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.

Any regular reader of this blog will know that new story: writing is not the transmission of information but the creation of knowledge. Writing is not perfectible, and there’s a reason the world’s best writers have the world’s best editors. Grammar is merely one of a great number of concerns in writing, not the central one. “Writing” includes composition, not simply inscription: it begins with thinking about what to say and ends in a reader’s hands, not with drafting. Writing is not an empty container into which content is dumped; the container is the content. Thus, writing is a situated activity responding to particular exigencies, different every time, not a universal skill that can be learned once and “mastered.” Revision is developing writing, not fixing it, and thus a sign of mature writing, not bad writing: most professional writers expect that their first draft is a starting point, not an ending point. Writing is not usually the work of lone geniuses inspired by a muse; writers usually work collaboratively with other writers and especially with readers. Writing is usually not easy for good writers, and it is usually not the kind of thing that ought to be.

So, again, my thoughts turn to education policy and the assumptions made in everyday discussion about writing. It’s still universally the old story. If what we’re doing with WAW works, somewhere down the line here we’re going to see fewer heads cocked skeptically when we tell the new story—indeed, if what we’re doing works, here and there school board members and policymakers and provosts and cops and medical doctors will start telling it to us. If what we’re doing works, eventually, most students will arrive from high school already knowing the new story.

Then, at least, when colleges keep insisting that teachers of writing need no special training and can be paid a pittance, they won’t have an entire cultural story of how simple, uncomplicated, and purely grammatical writing is to warrant their stance. And, more importantly, in a culture with a new story about writing slowly taking root to compete with the old story, the social injustices associated with the old one—which Composition has pushed against at least since Mina Shaughnessy—will start to disappear as well.

That’s what I’m waiting for.

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.

One of the challenges WAW pedagogies face is the “it’s-too-hard” factor. At first glance, WAW can seem like it would cause a lot of pain. Take reading, for example: I can tell you that most students at my institution are not reading works in first-year composition (FYC) that are nearly as challenging as what my students are reading in my WAW–based course. What about writing? This semester, I tried out a new assignment where I asked students to read Anne Beaufort’s “Developmental Gains of a History Major: Building a Theory of Disciplinary Writing Expertise,” and then use her framework of five knowledge domains to analyze a writing experience they have had in college. WAW assignments like these ask students to make moves that, I would argue, are more difficult than those asked of students in traditional FYC assignments. If WAW seems hard, it’s because it often is hard.

The students, of course, know this. They know the work is challenging because it feels challenging, and they get confirmation that it’s challenging when they talk to their peers about their FYC classes. At many colleges, I’ve come to learn, FYC courses sometimes have a reputation for being not particularly demanding. Here are two student comments on the difficulty level of each course, the first regarding WAW and the second regarding FYC:

When I signed up for th[is] course, I was expecting it to be another general education course that I was going to have to force myself to sit through. The first few weeks were a challenge because I wasn’t prepared for the workload after having heard stories about other such classes that were extremely easy.

From what I’ve heard about other sections of the course, it was easy and basically story hour, where you barely learn anything.

Students may say that they want easy classes, but they know when they’re being cheated and when they’re cheating themselves. And they know when they’re being challenged, as well as the benefits of a good challenge.

The other day I ran into a former student, Stanley, on the quad. I was amazed to hear him recount his experience in a WAW-based FYC course he had taken with me two years earlier:

That class was just one long ass-kickin’. You put the beat-down on us all semester with the academic articles and the research paper and everything. I remember the day you came in and said ‘You guys are the survivors’—‘cause a quarter of the class had stopped showing. That was a great day. I felt proud of myself. I figured if I could get through your class I could get through anything.

Students like Stanley appreciate a challenge. Challenges build understanding, but they also build self-worth, self-confidence, and self-efficacy. As an English major in college, I was taught to be suspicious of all those time-worn clichés about hard work that I learned before I got to college. But those clichés exist for a reason—because there is a good deal of truth to them. No pain, no gain. That’s one thing that WAW is all about.

