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.

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.

WPA Assessing and Dreaming

I had another good day of teaching. I know that the secret of teaching writing and enjoying it lies in discovering writing topics that you know your students will enjoy writing about and you will enjoy reading--and not grading. It's really very simple. I can imagine all the counter arguments--the ones about the importance of academic discourse and everything being an argument and so on. I'm just wondering tonight how the postsecondary structure has trained people to make them believe these arguments--when really, they should know better. They should think about about the wonder of writing, the way in which we find out who we are by writing about it.

My subject for this post is really something else (if I were an idiot writer, I would say, but I digress). It's about assessment.

First, a plug: Norbert Elliot, Ed White, and I just finished our final changes on the Galleys for a book on program assessment that we wrote. It will be out in March.  Here's the link:

Very Like a Whale

I have recently imagined a new frame for assessment--too late to get in that book. Here's the dream:

Let's imagine you are a new WPA.

You inadvertently stumbled on a new and effective paradigm of teaching writing. Your mantra was transfer of affect. One of your Student Learning Priorities was Self-Directed Learning. You imagined that students would continue to work on their self-sponsored writing if in their classes they enjoyed--like really enjoyed--their writing experiences. You imagined that their positive attitudes would carry over (transfer) into less inviting writing situations. They might even keep writing on the sly.

Most of your faculty seem to be taken up by this idea. Like you, they want to enjoy teaching writing. They don't think writing should be painful.

So after a few meetings, you and your teachers decide that affect, a positive attitude toward writing, should be the primary objective of writing instruction in the program .

You're teaching a class in the second semester and you ask your students to write about their histories as writers, their in-class and out-of-class experiences, including their experiences in the first semester writing class of your university.

So they write and when you read their essays, you find they are very explicit about their previous experiences, including their first semester writing experiences.

You are of course happy when they write about their wonderful teachers and writing experiences in Engl 101 (asking them not to use names). You pay attention to why they did--or didn't--like their 101 (and other) writing classes. As they explain which classes were good, you compare the teaching practices they liked to your own; likewise, when they explain which classes sucked and why they sucked, you compare the suck factor to your own practices.

You realize that there might be an authentic assessment model here. Instead of assessing a writing program by having students perform, you have them inform. Rather than have them submit portfolios or what-have-you with school-writing, you ask for serious communication. You ask them to write and explain, sometimes in painful detail, what they learned or didn't learn about writing in their previous classes and how these classes affected their attitudes toward writing and themselves as writers. And then you read their essays and through their eyes, you see yourself.

And then as a writing program director, you imagine this as a common practice: teachers self-assessing by reading about themselves through the lens of other teachers. If they're good teachers, they'll take their students' analyses seriously--not without caution--but seriously. As a WPA, you might even be able to get them together to write about and discuss what they have learned through this self-assessment practice.

If you're a real dreamer, you might even imagine ways of institutionalizing this self-assessment practice and follow-up teaching/writing groups. You imagine ways of tracking changes in student attitude/reports over the years--and in teachers reporting an increase in the pleasure they take in teaching and reading what their students write. You go to bed, happy.

Having Fun Again

I'm just saying: what would happen if writing teachers at all levels (think Lucy Calkins) made as their primary objective having fun with writing (writing and reading)--and note (as you will if you read my students' writing) some of this can be hard fun.

#personalwriting2.blogspot.com #ipeckham #personalwriting #funwriting

Self-Indulgence

I'm becoming more comfortable with simply writing something down here and in an uncritical moment, clicking on publish--of course I can think later and come back to delete a post, but if I've left it up for an hour or so, it may already have done its damage.  After a couple of conversations with forgiving friends who have been reading some of these posts, I have had to think about the self-indulgent character of blog writing, or at least my blog writing.

