Taking Writers out of Writing

On NCTE's Teaching and Learning forum, there has been a discussion about the use of first person and the writer's presence. I am going to make a claim: when we ask students to take themselves out of their writing (as David Coleman, Common Core) has said we need to do, we are mis-teaching writing. I recognize that some genres and rhetorical situations require authorial evacuation, but I am convinced that author-evacuated prose should in our classes be the exception, not the rule. At the elementary, secondary and post-secondary levels, we should bring students into our writing worlds, not create writing situations that make them want to be elsewhere. When the rhetorical situation demands it, people can write author-evacuated prose, but that should not be the stuff of our required writing programs.

As a consequence of the Teaching and Learning forum on first person, I asked my first-year students whether they came to our university expecting that academic writing would prohibit first-person prose. Sixteen said yes; two said no.

My colleague, Karen Nulton, and I have been surveying students' attitudes toward writing as they enter and leave our courses. We alway ask students whether they have been taught the five-paragraph essay (a prototypical author-evacuated school genre). Eight-seven to ninety percent say they have. And with rare exceptions, they say they hate it. They hate that kind of writing.

We know from our research that students want to write--but they want to have freedom of form and topic; they want to be creative. They hate writing when they have to stuff their thoughts into pre-conceived boxes, formula writing. They love to write when the thoughts unfold as they write, not when they are supposed to have the thoughts before they write.

I think the dislike of writing in boxes is obvious to people who love to write, who love to find out who they are and what they are thinking as the words roll out, almost on their own.

But we far too often teach a different ethos of writing--an ethos seemingly designed to kill the spirit of writing.

This is a long introduction to a frustrated comment from Dorothea Reiter--a high school teacher angry about what she has to teach when she knows that what she's teaching is the opposite of what she believes: Dorothea would clearly love to teach the love of writing.

Dor's comment below was the consequence of my post in which I asked, why are so many secondary teachers teaching a myth of writing that is seems like flat earth theology. Why are they demanding author-evacuated prose when that's not how many of us (and sorry for all you others) at the university level teach writing? Basically, at the secondary level, they are teaching counter-productive myths that lead to bad writing and bad attitudes toward writing.

Dor sent me the following (her frustration is probably widely shared among high school teachers):
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Message From: Dorothea Reiter 

I absolutely think that the testing industry is the driving force behind how we teach writing in public schools in this country, and it is a travesty. What choices do we have when we are evaluated based on student performance on these mindless, student essays? How can we expect K-12 students to embrace writing as a contemplative process with many contributing factors, such as audience, attitude/tone, mood, etc.? If I do not adhere to and teach the formats required by the tests, how can I expect to continue in the position of a public school English teacher? The law now states that my district can fire me if my students do not pass muster as measured by their asinine test. What good can I do for students if I am not in the classroom? Add to the quagmire the current trend of heterogeneously placing students in "untracked" English classes and my need to differentiate my instruction for up to five levels of learners in every section, and it's a wonder we even manage to teach them the five paragraph model at all. AND, most of the new testing models lend themselves to a four paragraph essay, not a five paragraph essay. We are losing ground on every front. I could go on, and on, and on...

Dor

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I am an ex-high school teacher. I hear Dor, the frustration of someone who wants to teach serious writing, not writing in boxes.

I think that for those of us in the postsecondary level, we have some obligation to fight against the testing industry driving bad instruction. We have to unite in support for teachers like Dor. There must be a way to do this. We have Doug Hesse president-elect of NCTE--and he knows. I think on our local level, we have to fight back against the testing industry and the consequent bad teaching of writing. I suspect we have parents on our side--parents who are unhappy about their children having to complete these awful writing tasks, as opposed to a child coming home and eager to write about some kind of fantasy or memory, about a way of thinking about all that he or she is feeling, she being front and center in her writing.

Mostly a Dream

This post will be a few words from me and then more thoughtful ones from Patty Ericsson.

If I'm interpreting Patty correctly, we both are deeply suspicious about the worth of the "research paper," complete with works cited (and like who really cares whether the works cited is in mla, apa, chicago, iieee, or namaste style (Patty's note was in response to my question--what's namaste style?--no comments please about my cultural ignorance).

Keith Rhodes has a good tactic: he said something like: I just tell my students if I can easily find what you found, then it's good.
[image: by theSong]

I make a practice of hyperlinking. If you hyperlink when you can, you don't  really need a reference in your works cited, do you?
 
I think I wrote in one of my entries below that I'm ok with research--but research of a special kind, let's call it naturalized research. There's nothing wrong with getting our students to check  their information or preconceptions against what others say about that (Ben Carson and Donald Trump should try that) or in trying to find out something more about something you're interested in. But there's everything wrong with asking your students to do library (scholarly) research on something they are not interested in and then write up a report, or what's worse, an argument, about what they discovered, complete with a works cited. I keep asking teachers who think we should be teaching that kind of nonsense: do you like reading those?????

From Patty (thanks, Patty [and Keith])

It is mostly a dream, Irv.  A kinder, gentler way to honor those whose works we build upon.  Kristin Arola has presented on (and is writing) a piece on Native American (especially her Objibwe) ways of collecting things from nature and the built world to prepare for a variety of celebrations.  Each collection is marked by acknowledging where the “assets” come from, thanking the provider (whether a tree, a plant, or a person), and also by leaving something in replacement for what you have taken—even if it’s a small token.  There is also an important element of community in this gathering and using. She calls her possible approach “slow composition."

So my jest of a Namaste style was (I realized later) influenced by her work, but also my my attempts to make my life and being more peaceful, grateful, and loving. If we would choose a thank you word or phrase that honors or somehow gestures toward an appreciation for the assets we bring to our composing, maybe that kind of citation would be better? What if we considered where the assets came from—the quote, the picture, the movie clip, whatever?  And considered in the context in which these assets were developed? And then finally considered more respectful ways of using/appropriating these assets in our work?  I guess I’m asking what if we threw out the pretty much meaningless forms (although there are some who argue that the forms have lots of meaning). I don’t think our student or us (for that matter) give much of a hoot.

