with a set range of requirements), while portfolios cover a much wider range of work from a longer period of time. For White, the key to better scoring of portfolios of student writing is the reflective letter students must write as the most important component of the portfolio. In other words, students must think about the work they have done and be able to demonstrate if that work meets—or does not meet, as the case may be—the requirements of the course, program, major, or whatever overall activity/discipline they were associated with. This means that faculty and administrators of such programs must be able to provide students with clear statements about those requirements from the get-go so students know what they have to do to meet them. By the end of the program, students’ reflective letters become rhetorical arguments, with the portfolio components serving as specific evidence, that the requirements have been met. I have never scored portfolios for assessment or otherwise, but I find White’s ideas intriguing. Perhaps they can be adapted on a smaller scale for the Comp and World Lit classes I teach, but I do worry about the investment of time (of which I have so little as a Graduate Assistant) to administer such a grading method.
Royer and Gilles’s essay, “Directed Self-Placement: An Attitude of Orientation,” explores what, to me, at any rate, is a unique way of placing students in regular Freshman Composition courses or in preparatory (remedial) Freshman Composition courses: letting students decide for themselves which course they feel they should be in—based on their knowledge of themselves and their reading/writing ability. I admit, while I was reading this article, I found the very idea of “directed self-placement” to be revolutionary and I started wondering how it might work here at UNLV. In any case, the whole idea of letting students decide for themselves which composition course they should be in places the responsibility for their success or failure on them, rather than on faculty and administrators who were, in the past, trying to make decisions about people they do not know based on test scores and GPAs. After using the “directed self-placement” method for their composition courses, Royer and Gilles report good success. They feel that most students who place themselves into an ENG 098 section are those whose test scores and GPAs would have “placed” them there from the get go. What allowing students to decide for themselves which course to go into creates, are circumstances where students aren’t resentful and angry at a system and its faculty and administrators for putting them into a course they shouldn’t be in. There is just something so sensible and eminently pragmatic about Royer and Gilles ideas that seems hard to resist.
Reading the NCTE report, “The Impact of the SAT and ACT Timed Writing Tests,” was interesting and presented results I wasn’t too surprised to read. It was in March 2005 that SAT and ACT exams came to include a 25 minute timed essay as a required component—adding another layer or hoop that graduating high school students had to jump through in order to get into college. All sorts of concerns about the new timed essay portion of the exam were raised by the task force charged with looking at what the SAT/ACT folks were up to: concerns about the test’s validity and reliability as an indicator of writing ability, how implementation of the test would impact writing instruction and curriculum in high school, about the unintended consequences as far as the uses of such tests, and about equity and diversity. Not surprisingly, to me, the NCTE task force felt that the timed essay would not be a good indicator of student writing ability, that high school teachers would be forced to teach to the test (and take away valuable teaching time from other more important learning objectives), that the tests could be used as de facto placement tests by colleges and universities, and that students from different socio-economic backgrounds would be unable (for a variety of reasons) to perform as well on such exams as their white, middle-class American counterparts. This report only confirms my mistrust of standardized exams like this.
Lastly, in “An Apologia for the Timed Impromptu Essay Test,” White encourages us to not overlook (and, perhaps more importantly, not to condemn outright) the advantages timed impromptu essays offer. He points out that such tests do involve student writing, rather than the answering of multiple choice questions about grammar, mechanics, and literary attributes of texts. Students actually have to write when it comes to essay tests, and that calls for a combination of skills and abilities such as “recalling information, selecting an appropriate vocabulary, constructing sentences and paragraphs, and, somehow, having something to say” (35). But even though White encourages use of timed essay tests, he does caution us to be aware of their limitations, too. But, they can be as effective as other methods of assessment (such as portfolios)—it just depends on the circumstances. And so it does. With assessment there is no one size fits all.
I was also interested in Huot’s section on raters of papers. I was intrigued by the idea that raters’ expectations about student essays plays a significant role in how those essays are scored in the assessment process. He note studies that determined essays known to be written by honors students were scored higher by raters than other kinds of students. I have found that when I’m grading essays, particularly later into a semester after I’ve had a chance to get to know my students and see what kind of work to do, that I find myself grading my best students at a higher level than those students who demonstrate less ability with writing. Perhaps I should figure out a way for my students to turn their papers in to me blindly so that I don’t know whose paper is whose and grade them that way?
White, in “The Scoring of Writing Portfolios: Phase 2,” argues that holistic scoring is a wholly inappropriate method for scoring writing portfolios. This is because holistic scoring was designed for limited and specific circumstances (1 or 2 essays with a set range of requirements), while portfolios cover a much wider range of work from a longer period of time. For White, the key to better scoring of portfolios of student writing is the reflective letter students must write as the most important component of the portfolio. In other words, students must think about the work they have done and be able to demonstrate if that work meets—or does not meet, as the case may be—the requirements of the course, program, major, or whatever overall activity/discipline they were associated with. This means that faculty and administrators of such programs must be able to provide students with clear statements about those requirements from the get-go so students know what they have to do to meet them. By the end of the program, students’ reflective letters become rhetorical arguments, with the portfolio components serving as specific evidence, that the requirements have been met. I have never scored portfolios for assessment or otherwise, but I find White’s ideas intriguing. Perhaps they can be adapted on a smaller scale for the Comp and World Lit classes I teach, but I do worry about the investment of time (of which I have so little as a Graduate Assistant) to administer such a grading method.
Royer and Gilles’s essay, “Directed Self-Placement: An Attitude of Orientation,” explores what, to me, at any rate, is a unique way of placing students in regular Freshman Composition courses or in preparatory (remedial) Freshman Composition courses: letting students decide for themselves which course they feel they should be in—based on their knowledge of themselves and their reading/writing ability. I admit, while I was reading this article, I found the very idea of “directed self-placement” to be revolutionary and I started wondering how it might work here at UNLV. In any case, the whole idea of letting students decide for themselves which composition course they should be in places the responsibility for their success or failure on them, rather than on faculty and administrators who were, in the past, trying to make decisions about people they do not know based on test scores and GPAs. After using the “directed self-placement” method for their composition courses, Royer and Gilles report good success. They feel that most students who place themselves into an ENG 098 section are those whose test scores and GPAs would have “placed” them there from the get go. What allowing students to decide for themselves which course to go into creates, are circumstances where students aren’t resentful and angry at a system and its faculty and administrators for putting them into a course they shouldn’t be in. There is just something so sensible and eminently pragmatic about Royer and Gilles ideas that seems hard to resist.
