Social Class Reproduction

Four Rules for Teaching Writing:
Image result for image: joy of writing
Always give writing assignments that

1. you will enjoy reading;
2. students will enjoy writing;
3. students will enjoy reading what others in the class have written
4. you will enjoy writing.

If any one of these conditions were not true, then it probably wasn't a very good assignment.

Advice I give to my students: When your words surprise you, you know you are writing.

Saturday, January 7, 2017

What Are Your Research Questions?



Although recently sidetracked by Trump, I have devoted this blog to pedagogical issues with a focus on promoting teaching practices that create positive writing experiences in our classrooms and consequently, positive attitudes toward writing. Although I may be in the minority among writing teachers in accentuating this link between experience and attitude, I know there are many in the field who appreciate this link and work to encourage a love of writing among their students (if not love, at least like). But there are a distressing number of teachers who to my mind inexplicably maintain a no-pain, no-gain theology.

If I were looking for a research/book project, I would investigate how in the face of so much educational research on motivation and learning (see Dewey, Britton et. al, Moffett, Tagg), writing teachers maintain what seems to me to be a counter-intuitive logic discounting or at least down-playing the effect of a student's learning experience on the object of learning.

As I have said before in this blog, a colleague and I have been working on developing a writing program and assessment project  predicated on the link between experience, attitude, and learning. As part of our project, we began to investigate the link between teachers' attitudes toward and experiences with writing toward how they teach writing. We might even generalize: teachers' attitudes toward and experiences of learning with how they teach.

My colleague and I understand that how teachers teach is also shaped by the rhetorical situation within which they teach: the physical, institutional, and political environments--e.g., an adjunct devoted to writing might be teaching in a basement within a program with ogres for wpas, chairs, and deans in Texas.

I have had some conversations within the past few days that made me wonder about a further relationship between researchers' attitudes toward and experiences of writing and their research.  I am assuming here that like teaching, no research (or researcher) is innocent. Perhaps writing studies researchers might ask themselves (and maybe reflect in writing) what their attitudes toward writing are and how those attitudes affect their research questions. I can imagine, for example, one dimension of attitude as a scale with writing for fun and writing as duty. How would one's location on this continuum affect the kind of research questions they asks (please ignore [or maybe not] the phallic implication)?


2 comments:

  1. In this book project will you be talking about verbal abuse of grad students by profs? I am not talking about critique. I am talking about "you should have failed your comps, but no one wanted to be that person" and "how did you even get into this program when you ask questions like that" type of abuse. The goal is a "tough love" type of encouragement, but in many cases it backfires into delegitimizing voice and creates apathy.

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  2. In order to find the best player in the selection point each step is making the momentum promising in each level of education. To explore along with process the best thoughts this is the ideal situation in every sphere of life.

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