In my pedagogy course this fall, I am asking new teachers to think of their syllabi and assignments as a narrative—that their course is a story and that it is told in the syllabi, assignments, and all the other supporting documents. All of their work is situated in the bureaucracy of the comp program, but I’m asking them to consider that part of the narrative as well.

I borrowed this (copied below) to help them: http://www.aerogrammestudio.com/2013/03/22/the-story-spine-pixars-4th-rule-of-storytelling/

I’ll let you know how they do with this.  At least they might have some fun!

The Research Paper

A recent discussion on the WPA list concerning documentation styles made me think of some essays my students wrote recently. With Joe Harris and Patty Ericsson, I (I think I'm reading them correctly, but with Joe and Patty, one never knows) don't really spend much time with documentation style. Along with teaching the more or less decontextualized research paper, this is wasted instruction and really not a whole lot of fun. They all use Easybib, but as Joe said--who cares? At most, our students might have to use a particular documentation style in other classes; if other teachers think documentation is important, they can use their class time teaching students about commas here and there. Actually, I do spend a little time on this, but it's minor--somewhere in the orbit of the ablative absolute.

I  think research is important, but as I have probably written elsewhere in this blog, I like to naturalize research. Students are doing it all the time--they just don't know how to link it to the kind research we do--the kind very few of them will ever be doing in the post-collegiate lives.

I'm going to print a research paper from one of my students below.  I have the students first write essays telling the rest of us about their (the writers') previous writing experiences and their attitudes toward writing and themselves as writers.

These quick essays are fascinating to read. Students like to write them; they like to read them, and I like to read them--so that makes it a pretty good writing assignment. In addition, we all learn more about learning --and not learning about writing. We write these essays in class--about 15 minutes. They are remarkably good essays for coming right out of the students' brains.

Then we read and write back to each other. I really like doing this. I also ask them to take notes when they see something interesting that they can use for the next essay--which is to generalize about students' experiences with writing.

For their next class, I  ask them to take about thirty minutes and write a brief essay generalizing from their own experiences and from what they have read from others. This, of course, is research--going outside your head to check with external sources. The students have never considered something like this is research--or the results of their investigation, reporting what they learned, as a research paper. It is, however, my kind of research paper. When YOU think of it, it's not that far from the kind of research I and many of my friends on this list do.

Link to what I asked the students to do:

Directions for Generalizing

As far as documentation, I tell the students that it's kind to tell your readers where you got your information and let them know how to find it themselves. In the essay below, we didn't need to document because they all knew the writers and where to find the specific essay on our Blackboard site.

I like what Kiera did in her essay (30 minutes, but I suspect she might have taken longer--I'll ask her). I like how she takes her generalizations and moves outward or upward to theorize. She worked from her own experience, generalized from others, and let her mind go, theorizing about the function of writing. Nice.
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Kiera:

From reading my classmates' reflections on their writing experiences, it seems a general trend that most prefer to write with a type of "freedom" (Nicholas), with "no restrictions or limits" (Ksenia). Lydia mentions her love of writing stories to make herself laugh, and Chris Z. mentions the thrill of storytelling, with "barriers lifted". Most of us have experienced the joy of writing, the satisfaction of creating a secret world or reflecting on the one we live in with no one to judge or stop the flow from heart to pen to page.

However, it also seems that many of us have certain prejudices against writing, some stubborn psychological aversion which tells us that we cannot write properly. We "worry people are not going to understand" (Chris J.). We continue to mark our writing mentally with the red pen of our teachers in high school, rating ourselves as "average" (Branston). These red markings may have damaged our view of what writing is, Zoë notes.

Kaila claims that there are too many structured papers demanded during high school, while Michael says he enjoys these types of more straightforward papers. Stephanie found her overall writing education to be "nourishing" to her personal growth.

There seem to be some discrepancies about who we write for, and why we write. High school has taught us "how to write", but what is the value if we have no desire to write? We must look at finding a balance by both writing for necessary assignments and also recreationally for ourselves and loved ones. I think we could also compartmentalize. If we think of academic writing as having to do more with skill than personality, we will feel less vulnerable about criticism of our academic writings. If we think of casual, creative writing as having to do more with personality, we may be more open to share with others through this medium.

We all agree that writing is necessary for our future careers, and this class seems to be a positive start to changing our perspective on the purpose of writing. If we learn to trust our writing more, as Bransten achieved, then we can come to know and trust one another, too. To know someone through writing, and to reveal oneself through writing, is a powerful tool. I do think the word "trust" is key.

Some of us have already taken steps toward becoming comfortable with our own writing. David was insecure about his writing abilities, so he joined the school newspaper to work on it. Sam discovered a passion for historical preservation and how this relates to writing and reading. Dr. Peckham versed himself in grammar and abandoned his romantic notions to discover the fulfilling reality of being a writer. He "ended where [he] wanted to be".

All of us are on a path to realizing how writing can enrich our lives by connecting us with one another and understanding more about our chosen career fields. If we make the choice to get past our existing ideas of writing, negative or positive, I think we will discover new types of writing that work for who we are and where we wish to go.
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Going from here: 
The next obvious assignment (or series) is imagine and construct some kind of survey, distribute and analyze it; do some internet research on specific issues that come out of these exercises; look in the library databases for readable (i.e., not written by rhet/comp scholars--with some exceptions here and there) essays on the subject; then write up singly or in groups the results of what they have learned. At that point, I would like to have them tell readers--like readers of this blog--where they found the information and how the readers could find it also.The would need some kind of documentation.

Sarah: On the Essay

I'm probably violating several protocols here, but I can't help myself. I want to make Sarah's essay on the essay more than just a comment on my blog. I didn't ask her permission. Forgive me, Sarah.

