What is/are the most significant thing/s that you learned which you plan to use in some way in the future?

Late again!  The end of this semester has been a little busy.

For my final blog post, I would like to say that so much of what I've learned this semester has been valuable, and from a strictly pragmatic point of view, this class has been fantastic.   But really, what I think I value most about what we've discussed is this idea of beginning with the end in mind.

I would really like a job.  This sounds like a completely obvious statement but it's not.  For the entire MFA, I heard there were no jobs to be had, and so I never really considered that I'd like to end up tenure track faculty in a strong English department.  But now I think of this path as a real possibility, and I have a few years at TTU to work on this goal.

(With that in mind, I find myself looking at this link quite often: http://academicjobs.wikia.com/wiki/CreativeWriting_2016.

This website takes some of the opaqueness out of the process, but the content is user-generated, so maybe not 100% accurate.  Still, useful. )

Also, to go with this idea, I learned how to think and talk about composition in a much more informed way.  The theorist I most responded to was Peter Elbow, and I'll be sure to use his ideas about learning the language of SWE in future classes.

Write about anything you like.

I'm a day late this week because I've struggled with this prompt.  I've thought about a few things, but nothing in particular, or in any depth.  I've thought about how it is that creative writers have perhaps the least academic training in the department (the MFA is often considered a studio degree) and how we learn to be peers of TCR and literature students, even though in these areas, we are probably far less qualified than students who were denied admission.  I've thought about my fairly rigid view of first year composition and what it is I think students should take from it.  I've thought about beginning with the end in mind (so about what I'd like to happen after the PhD), every semester needing a plan (I highly recommend a presentation I viewed at the beginning of the semester; I think this is it:  http://www.facultydiversity.org/?FallSemesterPlan), and how the growth/fixed mindset model of education currently does and will continue to influence my teaching.  In short, I've thought about a lot.

And then today in my FB newsfeed was a link to a former peer's essay in Tin House (here's the link to "On Pandering:" http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/41314/on-pandering.html).  And holy cow, did this essay strike a nerve.  I've struggled for some time to articulate the difference between masculine and feminine writing, and why masculine work receives a better critical reception.  Meanwhile, even as I wrestle with the differences (are they empirical or perceptional?), I realize that these differences should not matter.  I presented at the Women and Gender's Studies Colloquium here at TTU this semester, and frustratedly conceded that I could not explain the difference, and I'm tackling a similar question in my paper for research methods this fall.  Ironically, this author's astronomical success first raised this question in my mind:  both she and another writer in my program, Donald Ray Pollock, met with serious success after their work was described as masculine.  As if this was the most laudable thing about their work, and both writers are frankly fantastic on their own.  But immediately, I wanted to get to work being masculine in my writing, to add some grittiness in here, and to subtract some lyricism there.  If I were to describe a text as masculine, I daresay you would know exactly what I mean.  If I were to distribute a list of authors to our class and ask students to classify them (say Chuck Pahlaniuk, Joyce Carol Oates, Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth, A.S. Byatt), I also think our decisions would be nearly unanimous.

So today I'm copying and pasting the end of Claire Vaye Watkins's essay here, the part where she offers ideas to marginalized writers.  And now, as the semester ends and as a big round number birthday approaches, this list feels like a sort of freedom.  Not that things have changed, but that they're changing.  (Warning: there's some language here).  (Okay, never mind; I edited it.)

Let us embrace a do-it-yourself canon, wherein we each make our own canon filled with what we love to read, what speaks to us and challenges us and opens us up, wherein we can each determine our artistic lineages for ourselves, with curiosity and vigor, rather than trying to shoehorn ourselves into a canon ready made and gifted us by some white [dudes] at Oxford.

Let us use our words and our gazes to make the invisible visible. Let us tell the truth.

Let us, each of us, write things that are uncategorizable, rather than something that panders to and condones and codifies those categories.

Let us burn this... system to the ground and build something better.

What is the thesis to your article for this course? What support will you cite to help you make your case?

So I don't quite have a thesis yet, but I'm working that direction.  I'm looking at some new research in the larger K-12 education field, and wondering about its implications for me in a composition classroom.

