I haven’t been posting for a while—interrupted by a trip to California (best state in the Union)—and some life redirection as a consequence of professional conflicts—how’s that for a teaser?

A friend included me in a post on her blog about a course she is trying to reimagine (it could use some re-imagining), so I took some time out from my personal life reconstruction to write the following reply:

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Hi,  ****. Thanks so much for the nod to my blog. I appreciate what you're doing in your course: Style in the Personal Essay. I'm going to make a couple of comments that may or may not be very helpful--I'm thinking as I'm writing.

One: over on the right hand side of my blog is a book my students wrote: Writing Ourselves into Each Others' Lives. I have had subsequent classes read from that book--the response is always good. Look at the chapter on Voice; or Kaitlyn's essay at the end of the book; Hope's; there are several others that students love to read and link back to their own writing. In sum, I almost always have students read other students rather than anything published. By reading what other students have written, they get ideas about their own writing.

I don't want to make this too long. I would think more about the reasons for having them write a certain kind of essay, i.e., in a specific genre--even something as amorphous as the personal essay. My take: students don't need to learn how to do this or that; what they need are good experiences in writing (I get criticized this claim), but what the hell--you want them to be writing what they will enjoy writing and reading--I mean reading and responding to what others have written. There are no end of topics that students will automatically start writing about (when they know they are writing primarily for their classmates (and the teacher--who is NOT grading but is reading as the other students are reading).

Leading to another topic: we can perhaps move away from thinking that students need to produce completed pieces-- X number of essays. I have lately moved away from revision--kind of letting students revise on their own. When they know that the primary readers are the other students, they automatically revise. Automatic revision was one of the first things we learned about in the Bay Writing Project—nods of gratitude to Jim Grey & Miles Myers.

When students are writing like this, there is all sorts of room to have some in between sessions on ways in which they can improve their styles, and little structural problems that most students seem to make. 

I also like to have students read "Correctness" by Joe Williams (in early editions of Style). Then we can have interesting discussions about what's right: He don't know how to tie his shoes backwards-- or-- He doesn't know how to tie his shoes backwards (and of course what "right" means--leading to Bill Clinton's famous remark: that depends on what "is" is-- for a little humor). Then we can have discussions about whether the comma goes inside or outside the quote marks and whether it matters and why some people think it might and why others don't give a shit.

(personal admission: I had to think about whether I could write "shit"). Talk about cultural imbrication--including a reference to something we all do!

We need to think about all the writing they do as writing. That includes the responses they make to each other (and the responses to the responses). What I'm getting at here: the flow, the continuous flow of writing--as is happening right now, me with you. That's writing.
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I wrote my response to **** without looking at the course description for Style in the Personal Essay.  After looking at it, I wrote the following:

I just looked at the course description: looks as if people threw in everything but the kitchen sink. Notable that nothing is in there that aligns with attitude toward writing, the experience of writing. It's almost as if we're teaching students how to write nothing to no one--but pretend that it's something to someone. Really awful course description. 

I'm going to add my final impression: it seems as if much of what rhet/comp people do (and have historically done) is directed outward--proving to outside stakeholders that we're responsible educators and in the process eliding what we know as writers and writing teachers (or maybe forgetting what we once knew).  In sum, I think we need to direct our pedagogy back to the students, helping them with their writing and experience of writing and imagine outside stakeholders as tertiary at best.
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Postscript: I hadn't looked too carefully (typical me) at that picture. One needs to add the act of writing, which doubles the transition from the old me to the new me--this at least is true in expressive/reflective genres.

 x

Assessing the Misuse of Language

I am on my way back from the 2016 Writing Program Administrators Conference in Raleigh. This may have been for reasons about which I will write later my last WPA conference, after having attended them religiously for twenty-six years, a time to see friends I have known for these two + decades and meet new people coming into the field.

As always at conferences, my thought processes kick into high gear (or I think they do), a consequence of presentations and sideways conversations. Back at my home institution, thinking is more of a solitary occupation--the conversations being largely virtual: my engagements with books, articles, and listservs. 