Reading the NCTE report, “The Impact of the SAT and ACT Timed Writing Tests,” was interesting and presented results I wasn’t too surprised to read. It was in March 2005 that SAT and ACT exams came to include a 25 minute timed essay as a required component—adding another layer or hoop that graduating high school students had to jump through in order to get into college. All sorts of concerns about the new timed essay portion of the exam were raised by the task force charged with looking at what the SAT/ACT folks were up to: concerns about the test’s validity and reliability as an indicator of writing ability, how implementation of the test would impact writing instruction and curriculum in high school, about the unintended consequences as far as the uses of such tests, and about equity and diversity. Not surprisingly, to me, the NCTE task force felt that the timed essay would not be a good indicator of student writing ability, that high school teachers would be forced to teach to the test (and take away valuable teaching time from other more important learning objectives), that the tests could be used as de facto placement tests by colleges and universities, and that students from different socio-economic backgrounds would be unable (for a variety of reasons) to perform as well on such exams as their white, middle-class American counterparts. This report only confirms my mistrust of standardized exams like this.
Lastly, in “An Apologia for the Timed Impromptu Essay Test,” White encourages us to not overlook (and, perhaps more importantly, not to condemn outright) the advantages timed impromptu essays offer. He points out that such tests do involve student writing, rather than the answering of multiple choice questions about grammar, mechanics, and literary attributes of texts. Students actually have to write when it comes to essay tests, and that calls for a combination of skills and abilities such as “recalling information, selecting an appropriate vocabulary, constructing sentences and paragraphs, and, somehow, having something to say” (35). But even though White encourages use of timed essay tests, he does caution us to be aware of their limitations, too. But, they can be as effective as other methods of assessment (such as portfolios)—it just depends on the circumstances. And so it does. With assessment there is no one size fits all.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
4/22/10 Readings
Even though I don’t, currently, teach literacy, Freire’s article, “The Adult Literacy Process as Cultural Action for Freedom and Educatio and Conscientizacao,” was an interesting read as a companion piece to his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which I read a number of years ago. It was intriguing to find that Freire and his associates achieved success at teaching illiterate persons how to read using terminology from their own lives. I also found the idea that you can’t just teach people literacy by demanding (or thinking all they can do is) that students learn things by rote. True teaching and true learning comes from giving students the means of understanding that they are part of culture and can, in turn, contribute to the creation of that culture. What I’ve always found problematic about Freire’s pedagogy, is that it seems incompatible (in the broadest sense) with the kinds of students I teach in the classroom here at UNLV; students who are, in the main, far more privileged and entitled in a way that those in the part of the world in which Freire worked aren’t/weren’t. As other writers have pointed out, I am working with students who are, most likely, trying enhance and solidify their position within dominant culture. They’re going to be disinclined to a pedagogy that might threaten their goals.
I also enjoyed Ira Shore’s piece, “Monday Morning Fever.” Shore draw’s on Freire’s work and in a way that makes more sense as far as empowering students as writers no matter their socio-economic or political situation. I found Shore’s detailed pedagogy intriguing, including as it does the sharing of experience and insight about work (I wondered what my students would have to say about their work experiences and how it might compare to the comments from Shore’s students about work), his method of making the classroom student-centered from the outset by having students get up in front of the classroom to introduce themselves while the professor takes notes while making him- or herself otherwise inconspicuous, and I was most impressed with the idea of having students read their papers out loud in class as a means of grammar instruction. I have long-advised my students to use such a technique in their own writing process with what I thought of as limited success, but I had never before thought of having them do it in class. Perhaps the next time I teach composition, I will employ this pedagogical technique in my classroom.
Berlin’s essay makes the point that rhetorical pedagogies are always ideological and, as such, there’s no point in claiming otherwise. Something is always at stake when it comes to teaching and learning in the university classroom. Berlin favors what he calls social-epistemic rhetoric because such a rhetoric recognizes its ideological investments (and doesn’t shy away from them), and recognizes that the world is made up of social constructs that are historically contingent (i.e., they are specific to a time and place and, thus, do not have to be the way they are but for historical accident). Teaching this way, or from this perspective, allows professors to empower students to deconstruct their world(s) and to keep them from becoming victims of the dominant (and, at times, destructive) power structures operative in those worlds.
Berlin stands in direct contrast to a scholar like Hairston, who believes, emphatically, that ideology has no place whatsoever in the college classroom and, in particular, in the freshman composition course. The only thing, Hairston argues, we should be doing as composition professors, is teaching students how to write clearly and effectively. Students (and I think she means freshman students in particular), are not capable of dealing with all of the baggage an issues- or ideological-oriented course would freight them with. I find Hairston’s ideas on this point to be derogatory toward students. Assuming from the get-go that they aren’t smart enough or sophisticated enough to be able to handle dealing with big or important issues while they are learning to write at the same time is an underestimation of students that is unfair and, in the end, derogatory. I also feel like that, with the way she presents her ideas, she creates an either/or binary about writing and ideology that fails to take into account of the possibilities of a yes/and pedagogy. Why can’t students learn how to write just as well (if not better) in a composition class that is focused on some sort of a social or political issue that might have relevance in their everyday lives? To just dismiss that possibility outright seems shortsighted.
I also liked Smith’s article on academic gatekeeping. In it, Smith offers a down-to-earth take on the “issue” of gatekeeping. Whether we like it or not, we are gatekeepers and our students, prior to arriving in our college classrooms, have jumped through a huge number of gates to get there. I do like his supposition that we should expand our notion of what gatekeeping is, and I found his example of someone in the composition classroom who wants to be a doctor to be compelling. As writing teachers, we can’t teach someone how to operate on another human being’s brain, but we can teach such students about being a dedicated (for example) individual that will, hopefully, have an impact on the kind of doctor that student becomes later in life. In that sense Smith, as I understand him, sees gatekeeping. Gatekeeping, in other words, should not be seen as the negative it has become.
