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

---- 

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.

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.

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.

Writers Workshop

I only want to start a post--my method of getting something down.  The overall theme of this blog is productive ways of helping students with their writing.  To help them with their writing, writing teachers need to challenge counter-productive strategies.

I've never been a fan of the Writer's Workshop (Iowa's--thank you, Maja) model, but I lately received from one of my students a reflection that cemented my disaffection.

Most of you probably know the model, but let me paraphrase:  two or three writers distribute their work for each class session.  Participants are to read the stories/poems/essays before hand and be ready with some hard-nose criticism.  I think perhaps one or two critics are to lead the charge.  Caveat: I have not participated in one, so my descriptions are hearsay--and somewhat common knowledge among those of us who have been in the business for a while.

I think that generally, readers are encouraged to be aggressive--not let anyone get away with shit.  The thesis behind the hard-nose criticism is that serious writers need steel-plated egos.  If you want to be a writer, get ready for rejection and ruthless criticism.  So the critics let go with their critiques while the writer has to sit on her hands, forbidden to speak (or defend or explain).  I think there might also be an unacknowledged showmanship at play here, a macho kind of thing--the critics displaying for the teacher (who has weathered the storm) how witty, incisive, and ruthless they can be.

If our purpose as writing teachers is to breed little Phillip Roths, this protocol might serve its purpose.  Weak writers aren't going to make it.  Only the strong will survive, arguably preserving the high quality of American literature.

And this is a load of crap, reifying a selfish, (Ayn/Paul) Randian genuflect to the capitalist enterprise under the guise of high art--as if art hasn't always been a means of justifying the status quo while pretending to critique it (with the field of art/literary critics doing their bit as cheerleaders).

I'm not going to argue my claim.  I really have little tolerance of people who like to advertise their aesthetic sensibility.  Their strategies for self-promotion are obvious--and obviously a consequence of an uncritical reading of capitalist culture that has made them pretend to critique what they really promote.

A counter-strategy--and the one I'm obviously promoting in this blog--is to imagine that all (or almost all) people can write things that others should read.  Consequently, our place as teachers is not to collude in sorting people out (in this case, on the basis of their "writing" ability) but rather to bring them in, do what we can to make as many people as we can fully enjoy the act of writing, of being, of communicating fully with others through writing (and more fully communicating with themselves).  We should search out any teaching strategy not predicated on making each person feel good about him or herself and her writing.  Within this kind of soft-minded (yes, and possibly feminist) pedagogy (we all know--the nurturing kind), there is room for helping writers move along, friends speaking to friends, saying something like, this sounds as if you said the same things twice--what would it be like if you cut this out & said it only once?

School-reading; School-writing

I'm engaging in a little avoidance writer here (blogs are clearly great for that).  I had two experiences yesterday (actually four) that have to do with my subject here, so I want to get them down.  The two that I'm not going to write about were my experiences with my classes, my English 2000 (the second of our required writing classes) and my English 4023 (Life Writing).  Both were very pleasant experiences and they have a lot to do with using personal writing in the classroom, but I'm going to move to two other experiences: a dissertation defense and my telephone conversation with a friend, who is also blogging about writing, although from a different perspective than mine.

I was the dean's representative in the dissertation defense.  The candidate is a very good teacher--she's been an elementary school teacher for some years.  Normally, I'm kind of cool-headed in a defense, but I became progressively irritated as I sensed in the discussion a less-than-critical perspective on the ethics of teaching school-reading (which is the same as teaching, to my mind, school-writing).  Actually, I got angry, but I kept my anger within and (I think) only displayed a kind of mild irritation.

The research (dept of education) focused on the use of a Commonplace Book, as it has been used by Denis Sumara.  Sumara has students reading a text multiple times and each time writing their thoughts in the margins of the text--and underlining and highlighting.  The candidate had teachers replicating this practice while reading YA "memoirs" (I am scarequoting because of the general practice of calling autobiographies memoirs just as many like to call diaries journals--for obvious and somewhat silly reasons).

The first reading is a traditional school-reading--teaching fifth graders to read for plot, character, language use & so on; the second, I gather, is a more free-form intertextual act, writing back to the book.  I call all of this school-reading and really, just a bunch of junk.

