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Saturday, December 1, 2012
An Ethic of Service in Composition and Rhetoric
Research, teaching, and service—the traditional tripartite division of academic work. The kind of institution and the nature of institutional priorities have some bearing on the arrangement of the first two parts, but service always comes last. From our shared perspective as faculty members and administrators in writing studies, though, the nature of service is both more meaningful and more complicated than this seemingly straightforward arrangement would suggest. For us, service is simultaneously an integral part of the teaching and research that we do (which, we should note, are also virtually inseparable) and a problematic label that is often attached to many of the courses that we teach, especially at the first-year level...more.
Friday, November 16, 2012
Wednesday, November 14, 2012
Sunday, November 4, 2012
Books & Ideas for Next Time
Recommendations from Meredith Taylor:
Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs., and Thomas R. Burkholder. Critiques of Contemporary Rhetoric. Belmont: Wadsworth Pub, 1997.
Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs., and Susan Schultz. Huxman. The Rhetorical Act: Thinking, Speaking, and Writing Critically. 3rd ed. Belmont, CA, USA: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2003.
Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs., and Thomas R. Burkholder. Critiques of Contemporary Rhetoric. Belmont: Wadsworth Pub, 1997.
Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs., and Susan Schultz. Huxman. The Rhetorical Act: Thinking, Speaking, and Writing Critically. 3rd ed. Belmont, CA, USA: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2003.
Two other ideas:
1. Use OWL to introduce rhetoric and just have the students write a ton of papers, evaluations, proposals, classical arguments, etc.
2. Focus the course on rhetorical genre theory.
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
NOtes from Earl's T/P Meeting
Key Docs for Earl:
- Vita (annotated)
- Personal Statement (“Where you get to expand on the CV…”)--length: "I would hate to give you a guideline...this is your portfolio, I should not be driving the length of your portfolio"
Annotated Vita (teaching, service, scholarly activities—this
is the order he said it)
Need to emphasize teaching and service—the CV needs to look
different and not be a traditional CV
What courses have you taught and how often?
Did you teach them some place else?
I want him to be able to say “Michaud has taught a wide
range of courses and had a great student response to all these courses…”
Service—committees I’ve served on, time I did this, work I
did. “Dr. Michaud has done service in…”
He’s literally telling us what the sound of his 1.5 page
letter to Ron will read like, starting with Teaching and then going on to
Service.
Scholarly Activities
PERSONAL STATEMENT:
I think I need to mention that if there is an “up and down”
in my teaching evals, it’s because I have, since I arrived here, been
continually teaching new classes and thus, the first time out, classes have not
always gone “perfectly”—give him a reason to ignore the “bad” evaluations.
Am I highlight the use of technology enough in my teaching
statement?
Earl makes it sound like—“Tell me in the statement what I should
be paying attention to in terms of your student and peer evaluations.”
IN teaching section, need to highlight my collaborative
writing/research projects with students, including Terri’s recent publication
acceptance.
Service
Highlight the 2-3 service commitments that I took on and
tell him why these were important and how I contributed.
Advising counts as service (to the department)--retaining students
Scholarship
How'd you get into where you are?
What are you doing there?
Why is that important? How has that moved that area of scholarship/activity forward? The impact of my scholarship on the field...
Has the college offered you the opportunity and environment to stay engaged in your scholarly area and have you taken advantage of it?
---
Everything else in the binder is support material for what you've told me in the vita and personal statement.
You are tenured and promoted based on the argument you make about your teaching, service, and scholarly activities. Make the argument, provide the supporting material.
Return to make connections across teaching, service, research...
Should I highlight that my service and teaching have taken up most of my time? Or just leave that alone...
Need to tabulate teaching evals...
Sunday, October 14, 2012
STEAM: an interesting resource for teaching
The Simple Team Experience Assessment Measure (STEAM) allows faculty to offer peer evaluations to student teams. A peer evaluation simply asks students how their peers performed on a team project. Peer evaluations, when properly implemented, allow an instructor both to assess how well individuals performed on a team as well as provide feedback to students so they become better at working on teams. For those unfamiliar with teams or peer evaluations a list of resources will be found later.
Thursday, October 4, 2012
The Atlantic on Writing
Great Writing Comes Out of Great Ideas
We can certainly all agree that if you want students to learn to write well, you have to start by asking them to write. Looking broadly across the U.S., this will require a major change. The high-stakes tests that drive curricula in most states require very little writing, and that in turn has driven writing out of many classrooms. The National Assessment of Educational Progress reported earlier this month that in 2011, 40 to 41 percent of public school students at grades 8 and 12 were given less than a page of writing homework in a typical week. In fact some 14 percent of 12th graders reported being asked to do no writing for homework at all.
In our own studies, we found that roughly 80 percent of the assignments students complete do not require them to compose text. Instead, they are asked to fill in blanks, copy notes, or choose among multiple-choice responses. Such activities may help them remember specific content, but they do not help them learn to do anything interesting--that is, to explore ideas that matter. And they certainly don't help them learn to write.
---
Many of the things that contributed to success in the schools we studied also seem to be present in New Dorp.
First, there was strong support and leadership from the school administration. Writing has to be high on a school-wide agenda.
Second, and closely related, teachers were involved in initiatives that went beyond their own classrooms. In our studies, the sources for these initiatives varied widely, from the National Writing Project, to collaborations with local universities, to state-sponsored professional development projects. The dedicated teacher standing in front of her own classroom, however stimulating and exciting, is not enough to transform achievement for a school as a whole.
Third, teachers became part of professional learning communities, working together, sharing ideas, gathering information, and changing curriculum and instruction in response to what they were learning. Such approaches build school-wide capacity by honoring the knowledge and experience that teachers bring with them. And they also recognize that there is no simple script, no silver bullet, that will improve student achievement. Instead, they require consistent emphases across the school, evolving over time in response to students' needs and accomplishments.
Fourth, there was a recognition that writing is tied closely to thinking about new material, and requires tools and strategies that can and should be taught. These may be as formulaic as the structure of a five-paragraph theme, or as open-ended as using sentence starters (because, although, if) to build arguments. They may include turn-taking cues to draw readers into productive discussion ("I agree/disagree...because," "I have something to add"). The point is that these are tools, not ends in themselves. Once students have learned to use them, instruction can focus elsewhere.
Finally -- and this is where I think Peg Tyre's article may lead us somewhat astray -- the most effective writing programs are able to embed what is required by high stakes tests and then move beyond to a much richer vision of curriculum and instruction. This is necessary whether the tests are those currently in place in most states, or the new ones being developed for the Common Core. Argument and exposition are important skills, but they build upon and incorporate the richness of the narratives that give most children their first opportunities to write (and talk) at length.
We can certainly all agree that if you want students to learn to write well, you have to start by asking them to write. Looking broadly across the U.S., this will require a major change. The high-stakes tests that drive curricula in most states require very little writing, and that in turn has driven writing out of many classrooms. The National Assessment of Educational Progress reported earlier this month that in 2011, 40 to 41 percent of public school students at grades 8 and 12 were given less than a page of writing homework in a typical week. In fact some 14 percent of 12th graders reported being asked to do no writing for homework at all.
In our own studies, we found that roughly 80 percent of the assignments students complete do not require them to compose text. Instead, they are asked to fill in blanks, copy notes, or choose among multiple-choice responses. Such activities may help them remember specific content, but they do not help them learn to do anything interesting--that is, to explore ideas that matter. And they certainly don't help them learn to write.
---
Many of the things that contributed to success in the schools we studied also seem to be present in New Dorp.
First, there was strong support and leadership from the school administration. Writing has to be high on a school-wide agenda.
Second, and closely related, teachers were involved in initiatives that went beyond their own classrooms. In our studies, the sources for these initiatives varied widely, from the National Writing Project, to collaborations with local universities, to state-sponsored professional development projects. The dedicated teacher standing in front of her own classroom, however stimulating and exciting, is not enough to transform achievement for a school as a whole.
Third, teachers became part of professional learning communities, working together, sharing ideas, gathering information, and changing curriculum and instruction in response to what they were learning. Such approaches build school-wide capacity by honoring the knowledge and experience that teachers bring with them. And they also recognize that there is no simple script, no silver bullet, that will improve student achievement. Instead, they require consistent emphases across the school, evolving over time in response to students' needs and accomplishments.
Fourth, there was a recognition that writing is tied closely to thinking about new material, and requires tools and strategies that can and should be taught. These may be as formulaic as the structure of a five-paragraph theme, or as open-ended as using sentence starters (because, although, if) to build arguments. They may include turn-taking cues to draw readers into productive discussion ("I agree/disagree...because," "I have something to add"). The point is that these are tools, not ends in themselves. Once students have learned to use them, instruction can focus elsewhere.
Finally -- and this is where I think Peg Tyre's article may lead us somewhat astray -- the most effective writing programs are able to embed what is required by high stakes tests and then move beyond to a much richer vision of curriculum and instruction. This is necessary whether the tests are those currently in place in most states, or the new ones being developed for the Common Core. Argument and exposition are important skills, but they build upon and incorporate the richness of the narratives that give most children their first opportunities to write (and talk) at length.
Wednesday, September 26, 2012
Teaching: Devising a Pedagogy-of-Activity
Over the course of my first years in the English Department, I have been fortunate enough to have been given the opportunity to devise a series of new writing courses for undergraduates (majors and non-majors alike) at Rhode Island College. During the 2009/2010 school year, with the generous assistance of both the Department Chair and numerous members of the Department, I undertook to design two new courses at the 300-level: ENGL 378: Studies in Composition and ENGL 379: Studies in Rhetoric. During the 2010/2011 school year, again with considerable help from my colleagues and in collaboration with other writing faculty, I undertook a redesign of the writing minor (renaming it the Rhetoric and Writing minor), revised two existing courses (ENGL 230: Writing for Professional Settings and ENGL 231: Writing for Digital and Multimedia Settings), added two new courses (ENGL 232: Writing for the Public Sphere and ENGL 477: Internship in Rhetoric and Writing), and re-engineered the sequence of instruction within the minor. During the 2011/2012 and 2012/2013 school years, along with the director of First-Year Writing, Becky Caouette, I have, via these new courses and this new curriculum, begun the exciting work of introducing RIC English majors to the knowledge and practices of the field of composition/rhetoric, thus expanding their opportunities for learning about writing and about the full range of areas of specialization within the field of English studies.