I also enjoyed Ira Shore’s piece, “Monday Morning Fever.” Shore draw’s on Freire’s work and in a way that makes more sense as far as empowering students as writers no matter their socio-economic or political situation. I found Shore’s detailed pedagogy intriguing, including as it does the sharing of experience and insight about work (I wondered what my students would have to say about their work experiences and how it might compare to the comments from Shore’s students about work), his method of making the classroom student-centered from the outset by having students get up in front of the classroom to introduce themselves while the professor takes notes while making him- or herself otherwise inconspicuous, and I was most impressed with the idea of having students read their papers out loud in class as a means of grammar instruction. I have long-advised my students to use such a technique in their own writing process with what I thought of as limited success, but I had never before thought of having them do it in class. Perhaps the next time I teach composition, I will employ this pedagogical technique in my classroom.
Berlin’s essay makes the point that rhetorical pedagogies are always ideological and, as such, there’s no point in claiming otherwise. Something is always at stake when it comes to teaching and learning in the university classroom. Berlin favors what he calls social-epistemic rhetoric because such a rhetoric recognizes its ideological investments (and doesn’t shy away from them), and recognizes that the world is made up of social constructs that are historically contingent (i.e., they are specific to a time and place and, thus, do not have to be the way they are but for historical accident). Teaching this way, or from this perspective, allows professors to empower students to deconstruct their world(s) and to keep them from becoming victims of the dominant (and, at times, destructive) power structures operative in those worlds.
Berlin stands in direct contrast to a scholar like Hairston, who believes, emphatically, that ideology has no place whatsoever in the college classroom and, in particular, in the freshman composition course. The only thing, Hairston argues, we should be doing as composition professors, is teaching students how to write clearly and effectively. Students (and I think she means freshman students in particular), are not capable of dealing with all of the baggage an issues- or ideological-oriented course would freight them with. I find Hairston’s ideas on this point to be derogatory toward students. Assuming from the get-go that they aren’t smart enough or sophisticated enough to be able to handle dealing with big or important issues while they are learning to write at the same time is an underestimation of students that is unfair and, in the end, derogatory. I also feel like that, with the way she presents her ideas, she creates an either/or binary about writing and ideology that fails to take into account of the possibilities of a yes/and pedagogy. Why can’t students learn how to write just as well (if not better) in a composition class that is focused on some sort of a social or political issue that might have relevance in their everyday lives? To just dismiss that possibility outright seems shortsighted.
I also liked Smith’s article on academic gatekeeping. In it, Smith offers a down-to-earth take on the “issue” of gatekeeping. Whether we like it or not, we are gatekeepers and our students, prior to arriving in our college classrooms, have jumped through a huge number of gates to get there. I do like his supposition that we should expand our notion of what gatekeeping is, and I found his example of someone in the composition classroom who wants to be a doctor to be compelling. As writing teachers, we can’t teach someone how to operate on another human being’s brain, but we can teach such students about being a dedicated (for example) individual that will, hopefully, have an impact on the kind of doctor that student becomes later in life. In that sense Smith, as I understand him, sees gatekeeping. Gatekeeping, in other words, should not be seen as the negative it has become.
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Readings for 04/15/10
Hillocks’s “What Works in Teaching Composition: A Meta-analysis of Experimental Treatment Studies” was published in 1984 and, when I noticed that date, I was afraid the material it covered would be just as dated. In any case, this essay, as its title suggests, looks at what it terms “experimental treatments” as regards composition studies in order to get a sense of what does and what doesn’t work from a pedagogical perspective in the classroom. Instruction methods tracked in the course of the study include: presentational (where the teacher presents knowledge and expects students to soak it up), natural process (makes use of such things as free writing and peer reviewing with fairly minimal teacher involvement), environmental (teacher direction is specific and oriented toward student production of specific tasks, but teacher involvement is still minimal), and individual (where instruction is tailored to individual students through various means). Findings of the study include that the presentational pedagogy is the least effective at teaching writing to students yet, at the same time, it is the most prevalent pedagogy used in the classroom, while the most effective pedagogy is environmental. Another finding was that teaching of grammar in the composition classroom rarely proves effective. This study seems to me like a rather laborious way of getting to a point that seems like common sense to me: that a composition pedagogy needs to be multivalent and accommodating rather than narrowly-focused and draconian. But that’s just me.
In “Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories,” Berlin examines, briefly and succinctly, four major schools of thought on composition pedagogy: those of the “Neo-Aristotelians or Classicists, the Positivists or Current-Traditionalists, the Neo-Platonists or Expressionists, and the New Rhetoricians” (766). (In regards to the latter category, I am left wondering if the term New Rhetoricians ever caught on and if it is in current/general use. Nevertheless, it’s a nice steal from Greenblatt’s New Historicism.) The Neo-Aristotelian approach uses logic/reason on data in order to get at the truth; in this system, a sign = a thing unproblematically. The Current-Traditional approach is a means of getting at truth by what is observable or what is empirical, and it, Berlin notes, dominates composition instruction (or, at least it did in the 1980s when he wrote this essay). The Expressionist approach is a Platonic approach that seeks for truth but is suspicious that language can ever express said truth because language is prone to error and instability. Perhaps because Berlin himself, as he admits readily, is a proponent of the New Rhetorical approach to composition pedagogy, his comments on the other three approaches seem derogatory. Be that as it may, he notes that the New Rhetorical approach embraces the idea that truth “is dynamic and dialectical” and that “data must always be interpreted—structured and organized—in order to have meaning” (774). Given this idea, New Rhetoric invites and encourages students to become the creators of meaning rather than merely passive receptors of “knowledge” imparted to them by their teachers. With the way Berlin presents it, New Rhetoric seems like an incredibly idealistic pedagogy. But the idea of creating meaning through interpretation appeals to me as a composition instructor, especially one like myself attempting to work with queer theory and the discourse(s) of heteronormativity in the classroom. It seems the best way to teach students how to deal with the discursive world in which we live.
