“The fact that we do not commonly feel the influence of writing on our thoughts shows that we have interiorized the technology of writing so deeply that without tremendous effort we cannot separate it from ourselves or even recognize its presence and influence” (19). So writes Walter J. Ong, S.J., in “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought.” The ideas associated with writing and thought that Ong discusses seem to flirt with the whole which came first question, the chicken or the egg? At least for those of us who grew up in a culture where writing was not only an advanced technology, but ubiquitous to the functioning of society and relations between beings in said society. As Ong shows, thought came first, particularly in oral societies that moved (easily?) from thought to the spoken word. For people in oral societies, a thing—such as a tree—for example, was simply a tree. For us today, given the pervasive influence of writing, a tree can never be just a tree since we define “words by other words,” [a tree is different from a bush or a plant, at least in specificities; trees are differentiated among trees by type: elm, aspen, oak, etc.] (26). Someone in an oral culture, on the other hand, would determine what tree means “by putting the word in a non-verbal context, as in pointing to a tree, not by saying in words what ‘tree’ means” (26). Thus the technology of writing—which includes defining or describing things by using words rather than material realities (i.e., a tree itself)—changes how we think about the world in which we live. I liked Ong’s relating of the technology of writing to the technology of computers—both as something that we do not need to be afraid of and can, in fact, benefit society in unforeseen ways. But both, also, as technologies that can change the way we think about the world.
Ong’s article emphasizing the idea of writing as a technology that has influenced the way human beings think about the world serves as a nice prelude to the two articles on writing and cognition which—to me—simply means the way we think not only about the world, but how we approach the completion of all the tasks we are required to address in life. For Flower and Hayes, writing “is best understood as a set of distinctive thinking processes which writers orchestrate or organize during the act of composing” (275). These thinking processes as regards a specific writing task are, for them, hierarchical, and include such elements as planning, translating, reviewing (each of which have their own embedded components), and guide the overall production of a piece of writing. Flower and Hayes’ model or theory of writing as a hierarchical arrangement of thinking processes makes sense as a means of working with knowledge in order to develop either new knowledge or an understanding of current knowledge about a particular topic. What bothers me about it, is that it seems too linear in that there seems to be no recursive or reflexive aspect to Flower and Hayes’ theory. No matter how good a writer one thinks him or herself to be, no one gets it right the first time all the time.
In “Cognition, Convention, and Certainty: What We Need to Know About Writing,” Patricia Bizzell takes issue with Flower and Hayes’ cognitive model of writing, even as she agrees with the basic premise that writing is thinking (and vice versa?). She goes on to discuss the idea (borrowed from Stanley Fish, et al) of discourse communities in which, particularly in the academic realm, students are, more or less, part of. Indeed, without building some kind of familiarity or sophistication with a particular discourse community, students will be unlikely to be able to write appropriately within such a community. As such, we as compositionists need to be teaching students about the conventions of various discourse communities. These discourse communities offer a way of thinking about the world in specific ways that must (can) be learned and, by so doing, perpetuate themselves. The way Bizzell describes this idea in a more general moment is: “we can know nothing but what we have words for, if knowledge is what language makes of experience” (395). From my own experience as a professor of World Literature, I cannot expect my students to write as academic literary critics until I teach them—and they (hopefully) learn the idiosyncratic language of academic literary critics; indeed, until I do that, they will not be able to fully partake in the discourse community of academic literary critics. From this perspective, I need to teach my literature students how to invent the university, insofar as the university (or a small part of the university, rather) is a discourse community of literary critics. Once they “know” the language of literary criticism, my students can participate more fully in such a community. Learning about how literary critics write is going to change my students’ thinking about their world in specific ways.
Of course, as a Composition and a Literature teacher in the freshman and sophomore classroom, and as Kellogg points out in “Training Writing Skills: A Cognitive Developmental Perspective,” I am just one part of a years’ long process of learning for students; indeed a process that can take 20 some years for students to complete or master and bring themselves to the level of knowledge-crafting—if they ever get that far. I loved Kellogg’s comparison of writing at an expert level to that of learning how to play a musical instrument like the violin—through a combination of dedicated practice as well as watching how such playing is done from others. It just seemed so apropos given that I feel I have grown and matured as a writer through a years’ long process of trial and error, practice, sweat, and, at times, tears and frustration.
I liked Dias, Freedman, Medway, and Pare’s article, “Distributed Cognition at Work,” because of the years I spent in the “real” working world prior to returning to academia. I worked for a direct marketing company for about 15 years that was privately owned by its founders who were family. For many of those years, I was an analyst, responsible for looking at numbers and, in so doing, providing interpretations for my higher-ups about what our future mailings should look like in terms of which customers to target (send catalogs to), how many customers to target (500,000 or 1,000,000?), customers from which age groups and from which spending category to target . . . and so forth. In effect, I was creating a narrative of past mailings and using those to craft another narrative of what our future mailings should look like with the goal being to make the maximum amount of money for the company.
Russell’s “Rethinking Genre in School and Society: An Activity Theory Analysis” was an interesting read—for me, most particularly as regards how multifaceted students are in their lives, i.e. as students, as family members, as boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife/significant other, as community activists, etc. – and how those spheres can influence their involvement in academic disciplines and academic discourses. I feel the push and pull of these forces now as a PhD student in English here at UNLV. I am a literature scholar, specializing in Shakespeare, which demands that I focus my research on certain kinds of projects and that I write those projects in a certain kind of way. Yet, I am also a gay man, and I feel it is important for me to research and write about Shakespeare from that perspective—even if it is still a minority perspective. Granted, so doing may limit my options in the working academic world that, were I more of a Shakespearean generalist, might not happen. But I am not willing to forego the kind of research and writing I think is important . . . indeed crucial.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Dissonance Blog Entry (Finally)
Although I did a fair amount of workplace training throughout the years I worked in marketing, I did not begin teaching formally—in a college classroom environment—until I became a part of the MA program in English here at UNLV in Fall 2006. During my first semester as a graduate assistant, I was responsible for teaching one section of ENG 101 Composition I. (I served the other part of my department commitment in an administrative capacity as the Composition Coordinator, otherwise I would have been assigned to teach two sections of ENG 101.) Looking back on my first semester teaching from the vantage point of three-and-a-half years later, I feel like I made a number of significant mistakes that, perhaps, I could have avoided had circumstances (i.e. my training, mentoring, prior experience, etc.) been even just a little different.
As I have written elsewhere, one thing I did that first semester of teaching that benefitted neither me nor any of my students was taking an entirely negative and overly prescriptive approach to grading and commenting on the essays my students turned in for evaluation. Without even realizing it, I fell—all-too easily—into the trap of feeling like it was my job to point out every single little thing that was wrong with my students’ papers. In red ink, no less. It was exhausting work, of course, but I felt I had little choice given how “bad” I thought the papers were. And I thought I was doing the right thing by them by being so anal-retentive about their work. But I was taken aback—and hurt, too, if truth be told—when one of my students commented on his/her teaching evaluation (and on RateMyProfessor—which, after reading about myself at that site, I could not bring myself to look at it again; and still haven’t looked at since the end of fall term 2006) that I was the kind of professor who was never happy with anything. Reading that, I realized that was not how I wanted to be, or to be perceived as, as far as my teaching is concerned.
