The idea behind this was to create a sort of ethos family tree that would represent the devices related to ethos. It is in response to the semester-long troubled understanding of how devices go into making a rhetorical appeal that I encounter with many students. Dr. Rice recommended making the explanation more concise and font size larger, as well as representing the Ethos bubble at the top of the tree with a different shape to represent that it is the appeal instead of one of the devices. I am working on these changes, but am having trouble replicating the color and transparency of the graphic, even though I am using the same settings. Any additional suggestion would be greatly appreciated!

Culture and Process in the Classroom

This is a post that has more questions than answers- questions raised from our Thursday discussion with the Chinese educators. What does the structure of our freshman writing curriculum communicate about our cultural values? The Chinese writing classroom centers around learning to write and communicate well through a contextual understanding of the culture whose language they write in. I think that this principle is missing in many ways from our freshman classes. We want them to write professionally without properly initiating them into the world of professional communication. We deduct points for cliche phrases and informal writing by simply saying that its not professional. This may not get them any closer to understanding what exactly professional language is and why they need to develop this type of writing as a separate language set. Would it be helpful to explain to them the culture of professional writing? We try to teach them the large concept of audience, but when we are their audience, how do we make this a concept that extends outside of the classroom and into the larger world of writing they will encounter?  

Our curriculum also values technology. Online interface replaces some of the face time with the teacher in the classroom. I was interested in the fact that the Chinese composition classes meet four days of the week. Which brings me to another question- what does our format communicate about writing as a process? Several of our assignments represent writing as process, but does the classroom format undermine this value? It seems that more frequent meetings communicate learning as a community process that involves the teacher and the students cooperatively. In terms of developing a post-process way of looking at composition, it seems that more time in the classroom would foster the opportunity to approach the process of writing from multiple directions. In our program, the idea of process becomes an individual student burden. Ultimately the responsibility falls on the student, but does the online mechanization of process favor some students over others? Could the same written product be constructed through other approaches? Ultimately no matter how much we try to include process and post-process writing approaches, we are looking for a specific product. I think we need to more carefully define what this product is for students and help them to understand the academic culture that requires this specific product.    

Writing Commentary as Conversation

This week I was most interested in Haswell’s idea that responding to student writing can be a conversation. In the Raiderwriter system, my students tend to separate grading from instruction and think because I don’t grade all of their papers I can’t help them interpret commentary on their writing. Despite encouraging my students to visit me in office hours if they need further explanation, they do not see grading as a potential conversation with me. However, with more effort on my part, this does not have to be the case. To make grading more of a conversation in my classroom next semester I plan to use class discussion and the class blog as spaces to continue the conversation about grading. By reviewing student work throughout the semester to find common problems specific to the class, I could create a focused discussion on writing improvement. This extended conversation would start in the classroom with review and continue through the blog. On the blog site I could post resources not only for common grammatical problems, but issues of genre, discourse, and critical thinking that are not represented in the 20 most common list.  Students can refer back to the blog resources as they write and revise their work on a central site specific to their class. Furthering the conversation, I could assign groups to present to the class on some of the common issues in order to encourage students to take ownership of resources that will help them improve their writing.

It follows Haswell’s idea of economy by creating a way to reproduce the value of individual conferencing without the extended time it would take to meet with students individually. Though many of the same issues would probably crop up every semester, the idea of the continuous conversation about writing problems developed over the semester and in direct response to students’ actual work may add investment for students to understand writing commentary. This would develop writing as a process and community discourse. This method offers a shift from dictating a fixed value on a returned document to a multi-directional conversation about improvement and encourages students to see the value of a returned assignment as not just a grade, but as a roadmap for better writing. 

The $$Value of Collaboration

Learning about collaboration and reading the Wall Street Journal article sent through the English list serve, “Putting a Price on Professors,” in the same week has got me thinking about the value of collaborative learning. The monetary value. If as teachers we are asked to justify our pedagogy by converting learning objectives into monetary value, where does that leave collaboration?  Much of the composition theory we have read encourages us to think about the value of teaching methods that can’t easily be quantified in the traditional grading system- how much harder will it be to quantify these concepts in dollars?