Today’s guest blogger is Dr. Rebecca Block, an Associate Professor and Writing Center Director at Daytona State College; she completed her graduate work in Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Louisville. She is currently teaching introductory writing using a writing-about-writing approach in an open enrollment institution where this approach has not previously been employed.

Before I began teaching with Writing About Writing, I was fairly apprehensive about how it would go over in an open enrollment environment. What I’ve discovered, though, is that the students here—especially the ones returning to school after years being away—seem to flourish under the challenge of investigating themselves and tackling difficult reading and writing assignments. Their excitement is so rewarding that I find myself looking forward to the class and to reading their homework and major projects to hear what they have to say. 

“I’ve written a bunch of scripts for my various YouTube videos,” Tom (not his real name) tells me as I look up from my computer. “I’m up to about 40 of them now.” I smile and congratulate him, remembering how this same student, just a semester ago, declared early on that he was “no writer” and attending my introductory composition class only because it was required. Tom, like many students at the institution where I teach, had a bad history with education, and was returning to school after years away from it to obtain an associate’s degree with the hope of improving his employment prospects. Given his initial demeanor, the transformation in his attitude about himself as a student and writer over the course of the semester was amazing to watch.

About two thirds of the way through the term, Tom wrote the following:

I must say my life has been changed dramatically by ENC 1101. Though I have read voraciously at many times in the past and have an appreciation for the people who are able to write, in the past I viewed authors as people with some type of “special” skills. Imagine my surprise when suddenly I am being taught there are many specific methods for prose production. My vocabulary has been forcibly expanded, my ability to write (and my desire to) has been enhanced by several orders of magnitude, and my knowledge of MLA and paragraph structure may be on the way to being satisfactory. Knowledge of the multitude of revision strategies have allowed me to pick and choose what works for me, and though I don’t need or want to use some of them, others have been very helpful.…

In a chronology of myself as a writer, I have progressed from knowing none of the “official” terminology, doubting that I could ever write because I possessed none of the tools, and afraid to write because I had no way to gauge the suitability and quality of what I had written. Now I have produced some writings, and feel capable of many more. Indeed, I feel euphoric when I put my thoughts to paper and force my 55-year-old brain to tell my fingers what to say! I find myself thinking of subjects, and stories about them suddenly come to mind.

Tom, like all of my students last semester, was initially quite resistant to reading scholarly work as part of an introductory writing class. In the first few weeks of last semester, I focused on reading, to near disastrous effects. It wasn’t until we got to the readings on the writing process, and activities that asked students to investigate it within themselves, that things started to turn around.

So this semester, facing a class where half of my students were my age or older and had been out of school for years, I decided to begin by focusing on who they were as writers and what their experiences with writing had been. Early participation and homework submissions increased, and classroom discussion was so active that when I lost my voice for a week early in the semester, I was able to turn the discussion over to a few of the students to lead while I observed. Just last week, one of my students came into my office to talk with me about how she uses the things she’s learned to talk with her kids about how to approach school, and how her work in our class has caused her to feel smarter and more confident in her job. She had been writing all her boss’s communications for over a decade, she said, and yet had always felt inferior to him—until reflecting about her writing history in this course.

Also during this semester, a few of my colleagues and I started a composition reading group. We meet at least once a month to discuss readings and approaches to teaching writing, and as a result of hearing my stories a couple of them have decided to try out WAW as well. Like me, they are excited about the idea of approaching composition as an opportunity for students to discover who they are as writers. This is especially true because our students most often conceive of writers as people with “special skills,” as Tom did. Our hope is that by helping students recognize they are already writers, they can then study their writing as an extension of the interests that brought them back to school in the first place, instead of viewing writing as a punitive exercise or a pursuit of an unattainable status.

ZuZu Feder is a second-year student in the English M.A. program at Montana State University, Bozeman. She has taught Writing about Writing first-year composition for two years while in graduate school, and her graduate research has focused on incorporating multimodal composition into FYC courses based on WAW pedagogy. Following graduation she will be taking off for adventures in Europe and trying to find a way to spend her life traveling and writing.