When I came across an article on facilitative versus directive response on student essays that I had to read as part of the ENG 791 seminar, it was, for all intents and purposes, too late for me to make any changes that would make any difference in the first college composition course I taught, at least as far as how I was responding to my students’ essays. But that article stood out in my mind because it—unlike the minimal mentoring and training I had received in teaching college composition—showed me that there was another way to evaluate student essays that would, hopefully, encourage them to produce substantive revisions and without making them feel like I was unhappy with everything I saw in their writing and that their work would never be up to my, or any other professor’s, par.
I did not teach again until fall term 2008 because, beginning in spring 2007, I moved into administration as the Composition Coordinator for the entirety of my graduate assistantship (i.e. the full 20 hours a week work requirement). In fall 2008, I did teach two sections of ENG 101, and I felt I had a much, much better experience teaching that time around than I did when I first taught ENG 101. I incorporated the use of more facilitative responses on my students’ essays and did my best to avoid making prescriptive and negative comments altogether. I want to think I was pretty successful at this avoidance, and that both me and my students enjoyed those two sections of ENG 101 far more than me and my students from 2006. Not incidentally, teaching ENG 101 again in fall 2008 was when I realized—after I relaxed a bit as a teacher and stopped holding myself and my students to such impossibly high standards—I liked reading my students’ essays and seeing where they were in terms of knowledge as human beings. And that was a very cool feeling.
In spring of 2009, I taught two sections of ENG 102 Composition II for the first time, in a computer classroom (CBC C311). Even after working for two years in the department as the Composition Coordinator with Dr. Brown, Carol, Elaine, and Ruby, and after having gone through ENG 791 and after having taught a few sections of ENG 101, I feel I (and I suspect most of my first-time-teaching-102 colleagues, as well) was woefully unprepared to teach ENG 102. The goal of ENG 102 here at UNLV is to teach students how to produce a fairly substantial research paper; so it is a very different course from ENG 101 where the goal is to introduce students to various types of generic expository writing in such forms as narrative, definition, process analysis, evaluation, and problem-solution essays.
With ENG 102, I was given, basically, a shell of a syllabus, a textbook, and my section assignments . . . and then thrown into the deep end of the pool. I was left to my own devices as far as figuring out how best to divvy up the required readings from the textbook, how best to approach assigning and teaching the four essays ENG 102 students are required to write, how best to incorporate the technology of a computer classroom into the course . . . and in a way my students would truly benefit from (as opposed to just coming to class twice a week to play on Facebook or something along those lines), and how best to teach the process of beginning, executing, and completing a research paper. There was no mentoring or oversight. Needless to say, I don’t feel I was all that successful at teaching ENG 102 my first time out.
After teaching ENG 102 in spring 2009, I moved into teaching ENG 231 World Literature I. So I have not had a chance to get back into the ENG 102 classroom where I could begin to refine my approach to teaching that course based on what I learned that semester I first taught that class. Given that we are in a seminar on Contemporary Composition Theory, I don’t want to spend any more time on my World Literature teaching experiences—even though those include assigning essays to my students in those classes. That being the case, some of the questions/items that intrigue me as far as possible research topics on composition include:
· What is the best way to respond to student writing? Using a directive/prescriptive approach? Using a facilitative approach? Which creates true student involvement learning and encourages writing beyond the composition classroom?
· How can I best teach my students to do substantive—rather than superficial editing of their essays? In other words, how can I best teach my students to be able to rely on themselves rather than me as their teacher or their student colleagues as peer reviewers in order to improve their essays?
· Given that, here at UNLV, we teach Composition I by having students produce various kinds of generic writing (i.e. narrative, process analysis, evaluation, and problem solution), I am left to wonder if there aren’t more relevant (to the lives our students actually lead in today’s world) genres we could use to teach them writing . . . and would doing so be beneficial?
· How much modeling of the research paper process should I be doing as the professor of Composition II?
· Should I let students in Composition II research on whatever topic interest them? Or should I be more directive and limit the class to one topic that they (and I) can focus on for the entire semester?
· Is there a way to make the research students do in Composition II—with the end being the production of a substantial paper—relevant to the lives our students lead as denizens of 21st century America/Nevada?
As intrigued as I am by the above questions (all of which I feel I am going to need to address in some form as my career continues), I am even more compelled by the idea of how to incorporate Queer Theory into my composition classroom? For me, such an inquiry raises other questions and issues. These include (for starters):
· Just because I am a gay man, does that mean I have the right to incorporate Queer Theory into my composition classroom?
· By the same token (because I am a gay man), don’t I have the obligation (to myself and other GLBQT people everywhere) to incorporate Queer Theory into my composition classroom?
· Is outing myself to undergraduates and colleagues a path I really want to follow?
· Can teaching composition from a queer perspective be beneficial to my students? To me as their professor?
· Does Queer Theory have a place in the composition classroom?
For me, at this particular moment, the idea of incorporating Queer Theory into my composition pedagogy is where I feel the strongest sense of dissonance . . . and possibility.
As I have written elsewhere, one thing I did that first semester of teaching that benefitted neither me nor any of my students was taking an entirely negative and overly prescriptive approach to grading and commenting on the essays my students turned in for evaluation. Without even realizing it, I fell—all-too easily—into the trap of feeling like it was my job to point out every single little thing that was wrong with my students’ papers. In red ink, no less. It was exhausting work, of course, but I felt I had little choice given how “bad” I thought the papers were. And I thought I was doing the right thing by them by being so anal-retentive about their work. But I was taken aback—and hurt, too, if truth be told—when one of my students commented on his/her teaching evaluation (and on RateMyProfessor—which, after reading about myself at that site, I could not bring myself to look at it again; and still haven’t looked at since the end of fall term 2006) that I was the kind of professor who was never happy with anything. Reading that, I realized that was not how I wanted to be, or to be perceived as, as far as my teaching is concerned.
When I came across an article on facilitative versus directive response on student essays that I had to read as part of the ENG 791 seminar, it was, for all intents and purposes, too late for me to make any changes that would make any difference in the first college composition course I taught, at least as far as how I was responding to my students’ essays. But that article stood out in my mind because it—unlike the minimal mentoring and training I had received in teaching college composition—showed me that there was another way to evaluate student essays that would, hopefully, encourage them to produce substantive revisions and without making them feel like I was unhappy with everything I saw in their writing and that their work would never be up to my, or any other professor’s, par.
I did not teach again until fall term 2008 because, beginning in spring 2007, I moved into administration as the Composition Coordinator for the entirety of my graduate assistantship (i.e. the full 20 hours a week work requirement). In fall 2008, I did teach two sections of ENG 101, and I felt I had a much, much better experience teaching that time around than I did when I first taught ENG 101. I incorporated the use of more facilitative responses on my students’ essays and did my best to avoid making prescriptive and negative comments altogether. I want to think I was pretty successful at this avoidance, and that both me and my students enjoyed those two sections of ENG 101 far more than me and my students from 2006. Not incidentally, teaching ENG 101 again in fall 2008 was when I realized—after I relaxed a bit as a teacher and stopped holding myself and my students to such impossibly high standards—I liked reading my students’ essays and seeing where they were in terms of knowledge as human beings. And that was a very cool feeling.