Let me start with Dewey (Experience and Education).  He claims what should be obvious: a fundamental educational objective should be that students learn how to learn, the life-long learning project, or put in my terms, fall in love with learning (reading/writing).  I imagine (what Carra was quick to critique as a false dichotomy) an opposition between natural (ok--authentic) and school reading.  This dichotomy (which, in my defense, I imagine as a continuum) is genre-based.  Let me be personal: the degree to which I engage in intertextual reading (writing in the text) depends on what I'm reading and why I'm reading.  When I'm reading academic articles and books that I think I'll be using in my academic writing, I write like a madman in the texts, doing the Bartholomae act, writing with and against the writer.  Later, I review the text and put my comments in a database of notes (I use InfoSelect) for easy retrieval.  But when I read for pleasure (ok--these are the extremes of the reading act), I read to get out of my skin, to disappear in the text, and the last thing I would do would be to underline or highlight or write in the text--which would be to pull myself out of the disappearing act.  Reading for pleasure is how I learned to love to read.  It' s why I'm a reader.  It's why, in a rather weird kind of extrapolation, and how I became an academic, discovering a profession I have loved for decades.  It's why I have not spent my life as an autoparts salesman, as my father was (I'm not derogating the profession of autoparts salesmanship, but I know I have loved my job two thousand times more than my father loved his).

I think in that last paragraph, if you are still reading this, you will find the source of my anger.  This practice of school-reading kills the love of reading.  It interrupts the flow of reading, the magic of being elsewhere, of being someone else, of not being me.  In the ensuing conversation (me doing my best to keep my coat and tie on), we explored the link between school reading (why, after all, do we want to teach students how to read like English professors?) and assessment, having a way of proving that we are teaching something.  I'm getting irritated now as I write this--and I know I am getting down only an outline of what I mean--and I hope that you will be able to read the link between school reading and school writing.

Ok, so I griped about all this to Carra on the phone.  She likes to challenge me on just about everything.   She said she likes to read novels like that: annotating, writing in the text, pulling out of the magic of the text.  She told me about her thrill when she first understood what a symbol was--she was reading The Glass Menagerie and in an epiphany understood what the glass menagerie signified beyond itself.  She pushed against all my reasoning, and I pushed back.  Thankfully, we came out of the conversation remaining close friends.  I still think she's wrong, and she's sure I am.  I thought later, she's much more of an intellectual than I am.  I think I'm a pseudo-intellectual.  I pretend to be an intellectual so I can keep my job.  But basically, I just like to read and write for fun, as I am doing here and as I am increasingly doing in the classroom, now that I know I can no longer be fired.

Why I'm Angry--Maybe

This is far from an original thought (and yes, I am aware of iterative theory).  It's probably a mix of Marx, W.C. Allee, and Steinbeck (who, i think developed his social theories from Allee through Ed Ricketts.  Social reproduction theory posits that cultures act like single organisms (that's from Allee), unconsciously reproducing themselves, developing structuring structures (Bourdieu) that ensure the continuation of the species/culture.  The players in the game are of course unaware of their roles.  They imagine they are acting existentially.  The collective, of which they are a part, imagines (as if it had a mind--as if the individual had a mind--as if I have a mind) it is also acting existentially on the basis of announced (usually rationalized) purposes.  Higher education is one of those collectives in our particular culture.  Let's imagine HEd as a being, a collective, an organism within the larger organism (as our organs are collectives within the larger organism of us).  HEd has the announced purpose of educating citizens to be thoughtful, productive, cooperative, critical thinkers (of course) in our culture, ensuring the continuation and even evolution of our culture (the current standoff in Congress signifies what a great job we're doing of that).  

But the unannounced purpose of HEd is to reproduce the culture, which includes the culture of domination and radical asymmetrical distribution of wealth, status, and privilege (WSP).  I and others have of course written endlessly about this (Bourdieu, Clark, Katz, Gee, Bowles & Gintis and so on).  English departments are no different, although they like to imagine themselves as redistributing critical literacy.  And likewise, our field is no different, imagining such silly things as that we are teaching our students in our writing classes how to interrogate culture and write themselves into a better world.  (and of course, I have to imagine that I am no different either, although here I am, pretending that I have broken free from the structuring structures to think, ironically, for myself).  But just supposing I had a useful thought  born of the anger I feel towards writing classes and any other classes that make students feel what the student I have quoted feel--and I know there are many who feel that way.  Basically, I think we learn counterproductive teaching strategies (the kind that make our students feel off-balance, stressed, disliking what they are doing when they should be loving it [check out Gary Tate's searing essay, "Halfway Home") as part of that structuring structure, of that social mechanism that guarantees the ongoing radical asymmetrical distribution of WSP.  Think about it: who are the kids who get through (I mean through the whole educational gauntlet, leading the to JD, MD, or PhD)?  Probably (and this is obvious) the sons and daughters of those who already have lots of WSP.  I think this stupid notion of rigor is one of the primary mechanisms--we need to make our students work hard instead of enjoy the process of learning.  Maybe I have to think about why this would make me angry.

