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.

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.

The Research Paper

A recent discussion on the WPA list concerning documentation styles made me think of some essays my students wrote recently. With Joe Harris and Patty Ericsson, I (I think I'm reading them correctly, but with Joe and Patty, one never knows) don't really spend much time with documentation style. Along with teaching the more or less decontextualized research paper, this is wasted instruction and really not a whole lot of fun. They all use Easybib, but as Joe said--who cares? At most, our students might have to use a particular documentation style in other classes; if other teachers think documentation is important, they can use their class time teaching students about commas here and there. Actually, I do spend a little time on this, but it's minor--somewhere in the orbit of the ablative absolute.

I  think research is important, but as I have probably written elsewhere in this blog, I like to naturalize research. Students are doing it all the time--they just don't know how to link it to the kind research we do--the kind very few of them will ever be doing in the post-collegiate lives.

I'm going to print a research paper from one of my students below.  I have the students first write essays telling the rest of us about their (the writers') previous writing experiences and their attitudes toward writing and themselves as writers.

These quick essays are fascinating to read. Students like to write them; they like to read them, and I like to read them--so that makes it a pretty good writing assignment. In addition, we all learn more about learning --and not learning about writing. We write these essays in class--about 15 minutes. They are remarkably good essays for coming right out of the students' brains.

Then we read and write back to each other. I really like doing this. I also ask them to take notes when they see something interesting that they can use for the next essay--which is to generalize about students' experiences with writing.

For their next class, I  ask them to take about thirty minutes and write a brief essay generalizing from their own experiences and from what they have read from others. This, of course, is research--going outside your head to check with external sources. The students have never considered something like this is research--or the results of their investigation, reporting what they learned, as a research paper. It is, however, my kind of research paper. When YOU think of it, it's not that far from the kind of research I and many of my friends on this list do.

Link to what I asked the students to do:

Directions for Generalizing

As far as documentation, I tell the students that it's kind to tell your readers where you got your information and let them know how to find it themselves. In the essay below, we didn't need to document because they all knew the writers and where to find the specific essay on our Blackboard site.

I like what Kiera did in her essay (30 minutes, but I suspect she might have taken longer--I'll ask her). I like how she takes her generalizations and moves outward or upward to theorize. She worked from her own experience, generalized from others, and let her mind go, theorizing about the function of writing. Nice.
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Kiera:

From reading my classmates' reflections on their writing experiences, it seems a general trend that most prefer to write with a type of "freedom" (Nicholas), with "no restrictions or limits" (Ksenia). Lydia mentions her love of writing stories to make herself laugh, and Chris Z. mentions the thrill of storytelling, with "barriers lifted". Most of us have experienced the joy of writing, the satisfaction of creating a secret world or reflecting on the one we live in with no one to judge or stop the flow from heart to pen to page.

However, it also seems that many of us have certain prejudices against writing, some stubborn psychological aversion which tells us that we cannot write properly. We "worry people are not going to understand" (Chris J.). We continue to mark our writing mentally with the red pen of our teachers in high school, rating ourselves as "average" (Branston). These red markings may have damaged our view of what writing is, Zoë notes.

Kaila claims that there are too many structured papers demanded during high school, while Michael says he enjoys these types of more straightforward papers. Stephanie found her overall writing education to be "nourishing" to her personal growth.

There seem to be some discrepancies about who we write for, and why we write. High school has taught us "how to write", but what is the value if we have no desire to write? We must look at finding a balance by both writing for necessary assignments and also recreationally for ourselves and loved ones. I think we could also compartmentalize. If we think of academic writing as having to do more with skill than personality, we will feel less vulnerable about criticism of our academic writings. If we think of casual, creative writing as having to do more with personality, we may be more open to share with others through this medium.

We all agree that writing is necessary for our future careers, and this class seems to be a positive start to changing our perspective on the purpose of writing. If we learn to trust our writing more, as Bransten achieved, then we can come to know and trust one another, too. To know someone through writing, and to reveal oneself through writing, is a powerful tool. I do think the word "trust" is key.