As its title suggests, Fulkerson’s article looks at the state of composition pedagogy at the turn of the 21st century. Fulkerson seems convinced that composition pedagogy at the (mostly) present time has turned toward social theories, critical/cultural studies approaches. Given, once again, my interest in bringing queer theory into the composition classroom, this part of Fulkerson’s essay was particularly interesting. On this subject, although Fulkerson attempts to maintain a dispassionate or disinterested ethos, I found this part of his survey subtly biased against CCS approaches to teaching composition. Fulkerson’s main fear with CCS approaches seems to be that they do not foster teaching students how to write or what (undefined) good writing is—in favor of an agenda- or politically-driven pedagogy aimed at teaching students how to resist Western society’s dominant discourses (inclusive of patriarchy, capitalism, heterosexuality, racism, etc.). Fulkerson does raise a good point: if you’re going to use a CCS approach in the composition classroom, how are you going to make sure that composition remains a primary focus, as well? And that is something I feel I need to take into account as I develop my own queer composition pedagogy. In any case, after surveying Contemporary Expressivist Composition, Process and Post-Process theories, and Rhetorical Approaches to Composition, Fulkerson concludes that the composition classroom has, in the ten years between 1990 and 2000, become a far more complex place for professors and students alike to negotiate successfully (and this is particularly true with the seeming prevalence of CCS approaches to pedagogy that have manifest in those ten years). Hard to disagree with him there.
In their article, Downs and Wardle argue for changing the First Year Composition Course into an Introduction to Writing Studies course, a move, they claim, would allow composition and composition instructors to take their rightful place within the academy. This would be because, they insist, Writing Studies would move composition away from a one-size-fits-all and skills-based approach to the teaching of writing and toward something more rigorous and recursive. This is an intriguing approach to composition pedagogy that offers a number of elements that seem to be compatible with incorporating CCS (like queer theory) into the composition classroom. I was particularly impressed with Downs and Wardle’s insistence that their Introduction to Writing Studies course would accord full respect to students by refusing to make or give in to the persistent differentiation between student and expert writers. And, finally, in “Post-Process ‘Pedagogy’: A Philosophical Exercise,” Breuch makes explicit the fact that post-process pedagogy is much more than a critique of process pedagogy; post-process pedagogy is, in fact, aligned with notions of writing being an indeterminate range of related activities and demands engagement in the various discourse communities we all find ourselves caught up in (whether we realize it or not).
In “Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories,” Berlin examines, briefly and succinctly, four major schools of thought on composition pedagogy: those of the “Neo-Aristotelians or Classicists, the Positivists or Current-Traditionalists, the Neo-Platonists or Expressionists, and the New Rhetoricians” (766). (In regards to the latter category, I am left wondering if the term New Rhetoricians ever caught on and if it is in current/general use. Nevertheless, it’s a nice steal from Greenblatt’s New Historicism.) The Neo-Aristotelian approach uses logic/reason on data in order to get at the truth; in this system, a sign = a thing unproblematically. The Current-Traditional approach is a means of getting at truth by what is observable or what is empirical, and it, Berlin notes, dominates composition instruction (or, at least it did in the 1980s when he wrote this essay). The Expressionist approach is a Platonic approach that seeks for truth but is suspicious that language can ever express said truth because language is prone to error and instability. Perhaps because Berlin himself, as he admits readily, is a proponent of the New Rhetorical approach to composition pedagogy, his comments on the other three approaches seem derogatory. Be that as it may, he notes that the New Rhetorical approach embraces the idea that truth “is dynamic and dialectical” and that “data must always be interpreted—structured and organized—in order to have meaning” (774). Given this idea, New Rhetoric invites and encourages students to become the creators of meaning rather than merely passive receptors of “knowledge” imparted to them by their teachers. With the way Berlin presents it, New Rhetoric seems like an incredibly idealistic pedagogy. But the idea of creating meaning through interpretation appeals to me as a composition instructor, especially one like myself attempting to work with queer theory and the discourse(s) of heteronormativity in the classroom. It seems the best way to teach students how to deal with the discursive world in which we live.
As its title suggests, Fulkerson’s article looks at the state of composition pedagogy at the turn of the 21st century. Fulkerson seems convinced that composition pedagogy at the (mostly) present time has turned toward social theories, critical/cultural studies approaches. Given, once again, my interest in bringing queer theory into the composition classroom, this part of Fulkerson’s essay was particularly interesting. On this subject, although Fulkerson attempts to maintain a dispassionate or disinterested ethos, I found this part of his survey subtly biased against CCS approaches to teaching composition. Fulkerson’s main fear with CCS approaches seems to be that they do not foster teaching students how to write or what (undefined) good writing is—in favor of an agenda- or politically-driven pedagogy aimed at teaching students how to resist Western society’s dominant discourses (inclusive of patriarchy, capitalism, heterosexuality, racism, etc.). Fulkerson does raise a good point: if you’re going to use a CCS approach in the composition classroom, how are you going to make sure that composition remains a primary focus, as well? And that is something I feel I need to take into account as I develop my own queer composition pedagogy. In any case, after surveying Contemporary Expressivist Composition, Process and Post-Process theories, and Rhetorical Approaches to Composition, Fulkerson concludes that the composition classroom has, in the ten years between 1990 and 2000, become a far more complex place for professors and students alike to negotiate successfully (and this is particularly true with the seeming prevalence of CCS approaches to pedagogy that have manifest in those ten years). Hard to disagree with him there.
