posted: 5.23.12 by Elizabeth Wardle and Douglas Downs
Doug
How long will it be before college students who have taken writing about writing (WAW) comp courses finish their degrees, graduate, establish careers, and start delving into local, state, and federal politics? Fifteen years would do it, don’t you think? And since writing about writing has really taken off, maybe three years have elapsed. Hmmm. We have a while to wait.
So I guess while I wait, I’ll write about what I’m waiting for.
The thing is, while changing the way students think about writing is always my foremost goal for classes, my very first thinking about this writing-about-writing business, back over a decade ago, came out of public relations, not pedagogy. Composition has for its entire existence had a PR problem: our work as writing instructors is poorly understood and the relatively poor status of the profession follows. And our work is poorly understood because writing itself is poorly understood.
Connecting the dots, one route to improving the standing of writing instruction in higher education involves nothing less than changing deep cultural conceptions of writing, one person at a time. If higher education “works,” and we give students new ways of thinking about writing, then gradually students entering professions and political arenas will have a different story about writing than the one which has put writing instruction in the low-status place it currently occupies. [read more]
I’m hoping things are budgetarily cheery in your world; here at my institution they’re looking a bit bleak.
In particular, we’re facing a lot of pressure for our summer classes. We’ve already raised the caps on our FYC course by four, and I’m not sure the administration is done yet.
These courses are nearly impossible to begin with: how do you squeeze sixteen weeks of writing into six? We generally cut out two papers, but even then the course moves at breakneck speed with writing due just about every class. With our caps up, we’re thinking about how to streamline the class even more.
It’s sad when pedagogy suffers because of budget.
But it has me thinking, how do other institutions handle the general challenge of delivering writing courses in the summer? Do your summer classes last as long as the classes in a normal semester? If not, how to do you compress all that learning into so little time? What do you keep, what do you sacrifice, and what do you change?
The connected learning model relies on the power of aligning an educational context with student interests to foster their need to know more about the topic and about the skills they need to accomplish their goals. In the simplest terms, a student learns more when she’s studying something she’s interested in. While this idea is rather basic, the educational results can be quite powerful.
I was lucky enough to teach a first-year composition course in the mid-1980s that focused on the rhetoric of war. Admittedly, the topic was not one I had any deep ties to, nor that one I would have chosen on my own. I took on two sections of the specially-themed course as a favor.
I was not an authority on the topic. I hadn’t even reviewed all the texts for the course before I began teaching. I had to work to keep up with the readings and the films that the class watched. I designed the usual kinds of assignments and activities, which I have documented in a List of Ten and in my blog post Assignment: Naming and the Rhetoric of War. Frequently, the students in the classroom knew more than I did about historical battles and current military events.
Despite all the reasons the course could have gone wrong, I found myself with some of the most engaged students I have ever taught. Their personal interest in the topic made all the difference. Students had signed up for the course because they were interested in exploring the topic, so they came into the classroom ready to dig into the texts. [read more]
“At a certain point, I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”
President Obama, May 9, 2012
A friend and former colleague of mine posted on Facebook a one-word response to this recent statement by President Obama: “Huge.” Why so huge? For one thing, it was the first time a sitting president had made such a statement. It was the result of what Obama has called the “evolving” of his views on same-sex marriage. And for those voters for whom the issue is a deal-breaker, it made crystal clear the battle line between Obama and his presumptive opponent in this year’s primary. Romney holds firm his definition of marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman. [read more]
Homecomings can be bittersweet, since they inevitably involve leavetakings. And leaving the MV Explorer in San Diego left me a bit weak in the knees: coming down that gangway and stairs for the last time, looking up at the ship that had been home for nearly four months, and plunging into a sea of luggage and boxes looking for those with my name on them—it was overwhelming in every way. So I had little time for tears or nostalgia: I had to find those boxes, get them to UPS, pick up my bags, and head to the airport.
As the taxi drove away, I took a last look at our ship, waving wildly to those still on board (about 20 people were staying on for an “enrichment voyage” to the Galapagos), and trying to get one last photograph. Time to pull myself together and think “I’m home.” And soon enough, I was home, just a short plane ride from San Diego to San Francisco and then a 40 minute drive to my condominium on the Stanford campus. So I was home. But I was not home alone.
Rather, I was greeted by house guests who had been staying in my place. So I caught up with them while trying to unpack my two suitcases stuffed to bursting with things I had bought for my grandnieces Audrey and Lila (dresses from the Bahamas and Brazil and Ghana, pajamas from Japan and China, skirts from India . . . and more, much, much more). I threw in a load of laundry and looked at my schedule for the next day: meetings with eight graduate students starting at 8:00 a.m. and then two meetings in the late afternoon. And, whoops, I’d forgotten that I had two other guests arriving the next morning, coming to work with me on a writing project for three days. And oh yes, I would be flying to Vancouver, Canada the morning after they left to give some talks at Kwantlen Polytechnic. And that was just for starters. [read more]
One of the questions I believe is among the most important a cultural critic can ask is, “Whatever happened to the spirit of the sixties?” How, that is, did a generation who questioned the growing materialism and social inequities of their country end up participating in the creation of a society where those same inequities have widened to the dimensions of a veritable socioeconomic Grand Canyon, while their own conspicuous consumption has made that of their parents look like ascetic self-denial?