Some of us have already taken steps toward becoming comfortable with our own writing. David was insecure about his writing abilities, so he joined the school newspaper to work on it. Sam discovered a passion for historical preservation and how this relates to writing and reading. Dr. Peckham versed himself in grammar and abandoned his romantic notions to discover the fulfilling reality of being a writer. He "ended where [he] wanted to be".

All of us are on a path to realizing how writing can enrich our lives by connecting us with one another and understanding more about our chosen career fields. If we make the choice to get past our existing ideas of writing, negative or positive, I think we will discover new types of writing that work for who we are and where we wish to go.
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Going from here: 
The next obvious assignment (or series) is imagine and construct some kind of survey, distribute and analyze it; do some internet research on specific issues that come out of these exercises; look in the library databases for readable (i.e., not written by rhet/comp scholars--with some exceptions here and there) essays on the subject; then write up singly or in groups the results of what they have learned. At that point, I would like to have them tell readers--like readers of this blog--where they found the information and how the readers could find it also.The would need some kind of documentation.

Bad Ideas about Writing

I am responding in part to Cheryl's and Drew's invitation to rant about bad ideas about writing. In their CFP, they referred to the 1975 Newsweek cover article about why Johnny (and Jill) can't write. We can track these complaints back to1828 when Bishop Whately responded to awful student essays by theorizing that instead of having students write declamations about abstractions like "Citizenship" or "Honesty," he had them write from the experiences of their lives: thus, the now infamous "My Summer Vacation" essay.

We know that Harvard's claims about students' inability to write tracked back to the incoming students' inabilities to parse the sentence, “He said that that that that that pupil parsed was not that that he should have parsed” (1870).

If you parsed that :), you don't need to be remediated. It's a cool sentence and brain game. I challenge my students to parse it in the grammar section of their final portfolios at the end of the quarter. A few get it.

But here's what good writing teachers know: students of course can write--look at what my students have written in my links on the right side of this blog. I see good writing flying in from students in our program like . . . like, well, like undocumented drones.

What's  interesting is why certain kinds of people say students can't write. We hear this from politicians, members of the business community, and from many of our colleagues. From the professoriate, complaining about student writing is  a rite of passage.You're not a professor unless you complain about students' inabilities to write. If you think they can write, that just shows how much you know about writing.

Complaints from members of the professorial class may be slanted projections of their own troubled relationships with writing. They are certainly the consequence of their inabilities to create writing situations in which students might want to write (look at my rules for good writing assignments above).

Listening

I know I have written about assessment a bit too much--imagining a way of assessing our writing programs through what our students say about what they have learned in our writing programs rather than having them "prove" (or argue) what they have learned by their writing performance in, let's say, school (trying to be polite here) writing situations. Key is that we're evaluating our programs more directly than by asking students to perform in an artificially constructed rhetorical situation (unless we argue that teaching students how to argue for a grade is the kind of genre--and social dynamic--that we want to teach). I will say, somewhat selfishly (and in keeping with my four rules of good writing assignments), that it's more fun to read what student feed back to me what they have learned (or not learned) in our writing courses than it is to read essays in which students are arguing for a grade.

I'm imagining the same kind of dynamic--a direct evaluation--of students' learning experiences in our university. I think we can learn a lot by listening seriously to our students, through their writing, rather than by asking them to prove something to us through school writing.

At any rate, at the end of the last quarter, I asked the students to write about their first-year experience at Drexel--with some focus on what they may or may not have learned in our writing program. I've posted their essays over on the right of this blog: "Students Essays Describing First Year at Drexel." These essays were actually addressed to an Associate Vice Provost at Drexel who came into our class to talk to us about her interest in learning about students' experiences, but I also told the students that I would be posting these essays for other teachers to read.

I'm not going to say these are great essays--we do very little revising and rewriting in my classes--and, quite a shift for me, no peer response activities. We just read what others write and write back to each other. Still, I find their essays very interesting. I know we can learn a lot from our students by seriously listening to them--and what better way to listen to them then by paying attention to what they tell us in writing.