In spring of 2009, I taught two sections of ENG 102 Composition II for the first time, in a computer classroom (CBC C311). Even after working for two years in the department as the Composition Coordinator with Dr. Brown, Carol, Elaine, and Ruby, and after having gone through ENG 791 and after having taught a few sections of ENG 101, I feel I (and I suspect most of my first-time-teaching-102 colleagues, as well) was woefully unprepared to teach ENG 102. The goal of ENG 102 here at UNLV is to teach students how to produce a fairly substantial research paper; so it is a very different course from ENG 101 where the goal is to introduce students to various types of generic expository writing in such forms as narrative, definition, process analysis, evaluation, and problem-solution essays.
With ENG 102, I was given, basically, a shell of a syllabus, a textbook, and my section assignments . . . and then thrown into the deep end of the pool. I was left to my own devices as far as figuring out how best to divvy up the required readings from the textbook, how best to approach assigning and teaching the four essays ENG 102 students are required to write, how best to incorporate the technology of a computer classroom into the course . . . and in a way my students would truly benefit from (as opposed to just coming to class twice a week to play on Facebook or something along those lines), and how best to teach the process of beginning, executing, and completing a research paper. There was no mentoring or oversight. Needless to say, I don’t feel I was all that successful at teaching ENG 102 my first time out.
After teaching ENG 102 in spring 2009, I moved into teaching ENG 231 World Literature I. So I have not had a chance to get back into the ENG 102 classroom where I could begin to refine my approach to teaching that course based on what I learned that semester I first taught that class. Given that we are in a seminar on Contemporary Composition Theory, I don’t want to spend any more time on my World Literature teaching experiences—even though those include assigning essays to my students in those classes. That being the case, some of the questions/items that intrigue me as far as possible research topics on composition include:
· What is the best way to respond to student writing? Using a directive/prescriptive approach? Using a facilitative approach? Which creates true student involvement learning and encourages writing beyond the composition classroom?
· How can I best teach my students to do substantive—rather than superficial editing of their essays? In other words, how can I best teach my students to be able to rely on themselves rather than me as their teacher or their student colleagues as peer reviewers in order to improve their essays?
· Given that, here at UNLV, we teach Composition I by having students produce various kinds of generic writing (i.e. narrative, process analysis, evaluation, and problem solution), I am left to wonder if there aren’t more relevant (to the lives our students actually lead in today’s world) genres we could use to teach them writing . . . and would doing so be beneficial?
· How much modeling of the research paper process should I be doing as the professor of Composition II?
· Should I let students in Composition II research on whatever topic interest them? Or should I be more directive and limit the class to one topic that they (and I) can focus on for the entire semester?
· Is there a way to make the research students do in Composition II—with the end being the production of a substantial paper—relevant to the lives our students lead as denizens of 21st century America/Nevada?
As intrigued as I am by the above questions (all of which I feel I am going to need to address in some form as my career continues), I am even more compelled by the idea of how to incorporate Queer Theory into my composition classroom? For me, such an inquiry raises other questions and issues. These include (for starters):
· Just because I am a gay man, does that mean I have the right to incorporate Queer Theory into my composition classroom?
· By the same token (because I am a gay man), don’t I have the obligation (to myself and other GLBQT people everywhere) to incorporate Queer Theory into my composition classroom?
· Is outing myself to undergraduates and colleagues a path I really want to follow?
· Can teaching composition from a queer perspective be beneficial to my students? To me as their professor?
· Does Queer Theory have a place in the composition classroom?
For me, at this particular moment, the idea of incorporating Queer Theory into my composition pedagogy is where I feel the strongest sense of dissonance . . . and possibility.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
2/18/10 Blog Entry
In “Mechanical Correctness as a Focus in Composition Instruction,” Robert J. Connors provides us with an outstanding and blessedly succinct history of how and why mechanical correctness became de rigueur in the field of composition instruction. He begins with the rather bald statement that, during “most of its history as a college subject, English composition has meant one thing to most people: the single-minded enforcement of standards of mechanical and grammatical correctness in writing” (61). Some of the reasons for this happening include: America (and Americans) attempting to define itself decisively as the New World, separate and unique from the Old World (England, in particular, and the rest of Continental Europe), the centralization of the literary elite (if you will) in the Northeastern United States, a cultural, social, and class elite which looked down on the lack of linguistic manners evinced by those in the rapidly expanding (westward, of course) parts of the country, attacks by self-styled grammarians or language experts in both England and America that bemoaned the desecration of the Queen’s English.
As we read earlier in the semester, the concerns with rhetoric versus grammar found their way into the university world . . . indeed, the very top of that world: at Harvard. Instead of teaching the art of rhetoric, writing teachers began teaching mechanical correctness. According to Connors, it was in the mid nineteenth century in America that “the goal of the freshman writing course came to be teaching the avoidance of error rather than teaching genuine communicative competence” (65). For writing teachers who were overworked and overburdened by the sheer numbers of students in their classrooms, focusing on mechanical correctness was a far easier, and a far more manageable, task than “teaching genuine communicative competence” ever could be. As Connors points out: the “new emphasis upon mechanical correctness grew out of the furor over ‘illiteracy’ [in America] . . . but also out of the understandable need of teachers to somehow deal with their huge stacks of student themes” (67). One direct result of this new concern with mechanical correctness over communicative ability or success was the creation of the writing handbook, the purpose of which was to make it easy for writing teachers to enforce and thereby inculcate mechanical correctness in the “writings” of their students.
Connors goes on to reveal that, by the 1960s, the supremacy of mechanical correctness in composition was starting to be challenged from many quarters. On this point he writes: “during the early sixties theorists and teachers everywhere were actively—and sometimes heatedly—discussing the purposes and methods of teaching composition. The reign of mechanical correctness, which had largely depended on teachers’ continued ignorance, was threatened” (70). To this, I would add some comments on my own experiences from the first semester I taught composition here at UNLV. Not having been taught (in 791) or mentored any better (but I am NOT bitter), the compositions I graded that first semester ended up looking like murdered corpses given how much red ink I splattered over them in my quest to find every single mechanical error I could find (and it was not hard to find many, many, many of them) because, not knowing any better, I thought that is what my job was: to make sure my students were writing “correctly.” Forget what they had to actually say, or to communicate, as regards the assignments they were given. So, I would say that, even though the mechanical correctness notion has been challenged since the 1960s, it is still very much alive.
