As I was reading Scott Carlson’s article about “millennials” I realized I am one of them. I do not think for my generation being a “millennial” is necessarily a choice, I think, in fact, not being a “millennial” would be a choice. I entered high school with a cell phone in my hand and a buddy list full of friends to talk to on instant messenger as I did my homework after school. I write papers while watching tv, talking on instant messenger, and surfing the web. To me I need to have distractions so that I can take a break and collect my thoughts. I am part of this “attention-deficit-disorder” society Stephanie Miller refers to, but I think it is more of a way of life than a choice. Growing up in this new millennium, for a “millennial” is scary because, I think, so much is expected of us. I feel I am looked at with a sideways glance if I tell people I don’t know how to create a video for YouTube or that I’m an amateur at downloading music, or that I would have no idea what to do if my internet didn’t work or my ipod stopped playing. Being a part of this “millennial” society comes with its own expectations. Students want more time to meet in groups and interact not only to discuss what they are working on for the class they are in, but to discuss concerns with other classes. A student is doing their homework for one class during another because with class, work, driving time, and so many other obligations sometimes everything can’t be accomplished when it is supposed to. Where Carlson says “millennials” want everything “now” well, it’s because everything seems to be expected of us “now.”
I don’t think I will have a hard time understanding my students and this idea of a “millennial” society because I am a part of it. I understand multitasking and all that word encompasses. I think so many instructors become upset because they don’t feel students are listening to them, paying attention to the material, or taking the course seriously. Well, the truth is, sometimes they aren’t. With so much going on in a “millennia’s” life, Carlson is right in the fact that many students only learn what they want to learn and want to learn the lives. Juggling full course loads, full time jobs, and a social life leaves little room for fully absorbing a course. This idea, howeasiest way for them. Many students of the new millennium, however, don’t necessarily just want to learn this way, this is how they need to learn to accomplish everything in their ever, is taught to students during high school when they are accomplishing much of the same. By the time they reach college they have perfected the art of only doing what is necessary unless it is of interest to them. For today’s students they are taught what they do in high school will determine where they will go to college and if they will succeed, and in college they are taught how they perform in college will determine where and if they get a job. These pressures teach today’s “millennials” that a fast paced society full of technology is what they need to succeed. “Millennials” want their Google search results to have exactly what they need on the first page, they want to be able to pay their college tuition and find an article on Milton with one click of the mouse. I don’t think instructors should feel threatened by the way “millennials” learn, I think they just need to see it as a new way of learning, where a movie or a power point presentation helps us to constantly have something new to focus on, to keep our attention, whether that is right or wrong, it is the way we seem to learn.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Monday, September 29, 2008
On Fox, Perl & Tobin
Mem Fox's "Towards a Theory of Why People Write" was a very engaging piece of writing for me for several reasons. It veered me time and again towards thinking about my own writing practices, both implicit and explicit. Further, it actually practised what it preached-- it is very clear that Fox is "ach[ing] with caring over what [she is] writing" (Fox 113); that she is writing because it matters, and that the piece is a result of huge investment on her part. Fox's list of why people might want to write may not be exhaustive, but it does provide a solid platform to enter the discussion, or, to use Fox's martial metaphor, the fray. She provides three basic reasons why people should/might want to write and contains and explicates her arguments along those moot assumptions.
What Fox says about writers aching with caring over their writing seems to be, as she herself identifies later, the most important reason of the three. Frankly, I think it will be a challenge getting students in a writing class to care about what they are writing. As Ben very pertinently pointed out the last day in class, they might not care about things we care. On the other hand, even if we attempt to rise above our limitations to interest ourselves in what they care to write about, it might not always come through (I can foresee what a quandary I will be in if some of the students in my class decide to write gleefully on baseball, basketball or one of the other inscrutable sports that are so integral to American life). However, since identifying the problem is the first stage of solving it, one can still feel hopeful, and after reading the passage Tobin quotes in his essay from Donald Murray's Learning by Teaching (Tobin 5), I am all for hope.
The point Fox makes about writing as comradeship follows directly from this premise:"there's always someone on the other side, if you like, who sits invisibly watching me write, waiting to read what I've just written. The watcher is always important" (Fox 116). If the writer should be aching to care over his/her writing, it helps if s/he can believe that the reader is equally aching to care to read what s/he has written. Mere publication or financial reward --while by no means unwelcome!-- is not enough. This I can understand from my own experience. The writing sample I submitted as a part of my application packet to KSU was supposed to be published in an internationally refereed journal. It was refused by the referee. Twice. However, the fact that one of the professors at the University of Calcutta I respect and admire had appreciated it before the refusals came about meant much more to me. And since all contributions to the journal were unremunerated, it has always been a comfort to think that even if it did get published, I would not have been a cent richer for it (not to forget the fact that the petite piece had succeeded in wangling what it was to do along with the rest of the application packet--getting me chance to pursue PhD at KSU, with an assistantship).
Something else I liked about Fox was her insistence that form matters in writing. ("In the end they must be able to spell and punctuate; they are powerless without those skills."--Fox 124) i.e. while she does not say that form is the be-all and end-all of writing, she does not overemphasise content over form. As she concludes by saying:" Interaction, not action" (Fox 124). One must not neglect the rules in order to interact, let alone to forge that interaction into a tool of 'power'.