Carra stepped out a bit farther on the limb and noted that a good deal of my writing seemed self-indulgent--and I realize that right now, I am proving her point, writing about the writing life--as I see it.  I want in this post to reflect (there it is again) on two characteristics of personal writing and the kinds of writing my students do, particularly in Life Writing.  I think I first want to talk about my/our sense of readers, the readers in our heads and the readers who most definitely are not in our heads but who nevertheless stumble across our words and on occasion get back at us, letting us know they were, in fact, there.

When I'm writing in this blog, I have a sense of some of the people who might read these posts: several of my students because I usually let them know when I've made an entry (let's call this the rhetoric of enactment); many of my WPA friends, some of whom know what I went through two years ago (there's the self-indulgence in spades again); and some of my Facebook and Google+ friends, because I'm trying to promote this blog in both these venues (I'm going to try Twitter next).  And then there are some people who stumble across these posts and read them in any number of surprising ways, ways I could never have anticipated.

In our field, we generally emphasize to our students audience awareness--an emphasis Peter Elbow has at least partially challenged, noting that at times we need to be able to write without a sense of audience on our backs.  As a writing teacher, I have generally gone along with the audience-awareness trope, but my recent experiences have, at the least, complicated my sense of audience.  I know that when I am writing here, I am mostly trying to get down some thoughts about an issue, almost as if I were writing in my diary.  Getting the thoughts down is my priority--knowing I can always go back and get rid of deadwood and really stupid thoughts (assuming i can spot them).  But while I'm writing, I have a vague sense of some of my close friends who I think will be reading this--but it's as if I'm talking to them.  And then in the distant corners of my mind are memories of negative responses I've received about my writing over the years and a couple of negative responses to this blog.

To a certain extent, all the people who have responded to our writing/being in one way or another are on our backs as we write. I think the degree to which we can shake them off is some measure of our writerly self-indulgence.  And personally, I can say (Peter's point), the more I can shake this audience-burden, the more I enjoy writing.  I know that at times, I have to pay attention to audience (I'm trying to rewrite an article on the ecology of assessment right now--well, it's what I'm supposed to be doing, but I'm writing this instead, writing my way, if you will, into work).

I think I've worn this topic out.  I want to move from readers & self-indulgence to vulnerability and what my students are writing (and maybe, self-authored revision).  I'm going to try to make this quick; actually, the moves are obvious.  When writers self-indulge, they open themselves up.  And when we open ourselves up, we of course risk a lot, but we also open the door to other people, kind of like asking others into the party.  Some people are not going to have a good time, won't like the pictures on the wall and so on, but others will feel more or less at home.

That's not a very good metaphor--so let me try it this way.  In my Life Writing class, my students have really opened themselves up to each other.  Maybe rather than let people in, they have let themselves out--walked into the street and found a lot of other people like them, with the same problems, the same hurts, the same desires, the same fears.  Their words have helped them get out of their culturally imposed prisons (you are not supposed to go naked in public).  When my students discover commonality through their writing and when they write back to each other about these hurts and desires that we are taught we should keep under wraps, they discover writing.  It's not too hard to theorize how one can move from the self outward in this kind of writing (Chapter Two in Teaching the Universe of Discourse), but this post is already overly-long, and I really do need to be working on that article.

But a final word on revision.  You will see when my students give me all the links to their reflections on writing and vulnerability (you can see some of them by clicking on the Life Writing Autobiography page above) how they are paying attention to audience (the class as an audience and readers of this blog as a potential audience [and to a certain extent, me as an audience]) and both writing and revising with these different rhetorical situations fully in mind.  In my last class, to a person, they all said about my linking to their vulnerability essays, they wanted to look them over again first.

Ok--to the article.

#personalwriting2.blogspot.com #personal writing #writing #writing for fun #vulnerability #Irvin Peckham #Peter Elbow #audience #self-indulgent writing

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?