There is much to comment on Sarah's essay.  But let me focus on Sarah's break from the "essay" as a published text and certainly anything with a certain form and key moves (like moving from the particular to the general).  Rather, as Aldous Huxley described Montaigne's essays, the essay is one damned thing after another.  This works for blogs. (I know--I'm doing violence to Huxley's intent . . . still . . . )

Sarah:
Last year I taught I course on "Style in the Essay," a lower division elective. I was bothered by the the definite article -- THE essay?! -- and spent a lot of time thinking about what "essays" have been and meant through time and across cultures. I pulled out my old copy of Lopate's *The Art of the Personal Essay* and thought about how he chose pieces from around the world and across two thousand years. Drawing on what i learned in an MFA on nonfiction writing, and what I later learned about genres as social action, I asked myself again and again, What does the essay DO? What is it that makes each of these pieces in Lopate an essay? What, if any, is the common denominator, the shared aim?

What I finally came to is that we use the label "essay" to describe personal writing about matters of public interest. Topics may range from intimate matters (Montaigne's headaches) to highly social issues (as in Addison and Steele's publications), but the common thread is how the writer articulates her or his subjective experience in a way that invites identification and connection from others who do not personally know the writer. (It's the latter angle that makes some letters "essays" while others remain merely personal correspondence.)

Having reached that understanding of what "essays" have historically done, I next asked myself, "What serves this function today? Is it published essays, or something else?" I rejected published essays pretty quickly, because I don't think they have broad public appeal (another characteristic that I think it essential to the social function I had settled on); they are a genre by and for the hyper-literate, the readers of *The New Yorker* and of literary journals.

What I finally settled on was blogs. I think blogs are the essays of today: subjective experience and perspective presented in such a way as to engage public readers, inviting them to relate, to think, even to respond. They offer writers a chance to decide whom they want to engage, in ways that academic or literary essays do not, and they ask writers to make the difficult move of presenting their own perceptions or experiences in a way that is both true to themselves and to their readers.

I think it worked -- that is, I think the students learned a lot about writing and about themselves as writers, including what it is about writing that lights them up and makes them enjoy the challenges of constructing publicly effective AND personally meaningful prose.

The Labor of Teaching

I have been reading/listening to Zealot: the Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, by Reza Aslan. Aslan gives us a fascinating, historically contextualized account of the story of Jesus. What we know of Jesus' life is minimal and deeply indebted to oral history (Aslan notes that the notion of oral "history" is quite different from our current literate version, oral history being more concerned with the meaning than the actual occurrence of events).

There is much to think about in Aslan's reading of the story of Jesus, created by writers or group of writers from 60 to 120 years after the crucifixion. The story is a much a story of the times within which it was written (somewhere around a century after the crucifixion) as it was a story of the three to five years within which Jesus turned preacher.

Aslan frames the two stories within tribal struggles for land but also within the move from agrarian to feudal economies, from egalitarian to radically hierarchical social structures, from self-sufficient farmers to impoverished laborers who worked to service the wealthy, the ones nearer to the seats of power, nearer, that is, to the seat of God. You could say Jesus was the Bernie Sanders of the poor.

Aslan opens with a picture of the annual rituals at the Temple of Jeruselum, describing the various sacred and physical levels though which people could pass, according to their spiritual rank, gender, ethnicity, nationality, and social status, with the people of the upper levels gathering tithes from the lower levels. It is not too much to say that the lower one's level, the more real one's work. At the upper levels, the high priests mostly created rituals, swung incense, and wore  robes that set them apart from the rabble.

Although he didn't last long, Jesus was a teacher.

Since this blog is mostly concerned with teaching, someone asked what this post has to do with teaching.
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Here's the short version of what I was thinking:

Let’s assume God and the Jesus of the Bible are myths (trying here not to offend anyone who thinks there is a White-bearded male God and that Jesus is his son).

From there, let’s review that initial scene—the people coming to the Temple with its ascending layer of rooms through which fewer and fewer people are admitted until you get to the high priest, the only one permitted to go behind the veil of speak to God, the wizard of Oz, I guess.

In order to get in to each room, you are required to make sacrifices and give to the person/priests in charge of that layer progressively more significant tithes.

The order of priests are progressively richer and wear more ornate robes and jewels, signifying their exalted status (their nearness to God)

The people who do the real work in the culture are the laborers; the males make it to the second room, the women to the first. I think you’re also blocked according to your ethnicity.

The higher you go, the less real work you do; the more your “work” lies in constructing myths that what you do is work, but you’re mostly just creating rituals and myths that legitimize your position and wealth.  So you hang around swinging incense and muttering incantations and so on while others support you because they think you are doing something significant.

I can imagine links to educational structures. I'm reading a vaguely related book, Disciplined Minds, by Jeff Schmidt. Schmidt analyzes the ways in which professionals are taught to think and act (and not cause too much trouble--no turning over tables in the temple).

Writing What I Think

I had a student say after posting her firsthand portrait: This is so different from high school writing: I can write what I think instead of writing what I think the teacher wants to hear.
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I'm thinking more about "the essay" and the writing process. Of course we have to use the writing process when we're writing for publication. But I think our field has been compromised by our ancestry--our origins in the literature department, that we have to teach our students how to write publishable work and in so doing have alienated them from the flow of writing--the kind most people do in their nonacademic lives. And in so doing, we may end up alienating students from writing, the same way we do with reading when we push them to read like literary critics instead of consumers who read for the pleasure of reading and getting lost in the worlds and words of the writer.

Thinking

Rather than respond to a response, I'm entering a post because I can see that I am going to go on at length:

Kurt asked:

Irv, I wonder: do you think your system is viable (in terms of the grade distribution and/or the timing of when grades attach attaching grades) for untenured faculty (whether they be pre-tenure TT or adjunct)? Despite the extent to which it is theoretically, pedagogically, and operationally sound, might it not offer too much exposure--too much fuel, maybe--for contingent faculty to use? The "academic freedom" position is, for many who teach writing, an ideal rather than a practice. Thoughts?

