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. 

On the Possibility of Losing a Dog

I have to admit: I have become addicted to numbers. I write somewhat regularly on this blog because I like seeing the numbers of people who read it. In many ways, this numerical feedback is more important to me than feedback I get from having articles or books published. I know that this admission undercuts my almost unrelenting attack on the grading phenomenon--that my addiction to the number of readers is only a minimally disguised addiction to grades.

I could reflect and even undercut that admission, but I don't want to go there this morning--I want to go to a different place, the more serious reward for writing, the reward of having explained what was only half-thought in my head. I had a bad night last night--I found out that my dog very likely has cancer (he's being tested further today to determine what kind). So during the many times I was awake, I thought of all I wanted to write on this blog--one of my ways of not thinking about what I don't want to think about. If I wrote down everything I thought, you would still be reading this tomorrow.

I'm going to try to stay with two topics: "embodied" writing and maybe get back to grading student writing. I've been struggling through Laura Micciche's Doing Emotion lately. Much of what she writes seems important to me--particularly in these days when I'm dealing with Ali's cancer.

There was quite a bit in her book that I would challenge as a model of effective writing instruction (a bit too much time on having her students perform rather than write and respond to each other), but I think the gist of her treatment is both subtle and important. Writing, reading, and emotion--they are linked actions with the illusion of stasis--it is perhaps that (textual) illusion that allows one to "grade" or freeze a text. Micciche took a few chapters to make her point and I'm having a difficult time reducing it to my own meaning--but it is what I feel. This feeling, this emotion of writing is what draws me forward, draws the words out of me. In his recent article on James Britton, Russel Durst  describes Britton et al.'s belief that expressivity (there, I did it) is the matrix of all writing. Writing springs from the urge to "say," which is perhaps the obverse side of being "said" (Freire would say, being a speaking subject rather than a said object).

I have used writing to write my way out of my wife's early death. I use writing to write my way out of bad situations and into ways of imagining new ones. Writing for me is a way of becoming. A little later, it might turn into numbers. Ok: I like the numbers. But really, I like writing what I have half/thought/felt. Micchiche has something right, although I think in order to get published, she overly intellectualizes a simple truth about writing: writing and feeling are inextricably linked (even in the pretense of the writer not-feeling) and dynamic. I could write here about what I feel about the possibility of Ali dying as other dogs and people have died, but something blocks me--I think, too much emotion.

Almost Circumventing the Grading Factory

Readers of this blog might know that I work a lot with assessment, a not unsurprising interest, given that Charles Cooper was my dissertation director at the University of California, San Diego. I have also been using portfolios as an alternative grading practice virtually throughout my careers as a high school and post-secondary writing teacher. Since a good many of my rants on this blog challenge the efficacy of using grades as motivators and sorting tools (and that our job is to sort), I thought I would describe how I use portfolios to determine grades rather than averaging the grades assigned to essays, tests, and other assignments. 

I have had conversations/discussions/arguments with writing teachers who point out that by assigning any grade, regardless of my grade distribution (unless I assign everyone an A [or F]), I am still a toady of the capitalist enterprise that trains students to worship dollars through the agency of grades, an accusation to which I yield. Yes, I still assign grades. Yes, I am still a toady. Still, I work hard to help my students with their writing--and that's not only my job, it's my reason for being.

I use portfolios in an admittedly odd way. I have paid attention to Peter Elbow, Pat Belanoff, Kathy Yancey, Ed White (a co-author with Norbert Elliot of what we hope will soon become a famous book :), plug: Very Like a Whale); nevertheless, I have my own way of using portfolios--note that I use them for classroom assessment, not program assessment--the subject of our book. 

I assign grades on the basis of participation--which includes attendance (50%), mid-term portfolio (20%), and final portfolio (30%). I also tell students that if they want to know what their grades are at any time, they can see me in my office and we'll go over their work (and attendance) and discuss their grades. I'm also quite comfortable with being known as an easy grader--but I do expect them to always be in class and do all the work--and I would like to see them take some pride in what they write. It should perhaps go without saying that because I don't put grades on students' essays and other work, that doesn't mean I don't read and respond to their work--just as I like to have them read and respond to each other's work. I of course do. This in fact is something I enjoy doing (for reasons I have hammered in many of my blog posts).  

Some of my colleagues referred to above have asked how students know how well they've written if I don't grade the essays (but only respond to them). I'll just leave this remark to stand (or fall) on its own. 

