Peer Unresponse

I am increasingly using this blog as a place where I can document my thoughts about teaching writing--and the ways in which it is taught.

I am writing books about (mis)teaching writing--and using some of what I have written here as frames for what I write. But perhaps more importantly, I use others emails/thought to me as a way for me to rethink how we might more productively teach writing. One of my friends has been thinking carefully about peer response structure.

Hi, XXXXXXX

I’m writing a book, part of which will refer to peer response issues. I want to collect what my students have written about what they learn by unfocused peer response. These comments come in their portfolios—not really a response to a question, but they have remarked about what they learn by reading how others have written and then using those “other” essays to reframe what they have written or what they might have written.

I haven’t fully theorized this, but I have an idea. Constructed peer response (I’m culpable here) might to the students seem forced (duh). The real learning occurs not from what others say about what you have written but from your reading what others have written and using their texts as a mirror that reflects on your writing.

Maybe you see through others how you are seen. I haven’t figured this out, but here’s a try: the paradigm of peer response, while working in some situations, might be forced in our traditional peer response strategies (I think I wrote an article about this in about 1975). Maybe we’re forcing a professional paradigm onto non-professional rhetorical situations. At any rate, I have collected student comments on what they have learned simply by reading how others have written; that’s different than learning from others telling you how you should write.

I haven’t been posting for a while—interrupted by a trip to California (best state in the Union)—and some life redirection as a consequence of professional conflicts—how’s that for a teaser?

A friend included me in a post on her blog about a course she is trying to reimagine (it could use some re-imagining), so I took some time out from my personal life reconstruction to write the following reply:

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Hi,  ****. Thanks so much for the nod to my blog. I appreciate what you're doing in your course: Style in the Personal Essay. I'm going to make a couple of comments that may or may not be very helpful--I'm thinking as I'm writing.

One: over on the right hand side of my blog is a book my students wrote: Writing Ourselves into Each Others' Lives. I have had subsequent classes read from that book--the response is always good. Look at the chapter on Voice; or Kaitlyn's essay at the end of the book; Hope's; there are several others that students love to read and link back to their own writing. In sum, I almost always have students read other students rather than anything published. By reading what other students have written, they get ideas about their own writing.

I don't want to make this too long. I would think more about the reasons for having them write a certain kind of essay, i.e., in a specific genre--even something as amorphous as the personal essay. My take: students don't need to learn how to do this or that; what they need are good experiences in writing (I get criticized this claim), but what the hell--you want them to be writing what they will enjoy writing and reading--I mean reading and responding to what others have written. There are no end of topics that students will automatically start writing about (when they know they are writing primarily for their classmates (and the teacher--who is NOT grading but is reading as the other students are reading).

Leading to another topic: we can perhaps move away from thinking that students need to produce completed pieces-- X number of essays. I have lately moved away from revision--kind of letting students revise on their own. When they know that the primary readers are the other students, they automatically revise. Automatic revision was one of the first things we learned about in the Bay Writing Project—nods of gratitude to Jim Grey & Miles Myers.

When students are writing like this, there is all sorts of room to have some in between sessions on ways in which they can improve their styles, and little structural problems that most students seem to make. 

I also like to have students read "Correctness" by Joe Williams (in early editions of Style). Then we can have interesting discussions about what's right: He don't know how to tie his shoes backwards-- or-- He doesn't know how to tie his shoes backwards (and of course what "right" means--leading to Bill Clinton's famous remark: that depends on what "is" is-- for a little humor). Then we can have discussions about whether the comma goes inside or outside the quote marks and whether it matters and why some people think it might and why others don't give a shit.

(personal admission: I had to think about whether I could write "shit"). Talk about cultural imbrication--including a reference to something we all do!

We need to think about all the writing they do as writing. That includes the responses they make to each other (and the responses to the responses). What I'm getting at here: the flow, the continuous flow of writing--as is happening right now, me with you. That's writing.
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I wrote my response to **** without looking at the course description for Style in the Personal Essay.  After looking at it, I wrote the following:

I just looked at the course description: looks as if people threw in everything but the kitchen sink. Notable that nothing is in there that aligns with attitude toward writing, the experience of writing. It's almost as if we're teaching students how to write nothing to no one--but pretend that it's something to someone. Really awful course description. 

I'm going to add my final impression: it seems as if much of what rhet/comp people do (and have historically done) is directed outward--proving to outside stakeholders that we're responsible educators and in the process eliding what we know as writers and writing teachers (or maybe forgetting what we once knew).  In sum, I think we need to direct our pedagogy back to the students, helping them with their writing and experience of writing and imagine outside stakeholders as tertiary at best.
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Postscript: I hadn't looked too carefully (typical me) at that picture. One needs to add the act of writing, which doubles the transition from the old me to the new me--this at least is true in expressive/reflective genres.

 x

Assessing the Misuse of Language

I am on my way back from the 2016 Writing Program Administrators Conference in Raleigh. This may have been for reasons about which I will write later my last WPA conference, after having attended them religiously for twenty-six years, a time to see friends I have known for these two + decades and meet new people coming into the field.