In their article, Downs and Wardle argue for changing the First Year Composition Course into an Introduction to Writing Studies course, a move, they claim, would allow composition and composition instructors to take their rightful place within the academy. This would be because, they insist, Writing Studies would move composition away from a one-size-fits-all and skills-based approach to the teaching of writing and toward something more rigorous and recursive. This is an intriguing approach to composition pedagogy that offers a number of elements that seem to be compatible with incorporating CCS (like queer theory) into the composition classroom. I was particularly impressed with Downs and Wardle’s insistence that their Introduction to Writing Studies course would accord full respect to students by refusing to make or give in to the persistent differentiation between student and expert writers. And, finally, in “Post-Process ‘Pedagogy’: A Philosophical Exercise,” Breuch makes explicit the fact that post-process pedagogy is much more than a critique of process pedagogy; post-process pedagogy is, in fact, aligned with notions of writing being an indeterminate range of related activities and demands engagement in the various discourse communities we all find ourselves caught up in (whether we realize it or not).
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Proposal 2nd Draft -- Still needs work
This still needs work, but here is a draft of my paper proposal:
One of the things I was most excited about when I entered graduate school was that, for the first time in my life, I was going to get to teach, to be the one at the head of the classroom. Four or five years later, I’m still just as excited about teaching in the university setting. But, increasingly, issues associated with sexuality have come into play as regards myself and my place and purpose as a college teacher. As a gay man, should I be at all concerned with the problematics of sexuality in relation to the fact that I am the one in the position of authority now in the classroom? In other words, am I obligated to, in effect, come out to my students just because I am a gay man? Should my sexuality have any effect on the education my students receive from me? Shifting the focus just a bit, do I have an obligation to other GLBQT people—past, present, and future—to be open and honest about my sexuality in the classroom? To do what I can as a gay educator in the college environment to change things, hopefully for the better? If I were to attempt to queer the composition classroom(s) I am responsible for, how would I go about doing so? What would the texts I use in the classroom look like? What methodologies and pedagogies would I employ? What would be the goals and purposes of a queer composition classroom?
In “Rhetoric on the Edge of Cunning; Or, The Performance of Neutrality (Re)Considered As a Composition Pedagogy for Student Resistance,” Karen Kopelson argues for suspect [as regards, for example, race, gender, sexuality] individuals who are also in teaching positions to play their cards as close to their vests as possible when it comes to resistant composition students (and for Kopelson, all undergraduate students are resistant to writing instruction). In other words, Kopelson does not advocate a teacher’s coming out, if you will, to his or her students in the composition classroom. Even if teachers’ pedagogical aims are far from neutral and far from being depoliticized, the personal investments of said teachers need not be made manifest in the classroom.
As compelling as Kopelson’s insights are, I find Didi Khayatt’s approach to the idea of coming out in the classroom—as detailed in the article: “Paradoxes of the Closet: Beyond the Classroom Assignment of In or Out”—in which she argues that coming out in the classroom allows teachers to reinforce and support their students (no matter where they fall within the sexuality spectrum), to be a role model for all students (not just their fellow gay and lesbian students), to participate truly and wholeheartedly in the project of unsettling the dominance of heterosexuality, to prevent the continued institutionalization of homophobia and, to put themselves on the line for what they believe in.
Other scholars, including Edward J. Ingebretsen, Harriet Malinowitz, and David L. Wallace also deal with the pragmatics and the problematics of professors coming out in the composition
classroom. These individuals, unlike Kopelson, advocate teachers being open and honest about sexuality and its attendant issues with their students. But what happens after the professor comes out? How can said professor continue to queer the composition classroom beyond that milestone?
This seems to be the gap in current queer composition theory. As such, what I propose to do in this paper is to sketch out what kinds of readings and assignments could be used to teach students about rhetoric—as a form of persuasion—and discourse in a meaningful way that is in touch with contemporary issues. For example, if teaching students how to produce a Summary and Response paper (one of the first papers done in ENG 101 at UNLV), how would such an assignment look if the primary readings for it were coming out narratives written by lesbians and gay men? Perhaps a corollary assignment could be having students write a coming out narrative of their own—even if they identify as straight. What would a Definition paper assignment look like if that assignment were focused on marriage? Such an assignment would ask students not only to define marriage, but to explain how/why they would define it in such a way. Texts that could be used might include the proposed DOMA (Domestic Marriage Act) amendment to the United States Constitution, or something more local, like Nevada’s Constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. Analyzing such texts as rhetorical and discursive products and how they affect people in the so-called real world would provide an incomparable education in composition. It would also allow for Queer Theory (with a capital Q and a capital T) to be brought into the composition classroom in a meaningful and productive way.
One of the things I was most excited about when I entered graduate school was that, for the first time in my life, I was going to get to teach, to be the one at the head of the classroom. Four or five years later, I’m still just as excited about teaching in the university setting. But, increasingly, issues associated with sexuality have come into play as regards myself and my place and purpose as a college teacher. As a gay man, should I be at all concerned with the problematics of sexuality in relation to the fact that I am the one in the position of authority now in the classroom? In other words, am I obligated to, in effect, come out to my students just because I am a gay man? Should my sexuality have any effect on the education my students receive from me? Shifting the focus just a bit, do I have an obligation to other GLBQT people—past, present, and future—to be open and honest about my sexuality in the classroom? To do what I can as a gay educator in the college environment to change things, hopefully for the better? If I were to attempt to queer the composition classroom(s) I am responsible for, how would I go about doing so? What would the texts I use in the classroom look like? What methodologies and pedagogies would I employ? What would be the goals and purposes of a queer composition classroom?
In “Rhetoric on the Edge of Cunning; Or, The Performance of Neutrality (Re)Considered As a Composition Pedagogy for Student Resistance,” Karen Kopelson argues for suspect [as regards, for example, race, gender, sexuality] individuals who are also in teaching positions to play their cards as close to their vests as possible when it comes to resistant composition students (and for Kopelson, all undergraduate students are resistant to writing instruction). In other words, Kopelson does not advocate a teacher’s coming out, if you will, to his or her students in the composition classroom. Even if teachers’ pedagogical aims are far from neutral and far from being depoliticized, the personal investments of said teachers need not be made manifest in the classroom.
As compelling as Kopelson’s insights are, I find Didi Khayatt’s approach to the idea of coming out in the classroom—as detailed in the article: “Paradoxes of the Closet: Beyond the Classroom Assignment of In or Out”—in which she argues that coming out in the classroom allows teachers to reinforce and support their students (no matter where they fall within the sexuality spectrum), to be a role model for all students (not just their fellow gay and lesbian students), to participate truly and wholeheartedly in the project of unsettling the dominance of heterosexuality, to prevent the continued institutionalization of homophobia and, to put themselves on the line for what they believe in.