Soooo. At the risk of looking like a fool, I have included below my instructions for a final portfolio. The students use an electronic portfolio (iWebfolio) to submit their work. It may look as if I'm asking the students to do a lot of work, but they have already submitted a mid-term portfolio, on which they build. Each section below corresponds to a category in iWebfolio. The e-portfolios are very easy for me to review and respond to (in fact, I enjoy doing it because by reading what my students write, I learn quite a bit about what I/we did right and what I/we did wrong). It takes me about 30 minutes to read and respond to each e-portfolio. 

WPAs interested in program assessment will see that if I have all of the teachers in our program include in their students e-portfolios at least two categories (Myself as a Writer and Goals of the Course) that we can structure a robust program assessment in which a positive attitude toward writing is an important objective. 

I actually give the instructions below in a wiki that resembles the portfolio I want them to construct. But for the purposes of this blog, I have reproduced the instructions as a page. I hope you find this interesting.

======================

Final Portfolio Instructions
English 102
Winter Quarter 2015
Drexel University

===============================================

Introduction: Imagine that you are me and that at some point, some well-intentioned administrator might wonder about my grading practices. I would like to be able to give her for each student a fair example of the student's work and the student's reflection on what he or she has so far learned in the course, given our objectives. So imagine that your portfolio is that evidence of the grade that I would like to argue for in response to this well-intentioned administrator.

Introduction

In your Introduction, you should introduce your portfolio. Imagine an administrator other than me is going to read it (which in some cases, will be true).  This would be a good place to tell her (my dean) just a little bit about you, something about your major, your hopes for the kind of career that college might help you prepare for, and some statement about how you have created this portfolio to demonstrate the kind of work you have done and what you have so far learned about writing in this class.

Keep those goals in mind as you explain what you have done and learned in this class. To organize your response, I have created some categories with specific instructions.  Please look at the pages to the right, beginning with "Attendance."

Attendance

Just include some note about your attendance both for the face-to-face and online sessions. You'll probably be able to amend what you wrote in your mid-quarter evaluation. Most of you have been here every day and participated in all online sessions. I am going to add my own perspective: success often depends on being there. In this course, I emphasized community: we show up, you show up.

Yourself as a Writer

What did you think of yourself as a writer when you came into the class?  What do you think of yourself as a writer now--and your relationship to writing? I know that the move from our largely personal writing (like our inventory of our writing experiences) to the 4^th academic essay on education and identity formation may have introduced some difficulties in your relationship with writing. You might want to include in this discussion some reflection on the kinds of writing you/we like to do and the kinds we sometimes have to perform in our academic and professional environments.

Class Journals

Just give me a little advice on class journals. They are the way I keep in touch with you.

Compendium

After you have followed the directions for collecting all that you have written, come back up to the top of this page and tell your readers what you think about the writing you have done in here.

I would like to have this reflection be at the top of the compendium :).

First collect your initial post to one of the writing tasks, and underneath that, all the posts you made in response to what others had written. 

Note: Here’s the easy way to collect your response on any forum:

Go to the Forum and click on the top box on the left (Thread Actions/Date)
That should put a check mark on all threads.
Click on “Collect” (to the right of “Thread Actions”)
Then Sort by “Author’s Last Name.” All your responses will be grouped.

Repeat that for each of the writing tasks we did.

It should look something like this:

Post for:  Inventory of Writing Experiences

Responses to others: 

Response 1

Response 2

Response 3

Response 4

......(that means and so on)

Post for:  Subjective School Experiences

Responses to others: 

Response 1

Response 2

Response 3

Response 4

...
Post for:  Responses to "Correctness"

Responses to others: 

Response 1

Response 2

Response 3

Response 4

 ....
Post for:  Responses to Anyon

Responses to others: 

Response 1

Response 2

Response 3

Response 4

 ....
Post for:  Responses to Tate

Responses to others:

Response 1

Response 2

Response 3

Response 4

 ....

Post for:  Inventory of Research Experiences
No Responses

Post for: Third Essay on Educational Experiences

Response 1

Response 2

Response 3

Response 4

 ....

Post for: Writing our 3rd essay on Education and Identity Formation

No responses

Post for: Reading and Being Read—3^rd Essay

Response 1

Response 2

Response 3

Response 4

 ....

Post for Next Essay Topic: Outline

No responses

Post for 4^th Essay

Response 1

Response 2

Response 3

Response 4

 ....