Since arriving at RIC, my teaching, always focused on activities typical of writing classrooms (e.g. explicit instruction in pre-writing, drafting, and revision strategies; peer- and large-group writing workshops; one-on-one student conferences, etc.) has turned increasingly towards a pedagogy focused on facilitating or orchestrating student activity. Even as I begin to embrace the opportunity to teach English students the content of my field, I resist the traditional orientation of many college faculty--that of content-deliverers of declarative knowledge (the what of learning)--and find myself drawn to more procedural matters (the how of learning). Of course, it's impossible to separate these two aspects of teaching and learning and silly to privilege one over the other, but I find, in my conversations with faculty across the disciplines, that I perhaps err on the side of procedural learning more than my peers. This may stem from the very activity-focused nature of my scholarly area of interest (writing) and it may stem from other factors, such as the two two-hour-per-week learning blocks that structure English classes and which force faculty to get creative in finding ways to keep students engaged over extended periods of time. In sum, I find that I spend most of my time in the classroom facilitating student activity--devising a set of experiences and activities that provide students with learning opportunities and the motivation to take advantage of them.
devising tasks and creating online environments in which those tasks can be carried out, modeling how tasks should be carried out, monitoring task-engagement (in the room, on the screen), and reflecting with both individual students and entire classes, in both written and spoken language, on the learning that the tasks were designed to bring about.
My evolving pedagogy--a pedagogy-of-activity, if you will--is built upon a series of beliefs or values that I have come to hold about teaching and learning:
Day 1: Organizing Class Discussion (200/300-level course)
Day 2: Organizing Peer-Group Workshops (100/200 level course)
Day 3: Work Days (?)
Example 1: Discussion of Course Content
In what follows, I take an exemplary class meeting from a section of ENGL 230: Writing for Professional Settings (spring 2012) in order to try to illustrate the significance of these three items and their interaction during a typical class meeting.
Activity 1: Daily Plan. A typical day begins with me asking students to power up their computers and login to the course LMS. In each of my courses, I post a document called Daily Plans which maps out activity for each class meeting. This document is posted as a link within the LMS and thus, is always live and interactive. Once the students are all assembled, I pull up the Daily Plans document on the screen at the front of the room and the students open it on their computers and together we preview the outline of the day's work. I have found that students appreciate having access to this "itinerary" because it provides them with a sense of what to expect prior to and during class. It serves as a reference point, connecting each class meeting to the one before it and the one to follow. Reviewing the Daily Plan usually takes no more than 5-10 minutes.
Activity 2: Quiz. On many days, there is some kind of assigned reading that students are asked to complete ahead of class. On each day that a reading is assigned, class begins with a short quiz, which students take in the LMS, using the "Test" function. The quizzes always consist of ten true/false questions and can be completed within a matter of minutes. Once they have finished the quiz, the LMS provides students with immediate results and a grade. We then take a few minutes to discuss questions or problems with the quiz. I think of the daily quiz as our first attempt to get into the day's reading and learning. Over the course of a typical class period, I try to bring students back to the assigned text in several different ways, at several different times. The quiz is the first such attempt. They usually take no more than 10-15 minutes.
Activity 3: Small Group Work. Once students have completed the quiz, we shift gears. On a typical day, I have constructed a set of tasks in regard to the day's reading that I want students to complete in groups. These tasks are contained within a google document that students can access and interact within (write in). There are usually about 4-5 different sets of tasks, one for each small group (the students pick their groups). The google doc is a wiki that allows multiple users to all write within one document (picture 20 people writing in a MS Word doc simultaneously, all having access to what the others are writing). Links to the day's google doc are contained within the LMS. As such, these docs become a kind of archive or record of our thinking during each class and a resource for later discussions and activities.
The tasks I ask students to complete usually consist of two kinds of work: summarizing/explaining key concepts and ideas and posing questions. So, for example, during one early class meeting in ENGL 230 we discussed Deborah Brandt's article "Literacy and the Knowledge Economy." The discussion of this article was spread out over two days with the first day devoted to an overview of the study itself and the second day devoted to an examination of Brandt's findings and conclusions. I assigned one of Brandt's findings to each of the small groups, asking them to do three things: 1) re-read the passage with their finding, 2) explain the finding in their own words (using 2-3 passages from the text as support or illustration), 3) pose two questions for the class to discuss in regards to their assigned section/finding. Students access or re-access the article itself within the LMS and then get to work in teams of 3-4. This activity represents a second attempt to focus carefully on the day's reading. I allocate 30-45 minutes, on average, for this kind of activity. Students read and then write together in the google doc. I move around the room asking and answering questions or sit at my computer, monitoring the development of the document and using the "Insert Comment" function to "talk" to the students in real-time about what they are writing (I praise them, re-direct, pose questions, ask for elaboration, ask for greater specificity, request that they edit particular sentences, etc., all of which can be seen on the screen behind me and which they can see on their monitor).
Activity 4: Large-Group Discussion.
Activity 5: Looking Ahead
Example 2: Writing Workshop
Since arriving at RIC, my teaching, always focused on activities typical of writing classrooms (e.g. explicit instruction in pre-writing, drafting, and revision strategies; peer- and large-group writing workshops; one-on-one student conferences, etc.) has turned increasingly towards a pedagogy focused on facilitating or orchestrating student activity. Even as I begin to embrace the opportunity to teach English students the content of my field, I resist the traditional orientation of many college faculty--that of content-deliverers of declarative knowledge (the what of learning)--and find myself drawn to more procedural matters (the how of learning). Of course, it's impossible to separate these two aspects of teaching and learning and silly to privilege one over the other, but I find, in my conversations with faculty across the disciplines, that I perhaps err on the side of procedural learning more than my peers. This may stem from the very activity-focused nature of my scholarly area of interest (writing) and it may stem from other factors, such as the two two-hour-per-week learning blocks that structure English classes and which force faculty to get creative in finding ways to keep students engaged over extended periods of time. In sum, I find that I spend most of my time in the classroom facilitating student activity--devising a set of experiences and activities that provide students with learning opportunities and the motivation to take advantage of them.
devising tasks and creating online environments in which those tasks can be carried out, modeling how tasks should be carried out, monitoring task-engagement (in the room, on the screen), and reflecting with both individual students and entire classes, in both written and spoken language, on the learning that the tasks were designed to bring about.
My evolving pedagogy--a pedagogy-of-activity, if you will--is built upon a series of beliefs or values that I have come to hold about teaching and learning:
- Frequent student-to-student collaboration enhances student learning and builds classroom community. While the principal classroom collaboration is often thought to be that of faculty and student, informal and frequent student-to-student collaboration produces meaningful opportunities for learning and a stronger sense of community among students.
- Communication technologies are tools for strengthening student engagement. Technological platforms (Blackboard, Google, Facebook, etc.) are not distractions from the work of learning; increasingly the seas in which we and our students live and work, they are, ideally, important locations where learning takes place.
- Frequent low-stakes, usually public, write-to-learn (WTL) activities facilitate increased understanding. In many college classrooms, writing functions as yet another means of assessment, but it's most powerful use is epistemic--WTL activities are important tools that enable students to try on new ways of thinking, acting, talking, and being.
- Frequent informal dialogue with individual students leads to increased learning and participation in learning. Dialogue with individual students often takes place, if it takes place at all, before or after class or in the margins of student papers. But frequent individual dialogue via one-to-one conferences and/or response to writing (i.e. via blog posts, discussion boards, etc.) is critical to both learning and building relationships which support learning.
- Flexible assignments which encourage choice and ownership usually lead to better student work. Much, if not all, of the content students are exposed to in college courses originates outside of themselves. Providing opportunities for students to use that content for their own purposes and projects (within the scope of the work of the class) will lead to stronger end-products.
- Opportunities for reflection should be built into the fabric of the semester's work. College courses often utilize the coverage-and-test model, thus leaving out the experience of the learner. If faculty don't build explicit so-called "taking-stock" moments into the semester's calendar and make these moments "count" towards students' grades, metacognition--thinking about one's thinking in relation to some endeavor--may not happen. Without metacognition, learning is rarely meaningful.
- Organizing a semester, in part, around a significant project and sequencing the work of the term as a series of steps towards the completion of that project produces effective learning outcomes. College syllabi are typically organized according to a coverage-and-test or coverage-and-paper model. A different approach might be to embed the content one wishes to cover within some larger undertaking, thus more closely linking the acquisition of knowledge (i.e. what should I know?) with its application (i.e. what can I do with what I know?).
Day 1: Organizing Class Discussion (200/300-level course)
Day 2: Organizing Peer-Group Workshops (100/200 level course)
Day 3: Work Days (?)
Example 1: Discussion of Course Content
In what follows, I take an exemplary class meeting from a section of ENGL 230: Writing for Professional Settings (spring 2012) in order to try to illustrate the significance of these three items and their interaction during a typical class meeting.
Activity 1: Daily Plan. A typical day begins with me asking students to power up their computers and login to the course LMS. In each of my courses, I post a document called Daily Plans which maps out activity for each class meeting. This document is posted as a link within the LMS and thus, is always live and interactive. Once the students are all assembled, I pull up the Daily Plans document on the screen at the front of the room and the students open it on their computers and together we preview the outline of the day's work. I have found that students appreciate having access to this "itinerary" because it provides them with a sense of what to expect prior to and during class. It serves as a reference point, connecting each class meeting to the one before it and the one to follow. Reviewing the Daily Plan usually takes no more than 5-10 minutes.
Activity 2: Quiz. On many days, there is some kind of assigned reading that students are asked to complete ahead of class. On each day that a reading is assigned, class begins with a short quiz, which students take in the LMS, using the "Test" function. The quizzes always consist of ten true/false questions and can be completed within a matter of minutes. Once they have finished the quiz, the LMS provides students with immediate results and a grade. We then take a few minutes to discuss questions or problems with the quiz. I think of the daily quiz as our first attempt to get into the day's reading and learning. Over the course of a typical class period, I try to bring students back to the assigned text in several different ways, at several different times. The quiz is the first such attempt. They usually take no more than 10-15 minutes.
Activity 3: Small Group Work. Once students have completed the quiz, we shift gears. On a typical day, I have constructed a set of tasks in regard to the day's reading that I want students to complete in groups. These tasks are contained within a google document that students can access and interact within (write in). There are usually about 4-5 different sets of tasks, one for each small group (the students pick their groups). The google doc is a wiki that allows multiple users to all write within one document (picture 20 people writing in a MS Word doc simultaneously, all having access to what the others are writing). Links to the day's google doc are contained within the LMS. As such, these docs become a kind of archive or record of our thinking during each class and a resource for later discussions and activities.
The tasks I ask students to complete usually consist of two kinds of work: summarizing/explaining key concepts and ideas and posing questions. So, for example, during one early class meeting in ENGL 230 we discussed Deborah Brandt's article "Literacy and the Knowledge Economy." The discussion of this article was spread out over two days with the first day devoted to an overview of the study itself and the second day devoted to an examination of Brandt's findings and conclusions. I assigned one of Brandt's findings to each of the small groups, asking them to do three things: 1) re-read the passage with their finding, 2) explain the finding in their own words (using 2-3 passages from the text as support or illustration), 3) pose two questions for the class to discuss in regards to their assigned section/finding. Students access or re-access the article itself within the LMS and then get to work in teams of 3-4. This activity represents a second attempt to focus carefully on the day's reading. I allocate 30-45 minutes, on average, for this kind of activity. Students read and then write together in the google doc. I move around the room asking and answering questions or sit at my computer, monitoring the development of the document and using the "Insert Comment" function to "talk" to the students in real-time about what they are writing (I praise them, re-direct, pose questions, ask for elaboration, ask for greater specificity, request that they edit particular sentences, etc., all of which can be seen on the screen behind me and which they can see on their monitor).