Thoughts in response to Kurt (and thanks for your  note, Kurt):

We can't shy away from the social stratification system and unequal distribution of pay, prestige, and privileges (reproducing the more general cultural system) at play in English departments. Sometimes, there are phatic gestures of equality that no one believes. I wrote in "Acting Justly" about the social stratification system in English departments--tracking back to the Wyoming Conference Resolution and its watered-down descendants (also see "Whispers from the Margin"). English departments are simply usually unconsciously articulating the larger function of the university--one of Althusser's ideological state apparatuses (with some gestures of pushing against orthodoxy).

Social reproduction theory is only the frame for my response. As actors, we have some degree of consciousness but it's easy to overstate our case. Grades--and the way they are institutionally naturalized--are only one more strategy in the social reproduction game.

So .  . . yes, the less privileged take more chances when they challenge orthodoxy. Tenured full professors can challenge grading systems relatively unscathed, although people might avoid them in receptions. Part-time teachers will not be rehired. NonTT teachers might be dismissed. Assistant professors might not get promotion and tenure, and associate professors might associate forever.

This scheme might be mitigated and even countermanded by a writing program administrator or (less likely) a chair or (more less likely) by a dean who might commit themselves to teaching rather than social reproduction (I know--this is not a hierarchical opposition--more of a dialectic: I know a lot of very good writing teachers who still grade essays and literature teachers who grade tests).

However, what does it say about our system if we recognize that our pedagogy contradicts our goals but we hang on to it because the structure within which we teach (which usually includes in its Essential Learning Outcomes something like self-sponsored/life-long learning) threatens dismissal if we refuse to engage in counterproductive teaching habits--like grading?

Let me give two more examples of mis-education (Dewey)--ones with which most people in our field would agree but still dominate education: the focus on testing, "measurable" outcomes (I cringe whenever I hear this phrase)--and its link to the testing industry; and formula writing. Even though most of us in the field have endlessly dissed the five-paragraph essay and its cousins, it and other models of formula writing dominate secondary (and in some places, postsecondary) education.

Let's imagine that we want our students to love writing, to love learning (both of which would lead to self-sponsored writing and learning); then we should always ask at the end of our course or curriculum, do they go out of our courses and programs with a more positive attitude toward writing and learning than when we first met them? And by "they," I mean at least 90% of our
students. If the answer is no, then we need to think (critically).

Post-Process Writing

I will try to  make this post uncharacteristically quick because I'm tying to write out a thought that I am using in another essay. I referred to the question about revision and the aligned project of teaching writing as process in a post below.

I'm somewhat surprised by myself. When John Trimbur announced the post-process movement in 1994, I remember I thought, well--here we are: we have to announce ourselves by announcing the death of our father, another turn in the never-ending series of "turns" in our field.

And now here I am in 2015, post-processing. My logic is not Trimbur's. But nevertheless, as I have written below, I back-pedal on invention and revision. I know in my own writing the value of invention and revision (in fact, I am inventing here for writing I am doing elsewhere), but I like to have my students write and write and write (with invention and revision here and there).

My logic  is simple: I know students get bored by process, spending far too long on an "essay." I think there might be more value in having the students more frequently combine invention/writing, they are inventing (as I am doing here) as they go along. And maybe revise a little--like look back before you post, change some things here and there, but don't overly restrict the flow of writing, of writing as a conversation.  I think my students get more out of inventing/writing a lot than being mired in the process of writing. I can imagine a metaphor for how we live.

Grades Again

I had a conversation yesterday with a colleague and good friend (a lot of these posts, I realize, are the consequence of conversations in which I wasn't able to explain myself and then woke up at 2:30 the next morning and thought for two or three hours about what I really meant).

The conversation was about portfolios and grades--but of course when one is talking about grades (and portfolios, a method for minimizing the role of grades), one is talking about so much more--and it's that "more" that I want to get to in this post.

My friend and I were in a group discussing the use of portfolios. Somewhere in the conversation I slipped into a rant. Well, first, I was explaining my use of portfolios as a way of minimizing the role of grades in my writing classes. I have the students submit portfolios at mid-quarter and for a final. Portfolios are  easy to  grade to when you basically give mostly As and Bs in your class. As readers of this blog probably know, I start from the assumption that everyone in the class has an A. All they have to do to maintain that grade is never miss class and do all the work, let's say, honestly.

When I frame the rhetorical situation for my students, I tell them that they have to give me portfolios that I could show to outside readers, like deans or chairs, who might challenge my grade distribution (people who imagine the bell curve as real--see bell curve).  Here is an example of my instructions to students:  final portfolio instructions-Engl 103

This simple explanation led to a kind of rant. I noted that people who use the portfolio system and unhook themselves from their addiction to grades (not a good rhetorical move on my part--but I think I said something like that) seem to give more As and Bs than when they used the traditional grading system because their students write better and they write more.

You can see the rant coming. I was slipping into my I-don't-care-what-anybody-else-thinks-because-I'm-right mode.

The logic is that in order to defend this high proportion of As and Bs, the teacher  needs evidence to justify the inordinate supply of As and Bs (this could lead to an interesting conversation about grades, capitalism, zero-sum logic, and supply and demand).

Interlude:

I think I may have mentioned something about co-dependent grade addiction (another bad rhetorical move--but it is worth noting that when teachers argue that students are over-addicted to grades, the pointing finger curves back toward the self).

The more and better claim: Teachers who have overcome their addictions to grades and create in their classrooms a grade-free zone of trust, appreciation, teacher-student collaboration (Freire), and love of writing will see from their students more and better writing. They will see that their students really want to learn--they want to learn more about writing and they want to like to write again--an attitude toward writing generally left behind somewhere around fifth grade. So the students almost necessarily write more and better. The higher grade distribution follows.

Back to the discussion:

My friend said, have you ever had anyone challenge your grade distributions?

He had me there. No, I had to say (but I'll bet they've thought about it). So my constant complaint about fake writing more or less came back into my face.  In my  weak defense: I have--I think even in this blog--used students' portfolios to demonstrate to the Natilie Wexler's (see Personal Writing in the Classroom: A Reply to More Ignorance) of this world that students can write quite well, thank you, that perceptions of "bad writing" may have more to do with bad assignments than with bad writing.