Sondra Perl's "The Composing Processes of Unskilled College Writers" begins by outlining ambitious goals (Perl 417), and by the time the essay is over, it is clear that she has progressed a good deal in achieving them. Perl's methodology attempts to represent in quantifiable terms the process of how unskilled writers write. Her analysis of Tony's writing process, especially her discussion of 'miscue categories' with regards to encoding and decoding helps indicate in concrete terms the hurdles an unskilled writer faces while writing. The primary characteristics Perl identifies, such as-- too much editing that hinder fluency and/or logical continuity of thought; unease while writing about subjects too far-related to the writer; an egocentricity that takes meaning for granted resulting in imperfect articulation seem to stem from as much a lack of confidence (too much editing) as from an overabundance of misplaced confidence ('the meaning is clear already, I need not explain any further'). One of the most interesting of Perl's final observations was her corrlataion between "the number of problems remaining in the student's written products" and "the number of miscues produced during reading" (Perl 434). It identifies a critical lacuna in the writer's writing process which, it seems to be the job of the teacher to help the writer identify and address appropriately.
Lad Tobin's "Process Pedagogy", while it offers a perfectly competent and animated history of the subject itself from an engagingly personal point of view, does little else. the only idea I found helpful was his decision to start off a semester by asking the students to write an essay on a subject of their choice on which they would not be graded but receive only feedback. This, I thought, might be a good idea to begin building a writing relationship with the students. Other such methods may include asking them to write a review/reaction to an artefact from their immediate environment or popular culture (the most interesting advertisement in the Daily Kent Stater of the day? a Madonna video? Tina fey's imitation of Sarah Palin?). And then, get down to doing my job, which is "not to tell the writer where she had gone wrong or right but to help her see what she had accomplished and what the essay might become in its next incarnation" i.e. to read "not for error and assessment but for nuance, possibility, gaps, potential" (Tobin 6).
What Fox says about writers aching with caring over their writing seems to be, as she herself identifies later, the most important reason of the three. Frankly, I think it will be a challenge getting students in a writing class to care about what they are writing. As Ben very pertinently pointed out the last day in class, they might not care about things we care. On the other hand, even if we attempt to rise above our limitations to interest ourselves in what they care to write about, it might not always come through (I can foresee what a quandary I will be in if some of the students in my class decide to write gleefully on baseball, basketball or one of the other inscrutable sports that are so integral to American life). However, since identifying the problem is the first stage of solving it, one can still feel hopeful, and after reading the passage Tobin quotes in his essay from Donald Murray's Learning by Teaching (Tobin 5), I am all for hope.
The point Fox makes about writing as comradeship follows directly from this premise:"there's always someone on the other side, if you like, who sits invisibly watching me write, waiting to read what I've just written. The watcher is always important" (Fox 116). If the writer should be aching to care over his/her writing, it helps if s/he can believe that the reader is equally aching to care to read what s/he has written. Mere publication or financial reward --while by no means unwelcome!-- is not enough. This I can understand from my own experience. The writing sample I submitted as a part of my application packet to KSU was supposed to be published in an internationally refereed journal. It was refused by the referee. Twice. However, the fact that one of the professors at the University of Calcutta I respect and admire had appreciated it before the refusals came about meant much more to me. And since all contributions to the journal were unremunerated, it has always been a comfort to think that even if it did get published, I would not have been a cent richer for it (not to forget the fact that the petite piece had succeeded in wangling what it was to do along with the rest of the application packet--getting me chance to pursue PhD at KSU, with an assistantship).
Something else I liked about Fox was her insistence that form matters in writing. ("In the end they must be able to spell and punctuate; they are powerless without those skills."--Fox 124) i.e. while she does not say that form is the be-all and end-all of writing, she does not overemphasise content over form. As she concludes by saying:" Interaction, not action" (Fox 124). One must not neglect the rules in order to interact, let alone to forge that interaction into a tool of 'power'.
Sondra Perl's "The Composing Processes of Unskilled College Writers" begins by outlining ambitious goals (Perl 417), and by the time the essay is over, it is clear that she has progressed a good deal in achieving them. Perl's methodology attempts to represent in quantifiable terms the process of how unskilled writers write. Her analysis of Tony's writing process, especially her discussion of 'miscue categories' with regards to encoding and decoding helps indicate in concrete terms the hurdles an unskilled writer faces while writing. The primary characteristics Perl identifies, such as-- too much editing that hinder fluency and/or logical continuity of thought; unease while writing about subjects too far-related to the writer; an egocentricity that takes meaning for granted resulting in imperfect articulation seem to stem from as much a lack of confidence (too much editing) as from an overabundance of misplaced confidence ('the meaning is clear already, I need not explain any further'). One of the most interesting of Perl's final observations was her corrlataion between "the number of problems remaining in the student's written products" and "the number of miscues produced during reading" (Perl 434). It identifies a critical lacuna in the writer's writing process which, it seems to be the job of the teacher to help the writer identify and address appropriately.
Lad Tobin's "Process Pedagogy", while it offers a perfectly competent and animated history of the subject itself from an engagingly personal point of view, does little else. the only idea I found helpful was his decision to start off a semester by asking the students to write an essay on a subject of their choice on which they would not be graded but receive only feedback. This, I thought, might be a good idea to begin building a writing relationship with the students. Other such methods may include asking them to write a review/reaction to an artefact from their immediate environment or popular culture (the most interesting advertisement in the Daily Kent Stater of the day? a Madonna video? Tina fey's imitation of Sarah Palin?). And then, get down to doing my job, which is "not to tell the writer where she had gone wrong or right but to help her see what she had accomplished and what the essay might become in its next incarnation" i.e. to read "not for error and assessment but for nuance, possibility, gaps, potential" (Tobin 6).