Activity 4: Large-Group Discussion.
Activity 5: Looking Ahead
Example 2: Writing Workshop
Sunday, September 23, 2012
Tales of an Emergent Academic Technologist
In college, I somehow came to distrust technology. This was around the time of the Unabomber, in the early to mid-1990s, and I remember reading one of his manifestos in the newspaper and thinking--"This guy is crazy, but he's sure getting a few things right."
I'm not sure I would have seen it that way prior to my becoming an English major at the University of New Hampshire, but I think that studying English can cause you to distrust a lot of things, among them: organized religion, corporations, politicians, the military, and maybe, if you're like me (and the Unabomber), technology. These things somehow all get lumped into one wonderfully irrational religio-corporate-politico-military-techno complex and what your coursework all seems to add up to is a kind of Eisenhowerian warning: beware...the world. To be sure, being an English major gave me skepticism, distrust, and cynicism about the world in which I was living.
I'm not sure I would have seen it that way prior to my becoming an English major at the University of New Hampshire, but I think that studying English can cause you to distrust a lot of things, among them: organized religion, corporations, politicians, the military, and maybe, if you're like me (and the Unabomber), technology. These things somehow all get lumped into one wonderfully irrational religio-corporate-politico-military-techno complex and what your coursework all seems to add up to is a kind of Eisenhowerian warning: beware...the world. To be sure, being an English major gave me skepticism, distrust, and cynicism about the world in which I was living.
For some, a Thoreauian vision emerges as a kind of solution to a dim world-view. Get off the grid. Go out into nature. Bring a paper and some pencil. Write. Grow your own food. Whatever. I imagine I am not the first or the only English major to have lived some version of this dream--to have had his coursework seem to point him in this direction.
But while I was holed up in Hamilton Smith Hall in Durham, New Hampshire, reading and discussing Raymond Carver and James Baldwin and Joan Didion, there was a whole other group of guys on the other side of campus, in Kingsbury Hall, tinkering around with this new thing called the internet and for them, the world must have been really opening up. Here was this relatively new invention that allowed you to talk to other people in sometimes distant places and share ideas and information across time and space. I didn't know those guys and I don't really know what that moment in history was like for them, but it had to be exhilarating--a whole new world of possibility emerging before their eyes.
Despite the fact that I now teach English majors, I have only a slight sense of how such students view the world today. When I hear a student say, as one did in my rhetoric course the other day, that he would prefer to talk less about politics because he "fucking hates politics and all politicians," I begin to think that being an English major may not have changed a great deal. On the technological front, things are a bit more complicated. On the one hand, many of the English majors I teach embrace their smart-phones and their facebook pages with great vigor. On the other hand, I had a student last year who confessed her adoration and preference for the pencil. Another questioned why so much of what we were reading was posted online (she wanted to read more books). Each semester, a consistent minority of the English majors I teach seem to struggle with very basic technological operations and some, I think, take pride in this. I look around and see the obvious adoration of certain of our creative writing faculty and the popularity of certain literature courses and I think that things have, perhaps, not changed that much from the days when I was an English major. A certain kind of person is still attracted to the work--drawn, as I was, to the often romantic vision of the world and self that is sometimes still encouraged by the study of writing and literature. They sit on benches reading hard-cover books in the bright autumn sun on warm September afternoons. They carry journals in which they scribble quotes from their reading and questions about--well, everything. I was one of them.
When it comes to issues of technology, English professors, not surprisingly, are sometimes like their students. We are forever forgetting (or refusing to remember) how to work the hardware in our classrooms. We carry around stacks of our students' papers and write comments assiduously in the margins with our favorite pens. We queue up at the photocopy machine, printing out, for example, massive packets of MLA guidelines that could just as easily be linked to online. Mention of the campus learning management system (LMS) elicits eye-rolling or nervous laughter in the hallways where I work. Complaints about students' texting behaviors never cease (in the 60s and 70s, when these professors were students, this same ire was directed at television). During the first week or so of classes each semester, an older colleague across the hall calls me over to his office to help him add the Discussion Board tool to his LMS site. He confesses that he can't remember how we did it last time and sheepishly asks if I can show him again. The first few times he asked, as I added the tool I pointed out that our campus IT support unit holds regular seminars and workshops on how to use the LMS. But since he's still asking for my help at the start of each term, it's hard not to conclude that not only hasn't he sought out help--he doesn't really even want to learn. Like our students, we English professors have always been and may always be conflicted about the machines in our garden.
There is a passage in the book 1977: A Cultural Moment in Composition that has been following me around since I first encountered it a year or so ago. I'm using this passage in conversation with a research project about the history of composition teaching at the University of New Hampshire, but I'm finding all sorts of other uses for it and now, I think, I've found another one. Here it is:
Why do people teach composition as they do at any given moment? What determines their choices of textbooks, assignments, and daily classroom activities? Of all the possible approaches to the teaching of writing, why do teachers settle on particular ones? What accounts for the shape of composition programs--sequences of courses, testing and placement procedures, staffing and administrative practices? Individual preferences and personal styles are certainly involved; so, of course, are institutional values and constraints. But even more certainly, the teaching of composition is shaped by the available means of persuasion that are presented to us by intellectual and professional communities (broadly considered)--communities shaped, inevitably, by culture, circumstance, and history. (3)
In this first blog post, I've been trying to think about the communities and culture, circumstances and histories that have shaped my own orientation towards the use of technology in the classroom. My point, I think, is that for many who teach writing, the available means of (pedagogical) persuasion probably included some variation on this theme of skepticism/suspicion of the machine in the garden. We were not born with the impulse to roll our eyes, laugh nervously, or intentionally forget when issues related to technology come up--we were enculturated into these ways of knowing, we learned them while playing in the garden.
I've managed to unlearn them.
Today, in most of my classes, I strive to create the paperless classroom. I joke with my students that the paperless classroom is the penance I am doing for all the forests I killed in South America during my early teaching days. "You're papering them over," an older colleague and former professor once said as he stood in line, waiting for me to finish making copies.
But the paperless classroom is more an ethos than it is a penance. I hope, through this blog, to share this ethos with you. Like those computer scientists discovering the internet back in the 1990s, my orientation towards technology in the writing classroom is one of possibility and opportunity. But as I say, it hasn't always been so. And that's why I decided to start this blog by looking back. To know where you're going, you've got to know where you've been. This is an important lesson I learned from being an English major, too.
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Notes on Research: Tales of an Emergent Fox
In the Introduction to his book, The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States, Gordon Wood reflects on the nature of the work of the professional historian by drawing on the words of Isaiah Berlin, who drew on the words of the Greek poet Archilochus, who wrote: The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. In summarizing Berlin's discussion of the knowledge of the fox and the hedgehog, Wood writes,
On one side of this chasm [a]re the hedgehogs, "who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for psychological or physiological cause, related by no moral or aesthetic principle." On the other side [a]re the hedgehogs, "who relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel--a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance." (1)
Wood points out that it was Berlin's purpose to try to organize great writers into the categories of hedgehog and fox, but suggests that historians, too, can be classified using these terms. A close colleague and friend, Wood suggests, is undoubtedly a fox, jumping from topic to topic, following his interests wherever they lead. "He knows many things and is interested in many things," Wood explains. As for himself, Wood claims to be "a simple hedgehog," preoccupied, throughout his career, with a single topic: "the American revolution and its consequences" (2).
Foxes and hedgehogs. Hedgehogs and foxes. I'm not sure we all fit so neatly into these two categories, but if forced to choose, I would have to identify myself, like Wood's colleague, as a fox. I'm not sure I planned for it to be this way, but this is the way things seem to be working out for me when it comes to my scholarship and academic interests. A common theme, if there is one, is that my scholarly projects tend to emerge from my teaching and then feed back into them. Let's take three examples:
1. Prior to pursuing doctoral study I worked for one year as a high school teacher and two years as an adjunct/lecturer in English. During those two years, I took every teaching assignment that came my way: I taught at a traditional public state university, a small private liberal arts college, a recently-turned for-profit community college, and a continuing education branch of a large state system (for whom, in 1999, I designed and taught several fully-online writing courses).
During this period, I worked with many students and many different kinds of students. I was frequently intrigued and inspired by the non-traditional or adult students with whom I worked. And I had lots of questions: What kinds of experiences with writing did such students bring to their coursework? What were their writing histories? What sense of themselves as writers did they carry around in their heads? And what did they want from a course focused on academic writing? To add to my curiosity, around this same time, my own mother had returned to school to earn a long-awaited bachelor's degree and so there was an odd sort of synergy where I was a teacher, new to the classroom, and frequently teaching adults like my mother and she was a student, new again to the classroom, and frequently learning from younger faculty members like me. We had terrific conversations about our experiences--she offering me a living example of the challenges that many adults face balancing school, work, and family and me offering her, where I could, advice on how to interpret assignments and write papers that would earn good grades.
Several years later, having completed my graduate coursework and now casting around for a dissertation project, my mind returned to those days teaching adults and trading stories with my mom. I could not recall reading, in my admittedly brief introduction to the field of composition and rhetoric, a single study documenting the experiences of non-traditional students mediating between the writerly worlds of school and work. I decided I wanted to try to understand that transition better--I wanted to try to understand and interpret what writers go through as they move back and forth between writing-for-the-boss and writing-for-the-teacher. I hoped my work would both advance knowledge in the field about the challenges writers face as they move between discursive contexts and instruct those who work with adult students, so that they might design curriculum and instruction to better meet the needs of returning adults.
To date, this project has lead to a half dozen or so conference presentations and four scholarly publications (one book chapter and three articles), each of which focuses on some aspect of adults' mediation between workplace and academic contexts of writing. One article looks at the issue of genres learning, trying to understand how adults sometimes draw on genre knowledge gained in one context when negotiating new genres in a new context. Another article focuses on the issue of identity, trying to understand the ways in which professional identities earned over many years in the workplace affect the choices adult students make when writing in school. A third article examines the writerly histories and current writing practices of all seven adult students who participated in the original study, attempting to paint a broad picture of the role of writing in adult students lives, past and present. In the years ahead, I hope to return to this work to find ways to organize it into a single scholarly monograph.
2. While the focus of my dissertation project was on adult students and their experiences with writing across multiple contexts, a secondary benefit of this project was an introduction to the field of workplace or professional communication. During the data-collection period of my research, I asked my participants to bring in writing artifacts from three contexts: work, school, and home/community. During our interviews, we discussed these artifacts in great detail, but we spent the greatest amount of time, it seemed, looking at workplace writing. My participants ranged from IT specialists to paraprofessionals, from administrative assistants to construction industry marketers. All were writing and doing research of one kind or another on the job and so I was able to see, firsthand, genres of professional writing and also to learn about the rhetorical contexts and situations that gave rise to and necessitated workplace genres. Thus began my initiation into the field of professional writing and my introduction to the pedagogical question that focuses much research within the field: given the differing contexts in which professional and academic writing are produced and the differing purposes of academic and professional writing, what can we do in academic settings to prepare students effectively for the myriad contexts for and types of workplace writing they will produce during their professional careers?