Winsor’s article showed that writing that doesn’t usually count should, including the collaborative use of note taking for the engineering students. The way their voices and ideas blended together in note taking was perfectly suited to their goal, a goal that was meant to simulate a professional engineering task- one they would likely encounter in their careers. This method worked because they weren’t worried about who ideas belonged to- the group owned the ideas. Would teaching common goals that promote collaboration over individual ownership of knowledge be a more realistic practice?

But in a higher educational system that is concerned with spreadsheets and monetary evaluations, the personal student benefit through group discourse may lose value. When teachers have to look at themselves in terms of break-even analyses, what advantage does collaboration have? I guess my larger question is can creative composition teaching survive in disparity to capitalist institutional values? Clearly intellectual property is important, especially for members of the academic field. I am not suggesting a collaborative free-for-all of evolving knowledge is the answer. But how do we as teachers, in an academic and national culture that measures success in the quantification of individual property and achievement, convince students authentically that anyone should share their ideas for free? Cynical, I know- but we get at least one cynical post a semester, right?

Are There Any Good Robots?

Using the moo was a somewhat uncomfortable experience for me. But the kind of uncomfortable that could be beneficial with more use. As Scott suggests in his blog, over the course of a semester I think I could learn to pick up the on the fast paced interchanges. But for now I am self-consciousness about seeing my words in print on a screen- I want to be able to read over what I write and feel it is "ready" before I project it into any space. By the time what I wanted to say found its way into acceptable wording, the conversation topic had moved on. I have never involved myself much in chat experiences, even the social kind. My limited experiences chatting with friends through facebook have been odd, mostly because they seem to have alternate chat personalities. Within the chat space, they relied on a set of different communication conventions. The short space and fast-paced bursts directed how they wrote, creating a range of communication that began to sound a lot like the same voice. I felt like I lost them in the medium. However, in the moo many people in the class clearly expressed their personalities through chat and for others it brought out different, but not generic, personalities than what they display in the classroom.

With this in mind, I am interested in the idea that finding a way to factor in the underlife of students will result in a more authentic forum for expression. It seems that the underlives of students have their own rules and structures. Like chatting on facebook. Student voices may not be corralled into academic formulations as in Engfish, but is there any functioning space that does not create rules and roles? Perhaps, then, creating opportunities for students to interact with an underlife is not so much a way of getting at individual expression as it is revealing multiple discourses at work. It seems that the most effective students will be the ones that can recognize different worlds of discourse and successfully navigate between them. I think that simply having the awareness that multiple communities of discourse function in legitimate ways opens up the field to question authority positions, while at the same time understanding that we all must operate in authority systems in different contexts.  

Students and Subject Positions

Over the fall break, I began research on my extended analysis, interviewing a composition instructor that teaches courses at both New Mexico State University main campus and Dona Ana Community College. Reflecting on this interview and the difficulty my own students have with thinking of themselves as writers, I have been thinking about the relationship of classroom authority, subject positions, and interest. This led me to Brodkey’s “On the Subjects of Class and Gender in ‘The Literacy Letters’, ” which describes a postmodern view on discourse, subjects, and those who authorize texts.

The instructor I interviewed noted that there was a marked difference in the student responses to grading and peer revisions between the community college (CC) students and the main campus students. He indicated that the CC students were much more open to talking about their own work, commenting on other's work in class, and accepting peer review comments. This seemed to have to do with the subject positions of the students. Many of the CC students were pursuing education in a non-traditional avenue. Some were pursuing terminal degrees at the CC, some hoping to branch over to the main campus, and some returning students or later life students. Many varied subject positions were represented in the class.