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Some of the things I took away from Monday’s three texts:
Fox places emphasis on the view of writing as intertwined in the social. That is, (via her citation of Mitchell and Taylor, “…the writing on the pages is not a concrete object but one portion of a relationship” (p. 116). Two pages later, Fox adds to this idea: “It’s what happens beyond publishing that’s important; it’s the response to my work that matters” (p. 118). Defining a piece of writing as simply a tangible object independent of any social, cultural, personal, etc aspects is as reductive as defining a student as independent of those aspects. I suppose Fox (and others) might argue that a piece of writing is an extension of the self: language voiced into the world via the medium of writing chosen by the writer. By viewing writing in this manner, we can better understand how to ‘teach’ writing: How do we get our students to see themselves as writers and to embrace their power over language? How can we prepare them for the various writing tasks they will need to perform and undertake throughout their lives? Or perhaps one of the more daunting questions: How can we get them excited over writing and learning? Fox explains, “clarity and voice and power and control are much more easily developed through letter writing because, perhaps, the audience is so clearly defined and will, if all goes well, respond” (p. 122). While I am not planning on only assigning letters to my students, I do think Fox’s emphasis on the letter can point to the importance of audience.
Even the most well planned writing topic is nothing without a consideration of the audience. Often, I think we write for a specific audience without even thinking (too in depth or continuously) about it: A research paper for the academic community, a note to our self, a blog post to a specific group, etc. Even the most banal dictionary definition was written with a certain audience in mind: the speaker of the language in question. Fox points to the letter, in part, because it allows the writer an audience to receive the text and thus helps him/her to better focus the clarity, voice, power, and control of the writing. It is almost as if having a specific audience in mind helps the writer see a bigger purpose in the text, rather than writing to simply finish to assignment.
To reference Perl, it is mentioned that students often complain that they have “‘no idea” what to write” (p. 430). Perhaps instead of beginning the topic-hunting process, students might try to discover a specific audience to which they would like to write. I would think this might help to narrow the topic selection down a bit. Rather than requesting that students simply write an argumentative essay on a topic of their choice, they should write an argumentative essay on a specified topic to an audience of their choice. I’m just brainstorming myself here, but maybe something like that would help.
On another note: I found Tobin’s piece really helpful in explaining process pedagogy. I’ve been introduced to these ideas previously, but never read about them in the detail that he goes into. Process pedagogy will help students “adopt more productive attitudes and practices…that may take time to integrate but will remain long after the course has ended” (p. 12). In addition, he also explains the importance of using other pedagogical approaches to create a more holistic learning environment: audience identification, establishing a “credible ethos,” source citation, the infamous five-paragraph essay (for our favorite standardized test, the GRE), and various postprocess concepts and methods (p. 16).
Even the most well planned writing topic is nothing without a consideration of the audience. Often, I think we write for a specific audience without even thinking (too in depth or continuously) about it: A research paper for the academic community, a note to our self, a blog post to a specific group, etc. Even the most banal dictionary definition was written with a certain audience in mind: the speaker of the language in question. Fox points to the letter, in part, because it allows the writer an audience to receive the text and thus helps him/her to better focus the clarity, voice, power, and control of the writing. It is almost as if having a specific audience in mind helps the writer see a bigger purpose in the text, rather than writing to simply finish to assignment.
To reference Perl, it is mentioned that students often complain that they have “‘no idea” what to write” (p. 430). Perhaps instead of beginning the topic-hunting process, students might try to discover a specific audience to which they would like to write. I would think this might help to narrow the topic selection down a bit. Rather than requesting that students simply write an argumentative essay on a topic of their choice, they should write an argumentative essay on a specified topic to an audience of their choice. I’m just brainstorming myself here, but maybe something like that would help.
On another note: I found Tobin’s piece really helpful in explaining process pedagogy. I’ve been introduced to these ideas previously, but never read about them in the detail that he goes into. Process pedagogy will help students “adopt more productive attitudes and practices…that may take time to integrate but will remain long after the course has ended” (p. 12). In addition, he also explains the importance of using other pedagogical approaches to create a more holistic learning environment: audience identification, establishing a “credible ethos,” source citation, the infamous five-paragraph essay (for our favorite standardized test, the GRE), and various postprocess concepts and methods (p. 16).
Who are we writing for?
Of the three articles we read this weekend, Mem Fox’s article really made me think and reflect about why my students will be writing. As Lad Tobin confesses, he and many undergrad students write their papers the night before they are due, cursing themselves and the assignment, all the while swearing to themselves they will never wait that long to write a paper again, that is, until the next assignment is due. This idea of Fox’s though, where students are writing for more than just an assignment, is very intriguing.
In my junior English class we were asked to write an editorial for the local newspaper. The final part of the assignment was to actually send our responses to the paper. That one assignment took most of our junior class longer to write and correct than any other assignment. Everyone wanted to make sure their copy was as close to perfect as was possible before sending it to the editor. Looking back, this process is very good, yet very disturbing. It seems when we write and we know it is just us and the teacher reading our papers that although we try to write the best possible paper, it is ok if there are grammatical mistakes or questionable ideas because only two people will only ever see the paper, and for many of us, the teacher is someone we have come to know and therefore it is somehow ok that he or she sees a paper that may not be our best work. I think this is especially true for freshman and sophomore undergrads. If you add another element, however, a stranger who you do not know how he or she will judge your work, somehow the level of perfection in the assignment is uppped.