It proved interesting for me to read Patrick Hartwell’s “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar,” and for a number of reasons. When I taught composition here at UNLV, I learned that we’re not really supposed to teach grammar. Maybe I should say that we’re not supposed to teach composition as an entire course on grammar. In any case, one of the things I would do following a round of grading student essays is to create exercises using examples from those student papers that pointed out various grammatical (and mechanical) problems – such as comma splices, subject verb agreements, inadequate pronoun referents, and the like – and workshop them as a class so that students could have some idea of what to watch out for as they wrote subsequent essays. While I don’t have years of teaching experience behind me, I think such grammar/mechanical exercises only helped my students to improve their papers minimally. And it took away from concentration on their ideas and how well they were able to express those ideas (to persuade readers’ to their point of view). Whether it is provincial or just downright mean-spirited of me, I do feel that by the time students get to the college composition classroom, they should be able to deal with the demands of grammar and mechanics (i.e., this is something they should have mastered by the end of high school).
I’m not sure if I should admit to this or not, but I enjoyed Peter Elbow’s article, “Reflections on Academic Discourse: How it Relates to Freshmen and Colleagues,” because it seemed to be the perfect mix of the pragmatic or practical with the idealistic. Diving into this piece, I was reminded immediately of Bartholomae’s essay on inventing the university and how that is the daunting task the academy sets for undergraduate students upon their entrance into academia. It was nice to see Elbow challenging that notion or, perhaps, extending that notion, to consider the idea that teaching students to wrestle effectively with academic discourse is but only one way of teaching composition. Part of his argument includes the – to me – liberating idea that, perhaps, we should also be teaching our composition students how to make writing a part of their everyday lives [which, particularly with text messaging and other forms of electronic communication in the 21st century, seems like a given] and not scare them away from writing completely. In other words, Elbow advocates for teaching students how to write in a non-academic manner that will be just as valuable, if not more so, to their everyday selves and lives. I found myself agreeing with Elbow and wondering how, in my World Literature courses, I can figure out a way for my students to do writing that is not some bastardized version of literary criticism but, instead, a reflection of how my students feel and really want to write about the literature they are encountering in my class.
For me, style is an amalgamation of how a writer expresses him or herself in verbal/visual/written form. As such, style is always going to be idiosyncratic (or it ought to be always idiosyncratic). Paul Butler, in “Style in the Diaspora of Composition Studies,” makes the case that study and understanding of style has shifted from a category in its own right to one mixed with other compositional concerns, including genre theory, rhetorical analysis, and personal writing. In any case, what’s important is how a writer presents and expresses him or herself in a piece of verbal/visual/written prose. I thought that Butler’s discussion of how such things as gender, class, and ethnicity can play significant roles in how a writer writes to be intriguing if less developed than I would have liked (i.e., I wanted more!).
Both pieces on responding to student writing (Sommers’ and Connors’), were at once comforting and disconcerting. When I taught my first composition course here at UNLV a few years back, I made the horrible mistake of thinking it was my job to point out every single thing that was wrong (mechanically, grammatically, etc.) with my students’ papers. Small wonder that my students weren’t all that happy with me by the time all was said and done. In subsequent composition courses I taught, it proved much more beneficial to me to try to give substantive comments to my students about their ideas and how they were presenting them in their essays. And my students’ seemed to appreciate my efforts at doing such commentary rather than pointing out all of their mistakes. Since I have moved into the literature classroom for the time being, and I am set to take my comprehensive exams this coming fall, and I have numerous seminar and conference responsibilities, I feel that I do not have time to provide substantive commentary on the essays I have assigned my World Lit students to do. Not on 70 papers or within a reasonable period of time. I am left to juggle and, unfortunately, the one ball I feel I need to drop is substantive commentary. And being in such a position is difficult for me because I feel my students have the right to expect better.
As we read earlier in the semester, the concerns with rhetoric versus grammar found their way into the university world . . . indeed, the very top of that world: at Harvard. Instead of teaching the art of rhetoric, writing teachers began teaching mechanical correctness. According to Connors, it was in the mid nineteenth century in America that “the goal of the freshman writing course came to be teaching the avoidance of error rather than teaching genuine communicative competence” (65). For writing teachers who were overworked and overburdened by the sheer numbers of students in their classrooms, focusing on mechanical correctness was a far easier, and a far more manageable, task than “teaching genuine communicative competence” ever could be. As Connors points out: the “new emphasis upon mechanical correctness grew out of the furor over ‘illiteracy’ [in America] . . . but also out of the understandable need of teachers to somehow deal with their huge stacks of student themes” (67). One direct result of this new concern with mechanical correctness over communicative ability or success was the creation of the writing handbook, the purpose of which was to make it easy for writing teachers to enforce and thereby inculcate mechanical correctness in the “writings” of their students.
Connors goes on to reveal that, by the 1960s, the supremacy of mechanical correctness in composition was starting to be challenged from many quarters. On this point he writes: “during the early sixties theorists and teachers everywhere were actively—and sometimes heatedly—discussing the purposes and methods of teaching composition. The reign of mechanical correctness, which had largely depended on teachers’ continued ignorance, was threatened” (70). To this, I would add some comments on my own experiences from the first semester I taught composition here at UNLV. Not having been taught (in 791) or mentored any better (but I am NOT bitter), the compositions I graded that first semester ended up looking like murdered corpses given how much red ink I splattered over them in my quest to find every single mechanical error I could find (and it was not hard to find many, many, many of them) because, not knowing any better, I thought that is what my job was: to make sure my students were writing “correctly.” Forget what they had to actually say, or to communicate, as regards the assignments they were given. So, I would say that, even though the mechanical correctness notion has been challenged since the 1960s, it is still very much alive.
It proved interesting for me to read Patrick Hartwell’s “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar,” and for a number of reasons. When I taught composition here at UNLV, I learned that we’re not really supposed to teach grammar. Maybe I should say that we’re not supposed to teach composition as an entire course on grammar. In any case, one of the things I would do following a round of grading student essays is to create exercises using examples from those student papers that pointed out various grammatical (and mechanical) problems – such as comma splices, subject verb agreements, inadequate pronoun referents, and the like – and workshop them as a class so that students could have some idea of what to watch out for as they wrote subsequent essays. While I don’t have years of teaching experience behind me, I think such grammar/mechanical exercises only helped my students to improve their papers minimally. And it took away from concentration on their ideas and how well they were able to express those ideas (to persuade readers’ to their point of view). Whether it is provincial or just downright mean-spirited of me, I do feel that by the time students get to the college composition classroom, they should be able to deal with the demands of grammar and mechanics (i.e., this is something they should have mastered by the end of high school).
I’m not sure if I should admit to this or not, but I enjoyed Peter Elbow’s article, “Reflections on Academic Discourse: How it Relates to Freshmen and Colleagues,” because it seemed to be the perfect mix of the pragmatic or practical with the idealistic. Diving into this piece, I was reminded immediately of Bartholomae’s essay on inventing the university and how that is the daunting task the academy sets for undergraduate students upon their entrance into academia. It was nice to see Elbow challenging that notion or, perhaps, extending that notion, to consider the idea that teaching students to wrestle effectively with academic discourse is but only one way of teaching composition. Part of his argument includes the – to me – liberating idea that, perhaps, we should also be teaching our composition students how to make writing a part of their everyday lives [which, particularly with text messaging and other forms of electronic communication in the 21st century, seems like a given] and not scare them away from writing completely. In other words, Elbow advocates for teaching students how to write in a non-academic manner that will be just as valuable, if not more so, to their everyday selves and lives. I found myself agreeing with Elbow and wondering how, in my World Literature courses, I can figure out a way for my students to do writing that is not some bastardized version of literary criticism but, instead, a reflection of how my students feel and really want to write about the literature they are encountering in my class.