 I’m in a reflective mood these days. Graduation is two weeks away and there’s a lot to think about from my two years in MSU’s English M.A. program. When I’m not wondering what to do with the ridiculous sleeves on my graduation gown, I’m reflecting, with amazement, that I made it through the program. To state the obvious, graduate school is hard—but the hardest part was teaching a Writing about Writing (WAW) first-year composition course each semester.

Doug Downs and Elizabeth Wardle have said that one of WAW’s challenges lies in training graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) to teach it. Teaching a WAW curriculum as a new teacher adds another level of difficulty to an already breakdown-inducing situation—it’s hard to teach what you don’t fully understand.

I had some background with WAW from undergraduate classes with Doug, and I was hooked on the idea before graduate school. Understanding writing as a rhetorical activity had answered many of my questions about writing and reading—learning to think about how and why texts are the way was eye-opening. I wished someone had taught me about rhetoric years ago.

I believe what helped me most was first acquiring an understanding of and belief in or respect for the goals of WAW. On days when only three of my students had done the reading, I held onto why I had them read what they so eloquently termed “boring wordy articles.” I firmly believe that learning about how writing works is invaluable for both reading and writing, in college and elsewhere, and I know from experience that WAW is effective in teaching this. So, I would reassign the unread selection for the next class. I asked my students to trust me, to give it a chance, to just try to understand anything they can in the reading, and I said yes, I know it’s hard.

I don’t know how to make training GTAs to teach WAW easier. I had the advantage of three semesters of rhet/comp in college that many GTAs haven’t had, so it wasn’t new to me ten days before I started teaching. I think that somewhere along the way, GTAs need a chance to develop a sense of understanding and respect for what they’re teaching. We may not always know what we’re doing, but I can’t imagine struggling through the hard days without knowing why, without knowing what that moment felt like when I first said, “Why hasn’t anyone told me this before?!”

Every semester, several students have said, “I wish someone had told me this before,” and it always reminds me to hang in there because I remember how that moment felt, and I want my students to have it. I think helping GTAs understand the goals of the course, and more importantly, know what those goals feel like, is essential in helping them implement a difficult curriculum. I’m not sure what I would have done on those days when students hadn’t done their reading had I not been sure of the value of that reading in reaching my goals for the course, and I don’t know how I could have been sure had I not experienced the value of that reading myself.

Today’s guest blogger is Barb Bird, who teaches basic and freshman writing and directs the writing center at Taylor University in Indiana. Her passion in both teaching and researching is basic writing, where she has used a writing about writing (WAW) approach for eight years. Her current research focuses on how a WAW basic writing curriculum transforms students’ sense of authority as academic readers and writers.

A week ago I passed back my first-year composition students’ second essay, a personal writing history reflection (chapter four in Writing about Writing). One of my students (I’ll call him Jim), whom I had in my fall basic writing course, focused his essay on his transformation as a writer. He said that in high school he got stuck in a downward cycle of receiving negative feedback, which led him to put little effort into his writing, leading to more negative feedback from his teachers. The eventual outcome of this cycle was a steady stream of Ds and Fs on his papers, convincing him that he would never be able to write. He went on to say that with what he has learned this year (he is in his second WAW writing class), he feels he now has real authority as an academic writer.

Jim was one of the best writers in class last semester and even one of the best I have had in my nearly eleven years of teaching. Ds and Fs on papers just last year? This statement really surprised me.

Jim’s transformation as a writer is not due to my pedagogy or my care and empathy for students (though both student-engaging pedagogy and teacher care are extremely important for student success). Jim’s transformation stems from being immersed in the WAW curriculum we use in our basic writing course: academic articles on making meaning as readers and writers and gaining confidence and authority as academic writers. This WAW content addresses tentative, unengaged students who believe (for a variety of reasons) that they are not on the same level as their peers, transforming them into confident, engaged academic writers who boldly develop and express their ideas.