Apologies and Teacher Narrative

Teacher Narrative

This morning, I want to begin with an apology: when I wrote my last blog (before I edited it), I was feeling a little overfull of myself, and I let that spill out onto the page.  I had just had a wonderful day of  working with my students in the classroom; and a couple of other things are going right in my life; and so I simply got carried away with myself in a public sphere.

Apologies having been offered, I want to think in this space about another conversation I had with  Carra--I guess I depend on her to keep my honest.  She has been traveling with me in this personal writing conversation--and the interchanges on WPA-L.  The pseudo opposition between personal and academic writing is of course historical, having been played and replayed many times in the last three centuries--and in our own experience, in the Bartholomae/Elbow conversation (side note: one of my students perceptively noted how Bartholomae was appropriating Elbow's style in that CE/CCC conversation).

Carra suggested that many of us have a common narrative in which we travel in and out of writing for pleasure.  She painted a kind of mind-map for me, which I have tried to reproduce, but I'm not that kind of thinker, so I'm writing out here my map as my own way of understanding it.  She said there are probably many people in our field who think somewhat as I do, people who have been drawn into the profession because of their love of writing.  Here's where the trouble starts: this love runs into social demands on the writer.  In school, the writer runs into the teacher.  Our love of writing very likely (as was the case with me--and as is a common narrative) had a lot to do with our love of reading. I'm going to include a link here to my narrative of my -- i kind of hate to use the term but -- my literacy history.

School is really a killer.  Yes, we learn things there--but frequently, not the lesson intended.  The majority of students learn to dislike reading and writing.  This disaffection is in part a consequence of social class reproduction--which I and many other writers/scholars have explored.  I'm going to stick to writing here.  Probably most of us who are writing teachers managed to survive negative school writing experiences--and of course some thrived (that wasn't me--see my narrative).  I don't think it would be too difficult to create a graphic correlation between social class fraction and writer-survival.

Here's where the story gets complicated:  I think it's the tension between being and seeming (another side note: Bourdieu links these conditions to social class origins--guess who is and who pretends to be).  We come into being through our non-school writing, which we maintain (and most give it up) in spite of our school experiences.  The school writing is mostly seeming and an unsatisfactory experience for several reasons:  we're being graded for our "being," and we soon learn we have to "seem."

I can already see this is going to be too long.  Let me try to cut to the quick.  By the time we get our PhDs, we're pretty securely locked into the land of seeming.  We know how to negotiate it.  We learn how to get published, how to cite, how to assume certain poses, how (Judith Butler?) to obfuscate, seem more intelligent than we are, how to be someone other than who we are.  We learn how to "seem" intelligent, learned, how to quote Bakhtin, Foucault, and Butler, trying to insert ourselves in the unfolding conversation.  I know I'm being a bit cynical here; on the other hand, I have too often had to counsel graduate students about the need for simple, clean language--enough of this iterative discourse already.

Most of us probably segue into WPA positions--that was my trajectory after teaching high school for 13 years and returning to graduate school at forty.  When I was a high school teacher, I taught in California according to the closed-door concept.  I basically taught courses in Steinbeck and writing.  In my writing courses I had the simple formula to which I have (now that I am no longer a WPA) returned: create writing assignments you know your students will enjoy writing, that you will enjoy reading, and that they will enjoy reading what the others have written. Dewey and Freire are embedded in this formula:  learning should be exciting and fun, a lifelong project.  And as Moffett said, we are not only teaching what, we are teaching how.  If learning is fun in our classroom, we are teaching learning as fun.  If learning is a pain, well . . .

I am somewhat comfortable about how I handled my years as a WPA.  Nevertheless, much of what I did could be interrogated.  When I was WPA in my two universities, I lost my closed-door pedagogy; instead, I felt as if I were in a fishbowl.  I felt as if I had to create a pedagogical model that could responsibly be repeated by new graduate students and instructors and approved by professors in other disciplines.  Actually, I think I did a pretty good job of this.  I linked our objectives and genres to what we discovered were common in other disciplines.  There is of course an obvious fault line here: what if those objectives make students dislike or even hate writing?  And what if a significant proportion of our objectives in higher education are bogus--just a part of the game of maintaining social-class relationships.  I'm just wondering.