[I'm almost where I imagined I would go ( see Flow)]

Somewhere in the conversation, my friend said he felt as if he wasn't acting fairly if he didn't distinguish between the student who clearly worked hard and wrote well and the student who didn't work as hard and didn't write quite so well.

I will have to admit--I have often when assigning mostly As in my class thought the same thing. I do make gross distinctions--you can see those gross distinctions in the portfolios, but I don't make really fine, criterion-centered judgments, much as I have in the past. Here's what I really think--and I know the lines of logic are blurred:

We should not be socializing our students into reward-dependency: working for the reward. The social reproduction function should be obvious.

I know I'm a romantic, but I simply am unwilling to give up the ideology of looking for the reward in  the action, in the living, in the writing itself, not in the gold star we receive for our performance. I will also add that reward comes from doing something that results in community contribution. I get rewards from knowing I have turned my students on to writing. The money and the grades are highly incidental. I know that we live fuller, richer lives if we focus on living rather than on the gold streets paving Heaven.

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I just had my current students read (online) my portfolio instructions--and I asked them whether there are any questions about it. Here's one of the first replies:

"I have read the instructions and am wondering, is the portfolio more for our sake than for anyone else? At least as far as measuring our own growth, this seems to be a useful tool for self-examination on our parts.

I also think that any department heads or administrators would love to read the type of writing done in this class, although they might find trouble putting specific "grades" to it, because of its subjective nature - is that correct?"

She has it right.

Revision, Word Count, and Readers

I would like to write about revision this morning--that, and maybe about ways to frame writing assignments.

Decades ago, I shifted from minimum word count (which matches grading/ranking student writing as one of the more counterproductive pedagogical strategies) to maximum word count--e.g., "no more than c. 1200 words."  The logic is obvious--as is the dis-logic of minimum word counts.

About two years ago, I started using time: "see what you can do in about one and a half hours of writing before posting. Spend about an hour writing and leave yourself at least a half-hour to look it over and make any changes."

I'll just say this works: when the students know that their primary audience is other students in the class (remember, I don't grade), they are concerned with how they textually appear to their peers--let's just say they care more about them than us. When you ask your students to spend about an hour and a half writing, about half of them will spend three. Students are not dumb. They know that what they write and how they write shapes how their peers will see them. We don't need grades to teach them how to see this.

I have been thinking about revision. I have for decades used the first draft/second draft/final revision. We have long noted that when students are writing with computers (like us), revision is not a matter of drafts. Now I hardly ever ask students to revise. I know they are revising as they write and before they publish. Today, I wrote a post on the CWPA list about the link between authentic revision and reading aloud to peers.

I have realized that there's a-textual revision. As well as revise before they send, students virtually revise when they read what others have written. Revision is in their minds: they see what others have done, particularly those who are getting serious responses from others in the class, and they think, maybe I could have done this or that, included or excluded, been more personal, taken a few risks, heard myself speak through writing. When students do this virtually (and I get them to write about it by inventorying their experiences about writing, reading, and being read), they are learning about writing. They don't need to rewrite. Sometimes, they just need to write something new, remembering what they learned from what they last wrote.

I can't help but add: I have been reading somewhat impatiently on the list about all the time teachers waste by having their students read out of readers--as if students don't have a million things to write about intimately connected with their lived experiences. Publishers and academics make money out of these readers. Teachers have students kill time by reading and writing/discussing about what they read (this is the critical-reading strand of our  field). Ways of Reading was one of the worst exercises in this misdirection of writing instruction. If you really want students to learn about writing, have them write--all the time, writing out and writing back and forth to each other. I am hardly the first to note that we learn to swim by swimming, not by reading about how others swim.

A Reply to More Ignorance

I am a member of a university writing committee charged to investigate the state of writing at Drexel and what we can do to improve student writing.  One member of the committee send around a link to Natalie Wexler's Op-Ed in the Washington Post: Why Americans Can't Write.  I sent to our committee the following response:

For my response, please see my blog link to another uninformed opinion of the same ilk. Apologies, if my post offends anyone:

Personal Writing in the Classroom: Bad Ideas about Writing

As I note in this post (and as did the Zeff article we cited in our report), this kind of uninformed opinion, while popular, is nothing new (I'm inclined to link it to Trump's rants about what's wrong with America--and I know how to fix it; just trust me).  It seems slightly naive to look for educated opinions on a subject from someone who has zero credentials in the field. Natalie Wexler has been a volunteer tutor in DC schools. This does not make her an expert in the field of writing. I would hate to have a physicist take my opinion (although I happen to like physics) on what should be taught in physics classes and how it should be taught. As scholars who presumably respect research and scholarship, we should perhaps respect people who actually have expertise in a particular field.

As did Zeff, I historicized this common complaint about students writing. If anyone has the time, look on the right side of my blog for examples of how "kids can't write" (Student essays: our first year at Drexel).

Basically, Wexler is full of bad advice, much of it derived from David Coleman's tunnel vision and his influence on  Common Core. Coleman is one more person who knows next to nothing about teaching writing; yet he is in charge of the Common Core standards--of writing, in particular. He, like Wexler, has a vested interest.  See Diane Ravitch (who finally started investigating rather then repeating the what's-wrong-with-the-

students-these-days line)--her post on Coleman.

http://dianeravitch.net/2012/05/19/who-is-david-coleman/

I'm just pointing out:  if we want to know something about a particular field, we should probably not rely on op-eds written by people who know next to nothing about that field, no matter how much they say what we want them to say.

I'm going to try to connect three things: this beautiful day in New Jersey,  Pope Francis, and writing as pleasure.

I have just finished reading my new students' responses to my initial inventory of their writing experiences. A few things are clear: for most of them, school writing has been a pain in the derriere. They don't like to do it. They write about how they don't like reading a text and having to analyze it. Boring (to write and to read). They don't like writing for the teacher, having to guess at what he or she wants, for a grade.  Somewhat surprising is how they mostly know that there is school writing (i call this fake writing) and non-school writing (real writing). They like to do the latter. Many of them persist in writing poems, stories, blogs, in spite of teacher's attempts to promote writing as hard work, as pain.