Around the same time that I was first gaining exposure to workplace writing via my dissertation project, a new movement was gathering steam within the field of composition/rhetoric, a movement that focused on the ongoing question of how to best teach first-year composition (FYC) courses so that what students learned about writing there might better 'transfer' to other academic contexts. Adherents of this movement argue that rather than focus FYC courses on students' personal experiences or general areas of inquiry for which the instructor may or may not have formal academic training (i.e. love, war, food, childhood, etc.), writing instruction in FYC courses should draw on the research and knowledge of the field of composition/rhetoric itself to help students develop transferable knowledge about writing itself--knowledge that they will be able to use in other courses and in the world beyond college. This movement, known as writing-about-writing (WAW), posits that, like other academic disciplines, the knowledge we convey to our students should be the accumulated wisdom that we, ourselves, have accumulated over the forty or fifty or so years that academics have formally studied writing.
I was an earlier adopter of and advocate for the WAW approach and a reviewer of the first WAW-based textbook. As such, I began to see other possibilities for applying WAW principles, one important one being that of the professional or workplace communication course. Like FYC classes, workplace writing courses are concerned principally with preparing students to write in other contexts--contexts beyond the walls of the room in which they are currently sitting. Like FYC classes, workplace writing courses are concerned with the issue of transfer--of what we can teach in one context that will be useful in another. Because I frequently teach both FYC and professional writing courses, I began to see parallels between the institutional functions of these two classes and began to experiment with devising and articulating a WAW pedagogy for professional writing classes. This work is very much in its early stages and, I am excited to say, is now collaborative. At the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) in March, 2012, I presented work with my colleague Sarah Read (DePaul University), attempting to articulate a rationale for what we have come to call WAW-PW pedagogies for professional communication. Sarah and I also met with an editor from Bedford/St. Martin's during the conference to explore the possibility of a WAW-PW textbook. We are now at work on an article which furthers material we developed for our presentation at CCCC and which we hope to submit for publication this fall. The article, we hope, will lay the groundwork for the textbook we hope to begin work on in 2013.
3. As I have attempted to learn more about and experiment with the WAW approach to teaching FYC courses and begun to articulate a vision of WAW for professional communication instruction, I have found myself moving further and further from many of the core beliefs and practices I once held about writing and writing instruction. Or so it has seemed. This journey probably pre-dates my introduction to WAW and can be traced to my years of doctoral training, when my world, as regards the study and teaching of writing, was expanded considerably. As an undergraduate at the University of New Hampshire (UNH) during the early to mid-1990s, I had experienced what has come to be known as the "process" approach to writing instruction, an approach which emphasizes the importance of explicit instruction in pre-writing or invention, frequent and thoughtful feedback or response (from teacher and fellow-students), student-choice (in topic selection), ongoing revision, and a shared classroom community of writers. As a Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) candidate at the University of Iowa in the late 1990s, the curtain was pulled back and I learned the rationale for and methods of implementing process pedagogies. But by the time I left UNH again, in 2007, having completed my Ph.D., writing and the teaching of writing no longer seemed as straightforward as they perhaps once had and my teaching had shifted in emphasis, focusing more on examining the contexts which shape writing than on writers themselves.
The cognitive dissonance I sometimes felt when attempting to balance approaches to the teaching of writing that seemed fundamentally at odds with one another came to a head two or so years ago, when I decided to revisit and adopt for a course on expository writing a book that had once been my bible, Donald Murray's The Craft of Revision. Murray was a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and founder of the writing process movement in the late 1960s. A prolific writer himself, Murray spent the better part of the 1970s and 1980s trying to document the "writing process" (as if there was just one) and teaching writing teachers how to, as the title of his 1971 manifesto argues, "Teach Writing as a Process Not Product." Murray was also a professor at UNH where his influence was very much still felt when I was there as an undergraduate and persists, to some degree, to this day.
I had always thought of myself as an adherent to the Murray approach and to what I've come to think of as the "UNH School" of writing instruction. But that semester when I revisited Murray's The Craft of Revision, I was confronted with the fact that I no longer believed in a good deal of what Murray was saying about writing and the writing process. First, I had come to accept that there were many, many writing processes and I had become suspicious of anyone attempting to extrapolate about how writing worked based a data source as limited as his or her own experience (Murray's primary source of evidence). Second, I had come to feel that the context in which the writer finds him or herself matters at least at much (if not more) to the writing process as what the writer went through while writing (the latter of which being Murray's primary pre-occupation). These two beliefs made it virtually impossible for me to sign on to what Murray was preaching and caused in me a feeling of crisis in the sense that I began to feel as though I was turning my back on what had been, previously, my primary professional identification with the UNH School.
Around this time, I decided to go back and start re-reading Murray. I skipped his textbooks and began to read his published scholarly articles. I read everything he published in our field's major journals and a good number of pieces he published in smaller, more obscure venues. I found, as I read, that while Murray missed some things and made some moves that caused me to now feel uncomfortable, a good deal of what he said about writing and the teaching of writing he got right. Perhaps more important, I found that underlying my concerns about certain of his methods were a core bedrock of principles that I still very much believed in and adhered to. I still believe, for example, that students should be allowed to use writing to discover what it is that they want to say. I still believe that it's important for students to feel invested in the topics about which they are writing. And I still believe that, as Murray wrote in his "Teach Writing as Process Not Product," "There are no rules, no absolutes, just alternatives. What works one time may not another. All writing is experimental." My re-assessment of Murray's work has shown me that it is possible to disagree and agree--that it is possible to argue with one's mentors and still maintain identification with the larger projects and affiliations you both share. It has shown me that I am still very much of the UNH School.
And it has done something more. Despite his considerable influence on the field of composition/rhetoric, Donald Murray's work has not yet been examined and assessed in a sustained, critical manner by the field's historians. UNH, as an institutional site of composition teaching, has not yet been studied or placed on the map of significant historical places as regards the development of the field of composition/rhetoric. My work re-reading Murray, which emerged out of my own evolving pedagogical orientation, has now turned into a larger project, as I have initiated detailed historical study of both Murray's life and work and of the various writing programs he helped establish and shape at UNH. To date, this work has lead me to conduct interviews with numerous UNH English faculty and alumni and to conduct archival research in three institutional sites: Murray's archive (Poynter Institute, St. Petersburg, FL), the Milne Special Collections and Archives (UNH) and the UNH English Department archives. While this research is still very much ongoing, I have begun to experiment with shaping narratives which articulate Murray's significance to the field of composition/rhetoric and which argue for the significance of UNH as a key institutional site shaping the emergence of the field of composition/rhetoric in the 1970s/80s. I will share this work with the community of composition/rhetoric for the first time at the 64th Annual Convention of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (March, 2013), via my participation on a panel entitled “Archival Research and the Origins of Composition," where I will present a paper called "'Now I’ll Tell You About the Great Revolution': Donald Murray and The Transformation of Freshman English at the University of New Hampshire. I anticipate that this paper will turn into the first of several publications, including a scholarly monograph, on Murray and the writing programs at UNH.
What draws all this together? Connections...back to hedgehog and fox...
On one side of this chasm [a]re the hedgehogs, "who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for psychological or physiological cause, related by no moral or aesthetic principle." On the other side [a]re the hedgehogs, "who relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel--a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance." (1)
Wood points out that it was Berlin's purpose to try to organize great writers into the categories of hedgehog and fox, but suggests that historians, too, can be classified using these terms. A close colleague and friend, Wood suggests, is undoubtedly a fox, jumping from topic to topic, following his interests wherever they lead. "He knows many things and is interested in many things," Wood explains. As for himself, Wood claims to be "a simple hedgehog," preoccupied, throughout his career, with a single topic: "the American revolution and its consequences" (2).
Foxes and hedgehogs. Hedgehogs and foxes. I'm not sure we all fit so neatly into these two categories, but if forced to choose, I would have to identify myself, like Wood's colleague, as a fox. I'm not sure I planned for it to be this way, but this is the way things seem to be working out for me when it comes to my scholarship and academic interests. A common theme, if there is one, is that my scholarly projects tend to emerge from my teaching and then feed back into them. Let's take three examples:
1. Prior to pursuing doctoral study I worked for one year as a high school teacher and two years as an adjunct/lecturer in English. During those two years, I took every teaching assignment that came my way: I taught at a traditional public state university, a small private liberal arts college, a recently-turned for-profit community college, and a continuing education branch of a large state system (for whom, in 1999, I designed and taught several fully-online writing courses).
During this period, I worked with many students and many different kinds of students. I was frequently intrigued and inspired by the non-traditional or adult students with whom I worked. And I had lots of questions: What kinds of experiences with writing did such students bring to their coursework? What were their writing histories? What sense of themselves as writers did they carry around in their heads? And what did they want from a course focused on academic writing? To add to my curiosity, around this same time, my own mother had returned to school to earn a long-awaited bachelor's degree and so there was an odd sort of synergy where I was a teacher, new to the classroom, and frequently teaching adults like my mother and she was a student, new again to the classroom, and frequently learning from younger faculty members like me. We had terrific conversations about our experiences--she offering me a living example of the challenges that many adults face balancing school, work, and family and me offering her, where I could, advice on how to interpret assignments and write papers that would earn good grades.
Several years later, having completed my graduate coursework and now casting around for a dissertation project, my mind returned to those days teaching adults and trading stories with my mom. I could not recall reading, in my admittedly brief introduction to the field of composition and rhetoric, a single study documenting the experiences of non-traditional students mediating between the writerly worlds of school and work. I decided I wanted to try to understand that transition better--I wanted to try to understand and interpret what writers go through as they move back and forth between writing-for-the-boss and writing-for-the-teacher. I hoped my work would both advance knowledge in the field about the challenges writers face as they move between discursive contexts and instruct those who work with adult students, so that they might design curriculum and instruction to better meet the needs of returning adults.
To date, this project has lead to a half dozen or so conference presentations and four scholarly publications (one book chapter and three articles), each of which focuses on some aspect of adults' mediation between workplace and academic contexts of writing. One article looks at the issue of genres learning, trying to understand how adults sometimes draw on genre knowledge gained in one context when negotiating new genres in a new context. Another article focuses on the issue of identity, trying to understand the ways in which professional identities earned over many years in the workplace affect the choices adult students make when writing in school. A third article examines the writerly histories and current writing practices of all seven adult students who participated in the original study, attempting to paint a broad picture of the role of writing in adult students lives, past and present. In the years ahead, I hope to return to this work to find ways to organize it into a single scholarly monograph.