Post for: Writing the 4^th Essay (We didn’t have time for responses here, but a few of you responded to each other).

 Response 1

Response 2

Response 3

Response 4

 .... 

Ok: I think I pretty much have all the major work we did in here. Email me if there’s something I missed.

Notes You Have Taken

In this section, paste any notes you have taken from others and that you have gleaned from your research on the Internet--important notes about the relationship between our educational experiences and who we are, what we think of ourselves, our relationship to learning, and perhaps to our society. I will be interested in which excerpts you thought were important.

Analysis of Writing

Please post a paragraph or two of

1. What you wrote in response to Subjective School Experiences
2. 4^th Essay

Then give me about 30 minutes in which you think and write about the similarities and differences here regarding you as a writer (as you are revealed in these different kinds of writing tasks).  You might consider differences/similarities in your voice, your attitude toward the writing task, your attitudes toward who your readers might be, whether it’s fake or real writing. I’m very interested in your analysis here of who you are as a writer and how you met these different writing tasks.

Favorite Thing You Have Written in Here

In this section, just post the favorite thing you have written in our class--This could be one of the essays, a response you have written to other, to one of our readings, an inventory--anything.  And tell us why you picked this one.

Goals of the Course

1. To investigate research—and the theory of research
2. To improve our clarity and fluency—fluency in the sense of writing easily and the flow of writing
3. To improve style, grammar, and punctuation
4. To improve our integration and evaluation of information
5. To explore the links between rhetorical situation and when claims need to be supported by evidence, and warrants
6. To explore the connection between writing and audience
7. To encourage a positive attitude toward writing

I realize that we have explored some of these goals more deeply than others (and some explorations have been tacit, some overt). But tell me what you may have learned about each of these goals--and how well we succeeded as a class in exploring them.

Note: by "rhetorical situation," we generally mean the writing situation: the demand for writing (why is this thing being written in the first place?), the writer's relationship to the subject, the reader's relationship to the subject, the writer's relationship to the reader(s), the reader(s) relationship to the writer--things like that.

Regarding 5: The relationship between claims and evidence are probably obvious.  I know we haven't covered "warrants." They refer to the logic that ties evidence to claims--why is this evidence for the claim? You might claim that the sun goes around the earth (claim). As evidence, you could cite that's what I see everyday.  Your warrant would be, because I see a phenomenon, that's what it is.  (You are of course leaving out knowledge of limited perspective, the position from which you "see" something, relegating you to the category of "flatlander.")

Similarly, as I have noted: You could claim that the United States is the best country to live in.  Your evidence is that everyone you know says that. Your warrant is that if everyone you know says something, then it is true--relegating you again to the category of flatlander.

Writing that Does (and Doesn't) Matter

My friend and co-author, Norbert Elliot, recently did an extensive survey on genres--the kinds of writing that people actually do, apart from what we imagine they do.

I'm paraphrasing here--but I can't imagine we don't know this: the genres we have students practice in our writing courses has very little to do with the kinds of writing they do after they get out of school.

Norbert and his colleagues surveyed (and I'm going from memory here) secondary, post-secondary, and post-graduates to evaluate alignment on what we teach and post-pedagogical transfer. From transfer and genre theory, we know that transfer links to genre-similarity. This should be no surprise. If we teach students how to write 5-paragraph essays, their clunky knowledge about writing will not make them poets.

Norbert and his colleagues found that postgraduate writing is not what we teach--in other words, limited transfer. Seven percent of postgraduate writing (surprisingly high) resembles the "essay."

We  should think about this disjuncture between what we teach and the utility of what we teach--and certainly about the referentiality of reproducing ourselves through what we teach.

I can imagine where this line of inquiry would lead--theories of social reproduction, social class and ethnic discrimination, mindless pedagogy, teachers unaware of how they are cogs in the machine. In this post, I'm only going to suggest these implications--my real thesis being that we are too easily inculcated in a project of teaching students how not to write by imagining that we are teaching them how to write.

I had better stop here. But I wondered what Norbert et al.'s data would have shown if they had investigated the frequency of non-academic and non-professional writing that people do--for me, the kind of writing that matters.