Here's my dream (unreal, I know): we could revolutionize writing instruction--get over this hard work, rigor ethos--mostly imposed on us from an external ideology; that we could make our writing classes fun, that we could self-correct writing activities that would entail avoidance rather than embrasure, that we as teachers could seriously reflect on how we got into this writing as pain ethos. I know that's asking a bit much, but . . .

Where does this lovely day and Pope Francis fit in? I don't really know, but I have a feeling about it. Something about communicating, being with others through writing rather than performing for our own materialist accumulation (like GPAs, metaphors for money).

It should perhaps go without saying that there is a link between writing and learning for pleasure. I know there are some people who think we need to know how to suffer, how to defer pleasure. Please.

Having Fun

Galen asked me about writing as fun. I know that in this blog I’ve been advocating writing as fun and challenging writing as hard work. Rather than advocate my writing-as-fun position (which to me seems like a no-brainer), I wonder about the writing as hard-work. Like where do writing teachers get into this???

Bad writing tasks—the kinds most students don’t enjoy writing and responses to which the teachers don’t enjoy reading (much less, grading), tasks that come from the teacher thinking he or she needs to teach certain skills--like how to argue, how to analyze, how to document, disregarding that in most real-world writing, writers don’t add Works Cited. 

What do we get from all this writing as hard-work rhetoric? Why can’t we promote writing as play? I would love to hear what others think about this. I think the answer(s) are complicated and that they involve more than just teaching. Bowles and Gintis, Bourdieu, Appleby and many others have made clear that the educational industry has in part (if not, in whole) the function of reproducing social class relationships. So how do hard-work theories of composition play into this?

What's-Good-4-Them

I had a conversation with a well-known rhetoric and composition scholar a few days ago. My friend made two claims common among writing teachers: teachers know what’s good for students and writing teachers have to teach first-year students how to cope with writing situations they will later face--that’s what’s good for them.

These are only two of the many reasons that even highly respected rhetoric and composition scholars articulate in their promotions of what they imagine as central academic genres—argument, analysis, and other forms of “evidence-based” writing. They imagine they “know” the writing world that lies before the students, how rigorous the demands of that world are, and that they the teachers need to hold to high standards in order to prepare their students for that world. Some of these tough-love rhetoricians have fantasized that our students in their post-collegial lives would have to write research papers.

We know the classed, raced, and gendered arguments against encouraging pleasure writing in our required/first-year writing classes—and the reasons for which writing teachers frequently capitulate to the hard-nosed rhetoric of theorists who imagine their responsibility is to teach students how to read, think, analyze, and argue, even though they suspect that by creating uncomfortable writing experiences in their classes, they may be teaching their students the wrong thing about writing.

I have been working on an article about social class and assessment, which led me to think about four universes of writing. “Sat” refers to the SAT and ACT writing tests—and by extension, to all models of timed, five-paragraph writing—and perhaps by further extension, five-paragraph thinking, one leading to the other.

When we employ the “we-know-what’s-good-for-them," argument, we should perhaps remember our predecessors, who also knew what was good for them—and think of our descendants, who may wonder how we thought what we thought.

Bad Ideas about Writing

I am responding in part to Cheryl's and Drew's invitation to rant about bad ideas about writing. In their CFP, they referred to the 1975 Newsweek cover article about why Johnny (and Jill) can't write. We can track these complaints back to1828 when Bishop Whately responded to awful student essays by theorizing that instead of having students write declamations about abstractions like "Citizenship" or "Honesty," he had them write from the experiences of their lives: thus, the now infamous "My Summer Vacation" essay.

We know that Harvard's claims about students' inability to write tracked back to the incoming students' inabilities to parse the sentence, “He said that that that that that pupil parsed was not that that he should have parsed” (1870).

If you parsed that :), you don't need to be remediated. It's a cool sentence and brain game. I challenge my students to parse it in the grammar section of their final portfolios at the end of the quarter. A few get it.

But here's what good writing teachers know: students of course can write--look at what my students have written in my links on the right side of this blog. I see good writing flying in from students in our program like . . . like, well, like undocumented drones.

What's  interesting is why certain kinds of people say students can't write. We hear this from politicians, members of the business community, and from many of our colleagues. From the professoriate, complaining about student writing is  a rite of passage.You're not a professor unless you complain about students' inabilities to write. If you think they can write, that just shows how much you know about writing.

Complaints from members of the professorial class may be slanted projections of their own troubled relationships with writing. They are certainly the consequence of their inabilities to create writing situations in which students might want to write (look at my rules for good writing assignments above).

What We're Aiming For

I could have foregrounded many student essays exemplifying what we're aiming for. I just reread Annelise's--and I want to post it here. Hers was a rewrite I had missed--technology gaff. I want to foreground here how interesting our students are--and how clearly they can explain themselves. I'm really sick of teachers who devalue student consciousness--perhaps as a way of overvaluating their own. I could post here several students essays, but I just reread Annelise's and wanted (with her permission) to post hers. This essay was in response to my writing task, Walking through the Doors--look at Student Essays to the right. I should add--Annalise knew she was getting an A. You might be able to see that what grade she would receive had nothing to do with what she wrote.

Post for: Walking Through the Door

Although I could not predict what I would be confronted with in college and what exactly I would have to adjust to, my entire upbringing has been preparing me for adaptation, specifically for this year’s transition into adult life. As mentioned in my autobiographical introduction, I was not taught a religion, where logic and faith are fused; instead I was solely taught logic. While my family takes an atheist approach to acting logically, I find it spiritual to decide in the present moment what the right way to act is. Hinduism, which teaches to reflect on the present moment, has guided me in this while allowing me to feel self-reliant and in control. I chose this route in high school, but because my family’s beliefs are so similar to mine, I never felt I really had to expend any energy to explain and practice my way of living.