First, some background:  Before I moved to Ohio, I was certified with the state of Texas as a 4-8 generalist, and I taught upper elementary special ed.  After I had children, I found myself in Ohio (which did not have a reciprocal agreement with Texas for teaching certificates) and reading quite a bit on best practices in early childhood education.  One of the most striking things I read was from a book titled Nurtureshock, and the short version of the shocking thing is that it's actually not so great an idea to tell children that they're smart, as it decreases their agency and correlates with struggling when something gets too difficult.  It's much better, it turns out, to tell children that they are hard workers.

Approximately two years ago, I took a Stanford MOOC about best practices in math education, and a similar message was heard.  Carol Dweck, a behavioral psychologist from Stanford, wrote a book called Mindset, which details the difference between a fixed educational mindset (wherein one believes that intelligence is innate, that a person is either good or bad at math, for example) and a growth mindset (that the student has power over his or her education based on the amount of work put in, that intelligence can actually be influenced by the actions we take).  Long story short:  it's when a student makes mistakes that the most synaptic pathways are formed in the brain, thus, in effect, growing the brain.  Also, it's incredibly unproductive as a teacher to label students as good or bad at a subject, or to do things that lead students to believe that they're good or bad at a subject.  It's much more helpful to embrace mistakes, and to embrace process.

It's this word process that intrigues me here, as we've talked about process for 13 weeks now, and the composition definition of process is only slightly different.  I also can't help but compare this message with the difference in approach between the composition and the creative writing classroom.  In a creative writing classroom, we assume that we're all beginners to some extent, early on the path, there to learn.  In a composition classroom, we ask students to demonstrate what they've already learned, and there is a much greater emphasis on this performance.  I wonder if there's something here that composition can't take from creative writing, and that sort of goes with this growth and fixed mindset idea.

Anyway, I'm looking at Dweck, at Nurtureshock, at Elbow and Shaughnessy and Hairston, and I hope to get closer to a thesis soon.

Review the learning objectives for this course. What's one thing you've learned that connects to an objective and to your future job?

One of the things I keep thinking about this semester (of course) is the difference between creative writing and composition courses and how, with the change of genre, everything changes: curriculum, presentation, assignments, exercises, even teaching styles.  Both courses teach writing, but audience and purpose changes everything.

I connect this difference to this learning objective from our syllabus:

• Stylistic information presentation. Make stylistic choices appropriate for a given rhetorical situation. Measurement: successfully create and report on applications of core composition concepts through collaboration.

With the change in genre comes this change in rhetorical situation, and this seems to be the key thing for toggling between teaching composition and creative writing.  This semester I've thought about the differences and where there are overlaps, and things I want to preserve no matter the rhetorical situation or genre.

For example, in discussion the other day, I realized that we teach creative writing as if students are beginning writers, because most are new to the genre.  We teach composition as if students are experts.  This difference in teacher perspective means a profound difference in instruction and assessment, and it seems to me that we lose something, some motivation, some autonomy on the part of the student, when we treat students as if they are not learners but performers.  In my composition courses, I'd like to recapture the idea that students are there to learn composition, not to demonstrate to me that they have learned composition prior to the class.  So much research shows that the learning occurs in the mistakes, and yet our current model penalizes mistakes.

This connects to my future job, of course, because it's possible that I may teach either composition or creative writing.  There are differences, but the learning objectives do not diverge profoundly;  to move the student farther along the writing road, to develop the technical skills and thought processes that contribute to good writing.

Identify where you think students may fail in an assignment in your syllabus, and how you will use that at a teachable moment by design.

In the scaffolded researched paper (which I've adapted from OSU's first year composition program), there are three distinct stages to the assignment:  the primary source analysis, the secondary source integration, and the final researched paper.  All three steps require at least some tricky work, but I'd like to focus on the first part of the assignment, the primary source analysis.

This assignment asks a student to select a text pertaining to the theme of the course.  My favorite theme to teach is Horror, Suspense, and Crime in American Fiction, and I've had students analyze episodes of The Twilight Zone and Lost, short stories like "The Yellow Wallpaper" (who is Jane?!), and novels like Carrie, among countless other texts.  This first assignment asks the student to become really familiar with this primary source, and to write two to three pages taking it apart and analyzing it rhetorically, and then to conclude this exploration with two to three research questions to move the student forward into the next step.