On the right side is also a link to a book my LSU students wrote--"Writing Ourselves into Each Other's Lives." They wrote that for other teachers to read, so I hope some of you will look at it. If you want to use any of the chapters, feel free to link to the book or copy the chapters. Let me point to the chapter on "Voice." My students always like reading that one. Another favorite is "Journals." And many of the essays in the last half of the book are, to me, startling.

Walking Through the Door

Below is an essay assignment I am posting for my class next week. It's a prelude to the next writing task, which will be to write an essay to teachers, telling them what does and doesn't seem to work with teaching/learning writing.
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Walking through the Door

This essay will be in part a preparation for our last essay, which will be directed to teachers at Drexel (and really, a wider audience, because with your permission, I may link teachers around the country to what you tell them—I have a blog about teaching writing, and I’ll put your essays up there).

Here’s my thesis--and I don’t think it’s a half-bad one: education works when students enjoy learning about something. It doesn’t work when students don’t enjoy learning. Actually, these claims seem obvious—but I’ll bet there are many professors who would argue with me on this. But one of the things we want to do as educators is encourage students to be self-directed learners such that learning is a life-long project.  Self-Directed learning is in fact one of the twelve Drexel Student Learning Priorities  (aside—one wonders why 12?).  It’s one of the two we have adopted for our writing program.  In general, one might suspect that each of you has decided on a major because you have learned how to enjoy the activities associated with that major. (I know there might be other reasons as well.)

Since I am very interested in writing and would like writing to be a part of your lives, I’m going to make another claim—which I know I have already made in class: if any writing task assigned to you in any course (including mine) makes you have an uncomfortable experience with writing, then you will be inclined to have a bad association with writing; consequently, you will have learned the wrong thing about writing. This is just me. As I said, a lot of people disagree with me. But they’re wrong (joke--maybe).

Ok, let’s get to a topic we can write about. I would be very interested in your experience so far at Drexel. But I’m interested in a bit more than your experiences in courses. I’m interested in how this part of your life is different (I’m thinking of Annelise’s essay here, the essence of which that the childhood part of her is over and now there is that “adult” (and her use of scare quotes was appropriate, given how many of us act as “adults”) life stretching in front of her—and this year might be thought of as walking through the door.

So maybe you can spend a couple of hours telling us (in writing) what it’s been like, walking through the door. It will be fun for the rest of us to read if you can give us some specific issues and maybe scenes, things that happened and made you think about things, about life, about who you are, about what you’re doing (again, Annelise’s essay is a great start in this kind of thinking because she has described for us her changing beliefs—I know I really didn’t do it justice in class today).

As you describe your journey in this first year, it would be great if you would include something about your experiences in your various classes.  I (and a lot of other people) would really like to know about the kind of learning experiences you are enjoying and the ones you’re not. I’m good friends with an associate vice provost here who is very interested in retention issues. I know that I would like to share your essays about walking through the door with her—I’ll bet she’ll learn something by what you write.

An Act of Grace

I'm working through grief about Ali. I've been here before--or at least in a place too much like this one, but that doesn't make the journey any easier. I'm one thought away from crying.

When people ask me, innocently, how are you?, they really just want an easy answer, a sign that everything's okay and we can continue on with our day unburdened by other people's griefs. My problem at this stage is that if someone asks me, I tell them probably in some attempt to unburden myself. I know from hard experience that keeping grief inside doesn't work. It festers there. On the other hand, you can't shout it from the rooftops. Some people really don't want to hear.

These thoughts and one of my friends led me to a new thought about personal writing. I have for decades used writing as a way of getting things more or less "out there," not keeping them "in here." Of course they stay inside, but by having them out there as well, they're just not as bad. Sometimes, I  even figure things out. I think that being able to use writing like this is an emotional resource and that we should at least in our writing classes give this gift of writing to our students.  A few years ago, my students wrote a book of advice for writing teachers. If you look at the chapter on "Journals," you'll see how students use writing to cope with some of the difficult problems we face in our lives.