For me, style is an amalgamation of how a writer expresses him or herself in verbal/visual/written form. As such, style is always going to be idiosyncratic (or it ought to be always idiosyncratic). Paul Butler, in “Style in the Diaspora of Composition Studies,” makes the case that study and understanding of style has shifted from a category in its own right to one mixed with other compositional concerns, including genre theory, rhetorical analysis, and personal writing. In any case, what’s important is how a writer presents and expresses him or herself in a piece of verbal/visual/written prose. I thought that Butler’s discussion of how such things as gender, class, and ethnicity can play significant roles in how a writer writes to be intriguing if less developed than I would have liked (i.e., I wanted more!).
Both pieces on responding to student writing (Sommers’ and Connors’), were at once comforting and disconcerting. When I taught my first composition course here at UNLV a few years back, I made the horrible mistake of thinking it was my job to point out every single thing that was wrong (mechanically, grammatically, etc.) with my students’ papers. Small wonder that my students weren’t all that happy with me by the time all was said and done. In subsequent composition courses I taught, it proved much more beneficial to me to try to give substantive comments to my students about their ideas and how they were presenting them in their essays. And my students’ seemed to appreciate my efforts at doing such commentary rather than pointing out all of their mistakes. Since I have moved into the literature classroom for the time being, and I am set to take my comprehensive exams this coming fall, and I have numerous seminar and conference responsibilities, I feel that I do not have time to provide substantive commentary on the essays I have assigned my World Lit students to do. Not on 70 papers or within a reasonable period of time. I am left to juggle and, unfortunately, the one ball I feel I need to drop is substantive commentary. And being in such a position is difficult for me because I feel my students have the right to expect better.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
On Readings for 2/11/10
Since I'll be in Albuquerque, I needed to get this reading and post done early.
This week’s readings focus on the idea of writing as a process rather than a finished product. In fact, that is Donald M. Murray’s argument in his 1972 article: that we ought to be teaching students that writing is an ongoing activity rather than as one that has any kind of a definite end. For Murray, “the process [is one] of discovery through language. It is the process of exploration of what we know and what we feel about what we know through language. It is the process of using language to learn about our world, to evaluate what we learn about our world, to communicate what we learn about our world” (4). This is a collection of very idealistic (and, dare I say, Romantic?) statements about writing that, for me, serve as a nice reminder of what is possible when it comes to writing. I will admit, however, to some concern (probably born out of fear) when Murray writes that “we should teach unfinished writing and glory in its unfinishedness” (4). I am certain Murray does not, by unfinished, mean writing that is incorrect and/or incoherent, but rather writing that is demonstrative of that still striving for understanding and knowledge of the world. Perhaps this is where I need to remember that, as an English professor, that I am part of that process—the process that seeks to teach students how to write—and not the sum total of that process. In other words, students’ ability to write is something organic and ongoing that will continue to develop long after they have left my classroom for the last time.
I was also concerned with Murray’s reduction of the writing process to a formula, complete with percentages. These included 85% of a writer’s time being spent on prewriting, maybe 1% on the actual mental and physical act of writing, and the remaining 14% spent rewriting. I just don’t feel that the writing process can be quantified—or should be quantified—in such a way. As even Murray himself goes on to say when he describes Implication No. 9 of his process: “students are individuals who must explore the writing process in their own way” (6), the writing process is idiosyncratic for every writer and, as such, attempting to group them under some neat mathematical formula clashes with the ideas if individuality and idiosyncrasy. But I did like Murray’s Implication No. 3, which states that, within the writing as process ideal he imagines, students use their own language (5). To me, that made a nice connection with David Bartholomae’s article in which he describes how students are expected to reinvent the university, at least in terms of its disciplinary idioms, every time they step into all of their different classes. Is it possible, I wondered after reading Murray, for students to reinvent the university using their own language? Or does, as Bartholomae seem to insist, reinventing the university demand absolutely that students learn and regurgitate (until they can make it their own) academic discourse?
Meanwhile, in her 1977 article, Janet Emig explores the idea of writing as a unique mode of learning that is different—in distinct and quantifiable/observable ways—from reading and listening. I like this idea and hope that it is something I can communicate and teach to my students regardless of what kind (i.e. Composition or Literature or Theory) of English class I am professor of. In my own experiences with writing, one of my idiosyncrasies is that I often begin a piece by writing in hand with old fashioned pen and paper. Not only does it slow the process and, in my opinion, allows me to think through my ideas more as I am writing, it makes me feel “closer” to what I am doing and trying to accomplish in whatever project it is I am working on. One major point in this article was Emig’s statement—contra those theories Rose delineated for us last week on hemispheric studies from past decades—that writing “involves the fullest possible functioning of the brain, which entails the active participation in the process of both the left and the right hemispheres” (10-11). Even though I am not a psychologist or a doctor with medical knowledge of the brain, but it was nice to read someone like Emig expressing the idea—with conviction—that the entire brain is involved in the writing process rather than only one side or the other. Writing has always seemed like a full-brain activity to me!
After five weeks of being in Contemporary Composition Theory, I could not help but be struck by the title of Sondra Perl’s article, “The Composing Processes of Unskilled College Writers.” Of course, my attention focused on her use of the term “unskilled” in the title of her article, particularly after the discussions we’ve had and the readings we’ve done that attempt to challenge the notion that writing is a mere skill that anyone can learn and should learn/master by the time they arrive in the Freshman Composition classroom. Aside from title problematics, Perl’s article was the kind of piece that, as primarily a literature scholar, drives me crazy. All of the documentation about how the study was done and the charts detailing the data collected did not interest me. All I wanted to get to was the results and the findings of the study. It was interesting to discover that “unskilled” writers have just as palpable of a composing process as more experienced writers. It also seems logical that less experienced or practiced writers would produce essays that make too many assumptions about what their readers know and don’t know, that are disjointed and mangled due to their focus on the “rules,” and that are comparatively unsophisticated. I would think that, as writers continue to practice writing—in tandem with good professorial instruction—that writers would make the leap from “unskilled” to “skilled.”
Along the same lines, Nancy Sommers article looks at how student (significantly, as opposed to “unskilled”) writers approach the demands of revision in comparison to experienced adult writers. Once again, it seems logical that student writers would look at things like surface errors, particularly at only a word level, as they approach the task of revising a piece of writing. I have also seen in my own classes, that student writers have a very difficult time seeing (or re-seeing) their papers in a larger context; they seem to think that changing a word or two here or there, or correcting their punctuation is sufficient revision. And, it seems logical that adult writers, or writers with more experience writing, would be concerned with their ideas and how those ideas are articulated on the page in terms of order, style, and coherence. Such writers have more of an idea that they are writing for others who want to understand what it is they have to say. The question becomes, how do you teach student writers to cultivate the perspective (and its demands) of more experienced writers?