[ok--I wrote what i was thinking.  as i said, highly unoriginal--but i think it needs to be revoiced from time to time]

And now I realize why I'm angry: I'm probably reworking my anger at teachers/the system that almost killed my love of reading and writing.  I have never been the best of students.  School still bewilders me.  

Keeping our students off-balance

A student sent me the following note (I have her permission to post it):

Dr. Peckham,

I want to let you know what's going on so you know why I've been missing class. I am overwhelmed more this semester than I have yet in my college career. Today I am meeting with a counselor to discuss dropping my 3015 course to help alleviate some of this stress, which is why I'm missing today, and discuss how to balance my schooling. I have been trying to manage it all but sometimes I just don't know how to. This reflects in my autobiography. I have been trying to finish my autobiography and add the parts about college, but it's hard because I have been feeling so negative about college lately that my writing reflects that negativity. I hate that. Remember in class when we talked about how we were nervous how our autobiographies were portraying us? Right now mine would portray me as a miserable human. I'm not. I'm the farthest thing from that. But with all this stress I can't think of what to write about in college. The difficulty? The amount of pressure I receive constantly from my parents, my sorority, my friends? How angry I am that my teachers have made me question my passion for writing? It's just a lot to realize that is what I want to say when I used to be happy-go-lucky Gabrielle. When your colleagues try to tell you that writing an autobiography is too easy, it makes no sense to me. This autobiography is not easy. It has made me reflect upon where I've been, where I am now, and realize that I am not where I thought I would be. I know that one of the beauties of life is that it will always turn out how the way you didn't expect, but writing this has made me question if I've done anything in college worth writing about yet. This can be terrifying, especially since I'm already a junior.

----- 

She is one of my very good students and writers in my life writing class.  She is really a lovely girl and has a million things going for her.  This note disturbed me on several levels.  I'm just going to think for a few minutes about where we might be going wrong and what we writing teachers can do to at least ameliorate this kind of response to education.  I guess I'll start with the obvious:  Dewey certainly wasn't the first educator to understand that we're teaching students how rather than what--we're teaching them how to learn (Experience and Education).  We want to encourage a love of learning so that learning will for the student be a lifelong project.  Students will love learning if it's an enjoyable, exciting experience, which it has not been for my student above--and we all know that she is hardly an exception.  Higher education seems to specialize in stressing students--preparing for the "real" world, I suppose.  I think we specialize in keeping them off-balance, which might be  a way of protecting ourselves, of maintaining control.  Freire has of course written about this extensively: the "knower" controlling by impelling into others their sense of being ignorant.  

My student is angry that that mechanism is undermining her love of writing.  I'm angry, too.  I think so much of what we do in our writing classes works against what should be our dominant objective: helping our students to love writing.  I used to think as a WPA that we could sacrifice that objective for the more defensible objective: preparing our students to meet the kind of writing tasks they will encounter in their other classes.  But I am convinced that if that latter objective discolors what I think should be the dominant objective, we are failing as writing teachers and as educators.  I think we make up all sorts of crazy justifications for teaching writing as hard work.  Our history if full of good intentions and bad instruction--guaranteeing that only those who have a kind of parental support and certain kind of linguistic environment will be able to endure.  I think the craziest thing we do is to fall into the "rigor" trap--as if life should be hard (all phallic connotations are inescapable).  This is just CRAZY.  I vote for life as fun.  I vote for teaching as fun, education as fun, writing as fun.  

I asked my students in one of my classes to list the kind of writing assignments they have been doing.  You might want to look at them on one of my pages (Kinds of writing tasks--or something like that).  Notice that few tasks are argumentative assignments (not in Kinneavy's s sense of scientific writing).  Yes, yes, I know: everything's an argument (which, I'm sorry, is like saying everything is strawberries).  And so we have gotten into this argument fixation.  Crazy.