In asking that question I am not looking down on that generation: I am of it myself, though I have been able to steer clear of what I see to be its excesses. Part of what has helped me to avoid the siren song of consumption has been my knowledge of and admiration for what was once a central American value. The colonial-era writer St. John de Crevecoeur called this value “competency”: that is, the achievement of an economic middle ground between luxury and poverty, comfort without excess. That, Crevecoeur opined in his Letters from an American Farmer, was what America was all about.
The valuing of competency has collapsed in the decades since the sixties. The explanation for what caused this collapse lies far beyond the scope of this blog, but we can get an interesting glimpse from the 1983 film The Big Chill. [read more]
posted: 5.17.12 by Elizabeth Wardle and Douglas Downs
Today we welcome guest blogger Michael Michaud. Michael teaches courses in composition and rhetoric at Rhode Island College, where he is an assistant professor of English. His current research investigates the role that professional or workplace identities play in adult students’ transition to academic writing. He has been experimenting with writing-about-writing pedagogies in first-year composition courses since the fall of 2008.
Writing teachers don’t often think of themselves as drill sergeants. We’re a “kinder, gentler” variety of taskmasters. We tend to be empathetic, flexible, polite, generous, warm, and encouraging. We want our students to succeed. It’s not a competition with us and we’re not trying to break students down so we can build them back up again. We are nurturers.
But outside of writing classrooms, the world often works differently. As a young man, I thrived on competition—on the court, on the field, in the pool. I relished the opportunity to prove to hard-nosed and tough-minded coaches that I craved a challenge and could get through anything they threw at me. When a trial of some sort ended, I took special pride in knowing that I had survived.
Not all our students are like I was. But some are. And many, perhaps even most, by the time they arrive at college, have internalized the American obsession with not just competition, but also the idea that suffering leads to growth: No pain, no gain. [read more]
One of the classes I’ve been teaching this semester is Advanced Exposition. I’ve framed it, though, as Queer Composition. It’s been an interesting semester, in part because most of the students took the class because they needed to, but also because all of them have come to embrace explorations of rhetorical genres that emerge out of LGBTQ experience: everything from cruising to camp to disco.
The entire semester has been focused on identifying and analyzing the generic features of each of these rhetorical forms, but for our last week we’re turning that process around in a very special way.
Last week we looked at the “It Gets Better” video as a specific genre. This coming week, using what we learned, we’re going to make our own video for the project. I have to say that for me, personally, this is exciting. Not only do the students in the class get to compose for a real-world audience, and not only do they get to do so in new media, but I get to compose with them. More than that, I get the chance to make a difference.
Along with all of you, I’m looking forward to a change of pace as the demands of serving over 1,800 students in 90+ sections give way to (a little) more unstructured time. One of my summer projects is to begin work on the 3rd edition of Portfolio Keeping: A Guide for Students and Portfolio Teaching: A Guide for Instructors. Waiting for reviews of the 2nd edition, published in 2006, I’m excited to dive back in and incorporate what readers and users want in these guides to writing portfolios.
As I begin work on this new edition, I would like to see our first-year writing courses (finally) make the shift—program-wide—to electronic portfolios. While most of our instructors require electronic submission of the final portfolios, these are simply word-processed documents delivered electronically, which saves paper, but as rhetoric and composition specialists have firmly established, eportfolios are not simply paper portfolios uploaded into a digital placeholder. Navigation is a non-issue with traditional page-turner portfolios, but it becomes crucially important with (genuine) electronic portfolios because reader/users have choices of where to go next. In addition, most eportfolios benefit from a dominant theme or metaphor, and digital portfolios welcome a variety of media—and, in turn, require design decisions in how to deliver each medium. A few of our instructors are asking students to produce eportfolios, especially in our upper-division courses, but I believe that it’s time to ask all first-year writing courses to conclude with the production of an electronic portfolio. It almost feels like we’re behind the curve if we don’t make this change. [read more]
What would happen if we rethought the ways that we think and talk about writing and the writing process to use the kind of language and thinking that people use when they play games? That’s the question I’ve been pondering during the several weeks since Katie Salen’s webinar, Making Learning Irresistible: 6 Principles of Game-like Learning. (Please watch Salen’s webinar for a complete explanation of her ideas, which I’ll refer to and summarize in this post.)
Last week I talked about how to make a curriculum relevant by thinking like a game designer when you structure your curriculum. This week I want to take that idea a little further by considering how a game designer might teach writing. How would my teaching change if I reconceptualized writing to apply the same strategies used during game play?
First, I’d have to place more of a focus on risk and experimentation. If I were playing Angry Birds, I’d try different tensions on the slingshot, and I’d aim the bird I was launching in various places. I’d experiment until I found the best combination. In the same way, Salen’s game-like approach to learning focuses on encouraging students to try out ideas. When something doesn’t work, the student hasn’t failed. Instead, the student takes the part that works, moves forward, and tries again (just as I do with Angry Birds). The key issue is the take-away from a particular iteration. The writing classroom would become a place where students try as many approaches as they like with no negative repercussions. [read more]
Doug