Engaging in real time conversations with people who are similarly invested in teaching writing--well, it will be hard to let go. It was a lovely conference. I am very glad I went. My thanks to Jessie for organizing it--and of course to Susan for her dynamic leadership, frameworking who we are and what we do. And I very much appreciated the WPA article award. It came at just the right time. Kairos.

I want to focus in this post on a singular issue that my mind has been circling around throughout the conference. I write endlessly about institutional complicity in promoting inequality--a structural function that seems obvious to me. Asao in his keynote address focused on whiteness and language. Both of us have argued perhaps incessantly how language through assessment practices promotes inequality, privileging as normal discourse the language habits of the already privileged. I don't know how someone couldn't get this. I like to imagine how assessment would re-function if we privileged working-class White and working-class African/American language as the normal discourses. Students who would write "He doesn't know how to write" instead of "He don't know how to write" should be sentenced to remedial instruction. It's not as if one locution carries more meaning than the other--that is, other than signifying the social class to which the speaker belongs.

The use of language as a controlling structure is an old story, beginning far before Students' Rights to Their Own Language. Like Whiteness, this privileging function seems invisible. Rarely do we hear in writing assessment discussions reflections on how through our practices we are reproducing social injustice through the languages and genres we privilege. But when you write it, materialize it in words, this oppressive use of language habits seems obvious. Think about which language was privileged in post-1066 in England. Think about how in our field for questionable reasons, we privilege argument as a more sophisticated genre than autobiography. What?

Many of us at this conference have pushed this language and genre privileging thought further--asking ourselves what other practices in our field we follow that are invisibly reproducing social injustice. When you start thinking this way, little gremlins pop up all over the place. I have to put a plug in for Chuck Bazerman's book, A Theory of Literate Action. Ok--he over nominalizes (Williams), but he wonderfully frames how we unthinkingly do what we imagine as conscious action.  

One has only to start with grading student writing, intersecting with whose language framed as the normal discourse drives the grading; teachers maintaining structures of control to keep students under their thumbs; teachers dominating classroom conversations; autocratically constructing the curriculum or implementing WPA constructed curriculum; mainlining genres that keep the power structure intact; reinforcing the hierarchical social class structure through the department and ranking of teachers from full professors down to the part-time teachers. It doesn't take too much "critical thinking" to take the bandage off, to see the wound that resists healing, perhaps because it hasn't had air. 

As usual, I can see I'm heading for an overly-long post. Let me focus on one takeaway.

Here's what surprised me at the conference. I was at several sessions in which I heard presenters talking about assessment as a collaboration among students and teachers to improve the courses in which they were all learning. The important shift (note: I resisted calling it a turn) lies in the object of assessment: it is not the students; it is the course. The new indirect assessment is in fact assessment of student writing--we should move beyond evaluating our course by ranking student texts or portfolios in fake writing situations in which they are writing for grades--are we kidding? The direct assessment is directly assessing the course--not the students' responses to fake writing situations.

I will be writing more about this, but I wanted to get down my pleasure at hearing how several of us seem to be moving in this direction of authentic assessment. There are two key concepts in this move. First, our primary stakeholders in this version of a direct assessment are the people most directly involved: the students and teachers. We should be wary of taking our eye off the ball, of thinking more about how outside stakeholders--chairs, deans, provosts, and politicians--evaluate our evaluations. That's a good way to strike out. The primary stakeholders are the people in the classroom.

Second: we need to stop being so damn defensive, feeling as if we have to prove to outside stakeholders the “value-added” of our teaching. We need to believe in our own professionalism, resist the de-professionalizing agendas behind which administrators rise, politicians gain votes, and assessment industries make money.

This post is too long, but let me add a final thought. I'll try shorthand thinking. Consider this: we de-professionalize ourselves when we allow our teaching to be compromised by conspiring in projects that allow part-time labor. Anyone who has halfway thought about this realizes that we do this so that the ever-increasing pool of administrators can make money and create the need for more administrators. We have been complicit for interesting reasons in the coterminous growth of part-time teachers and administration, aligned with the decrease in TT and full-time positions. 