Writing Ourselves into Each Other's Lives

A close friend of mine has been listening to me whining. I called her on the day Ali died. She had had a particularly hard day herself, coping with something very sad in her life. She listened to me for about an hour on the phone, I suppose you could call it bearing witness to my grief. I talked to her the next day and she said something striking.

She said something about how it made her feel better by making me feel better by her listening. I can't remember her exact words--but I had never thought of personal writing from this point of view. It goes something like this: the writer gets some sort of release by opening up those emotions, fears, hurts that our culture teaches us to cover--the places where we are most human, and as Bene Brown has said, most vulnerable. I had never thought about how opening up is a gift of sorts to whoever was gracious enough to hear you. I haven't quite said it yet: the reader gains by opening up to hear the writer. It's really an act of grace.

DeCentering Writing Studies

I have finished taking notes on Laura Micciche’s Doing Emotion. Her book was well worth my reading. I appreciated most of what she wrote. And in those places where I had to acknowledge different universes, she brought up points for discussion.

Her important point to me involves the materiality of emotion: that we see emotion and we read emotion in texts—again, understanding texts as only superficially static. When we read emotions in texts, we are obviously reading ourselves, our histories, out cultures, our relationships with others, our friends we have loved, those who have died, those who have faded from our lives but left in our minds their traces.

Micciche makes a convincing argument to the necessity of paying attention to the materiality of emotion through language. Her larger point contests the debilitating dichotomy between emotion and reason—as if they could ever be separated by a theoretical centrifuge.

I believe with Micciche that when students are emotionally invested in whatever they write, they will write better than when defending some kind of canned topic. Not only will they write better, they will learn more about writing by having been engaged in the writing act.

Although Micciche links Marx’s theory of alienated labor to her overly-labored argument positioning composition and writing program administration as subjugated and feminized, I might turn it against what I have previously called performative, fake, or school writing—when we ask students to write essays demonstrating their competence or knowledge in order to achieve an external reward—a grade (see Daniel Pink’s TED talk on extrinsic vs intrinsic rewards). Reframed, we can see this kind of writing as alienated labor, labor that is “external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his essential being; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself . . . mortifies his body and ruins his mind.” This frame of school-writing might help to explain the marked difference between the kind of writing we get when we ask for honest or bogus information.

I appreciate the general thrust of Micciche’s argument, but I have to wonder about the space between what she and I see or whether one or both of us are blind. I wrote in a previous post that I have never “felt” the subjugation of writing studies or writing program administration—and I have often wondered about the disenfranchised claims—which Micciche extensively documents. I don’t have space to disentangle our differences here. I have always felt respected within the academic environment—and I think many of my WPA friends  have felt the same. I think some of this difference might be located in social class relationships—I don’t know. I do know that as a Writing Program Administrator, as a Professor, I have occupied an incredibly privileged social position. And I know that as a WPA, one of my dominant projects is to abdicate disenfranchised academic labor.  There is absolutely no logic that supports requiring writing courses taught by part-time teachers (other than the logic of profit).

Micciche argues extensively that Writing Studies suffers from its link to materialism, caring, affect. I think as a field we may have overly disenfranchised ourselves. I have seen a long history of rhetoric and composition scholars (note the way in which we have linked composition to “rhetoric”) attempting to argue for the centrality of our field. To me, these arguments have seemed silly. I think it’s equally important for citizens to be able to name in distant order the planets in our solar system as to be able to define ethos, logos, and pathos. I think as scholars we need to pay some attention to how our arguments make ourselves the center of the intellectual universe.  I love to write. If I can pass that on, that seems good enough. I’m not certain that this love should be required.

Writing Program Administration and Labor

I should be doing other work, but I have continued to struggle through Micciche's Doing Emotion this morning. The reading struggle has changed as I have moved through the chapters. In the early chapters, I resisted her theoretical language. I felt as if she were reproducing high-fives in the field. Micciche notes elsewhere Peter Herman's complaint that scholars in the field have reduced themselves in the tenure game to re-saying currently popular saids. I doubt that this trend is new. It might simply be an unannounced tradition of scholarship, mimicking a cultural phenomenon of resaying what's au courant. And who can blame? We all want to be known (see my previous post on numbers).

