Tilting against Grades

I feel as if I am tilting against windmills. It's a little late in life to be attacking these sort of things, but I can't stop. I didn't mean to get into a WPA-list conversation about grades again, but when a friend told me about Quinnipiac's first-year writing policy of no-grade/final portfolio, I wondered how many other schools had managed to reimagine education.

Here are the colleges that have responded to my question of whether they have a no-grade/pass-fail/final portfolio option: University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; Kingsborough CC, CUNY; New College of Florida; Evergreen College; University of Maine. 

The general response that I get when I suggest going to non-graded writing instruction is 1. we can't do it because the students are so grade conscious; 2. we are in an institution governed by grades; 3. students will slack off if we don't motivate them by grades.

I am not convinced by the argument that because everyone else is doing it, that’s what we have to do. For academics who prioritize critical thinking, I should think that argument would fall flat on its face. 

I think many teachers know: teachers like to respond to student writing if they are seriously responding, talking back to the students. This is writing as communication. But they do not like/even hate grading. That's why teachers procrastinate with that stack of papers.

Teachers know (and research is clear about this): students look at the grade. If it's an A, they'll read the comments; otherwise, they either ignore the comments or read them in order to fight back. These are not productive learning discussions.

Teachers complain about students who come to them and ask, but what can I do to get an A--the what-do-you-want syndrome. Like who's at fault here?

And finally, we have the argument about motivation--that if we don't motivate them by grades (presumably with high standards, leading to raising-the-bar rhetoric), they won't work on their writing. 

Left out of the grade-motivation argument is how are we teaching writing? Let me assume (and my experience and research confirms this) that most students really like to write--and they want to improve their writing. But some of the ways in which we try to teach writing (the we-know-what’s-good-for-you-strategy); well, if I were a student in a pass/fail course, I would also try to skate as close to the nether edge as I could (a response to Ed's and Val's post). Some of the stuff we try to teach students is pure junk and they know it.

Our research at Drexel is very clear: half of the students enter our first-year classes disliking, sometimes hating writing. Nearly all of them began pre-school and kindergarten enjoying scribbling/writing. As teachers, we have killed that pleasure in writing--the early death usually beginning around 5th grade often in the form of the five-paragraph essay. Our challenge is to bring back their early pleasure in writing. If you're not doing that, what are you doing? 

Anyone interested in this conversation should consider Tagg’s (the learning paradigm) distinction between surface and deep learning, intrinsic or extrinsic motivation or perhaps view Ken Robinson’s TED talk on creativity. Also Jeff Schmidt’s Disciplined Minds—which might explain our profession’s inability to unhook itself from grades, even though some teachers know the pleasure of responding to student writing without reducing their responses to a GRADE.

The Displeasure of Reading and Writing

I'm still reading Tagg. He's not giving me new information. As I pointed out in my previous blog--Tagg's is progressive pedagogy: Dewey, Freire, Moffett, Judy, Rose, Elbow, me.

Perhaps what surprises me is that student/learning-centered pedagogy chronically remains in the back seat--if not in the trunk. Educators pretend to care about student learning, but . . . well, particularly as they gravitate into upper administrative levels, educators lose their foci on student learning, focusing instead on numbers and forms--really, the appearance of teaching. If you think of Plato's parable of the caves, this retrogressive progression might be inevitable: the higher your social group membership, the more abstract your perception (Bourdieu). At the highest level, you are with the stars. Forget the fools in the shadows.

From the perspective of upper level administrators, or worse, politicians, our students are shadows. The higher you fly, the less you see on the ground. You reiterate commonplaces that sell in your social group: the most common one being the Socratic trope about the declining literacy and cognitive abilities of the kids these days. Unfortunately, this trope and the theorized remedy--usually
framed by standards, outcomes, and assessment--smother good teaching, the kind Tagg describes in The Learning Paradigm, and Dewey described in Experience and Education. Key to good teaching is knowing how to learn with your students.

I have many things I have learned from my students, but I am going to focus here on two that really bother me.

I have recently been struck in my student's portfolios by how many of them say they no longer do self-sponsored writing and reading. They feel stressed, too busy. I suspect that many of their postsecondary school activities are disengaged, the kind assigned by tough-love teachers, brainwashed, as Jeff Schmidt (Disciplined Minds) describes it, by their passage through the educational gauntlet. (I know: I think I've survived the brainwash).

Because the students are disengaged, they put off their work. Then they get into a frantic mode, which is always counter-productive. They write bad stuff, stuff they don't care about. They just want to get it done and turn it in to the teacher, whom they hope to please.