Other scholars, including Edward J. Ingebretsen, Harriet Malinowitz, and David L. Wallace also deal with the pragmatics and the problematics of professors coming out in the composition
classroom. These individuals, unlike Kopelson, advocate teachers being open and honest about sexuality and its attendant issues with their students. But what happens after the professor comes out? How can said professor continue to queer the composition classroom beyond that milestone?
This seems to be the gap in current queer composition theory. As such, what I propose to do in this paper is to sketch out what kinds of readings and assignments could be used to teach students about rhetoric—as a form of persuasion—and discourse in a meaningful way that is in touch with contemporary issues. For example, if teaching students how to produce a Summary and Response paper (one of the first papers done in ENG 101 at UNLV), how would such an assignment look if the primary readings for it were coming out narratives written by lesbians and gay men? Perhaps a corollary assignment could be having students write a coming out narrative of their own—even if they identify as straight. What would a Definition paper assignment look like if that assignment were focused on marriage? Such an assignment would ask students not only to define marriage, but to explain how/why they would define it in such a way. Texts that could be used might include the proposed DOMA (Domestic Marriage Act) amendment to the United States Constitution, or something more local, like Nevada’s Constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. Analyzing such texts as rhetorical and discursive products and how they affect people in the so-called real world would provide an incomparable education in composition. It would also allow for Queer Theory (with a capital Q and a capital T) to be brought into the composition classroom in a meaningful and productive way.
On Readings for 040810
This week’s readings on computers and writing proved interesting. Patricia Sullivan’s “Taking Control of the Page: Electronic Writing and Word Publishing” verged on the anachronistic—even though it was published only twenty years ago—yet some of the points Sullivan raises are still valid in the composition classroom of the 21st century. It was great to be informed about how, historically, and since the invention of the printing press, the writing of a text was separate from said text’s composition (in terms of layout, design, typeface, etc.) and physical publication. Writers, in other words, did not have to be concerned with how their texts looked, that was someone else’s job to worry about. With the advent of desktop publishing in the 1990s and even more sophisticated means of text preparation and presentation to an audience, more and more writers (or authors) could take control of the final product that results from their original written text. Here at UNLV, the only aspect of composition I am aware of we use to teach or to familiarize students with the possibility of using something other than basic text in their essays is in ENG 102. In that class, one of the requirements for successful completion of students’ 7-10 page researched argumentative essays is the inclusion of some kind of a graphic. This graphic can be a picture, a chart, a graph, etc. Of course, the picture, chart, graph or whatever that students choose to incorporate into their essays must make sense within the context of the essay itself and it must work aesthetically. For me, since I am only reasonably familiar with MSWord and, to a far lesser extent, MSExcel, I find it difficult as the professor to teach students how to bring in such elements as pictures, charts, graphs and so on so that they end up being effective and enhancing components of their essays. Also, having been schooled for more years than I’d like to remember in English studies as a text-based discipline, I am far more used to creating essays that are textual only and sans anything like pictures, charts, graphs, etc. Granted, I still want those texts to be pleasing to the eye of my readers and to be easily comprehensible (for the most part), but moving too far away from strictly textual boundaries puts me in something of an uncomfortable position.
In “The Internet-Based Composition Classroom: A Study in Pedagogy,” Harris and Wambeam discuss their 1994 experiments with creating a truly Internet-based pedagogy in the composition classroom. As someone who is considering using blogs as the medium my students will complete and submit their response papers for the next incarnation of my ENG 231 class, I found Harris and Wambeam’s experiments with listserves and email communications to be intriguing. It was heartening to see that students in the Internet-based classroom (as opposed to those in the control, or traditional, classroom) responded enthusiastically to performing to classroom assignments—and their peers—in the online environment. Of course, someone like Mueller, in “Digital Underlife in the Networked Writing Classroom,” comes along later (at least in the sequence that I read this week’s essays) and offers, via a citation, a more cautionary tale of blogging in the classroom; here, one teacher recounts how her students felt blogging was just another required activity—another hoop they had to jump through—just to get a grade. It wasn’t, in other words, an activity they engaged with.
Setting aside one teacher’s less than great experience using blogging in the Internet-Based Composition Classroom, I think teaching in a wired classroom offers, or can offer, more benefits than problematics. I suppose I qualify as one of those instructors who has “given in” to the fact that technology is ubiquitous and that no matter what proscriptions I may put in place “against” technology in the classroom, my students are going to find ways to circumvent those proscriptions. So, I tell them up front as class is starting at the beginning of the semester that they are free to use their laptops or Ipads or cell phones for whatever, as long as they are respectful of me and their colleagues—meaning, I do not allow them to take and receive calls in class, but they are free to text as much as they want as long as they realize that they still need to be paying attention to the lecture and to their peers in class discussions. I liked Mueller’s use of the phrase “economies of attention” because it seems so apropos to today’s students; they really do need to pay attention to a lot of different competing things. I haven’t heard the phrase in some time, but one mark of a good employee in the regular working world is someone who could multitask; in order to multitask, one needs to be able to fragment one’s attention to various things effectively. So, why not use the classroom to allow students to develop their abilities to do multiple things at once?
Having used some kind of a word processing program since PCs entered the working and the university worlds 30 some odd years ago (give or take), I have been suspicious of the grammar and spell-checkers embedded within such programs as MSWord. So I really enjoyed reading McGee and Ericsson’s “The politics of the program: MSWORD as the invisible grammarian.” As a writer, I don’t often use the grammar function in MSWord, meaning I don’t put much stock in the grammar suggestions MSWord presents to me as I am writing. SpellCheck has become something that happens pretty much automatically these days, so that I do use, if more by default than anything else. As far as my students are concerned, I find myself having to remind them that, at least when it comes to spelling, they still need to double check and proofread their essays before they turn them in to me—particularly as regards homonyms and so forth. Also, in my general experience, it seems to me that if MSWord’s grammar checker were truly effective, I wouldn’t see so many comma splices, misplaced modifiers, and subject-verb agreement problems as I do in my students’ essays.