In “A Method for Teaching Writing,” Elbow (some twelve years earlier than Sommers) focuses on the idea that writers are always trying to produce some kind of desired effect in their readers (115). For Elbow, writing assignments in the Composition classroom should be drawn from real life or, in other words, they should be demonstrative of the kinds of writing human beings do (or could do) in their everyday lives, like a letter-to-the-editor or a plea to state legislators to not cut higher education funding anymore than it already has been (sorry, had to get that out) in Nevada. From this perspective, the only criterion of good or successful writing is whether or not it gets readers to do what writers want them to do (or to think in a certain way, or to change their minds about something, etc.). Heaven forbid our Composition courses should be practical as well as academic.
Since I am new to blogging in the classroom, I found Lowe and Williams’s article, “Moving to the Public: Weblogs in the Writing Classroom,” to be enlightening and informative. I am, in fact, to the point where I would like to figure out how best to incorporate blogging into my Composition and my Literature classes. It seems like an excellent means of making the writing students do in my classes both relevant and exciting for/to them (and myself as their professor).
This week’s readings focus on the idea of writing as a process rather than a finished product. In fact, that is Donald M. Murray’s argument in his 1972 article: that we ought to be teaching students that writing is an ongoing activity rather than as one that has any kind of a definite end. For Murray, “the process [is one] of discovery through language. It is the process of exploration of what we know and what we feel about what we know through language. It is the process of using language to learn about our world, to evaluate what we learn about our world, to communicate what we learn about our world” (4). This is a collection of very idealistic (and, dare I say, Romantic?) statements about writing that, for me, serve as a nice reminder of what is possible when it comes to writing. I will admit, however, to some concern (probably born out of fear) when Murray writes that “we should teach unfinished writing and glory in its unfinishedness” (4). I am certain Murray does not, by unfinished, mean writing that is incorrect and/or incoherent, but rather writing that is demonstrative of that still striving for understanding and knowledge of the world. Perhaps this is where I need to remember that, as an English professor, that I am part of that process—the process that seeks to teach students how to write—and not the sum total of that process. In other words, students’ ability to write is something organic and ongoing that will continue to develop long after they have left my classroom for the last time.
I was also concerned with Murray’s reduction of the writing process to a formula, complete with percentages. These included 85% of a writer’s time being spent on prewriting, maybe 1% on the actual mental and physical act of writing, and the remaining 14% spent rewriting. I just don’t feel that the writing process can be quantified—or should be quantified—in such a way. As even Murray himself goes on to say when he describes Implication No. 9 of his process: “students are individuals who must explore the writing process in their own way” (6), the writing process is idiosyncratic for every writer and, as such, attempting to group them under some neat mathematical formula clashes with the ideas if individuality and idiosyncrasy. But I did like Murray’s Implication No. 3, which states that, within the writing as process ideal he imagines, students use their own language (5). To me, that made a nice connection with David Bartholomae’s article in which he describes how students are expected to reinvent the university, at least in terms of its disciplinary idioms, every time they step into all of their different classes. Is it possible, I wondered after reading Murray, for students to reinvent the university using their own language? Or does, as Bartholomae seem to insist, reinventing the university demand absolutely that students learn and regurgitate (until they can make it their own) academic discourse?
Meanwhile, in her 1977 article, Janet Emig explores the idea of writing as a unique mode of learning that is different—in distinct and quantifiable/observable ways—from reading and listening. I like this idea and hope that it is something I can communicate and teach to my students regardless of what kind (i.e. Composition or Literature or Theory) of English class I am professor of. In my own experiences with writing, one of my idiosyncrasies is that I often begin a piece by writing in hand with old fashioned pen and paper. Not only does it slow the process and, in my opinion, allows me to think through my ideas more as I am writing, it makes me feel “closer” to what I am doing and trying to accomplish in whatever project it is I am working on. One major point in this article was Emig’s statement—contra those theories Rose delineated for us last week on hemispheric studies from past decades—that writing “involves the fullest possible functioning of the brain, which entails the active participation in the process of both the left and the right hemispheres” (10-11). Even though I am not a psychologist or a doctor with medical knowledge of the brain, but it was nice to read someone like Emig expressing the idea—with conviction—that the entire brain is involved in the writing process rather than only one side or the other. Writing has always seemed like a full-brain activity to me!
After five weeks of being in Contemporary Composition Theory, I could not help but be struck by the title of Sondra Perl’s article, “The Composing Processes of Unskilled College Writers.” Of course, my attention focused on her use of the term “unskilled” in the title of her article, particularly after the discussions we’ve had and the readings we’ve done that attempt to challenge the notion that writing is a mere skill that anyone can learn and should learn/master by the time they arrive in the Freshman Composition classroom. Aside from title problematics, Perl’s article was the kind of piece that, as primarily a literature scholar, drives me crazy. All of the documentation about how the study was done and the charts detailing the data collected did not interest me. All I wanted to get to was the results and the findings of the study. It was interesting to discover that “unskilled” writers have just as palpable of a composing process as more experienced writers. It also seems logical that less experienced or practiced writers would produce essays that make too many assumptions about what their readers know and don’t know, that are disjointed and mangled due to their focus on the “rules,” and that are comparatively unsophisticated. I would think that, as writers continue to practice writing—in tandem with good professorial instruction—that writers would make the leap from “unskilled” to “skilled.”
Along the same lines, Nancy Sommers article looks at how student (significantly, as opposed to “unskilled”) writers approach the demands of revision in comparison to experienced adult writers. Once again, it seems logical that student writers would look at things like surface errors, particularly at only a word level, as they approach the task of revising a piece of writing. I have also seen in my own classes, that student writers have a very difficult time seeing (or re-seeing) their papers in a larger context; they seem to think that changing a word or two here or there, or correcting their punctuation is sufficient revision. And, it seems logical that adult writers, or writers with more experience writing, would be concerned with their ideas and how those ideas are articulated on the page in terms of order, style, and coherence. Such writers have more of an idea that they are writing for others who want to understand what it is they have to say. The question becomes, how do you teach student writers to cultivate the perspective (and its demands) of more experienced writers?
In “A Method for Teaching Writing,” Elbow (some twelve years earlier than Sommers) focuses on the idea that writers are always trying to produce some kind of desired effect in their readers (115). For Elbow, writing assignments in the Composition classroom should be drawn from real life or, in other words, they should be demonstrative of the kinds of writing human beings do (or could do) in their everyday lives, like a letter-to-the-editor or a plea to state legislators to not cut higher education funding anymore than it already has been (sorry, had to get that out) in Nevada. From this perspective, the only criterion of good or successful writing is whether or not it gets readers to do what writers want them to do (or to think in a certain way, or to change their minds about something, etc.). Heaven forbid our Composition courses should be practical as well as academic.
Since I am new to blogging in the classroom, I found Lowe and Williams’s article, “Moving to the Public: Weblogs in the Writing Classroom,” to be enlightening and informative. I am, in fact, to the point where I would like to figure out how best to incorporate blogging into my Composition and my Literature classes. It seems like an excellent means of making the writing students do in my classes both relevant and exciting for/to them (and myself as their professor).