When I was no longer WPA, I felt a certain freedom.  I was no longer teaching in that fishbowl.  I closed the door, and I taught and have been teaching writing the way I know I should have been teaching all along.  Anyone who has managed to get through this reflection might see the threads that lead into unknown directions--like a spider casting her silk into the wind and knowing that sooner or later, one of them will catch hold.

Writing and Teaching for Fun

Writing and Teaching for Fun

Well, it's a Thursday night and I'm just kind of hanging around my computer and thinking about the personal writing question--not really a question to me, because I am enjoying how I am teaching writing.  I go into the classroom every day to meet with students who are learning about themselves and each other through what they write.

I want in this post to take up the question of transfer that Jerry brought up in a WPA-L post yesterday & which I have included as a post below. If I may be reductive, Jerry notes that personal writing (and again--let's get over the hangup of what is and isn't personal writing-- doesn't move toward generalization.  It remains in the individual's experience, the logic of One.  Academic (let's call it scientific [Kinneavy] comes from a different direction: from research of the many, legitimizing generalizations that can the be applied to the One.  I know this is oversimplified, but that's the general drift.

Jerry then brings up the question of transfer: of what we teach in required writing classes (RWC) transferring to other academic contexts.  I feel myself moving into dangerous territory here and think I should stop, but I guess I'll plunge ahead for a couple of paragraphs.

Ok.  Probably a good deal of what we teach in RWCs is bullshit, everybody's wasted time.  Most of us know what's behind this claim--lots of money, for instance.  Seat time.  Release of tenured faculty for more research because of the cheap labor.  I'm not saying that we couldn't imagine seriously useful writing classes for first & second year students--but, well, I needn't go on.  Anyone who has taken the trouble to ask student at the third and fourth year levels how much those RWCes helped them negotiate subsequent writing tasks knows what I'm saying here.

Let me get to two fundamental questions.  What do I want to focus on in my writing classes.  It's love of writing. It's learning how writing can help you understand more about who you are and who others are (when you read their writing) and then adjusting your frames as a consequence of what you read.  And when you get your students writing about what they are going through (and including what you are going through), they read about each other and move toward generalizations about the human experience by having read about real experiences.  Obviously, I'm relying on Freire here (unapologetically, my personal hero, along with Moffett and Bourdieu).  And if writers can reflect back on this generalizing process--well, what does one need to say?

And finally, the important question of transfer.  I'm a genre freak.  My dissertation was on the uses and misuses of genre.  But now I'm writing about affect transfer.  I think that if students have good writing experiences, they will be more open to meeting new rhetorical situations/demands. If they have made the kind of connect with writing that I and so many others of you have made with writing, they'll be able to move their love of writing and confidence of themselves as writers into new territory--understanding how this move into new territory works.

Writing should be fun; reading what our students write should be fun; our students reading what the others write should be fun; and thinking about all this should be fun.  I'm going to make a claim--if you're not having fun with your students and their writing, well, it will probably show.

The Question of Transfer

I'm going to post Jerry's post the WPA-L here and then struggle to answer his central question.  As usual, Jerry poses thoughtful remarks--and the earmarks of seriously thinking about his question rather than pose a rhetorical question, using the question as a frame within which to make his argument. I'm going to think carefully about his post and a way of engaging in his question.  I'll probably combine this with some links to others who have taken seriously my project of making writing fun.  I'm assuming Jerry wouldn't mind this reposting.
----
Irv,

Very nice summary of much of the argument for teaching personal writing.  As David suggested, many of us in the field don't view personal writing as too easy but just the opposite.  And I would take it one notch further: I suggest that personal writing is really a complex of different writing functions that rely primarily on one particular kind of data (i.e., personal experience) and tend to take a similar form (i.e., narrative).  But the purposes of these different "genres" ("sub-genres"?) can be vastly different.  Yet they also share one more trait: a limitation in the ability to generalize from them, because they rely primarily on personal experience and narrative.