And, finally, in “Understanding ‘Internet Plagiarism’,” Rebecca Moore Howard reminds us that it only seems like plagiarism cases have risen to intolerable levels because of the ubiquitousness of the Internet. She goes on, rightly, in my opinion, to charge us as composition professors, to be vigilant about teaching our students how to cite source usage properly. And that is just plain common sense.
In “The Internet-Based Composition Classroom: A Study in Pedagogy,” Harris and Wambeam discuss their 1994 experiments with creating a truly Internet-based pedagogy in the composition classroom. As someone who is considering using blogs as the medium my students will complete and submit their response papers for the next incarnation of my ENG 231 class, I found Harris and Wambeam’s experiments with listserves and email communications to be intriguing. It was heartening to see that students in the Internet-based classroom (as opposed to those in the control, or traditional, classroom) responded enthusiastically to performing to classroom assignments—and their peers—in the online environment. Of course, someone like Mueller, in “Digital Underlife in the Networked Writing Classroom,” comes along later (at least in the sequence that I read this week’s essays) and offers, via a citation, a more cautionary tale of blogging in the classroom; here, one teacher recounts how her students felt blogging was just another required activity—another hoop they had to jump through—just to get a grade. It wasn’t, in other words, an activity they engaged with.
Setting aside one teacher’s less than great experience using blogging in the Internet-Based Composition Classroom, I think teaching in a wired classroom offers, or can offer, more benefits than problematics. I suppose I qualify as one of those instructors who has “given in” to the fact that technology is ubiquitous and that no matter what proscriptions I may put in place “against” technology in the classroom, my students are going to find ways to circumvent those proscriptions. So, I tell them up front as class is starting at the beginning of the semester that they are free to use their laptops or Ipads or cell phones for whatever, as long as they are respectful of me and their colleagues—meaning, I do not allow them to take and receive calls in class, but they are free to text as much as they want as long as they realize that they still need to be paying attention to the lecture and to their peers in class discussions. I liked Mueller’s use of the phrase “economies of attention” because it seems so apropos to today’s students; they really do need to pay attention to a lot of different competing things. I haven’t heard the phrase in some time, but one mark of a good employee in the regular working world is someone who could multitask; in order to multitask, one needs to be able to fragment one’s attention to various things effectively. So, why not use the classroom to allow students to develop their abilities to do multiple things at once?
Having used some kind of a word processing program since PCs entered the working and the university worlds 30 some odd years ago (give or take), I have been suspicious of the grammar and spell-checkers embedded within such programs as MSWord. So I really enjoyed reading McGee and Ericsson’s “The politics of the program: MSWORD as the invisible grammarian.” As a writer, I don’t often use the grammar function in MSWord, meaning I don’t put much stock in the grammar suggestions MSWord presents to me as I am writing. SpellCheck has become something that happens pretty much automatically these days, so that I do use, if more by default than anything else. As far as my students are concerned, I find myself having to remind them that, at least when it comes to spelling, they still need to double check and proofread their essays before they turn them in to me—particularly as regards homonyms and so forth. Also, in my general experience, it seems to me that if MSWord’s grammar checker were truly effective, I wouldn’t see so many comma splices, misplaced modifiers, and subject-verb agreement problems as I do in my students’ essays.
And, finally, in “Understanding ‘Internet Plagiarism’,” Rebecca Moore Howard reminds us that it only seems like plagiarism cases have risen to intolerable levels because of the ubiquitousness of the Internet. She goes on, rightly, in my opinion, to charge us as composition professors, to be vigilant about teaching our students how to cite source usage properly. And that is just plain common sense.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Conference Paper: Working Annotated Bibliography
Ingebretsen, Edward J. “When the Cave Is a Closet: Pedagogies of the (Re)Pressed.” In Lesbian and Gay Studies and the Teaching of English: Positions, Pedagogies, and Cultural Politics. Ed. William J. Spurlin. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2000. 14-35. A gay professor at a Catholic university, Ingebretsen makes the point that teachers like him are probably the most monstrous of creatures in the heterosexist, patriarchal culture of the West. Being openly gay in the classroom means risking becoming a public and a political spectacle. This underscores how heterosexuality presumes and perpetuates its normality and its role as the enforcer of all kinds of behaviors it considers acceptable and non-acceptable. Allowing gays and lesbians to have a voice in the rarified space of the classroom is transgressive and potentially liberating. Useful within my own project for considering how my own sexuality could come into play as a composition professor and for how to prepare for groups of students who are like the trapped figures in Plato’s Cave and may not deal easily or well with the idea of the gay Other.
Khayatt, Didi. “Paradoxes of the Closet: Beyond the Classroom Assignment of In or Out.” In Inside the Academy and Out: Lesbian/Gay/Queer Studies and Social Action. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. 31-48. In this piece, Khayatt argues for professors to be open and upfront about their personal investments—particularly as regards sexuality—in the courses they teach. Being open about sexuality allows teachers to reinforce and support their students, be a role model, to participate in the ongoing project of unsettling the dominance of heterosexuality, to avoid the continuation of institutionalizing homophobia, and to, as leaders, put the self on the line. Useful for my project because Khayatt provides a cogent argument for being out in the classroom that challenges the neutrality Kopelson argues for in her piece and which makes me uncomfortable.
Kopelson, Karen. “Rhetoric on the Edge of Cunning; Or, The Performance of Neutrality (Re)Considered As a Composition Pedagogy for Student Resistance.” College Composition and Communication. 55.1 (2003): 115-146. Kopelson’s main argument in this piece is that composition professors should teach from what she describes as a position of neutrality—even if their pedagogical goals are far from being neutral. She feels such an approach to teaching will accomplish more as far as reaching resistant undergraduates than being open and explicit about where one stands on issues such as gender and sexuality in the classroom. Useful for my project because I do not agree with Kopelson’s idea of pedagogical subterfuge, even if it may be more effective in changing the minds of students for the better about all of the Others they will encounter in their lives.