Paul Thomas' Blog

Paul's last entry begins:

To High School English Teachers (and All Teachers)

All teachers are incredibly important, but high school English teachers will always have a special place in my heart. I am in my fourth decade as an educator, spending almost two decades as a public high school English teacher (many years coaching and teaching/advising journalism/newspaper as well) and now in my second decade as a... Anyone interested in teaching should go to Paul Thomas' Blog

The Fear of Writing

Some friends on WPA-l are engaged in a mild conversation about the pleasure of writing. I want to elaborate here and then let one of my students, Jake, describe his problem with writing & how it has been taught.

I know my position is not popular; it might even be called dangerous. For a host of reasons, I would not recommend it for untenured or non-tenure track WPAs. Essentially, promoting the pleasure of writing is uncool--it's not rigorous.

I have, when trying to make my position sound more scholarly :-), called it the transfer of affect. I think one of the best ways of helping students negotiate difficult rhetorical situations (the kind I usually call school writing--I think in A Theory of Literate Action, Chuck Bazerman calls them school genres) is to encourage a positive attitude toward writing.  As others in the WPA-l discussion have noted, making a positive attitude primary does not stop us from teaching many other writing and research skills. I work with my students on grammar, style, rhetorical theory, and research strategies.

I think we can make all of these interesting and pleasurable, although several of my students are clearly enduring my grammar lessons. But above all, I want my students to come out of our class having enjoyed their writing and reading (mostly reading each other) experiences. Achieving this objective is really not very hard. In fact, it's fun. If you look at Rachel's essay at the end of this post, you'll see why.

I do know that encouraging pleasure in writing has invigorated the writing program I have been directing at Drexel. Almost all of the teachers have embraced it. The students as well have responded positively to it. My colleague, Karen Nulton, and I have significant research to support these claims. I think, however, focusing on the pleasure of writing is not the best way to make friends with administrators and other teachers who very likely do not enjoy writing. These are the people who believe in minimum word counts and a required number of scholarly sources.

I need to let Jake speak. But I do want to ground my theory as essentially a progressive, liberatory pedagogy. More lately, educators like Will Richardson, John Tagg, and L. Dee Fink refer to it as engaged learning--Tagg pushing for The Learning Paradigm College. None of this is new.

Here's Jake's description of why he had come to loath writing:
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After some consideration, I have decided to completely rewrite my essay.  Why?  Well that’s because I still have no clue what I want to write about.  I wrote my first essay about the power of words since it was the easiest thing to write about, but I still wasn’t that interested in it.  The main thing I wanted to pump out was how fascinated I was with the deaf 20 year-old story, which isn’t much to go on.  While I was reading Professor Peckham’s response to Chris Z’s essay, what he wrote about caught my attention.  Professor Peckham was curious as to why some students can’t find something to write about when provided a blank canvas.  It is pretty strange if you think about it.  Everyone has different opinions, ideals, experiences and thoughts, so there should be at least one interesting thing to write about, right? 

Even when I realized this, my mind still remains so empty that my head would have better use as an over-sized pickle jar.  I can’t understand why this is, but Professor Peckham provides another hint that really set the gears in motion; “There is no reason why people should not like to write—unless they have been trained not to”.  Reading this really makes things clear; the reason I’m not passionate about writing is that I was conditioned all throughout school to see writing as a chore.  This is all due to the various different English classes from grade school to high school.  I can’t recall a single class where I could reflect on anything that I wanted to.  All of those classes just had the same old routine; read a book, do work about said book, and then make a book report.  As you can probably guess, doing something like this wasn’t the least bit enjoyable.  In fact, the rules for writing got more constrictive throughout the years.  Those English classes left little room for creativity and really put a damper on my feelings towards writing.  I honestly wish that that phenomena could be fixed for future generations, but I don’t have the time nor drive to do something about it.