These research questions are tough, but super revealing.  Often, a student's first instinct is to try to answer some question brought up by the text with empirical evidence (eg. is the house in "The Yellow Wallpaper" really an asylum?  or did the Misfit's childhood make him what he is?  or are there really ghosts in The Turn of the Screw?).  These questions are impossible to answer, of course.  Therefore we spend a great deal of time looking at the kinds of questions suitable for academic work, and these questions can either look deeper into the text, or they can shift the focus to issues outside of the text (What textual evidence exists that the house is an asylum?  To what extent was Henry James interested in the occult?).  Finally, even though we have not yet done the work with secondary sources that will help us find our way to an answer and to a thesis, we have to begin to consider the 'so what?' question (What does James's interest in the occult have to do with anything?  What do we notice that is interesting and new?).

This assignment is one of my favorites because, to me, it shows a burgeoning sophistication with analysis, and a real separation between academic writing and the five paragraph essay.  Students are generally really excited about their primary sources, as well, as the theme is both general and high interest.  I also think it's important to address the difficult of these questions in the classroom, instead of in written assessment, as they are not yet tied to a formal grade.

List 5 terms you don't quite know yet how to define from our final keywords list.

A huge thank you to Leah and Aubrey and whoever else was involved with that crowd-sourced document.

I'm still having some trouble defining the following terms:

1. deconstruction -- I think this is being used differently in composition than it is in literature, maybe.  In the notes, someone has written "Derrida - valuing differences and addressing social constructs."  In literature, I understand deconstructionism to mean analysis to tease out ways in which the text contradicts itself.  So this is slightly different here.
2. expressive discourse - I understand expressive writing and I understand discourse.  Not positive how they fit together.
3. genre theory -- I know that we're focusing on the academic essay as a genre here, and that there are many other genres available to us in composition, but I'm not sure of the theoretical underpinnings.
4. pentad -- I understand this is a visual representation of Burke's dramatism.  But, as I understand it, it seems little more than a relic.
5. Several authors here:  Joseph Harris, Lester Faigley, etc.  

I am simply amazed by the work done in the keyword document and I hope to contribute. 

Assignment using collaboration and / or technology

What is one assignment you will include in your syllabus assignment that uses collaboration and/or technology and/or other things Yancey, Selfe, Breuch, Bruffee, or Shaughnessey have discussed?

So I've been thinking about how to incorporate writing across the curriculum in a highly standardized first year composition course.  I very much value the assignments we do in FYC -- even when they aren't working as well as I think they could -- because I value the type of writing these assignments are designed to foster and refine: academic discourse.  I also think there's a value in this type of writing despite the student's major; writing is required in every discipline in the university.  So how to incorporate writing across the curriculum here, and how to include collaboration and technology?

I think I'd like my students to do a reflective, investigative essay on the type of writing they will be expected to do in an academic version of their field  (I mean that an engineer in the academy will write quite differently than an engineer in industry).  I would start by pairing (or grouping; the groups don't necessarily have to have two members) students with similar majors.  Then I would ask each student to locate a scholarly article that would be similar to one they could see themselves writing.  To do this, I would ask them to first think about the type of job they would most like to have after graduation: a sculptor, a librarian, or a dentist, for example.  I would then ask them to search for an article written by the academic equivalent of the position, and print the article and bring it to class.  I would spend a class period asking students to take apart these articles, to see the moving parts and how they are working, and then I'd ask the student to write a page or two about what they discovered.  Then I'd ask them to meet with their partner(s), and to try to find links, similarities, or differences in structure and / or style.  I would then ask each group to present their findings to the rest of the class, either with Prezi or Powerpoint.

By doing this assignment, the student would gain firsthand knowledge of scholarly work being done in his / her field, content that has not been dumbed down or otherwise adapted for the first year composition student, and a clear awareness of article structure in the field.  While this assignment would not ask the student to write a similar article, I think that this exposure would be extremely valuable.  It reminds me of the metaphor of listening to the conversation before speaking.

Actually, as I'm sketching this assignment out in my head, it occurs to me that it follows a pretty similar structure to the extended analysis we did in 5060.  

Appreciating Peter Elbow

Engage in discussion about something that captured your attention over the past few weeks in the course. Relate it back to specific class discussions, readings, and your grading/teaching when possible.

I've had a difficult time articulating why I think it's important in a FYC classroom to spend some time on grammar, style, and mechanics, but when I read Peter Elbow's "Inviting the Mother Tongue," I suddenly understood why I valued these things when teaching.  Elbow does a fantastic job acknowledging the importance of safety for the mother tongue, and arguing that an instructor should show respect to students' original dialect.  In addition, he does this without downplaying the importance of standard written English, which he argues is the "written language of power and prestige."  This philosophy seems to me to have it both ways: to acknowledge that what we come in to the classroom already knowing is valuable and rich beyond measure, but that we still have work to do with regards to written language.  