This year has presented more challenges than all four years of high school combined; I have had to rethink in order to coexist with my environment while holding fast to my principles. It has been stressful to apply my morals to every action I take, but it has taught me responsibility. For example, living with my roommate, a person who did not understand “organic food,” and refused to hear an explanation, taught me to accept that I cannot educate everyone, and it is not my job to. All I can do is trash-dig for recyclable Easy Mac containers when she is not looking! Learning to balance my beliefs with my actions in a way that does not interfere with my relationships with people of opposing perspectives will probably be a lesson I learn in future years of college as well. Hopefully, the more my ideas interact with my environment, the more they are exercised, and the stronger they become. Like muscles, the stronger my beliefs are, the more capable they are to lift me out of hard situations that will surely present themselves in later years.

Luckily, this year was a test-run.  My most stressful environmental stimuli have been related to academics, socializing, and life-style development--that is, the weight with which I exercised was light enough so that I was not afraid of hurting myself during practice. Applying my perspective to these aspects of daily life has given me acumen, and I feel I am now a more adaptable, independent person as a consequence of my experience at Drexel.

For example, in my winter term’s English class, I was assigned an essay about identity. That was the prompt, to right about identity, whether it was specific, like Hispanic females in politics, or general, like the role of identity in job hiring. I chose to write about my identity as a vegan. In retrospect, answering the prompt this way gave me insight on the role veganism plays in my overall identity. An excerpt from this essay shows my then-new understanding of how large this role is, saying:

Similar to other identifiers, I am only aware that I am vegan when it is relevant; a person may only think about his or her level of education, for example, if he or she is having a conversation involving critical thinking. What makes veganism different from other identities is how often food is relevant to one’s life.  Since I am confronted by my eating choices three times a day, at every meal, maintaining the same outlook on consumerism is a continuous conscious process for me. Sometimes I even have to debate myself on why it is I am being so particular and demanding of my food, while I watch my roommate microwave Easy Mac. It requires self-reflection and recognition of my identity, something cannot be said of many other identities.

Although veganism is one of my main identifiers, I had never written about its influence in my life before this assignment. While many people in the class complained that the assignment was vague, the experience I had with this exercise was beneficial, because I was not pressured to research facts about an unheard-of subculture or political party, for example. The students who struggled to do the assignment were the ones looking for a rubric and an outside source of knowledge. It was enjoyable for me to write about something that had already been within me, waiting to be said.

The lack of structure in the assignment allowed my voice to be the focus of my writing, not the rubric. Therefore, writing the identity essay let me hear my voice, specifically on the topic of veganism, and finally see and fixate on the belief rather than letting it hide away in my head. This example, as well as several others-some involving school work, some being social- have allowed me to solidify ideas that already existed in my mind.

I am not alone in my views on this, Finke, et al. agree, saying of works of writing “the resulting creative cognitions can be focused or expanded according to the task requirements or individual needs by modifying the preinventive structures (p.240).” When I redesign assignments to be focused more on my need to discover myself, I find writing is a more creative and easily-flowing process. This idea has been said many times in English 103: writing for one’s self first and for an outside audience later makes the writing process easier, and the overall writing better.

I felt like this year’s transition has been insightful. One year has provided me with experiences that allowed me to listen to my voice for the first time and learn from listening to this voice- meaning self-reflecting on- who I am. In fact, not all of the hypothetical situations that I prepared myself to manage have actually happened yet. I like to think if they ever do, my self-understanding will be strengthened enough so that I can trust myself to overcome them in a way that not only preserve my integrity, but will further teach me. As I am currently learning, writing is a powerful method to bring awareness to my own voice on topics and issues. Writing frequently about daily obstacles and reading my pieces may reveal solutions I already have in my head that only become externalized and obvious when they are put on paper.

Slater, Annelise. “First Draft Vegan Identity.” Drexel University. January 16. 2015

Finke, R., Smith, S., Ward, T. “Creative Cognition: Theory, Research, and Applications.” 1996. The MIT Press. http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/research/modelling/hi/papers/theses/paulness/appendixd.pdf

It's worth looking at Annelise's comment about herself as a writer:

Myself as a Writer

This course has taught me to write for myself, and because of that I finally think of myself as a writer. When I write to follow a rubric, I don't consider myself anything other than a student doing homework. But, if the sole purpose of writing is to write, then I feel like a writer because I am choosing what thoughts I want to discuss, and the process is left up to me, not by the limitations of a rubric. Keeping a private journal and responding to classmates' essays has directed me to this self-realization as a writer.

In addition to being a "writer" now, I also find writing to be more enjoyable. I owe this to the grammar sessions in class. Since I feel more secure in my understanding of grammar, I am able to experiment with sentence-structure without the fear of sounding illiterate! This wave of exploration in my writing has given me new ways of thinking while I write. I think to myself "what would phrasing this the other way do to help or hinder the overall message." which was never a thought I had before, at least in the first-draft phase. The metacognition behind writing and realizing I control messages through my writing decisions make the process very interesting and fun for me.

Writing is also therapeutic.  When I am stressed in school, writing helps me vent. Several of my personal journal entries have contained some form of rant about my workload. It isn't the most fun concept to explore in writing, but it is efficiently relieving. After ten weeks of this, I'm more patient with myself, a better listener to myself, and am more comfortable in my own thoughts. Journals are not limited to the negative; I plan to write throughout the summer as a way to relive the day. When I look back and read, I can re-re-live! I was surprised this term, when I would read past journals, at how readily the emotions come flooding back from the memories. I'm grateful to have a new escape that serves to help me and as entertainment. In class, reading comments taught me that the more you re-read, and revisit the work, the more ways you see your work. This ties into my intro autobiography about how I want to see as many perspectives as I can in my lifetime...little did I know, writing was the way!

 

Naturalizing Writing—The Happiest Place on Earth

Wonderful CWPA 2015 conference at Boise. Thanks to all who worked to bring this off in the beautiful town of Boise. I want to come back. To live.