                After reflecting on this, I’m still very concerned for my writing career.  Is there any possible way that I can recover from this deep-rooted bias towards writing?  In general, writing doesn’t seem like something boring.  To express one’s complex thoughts upon a piece of paper (or more commonly today, upon a computer screen) in a way so that other people can feel the same way you do just by reading seems pretty interesting.  Maybe if I started to keep a personal journal, I can get to the root of the problem.  I’m glad that I finally realized my problem with writing.  After all, the first step towards recovery is acknowledgement.

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Jake was writing about his last essay. Really, I could post so many powerful last essays from my students to demonstrate how students can enjoy writing. I'm going to link to Rachel's -- both because it was a compelling essay and because Rachel came into this class utterly loathing writing. That's not how she went out. Her shift in attitude wasn't because of me--it was because of the class.  

For the record: there aren't any word limits to this assignment. I just basically asked students to write a reflective essay, for themselves first, for the rest of the class after.

Frankie: My Glasses

Pawns in the Game

I  was recently interviewed by a writer from The Atlantic who had surprisingly read my book, Going North, Thinking West. I know that when I talked to the writer, I let loose with many of my concerns about the way in which we (un)teach writing in our required writing courses.

In the interview, I was a bit of a loudmouth. I imagine myself (and I really mean " imagine") as a reasonably reasonable member of our field--our WPA charge being . . . well, I don't know what it is; it might be legitimating our profession with helping students improve their writing on the side.

I used to think our purpose was to help students negotiate their rhetorical situations in other disciplines. This line of thinking can lead downward into dirt: our charge is to prepare students for uncomfortable rhetorical situations, the nadir of which would be a timed, five-paragraph essay arguing something about which you don't give a s&#t for a reader who also doesn't give a s&#t about what you believed but has to assign on the basis of your performance a number or a grade.

I  have said before (shades of James Sledd) that required writing programs (RWP) are possibly a farce. We know historically that the birth of RWPs were gate-keeping mechanisms to keep the rabble out (Berlin). Our current strategies may not have advanced light-years beyond this placement mechanism in the 1870s that determined writing ability by asking students to parse: "He said that that that that that that pupil parsed was not that that that he should have parsed."

I may have also let loose in my interview my interpretation of the money-making, highly unethical practice of requiring incoming students to take a year of required writing and then while pretending that the course is soooo important hiring part-time labor to teach it--and in the process making a significant profit to fund non-productive tenured faculty to do next to nothing and administrators to do even less. Although one should hesitate to assign correlation to causality, the statistics of the decline in TT faculty since the 70s, the increase in part-time labor, and the corresponding increase in higher administrative positions should at least occasion pause.

Writing program administrators, as many of us know, are collaborators in the project. I don't know how deeply I want to go into this: I am channeling Sledd and Crowley. Maybe this is how many of us feel when we've been too long in the game. Perhaps we no longer believe in the arguments that gave us a reason for being.

Let me compress my argument. How many writing programs still spend time teaching MLA documentation? Why on earth are we focusing on citation and documentation when most writing situations don't require them? How many writing programs eulogize argument as the overarching genre when most writing situations fall within other supra-genres (Bazerman, Theory of  Literate Action)  How many programs have students read mind-numbing academic articles about who-knows-what in order to write about who-knows-what for a grade?

In the long line of progressive educators stretching from Whately to Dewey to Freire to Moffett to Elbow, I desperately in what might be the end of my career want to promote the love of writing. I just don't get why others in our field would want to situate writing within the frame of hard work and pain--the kind of thing you put off until the last minute.  Why do we want to teach students to hate writing?

This is a serious question: why do we do that? What do our actions have to do with social class reproduction (see Bloom, "Freshman Writing")? What do we do to make sure that our children and the children of others within our social class fraction will more easily negotiate the gauntlet of our RWPs than students from working-class and other minority backgrounds will be able to do? How do we as writing teachers become pawns in the game?