I also appreciate his discussion about SWE being nobody's first language, and I think this is a valuable point to make to students: you are not somehow wrong for not intuiting SWE.  Nobody does.  We all have to learn it, including your instructors.  

I think, in addition, this perspective allows an instructor to foster a safe classroom space, one where many dialects are welcomed, but still to do the job of improving a student's academic writing.  His answer as to how to accomplish this job is also valuable, I think: to have students figure out how and where to get help, and to focus on copy-editing as a sort of translation process.  

To me, this has been the single most practical reading for classroom implementation so far, and I've already put into practice some of his suggestions.  

Responding to Leah Helig's Presentation on 9/28

On Monday, Leah Helig presented an overview of the first year writing program at the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire, and since then, I've been thinking about a couple of the ways the university implements its program.

One thing I cannot help but think, and I may be just stating the completely obvious, is that most universities have a writing requirement and many have first year writing programs and writing centers.  It seems a truth universally acknowledged that students need to be able to write, and need instruction in that regard.  Why, then, the incredible differences from program to program?  Even when I've taught a class that is considered to be standardized (1301) in two different institutions, the difference in curriculum, assignments, and general course expectations are profound.  We all agree that writing is an important course for incoming students to take, and that the skills taught in this class are necessary, but nobody can quite agree on what those skills should be.  Even when skills seem to overlap (for example, the rhetorical analysis of "Lost in America" versus a close reading of "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been"), the outcomes have not been, in my experience, the same.

With this in mind, I followed Leah's presentation with interest, as Wisconsin Eau Claire has yet another model of teaching composition.  But their model seems to me to be set up for student success (and I'm not saying this as a contrast; I think most FYW programs I've been part of have been and are to some degree successful).  If you were to ask me (and probably many other instructors) what's missing in FYW as we've experienced it, I imagine that many of us would answer that there's not enough time, and that the classes are too large (interesting to me that these both have to do with time; the problem with a large class size is that the instructor's attentions are overly diffused).  Wisconsin Eau Claire addresses these issues with smaller class sizes and a 5 hour course requirement.  So students are a) getting more of the instructor's attention and b) getting more time in class.

And with what is this extra time being filled?  More reading on the front end, which seems to me to be an absolute luxury as a teacher, and yet totally appropriate to what we are trying to accomplish.  I really like the metaphor of listening to the conversation before you step in to say something, and I think it's absolutely something that adds value to these classes.  If you think of first year composition as a course that allows you to practice entering the conversation in your academic discipline (which is obviously what I think FYC is, in its ideal incarnation), this extra step seems crucial.  At TTU, we get to this step a bit later, in 1302 with the lit review requirement, and I can't yet comment on this aspect here.  (In addition, at TTU, we have a six hour course requirement, but it's spread over two semesters.)

Finally, I'd like to note the empirical evidence Leah presented for this model's success.  I have only superficially addressed this presentation; Leah presented much more specific information.  However, the materials provided on the website indicate that somehow we have a class required of most entering students, that this class provides them with a useful set of skills, and that this class was not so onerous or tedious that students leave never wanting to set foot in an English classroom again.  

What is andragogy, and how might the approach help in teaching FYC?

Andragogy involves teaching to adult learners, and adapting andragogical practices for first year composition classrooms may be useful for more than just nontraditional students.  Adult learners are often returning to the classroom after years of being in the workplace and out of an educational setting, and so may have different strengths and needs.

Often, adult learners are not returning to the classroom just because it is the next thing to do.  They've taken a different path, and their motives for returning are different.  Many are mid-career and seeking education to further that career; others are hoping for credentials to change careers.  Still others are returning because they know exactly what field they'd like to pursue; the difference between an eighteen-year old English major and a thirty-year old English major might be a degree of self-awareness and motivation acquired over the extra decade of life.

Because of this background, adult learners may have a different motivation, more intrinsic but also perhaps less patient.  So how does a teacher address this different motivation, without losing traditional students?

One key way to address this different motivation is by making assignments relevant.  Adult learners want to know why it's important to know something, and how a skill might help them in their careers.  But this curiosity is not limited to adult learners; at least as common a question from traditional students as "Will this be on the test?" is the question "But when am I ever going to use this?"

