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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.