Brodkey explains “each institutionalized discourse privileges some people and not others by generating uneven and unequal subject positions as various stereotypes and agents... Knowledge of multiple subject positions makes possible both the practical and the theoretical critiques that interrupt the assumption of unchanging, irreversible, and asymmetrical social and political relations between the privileged and unprivileged subject represented in a particular discourse” (633). In this particular situation, the instructor was applying some non-traditional composition activities and the non-traditional students found this easier to adapt to. Occupying the non-dominant subject position, the CC students seemed more open to different ways of learning to compose writing. When unfamiliar approaches were being applied, the traditional main campus students were uncomfortable with giving authority to other students to comment on their work. They were used to a structure where the teacher was the only authority that they had to appeal to. Whether they realize it or not, students are aware of how to participate in structures of normative authoritative discourse. When given the authority to evaluate peers and be evaluated, this is uncomfortable and presents a new value system.

The idea of authority figures granting validity to specific texts is important for classroom instructors and the graders in our system. This is manifested both through assigned texts that credibility is attached to and the evaluations given to students on their writing. This system seems to relate to subject position in what students think about themselves as writers- as though grades or instructor comments effect their actual subject position. They say, “I’m bad at English”, or “I’m a bad writer”, instead of “I didn’t write this very well” or “I didn’t do well on this assignment, but I can improve.” This displays a viewpoint of an internal status of being a writer vs. developing writing skills. I am interested to see if as we get into peer critiques and revisions, if the students will start to think about this differently. I also wonder what I can do along the way to help them think differently about their role as writers outside of the student-teacher authority scheme.

 Brodkey, Linda “On the Subjects of Class and Gender in ‘The Literacy Letters’.” The Norton Book of Composition Studies. New York: Norton, 2009. 631-646.

Collaborative Student Work and Grammar

A few times in my 1301 classes this semester, I have organized part of the lesson around looking at samples of the skill we were working on- usually in peers’ work from previous semesters made available to us to display anonymously. When my students are looking at another students work, they suddenly become grammar experts. Students have been both astute in picking out conceptual problems as well as grammar issues when given the role of conducting the critique. Embedded in their critiquing toolbox is an often-correct sense of grammar usage. I ask my students to consider themselves in the role of editor of their own paper, to apply this type of evaluation to their own work. But perhaps they haven’t sat in this position often enough to think of themselves as able to critique their own work, and some will not leave enough time to perform such edits. With more opportunities to critique and be critiqued, would students learn to develop a more critical eye to their own work regarding grammar? Why does the process they are used to writing within make applying these skills so difficult?

Perhaps their critiquing of others is more useful because of the distance they have from the other students’ work and their ability to view a sample text as a whole, locating the problems from a sense of grammar, structure, and content. This critical reading stance represents a distance they don’t give their own work. Rushing to meet a deadline, their papers often start out sounder in focus and often wavers at the end, both in ideas and form. For the most part, they don’t seem to separate in their writing process the production of the draft and editing. They think they are performing both roles at once. Perhaps with enough experience in both critiquing and being critiqued, they might learn to take on that role when approaching their own work. If they could bring the same editorial skills to their own work, to view what is actually on the paper instead of what they intended, they could start to produce better work within the framework of a writing process. 

Forming a Philosophy

During my master’s program, I was as an editor with an economic development branch of New Mexico State University, the Arrowhead Center. The Arrowhead Center worked with local small businesses and employed graduate students to conduct a number of studies for clients, including business plans, feasibility studies, and marketing plans. In the process of working with clients, the students would have to engage in a large number of email correspondence, write a proposal, create timeline documents, write weekly progress reports, write the report, and create a formal presentation of their findings. These students represented a cross-section of disciplines, including business, accounting, finance, education, English, communications, and engineering grad students. In addition, they were required to work with middle and high school teams in a business plan competition across the state, responding via online interface to student questions as these secondary students developed their own writing and presentation skills in the business area. They were tasked with a high level of writing at a professional level, and yet for many of them, their education had hardly developed these skills.