A friend of mine in undergrad had to submit, as part of his assignment, a creative piece to our schools literary magazine. I think this same principle holds true. The assignments were better read over, better developed than those just the student and teacher read. Maybe it is the element of the unknown that scares students into submitting only their very best work to a third party, or maybe it is the will to make sure he or she and the teacher are only seen in the best light that makes a student submit the very best to an “outsider.” Whatever the case, I think having someone else who matters read a student’s work is very beneficial. Fox tells us that it helps show students that there is a world beyond class assignments created just for a teacher to read. It shows them the world beyond college and helps them see the future. I agree with Fox, and I think providing student’s with another person, an unfamiliar third party, can be just what their writing needs.
In my junior English class we were asked to write an editorial for the local newspaper. The final part of the assignment was to actually send our responses to the paper. That one assignment took most of our junior class longer to write and correct than any other assignment. Everyone wanted to make sure their copy was as close to perfect as was possible before sending it to the editor. Looking back, this process is very good, yet very disturbing. It seems when we write and we know it is just us and the teacher reading our papers that although we try to write the best possible paper, it is ok if there are grammatical mistakes or questionable ideas because only two people will only ever see the paper, and for many of us, the teacher is someone we have come to know and therefore it is somehow ok that he or she sees a paper that may not be our best work. I think this is especially true for freshman and sophomore undergrads. If you add another element, however, a stranger who you do not know how he or she will judge your work, somehow the level of perfection in the assignment is uppped.
A friend of mine in undergrad had to submit, as part of his assignment, a creative piece to our schools literary magazine. I think this same principle holds true. The assignments were better read over, better developed than those just the student and teacher read. Maybe it is the element of the unknown that scares students into submitting only their very best work to a third party, or maybe it is the will to make sure he or she and the teacher are only seen in the best light that makes a student submit the very best to an “outsider.” Whatever the case, I think having someone else who matters read a student’s work is very beneficial. Fox tells us that it helps show students that there is a world beyond class assignments created just for a teacher to read. It shows them the world beyond college and helps them see the future. I agree with Fox, and I think providing student’s with another person, an unfamiliar third party, can be just what their writing needs.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Underlife (Carefull its Tricky)
Reading over the concepts of underlife produced by Robert Brooke, I decided to take some time and reflect on different ways I used underlife as an undergrad, or even as a graduate student, to be perfectly honest. I think all of us had been guilty of underlife at some point in time during our college career. All though as we have stated in class that the technological gap between us and our students may be greater than we had anticipated, we had other methods of producing underlife. I remember working on homework during class (mostly because of the ease of doing work in class rather than later that night), and I remember several occasions where I read ahead or was working on something for class, but none the less something that wasn't relevant to the topics in class that.
With beginning our class observations this past week I came to understand the concept of underlife as much more extent than my own personal experiences. In one class I witnessed 6 students sending text messages, one checking Facebook and another sending emails while the professor was talking. While none of these activities were extremely distracting the rest of the class (at least no more distracting than when I attempted to open a Sprite quietly and had it fizz and hiss from the back of the room) they still impeded those individual students in absorbing the information being discussed.
I would even purpose that some of the "stupid" questions that we will have asked in our classrooms will be a direct result of some sort of underlife activity. Students that seem to not be paying attention when we are giving directions, but may be paying attention to something else (the usual suspects: texting, facebook, myspace, webpages). The key question becomes, how do we counter these forces at work?
We had discussed several methods of attempting to overcome underlife in class the other day, but the one observation that I could make about most of the forms of underlife I noticed is that most, if not all, of the guilty students were sitting in the back of the room, and were only performing these activities when the teacher was standing and talking at the front of the classroom. It seems obvious that the students most likely to be playing on the computer or their phones will instinctively sit as far away from the position of the teacher as possible, so standing in one spot and talking at the students instead of talking with the students seems to be the least effective method of teaching possible for several reasons. First, the teaching style is very ineffective for just generally communicating with students. Second, as I have observed, the farther away a student is from the teacher, the more likely they are to engage in some sort of underlife activity.
The goal of the English teacher should not be to eliminate underlife. Brooke himself says that underlife is an important aspect of institutional life. I think what is important for a teacher trying to promote critical thinking and allowing students to discover their identities is to curtail the amount and types of underlife that takes place in our classrooms. While it may not be a horrible aspect of underlife for a student to doodle on a handout or talk to the person sitting next to them in class about an assignment, texting and distracting activities can be detrimental to a students success in our course.
With beginning our class observations this past week I came to understand the concept of underlife as much more extent than my own personal experiences. In one class I witnessed 6 students sending text messages, one checking Facebook and another sending emails while the professor was talking. While none of these activities were extremely distracting the rest of the class (at least no more distracting than when I attempted to open a Sprite quietly and had it fizz and hiss from the back of the room) they still impeded those individual students in absorbing the information being discussed.
I would even purpose that some of the "stupid" questions that we will have asked in our classrooms will be a direct result of some sort of underlife activity. Students that seem to not be paying attention when we are giving directions, but may be paying attention to something else (the usual suspects: texting, facebook, myspace, webpages). The key question becomes, how do we counter these forces at work?