Here's how my reading struggle has changed. I strenuously resisted the  theoretical language in her first chapters, although I value, in my current emotional struggle with my dog's cancer, much of what she claims. We might even be "on the same page" (please forgive me). In her later chapters, the overly nominalized, abstract phrasing merged into straight language. But her message shifted from theorizing the ontology of emotion to a kind of rant (the kind to which I am prone). I think she has inherited this rant. I am materializing it here because I think the rant disables effective writing program administration and productive theorizing and scholarship in our field (loosely, the field of Writing Studies).

The first one involves the derogation of writing program administration. I have been a WPA in three institutions, beginning in 1990. I admit I am male--and my gender distorts my perception, but I have never felt marginalized in my work. In the three universities in which I have worked, I have always felt respected, my work and responsibilities certainly equal to a literary scholar's responsibility to acquaint students with Milton. Our responsibility is to help students with their writing, to make writing, like reading, a part of their personal, professional, and civic lives. I can't think of a more important responsibility.

As Writing Program Administrators, we are embedded within a historical labeling of our work as grunt as opposed to the etherealized labor of our literary brothers and sisters, but this imbrication doesn't mean we have to buy it. We can engage in the conversation, not be submerged by it. I have always been proud of my role in helping students make writing a part of their lives. I couldn't have wanted anything else. I also know many colleagues who have felt this sense of mission: of our desire to bring the magic of writing into our students lives. Most readers of this blog will know the names--the people who have thought of writing as pleasure, discovery, communication. NOT argument.

We have been embedded within an historically institutionalized structure that has profited from the "Johnny Can't Write" mythology. We require first-year writing and institutionalize adjunct labor as teaching faculty, paying low wages and no benefits. The hypocrisy is hardly obscure. I estimate that at my present institution, charging upwards of $50,000 a year per student, that we make about $40,000 a year per course by requiring this First-Year Writing courses. We try to imagine that our writing program is something no well-educated student could do without, but a little bit of self-referentially critique might seriously undermine that claim (that we spend hours teaching them about logos, ethos, and pathos and the logical fallacies? Please).

Let me get to the quick: WPAs don't need to apologize for the work they are doing (unless they are fetishizing argument). We can be doing good work. We certainly don't need to be whining about our own positions (or at least those of us who are tenured--actually, I'm in a non-tenured position right now). Our real problem is labor practices. We can certainly unite behind one clear objective somewhat based on logic: if what we are teaching is important, we need to have full-time teachers teaching what we pretend is important. Let's call this a mission. And let's stop complaining about our own positions (the thrust of Micchiche's later chapters); Either we require first-year writing courses and then engage in responsible hiring practices; or let's forget it.

I didn't get to the second rant. 

Desire

I led a workshop yesterday at the Dornsife Center, a community center in a largely impoverished area of West Philadelphia. The workshop is part of an outreach series sponsored by Drexel in an effort to integrate the university with the surrounding community. Given that context, I suspect this blog entry will be a study in irony.

The workshop was about writing. Five community members, about five students--who came, I believe, because their teacher was awarding them extra credit--and my good friend Rachel was there. Like me, Rachel is in love with writing; she's also a prime mover in the community-based learning projects sponsored by Drexel (again, the irony).

We wrote and read aloud about ourselves as writers. I learned a lot by listening carefully to what others were saying. A kind of theme emerged as we dug deeper into our relationships with writing. Everyone in the workshop had an interesting story--a very interesting story--about themselves as writers. I would love to go over all I learned by listening to their stories, but this blog entry would be an essay. Instead, I want to focus on this theme, a kind of block, a gap, a contradiction.