I worked with many intelligent students well equipped in their specializations that could not adequately communicate their knowledge to clients without vast revisions on a basic composition level. And they did not always consider the writing they did other than reports to be serious writing, especially email correspondences. The students outside of English, communication, and education did not think that composition would be an important skill for the types of jobs they would be taking and they saw composition only in terms of the more formal writing, reports but not emails, presentations, timelines, or written responses to competition students. Their programs did not require them to take anything beyond freshman composition for one semester and a possibly one additional English course. Far removed as graduate students from their sophomore English classes, it was clear that these skills were actually required of them when they attained these highly coveted graduate positions obtaining 'real-world' job experience. They did not have the skill set for the composition of their reports or the variety of texts that they would be creating and the frequency that they would be asked to write.

This experience frames something I want to develop in my teaching philosophy. I believe that there has to be way to teach composition that somehow both transcends and connects to momentary interest and specific field. Composition is a social tool that is always in use, even outside of writing, and to develop composition skills through the writing process can create an awareness of the various ‘texts’ composed in different contexts. The question remains of how to frame composition in a way that will be useful to most students under any one subject matter description so they don't immediately dismiss is as irrelevant. Do you lose some students just by having the categorization of composition within the English department? Reflecting on the variety of writing skills asked of the Arrowhead students to a range of audiences leads me towards developing assignments for my syllabus project that will look at writing as a diversified skill set that is formulated not exclusively by the five paragraph essay, but by reception contexts as well. 

Grading and Technology

The outside resources sent to us by Dr. Rice- the article on using text expansion software and blog about digital media and oratory- have shaped the direction of this week’s blog. I am interested in the question of how technology in teaching might change the way students receive grades and comments on their own texts, and the way educators respond to student texts as graders. As I have grade assignments, I wonder how the students will receive my comments. I think about whether or not they will click on those links that will transfer them to Bedford to explain those common problems, or if the layers of this process will distance them from examining their own error. This made think about how they interact with their documents as a whole since they are only used to receiving feedback only on handwritten or word-processed printed out documents. Does the Raiderwriter interface distance them at all from their own writing when they look at their assignment? In the same way that many CI’s have commented on feeling distanced from their students in the grading process, do students become distances from their own work working with it in a strictly digital capacity? I am not suggesting that the Raiderwriter software is ineffective or that this transition to dealing with their texts as digital media isn’t a necessary one, but that these possible impacts should be considered.

On the teacher aspect of technologically aided grading- I was thinking about the “Using Text-Expansion Software to Respond to Student Writing” article. This writer’s creation of quick links for grammatical issues so that he can take a longer time on content implies a preference of content over form. His desire to spend more time on this aspect of student papers suggests that grading grammar is an inconvenient stage that must be gotten through in order to get to the more substantial portion of a grader’s responsibilities- content and delivery. I do not disagree with this approach or favoring of content- I lean the same way myself. What I am interested in is why if many composition educators (as indicated in the many respondents to the post which reflected similar grading strategies) are distancing themselves from highly formulaic approaches to writing in terms of time spent on grading components, how is this reflected in their teaching? How much time do they spend on grammar in the classroom? How do they weight grammar in the grade as a whole? A grader’s relationship with technology also reveals specific value systems for composition pedagogy. A system like RaiderWriter is not only a practical tool for grading such a large number of papers, but within its very structure and interface reveals composition preferences.  There’s no real conclusion here, just awareness that the tools we use to grade reflect composition priorities and should be evaluated as well as teaching and composition tools.   

Collaborations?

The historical overview of invention that Crowley described made me wonder how the actual students entering into composition programs affect the shift in theoretical paradigms within composition and rhetoric studies. Within composition programs there are specific methodologies and aims in place, but also the reality of the preparation level the incoming students may or may not have to meet those specific goals. So how are the needs of incoming comp students aligned with the aims of a program? How do specific theories get translated into practice in what may be a less than an ideal situation? If the level of freshman coming in is sub-par and this is impacting the way college teachers must teach their students, is there something that post-secondary institutions could do to provide some form aid of to secondary schools? Are there resources that could be shared between secondary and post secondary education?