The term transformation seems to be replacing transfer in discussions on writing transfer; however, I would argue that the goal should not even be on what students produce (whether they transfer or transform or translate their skills or knowledge) but on their sense of self. John Tagg (The Learning Paradigm College) argues that the core (both foundation and most important) contributors to deep learning, learning that lasts beyond the immediate context, are academic habits of mind. Although he lists several habits of mind, most of them contribute to or create an internal sense of authority. This authority allows students to approach reading and writing as meaning-makers and not merely passive receivers and paraphrasers of someone else’s meaning. The authority habit of mind drives students to engage with ideas, a drive that is not a “skill” that can “transfer” to another course. It is a disposition that affects how students approach academic tasks: students who believe they have the authority to be meaning-makers have integrated this sense of authority into who they are. Because of this internal habit of mind, my student Jim has transformed his sense of self from “student” to “meaning-maker.”

I know that we cannot study this habit-of-mind transformation as neatly as we can study improvement in use of grammar or syntax. It is much too muddy. Even so, I believe this transformation gets to the heart of education—equipping, encouraging, modeling, and teaching students how to become meaning-makers so that they can make their own contributions to society (in both large and small, local ways).

Because this transformation is so important, I am attempting a research project (with my research colleague, Carie King, and my methodologist-husband, Steve Bird) using multimodal data (pre- and post-surveys, portfolio reflections, and interviews) in order to get a “thick description” of how much students actually transform from student into meaning-maker. At this point, after primarily analyzing the pre- and post-surveys, we are beginning to see some solid evidence that our students do indeed make this transformation.

As teachers, we have the great privilege of watching faces light up when students “get it” and seeing marked improvement in their knowledge and skill acquisition. But I think the greatest privilege of all is playing a small role in leading our students through this transformation from a student to a meaning-maker. We are teachers by profession but empowerers through our work. We don’t do the actual transformation—that is the work of our students. But we do empower, equip, and energize that transformation.

Today’s guest blogger is Aaron Yost, who over the past 12 years has been the “instructor of record” for a wide range of courses—8^th grade Language Arts, high school Literature and Composition, AP English Language and Composition, and more recently Freshman Year Composition as well as Methods of Teaching English. He hopes he is occasionally considered a teacher. His current research orbits the possibility of applying Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony to the problem of pedagogy.

Last fall at Montana State University, Dr. Downs sold me on the idea of using writing about writing (WAW) to build the first-year comp (FYC) courses I would be teaching as a graduate student. On sabbatical from my high school teaching position, I was delighted to be handed a curriculum, but the first month was rough. I struggled every week to feel power over the subject matter. How was I supposed to teach Grant-Davie if I couldn’t master the material myself? But then I had an epiphany.

I realized that I was only one voice in the chorus of the WAW curriculum. I didn’t have to be the expert. I couldn’t be. Starting out, I was almost as much of an outsider in the world of Writing Studies as my students. And that was okay. I could be, as a WAW teacher, simply a master of introductions. Every new reading was sending students straight to the source, to the thinkers, scholars, and researchers at the field’s forefront. All these distinct voices were propelling my students in powerful directions. WAW seemed, by its very nature, to be polyphonic, and as the second semester began, and I had another chance at a FYC course, I knew my role: I would become a conductor of a WAW polyphony.

When my sabbatical ended, I puzzled over what to do with my composition classes back at the high school. I felt like my FYC students had progressed in powerful ways with WAW—they told me so. In their end-of-course reflections, they spoke to the effectiveness of what they’d studied and learned. They spoke, unprompted, of the kind of transformation Dr. Wardle and others have written about. They spoke of the power they now felt over a wide range of academic writing situations. They made me feel like a teacher.

How could I deny my high school students these same opportunities? I couldn’t. So I resolved to offer a WAW curriculum to the eleventh graders in a public high school.

In designing these courses and their practices, I was plagued by a few persistent doubts: I worried that juniors in high school wouldn’t be able to handle the scholarly readings; I worried that the intimidating abstractness of rhetorical situations and discourse communities might be too much for them; and I worried that the polyphony provided by WAW would overwhelm their largely monologic academic pasts and lead to mutiny.