2. While the focus of my dissertation project was on adult students and their experiences with writing across multiple contexts, a secondary benefit of this project was an introduction to the field of workplace or professional communication. During the data-collection period of my research, I asked my participants to bring in writing artifacts from three contexts: work, school, and home/community. During our interviews, we discussed these artifacts in great detail, but we spent the greatest amount of time, it seemed, looking at workplace writing. My participants ranged from IT specialists to paraprofessionals, from administrative assistants to construction industry marketers. All were writing and doing research of one kind or another on the job and so I was able to see, firsthand, genres of professional writing and also to learn about the rhetorical contexts and situations that gave rise to and necessitated workplace genres. Thus began my initiation into the field of professional writing and my introduction to the pedagogical question that focuses much research within the field: given the differing contexts in which professional and academic writing are produced and the differing purposes of academic and professional writing, what can we do in academic settings to prepare students effectively for the myriad contexts for and types of workplace writing they will produce during their professional careers?
Around the same time that I was first gaining exposure to workplace writing via my dissertation project, a new movement was gathering steam within the field of composition/rhetoric, a movement that focused on the ongoing question of how to best teach first-year composition (FYC) courses so that what students learned about writing there might better 'transfer' to other academic contexts. Adherents of this movement argue that rather than focus FYC courses on students' personal experiences or general areas of inquiry for which the instructor may or may not have formal academic training (i.e. love, war, food, childhood, etc.), writing instruction in FYC courses should draw on the research and knowledge of the field of composition/rhetoric itself to help students develop transferable knowledge about writing itself--knowledge that they will be able to use in other courses and in the world beyond college. This movement, known as writing-about-writing (WAW), posits that, like other academic disciplines, the knowledge we convey to our students should be the accumulated wisdom that we, ourselves, have accumulated over the forty or fifty or so years that academics have formally studied writing.
I was an earlier adopter of and advocate for the WAW approach and a reviewer of the first WAW-based textbook. As such, I began to see other possibilities for applying WAW principles, one important one being that of the professional or workplace communication course. Like FYC classes, workplace writing courses are concerned principally with preparing students to write in other contexts--contexts beyond the walls of the room in which they are currently sitting. Like FYC classes, workplace writing courses are concerned with the issue of transfer--of what we can teach in one context that will be useful in another. Because I frequently teach both FYC and professional writing courses, I began to see parallels between the institutional functions of these two classes and began to experiment with devising and articulating a WAW pedagogy for professional writing classes. This work is very much in its early stages and, I am excited to say, is now collaborative. At the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) in March, 2012, I presented work with my colleague Sarah Read (DePaul University), attempting to articulate a rationale for what we have come to call WAW-PW pedagogies for professional communication. Sarah and I also met with an editor from Bedford/St. Martin's during the conference to explore the possibility of a WAW-PW textbook. We are now at work on an article which furthers material we developed for our presentation at CCCC and which we hope to submit for publication this fall. The article, we hope, will lay the groundwork for the textbook we hope to begin work on in 2013.
3. As I have attempted to learn more about and experiment with the WAW approach to teaching FYC courses and begun to articulate a vision of WAW for professional communication instruction, I have found myself moving further and further from many of the core beliefs and practices I once held about writing and writing instruction. Or so it has seemed. This journey probably pre-dates my introduction to WAW and can be traced to my years of doctoral training, when my world, as regards the study and teaching of writing, was expanded considerably. As an undergraduate at the University of New Hampshire (UNH) during the early to mid-1990s, I had experienced what has come to be known as the "process" approach to writing instruction, an approach which emphasizes the importance of explicit instruction in pre-writing or invention, frequent and thoughtful feedback or response (from teacher and fellow-students), student-choice (in topic selection), ongoing revision, and a shared classroom community of writers. As a Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) candidate at the University of Iowa in the late 1990s, the curtain was pulled back and I learned the rationale for and methods of implementing process pedagogies. But by the time I left UNH again, in 2007, having completed my Ph.D., writing and the teaching of writing no longer seemed as straightforward as they perhaps once had and my teaching had shifted in emphasis, focusing more on examining the contexts which shape writing than on writers themselves.
The cognitive dissonance I sometimes felt when attempting to balance approaches to the teaching of writing that seemed fundamentally at odds with one another came to a head two or so years ago, when I decided to revisit and adopt for a course on expository writing a book that had once been my bible, Donald Murray's The Craft of Revision. Murray was a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and founder of the writing process movement in the late 1960s. A prolific writer himself, Murray spent the better part of the 1970s and 1980s trying to document the "writing process" (as if there was just one) and teaching writing teachers how to, as the title of his 1971 manifesto argues, "Teach Writing as a Process Not Product." Murray was also a professor at UNH where his influence was very much still felt when I was there as an undergraduate and persists, to some degree, to this day.
I had always thought of myself as an adherent to the Murray approach and to what I've come to think of as the "UNH School" of writing instruction. But that semester when I revisited Murray's The Craft of Revision, I was confronted with the fact that I no longer believed in a good deal of what Murray was saying about writing and the writing process. First, I had come to accept that there were many, many writing processes and I had become suspicious of anyone attempting to extrapolate about how writing worked based a data source as limited as his or her own experience (Murray's primary source of evidence). Second, I had come to feel that the context in which the writer finds him or herself matters at least at much (if not more) to the writing process as what the writer went through while writing (the latter of which being Murray's primary pre-occupation). These two beliefs made it virtually impossible for me to sign on to what Murray was preaching and caused in me a feeling of crisis in the sense that I began to feel as though I was turning my back on what had been, previously, my primary professional identification with the UNH School.
Around this time, I decided to go back and start re-reading Murray. I skipped his textbooks and began to read his published scholarly articles. I read everything he published in our field's major journals and a good number of pieces he published in smaller, more obscure venues. I found, as I read, that while Murray missed some things and made some moves that caused me to now feel uncomfortable, a good deal of what he said about writing and the teaching of writing he got right. Perhaps more important, I found that underlying my concerns about certain of his methods were a core bedrock of principles that I still very much believed in and adhered to. I still believe, for example, that students should be allowed to use writing to discover what it is that they want to say. I still believe that it's important for students to feel invested in the topics about which they are writing. And I still believe that, as Murray wrote in his "Teach Writing as Process Not Product," "There are no rules, no absolutes, just alternatives. What works one time may not another. All writing is experimental." My re-assessment of Murray's work has shown me that it is possible to disagree and agree--that it is possible to argue with one's mentors and still maintain identification with the larger projects and affiliations you both share. It has shown me that I am still very much of the UNH School.
And it has done something more. Despite his considerable influence on the field of composition/rhetoric, Donald Murray's work has not yet been examined and assessed in a sustained, critical manner by the field's historians. UNH, as an institutional site of composition teaching, has not yet been studied or placed on the map of significant historical places as regards the development of the field of composition/rhetoric. My work re-reading Murray, which emerged out of my own evolving pedagogical orientation, has now turned into a larger project, as I have initiated detailed historical study of both Murray's life and work and of the various writing programs he helped establish and shape at UNH. To date, this work has lead me to conduct interviews with numerous UNH English faculty and alumni and to conduct archival research in three institutional sites: Murray's archive (Poynter Institute, St. Petersburg, FL), the Milne Special Collections and Archives (UNH) and the UNH English Department archives. While this research is still very much ongoing, I have begun to experiment with shaping narratives which articulate Murray's significance to the field of composition/rhetoric and which argue for the significance of UNH as a key institutional site shaping the emergence of the field of composition/rhetoric in the 1970s/80s. I will share this work with the community of composition/rhetoric for the first time at the 64th Annual Convention of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (March, 2013), via my participation on a panel entitled “Archival Research and the Origins of Composition," where I will present a paper called "'Now I’ll Tell You About the Great Revolution': Donald Murray and The Transformation of Freshman English at the University of New Hampshire. I anticipate that this paper will turn into the first of several publications, including a scholarly monograph, on Murray and the writing programs at UNH.
What draws all this together? Connections...back to hedgehog and fox...
The Rhetoric of Prophets
A course on the rhetoric of prophets:
Jesus Christ
Ghandi
MLK
Malcolm X
John Lennon
Bob Marley
Jesus Christ
Ghandi
MLK
Malcolm X
John Lennon
Bob Marley
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
ENGL 379: Planning
Rhetoric: An Overview (Keith and Lundberg)
Rhetoric: How To (Hart and Daughton)
Rhetoric: Critical Texts (Aristotle?)
Rhetoric: How To (Hart and Daughton)
Rhetoric: Critical Texts (Aristotle?)
Friday, August 3, 2012
ENGL 232: Planning
Unit 1: Questions and Definitions
What is inquiry? (Lauer)
What is Web 2.0? (Murugesan)
What is literacy and what are literacy practices? (Barton and Hamilton)
What kind of litearcy practice is a weblog? (McNeil)
Unit 2: Identifying Areas of Inquiry
Blogging
Digital Project
Oral
Video
Multimedia (Flash)--bomb piece or Quan's piece
Photo Essay
Mash-Up
http://www.susandelagrange.com/450.03/?page_id=23
IDEA 2: Service Learning
First Half: Read Writing for Digital Media and do research on college students and writing and rhetoric/writing majors/minors
Teams:
A. Survey (who shows me how to do this?)
B. Interviews (who shows me how to do this?)
C. Analysis of other programs materials/websites (who shows me how to do this?)
Second Half: Projects for Rhetoric and Writing minor (teams)
RIC website (text/images)
Promotional Video
Brochure
Blogging about writing--some aspect of writing which interests them?
What is inquiry? (Lauer)
What is Web 2.0? (Murugesan)
What is literacy and what are literacy practices? (Barton and Hamilton)
What kind of litearcy practice is a weblog? (McNeil)
Unit 2: Identifying Areas of Inquiry
Blogging
Digital Project
Oral
Video
Multimedia (Flash)--bomb piece or Quan's piece
Photo Essay
Mash-Up
http://www.susandelagrange.com/450.03/?page_id=23
IDEA 2: Service Learning
First Half: Read Writing for Digital Media and do research on college students and writing and rhetoric/writing majors/minors
Teams:
A. Survey (who shows me how to do this?)
B. Interviews (who shows me how to do this?)
C. Analysis of other programs materials/websites (who shows me how to do this?)
Second Half: Projects for Rhetoric and Writing minor (teams)
RIC website (text/images)
Promotional Video
Brochure
Blogging about writing--some aspect of writing which interests them?
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
Notes on Service: Teaching Teachers
ITL
FCTL (advisory board)
When I was first hired at Rhode Island College several senior colleagues offered this bit of unsolicited wisdom: Try to find ways to make connections between your different responsibilities (teaching, research, service) and you'll find your work at the college more satisfying. I'm not sure how often faculty are able to operationalize this advice, but in my case, I've been fortunate in that my teaching, research, and service have tended to converge around at least two activities: educational technology and the teaching of writing. In what follows, I will articulate how I have served both the English department and Rhode Island College via these activities.