Collaborations could be initiated first on a local level where universities invest in programs to create a sense of continuity in composition and represent a logical relation between learning imperatives at the two levels. It could be counted towards faculty service requirements and would be a proactive step towards addressing the issue of freshman preparedness (which seems to greatly affect our freshman composition program). I understand that the kinds of policy enacted around secondary public education may in many ways hinder working relationships between the two. It would be difficult for teachers to introduce new teaching methods when they have specific standards they are supposed to meet and when doing well on standardized testing provides the greatest currency to school funding and job security. However, I am suspending this reality for the moment to pursue this idea.   

A conversation I had with a friend about composition led me to think of one potential area for collaboration. I asked this person if she had taken freshman comp. She received AP credit and did not, but went on to talk about her high school experiences in English, where she entered the advanced track as a freshman. In this track, they started with a very rigid idea of writing structure and rules as a basis, but over the years were taught to incorporate more freedom within their writing. She said this specific progression of rigidity to freedom over a long period of time created a basic reference for composition, but that eventually resulted in a more expansive mode of expression. Without the time frame, she doubted that it would have produced the same result.

If incoming freshman have not had this kind of preparation, what can be done about it? If the extremely structural and rule oriented approach creates results, but only over an extended time period, what can we hope for our freshman to take out of the classroom with them at the end of two semesters? If we can’t play catch up to four years of missing or inconsistent composition studies, is there another way to approach composition?

Many of my students have communicated a feeling of frustration with the amount of technology that they must use for class. Orienting them to technological modes as sites of academic and professional writing earlier than college would be beneficial. Because their interaction with communication on the internet is usually entirely social before college, learning the professional uses of online communication would not only better prepare them for the kinds of things that they will have to do in college, but expand their thinking about communication forums and show that the communication world is not sectioned into clear neat boundaries. A blog where they would begin to grasp the idea of posting academic ideas into a public forum would be a helpful start, and would also encourage the idea of learning as a socially mediated act. Instead of receiving information from teachers in familiar lecture style, they could share information and ideas with each other and begin to take ownership of their own ideas. With no outside software necessary to purchase, a blog could be a highly accessible option. Students would increase their sense of audience awareness, be able to analyze a wider range of communication mediums, and learn to incorporate feedback from peers.

This is where post-secondary collaboration could come into play. Writing programs could set up training sessions, even once a semester, to share experiences and ideas, and in the case of blogs help teachers select and get oriented to blog usage. This collaboration could benefit the post-secondary institution by producing more students ready to engage in composition at the college level. Additionally, allowing students to see individuals from universities willing to put time into their education could potentially create interest in higher education that may not have been there before for some students.  

Poe and the Creative Freshman

In addition to this week’s readings, I looked up Poe’s “Philosophy of Composition”. Having spent a lot of time with Poe in my undergraduate, but not having read this essay, I thought it was about time. How Poe relates to this all will be attended to later on in the post. But first on the readings for this week- the content describing composition programs in both the Bereton and Kitzhaber pieces brought up questions (whose answers are yet shifting) about what skills college freshman are expected to enter college with, and what skills will are commonly lacking. Another aspect of the same question is what incoming students assume composition is and how they will use it in comparison to what the university goals are for composition use among students. It was clear from both readings and our class discussions that historically and currently the answers to these questions are different in select time periods and institutions.

Having the framework of these pieces while grading the first 1301 assignment, I found it interesting that in several of the student’s responses, students identified their strengths as writers to lie in their ability to be creative. Although they recognized that they lacked technical skills, their faith in themselves as good writers remained firm because of this creative value.