WAW’s central values helped me address these concerns, and I committed to the following:

• Teaching, and continually emphasizing, the kind of reflective writing that would prod students toward meta-knowledge and that would provide me the feedback I needed to gauge the effectiveness of course activities (see Gwen Gorzelsky’s 2/29 post)
• Evaluating coursework using a reflective, end-of-semester portfolio so that throughout the term students could see their writing as drafts, as experimental, so they could feel the freedom to explore, to vent about, and to reflect on the course texts
• Furnishing an environment in which dialogue could flourish—an online wiki-space, in this case—and requiring students to post their writing to semi-public, digital forums, then providing ample time to read and comment on each others’ work, encouraging them to question their own and each others’ readings, claims, and evidence
• Helping students become more aware of the multi-faceted, rhetorically complex nature of their reading and writing so we could explore multiple levels of meaning, and more voices could be heard within, and in conversation with, the texts

These values and practices helped produce results that proved encouraging and enlightening. Once students were comfortable with the reflective nature of their writing, difficult texts became exciting problems to solve and lively conversations to enter rather than simply another body of knowledge to master. As student awareness of rhetorical situations and discourses grew, these became exactly the abstractions they’d been waiting for; they provided new and powerful lenses through which to make meaning from the texts themselves. Within the online spaces, the digital community grew and student conversations started expanding without my prompting. And as dialogism became a common aim, my teacher-presence faded and student voices came to the fore. The one-dimensional, teacher-dominated pedagogy that had ruled my high school classrooms for so long was changing.

In the epilogue to one student’s portfolio, she thanked her classmates for “the opportunity to belong to such a wonderful group of people who can share ideas and generate information to solve problems.” Reading reflections like this made me feel I had become a Master of Introductions. Once everyone was acquainted, my classrooms were becoming symposiums, where we were audiences first, voyeurs of sorts, listening in on the conversations. But when sparked, we were whispering new worlds to each other.

Frances Johnson is a full-time instructor of first year composition at Texas A&M University–CC, in their award winning learning communities program. Frances also teaches technical and professional writing and is a student in Texas Tech’s Ph.D. program in Technical Communication and Rhetoric.

Liz posted this question to the blog readership back in December:

When your program teaches composition courses designed around writing and declarative knowledge about writing, where is the line between what should be taught in composition and what should be taught in upper-level writing courses?

I have taken her question and applied it to first year composition (FYC) and discipline-specific, upper-level, writing-intensive courses. What is the line between FYC composition courses designed around declarative knowledge and upper-level, writing-intensive courses? On the other hand, should there be a division? Is it possible for the concept of writing and declarative knowledge to be used as the introduction for disciplinary writing concepts in FYC courses—especially when the courses are taught as WAC/WID courses that prepare students for discipline-specific writing?

I argue that such first-year courses could be introductory courses supporting upper-level, discipline-specific writing. A two-semester composition sequence merging FYC’s course design of writing and declarative knowledge with discipline-specific (discourse-community) writing needs accomplishes this. The first semester of the two-course sequence is the introduction to the concept of writing studies and discourse communities; the second semester becomes more writing scholarship with these concepts, then applying these concepts to a discipline-specific writing/communication project. For students enrolled in the science learning community at my university, the sharp division between FYC and upper-level, discipline-specific writing blurs.

The university enrolls all incoming freshmen in a learning community. The learning communities are either one or two large lecture courses linked with smaller classes of seminar and composition. While most of these learning communities have mixed majors, the science learning community has only those students whose major is some aspect of scientific or medical study. This population is highly motivated and wants to focus on learning that connects to their major; for them, “scientists do not write; all they do is research.”

The concept of using declarative research and reading scholarship about writing provides a way for these students to make connections between researching and writing. The idea that people actually research and write about writing connected with these students. Sondra Perl’s work about researching the writing process of unskilled college writers provided the biggest connection. After reading Perl’s work and using the methodology as a basis for an auto-ethnographical study, students were amazed at their results. The students made connections between the science discourse community they wanted to enter and their own research.