Here's what one of my students wrote:

For me personally when doing research papers on traditional topics in school I more or less just gather the required amount of sources, get the facts and then spit them back out onto the page in a way that I used three or more sources. I also found that when researching a topic that you are not interested in you never do more than you have to; it’s an obvious fact that I wish my old teachers had noticed but then again I always thought they gave us these projects as to learn the right way to research and cite properly.

Who wants to read that kind of writing? The normal response is to whine about student writing.

I feel terrible about what we are doing to our students. I'm going to frame and reframe my questions:

• When your student leave your writing classes, are they more excited about writing then when they came in? 
• Do you have a way of discovering the percentages of yes and no and what what you might do to improve your courses so that you get more yeses? 
• And if they don't enjoy writing in your classes, what on earth is your logic? What?

Objectifying (Student) Texts

While reading John Tagg, The Learning Paradigm College, I have thought more about the essential mis-educating practices that encourage, as Tagg frames it, surface rather than deep knowledge. I like the way Tagg revives Dewey’s notion of education verses mis-education. Mis-education creates surface knowledge, the kind of knowledge one absorbs for tests—or essays to be graded. Tagg characterizes this as episodic vs semantic knowledge, atomistic vs holistic—linking these dualistic categories to entity or incremental theories of knowledge—the former implying people are born with fixed abilities, the latter, that people learn and grow. 

The overall frame opposes performance to learning, the former proving a knowledge or skill for an extrinsic reward (grade/money), t

he latter for learning for its own sake, exploring the world and integrating the new knowledge with old knowledge, transforming both old and new knowledge—semantic knowledge, the words gathering meaning by their relationships to other words and their grammatical function as opposed to episodic knowledge, bits and pieces to be reproduced on tests or other performances and then forgotten.

In many ways, this conversation links with a WPA-l conversation on reading—the teacher imagining that her responsibility is to teach students how to “read critically,” generally giving them texts they wouldn’t read on their own and having some way of testing whether they had read the assignment.

I’ve made and over-made my point on how wrongheaded this is. I want to ignore this hard-reading theme to think more about grading, a consequence of a conversation I had with a friend, who has recently stopped grading her students’ essays and found herself enjoying teaching and writing more—and her students likewise, learning and writing.

Our conversation led me to think about the objectification of student writing. When we grade/evaluate an essay, we objectify it. In total disregard of Louise Rosenblatt’s transactional theory, we reduce the text to an object, not a medium for inter-subjective exchange, the dialectical flow of thought between a reader, a text, and the writer’s ideas within the text, and the culture speaking through the writer, reader, and text. No, rather than something alive with thought, it’s an object to be graded. The text has in a sense lost its meaning. It is little wonder that students dislike being graded and teachers dislike grading. To grade “objectively,” the teacher has to objectify, take the life out of a text, kill what they imagine they value.

What a difference when the teacher is allowed to “read” the text, to interact with it, to listen to the life within it and respond to it inter-subjectively. Suddenly, writing is alive: the student’s text and the teacher’s response—hopefully, intermixed with other students’ responses. Suddenly, it is a pleasure to be reading and writing back. And for the student, it is a pleasure to have been read. It’s not overly difficult to link this theory of reading or objectifying student writing to Freire’s theory of objectifying peasants.

Writing for Social Justice

On the WPA-l listserv, Kathleen Shine Cain asked for articles on writing for social justice. I think she has in mind a course teaching or encouraging students to write for social justice.  I wrote the note and created a bibliography below that I decided to repost on my blog, mostly because I was thinking of a course I might want to teach. Here's what I wrote to Kathleen and a list of references I created (actually, this is what I wrote after I wrote to Kathleen):

Writing for social justice can’t be divorced from how we educate and have been educated. I don’t agree with a lot of what is in the books below (except for what I’ve written), but you can see this is a rich and long discussion. I think most of the references concern how we should be (or not be) teaching students to work for social justice. Jessica Singer’s is probably the closest to making the argument you seem to be aiming at. 

I don’t think any of the books or articles address: here’s how you write for social justice. I would run this course by having students investigate social justice issues in the surrounding community.

I would work from their experience—having them write about their memories, experiences, perceptions of social justice, and work outward from there. I'm thinking of any times they or their friends have been the victims of social injustice--or instances in their communities in which they have witnessed social injustice (and if they haven't seen any--well, there's a topic for discussion). I would also want to them to write about how they reacted, how they would have liked to react, how they might have wished others would react.