Traditional academic and professional writing, different as they can be, share at this abstract level just the opposite functions and features: They use varying kinds of data and take a variety of forms with the intent of generalization.  And for me, this is where teaching personal writing becomes complicated, because the different functions of personal writing "genres" can make transfer a real issue--IF we assume that what students should learn from personal writing assignments should transfer to other kinds of writing and, specifically, academic and professional kinds of writing.

Let me give an example.  This semester, I am using Amy Chua's Wall Street Journal essay, "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior" as a starting point in teaching students how to actively and critically read texts, summarize texts, synthesize texts within ongoing "conversations," and respond to those conversations.  Chua's essay is interesting, because she relies virtually entirely on her own personal experience.  She mentions "tons of studies out there showing marked and quantifiable differences between Chinese and Westerners when it comes to parenting" and summarizes "one study," but she never provides any adequate citation of this research, and she leaves it behind after the 4th paragraph.  Also, notably absent is any data from other Chinese or Asian or other parents. All she provides are sweeping generalizations about Chinese parenting versus Western parenting (in addition, a clear either/of fallacy, among others).  Chua's essay, then, is a lesson in how not to use personal experience in argument.  Yet, there are moments of good personal writing, most notably her anecdote about her daughter Lulu (age seven) when trying to learn a particularly difficult piano piece, a narrative that Chua calls "a story in favor of coercion."  The problem, of course, is that Chua presents this as an example not just of how her "Chinese" (also called by experts in the field "tiger" and even "harsh" and "authoritarian") parenting can produce success for children but an example that, Chua claims, shows the superiority of her kind of parenting.

I don't know about you, but I've seen students--even graduate students--fall into this same fallacy of overgeneralizing from personal experience.  Yet, there are other examples--I think here of a number of Ellen Goodman essays--where the writer successfully relies on personal experience to suggest the possibility of generalizing.  Goodman was very good at telling a suggestive story and letting the reader do the generalizing from her or his own experience, although there were many times, where her personal stories would lead into actual arguments.  But that ability to use personal experience to suggest the possibility of generalization is such a nuanced art, I question the ability of many novice writers to apply their learning about that strategy to their own writing.

And so, I think many of us fall back on having students explicitly state the "lessons" of the personal experiences they relate and then, offer a final conclusion about how the lessons of these experiences could be relevant to that of others, perhaps even the readers.  And this is where I become ambivalent about the personal experience essay.  I understand the argument of having students succeed at writing early on.  Self-efficacy research is very clear: success raises self-efficacy levels and thus, breeds further success.  But the research is also clear that success as causation of further success must be perceived as relevant to that subsequent effort at success.  That is, what students learn from writing the personal experience essay must be seen as relevant to the writing of the next or some subsequent text(s).  That's why I tend to teach the use of personal experience as one source of data for supporting examples and the use of personal narrative as one argumentative strategy.  And I also teach reflective writing, which will include personal reflections, as a way for students to monitor their learning.

I am not saying, of course, that personal writing can't have other, just as important functions. There's research clearly showing the health and well-being values of journal writing that includes writing about personal experiences.  Personal writing can certainly help us explore ourselves and reflect on who we our and our relationship to the world.  But that brings me back to the larger issue of the purpose of the composition course.  It seems to me that if we view the comp course as preparing students to write academically and/or professionally, then the role of personal writing becomes a question. 

So, in the end, I'm not sure that personal writing is really the issue.  Personal writing exists.  It's not "easy."  It has important functions that should not be discounted.  But what's its role in college composition instruction?  And I'm asking this sincerely, because I am truly uncertain what I think about its role.