An example of the students’ connection between composition studies and science comes from the reflective portion of a mid-term portfolio assignment. A student reflects, “The auto-ethnography assignment at the beginning of the semester revealed my weakest skills as a writer. The ideas of Sondra Perl had me constructing style sheets to see my strengths and flaws from a scientific approach (1979/2011). Devising a code based on the experiments conducted by Perl allowed me to view composition as a scientific process (Perl, 1979/2011).” After making one connection, the students in the learning community are now ready to recognize others between writing and communication in their discourse community.

Making discoveries that researching and writing can and do go together opens the door to creating other discourse community connections. Connecting FYC content of declarative knowledge about writing with discipline-specific writing provides the basis for the writing done in writing-intensive major courses, because the students’ exposure to how writing works allows them to look for the conventions in any discourse community. So maybe the line between course content in FYC and upper-level courses is not solid, but rather permeable to allow for the flow of concepts between the two.

Today’s guest blogger is Gwen Gorzelsky, associate professor and Director of Composition at Wayne State University. She has published articles in CCC, Reflections, JAC, JAEPL, and other venues, as well as The Language of Experience: Literate Practices and Social Change (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005). She is conducting a mixed methods study of transfer between a sophomore/junior–level intermediate writing course and students’ subsequent courses. She is also writing a book on how a set of Zen literate practices mediate the relationship between personal and systemic change by using conceptual and procedural knowledge to reshape experiential knowledge.

In his post on WAW 2.1, Doug says that a version of Writing about Writing (WAW) developed from scratch right now would be “born rhetorical” and “born digital.” I want to suggest that it should also be “born reflective.” I mean this on two levels. One involves building student reflection into WAW courses to better promote metacognition, which Salomon and Perkins and other transfer scholars hold is crucial for knowledge transfer (or, to invoke Elizabeth’s and others’ term, knowledge transformation). The second level involves building reflection into the process of constructing course sequences and curricula. To suggest the importance of both levels of reflection for WAW, I’ll briefly sketch how we’re exploring the WAW approach at Wayne State University, an urban research institution that serves a highly diverse—and diversely prepared—student body.

First, we’re embedding our work with WAW in a larger assessment project that involves both a qualitative investigation into various program constituents’ perspectives and a quantitative evaluation of the outcomes of a WAW curriculum as compared with our existing curriculum. We began in winter 2011 with Intermediate Writing (ENG 3010), a sophomore/junior–level course that fulfills students’ second general education writing requirement and most directly prepares them for Writing Intensive (WI) courses they must take in their majors. Based on surveys of students in 3010 and WI courses, focus groups with students and instructors from both courses, and text analysis sessions with instructors from both courses, as well as reading in the field, we developed pilot WAW sections of the course. We taught five pilot sections in fall 2011 and are teaching four this term. Each semester, at least two of the WAW sections use an empirically based WAW curriculum, while at least two use that curriculum with a substantial reflective component. Much transfer scholarship emphasizes metacognition and abstraction of principles from specific learning contexts. Well-known scholars (Yancey; Anson; Larson) make persuasive arguments for the role of reflection in promoting these kinds of thinking. More recently, Taczak contends that including reflective assignments can play a key role in making WAW curricula effective. Therefore, we decided to test standard and reflective WAW approaches.

We’re doing so through portfolio evaluation, using Edward White’s phase two approach, in which students draft a reflective argument that shows whether and to what extent the portfolio’s contents demonstrate mastery of course learning outcomes. At the end of the fall 2011 semester, we conducted a portfolio evaluation on all WAW sections and on three control sections, using a scoring rubric developed directly from learning outcomes for the course. We’re now awaiting the results of a quantitative analysis designed to show whether there is any statistically significant difference between portfolio scores for WAW, WAW + reflection and non-WAW students. (Non-WAW sections use our existing curriculum, which asks students to read and write texts from the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences.) We’ll do another portfolio evaluation, with quantitative analysis of scores, at the end of the winter 2012 semester. The results of these quantitative analyses will play a substantial role in helping us determine whether and how to adopt a WAW approach across more sections of 3010 in fall 2012.