Which brings me to the relevancy of the Poe essay- Poe, when describing in detail his composition of “The Raven” spends the greater part of the essay explaining the structural process necessary to convey his intention. Poe points out that many authors would have the general public believe that “they compose by a species of fine-frenzy- an ecstatic intuition,” but that this is a convenient illusion to hide the real labor of composition. Although Poe’s analysis is of his own poetic work, the process he engages in has a much wider reaching application. So I will attempt to briefly generalize this process:

1.   Establish your overall intention/goal for the work.

2.   Establish the effect you want to produce.

3.   Choose a form to best accomplish your intention and effect.

4.    Evaluate the choices you have within this form thinking of audience reception, such as length, style, and tone.

5.    Once you have established the above criteria, you can begin to select content and construct the piece.

This highly structured way of approaching the composition of a text, especially a creative one, might seem too rigid to allow for creativity. Poe, however, suggests the opposite- that this very intentional structure is the only way to compose a truly original creative work. It is this lesson that reminded me of the freshman responses to their own writing- the ingrained idea that form will naturally follow ideas, when it may be much more useful to think of ideas following form, or to consider that even our best ideas remain in the realm of the abstract without the appropriate form to communicate them. I can see where the overemphasis on magical composition abilities of the creative mind comes from- an issue in Poe's time period, it persists as an ideal today (as Boice describes). Hopefully during the semester, I can move my students away from this type of thinking- and consider it for myself when I am tempted to use that old procrastination tactic that justifies itself by saying the greatest pressure produces the best work. 

Poe, E.A. "The Philosophy of Composition". http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/poe/composition.html 

Legitimizing Processes in Composition

I was interested in the way the readings this week described the foundational process of English not only as a course of study worthy of its own department in Universities, but also as a legitimate language to communicate “high” ideas within. This historical look at the evolution of English study was useful in framing where composition is currently headed in the face of an increasingly globalized and technological environment.

Looking specifically at the British Academy’s relationship to German as English was developing, described in the Parker article, was reflected in the opening chapters of Sartor Resartus (1833) by Thomas Carlyle, which I am reading for another class. Carlyle provided a literary account of the same sentiment- the opening chapters depict and editor introducing a groundbreaking work written by a German author on the philosophy of clothes, being translated into English in their publication. The claim is that only the German culture and language could have created these brilliant (and overlooked in British writing) conclusions and that it is then the job of the English to translate the work, essentially act as the mouthpiece of this brilliance to the rest of the western world. Among heavy satire, this idea reflects the philosophy that English is useful and powerful for getting ideas out to a growing literate population, but is not producing those ideas on its own in such a way that would completely break the tie with German. Therefore it seems that when English does reach the legitimacy of studying texts and writing them exclusively in English, it signals the widespread legitimacy not just of a language, but also the ideas being communicated by that language. 

Which brings me to what I see as the contemporary “application”: technological forums of communication and digital media, which can in many ways be understood to function like its own language (within a system of particular codes of mitigated meaning) is currently tied to English composition as a less legitimate and less academic form. However, composition programs will have to incorporate digital composition as a meaningful and socially important method of communicating as digital information becomes ever more a legitimate part of the social consciousness and exchange of ideas. It will then be the job of composition programs to create instruction that will help students make intentional communication choices and develop critical thinking within digital environments.

If this is pursued, a mutually legitimizing process can occur- where digital media gains professional credence by having knowledgeable and intentional writers and recipients, and where English departments maintain the public and academic belief in the need for composition within the scope of English study. Horner described how Aytoun altered his classes to accommodate changing circumstance to include local literature and British criticism, and in return had students paying him directly to attend his lectures. This adaptation seems like a good model for English departments.

What is Composition?

Composition is the practical transmission of ideas and performs a reliable communication function. Composition should be practically structured. Rules and structure are required in order to be widely communicable; highly communicable composition indicates quality of thought and credibility to an audience (not that quality thoughts don’t happen outside proper composition, but they will largely die outside of it as well).  From this point we can look at the recipients of particular communications and further qualify what structure and shape the communication should take.  Appropriateness of form varies from text messages, to academic papers, to web based documents, to poetry, etc. 

When forms of communication become less functional, changes will evolve within the structure of composition and traditional structures will be replaced by a mode of higher efficiency. Composition becomes less functional when things such as new technologies or changing social frameworks call for new or altered modes of communication. However, reformers must understand prior structures. Only from that point are credible changes brought about to meet communication needs. While in the grand scheme composition is fluid, it must be relatively fixed in order to be useful.