As always at conferences, my thought processes kick into high gear (or I think they do), a consequence of presentations and sideways conversations. Back at my home institution, thinking is more of a solitary occupation--the conversations being largely virtual: my engagements with books, articles, and listservs. 

Engaging in real time conversations with people who are similarly invested in teaching writing--well, it will be hard to let go. It was a lovely conference. I am very glad I went. My thanks to Jessie for organizing it--and of course to Susan for her dynamic leadership, frameworking who we are and what we do. And I very much appreciated the WPA article award. It came at just the right time. Kairos.

I want to focus in this post on a singular issue that my mind has been circling around throughout the conference. I write endlessly about institutional complicity in promoting inequality--a structural function that seems obvious to me. Asao in his keynote address focused on whiteness and language. Both of us have argued perhaps incessantly how language through assessment practices promotes inequality, privileging as normal discourse the language habits of the already privileged. I don't know how someone couldn't get this. I like to imagine how assessment would re-function if we privileged working-class White and working-class African/American language as the normal discourses. Students who would write "He doesn't know how to write" instead of "He don't know how to write" should be sentenced to remedial instruction. It's not as if one locution carries more meaning than the other--that is, other than signifying the social class to which the speaker belongs.

The use of language as a controlling structure is an old story, beginning far before Students' Rights to Their Own Language. Like Whiteness, this privileging function seems invisible. Rarely do we hear in writing assessment discussions reflections on how through our practices we are reproducing social injustice through the languages and genres we privilege. But when you write it, materialize it in words, this oppressive use of language habits seems obvious. Think about which language was privileged in post-1066 in England. Think about how in our field for questionable reasons, we privilege argument as a more sophisticated genre than autobiography. What?

Many of us at this conference have pushed this language and genre privileging thought further--asking ourselves what other practices in our field we follow that are invisibly reproducing social injustice. When you start thinking this way, little gremlins pop up all over the place. I have to put a plug in for Chuck Bazerman's book, A Theory of Literate Action. Ok--he over nominalizes (Williams), but he wonderfully frames how we unthinkingly do what we imagine as conscious action.  

One has only to start with grading student writing, intersecting with whose language framed as the normal discourse drives the grading; teachers maintaining structures of control to keep students under their thumbs; teachers dominating classroom conversations; autocratically constructing the curriculum or implementing WPA constructed curriculum; mainlining genres that keep the power structure intact; reinforcing the hierarchical social class structure through the department and ranking of teachers from full professors down to the part-time teachers. It doesn't take too much "critical thinking" to take the bandage off, to see the wound that resists healing, perhaps because it hasn't had air. 

As usual, I can see I'm heading for an overly-long post. Let me focus on one takeaway.

Here's what surprised me at the conference. I was at several sessions in which I heard presenters talking about assessment as a collaboration among students and teachers to improve the courses in which they were all learning. The important shift (note: I resisted calling it a turn) lies in the object of assessment: it is not the students; it is the course. The new indirect assessment is in fact assessment of student writing--we should move beyond evaluating our course by ranking student texts or portfolios in fake writing situations in which they are writing for grades--are we kidding? The direct assessment is directly assessing the course--not the students' responses to fake writing situations.

I will be writing more about this, but I wanted to get down my pleasure at hearing how several of us seem to be moving in this direction of authentic assessment. There are two key concepts in this move. First, our primary stakeholders in this version of a direct assessment are the people most directly involved: the students and teachers. We should be wary of taking our eye off the ball, of thinking more about how outside stakeholders--chairs, deans, provosts, and politicians--evaluate our evaluations. That's a good way to strike out. The primary stakeholders are the people in the classroom.

Second: we need to stop being so damn defensive, feeling as if we have to prove to outside stakeholders the “value-added” of our teaching. We need to believe in our own professionalism, resist the de-professionalizing agendas behind which administrators rise, politicians gain votes, and assessment industries make money.

This post is too long, but let me add a final thought. I'll try shorthand thinking. Consider this: we de-professionalize ourselves when we allow our teaching to be compromised by conspiring in projects that allow part-time labor. Anyone who has halfway thought about this realizes that we do this so that the ever-increasing pool of administrators can make money and create the need for more administrators. We have been complicit for interesting reasons in the coterminous growth of part-time teachers and administration, aligned with the decrease in TT and full-time positions.