For first year composition, this means that the instructor must thoroughly understand the course design and the individual assignments.  Often in introductory composition courses, these are scaffolded assignments created for practice, and the question of audience is complicated.  It may be best practice in this case to acknowledge that this practice is what these courses are designed to do, and it may be helpful to imagine where in a career the skill might be useful.  Though  many students dread first year composition courses, these courses are nothing if not practical and skill-based.

Also, in class, we have talked about the role of writing as part of becoming a citizen, and we've discussed the use of problem-based learning, using writing as an attempt to solve problems in the students' communities.  While this sort of writing may not currently have a solid place in first year composition, it strikes me as an extremely important skill with which to equip students, and also inherently practical, in a way that writing a rhetorical analysis draft might not be.

Teaching philosophy, part II

An evolution of my teaching philosophy (many thanks to MaryAnn Widerburg, whose teaching philosophy structure helped in the re-shaping herein):

In the book Why Art Cannot Be Taught, author James Elkins attempts to explain “the curious endeavor to teach the unteachable.”  He organizes the book by several arguments ("Art can be taught, but nobody knows quite how," "Art can be taught, but it seems as if it can't be since so few students become outstanding artists," and "Art cannot be taught, but it can be fostered or helped along," among them) but the ultimate impression is that the pedagogy of art is a mystery.  The book specifically applies to college level instruction of visual arts, but many of these concerns translate quite readily to the teaching of composition and creative writing.  A writing class is necessarily very different from a differential calculus class, for example, or from a language class.  It is a brief exposure to the process.  For some students, a writing class will be an introduction to the undertaking of a much longer study.  For others, it will represent a stage in their already started journey toward becoming a writer.  For still others, and especially in the case of creative writing, it will represent a mode of expression that may one day be discarded.

My values and goals as a teacher very much reflect the idea that learning an art is a process, and that I am in the midst of the same discovery process as are my students.  I value:

1.       Writing and reading as a primary means of communication within academic, personal, and professional spheres.

2.       Writing and reading as a way to connect, both to the internal (self) and to the external (the outside world).

3.       Clear expectations for individual writing courses, with instruction specialized according to audience, purpose, and student needs. 

Always, I focus on writing as both process and product, and know that separating one from another is impossible.  Additionally, as a creative writer and a teacher of first year composition, it is important for me to acknowledge the value of both modes of writing and the differences therein.

Writing and reading as a primary means of communication within academic, personal, and professional spheres.  Writing and reading remain primary methods of dissemination for the bulk of academic work, including journal articles, theses and dissertations, and press releases.  Students often believe that writing and reading are skills mainly used in the humanities, but though much of STEM research may be done in a lab or other setting, it is the publication of this work that makes it available to a larger community of scientists, and thus continues the conversation of knowledge.  In the personal sphere, though letter writing has fallen out of favor, we still write as a means of communication (emails, texts, social media posts, and yes, letters), and we read as a way to receive this communication.  In the professional world, being able to write continues to remain crucial for workers, and the opportunities for writing have only expanded (consider here the fields of business writing, technical writing, professional writing). 

Writing and reading as a way to connect, both to the internal (self) and to the external (the outside world).    As a creative writer and a teacher of creative writing, I value writing and reading both as a means of expression and as an aesthetic entity.  Writing and reading allow access to our most private selves, and much of the curriculum of creative nonfiction operates on the belief that we don’t truly know what we believe until we try to write these beliefs.  I believe in the value of expressionist writing as a source of self-discovery, as a means to facilitate healing in the case of trauma, and as a way to connect more fully to our human experience.  When this writing is shared, and when we share in the writing of others through the act of reading, we often connect in profoundly human ways, and often, we connect to people we have never or will never meet in person. 

Clear expectations for individual writing courses, with instruction specialized according to audience, purpose, and student needs.   I also believe in clear expectations for coursework, as the reason for writing figures greatly into the process of producing a piece of writing.  Readers have different expectations for different types of writing, and learning to recognize these different expectations is crucial to becoming a successful writer.  For example, a research paper is different from a business email, and so would have a different process and a different format.  In the same way, a creative essay is different from a poem, which is different from a rhetorical analysis.  I believe that clear expectations are crucial to student success at the assignment level, at the course level, and at the level of the overall degree plan.  If, as teachers, we understand exactly the kind of writing we want students to be able to produce after finishing the course, we can better construct this course in order to scaffold these skills.  Here, too, we are able to accommodate many different forms of and purposes for writing:  if our goal for freshman composition is preparing students  to participate in the academic conversation, we prepare them for these sorts of writing (literature reviews, researched papers, even lab reports).  If our goal for a fiction workshop is to understand the facets and nuance of story, we deconstruct story and study these elements, parts in the service of a whole. 