Department
One of the most significant contributions I feel I have made to the English Department comes via my work devising a new Rhetoric and Writing minor and, with it, a series of new writing courses. During the 2009/2010 school year, with the assistance of both the Department Chair and numerous members of the Department, I undertook to design and propose two new English courses at the 300-level: ENGL 378: Studies in Composition and ENGL 379: Studies in Rhetoric. During the 2010/2011 school year, again with help from my colleagues and in collaboration with other writing faculty, I worked to redesign the existing writing minor and its curriculum sequence, revise two existing courses (ENGL 230 & 231), add two new courses (ENGL 232 & 477). During the 2011/2012 and 2012/2013 school years, via these new courses and this new curriculum, I have begun the exciting work of introducing RIC students to current knowledge and practice within the field of composition/rhetoric, thus expanding their opportunities to learn about and improve their writing and to expose our English majors, especially, to the full range of areas of specialization within the field of English studies.
While my work on the Rhetoric and Writing minor has been ad hoc, my primary responsibilities to the department have come via my committee assignments. Here, I've served in four capacities: as a member of the Graduate Committee, as a Department Technology Liaison (DTL), as a member of the Composition Committee, and as internship supervisor. This year, for the first time, I am serving as a member of the Special Events committee in order to reinvigorate Career Day. It is my hope that this event will be an important step towards helping RIC English majors anticipate and plan for the world beyond college. I'd like to say a few words about my work as a DTL, Composition Committee member, and internship supervisor.
In my capacity as DTL, I have tried to serve as a bridge between the English Department and User Support Services (USS). On the one hand, I have tried to represent both official and unofficial questions and concerns of the English Department to USS. On the other hand, I have tried to bring to the English Department relevant news about issues related to technology. This latter work has meant quick reports at department meetings on the ever-shifting technological landscape at RIC and occasional demonstrations of new and promising tools for teaching. I have also served, in less formal capacities, as a consultant to English faculty using instructional technology, as a resource for faculty wishing to access technological instruction, and as an advisor to the Chair regarding questions of technology acquisition. I have found this work to be both satisfying and a means by which to get to know members of the department better. I have also found this work useful in that, as a heavy user of educational technology myself, I am interested in participating in conversations beyond the department-level about technology and technology-use at the college. Thus, in addition to serving as a bridge between English and USS, the DTL position has provided me with an opportunity to learn more about technological initiatives at RIC, generally, and, when appropriate, to offer input and feedback (e.g. this fall I am working with USS to pilot and offer feedback on the newest version of Blackboard). In the years ahead, I hope to get more involved, particularly when it comes to the college's recent interest in and plans for online learning.
Some of my most substantive contributions to the English Department have come, I believe, via my work as a member of the Composition Committee. We have seen significant positive change in the first-year writing program since the arrival of our current director, Becky Caouette. Becky has provided the Committee with numerous opportunities for collaboration and I have taken her up on offers in both official and unofficial ways. Some initiatives/developments with which I have assisted include: bringing speakers to campus, consulting on drafting and revision of program documents (and website), observation of WRTG 100 instructors, initiation of first-year writing awards, and ongoing assessment of WRTG 100. I have participated in first-year writing coffee-hour/brown-bag events and delivered a talk on teaching composition with technology. Recently, I have taken on an unofficial role as a mentor to a new WRTG 100 instructor, reviewing her course materials and offering feedback as well as coaching as she transitions to college-level teaching. As Becky's office neighbor and fellow compositionist, I have offered an ear when asked and advice when requested. Watching the first-year writing program develop, change, and grow these past four years and having the opportunity to help shape this process has proven to be among the most rewarding--and, I believe, far-reaching--contributions I have made to the Department (and to the college).
My work with Daniel Scott, facilitating student writing-internships, has offered me yet another opportunity to connect my professional interests in writing with my service to the English Department. This work, which started small, with just one to two interns per year, has grown and will, I anticipate, continue to grow in the years to come as Daniel moves on to his position as Department Chair and I assume greater responsibility for writing interns. Supervising writing interns offers me one of the most significant opportunities I've been given to contribute to the work of Department, and that is to advise and support English majors as they begin to negotiate the transition from school to work. This is enormously satisfying work in that I am able to both help students navigate a significant life passage and draw on my scholarly knowledge of the role of writing in academic and professional settings to help them make sense of their experiences. By helping interns identify and secure placement opportunities, I have gained knowledge of the greater-Providence community as well as the local non-profit sector and publishing industries--knowledge I can share with all English majors. Now that we have a designated course and course number for student interns, I hope that in the years to come, we will be able to offer this course, not just on a one-to-one basis, but at least once per year, allowing a small group of interns to share their experiences and complete coursework in addition to the work of their internships. This fall, I have taken one step in this direction by devising a curriculum which attempts to introduce students to scholarly knowledge about professional writing and provide them an opportunity to share and reflect on the day-to-day work of their internships. It is my hope that via courses like ENGL 477 and ENGL 230, and events like Career Day, English majors will feel more informed, supported, and empowered as they make the transition from school to work.
College
I did not anticipate, when I first arrived at Rhode Island College, that I would be engaged in the work of teaching teachers to the extent that I am today. Steadily, over the past four years, my engagement with faculty across campus on issues related to disciplinary writing instruction has increased. Early on, I was invited by the School of Management to do a half-day workshop on "best practices" in writing pedagogy. It was a terrific introduction to the work and I hoped for additional chances to share my knowledge and support faculty in their efforts to teach writing effectively. In the years following that first workshop, I found many such opportunities.
First, there was my regular participation in the Writing Board's annual Faculty Development Day (FDD). Each year I attended, in small ways--during panel presentations or break-out sessions or just during small group discussions--I found myself sharing my knowledge and experience with "best practices" for teaching writing and, frequently, challenging my colleagues to think in different ways about writing instruction and... struggling to find a way to offer them something more substantial in terms of professional-development than a brief conversation with a colleague on a cold winter afternoon.
As my reputation as a consultant on matters related to writing pedagogy grew, I found myself receiving occasional emails or engaged in spontaneous hallway conversations on questions related to the teaching of writing. These informal conversations, combined with my regular participation at the FDD, provided important opportunities to begin to understand the problem of teaching writing from the perspective of faculty in the disciplines--faculty who usually had received no formal training in the teaching of writing but were, nonetheless, doing their best to make writing instruction meaningful for themselves and their students. I think that these informal opportunities to listen to faculty who do not identify primarily as writing instructors were instrumental in my growing awareness that RIC faculty needed more support in how to implement effective writing instruction. They were also significant in that they helped me to begin to imagine approaches and strategies to effectively engage faculty in the disciplines in ways they would find persuasive.
It wasn't until the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning (FCTL) opened its doors in 2010, however, that I was able to put what I was learning into practice and, I believe, really make a difference in educating and supporting RIC faculty on developing pedagogically sound instructional practices for teaching writing. The FCTL offered me the opportunity to connect with faculty on writing initiatives via occasional co-operative workshops. More importantly, the FCTL offered a venue to advance more ambitious and sustained professional development opportunities for writing instruction--and to serve Rhode Island College in ways that, I believe, are having a significant and, I hope, lasting impact.
In 2011, in collaboration with FCTL Director Joe Zornado and with the generous underwriting of Vice-President of Academic Affairs (VPAA) Ron Pitt, I launched the first Summer Seminar for the Teaching of Writing (SSTW) at Rhode Island College. The SSTW consists of a one-week immersive instructional workshop on "best practices" for writing pedagogy, a series of follow-up support meetings during the academic year, and a culminating campus-wide panel presentation where SSTW "graduates" share instructional artifacts and stories and make explicit their learning processes. This structure grows, in large part, from my developing sense of the challenges disciplinary faculty face in shifting perceptions around writing pedagogy, learning new approaches to teaching writing, and implementing them in the classroom. Designing and delivering the SSTW has been one of the most satisfying professional experiences of my career. I believe it is among the most significant contributions I have made to the campus community at Rhode Island College, as this work with faculty in the disciplines has a ripple-effect, allowing me to play a positive role in affecting the educational experiences of many more RIC students than those that I teach each semester. As Joe and I look ahead to the third SSTW in 2013, we have begun to undertake plans for a small research study in which we hope to collaborate with SSTW participants to study the implementation process--to try to understand what faculty do with what they've learned when they return to their classrooms. We anticipate that this work will culminate in a a publication which explores the nature of writing-related professional development initiatives--thus allowing me to make connections between my service and scholarly responsibilities at the college.
In addition to this work via the SSTW, my service to RIC, helping to advance an agenda for effective writing pedagogy, has recently been institutionalized in a second important way. I have recently been elected to serve as the chair of the campus Writing Board. This represents a new opportunity to work with RIC faculty and the campus at large on initiatives related to writing and writing instruction, especially given that the responsibilities of the Writing Board chair have recently been expanded and enlarged. In addition to the traditional responsibilities of the chair, which included scheduling and presiding over meetings and heading up planning for the annual Faculty Development Day and other events, the revised responsibilities of the Chair include facilitating and coordinating support for writing instruction on campus, collaborating with programs and departments around initiatives related to writing, and coordinating with units such as the FCTL or COGE on writing-related matters.
FCTL (advisory board)
When I was first hired at Rhode Island College several senior colleagues offered this bit of unsolicited wisdom: Try to find ways to make connections between your different responsibilities (teaching, research, service) and you'll find your work at the college more satisfying. I'm not sure how often faculty are able to operationalize this advice, but in my case, I've been fortunate in that my teaching, research, and service have tended to converge around at least two activities: educational technology and the teaching of writing. In what follows, I will articulate how I have served both the English department and Rhode Island College via these activities.
Department
One of the most significant contributions I feel I have made to the English Department comes via my work devising a new Rhetoric and Writing minor and, with it, a series of new writing courses. During the 2009/2010 school year, with the assistance of both the Department Chair and numerous members of the Department, I undertook to design and propose two new English courses at the 300-level: ENGL 378: Studies in Composition and ENGL 379: Studies in Rhetoric. During the 2010/2011 school year, again with help from my colleagues and in collaboration with other writing faculty, I worked to redesign the existing writing minor and its curriculum sequence, revise two existing courses (ENGL 230 & 231), add two new courses (ENGL 232 & 477). During the 2011/2012 and 2012/2013 school years, via these new courses and this new curriculum, I have begun the exciting work of introducing RIC students to current knowledge and practice within the field of composition/rhetoric, thus expanding their opportunities to learn about and improve their writing and to expose our English majors, especially, to the full range of areas of specialization within the field of English studies.
While my work on the Rhetoric and Writing minor has been ad hoc, my primary responsibilities to the department have come via my committee assignments. Here, I've served in four capacities: as a member of the Graduate Committee, as a Department Technology Liaison (DTL), as a member of the Composition Committee, and as internship supervisor. This year, for the first time, I am serving as a member of the Special Events committee in order to reinvigorate Career Day. It is my hope that this event will be an important step towards helping RIC English majors anticipate and plan for the world beyond college. I'd like to say a few words about my work as a DTL, Composition Committee member, and internship supervisor.
