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?

Grades Suck

I'm keeping the syllabus conversation going. Below is an edited response to Bill Thelin, one of my good friends, who spends, I think, a fair amount of time negotiating a syllabus with his students. He cited Ira Shor's practice of negotiating a syllabus, described in When Students Have Power and Empowering Education. I think Bill also gives more importance to grades than I do. I think grades suck.

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 To Bill: If one demotes the function of the syllabus, then we don’t have to waste a lot of time on it. The syllabus, to my mind, is mostly a bureaucratic invention, serving more as a document to circulate outside the classroom. If one takes up seriously (and this Ira did—and to me, that was his main point; which was also Freire’s point) learning as collaboration rather then delivery (deconstructing, as F put it, the student/teacher dichotomy), then we don’t have to spend a lot of time negotiating a bureaucratic construction. Rather, we’re here to work on our writing; let’s go. 

I think the teacher also has to let the students know how the course will be run, the primary goals, and the kind of projects the teacher and students will be doing. The teacher also has to find ways of getting useful feedback from students and know how to adjust in light of that feedback. Ira used the after-class-group; I use a class journal. 

I think objectifying the institutional imperatives could be useful. But we should also note that in many ways, those imperatives are elastic and often disposable. We make our own choices as teachers about which ones we’ll follow (and the degree to which we want to bend our principles in order to have a job). 

We will disagree on grades: no, we don’t need them. They are silly. I don’t need them. The students don’t need them (I recognize the imperialism in that claim—let’s say they have been taught to need them, but most of them seem to know better). The bureaucracy needs them because they think they need them as a consequence of a structural inadequacy. 

Within this discussion, let me highly recommend 

Schmidt, J. (2001). Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-battering System That Shapes Their Lives. New York: Rowan and Littlefield.

I think anyone in the field of education should read Schmidt’s book. I think Schmidt would interpret grades as a way of inducing stress and maintaining control. You have to maintain control when you have adopted an adversarial rather than a collaborative stance.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.