We had discussed several methods of attempting to overcome underlife in class the other day, but the one observation that I could make about most of the forms of underlife I noticed is that most, if not all, of the guilty students were sitting in the back of the room, and were only performing these activities when the teacher was standing and talking at the front of the classroom. It seems obvious that the students most likely to be playing on the computer or their phones will instinctively sit as far away from the position of the teacher as possible, so standing in one spot and talking at the students instead of talking with the students seems to be the least effective method of teaching possible for several reasons. First, the teaching style is very ineffective for just generally communicating with students. Second, as I have observed, the farther away a student is from the teacher, the more likely they are to engage in some sort of underlife activity.
The goal of the English teacher should not be to eliminate underlife. Brooke himself says that underlife is an important aspect of institutional life. I think what is important for a teacher trying to promote critical thinking and allowing students to discover their identities is to curtail the amount and types of underlife that takes place in our classrooms. While it may not be a horrible aspect of underlife for a student to doodle on a handout or talk to the person sitting next to them in class about an assignment, texting and distracting activities can be detrimental to a students success in our course.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Rewriting and our students
I read an interesting article recently that is quite relevant to the things we’ve been discussing and reading: “More than just error correction: Student’s perspectives on their revision processes during writing”, by Debra Myhill and Susan Jones (_Written Communication_, V. 24, N. 4, Oct. 2007). Basically the authors argue that revision happens throughout the writing process rather than at one point (the draft). One of the first important distinctions made by the authors is that between editing and rewriting. They argue that editing is focused on fixing errors and surface-level problems, while rewriting actually “involves alterations to the meaning” (p. 324).
The authors reference problems that occur with novice writers and students, as opposed to “expert writers [who] change text level and meaning features” (p. 325). Students may have problems with revision and rewriting because they are not well-versed in self-monitoring their writing, and while they may notice problems with their writing, the students may not know ways to deal with those issues (p. 325). A reference to a text we’ve read before, Myhill and Jones argue “they engage in the process without the necessary cognitive, metacognitive, and social understanding to make appropriate changes” (p. 325). Now, this is definitely not to say the students do not have the abilities to do so, but may not be aware of those abilities, or have not yet mastered them. I think this is where we as teachers come in: We can help the students become aware of the abilities they possess, and learn to master their writing with those skills. In addition, Myhill and Jones argue, “writing is a process that demands self-monitoring” (326). Again, I think this is an important argument, because of the power it gives to the writer regardless of age, class, race, etc. Authorship involves power on a variety of levels, and in order to make the most of their voices, students will need to learn ways in which they can ‘monitor’ their writing and meaning-making activities.
The authors, after setting up the critical context, discuss the methods and results of their research. They observed writers in the classroom, did interviews, etc. in order to better gauge how the students understand their own writing processes. Finally, the authors discuss pedagogical implications of this study, which I think might be very helpful for us as teachers.
1) Teachers should “recoceptualize” revision and rewriting into an event that occurs throughout the writing process (p. 340).
2) We need to learn how to teach students to better understand their own metacognitive abilities with respect to writing and rewriting. This will, hopefully, give students better access to writing and rewriting strategies (p. 341).
3) “Fostering explicit metalinguistic discussion of texts, linguistic structures, and the ways in which linguistic choices can create different effects and different meaning-making possibilities might support writers in developing both a language and cognitive structures to solve their ‘dissatisfaction’ problems” (p. 341).
I encourage everyone to read this article; it’s not that long or dense, and I think it has some valuable information for us to use in the classroom.
The authors reference problems that occur with novice writers and students, as opposed to “expert writers [who] change text level and meaning features” (p. 325). Students may have problems with revision and rewriting because they are not well-versed in self-monitoring their writing, and while they may notice problems with their writing, the students may not know ways to deal with those issues (p. 325). A reference to a text we’ve read before, Myhill and Jones argue “they engage in the process without the necessary cognitive, metacognitive, and social understanding to make appropriate changes” (p. 325). Now, this is definitely not to say the students do not have the abilities to do so, but may not be aware of those abilities, or have not yet mastered them. I think this is where we as teachers come in: We can help the students become aware of the abilities they possess, and learn to master their writing with those skills. In addition, Myhill and Jones argue, “writing is a process that demands self-monitoring” (326). Again, I think this is an important argument, because of the power it gives to the writer regardless of age, class, race, etc. Authorship involves power on a variety of levels, and in order to make the most of their voices, students will need to learn ways in which they can ‘monitor’ their writing and meaning-making activities.
The authors, after setting up the critical context, discuss the methods and results of their research. They observed writers in the classroom, did interviews, etc. in order to better gauge how the students understand their own writing processes. Finally, the authors discuss pedagogical implications of this study, which I think might be very helpful for us as teachers.
1) Teachers should “recoceptualize” revision and rewriting into an event that occurs throughout the writing process (p. 340).
2) We need to learn how to teach students to better understand their own metacognitive abilities with respect to writing and rewriting. This will, hopefully, give students better access to writing and rewriting strategies (p. 341).
3) “Fostering explicit metalinguistic discussion of texts, linguistic structures, and the ways in which linguistic choices can create different effects and different meaning-making possibilities might support writers in developing both a language and cognitive structures to solve their ‘dissatisfaction’ problems” (p. 341).