I thought about many issues while attending sessions, listening to the speakers, and talking with old and new friends. I will try to focus on one.

I wandered into a session entitled “The Wonderful World of Administration: Improving Our Programs Using Tools from the Happiest Place on Earth.” I’m slow, but after a while, I caught on. I leaned over to whisper to my friend  sitting next to me, “Do you think I’m the only person in this room who didn’t know where the happiest place on earth is?”

Beth nodded and said, “Probably.”

Since I am neither a Writing Center person nor a Disneyphile, I was misplaced in this session—as I may be displaced in life; nevertheless, I got something out of this session. In her presentation, Nicole Caswell said an instruction to Disney hosts is “Make sure each visitor leaves Disney World happy. How can we make sure that every student leaves the Writing Center happy?” she asked. She didn’t seem to expect an answer.

Uncharacteristically, I didn’t respond, but I thought: Write their papers for them.

I also thought, the happiness exit would be a good credo for our writing classes. We should as writing teachers have as one of our primary objectives students should leave our class happy—our class, not our course.

There was a lot of talk in the conference about transfer. Underneath the question of transfer lie the overt and covert purposes of required writing courses (the convert ones are complicated, involving money and the maintenance of social categories).

Purposes invite objectives. In several sessions, I listened to what teachers hoped would be the take-away for students; and here’s what I took away from these discussions: as a field, we may be going over a cliff by complicating the natural act of writing, of letting words flow from our fingers because we have something we want to say about something we care about to people we hope are listening and may have something to say back--the way I am writing here, on a plane heading out of Boise, and thinking about what kind of student writing I love to read, the kind that makes them and me happy when they leave the class.

Listening

I know I have written about assessment a bit too much--imagining a way of assessing our writing programs through what our students say about what they have learned in our writing programs rather than having them "prove" (or argue) what they have learned by their writing performance in, let's say, school (trying to be polite here) writing situations. Key is that we're evaluating our programs more directly than by asking students to perform in an artificially constructed rhetorical situation (unless we argue that teaching students how to argue for a grade is the kind of genre--and social dynamic--that we want to teach). I will say, somewhat selfishly (and in keeping with my four rules of good writing assignments), that it's more fun to read what student feed back to me what they have learned (or not learned) in our writing courses than it is to read essays in which students are arguing for a grade.

I'm imagining the same kind of dynamic--a direct evaluation--of students' learning experiences in our university. I think we can learn a lot by listening seriously to our students, through their writing, rather than by asking them to prove something to us through school writing.

At any rate, at the end of the last quarter, I asked the students to write about their first-year experience at Drexel--with some focus on what they may or may not have learned in our writing program. I've posted their essays over on the right of this blog: "Students Essays Describing First Year at Drexel." These essays were actually addressed to an Associate Vice Provost at Drexel who came into our class to talk to us about her interest in learning about students' experiences, but I also told the students that I would be posting these essays for other teachers to read.

I'm not going to say these are great essays--we do very little revising and rewriting in my classes--and, quite a shift for me, no peer response activities. We just read what others write and write back to each other. Still, I find their essays very interesting. I know we can learn a lot from our students by seriously listening to them--and what better way to listen to them then by paying attention to what they tell us in writing.

On the right side is also a link to a book my LSU students wrote--"Writing Ourselves into Each Other's Lives." They wrote that for other teachers to read, so I hope some of you will look at it. If you want to use any of the chapters, feel free to link to the book or copy the chapters. Let me point to the chapter on "Voice." My students always like reading that one. Another favorite is "Journals." And many of the essays in the last half of the book are, to me, startling.

Scholarship as Social Class Privilege

I'm going to do some kind of presentation next week--or posing questions--at the WPA conference in Boise about alternative forms of "scholarship." I would  like to question the notion of scholarship. I'm a little worried about writing what I really think--that scholarship is pseudo-thinking, only a vaguely disguised form of reifying social class privilege. Actually, once I frame the subject this way, it almost seems as if I don't need to go on. Of course scholarship is a reification of social class privilege,  a way of making certain that the people who are born to a privileged language and more or less objectified way of thinking reserve for their children spaces for that privilege. I could move here to our discipline's conversation about the place of personal writing in our scholarship and pedagogy--a class/geneder/race infused conversation--one notably taken up by writers like Jane Hindman,  Laura Michciche, Victor Villanueva, and Richard Miller.

The objectified pose is always more privileged than the subjectified--let's call that the move toward the pseudo scientific and away from the foul bone and rag shop of the heart. Bourdieu has extensively documented the correlations among class, need, and distance from necessity.

In spite of many challenges, "scholarship" is linked to objectivity (I suppose one could track this to the Enlightenment), with a gesture toward the subjective. But we can't escape that our field, like other fields, are instruments of social reproduction, reaffirming gender, race, and social class relationships through the agency of discourse and cognitive habits.

I don't expect that it will every happen, but it would be lovely if scholarship were to turn its head on its tail, privileging personal writing over author-evacuated prose (Hindman, 2003--I think she was quoting Villanueva who was quoting Bakhtin). The real truth is that I can entertain notions of alternative forms of scholarship because I have arrived--somewhat surprisingly, I might add--achieved tenure and beyond. So the privilege of writing what you think, rather than what you think you need to write in order to be published, might in itself be a reification of social class privilege.

There might be some irony here: when you write in your voice, which is closer to what you think than what you think you should think, readers are more inclined to listen. I certainly find this to be true in my classroom--when my students write from themselves outward to their classmates rather than to me for a grade. That latter kind of writing, which I have called fake writing, is genuinely boring to read.

I doubt that in our field we'll every validate alternative forms of "scholarship," let's call it free-form publication--by which I imagine a non-peer-reviewed venue in which one  writes for the pleasure of writing--the kind of writing I like to sponsor in my classes. If others hear the writer (as verified, for example, by the number of hits on a blog), well, that could be scholarship.

Now that I write this, I think it's pretty lean thinking. But it's what I'm thinking.  I'm kind of hoping  I'll get a few hits.