All of the participants wanted to write. They wanted to write stories, memoirs, poems, essays, histories, diaries, collections of letters from ancestors--the desire was almost palpable. You could touch it. But with one--or perhaps two--exceptions, there was a gap, like a physical distance between the desire and its consummation. People want to write, but they find every reason not to do it--and that gap seems to make them want it more.

Our conversation made clear that all of them would be writing more, would be writing the way they breathe or whistle or sing if it weren't for how they have been conditioned not to write. It's as if in school, we have taken their voices away, and this desire to write is mostly a memory, a memory of far back in their childhoods when they loved to write, when they had such pleasure in putting words on a page and hearing them said, but we've schooled that pleasure out of them. It was enough to make me shiver.

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.

Distance between Writer and Reader

My friend Carra constantly sends me things she thinks I should read. I know she’s trying to educate me, and that’s all right. A few days ago, she linked me to Virginia Woolf’s review,  “The Modern Essay.”  I’ll admit, I scanned it.  I had an initial response that was different from Carra’s. I’m not arguing here against Carra’s—that would be surprisingly stupid. But I am using this incident as a way of saying something about the teaching of writing.

What a lovely piece of writing.  Perhaps a bit overwritten. I wonder whether other readers sensed just a bit too much time spent on getting the right word, image, phrase, and rhythm (a shade ironic, given her objects of disaffection)? But I was reading closely enough to catch that she marked Max Beerbohm, and perhaps to a lesser extent, Walter Pater, as writers who managed through their writing to diminish the distance between themselves and their readers. Admittedly, Woolf’s examples of meaningless paragraphs may have been overweighted to ridicule overly-distanced discourse; nevertheless, Woolf makes her point: good writing diminishes the space between writers and readers. Bad writing is distorted by intermediating personas.

I am thinking about what this notion of distance has to do with how we teach writing in required writing classes.  The distance between writers and reader is possibly in indirect proportion to one’s pleasure in writing and consequently related to the kinds of writing situations we construct in required writing classes. It's not too difficult to imagine why when we read so much of our students' writing that we complain, a complaint that is perhaps misdirected.   

I have had the good sense before publishing this post to reread Woolf's essay--and I have to thank Carra for sending me there--and wonder that I had never read it.  The first link below is to Woolf's paragraphs on Beerbohm--I want all of my student to read this.  The second is to the essay, which if you haven't read, take some time, give yourself pleasure and read it more slowly than I did at first. An essay like this makes you wish for all the time in the world only to read what gives you pleasure and as slowly as possibly and reread again.  I told Carra, I would hate to be on the receiving end of V.Woolf's sword.  I think Pope said something about true satire severing the head from the body and leaving the body standing.  Woolf leaves with few exceptions most bodies standing.

Links: Woolf on Beerbohm
            Woolf, The Modern Essay
            Beerbohm, A Cloud of Pinafores

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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.

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Rethinking Objectives

Two things of interest this morning: First is that I find it easier to write in here (i mean in this blog space) than I do in word, like in my diary, where I usually write something that I might paste somewhere in a more public forum.  I have no idea why this is so.

Second: I'm going to write something in here about personal writing and teaching every MWF (days when I'm not teaching)--and possibly SatSun, the days of reduced pressure.  This is a way of accumulating my thoughts about the subject, some of which will reappear in different forms when I write for publication.

I feel wonderful this morning for reasons I can't explain. It's a lovely day and I enjoyed yesterday with my students and reading their work.  There is of course more to feeling wonderful than that. But when we feel wonderful, we should in some way mark it down so that on other more gruesome days, we can go back and say--there, it was like that, and I will feel that again.

I am thinking a lot about the kind of writing my students are doing and how this kind of writing might or should fit into an undergraduate curriculum and even in required writing programs.  I think I"m going to stick with only one thought this morning--the degree to which we have skated over our students' (dis)affection for writing--and whether we should elevate affect in our objectives--like consider affect as a separate outcome in the WPA Writing Outcomes. I don't think in all of our discussions in the 90s that affect even came up as a topic. Others can correct me here.