However, reflection on what we’ve learned and on our programmatic and institutional circumstances is also informing our process of testing WAW in our context. Based on portfolio readers’ reflections after the December 2011 evaluation, we developed plans for instructors this semester to discuss learning outcomes with students and to lead students in using the portfolio scoring rubric to evaluate their own writing at mid-semester. Through extensive conversations with key stakeholders, including an assistant director of composition and a group of instructors he trained, we’re reflecting on how we might design WAW courses that fit our course sequence, student body, and existing program strengths. Given that 3010 prepares students for WI courses in their majors, we’re testing a WAW 3010 with a focus on academic and professional discourse communities. Given that our assistant director has developed and refined a first-year writing course grounded in rhetorical theory, we’re considering how we might incorporate WAW elements by including a range of primary texts from rhetorical studies (rather than using rhetoric textbooks) and how we might introduce concepts of discourse community and genre analysis in ways that help students explore civic and other extra-curricular discourse communities. We hope this approach may complement our 3010 course’s focus on academic and professional discourse communities, while exposing students to foundational concepts from rhetorical, genre, and literacy studies, and to relevant research methods, from interviews and textual analysis to observation. While our plans are still evolving, reflection is playing a key role in helping us think through the questions Elizabeth raises regarding the levels at which various writing studies concepts should be introduced. It’s also helping us pursue Kevin Roozen’s suggestion that WAW expose students to the broad range of both academic and extra-academic discourse communities, encouraging them to make connections across these worlds. Reflection can offer WAW both tighter links to knowledge transfer (or transformation) and smoother integration into curriculum and program development.

Today we welcome guest blogger Kevin Roozen, an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at Auburn University, where he teaches first-year composition as well as a range of undergraduate and graduate courses in rhetorical theory and practice, composition theory, literacy studies, and writing as social practice. Kevin’s research focuses on the interplay between writing for multiple contexts and the implications those linkages and disconnects have for the extended development of literate persons and practices.

My current interests in writing throughout the college years have prompted me to examine the kinds of literate activities students encounter in what are commonly referred to as the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) disciplines. As a result, I’ve found myself reading back through Dorothy Winsor’s Writing Like an Engineer: A Rhetorical Education this week.

At the very end of her book, Winsor writes,

I think, however, that, whatever their professions, what we fear for our students is that their professional discourse may come to dominate their lives at the expense of other ways of talking and being [and I would add writing and reading]. After all, the students described here are more than engineers. They are or will be perhaps citizens, artists, environmentalists, lovers, children, parents, and a wide variety of other possibilities. … Those other roles should produce other discourses, providing spaces from which to reflect on and critique their professional practices. (105)

I was struck by Winsor’s recognition that the students at the center of her study are “more than engineers.” I read Winsor’s statement as a call for instruction that finds a way to keep alive the many discursive practices in students’ repertoires, for the development of a rhetorical education that addresses, even includes, the rich array of discourses—both professional and “other”—that animate students’ lives.

One of the many strengths of a writing-about-writing (WAW) approach is how it contributes to the kind of education Winsor calls for. After all, WAW isn’t limited to addressing only those kinds of writing and writing practices valued in academic settings. Rather, it’s an approach that invites learners to examine their experiences with writing and literate activity for a wide range of purposes, be they academic, professional, or vernacular, and whether in their homes and families, churches, local communities, schools, or places of employment. In other words, the WAW approach invites learners to examine the full expanse of the discursive landscapes they inhabit rather than just those territories most closely associated with school and their majors.

In the FYC, upper-division, and graduate courses I’ve taught over the past few years, students have employed what they’ve learned from the WAW approach to examine the textual practices of crafting fan-fiction, organizing and leading a Bible study, keeping a journal, maintaining a community-based Web site, creating visual designs, assembling a scrapbook for a grandparent with Alzheimer’s, and using a short-wave radio as part of a disaster response and relief effort. In doing so, students are not only coming to understand the kinds of issues about writing, literacy, and literacy development that animate writing studies and the kinds of methods it employs, but are also developing a richer and fuller sense of the textual worlds they negotiate, of the discursive repertoires at their disposal, and of themselves as writers and literate persons more broadly.

