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.