The real issue is the degree to which we backpedal a bit on our focus of preparing our students for the writing situations they are likely to meet in other undergraduate courses, one of the two most often cited objectives in our required writing programs--the other being critical citizenship.  Most of us probably recognize that the Service/CC objectives frequently alienate students from the writing habit that as writers we claim to cherish.

If you've read this far, I encourage you to read some of the autobiographies, reflections, and essays on vulnerability students in my Life Writing class have written.

Links:  Life Writing Essays

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An Andean Flute

I have had a few difficult experiences in the past several days, not the least of which has been my ill-advised zinger on plagiarism on the WPA-l.  These experiences have been difficult to internalize, resort and rearrange so that I could come out on the other side, having learned something that would help me make more sense out of my life and the lives of those with whom I intersect.

Being the kind of writer I am, I make better sense out of events by writing about them.  Whether I let anyone see the process is in many ways the subject of this blog. I began this blog simply because I was asking my students to create blogs.  When I began, I was decidedly blog innocent.  I still am significantly innocent, but through the process of writing these posts, I have learned a good deal about writing, private and public discourse and the many areas in between, and I want to try to get down this morning something of what I am learning.  One would think I would have learned more, having been teaching and writing for more years than I care to mention, but people who know me well know I'm a slow learner. My wife, Sarah, used to console me by saying at least I learn.

I ask my Life Writing students to write personal essays that they are willing to let the other nine students in the class to read.  Some of these students have been willing to edit their essays and allow me to post links to them on this blog.  Needless to say, this kind of exercise is a natural reader-oriented activity, quite a bit better than "Imagine you are writing a letter to . . . ."

I have imagined my blogging as something of the same, although exaggerated by the number of unknown readers as a consequence of my attempt to gain some kind of readership by announcing on WPA-l and with Google+.  For several reasons, I wanted to engage in the same kind of writing I have been asking my students to do.  First, I like this kind of writing--it's how I figure myself out.  Well, I'll stop there. It's dangerous to try to figure yourself out in a public space. I did know it was dangerous, but I know I'm trying to discover for myself something about writing and being somewhere on the continuum from diary (absolutely private) to published book--large, unknown audience (this is all Moffett stuff).

Truthfully, I like the risk. I can't explain why, but I do. Actually, I do know why, now that I've thought about it, but I'm not going to explain it. Key is resistance to a kind of enforced sterility that characterizes most professional writing. I'm not all the much different than one of my students I quoted in my last post.

But I have gotten into trouble, and now I'm trying to work my way out of it.

About fifteen years ago, I published in an online journal an article documenting/interpreting the origins of the Conference on the Theatre and Pedagogy of the Oppressed (PTO), featuring the work of Augusto Boal and Paulo Freire.  I was one of the original organizers in about 1994 or so (it is still ongoing--this year's will be in Omaha, NE, the place of its origin.  In the article, I recounted several very difficult moments in the conference. I had occasion to reread this essay yesterday and I thought I would include here a couple of paragraphs near the end of the essay when I wrote about my decision to make public some of the problems that might have perhaps been left private, reminding me of one of my previous posts in which I wrote about crossing the line [the essay was called "The Flute"].
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After multiple identity conflicts and role juggling, the advisory committee [I was a member] reconstructed itself and moved forward.  I would like to expose these conflicts because they reveal the underbelly of social relationships and the liberatory movement, but in any movement, as in any relationship, there are things one shouldn’t talk about because the public right to know conflicts with the individual’s right to privacy (a statement that is itself conflicted by the linguistic social construction of  “individual” and “public”).  There is a point at which one glosses over discomforting issues and gets on with the business of living.  Where we place that point defines us—as I have defined myself by telling you this story.

I know that in order to hear Paulo’s music through the cacophony, one has to see beyond; one has to focus not on individuals, not on class, race, or gender but on the contradictions within the system—and on the possibilities for action.  That’s what Paulo means by conscientizaçao.  I think that we also have to move beyond blame.  We have to stop blaming others and we have to stop blaming ourselves.  But it’s hard to remember that amidst the finger-pointing and shouting.

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