I do feel that the focus on writing often neglects the act and skill of reading, and I hope to encourage within my students a love for the written word, a curiosity about their lives and their surroundings, and a respect for the process itself.   Research has shown that students who identify as readers are more empathetic, and have a larger referential knowledge base.  Reading is certainly a way to experience many lives that do not belong to us, and is thus enriching beyond measure.   I believe very strongly that readers become writers, in much the same way that people who like to eat learn how to cook.  And part of the process of learning to write lies in the process of learning to read, and in both a construction and a deconstruction of the craft.  But always craft is primary, and growth the goal.

Teaching philosophy

A draft of my teaching philosophy, wherein I try to combine composition and creative writing:

In the book Why Art Cannot Be Taught, author James Elkins attempts to explain “the curious endeavor to teach the unteachable.”  He organizes the book by several arguments ("Art can be taught, but nobody knows quite how," "Art can be taught, but it seems as if it can't be since so few students become outstanding artists," and "Art cannot be taught, but it can be fostered or helped along," among them) but the ultimate impression is that the pedagogy of art is a mystery.  The book specifically applies to college level instruction of visual arts, but many of these concerns translate quite readily to the teaching of composition and creative writing.  A writing class is necessarily very different from a differential calculus class, for example, or from a language class.  It is a brief exposure to the process.  For some students, a writing class will be an introduction to the undertaking of a much longer study.  For others, it will represent a stage in their already started journey toward becoming a writer.  For still others, it will represent a mode of expression that may one day be discarded.

My values and goals as a teacher very much reflect the idea that learning an art is a process, and that I am in the midst of the same discovery process as are my students.  I value

1.       Writing and reading as a primary means of communication within both academic and professional worlds.

2.       Writing and reading as a way to connect, both to the internal (self) and to the external (the outside world).

3.       Clear expectations for individual writing courses, with instruction specialized according to audience, purpose, and student needs. 

Always, I focus on writing as both process and product, and know that separating one from another is impossible.

I hope to encourage within my students a love for the written word, a curiosity about their lives and their surroundings, and a respect for the process itself.  I believe very strongly that readers become writers, in much the same way that people who like to eat learn how to cook.  And part of the process of learning to write lies in the process of learning to read, and in both a construction and a deconstruction of the craft.  But always craft is primary, and growth the goal.  

Based on your teaching philosophy (which may change over time), what are types of assignments which you would include in a FYC syllabus?

Quite naturally, this week's readings have me thinking about the type of writing assigned in first year writing programs, and how to best serve students with these assignments.  It is impossible to think of this, however, divorced from the context of what exactly first year composition is supposed to accomplish.

It seems to me that first year composition at a research university is designed to allow students to enter into the academic conversation.  This is not, of course, the only type of writing that students might ever do.  But the more I think about it, the more I think that other forms of writing (business writing, for example, or creative writing or technical writing) might be better served in more specific courses.  And it's not that an engineer will never need to know how to write a resume or that a marketing major might not ever have to compose a lab report, but I do feel that by trying to address all possible types of writing in an introductory class, we lose some of the class's utility.

With that in mind, I think of the first year writing program at Ohio State (which, by the way, is one semester long).  In first year composition, we led students through one paper over the course of the entire semester.  We started with examining primary sources, and there was a small paper at this point discussing the interesting aspects of our primary sources.  We didn't have quite the focus on rhetorical analysis as we do here, but there is plenty of room at this point for this very useful skill.  We concluded this portion of the semester with a research question, and because of the preliminary work, this question is borne of familiarity and curiosity.

Next, we focused on answering this question, and we spent time in research.  This included trips to the library, visits by librarians, a thorough introduction to our electronic resources, and then we set to the work of integrating this research.  We used MLA but we showed students where to find help with other styles, acknowledging that we were preparing them for a larger role in their own disciplines.  