I encourage everyone to read this article; it’s not that long or dense, and I think it has some valuable information for us to use in the classroom.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Stanley Fish and this week's readings
In my "underlife" as an NPR junkie, I recently listened to an interview with Stanley Fish, famous literary and legal scholar, which ended up being pretty pertinent to this week's readings. It's 29 minutes long, but worth the listen even if you disagree with every word of it or just listen to a couple of minutes. I nearly lost a quart of ice cream in the trunk while sitting in my driveway listening to it-- and I don't risk my ice cream.
INTERVIEW (audio): http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94420624
Mr. Fish just came out with a book entitled Save the World on Your Own Time. In it he argues that undergraduate institutions are not supposed to be engines of social progress; rather the job of professors is "to advance bodies of knowledge and to equip students for doing the same." He objects to professors trying to inculcate their ideas and agendas into the minds of their students, and by extension he believes that such activities as "service learning" do not have a place in the liberal arts curriculum.
He gives an example of a first year composition class, where he asked students to grade the rhetoric in speeches given by Kerry and Bush. Bush was voted the better speaker by a margin of 14-2, and Fish claims he was in the 14 even though he voted for Kerry weeks later. It is this division between academia and belief systems that Fish brings up again and again. "Academic freedom is defined as freedom to do your own (academic) job, but it is not your freedom to do someone else's job, " Fish says.
I didn't agree with everything Fish had to say, but it is interesting to compare his views with our body of readings, especially Powell's piece that clearly states that "the composition classroom has a social action element" (166). For me the argument gets gray when we discuss "critical thinking," a goal that Fish and Powell share. Fish believes that instructors should present students with facts and tools to make informed decisions, while Powell believes in exposing students to diverse readings and a spectrum of thought to widen their perception. Powell says that some of her students (rural, conservative) were "frustrated by the decidedly liberal slant of some of the selected texts" (161), and that over time she has had to revise her approach so as not to alienate students or their "home" values. Fish, on the other hand, believes there is a place for studying controversial texts (i.e., the Holocaust did not happen) not as a vehicle for his own belief system but as a way to encourage discussion and thought.
Identity of teacher and student plays into this discussion too, as Brooke points out. Students might feel more threatened when a female teacher pushes a feminist agenda and readings on her students than a female who hands out a section of Mein Kampf on day one and asks for opinions. Despite the radicalism of the latter, there is a perceived separation between the teacher and the material, and therefore, there is a space for the students to fill with their own ideas.
I am really interested in what others have to say about our role as vehicles for social change or simply purveyors of information. Or both. Hope we can talk about it some more.
INTERVIEW (audio): http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94420624
Mr. Fish just came out with a book entitled Save the World on Your Own Time. In it he argues that undergraduate institutions are not supposed to be engines of social progress; rather the job of professors is "to advance bodies of knowledge and to equip students for doing the same." He objects to professors trying to inculcate their ideas and agendas into the minds of their students, and by extension he believes that such activities as "service learning" do not have a place in the liberal arts curriculum.
He gives an example of a first year composition class, where he asked students to grade the rhetoric in speeches given by Kerry and Bush. Bush was voted the better speaker by a margin of 14-2, and Fish claims he was in the 14 even though he voted for Kerry weeks later. It is this division between academia and belief systems that Fish brings up again and again. "Academic freedom is defined as freedom to do your own (academic) job, but it is not your freedom to do someone else's job, " Fish says.
I didn't agree with everything Fish had to say, but it is interesting to compare his views with our body of readings, especially Powell's piece that clearly states that "the composition classroom has a social action element" (166). For me the argument gets gray when we discuss "critical thinking," a goal that Fish and Powell share. Fish believes that instructors should present students with facts and tools to make informed decisions, while Powell believes in exposing students to diverse readings and a spectrum of thought to widen their perception. Powell says that some of her students (rural, conservative) were "frustrated by the decidedly liberal slant of some of the selected texts" (161), and that over time she has had to revise her approach so as not to alienate students or their "home" values. Fish, on the other hand, believes there is a place for studying controversial texts (i.e., the Holocaust did not happen) not as a vehicle for his own belief system but as a way to encourage discussion and thought.
Identity of teacher and student plays into this discussion too, as Brooke points out. Students might feel more threatened when a female teacher pushes a feminist agenda and readings on her students than a female who hands out a section of Mein Kampf on day one and asks for opinions. Despite the radicalism of the latter, there is a perceived separation between the teacher and the material, and therefore, there is a space for the students to fill with their own ideas.
I am really interested in what others have to say about our role as vehicles for social change or simply purveyors of information. Or both. Hope we can talk about it some more.
IIIII have the power!!!
Yep, that was a He-Man reference. In light of Mem Fox's article I hope everybody will appreciate my lame attempts at humor. After all, "the most delicate transactions are best dealt with through a sort of self-effacing humor which makes one's point without causing offence" (Fox 122). I hope nobody's been annoyed too much by my feeble attempts to spice up the blog a bit.
In connection with the subject line, one of my favorite lines from Fox's article was this one, which I'm guessing everybody highlighted: "Those of us who write best have most power and therefore have most control over our lives" (123). I thoroughly enjoyed her realist and playful view on writing and language, though it may be a bit idealist at times. Students, after all, need to learn serious academic writing, even if occasional humor would be a welcome respite to many pieces of writing (or over-dry blogs).