In my capacity as DTL, I have tried to serve as a bridge between the English Department and User Support Services (USS). On the one hand, I have tried to represent both official and unofficial questions and concerns of the English Department to USS. On the other hand, I have tried to bring to the English Department relevant news about issues related to technology. This latter work has meant quick reports at department meetings on the ever-shifting technological landscape at RIC and occasional demonstrations of new and promising tools for teaching. I have also served, in less formal capacities, as a consultant to English faculty using instructional technology, as a resource for faculty wishing to access technological instruction, and as an advisor to the Chair regarding questions of technology acquisition. I have found this work to be both satisfying and a means by which to get to know members of the department better. I have also found this work useful in that, as a heavy user of educational technology myself, I am interested in participating in conversations beyond the department-level about technology and technology-use at the college. Thus, in addition to serving as a bridge between English and USS, the DTL position has provided me with an opportunity to learn more about technological initiatives at RIC, generally, and, when appropriate, to offer input and feedback (e.g. this fall I am working with USS to pilot and offer feedback on the newest version of Blackboard). In the years ahead, I hope to get more involved, particularly when it comes to the college's recent interest in and plans for online learning.
Some of my most substantive contributions to the English Department have come, I believe, via my work as a member of the Composition Committee. We have seen significant positive change in the first-year writing program since the arrival of our current director, Becky Caouette. Becky has provided the Committee with numerous opportunities for collaboration and I have taken her up on offers in both official and unofficial ways. Some initiatives/developments with which I have assisted include: bringing speakers to campus, consulting on drafting and revision of program documents (and website), observation of WRTG 100 instructors, initiation of first-year writing awards, and ongoing assessment of WRTG 100. I have participated in first-year writing coffee-hour/brown-bag events and delivered a talk on teaching composition with technology. Recently, I have taken on an unofficial role as a mentor to a new WRTG 100 instructor, reviewing her course materials and offering feedback as well as coaching as she transitions to college-level teaching. As Becky's office neighbor and fellow compositionist, I have offered an ear when asked and advice when requested. Watching the first-year writing program develop, change, and grow these past four years and having the opportunity to help shape this process has proven to be among the most rewarding--and, I believe, far-reaching--contributions I have made to the Department (and to the college).
My work with Daniel Scott, facilitating student writing-internships, has offered me yet another opportunity to connect my professional interests in writing with my service to the English Department. This work, which started small, with just one to two interns per year, has grown and will, I anticipate, continue to grow in the years to come as Daniel moves on to his position as Department Chair and I assume greater responsibility for writing interns. Supervising writing interns offers me one of the most significant opportunities I've been given to contribute to the work of Department, and that is to advise and support English majors as they begin to negotiate the transition from school to work. This is enormously satisfying work in that I am able to both help students navigate a significant life passage and draw on my scholarly knowledge of the role of writing in academic and professional settings to help them make sense of their experiences. By helping interns identify and secure placement opportunities, I have gained knowledge of the greater-Providence community as well as the local non-profit sector and publishing industries--knowledge I can share with all English majors. Now that we have a designated course and course number for student interns, I hope that in the years to come, we will be able to offer this course, not just on a one-to-one basis, but at least once per year, allowing a small group of interns to share their experiences and complete coursework in addition to the work of their internships. This fall, I have taken one step in this direction by devising a curriculum which attempts to introduce students to scholarly knowledge about professional writing and provide them an opportunity to share and reflect on the day-to-day work of their internships. It is my hope that via courses like ENGL 477 and ENGL 230, and events like Career Day, English majors will feel more informed, supported, and empowered as they make the transition from school to work.
College
I did not anticipate, when I first arrived at Rhode Island College, that I would be engaged in the work of teaching teachers to the extent that I am today. Steadily, over the past four years, my engagement with faculty across campus on issues related to disciplinary writing instruction has increased. Early on, I was invited by the School of Management to do a half-day workshop on "best practices" in writing pedagogy. It was a terrific introduction to the work and I hoped for additional chances to share my knowledge and support faculty in their efforts to teach writing effectively. In the years following that first workshop, I found many such opportunities.
First, there was my regular participation in the Writing Board's annual Faculty Development Day (FDD). Each year I attended, in small ways--during panel presentations or break-out sessions or just during small group discussions--I found myself sharing my knowledge and experience with "best practices" for teaching writing and, frequently, challenging my colleagues to think in different ways about writing instruction and... struggling to find a way to offer them something more substantial in terms of professional-development than a brief conversation with a colleague on a cold winter afternoon.
As my reputation as a consultant on matters related to writing pedagogy grew, I found myself receiving occasional emails or engaged in spontaneous hallway conversations on questions related to the teaching of writing. These informal conversations, combined with my regular participation at the FDD, provided important opportunities to begin to understand the problem of teaching writing from the perspective of faculty in the disciplines--faculty who usually had received no formal training in the teaching of writing but were, nonetheless, doing their best to make writing instruction meaningful for themselves and their students. I think that these informal opportunities to listen to faculty who do not identify primarily as writing instructors were instrumental in my growing awareness that RIC faculty needed more support in how to implement effective writing instruction. They were also significant in that they helped me to begin to imagine approaches and strategies to effectively engage faculty in the disciplines in ways they would find persuasive.
It wasn't until the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning (FCTL) opened its doors in 2010, however, that I was able to put what I was learning into practice and, I believe, really make a difference in educating and supporting RIC faculty on developing pedagogically sound instructional practices for teaching writing. The FCTL offered me the opportunity to connect with faculty on writing initiatives via occasional co-operative workshops. More importantly, the FCTL offered a venue to advance more ambitious and sustained professional development opportunities for writing instruction--and to serve Rhode Island College in ways that, I believe, are having a significant and, I hope, lasting impact.
In 2011, in collaboration with FCTL Director Joe Zornado and with the generous underwriting of Vice-President of Academic Affairs (VPAA) Ron Pitt, I launched the first Summer Seminar for the Teaching of Writing (SSTW) at Rhode Island College. The SSTW consists of a one-week immersive instructional workshop on "best practices" for writing pedagogy, a series of follow-up support meetings during the academic year, and a culminating campus-wide panel presentation where SSTW "graduates" share instructional artifacts and stories and make explicit their learning processes. This structure grows, in large part, from my developing sense of the challenges disciplinary faculty face in shifting perceptions around writing pedagogy, learning new approaches to teaching writing, and implementing them in the classroom. Designing and delivering the SSTW has been one of the most satisfying professional experiences of my career. I believe it is among the most significant contributions I have made to the campus community at Rhode Island College, as this work with faculty in the disciplines has a ripple-effect, allowing me to play a positive role in affecting the educational experiences of many more RIC students than those that I teach each semester. As Joe and I look ahead to the third SSTW in 2013, we have begun to undertake plans for a small research study in which we hope to collaborate with SSTW participants to study the implementation process--to try to understand what faculty do with what they've learned when they return to their classrooms. We anticipate that this work will culminate in a a publication which explores the nature of writing-related professional development initiatives--thus allowing me to make connections between my service and scholarly responsibilities at the college.
In addition to this work via the SSTW, my service to RIC, helping to advance an agenda for effective writing pedagogy, has recently been institutionalized in a second important way. I have recently been elected to serve as the chair of the campus Writing Board. This represents a new opportunity to work with RIC faculty and the campus at large on initiatives related to writing and writing instruction, especially given that the responsibilities of the Writing Board chair have recently been expanded and enlarged. In addition to the traditional responsibilities of the chair, which included scheduling and presiding over meetings and heading up planning for the annual Faculty Development Day and other events, the revised responsibilities of the Chair include facilitating and coordinating support for writing instruction on campus, collaborating with programs and departments around initiatives related to writing, and coordinating with units such as the FCTL or COGE on writing-related matters.
This new enlarged vision of the Writing Board chair furthers work already under way. As noted above, via previous experiences, I have already begun to serve as a consultant on matters related to writing across the curriculum/writing in the disciplines; have established relationships with campus units such as the writing center, FYW program and FYS program; have worked with departments and colleges to offer support for writing instruction; and have collaborated with units like COGE, Adams Library and the FCTL on writing-related issues and initiatives. The newly created Writing Board chair position provides me with an institutionally-recognized platform to continue to expand the scope of this work. In the days and weeks since my election to the Writing Board chair, I have already begun a new collaboration with the School of Nursing, to initiate what I hope will be a year-long series of talks and workshops on the teaching of writing in nursing education and to identify writing outcomes for nursing students. In the weeks and months ahead, in addition to planning and organizing the annual Faculty Development Day and leading members of the Writing Board in a revised agenda for our monthly meetings (focused on professional development and discussions of "best practices" in writing instruction), I plan to reach out to department chairs to initiate more discussions about and support for writing in the disciplines at RIC. During my first four years at RIC, my participation on the Writing Board has provided me with important opportunities to educate and support RIC faculty when it comes to the teaching of writing. I anticipate that my new role as Writing Board chair will allow me to further develop this work.
A final opportunity for serving the campus community around issues related to writing and writing instruction has presented itself to me in just the past few months, as I was selected to serve a two-year term as a Teaching Fellow in the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning (where I already sit on the Advisory Board). In this capacity, I will continue to serve RIC faculty via one-on-one consultation on "best practices" for writing pedagogy, lead co-operative workshops on different aspects of writing instruction (facilitating peer workshops, using technology to respond to student writing, designing effective assignments, etc.), and co-edit RIC's online journal, Issues in Teaching and Learning. The Teaching Fellow position provides me with yet another platform to serve RIC faculty by offering support on the inevitable challenges of implementing effective writing instruction.
When I first arrived at RIC, I felt that when it came to writing instruction, I had knowledge and experience that could help faculty in the disciplines improve their teaching practice, but I was unsure how I would share what I knew. I pictured a stone being tossed into a pond and the ripples going out. I felt like I could serve my students well when it came to writing instruction, but felt as though working with my own students would be just one ripple in the pond of Rhode Island College. I wondered if I would have the opportunity to create ripples that extended further and reached a wider audience of students. As I move into my fifth year, I am now finding myself in a position to create ripples which travel far beyond my own students and which extend to the many hundreds of RIC undergraduates who are taught by the dozens of RIC faculty with whom I have now worked. I am grateful to have the institutional recognition of and support for this work, thankful for the opportunities I now have before me to affect positive change with regard to the teaching of writing at Rhode Island College, and excited for the work ahead.
---
In the past two years, my work working with RIC faculty has been institutionalized or formalized in three important ways.
establish, design curriculum for, and teach
I've been thinking about my tenure file and about the letter/essay I need to write to accompany my materials. I've also been thinking about the themes I want to highlight in this file and how I want to present myself. I'm thinking about key words or sort of ways to organize my presentation of myself. I thought that perhaps I would start by just spending this week writing, to try to clarify for myself what it is that I want to say about myself and my work to others at the university. I am thinking of this as a real opportunity for "taking stock" of the various types of work and professional identities I have been enacting during my first four years at RIC. I welcome a moment of reflection and the moment to pause from other work (sort of) to look up and ask where I have been and, importantly, who I am in the process of becoming.