In this sense, Winsor’s passage brings to mind Mike Rose’s detailed reflection of his attempts at combining his extensive history with writing poetry with his emerging facility with scholarly prose and the benefits he received from this interplay. My sense is that Rose’s experience speaks directly to how beneficial and powerful this sort of “rhetorical education” can be. I’ve taken these excerpts from the lengthy Author’s Note that prefaces chapter fourteen of An Open Language: Selected Writing on Literacy, Learning, and Opportunity.

I became curious about the possibility of combining [the poetry and scholarly writing] I was doing. Scholarship and research gave me a set of powerful analytic tools, and I worked hard to get better at using them, felt good about what they enabled me to do. And the poetry provided a medium to convert all the little pieces of daily life—from dreams to objects on a shelf—into written language, and with that conversion came the development of descriptive skill: the image, compression, rhythm, the dramatic turn. Although composition studies afforded an increasingly important audience for me, the poetry offered different   sort of connection, one based more on an emotional and aesthetic response. I didn’t want to lose any of this. Could analytic, even formal academic prose, be blended with poetry, with story?

One thing I did was to photocopy a few paragraphs on the structure of long-term memory from a cognitive psychology textbook and tape them on a large sheet of paper. Underneath them, I placed some lines of poetry I had written about events from my childhood: a discussion of memorial processes right next to a depiction of memories. Why not? It was this sort of fooling around with text and genre that would lead to the form of Lives on the Boundary. Over the next few months, I would shift from poetry to narrative vignette—about my education and that of others as well—and in place of the textbook passages, there would be analysis of   the kind I was writing from scholarly journals but without some of the academic conventions. (286)

In a very real sense, I see the WAW approach as one avenue for helping students at all levels of education to recognize the wide range of discourses and literacies they have at their disposal, view all of those discourses and practices as legitimate and productive, and understand the potential benefits of weaving them together.

Liz

I admit to some level of amusement at that the fact that Doug’s last post is titled, “Oh the Creative Writing Students,” as a sort of lament at the “I don’t have anything to learn about writing” attitude, and that his post is followed by creative writing student Hayden James’ insightful comments about all that he has learned about writing in Mike Michaud’s class. I think that Doug’s lament about creative writing students is really about a particular kind of student (from any major) who walks in thinking he or she knows everything and who lacks intellectual curiosity. Hayden’s comments, on the other hand, are a direct example of what curiosity and a desire to learn about writing and language look like, and can result in.

I’m heartened but not surprised to see what Hayden found useful in Mike’s Writing about Writing (WAW) class. Concepts such as discourse communities, genres, and lexis, and heuristics like Swales’ CARS model, seem clearly helpful for literate learners navigating their way through varied rhetorical situations. The question I think our field must address is, when and where should various concepts be introduced? What is introduced during high school, during first-year composition, in introduction to writing studies, and in courses in a writing major like Rhetoric and Civic Engagement? Our field has not had to answer these questions, because for decades, all we had was first-year comp (FYC). We had to put all of our ideas about writing and goals for student writers into that class. But this is changing. We are developing new writing majors and minors every day, requiring us to consider how to scaffold, sequence, and develop theory and research from our field into courses for undergraduate students.

This means, of course, that we can’t expect to use the same book in FYC and in upper-level courses for the writing major, at least not for much longer. If Hayden had used the WAW book in his FYC class, what might he have been ready to explore and do in the Studies in Composition course that Mike was teaching? We need to consider this question and write textbooks appropriate to the task.

Doug and I have a contract to write a book for just such a course, and we plan to draft it this summer. If you have ideas for how that book should be different from the WAW book for first-year students, we would love to hear them. What should upper-level students be reading and writing about? What are the primary research areas and methodologies that they should be reading about? And how can we build on what students might have learned in a WAW FYC class?