The other section of Fox's article with which I identified was her bit on reaction: "I want to be published more than I want to be paid...it's the reaction to my piece that I long for. Publication is merely the first hurdle along the road to response" (119). In my two years of sports writing for a small town newspaper, I definitely found that the response was the most gratifying part of the job; in fact, a large part of why I left the position was that I rarely received feedback on my work. During the rare instances when a parent or coach would comment directly to me, I felt greatly rewarded.
Much of the time, however, I would go to the newsroom, write my articles, and go home, seldom hearing anything from my editor or anyone else. Once I began to notice this lack of affirmation the job lost much of its appeal. This is an important factor to remember when responding to student writing: your reaction is going to have a huge impact on how appreciated they feel and how motivated they are to continue and improve their writing. But that's the point Fox made. I suppose I don't need to make it again. I just want to emphasize that it's been very true in my own experience.
In connection with the subject line, one of my favorite lines from Fox's article was this one, which I'm guessing everybody highlighted: "Those of us who write best have most power and therefore have most control over our lives" (123). I thoroughly enjoyed her realist and playful view on writing and language, though it may be a bit idealist at times. Students, after all, need to learn serious academic writing, even if occasional humor would be a welcome respite to many pieces of writing (or over-dry blogs).
The other section of Fox's article with which I identified was her bit on reaction: "I want to be published more than I want to be paid...it's the reaction to my piece that I long for. Publication is merely the first hurdle along the road to response" (119). In my two years of sports writing for a small town newspaper, I definitely found that the response was the most gratifying part of the job; in fact, a large part of why I left the position was that I rarely received feedback on my work. During the rare instances when a parent or coach would comment directly to me, I felt greatly rewarded.
Much of the time, however, I would go to the newsroom, write my articles, and go home, seldom hearing anything from my editor or anyone else. Once I began to notice this lack of affirmation the job lost much of its appeal. This is an important factor to remember when responding to student writing: your reaction is going to have a huge impact on how appreciated they feel and how motivated they are to continue and improve their writing. But that's the point Fox made. I suppose I don't need to make it again. I just want to emphasize that it's been very true in my own experience.
Rethinking the Role of Writing Teacher
The readings for this week have gotten me thinking about the role of a writing teacher, and what this will mean for me. I suspect that I might be one of the older students in this class, so my experience with freshman writing (they called it English when I was a freshman) might have been different. Strangely, it has just occurred to me this very moment that although my course was called freshman English and not composition, the particular section in which I enrolled was much different from its more traditional counterparts. I took an English class that was "paired" with Geology, of all things. So I guess in a way that it did focus on critical thinking, structuring arguments, etc., and not so much on reading literature as a "way in" to composition. I digress, however. Most of the classes that my contemporaries back in 1995 were taking were literature centered. So, in response to some anxiety that Alex expressed at the idea of not using literature to teach composition, I can absolutely identify with that feeling, because this was simply the "way it was done" at the time. Although it feels different and slightly strange to me, I am not resistant to the idea of using a more diverse approach to the teaching of writing. I'm inclined to think that for most students in my freshman class, the class probably ended up being even more beneficial to the other students (as non-English majors) than a traditionally taught, literature based course. It was helpful for me because it made me feel that what I was learning in that class was "translatable" to other areas. So I imagine for someone uninterested in literature, this benefit was probably very noticeable. And in a very practical way, writing about plate techtonics and all of those kinds of rocks that I don't remember anymore, was beneficial in a more obvious way in that it reinforced information we were learning in (what I felt to be) another ridiculously boring class. They snuck in some extra Geology study-time on me.
At any rate, although that class was progressive for its time, there were ways in which it was not--particularly the role of the teacher. This class was an authoritarian regime, and frankly, it was kind of scary to even go to class, muchless to hand in written work that we all knew was destained to be ripped to shreds in what I would call a less than constructive way. Of course, we did do peer editing, but basically we weren't working toward helping each other produce the best essay we could, we were trying to help each other avoid being shamed in front of the entire class and figuring out how to "get by," in much the way that Brooke describes. We tried in our underlife to help each other out, but ultimately we failed. It was a brutal experience that certainly would've frightened anyone even considering a minor, or another course in English (a major notwithstanding) to stop consideration. This is precisely where I do not want to go, and the way that I do not want to be perceived.
This leads me to one point that I found most interesting in this week's reading. In the Brooke pieces, he refers to Knoblauch and Brannon, who suggest "changing the structure of the classroom to a 'writing workshop' where students and teacher can really talk to one another 'as members of the same community of learners'" (150). I am very intrigued by this, but at the same time I also wonder how I could do this. Brooke goes on to quote Donald Murray, who champions one-on-one conferences between students and teachers in which the student directs the discussion of his/her writing. I have always liked this idea because I have experienced it as a student and found it to work quite well for me, and have always planned that that would be part of my teaching. I'm interested, however, in thinking about ways to take it further. I'm interested in defusing the idea of teacher as "authoritarian," not only because it is a methodology that I have cultivated a distaste for personally, but because I suspect that students will be much less responsive to this kind of thing. I absolutely agree with Brooke that it is important to make a shift from the roles of a "traditional" classroom because teaching writing is not a traditional curriculum, but I continue to wonder how I will do this in my own classroom. I don't want to be their "best buddy" or anything like that (which would clearly not accomplish anything,) but at the same time I do not want to slip into this authoritarian "I am the teacher therefore I am right" kind role that I detested so much as a student. So I guess I am just wondering how I will negotiate the middle ground between these two extremes.