I would them have them read and respond to each other and then write more, exploring from these examples thoughts about social injustice, what it is, why it is, what's being done or not done about it, what might be done--the kind of writing in which they look on the internet and find out what others have said and done about these issues. So they might write again, having written, read, and having been read.

Then I might have them explore the seriously pressings issues in this local community (Philadelphia) and/or their home communities. This could be online exploration and onsite exploration--done in teams. There is of course no end of problems in Philadelphia, beginning with the schools, poverty, homelessness, the high incarceration rate, literary rates, unemployment, community deterioration, community/police relationships. I would also have them ask what Drexel has been doing about some of these problems (we have several real and pseudo community-based programs). I would have them keep records and notes of all they are discovering and discuss in class that what we are doing is research and have them talk and write about the importance of research--how it can promote social action, social responsibility.

I would want them to write up the results of their research which might also point toward social action. I would have them investigate ways of publishing their research, what they have discovered through Drexel publications, through community newsletters, through newspapers. I would probably want them to explore ways of making a class book (it's easy; I've done this before - see  Writing Ourselves --  that we could put online; or as an alternative or supplement, a class blog and find ways of drawing readers into their class blog--really an issue blog, the issue being social injustice in our area. I would want them to finish the course with social action suggestions: what can be done from here; what they might do--or maybe reflections on the tension between the call to social action and their own struggles as they try to negotiate the demands of school and their dreams of finding work that will be more like play than work.

Frankly, I wouldn’t have them read anything--at least not anything scholarly. Well, I might have them read Anyon's classic article & maybe Burton Clark's article about The Cooling Out Function--and some excerpts from Lareau's book (and maybe try to get an interview with her--I think she's still at Temple).

[Now that I've written this, I think I've planned a course for myself].

Below is a list.  Again—when you’re talking about social justice, you are also talking about school system that perpetuate social injustice—as if that is in part their function (which it is [see Bowles and Gintis]):

Anyon, J. (1980, Winter). Social class and the hidden curriculum of work. Journal of Education, 162, 67-92.

Berlin, J. (2003). Rhetorics, poetics, and cultures: Reconfiguring college English studies. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press. (Original work published in 1996.)

Berlin, J., & Vivion, M. (Eds.). (1992). Cultural studies in the English classroom. Portsmouth, NH: Routledge.

Blitz, M., & Hurlbert, C.M. (Eds.). (1991). Composition and resistance. Portsmouth, RI: Heinemann.

Brodkey, L. (1994). Writing on the bias. College English 56, 527-47.

Clark, B. (1960). “The Cooling Out Function in Higher Education.” American Journal of Sociology 65, 569-76.

Dews, B. & Law, C. (Eds.). (1995). This fine place so far from home: Voices of academics from the working class. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Ellsworth, E. (1989). Why doesn't this feel empowering?: Working through the repressive myths of critical pedagogy. Harvard Educational Review 59, 297-324.

Friere, P.  (1994).  Pedagogy of Hope.  (R. Barr, Trans.). New York: Continuum.

Frey, O. 1998. “Stupid Clown of the Spirit's Motive: Class Bias in Literary and Composition Studies.” In Shepard, et al.

Gee, J. P. (2004). “Learning Language as a Matter of Learning Social Languages within Discourses.” In Language Learning and Teacher Education: A Sociocultural Approach, ed. M. R. Hawkins. Clevedon, 13-31. Clevedon UK: Multilingual Matters.

Kozol, J. (1991). Savage Inequalities. New York: HarperCollins.

Lareau, A. (2003). Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life.  Berkeley, CA: University of California Press

Peckham, I. (2007). The stories we tell.  In K. Cahill & L. Johannessen (Eds.).  Considering class: Essays on the discourse of the American dream (pp.  169-182).  Berlin: Lit Verlag.

Shor, I. (1992). Empowering Education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Shor, I. (1996). When Students Have Power: Negotiating Authority in a Critical Pedagogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Thelin, W. and J. P. Tassoni, ed. (2000). Blundering for a Change: Errors and Expectations in Critical Pedagogy. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook.

Finn, Patrick.  Literacy with an Attitude.

Greenbaum, Andrea.  Insurrections.

Singer, Jessica. Stiring up Justice.

Johnson III, Richard Gregory. A Twenty-First Century Aproach to Teaching Social Justice.

Also look at mine: Going North, Thinking West: The Intersections of Social Class, Critical Thinking, and Politicized Writing Instruction.

Those are some of my favorites. I can’t help but add:

Bowles, H. & S. Gintis. (1976). Schooling in capitalist America. New York: Basic Books.