Finally, we finished the papers, spending at least a couple of weeks drafting complex thesis statements.  We worked on intros and conclusions, and formatted our Works Cited page.  After the paper was finished, we turned our attention to editing and revision.  The students left first year writing with a clear sense of what to do in each stage of the writing process when writing a researched paper.  Again, we're excluding many other types of writing here, although many classes had a blog where students practiced writing for a different audience.

It seems to me that there's a great deal of value in the slow and steady building of a paper over time, and that this process allows students to practice each stage of the process thoroughly.  For my own assignments, I would keep much of this framework, as I think it debunks some of the impression that writing is a kind of magic, that you're either good at it or not.  By emphasizing the conversation, you increase intrinsic motivation and you help students see writing as a skill that can be learned and practiced.

I also would adopt much of the rhetorical analysis work we're doing in 1301 now, as I think it is extremely valuable, especially in the refinement of critical thinking that we're looking for as teachers of writing.  I would use this rhetorical analysis as the content for the paper, which is similar to what's happening now in 1301.  

And finally, I would encourage students to look for the kind of writing that they will be asked to do in their fields, by attending undergraduate research conferences or poster sessions, or by seeking theses or dissertations in the library.  In class, I love to use the image of college as an apprenticeship, that one of the goals is for students to learn how to communicate and act in their field.  

What is the most difficult thing to teach in the teaching of writing?

 What is the most difficult thing to teach in the teaching of writing, and how do you go about teaching that? 

This week's readings have certainly emphasized that writing is a multi-faceted thing (skill?  subject?) and as such, a complex thing to go about teaching.  When I consider difficulties students have in writing, and what I'd like them to take from a composition course, my first instinct is to want to instill in them an ease with creating writing.  Of course, no such thing exists, even for experienced writers, and this goal is such a flimsy and unspecific one that it's of virtually no use to me.

What is of use, however, is tracing this teaching instinct back to a source, to a reason for existing, and then questioning the source.  Writing, as acknowledged previously, is such a multi-pronged activity that a difficulty with any one piece of this activity results in a difficulty with the whole process.  Reading through the pre-semester diagnostic assignments this weekend has revealed to me that many of my students do not feel comfortable with standard English conventions, and because of this discomfort, the whole process of writing is fraught with worry about these conventions.  How is it possible to move on to the discussion of composition without first addressing the question of standards?  Even when we tell students that it's okay to make mistakes, we still mark up their assignment and let them know how their writing has fallen short.  

The Reeves article, "Minimizing Writing Apprehension in the Learner-Centered Classroom," seems to have a pointed and practical answer to this question.  On page 40, in the section sub-headed "Contextualize and Customize," she mentions that grammar shouldn't be taught in isolation, and then gives specific instructions for addressing persistent grammar issues, using Nancie Atwell's mini-lessons in grammar and then having students proofread essays in small groups.  I have not seen Atwell's mini-lessons, but I'd like to.  I do start composition classes with grammar rules, one per day, as a sponge activity to begin the class, and as a class, we correct sentences.  We only address one grammar issue per class period (for example, pronoun-antecedent agreement) because otherwise I'd lose them.  But it seems to me that focusing a little on the standards of written English seems to remove some of the anxiety for student writers, and also helps them to understand feedback on their work.  

All of this is not to say that I think grammar instruction should be the heart of composition instruction, only that it is a source of anxiety for students, and that easing this anxiety is one of my primary goals as a composition instructor.  As Flower and Hayes note in "A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing," translating (their term for "the process of putting ideas into visible language") "requires the writer to juggle all the special demands of written English, which Ellen Nold has described as lying on a spectrum from generic and formal demands through syntactic and lexical ones down to the motor tasks of forming letters."  The sum of these requirements can easily overwhelm, as they note:  "If the writer must devote conscious attention to demands such as spelling and grammar, the task of translating can interfere with the more global process of planning what one wants to say."  When we introduce explicit grammar instruction in a college classroom, we are not teaching grammar from scratch, but solidifying rules with which the student is probably already familiar, and my hope is that by acknowledging the conventions of language and spending a little bit of time with them, that we are easing the discomfort of the writer.