Who am I in the process of becoming? That's an interesting way of putting it. The most obvious piece or the piece that's most on my mind this morning, given the workshop i just conducted yesterday, is the piece where I am in the process of becoming a teacher of teachers. So, perhaps I'll write a bit about this.
Assistant Professor, Composition and Rhetoric [2411]
The English Department at Rhode Island College invites applications for a tenure-track position at the rank of Assistant Professor. Responsibilities include teaching undergraduate courses in composition and general education as well as the possibility of introductory surveys and specialty courses at upper-division and MA levels; an ongoing commitment to scholarly work; and departmental and college service. Faculty in composition may collaborate with Writing Across the Curriculum or Writing in the Disciplines work on campus as well as with a very active Writing Center and the Rhode Island Writing Project. Requirements include: Ph.D. in English with specialization in composition and rhetoric or Ph.D. in composition and rhetoric. Preferred: An interest in professional, business, and/or technical writing; expertise in writing assessment. (Job Ad, posted in MLA Job Bulletin, fall 2008)
---
In the past two years, my work working with RIC faculty has been institutionalized or formalized in three important ways.
establish, design curriculum for, and teach
I've been thinking about my tenure file and about the letter/essay I need to write to accompany my materials. I've also been thinking about the themes I want to highlight in this file and how I want to present myself. I'm thinking about key words or sort of ways to organize my presentation of myself. I thought that perhaps I would start by just spending this week writing, to try to clarify for myself what it is that I want to say about myself and my work to others at the university. I am thinking of this as a real opportunity for "taking stock" of the various types of work and professional identities I have been enacting during my first four years at RIC. I welcome a moment of reflection and the moment to pause from other work (sort of) to look up and ask where I have been and, importantly, who I am in the process of becoming.
Who am I in the process of becoming? That's an interesting way of putting it. The most obvious piece or the piece that's most on my mind this morning, given the workshop i just conducted yesterday, is the piece where I am in the process of becoming a teacher of teachers. So, perhaps I'll write a bit about this.
Assistant Professor, Composition and Rhetoric [2411]
The English Department at Rhode Island College invites applications for a tenure-track position at the rank of Assistant Professor. Responsibilities include teaching undergraduate courses in composition and general education as well as the possibility of introductory surveys and specialty courses at upper-division and MA levels; an ongoing commitment to scholarly work; and departmental and college service. Faculty in composition may collaborate with Writing Across the Curriculum or Writing in the Disciplines work on campus as well as with a very active Writing Center and the Rhode Island Writing Project. Requirements include: Ph.D. in English with specialization in composition and rhetoric or Ph.D. in composition and rhetoric. Preferred: An interest in professional, business, and/or technical writing; expertise in writing assessment. (Job Ad, posted in MLA Job Bulletin, fall 2008)
Tuesday, July 3, 2012
Blogging is the New Persuasive Essay
As an English teacher, I’ve had numerous conversations with college professors who lament the writing skills of their first year students. But not all writing. Most students are capable of solid expository writing. It’s their skill with persuasive writing that’s the problem. Specifically, they’re weak at writing a thesis statement that can be argued.
More...
More...
Monday, June 18, 2012
About Writing Studies
The following passages were really useful in helping me think about my own field. Taken from Doug Downs book chapter, "Teaching First-Year Writers to Use Texts."
Writing Studies is marked by a free mix of research methodologies from the humanities and social sciences—or in Michael Carter's terms, the meta-genres of research-from-sources and empirical inquiry (396-98)...Despite its positioning in English departments, Writing Studies also often behaves like a social science. While showing discomfort with positivist empirical epistemology (or a humanist's fear of parametric statistics), the field was born in and continues to value data-driven rather than only or purely theoretical analysis... Resulting from this blended epistemology, a given article may work across multiple fields and take methods as it finds them, even though such practice can lead to methodological "looseness" that the fields originating the methods might take issue with. Writing Studies texts also tend to valorize personal experience and believe that more can accurately be said about the experiences of a small number of writers discussed in detail (as through ethnography, case study, longitudinal study, and interview) than about larger datasets generated through experiment with only limited control of variables. At the same time, drawing from their humanities and literary-studies roots, scholars in the field read and analyze textual discourse with unusual sensitivity. Unlike those fields, however, Writing Studies finds as much value in reading unfinished student texts in this fashion as it does literary texts—a distinction Robert Scholes has argued strongly distinguishes the values of Literary Criticism and Writing Studies. (33-34)
Writing Studies is marked by a free mix of research methodologies from the humanities and social sciences—or in Michael Carter's terms, the meta-genres of research-from-sources and empirical inquiry (396-98)...Despite its positioning in English departments, Writing Studies also often behaves like a social science. While showing discomfort with positivist empirical epistemology (or a humanist's fear of parametric statistics), the field was born in and continues to value data-driven rather than only or purely theoretical analysis... Resulting from this blended epistemology, a given article may work across multiple fields and take methods as it finds them, even though such practice can lead to methodological "looseness" that the fields originating the methods might take issue with. Writing Studies texts also tend to valorize personal experience and believe that more can accurately be said about the experiences of a small number of writers discussed in detail (as through ethnography, case study, longitudinal study, and interview) than about larger datasets generated through experiment with only limited control of variables. At the same time, drawing from their humanities and literary-studies roots, scholars in the field read and analyze textual discourse with unusual sensitivity. Unlike those fields, however, Writing Studies finds as much value in reading unfinished student texts in this fashion as it does literary texts—a distinction Robert Scholes has argued strongly distinguishes the values of Literary Criticism and Writing Studies. (33-34)
Thursday, June 7, 2012
Personal Statement planning?
A Pedagogy of Activity
Importance of talk
Once children begin telling their stories on paper, we'll get a glimpse of what they actually are learning, and from that, we'll find out what we need to teach more explicitly. (17)
This passage fascinates me and pushes me to consider the notion of an pedagogy of induction or inductive pedagogy...if I understand it right? "...inductive reasoning, arguing from observation, while Rizik is using deductive reasoning, arguing from the law of gravity." Similarly, there might be inductive teaching, teaching from observation of student talk and deductive teaching, which is teaching from...what?
...many of the problems of the infant and junior schools would be solved if we could have more adults or older children to engage in talk, for it is above all talk with an understanding older person that is wanted, talk that arises directly out of shared activity in and around the classroom (James Britton, qtd in Horn/Giacobbe p. 19).
By providing opportunities for her students to make meaning and by giving language to what they do, she is doing what Britton advises, "patiently exercising the special kind of leadership [needed] to build a talking community" (James Britton, qtd in. Horn Giacobbe, p. 19)
- Opportunity for student-to-student dialogue/interaction
- Opportunity to write before speech (discussion...we never launch into "So what did you think of the readings?")
- opportunity for collective problem/question posing
- visibility of student words (written)
- frequent opportunity for informal dialogue/conversation w/faculty (written)--blogs, discussion board, "comment" feature of google docs
- collaborative learning and task completion
Importance of talk
Once children begin telling their stories on paper, we'll get a glimpse of what they actually are learning, and from that, we'll find out what we need to teach more explicitly. (17)
This passage fascinates me and pushes me to consider the notion of an pedagogy of induction or inductive pedagogy...if I understand it right? "...inductive reasoning, arguing from observation, while Rizik is using deductive reasoning, arguing from the law of gravity." Similarly, there might be inductive teaching, teaching from observation of student talk and deductive teaching, which is teaching from...what?
...many of the problems of the infant and junior schools would be solved if we could have more adults or older children to engage in talk, for it is above all talk with an understanding older person that is wanted, talk that arises directly out of shared activity in and around the classroom (James Britton, qtd in Horn/Giacobbe p. 19).
By providing opportunities for her students to make meaning and by giving language to what they do, she is doing what Britton advises, "patiently exercising the special kind of leadership [needed] to build a talking community" (James Britton, qtd in. Horn Giacobbe, p. 19)
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
A new story about Writing
Any regular reader of this blog will know that new story: writing is not the transmission of information but the creation of knowledge. Writing is not perfectible, and there’s a reason the world’s best writers have the world’s best editors. Grammar is merely one of a great number of concerns in writing, not the central one. “Writing” includes composition, not simply inscription: it begins with thinking about what to say and ends in a reader’s hands, not with drafting. Writing is not an empty container into which content is dumped; the container is the content. Thus, writing is a situated activity responding to particular exigencies, different every time, not a universal skill that can be learned once and “mastered.” Revision is developing writing, not fixing it, and thus a sign of mature writing, not bad writing: most professional writers expect that their first draft is a starting point, not an ending point. Writing is not usually the work of lone geniuses inspired by a muse; writers usually work collaboratively with other writers and especially with readers. Writing is usually not easy for good writers, and it is usually not the kind of thing that ought to be.
--Doug Downs, Bedford Bits, May 23, 2012.
--Doug Downs, Bedford Bits, May 23, 2012.
Friday, February 10, 2012
Core beliefs
- Quantity: students must write a lot of words--ideally in frequent low stakes ways which don't feel onerous to them or you, which can be assessed quickly, if at all, and which add up to a significant portion of students grade (20-30 percent).
- Public: writing must be public and it's presence must be made visible in your course on a daily basis. Low stakes writing should be shared frequently and high stakes writing should be as well.
- Course management system: in order to accomplish 1 & 2, as frequently as possible and ideally all the time writing must be done in digitally, by using the CMS. (this means that laptops should be encouraged in class and frequent trips to writing labs should be taken.
- Class time: class time should be allocated to ACTIVITY--lecture is just one kind of activity and should not be the primary activity of class time. Activities which engage students in writing-related activities (individual writing, group/collaborative writing, peer-review, discusion of student texts--low stakes and high) should far outweigh the activity of lecture.
- peer review: all major or high stakes writing should be peer-reviewed multiple times/drafts before it is handed in for a grade.
Teaching writing effectively means adopting a student (as opposed to a content) centered orientation towards the classroom. You are there to teach students how to KNOW and to DO things. Knowing and doing are equally important. Effective student-centered instructors develop a repertoire of strategies and tools for structuring classroom activity to facilitate knowing and doing. They are constantly adapting their practice to expand the range of strategies and tools they deploy to accomplish their objectives. Communications technologies are key tools in student-centered teaching.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Internship Opportunities
RI Monthly magazine (12 hours per week required)
Genie McPherson Trevor
genie@ediblerhody.com
www.ediblerhody.com
Fall, Spring, Summer internships
To Apply: write to them by email (no website info for interns)
cover letter
resume
links to previous work (at least 2 published examples of work, not school papers)
Direct Letters of Inquiry to:
Jamie Coelho
jcoelho@rimonthly.com---
What's News
RIWP
Edible Rhody
genie@ediblerhody.com
www.ediblerhody.com
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
What is research-writing?
As compositionists should know, research-writing (and therefore research) is not simply about assembling readymade information, but about changing the ways a topic can be looked at and about making new cross-connections between material. (87)
Scott, Patrick. "Bibliographical Problems in Research on Composition." College Composition and Communication 37 (1986): 167-77.
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