A note to my students: Brainwashed in Writing Classes

Below is a note that I sent to my students about our next essay:

OK, here’s what I’m thinking about this next essay or re-vision of your current one. In general, I would like you to take this chance to rewrite and/or refocus your last one and make it an essay that you’ll feel good about. I want you to include more research, research of your classmates, on the internet, and in the library databases. Next week, we’ll work in class on the library databases—I’ll try to give you some search tips. I also would like this to be an essay that teachers in our program should read.

But right now, I want to talk about refocusing. Robert came into my office yesterday and we looked at his essay again—and we discovered a few things.

First, Robert and I saw several places where he could do some research to give more substance to his opinions. I’ll give an example. Robert thought that women in general were more stressed than men. As soon as you think something like that, you want to research it. Robert was basing this on his relations with his sisters (and the schools they went to), but a thought like that begs for research. Another common gendered thought is that men are better than women at math—again, begs for research.  In general, we hear in our lives common stories and if we hear them often enough, we think they are true.  If you’re a critical thinker, you check them out.

I had another student in my office yesterday (someone else’s student). In our conversation he said something about in the United States, we tolerate crime less than anyplace else in the world. I raised an eyebrow. “Really?” I said. See if you can find anything about the crime rate per capita in all countries. A very quick search gets this:

The top ten countries in per capita crime rate are as follows:
1. Dominica: 113.822 per 1,000 people
2. New Zealand: 105.881 per 1,000 people
3. Finland: 101.526 per 1,000 people
4. Denmark: 92.8277 per 1,000 people
5. Chile: 88.226 per 1,000 people
6. United Kingdom: 85.5517 per 1,000 people
7. Montserrat: 80.3982 per 1,000 people
8. United States: 80.0645 per 1,000 people
9. Netherlands: 79.5779 per 1,000 people
10. South Africa: 77.1862 per 1,000 people

Crime rate per capita per country

That’s only one source, but a more extended search would tell us whether answers.com is overly fabricating the stats. The following source said that the U.S. was close to the leader in high murder rates in developed countries:

Murder rates in Developed Countries

But you of course have to check this stuff out—that last source is notably liberal (Rawstory.com).

Robert and I saw several other claims in his essay that could bear research and substantiation.  Here’s what I would suggest: when you make some kind of claim (like the United States is the best country to live in) that you might imagine others from a different belief system might challenge, ask yourself, how do you know that? Do you know that because that’s what everyone you know says? There was a time when everyone said the world was flat.

The most interesting part of Robert’s essay was about stress—the way his sisters were stressed out in STEM schools with a kind of side slide into the way in which students at Drexel are stressed. Behind this conversation lies our previous conversation in class about stress with some suspicion that teachers like to create stress as a way of control (Robert and I ventured here into the link between torture, stress, and control).  We have all wondered in this class as a consequence of your narratives about the turn in education somewhere around 5^th grade, at which point learning was no longer fun.

We can always question why schools/teachers emphasize stress/rigor rather than fun in learning. I have been asking this question lately—why do we try as educators to stress students out? Why aren’t we having fun? It seems clear to me that if we’re having fun doing one thing, we might want to do more of it. The other side of the coin might be true.

Toward the end of his essay, Robert threw in a casual thought. It was somehow linked to Elizabeth’s comment about grades—about how we are trained to think we have to get all As, that we have to be perfect. Schools, parents, and culture of course combine to create this drama about being perfect. You don’t, after all, want to be an F. You want to be an A. A straight A. I am sure that you all recognize that this line of thinking is connected to our overall investigation of how schools affect our identities—our ways of understanding who we are. In grade school, were you a cardinal or a blackbird?

In his essay, Robert threw in a comment about how schools brainwash us. I told Robert I thought “brainwash” might be a bit heavy.

In his concluding paragraph, he said something about the way in which we are brainwashed into not feeling good about ourselves so that we’ll want to buy things to make us feel better about ourselves. In essence, when we don’t feel Ok about ourselves (which maybe is what our schools are trying to make us feel), we’ll be conditioned into buying things, always buying more, to fill up that empty space in ourselves, the space school has created in order to perpetuate the culture within in which school resides, a consumer culture.

At the end of our conversation, I told Robert I thought his claim/insight was kind of veering into a new direction, and I said maybe you should just think that but not say it. But I thought a lot about Robert’s direction, and I have changed my mind. I think that direction could well be the focus of his essay, an answer to our question about why schools try to stress us out.  But maybe “brainwashed” isn’t it. It’s brainpolluted.

[Names of course have been changed.]

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.