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Readings for 2/4/10
A little long, but I had a bit (and only a bit) of extra time this week. Ssshhh. Don't tell Dr. J.!
I will begin this blog entry by looking at Mina Shaughnessy’s “Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing.” As I understand the phrase, basic writing refers to the productions of those writers deemed to be deficient in some, or many, ways upon their entrance to college / university. What I like most about Shaughnessy’s approach to the subject of her article is that it is professor-oriented. And not in the sense of confirming professors’ negative and/or demoralized views on student writing, but rather in the sense of getting professors’ to challenge those negative/demoralized views and to change things in the composition classroom from the top down (if you will). In other words it is not about what is wrong with students and their writing, it is about what is wrong with composition professors and their methods of teaching.
Shaughnessy’s developmental scale as regards composition professors was interesting. It includes the stages: 1) Guarding the Tower, from those students thought incapable of ever becoming true parts of the republic of letters, 2) Converting the Natives, working only with those few students who seem to be likely to turn into citizens of the republic of letters with a lot of hard and agonizing work, 3) Sounding the Depths, when the realization dawns that the composition professor looks not only at how his/her students are functioning in the classroom, but at how his/her-self is functioning in the classroom, and 4) Diving In, when the professor commits to changing his/her-self—the way he or she thinks of students and how to teach composition—for the betterment of that self and students alike. I liked especially Shaughnessy’s description of diving in as “simply deciding that teaching them [students] to write well is not only suitable but challenging work for those who would be teachers and scholars in a democracy” (317). I cannot but help feeling the rightness of this statement; that there is (or should be) a nobility in teaching composition to writers of all kinds (and most especially to so-called basic writers).
This is not the first time that I have encountered David Bartholomae’s essay “Inventing the University.” I think the insights it provides about the college/university experiences of real students is invaluable. As a professor of composition, I think we need to be reminded—often—of the very real fact that we are asking our students to engage with ideas and theories and entire bodies of discourse that they are most likely unfamiliar with (no matter how good their high school preparation for college/university was) and, most likely, have no idea (and even less preparation for) how to deal with effectively and appropriately in the big, bad world of academia. His insight that, given the breadth of subjects students are exposed to in their general education programs, said students are expected to be able to write like literary critics, psychologists, and historians on Mondays and Wednesdays, then to be able to write like astronomers, physicists, and mathematicians on Tuesdays and Thursdays was striking.
As a graduate student in the discipline of English, I know first hand how difficult it is to meet the writing demands—in terms of amounts and discursive conventions, for example—of a single subject area that I am a working professional in. While, over time, I feel that I have gotten pretty adept at meeting the writing demands of English as a discipline, I know I would be subjected to a significant learning curve if I were to sit down to write about history or mathematics because those subjects require a different, though no less rigorous, means of communication. It is disconcerting, in many respects, to be in the position I am (as a GTA in the English PhD program at UNLV) and find myself wondering how undergraduates manage to meet the writing demands of the general education curriculum. This line of thinking also takes me closer to the opinion that there is no way the English department—as the home of Freshman Composition—can prepare the college/university’s students to write everything required in every discrete discipline.
Bartholomae, brilliantly, reminds us academics that every time a new student enters the college / university, that student has to learn how to do the talk, to do the writing of not just one, but all different kinds of disciplines; they have to learn how literature scholars write to each other, how historians write to each other, and so forth. Is that a lot to ask of 21st century students?
In “The Language of Exclusion: Writing Instruction at the University,” Mike Rose offers an interesting historical look at why composition instruction is the way it is in today’s college / university. As such, it seems as if writers who have been deemed unable to write have suffered a series of denigrations almost from the get-go. We see composition instruction dominated by the “finding-every-single-error-possible” mode of thought in relation to writing; we see writing labeled—in a derogatory sense—as merely a skill and, thus, a second-class intellectual endeavor; we see the language of remediation in relation to writing evolving from, or being spun off from medical terminology with nothing but negative connotations for students who are unfortunate enough to fall into the category of needing remediation; and we see students who are unable to hit the ground running in terms of being able to master the written demands of discourse being labeled, functionally speaking, illiterate. Rose also provides the cautionary that everyone involved in (higher) education can no longer afford to maintain the myth that remediation as regards writing is something, a problem, that will go away if we can only figure out the magic formula to make it go away . . . instead of taking the blinders off and dealing writing at the college / university level as an imperative of our discipline that will not ever go away.
Rose continues his eye-opening look why composition or writing instruction is the way it is in American colleges / universities in “Narrowing the Mind and the Page: Remedial Writers and Cognitive Reductionism.” The background information Rose provides in this essay is invaluable. It can be boiled down to the idea that people who cannot write were (are?) thought to have something wrong with their ability to think, whether that has something to do with their being field-dependent or field-independent, which side of their brains they are working with, what are students’ social/economic/familiar circumstances (with the idea being that students from at-risk areas will never be able to succeed or will struggle harder to succeed, and what counts as literacy in Western society. In both articles, Rose’s point seems to be that, in one way or another, there is a systematic means in place of excluding people (particularly incoming freshman who cannot write) from academia for reasons that seem to be plausible, but when looked at more closely, prove to be problematic in the extreme. His call for critique and reflection seems apropos.
I chose to read Sugie Goen-Salter’s “Critiquing the Need to Eliminate Remediation: Lessons from San Francisco State,” in part because I lived in California (although not in San Francisco or the Bay Area) for so many years. I liked how this article showed the creation of the Integrated Reading/Writing program since I, too, believe that reading and writing are activities that are inextricably linked with one another (i.e. one cannot be done effectively in the absence of the other). It does not seem as if we stress reading as much as we should in our composition program at UNLV. I thought it was interesting, too, to see that, despite their best efforts, even a great higher education system like that in California could not eliminate the “problem” of remediation where writing instruction is concerned. Maybe there is hope for those of us at less high-profile schools like UNLV.
Sean Zwagerman’s article “The Scarlet P: Plagiarism, Panopticism, and the Rhetoric of Academic Integrity” was not what I was expecting considering the subject matter as it is announced in the title. Quite honestly, I expected another article bemoaning the evils of plagiarism on the part of students with lots and lots of advice on how professors can thwart this kind of academic misconduct. That the author took the position that professors and administrators in the college/university environment are far too overzealous in pursuing both suspicion of student plagiarism and in punishing student plagiarism was a surprise. A nice surprise, but a surprise nonetheless. His relation of the surveillance ethos the war against plagiarism creates for both students and professors to Foucault’s ideas in Discipline and Punish were almost frightening to encounter because I think he is right. Ironically enough, one of the things I have done for the last three or four years is serve as an on-call panel member for UNLV’s Office of Student Conduct. I am also serving on a task force that is revising our Academic Misconduct Policy for the university, where plagiarism is addressed along with any number of other academic misconduct violations. I am just not sure if I agree that the penalties for students caught plagiarizing someone else’s work should be as lenient or non-existent as Zwagerman seems to suggest. I am also unsure if educating students about what plagiarism really is and how to avoid it (by teaching them to look beyond the future economic value of their college degree) will be a sufficient deterrent.