Malinowitz, Harriet. “‘Truth’ or Consequences: The Lesbian or Gay Student in the Mainstream Writing Class.” Chapter Two of Textual Orientations: Lesbian and Gay Students and the Making of Discourse Communities. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995. 35-44. Given the undeniable and pervasive homophobia of Western society, the lesbian or gay student in the composition classroom faces myriad difficulties when faced with the charge of writing authentically about their lived experience. What, Malinowitz wonders, would help such students to feel comfortable and empowered to write about such things as coming out, one of the most singular and crucial experiences of gays and lesbians, yet one that is discounted entirely by normative heterosexuality? How can such students become empowered as writers? Advocates creating a “safe” classroom where gay and lesbian students can be themselves without fear of harm of any kind. Useful for my project in imagining what kind of a composition classroom I could create in which all students are welcome and encouraged to be authentic and real.
——. “Adrian O’Connor: ‘It’s a Social World.’” Chapter Eight of Textual Orientations: Lesbian and Gay Students and the Making of Discourse Communities. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995. 163-185. This chapter of Malinowitz’s book describes the experiences of a young gay man known as Adrian in the composition classroom that Malinowitz led at what she refers to as Cosmopolitan University. With the encouragement of his teacher and his fellow students, this writing course allowed Adrian to find his authentic voice and, perhaps more importantly, his identity as a young gay man. Useful to my project for revealing how my interventions as a gay composition professor might help my students at some point in the future.
Wallace, David L. “Out in the Academy: Heterosexism, Invisibility, and Double Consciousness.” College English. 65.1 (2002): 53-66. Focuses on three experiences Wallace, as a gay professor at Iowa Sate University, had facing heterosexism in the academy. For Wallace, these “institutional moments” led him “to speak or write as a gay academic in the service of beginning to make political interventions in dominant culture” (54). The most poignant of the three experiences involved gay students at ISU who were prevented from attending meetings of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Ally Alliance on campus because of commitments to a summer bridge program the administrators of would not find a way to accommodate. For Wallace, the administrators’ actions made it seem as if the students’ sexuality/identity did not matter. Though unsuccessful in getting the administrators to change their minds about the LGBTAA, Wallace did what he could to help the students. Useful for my project for providing examples of the kinds of interventions I could on behalf of my students once in the position to do so.
Khayatt, Didi. “Paradoxes of the Closet: Beyond the Classroom Assignment of In or Out.” In Inside the Academy and Out: Lesbian/Gay/Queer Studies and Social Action. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. 31-48. In this piece, Khayatt argues for professors to be open and upfront about their personal investments—particularly as regards sexuality—in the courses they teach. Being open about sexuality allows teachers to reinforce and support their students, be a role model, to participate in the ongoing project of unsettling the dominance of heterosexuality, to avoid the continuation of institutionalizing homophobia, and to, as leaders, put the self on the line. Useful for my project because Khayatt provides a cogent argument for being out in the classroom that challenges the neutrality Kopelson argues for in her piece and which makes me uncomfortable.
Kopelson, Karen. “Rhetoric on the Edge of Cunning; Or, The Performance of Neutrality (Re)Considered As a Composition Pedagogy for Student Resistance.” College Composition and Communication. 55.1 (2003): 115-146. Kopelson’s main argument in this piece is that composition professors should teach from what she describes as a position of neutrality—even if their pedagogical goals are far from being neutral. She feels such an approach to teaching will accomplish more as far as reaching resistant undergraduates than being open and explicit about where one stands on issues such as gender and sexuality in the classroom. Useful for my project because I do not agree with Kopelson’s idea of pedagogical subterfuge, even if it may be more effective in changing the minds of students for the better about all of the Others they will encounter in their lives.
Malinowitz, Harriet. “‘Truth’ or Consequences: The Lesbian or Gay Student in the Mainstream Writing Class.” Chapter Two of Textual Orientations: Lesbian and Gay Students and the Making of Discourse Communities. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995. 35-44. Given the undeniable and pervasive homophobia of Western society, the lesbian or gay student in the composition classroom faces myriad difficulties when faced with the charge of writing authentically about their lived experience. What, Malinowitz wonders, would help such students to feel comfortable and empowered to write about such things as coming out, one of the most singular and crucial experiences of gays and lesbians, yet one that is discounted entirely by normative heterosexuality? How can such students become empowered as writers? Advocates creating a “safe” classroom where gay and lesbian students can be themselves without fear of harm of any kind. Useful for my project in imagining what kind of a composition classroom I could create in which all students are welcome and encouraged to be authentic and real.
——. “Adrian O’Connor: ‘It’s a Social World.’” Chapter Eight of Textual Orientations: Lesbian and Gay Students and the Making of Discourse Communities. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995. 163-185. This chapter of Malinowitz’s book describes the experiences of a young gay man known as Adrian in the composition classroom that Malinowitz led at what she refers to as Cosmopolitan University. With the encouragement of his teacher and his fellow students, this writing course allowed Adrian to find his authentic voice and, perhaps more importantly, his identity as a young gay man. Useful to my project for revealing how my interventions as a gay composition professor might help my students at some point in the future.
Wallace, David L. “Out in the Academy: Heterosexism, Invisibility, and Double Consciousness.” College English. 65.1 (2002): 53-66. Focuses on three experiences Wallace, as a gay professor at Iowa Sate University, had facing heterosexism in the academy. For Wallace, these “institutional moments” led him “to speak or write as a gay academic in the service of beginning to make political interventions in dominant culture” (54). The most poignant of the three experiences involved gay students at ISU who were prevented from attending meetings of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Ally Alliance on campus because of commitments to a summer bridge program the administrators of would not find a way to accommodate. For Wallace, the administrators’ actions made it seem as if the students’ sexuality/identity did not matter. Though unsuccessful in getting the administrators to change their minds about the LGBTAA, Wallace did what he could to help the students. Useful for my project for providing examples of the kinds of interventions I could on behalf of my students once in the position to do so.
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