An aside here, and one about the teaching of writing in the elementary grades: as my children learn to write, I have followed their curricula, and I have seen two opposing schools of thought in their teaching.  One is the "Write, write, write, revise, revise, revise" school of thought, characterized by writing assignments being assigned early and often in the hopes of achieving exactly the kind of comfort with writing that I'm describing.  In its worst iterations, this method has kindergartners (who have often not yet learned to form letters) asked to write three sentences about George Washington for Presidents' Day.  This method embraces invented spelling and intense revision.  The other school of thought that I have seen is one that acknowledges that the development of writing is a step behind the development of reading, and has students spend time in fine motor skill development before attempting to craft written texts.  At its extreme form, this method of teaching writing progresses from letter formation, to copy work, to dictation, all in the attempt to separate the physical process of forming letters from the mental process of forming sentences, paragraphs, and texts.  In my entirely anecdotal experience, the second method seems to produce a more comfortable writer, precisely because we did not tell the writer that those rules don't matter.  And it's this comfort that I am after as a teacher.

Finally, after all of this discussion, I have to acknowledge that we never really reach comfort, and that writing, even for the most experienced writer, is a painstaking process even on the best of days.  My hope is that, by introducing but not focusing on the conventions of written English, that we at least make students more comfortable with this one aspect of writing, in order to shift our focus more fully to composition as a way to join the larger conversation.  

What is rhetoric?

what is rhetoric? what is the history and theory of rhetoric? What do you want to do with the content from this course?


I have always understood rhetoric to be the art of persuasion, and this seems to me to be a definition that encompasses nearly every speech or piece of writing.  Rhetoric is delivering a message to an audience, and part of this definition includes why and how the message is being delivered.  We tend to think of rhetoric as a formal exercise, or even as a pejorative term that dismisses the message or messenger as being manipulative, but the definition is much broader than that.  When we introduce rhetoric to students, we teach them how to build an argument, and how to clarify a message, and maybe this exercise of teaching better helps us to understand just what we mean when we use the term.

When I think of the history of rhetoric, I think of its classical origins, and its formal explanation by Aristotle, and it's been my experience that most students have a vague understanding of this history.  Certainly, many of them are familiar with the terms ethos, pathos, and logos, and those who are not pick them up with ease.  There is something fundamental and instinctive about the art of persuasion, and we take to its parts well, and in particular, we grasp pathos and logos almost without second thought.

Our readings this week on the history of rhetoric have been fascinating, however.  I had no idea of the relatively young age of the English department, and to discover that Oxford and Cambridge were two of the last universities in the English-speaking world to hire an English professor shocks me.  I do think of 19th century historical fiction that I read when I was much younger (books like the Little House series and the Anne of Green Gables series), and I remember the role of oration in a 19th century education, even in remote areas, at least insofar as these tales can be trusted to represent a true snapshot of society.  (Also, as a parent with children of school age, I've been interested in elementary curricula lately, and have found books like the McGuffey Readers and other primers that were reportedly used by many students who may or may not have had access to formal education.  These readers reveal a pretty rigorous expectation of basic elementary reading and writing, but I'm not sure how widespread their use was.)  All of this is to say that reading, writing, and the study of literature seem quite naturally to me to go together, and I'm surprised that this was not always seen to be the case.  Parker presents some convincing arguments that I think this only because this is the way I have always known it.

One final note on the history of rhetoric and where exactly it belongs in the academy, and that's that one of the reasons rhetoric seems so clearly linked to composition to me is that the study of each one is a refinement of thinking and then this refinement of thinking is therefore translated to a refinement of expression.  In creative writing workshops, I've often heard it said that a story or an essay does not have a writing problem, but a thinking problem.  With this said, I can understand how composition might easily fit under another academic banner -- one such as logic, perhaps -- but that means that as an English teacher, I have to bring that logic to my field.

When I think of what I want to do with this course, I keep this point in mind.  I've heard we learn language mostly through osmosis, through absorbing what we read and write, and I wholeheartedly agree with this statement.  We don't, however, learn this art of persuasion, and many of our best readers and writers have not been taught a formal rhetorical logic but have a great grasp of conventions.  (I remember when I went to a pre-quarter training to teach a similar course at OSU and the director asked how many people were teaching the course who had themselves never taken it because they'd tested out; nearly every hand went up.  We knew how to write and were managing to write researched papers, but we were just fumbling towards them without this crucial training.  It seems that most people don't inherently know how to write a researched persuasive paper.)  Other writers don't have the same reading background, and as teachers, we need to help them bridge this gap and teach the conventions of writing.  When I think about what I want to take from this course, it's an understanding of how to further these two distinct goals as a teacher.  That is, I'd like to be able to help my students become better writers, but also better thinkers.