I will begin this blog entry by looking at Mina Shaughnessy’s “Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing.” As I understand the phrase, basic writing refers to the productions of those writers deemed to be deficient in some, or many, ways upon their entrance to college / university. What I like most about Shaughnessy’s approach to the subject of her article is that it is professor-oriented. And not in the sense of confirming professors’ negative and/or demoralized views on student writing, but rather in the sense of getting professors’ to challenge those negative/demoralized views and to change things in the composition classroom from the top down (if you will). In other words it is not about what is wrong with students and their writing, it is about what is wrong with composition professors and their methods of teaching.
Shaughnessy’s developmental scale as regards composition professors was interesting. It includes the stages: 1) Guarding the Tower, from those students thought incapable of ever becoming true parts of the republic of letters, 2) Converting the Natives, working only with those few students who seem to be likely to turn into citizens of the republic of letters with a lot of hard and agonizing work, 3) Sounding the Depths, when the realization dawns that the composition professor looks not only at how his/her students are functioning in the classroom, but at how his/her-self is functioning in the classroom, and 4) Diving In, when the professor commits to changing his/her-self—the way he or she thinks of students and how to teach composition—for the betterment of that self and students alike. I liked especially Shaughnessy’s description of diving in as “simply deciding that teaching them [students] to write well is not only suitable but challenging work for those who would be teachers and scholars in a democracy” (317). I cannot but help feeling the rightness of this statement; that there is (or should be) a nobility in teaching composition to writers of all kinds (and most especially to so-called basic writers).
This is not the first time that I have encountered David Bartholomae’s essay “Inventing the University.” I think the insights it provides about the college/university experiences of real students is invaluable. As a professor of composition, I think we need to be reminded—often—of the very real fact that we are asking our students to engage with ideas and theories and entire bodies of discourse that they are most likely unfamiliar with (no matter how good their high school preparation for college/university was) and, most likely, have no idea (and even less preparation for) how to deal with effectively and appropriately in the big, bad world of academia. His insight that, given the breadth of subjects students are exposed to in their general education programs, said students are expected to be able to write like literary critics, psychologists, and historians on Mondays and Wednesdays, then to be able to write like astronomers, physicists, and mathematicians on Tuesdays and Thursdays was striking.
As a graduate student in the discipline of English, I know first hand how difficult it is to meet the writing demands—in terms of amounts and discursive conventions, for example—of a single subject area that I am a working professional in. While, over time, I feel that I have gotten pretty adept at meeting the writing demands of English as a discipline, I know I would be subjected to a significant learning curve if I were to sit down to write about history or mathematics because those subjects require a different, though no less rigorous, means of communication. It is disconcerting, in many respects, to be in the position I am (as a GTA in the English PhD program at UNLV) and find myself wondering how undergraduates manage to meet the writing demands of the general education curriculum. This line of thinking also takes me closer to the opinion that there is no way the English department—as the home of Freshman Composition—can prepare the college/university’s students to write everything required in every discrete discipline.
Bartholomae, brilliantly, reminds us academics that every time a new student enters the college / university, that student has to learn how to do the talk, to do the writing of not just one, but all different kinds of disciplines; they have to learn how literature scholars write to each other, how historians write to each other, and so forth. Is that a lot to ask of 21st century students?
In “The Language of Exclusion: Writing Instruction at the University,” Mike Rose offers an interesting historical look at why composition instruction is the way it is in today’s college / university. As such, it seems as if writers who have been deemed unable to write have suffered a series of denigrations almost from the get-go. We see composition instruction dominated by the “finding-every-single-error-possible” mode of thought in relation to writing; we see writing labeled—in a derogatory sense—as merely a skill and, thus, a second-class intellectual endeavor; we see the language of remediation in relation to writing evolving from, or being spun off from medical terminology with nothing but negative connotations for students who are unfortunate enough to fall into the category of needing remediation; and we see students who are unable to hit the ground running in terms of being able to master the written demands of discourse being labeled, functionally speaking, illiterate. Rose also provides the cautionary that everyone involved in (higher) education can no longer afford to maintain the myth that remediation as regards writing is something, a problem, that will go away if we can only figure out the magic formula to make it go away . . . instead of taking the blinders off and dealing writing at the college / university level as an imperative of our discipline that will not ever go away.
Rose continues his eye-opening look why composition or writing instruction is the way it is in American colleges / universities in “Narrowing the Mind and the Page: Remedial Writers and Cognitive Reductionism.” The background information Rose provides in this essay is invaluable. It can be boiled down to the idea that people who cannot write were (are?) thought to have something wrong with their ability to think, whether that has something to do with their being field-dependent or field-independent, which side of their brains they are working with, what are students’ social/economic/familiar circumstances (with the idea being that students from at-risk areas will never be able to succeed or will struggle harder to succeed, and what counts as literacy in Western society. In both articles, Rose’s point seems to be that, in one way or another, there is a systematic means in place of excluding people (particularly incoming freshman who cannot write) from academia for reasons that seem to be plausible, but when looked at more closely, prove to be problematic in the extreme. His call for critique and reflection seems apropos.
I chose to read Sugie Goen-Salter’s “Critiquing the Need to Eliminate Remediation: Lessons from San Francisco State,” in part because I lived in California (although not in San Francisco or the Bay Area) for so many years. I liked how this article showed the creation of the Integrated Reading/Writing program since I, too, believe that reading and writing are activities that are inextricably linked with one another (i.e. one cannot be done effectively in the absence of the other). It does not seem as if we stress reading as much as we should in our composition program at UNLV. I thought it was interesting, too, to see that, despite their best efforts, even a great higher education system like that in California could not eliminate the “problem” of remediation where writing instruction is concerned. Maybe there is hope for those of us at less high-profile schools like UNLV.
Sean Zwagerman’s article “The Scarlet P: Plagiarism, Panopticism, and the Rhetoric of Academic Integrity” was not what I was expecting considering the subject matter as it is announced in the title. Quite honestly, I expected another article bemoaning the evils of plagiarism on the part of students with lots and lots of advice on how professors can thwart this kind of academic misconduct. That the author took the position that professors and administrators in the college/university environment are far too overzealous in pursuing both suspicion of student plagiarism and in punishing student plagiarism was a surprise. A nice surprise, but a surprise nonetheless. His relation of the surveillance ethos the war against plagiarism creates for both students and professors to Foucault’s ideas in Discipline and Punish were almost frightening to encounter because I think he is right. Ironically enough, one of the things I have done for the last three or four years is serve as an on-call panel member for UNLV’s Office of Student Conduct. I am also serving on a task force that is revising our Academic Misconduct Policy for the university, where plagiarism is addressed along with any number of other academic misconduct violations. I am just not sure if I agree that the penalties for students caught plagiarizing someone else’s work should be as lenient or non-existent as Zwagerman seems to suggest. I am also unsure if educating students about what plagiarism really is and how to avoid it (by teaching them to look beyond the future economic value of their college degree) will be a sufficient deterrent.
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