Writing Task on First Day of Class

Writing Experiences

I am very interested in your experiences as a writer. I know (and hope) that you have described your experiences to your other writing teachers, but I don't know them. I'm particularly interested in your early experiences--like the first ones you can remember and how these experiences may have changed over the years--and whether and how they changed your attitude toward writing and towards yourself as a writer. I would also like to know about your experience in English 101--whether and how that course may have affected your attitude toward writing, your knowledge of writing, and toward yourself as a writer.

Please give me about 15 minutes of a response to this question. I can assure you, I will find your responses interesting. You will also be reading each other's responses--and I'm pretty certain that you'll find others' responses interesting. It's particularly interesting when you think of how much writing has to do with how we get things done in the world.

Research on Writing Instruction

I've just finished reading my students' responses to my initial writing topic which was, generally, to tell me about their experiences as writers, including their experiences in our first quarter writing course, English 101--our first required writing course at Drexel. I then asked them to read and respond to each other's essays and then later write a summary of what they had learned about teaching writing by reading each other's essays.

I have written before on this blog about one of my fundamental criteria for teaching writing--if you don't look forward to reading what they wrote, you're doing the wrong thing. Well, if you ask the kind of question I posed above, I can't imagine you wouldn't be interested in what your students write. If you're a WPA, you'll get a plethora of information about your program-as well as advice from students on how to teach or not teach writing.

Let me pose this as a question for WPAs: why not ask students about their attitudes toward writing and how their experience in X course influenced their attitudes? How about getting a significant number of your teachers to pose the same kind of question and then getting together to review what students said about the value of what they learned?  I'm thinking this kind of assessment strategy is more informative than one that poses a writing task (or portfolio project) and then has teachers read and rank the quality of responses according to a rubric. Rather than test or rank students, we should interview them.

Being Single

You know you're single when you've moved to a new town and have gone for a bike ride and got a

flat tire five miles out and your expensive portable bike pump doesn't work and you're wearing road bike shoes.

--I know what I want for Christmas.

Thinking Slowly

While I'm procrastinating on another project, my mind slipped (trying to avoid that other project), back to the struggle trope. One of my good friends said she had to struggle to read the Freirean quote on critical thinking that heads this blog. She said, "I slowed down to understand this challenging bit

of text.  I noticed two things.  First, I had to wrestle with the language to consider how to read “critical thinking-thinking”—which I like, as an expression, but it was a challenge to capture.  And I circled around the text to sort out the complicated constructions and to construct for myself the meaning.  I think reading can often be a 'struggle.'  So why not writing?"

Racing ahead in my mind, I can see this post is  going to be too long (and I need to get to that other project). I know I had to read Freire slowly when I first stumbled across him--as with my friend, Mary, I had to read forward and back, thinking through and digging into his ideas. It's worth analyzing why this passage and so much of the early Freire is difficult to read. The ideas are not complex--we're just not used to those thoughts--"an indivisible solidarity between the world and the people and admits of no dichotomy between them." OK--use of "dichotomy" is a bit problematic--Freire means a break, a division between opposing forces. In capitalist America (and particularly in Louisiana), we'll have some trouble with that concept--we're people, God's people, and he put the earth and animals (and the universe) here for us to use--the Universe is our Eden. So it's a bit difficult to imagine a stone as important as us.

I'm really procrastinating. I would enjoy, like Mary, going through this passage sentence by sentence. I have spent a class period with my students on this paragraph, slowing down, if you will, to read seriously, turning what might be a struggle into, well, into something else--a walk in a garden where friends sit on a stone bench and just talk and think about things. We don't have to get anywhere or do anything; we just consider, wonder.

I am wondering now whether struggle is a consequence of speed--and that we create struggle for our students by hurrying them, giving them lots to read and write and prove to us that they have read and written.

Let me offer a for-instance: why don't we spend more time having students write and read and respond (to what was said, not how it was said) to each other in class? Quiet time. Like in a garden. Music. Writing and responding to each other as pleasure.

I have to stop. I really have to get that work done.

Thanks, Bruce and Liquidiamonds: I want to acknowledge your comments and ask others to go back to Lad Tobin's book, Reading Student Writing.  I'm taking notes right now, digitizing some of Lad's insights--and there were many.  Here's one when he writes about his classes: “ . . . my students produce pieces that are aimed at actual humans who might actually be interested” (125).

Lad and I both address the phenomenon of "Reader's Block," teachers who procrastinate, recreating in their reading the scene they have set up for their writers. Lad seems to have given up on the rhetoric and composition community (personal communication); I'm hanging in there. The question I'm asking--why can't we stop creating rhetorical situations that push students away from writing when it's so easy to invite them in? I think this is actually a very interesting question. Enough with this struggle trope.

How We Know We're Wrong

I'm writing this just to remind myself as I'm going through Lad Tobin's book and taking notes (he and I are so much in synch--very surprised we never got together).

Here's one of my mantras (and I've probably said this before): if you don't like reading what your students wrote (and most likely, they didn't like writing--the struggle issue), that's proof that you set up the wrong rhetorical situation.

I wrote too hurridly--not giving full space to Mary (and I hope John Bean isn't reading this blog). I'm going to cite Mary's reply (I think this is all right, because she posted it in a comment):

"Ouch Irv! I think you have indeed either misunderstood or taken my comments too much out of context. When I referred to a bad workout, I meant that sometimes even those things we enjoy involve difficulty. And I think it's important to talk with students about how it's perfectly natural to experience these moments (same goes for practicing a musical instrument). It doesn't mean we stop. It doesn't mean we still can't enjoy the broader experience of the activity. In the context of writing, I tell my students all the time that writing is thinking and sometimes thinking can be messy! But if they stick with it and get feedback, they can work through to clarity and deeper thinking. This is true for all meaningful writing, including what you refer to as naturalistic research (which I find quite interesting and valuable!)."

I know that sometimes writing is a struggle and that maybe we have to teach students how to push through the struggle. What Mary is doing is foregrounding for students the nature of the struggle and making it an object of inquiry. I know of course that Mary is helping her students discover ways of coping with the frequently difficult writing situations students face in academic and professional environments. I think Dewey has an interesting passage in Experience and Education in which he compares education (as opposed to mis-education) to game; once in the game, the players play almost for the sake and pleasure of being in the game, the rules and moves almost hardwired into who they are. As a game freak and biker, I understand what Mary's getting at--the struggle becomes part of and a pleasure in the game. We know if we're doing the right thing with our students in this game of writing if we get reports from them about the pleasure, struggle notwithstanding, of the game.

A key indicator: can they hardly wait to get back into the game, or do they put it off until the last minute the way teachers put off reading the results of their play (reader's block). If we see eagerness, in spite of the fact that it may involve struggle, to both write and read, we'll know we're doing the right thing.

Writing as Struggle

In her comment to one of my posts, Mary Goldschmidt (whom I like and greatly admire) refers (I'm struggling not to decontextualize her comment) to writing that is sometimes like a bad workout. I'm framing Mary's remark within notes that I am now taking on Lad Tobin's book, Reading Student Writers.

I am also going to struggle to stick to two points, noting that my struggle, unlike the struggle to which Mary and John Bean (Engaging Ideas) refer, is a struggle not to write, not to write, I think because I have let loose of the personal/impersonal dichotomy. Once we see writing as continuum moving from ourselves outward (Moffett), much of the conflict between scholars like Lad, Peter Elbow, and me and those who think of the personal as squishy, unrigorous (should i say, "unmale"?) deconstructs. And in a large part, I think the "struggle" deconstructs as well.

I'm a mountain biker (Mary's a road biker) and I always try to beat my last time, so I recognize Mary's comparison to her struggle for better times to the struggle to write--one rigor scholars have previously cited to justify making their pedagogies that make their students struggle with their writing in order to struggle with their thinking (Bean), but I think we need to distinguish between games we have voluntarily entered and those we have required. And I am deeply suspicious of comparing a communicating/social activity like writing to a competitive, athletic activity like biking. I don't like to think that I am writing in order to beat my former self or others who may be writing in the same race.

I am about to launch into several directions, so I'm going to try to get to my second point: If we can deconstruct the dichotomy between personal and impersonal, perhaps we can naturalize research for our students. I have probably written in here about this before, so here goes again. The overdetermined concept of the "research paper" has depersonalized, overly scientized research.

I like to think of research like this: I've got an issue that I'm interested in for deeply personal reasons (in my case, the use of personalized writing in academic settings). I write about this, working from the inside out, so to speak. I materialize in writing my own jumbled thoughts and desires. I know that others (like Lad and Peter) are concerned and have written about these issues. So I read a bit about what some of my friends have had to say about the issue. This is like in the classroom where we have our students write about an interesting issue (like what are some of the important fears you have in your life) and then have them read what their classmates have written.

This is already too too long for a post: but you get the drift. The students listen to their friends and then rethink (one could call this critical thinking) some of what they thought and have written about their own fears. So then maybe we can write about fear as seen from the perspective of the class. This could easily lead to some primary research, some surveys or just asking questions/interviewing others outside the class--like focusing on fear as a controlling mechanism, fears of grades, fears of writing (procrastination), fears of loneliness, fears of the unknown, or as one of my students said, of what lies around the corner, fears of the future, fear of girls, fear of boys, fears of death.

Obviously, the next stage is to do some internet searches and then replay our results back into the class, moving the investigation and discussion forward and deeper. We can even investigate how people get caught up in a social system, reproducing the structure of fear as a controlling mechanism, or how teachers who have had their voices taken away by having been graded using grades to take away their students' voices. One can go on. It gets pretty interesting. One can even start using library databases to find accessible (I mean readable) discussions of various structures and uses of fear.

My point here was to naturalize research, the kind I am currently doing by reading people like Lad  and doing surveys of students here with the intent of writing about what I'm learning--with some hope of changing the world.

Inter-species Love

Thanks to Rich, Ikea, Sarah, and Mary.

I'll try to think through several of these issues--and imagine a way of framing writing as natural and writing as academic--I'm thinking of my friend, Mary here.

I'll say this about writing instruction (and I'm replying to Mary): if the way you are framing writing tasks and responses results in impelled writing, you're on. If it's writing as struggle (John Bean--may God forgive him), you're off.

Like Rich and Jan, I'm so much into writing as pleasure, as a way of materializing who we are and how we relate to those around us. If writing (a ghost for living) is a struggle, I think we're creating a destructive educational environment. I'm personal here: I have used writing as a way of understanding myself and how I relate to others. I think students like to use writing like this--and find out about who the others are, a knowledge that feeds back into our self-discovery.

So . . . if what you are doing is creating positive experiences for writing, you're doing the right thing. If you're not, you're not. Ask your students and you'll get a hint.

Loss of Voice

I should, as usual, be doing other things. But my mind is on teaching right now--and writing about and doing teaching. I had the pleasure of a long skype conversation with Rich Haswell this afternoon; we were reviewing many of our common ideas about teaching writing in the process of excavating the history of holistic assessment. At the end, I was thinking about how much I regret that Rich has retired--one of the people who seriously knows productive ways of teaching writing, who understands that writing in the classroom (and this was one of Moffett's points) should as closely as possible resemble how those of us who are writers write. I have written before that as writers, we write to communicate, we circulate texts the way we circulate conversations, real people having real things to say to people who matter. Moffett has theorized the move outward from the self to friends, to acquaintances, to an anonymous audience writers have been internalize by interpreting it through the people the writers know.

Real writing is so different from the bulk of school writing, which I have called writing as performance, students writing to follow a teachers' formula in response to a task with some description of criteria for success set down. I realize that in every speech act, there is some degree of performance. But as performance takes over, writers lose authenticity and voice. And performance for an extrinsic motivation is simply generally painful to read. That's the essence of school writing, as opposed to real writing.

When we create in the classroom conditions that will impel students to want to write, to share their thoughts with each other, to write and write back, we are close to the conditions of real writing. And I believe that we learn more about an activity by  doing it in real as opposed to fake time.

When students are allowed to write naturally (yes, I hear my critics), they will maintain and develop the positive attitudes toward writing with which they first began to scribble.

Here's my hypothesis: if we promote a positive attitude toward writing & toward themselves as writers, we will be helping writers face uncomfortable writing situations. Students with a positive attitude will probably procrastinate less, will feel more at ease, and consequently perform (in those performance-laden situations) better. And the opposite is very likely true--negative attitude leads to increased procrastination. So what are we doing when we create negative attitudes toward writing?

It seems to me that any teacher could discover a way to assess whether she has promoted a positive or negative attitude toward writing. That should be easy. And if negative, figure out what she is doing to make students feel that way.

Just a side note on voice--we were talking about voice in class the other day: what if one of the functions of school (and writing classes in particular) is to take away students' voices? For evidence, we might look at the link between voicelessness and the bulk of school writing.

[If you can think of any research that has investigated the relationship between attitude toward writing and the ability to negotiate unfamiliar writing situations (this relationship could be generalized), please leave in a comment.]