At any rate, although that class was progressive for its time, there were ways in which it was not--particularly the role of the teacher. This class was an authoritarian regime, and frankly, it was kind of scary to even go to class, muchless to hand in written work that we all knew was destained to be ripped to shreds in what I would call a less than constructive way. Of course, we did do peer editing, but basically we weren't working toward helping each other produce the best essay we could, we were trying to help each other avoid being shamed in front of the entire class and figuring out how to "get by," in much the way that Brooke describes. We tried in our underlife to help each other out, but ultimately we failed. It was a brutal experience that certainly would've frightened anyone even considering a minor, or another course in English (a major notwithstanding) to stop consideration. This is precisely where I do not want to go, and the way that I do not want to be perceived.
This leads me to one point that I found most interesting in this week's reading. In the Brooke pieces, he refers to Knoblauch and Brannon, who suggest "changing the structure of the classroom to a 'writing workshop' where students and teacher can really talk to one another 'as members of the same community of learners'" (150). I am very intrigued by this, but at the same time I also wonder how I could do this. Brooke goes on to quote Donald Murray, who champions one-on-one conferences between students and teachers in which the student directs the discussion of his/her writing. I have always liked this idea because I have experienced it as a student and found it to work quite well for me, and have always planned that that would be part of my teaching. I'm interested, however, in thinking about ways to take it further. I'm interested in defusing the idea of teacher as "authoritarian," not only because it is a methodology that I have cultivated a distaste for personally, but because I suspect that students will be much less responsive to this kind of thing. I absolutely agree with Brooke that it is important to make a shift from the roles of a "traditional" classroom because teaching writing is not a traditional curriculum, but I continue to wonder how I will do this in my own classroom. I don't want to be their "best buddy" or anything like that (which would clearly not accomplish anything,) but at the same time I do not want to slip into this authoritarian "I am the teacher therefore I am right" kind role that I detested so much as a student. So I guess I am just wondering how I will negotiate the middle ground between these two extremes.
Monday, September 22, 2008
comp without lit
There was a thought in my head that I wasn't really sure how to articulate in class today. I know that our goal as composition teachers is to engage our students in critical thinking. We want to help them articulate ideas, make arguments, and generally think in new and challenging contexts. How we go about doing this, it seems, is pretty flexible.
I did my first class observation this morning and the experience was completely unexpected. I’d anticipated a discussion relating to a short story or novel, or at least some vaguely social or literary topic. Instead we watched a student play Mega Man 3 for the Nintendo Entertainment System.
Well, that’s not fair, we didn’t just play Nintendo. The video game was part of a larger lecture regarding semiotic domains and the distinction of specific motifs in specific contexts. The course is themed around popular culture. This particular section focused upon video games and how they can be seen (and are therefore useful) as a series of problem solving exercises. The teacher draws much of his theory, and his class readings, from James Paul Gee.
I'm not saying that simply because the class involved video games that nobody learned anything. On the contrary, I witnessed some challenging concepts being conveyed through a medium that students today are likely to accept and embrace. This particular teacher is achieving his goals: he's getting students to think critically.
That said, I did feel a twinge of disappointment. It strikes me that one can teach a composition class without ever reaching into the body of works that would traditionally be called "literature." We can use New York Times articles in our class readings; we can use articles on culture, politics, gender; we can use movies and video games. We can use so many things to dissect so many different issues that there's really no absolute need to include a story, a novel, a play, even a comic book.
It makes me wonder if I am overstepping my bounds to want to go beyond helping my students to think critically and "learn how to learn." I know they won't all be English majors. Maybe none of them will. But I would like to at least try and instill in them an appreciation for literature. It's so common today to hear people say "Nobody reads anymore." This clearly isn't true. Everybody reads. But what we read is definitely changing. Maybe novels and short stories really are going out of style. I'm just surprised that you can already have a comp class without them.
I did my first class observation this morning and the experience was completely unexpected. I’d anticipated a discussion relating to a short story or novel, or at least some vaguely social or literary topic. Instead we watched a student play Mega Man 3 for the Nintendo Entertainment System.
Well, that’s not fair, we didn’t just play Nintendo. The video game was part of a larger lecture regarding semiotic domains and the distinction of specific motifs in specific contexts. The course is themed around popular culture. This particular section focused upon video games and how they can be seen (and are therefore useful) as a series of problem solving exercises. The teacher draws much of his theory, and his class readings, from James Paul Gee.
I'm not saying that simply because the class involved video games that nobody learned anything. On the contrary, I witnessed some challenging concepts being conveyed through a medium that students today are likely to accept and embrace. This particular teacher is achieving his goals: he's getting students to think critically.
That said, I did feel a twinge of disappointment. It strikes me that one can teach a composition class without ever reaching into the body of works that would traditionally be called "literature." We can use New York Times articles in our class readings; we can use articles on culture, politics, gender; we can use movies and video games. We can use so many things to dissect so many different issues that there's really no absolute need to include a story, a novel, a play, even a comic book.
It makes me wonder if I am overstepping my bounds to want to go beyond helping my students to think critically and "learn how to learn." I know they won't all be English majors. Maybe none of them will. But I would like to at least try and instill in them an appreciation for literature. It's so common today to hear people say "Nobody reads anymore." This clearly isn't true. Everybody reads. But what we read is definitely changing. Maybe novels and short stories really are going out of style. I'm just surprised that you can already have a comp class without them.
Film studies in a writing class?
I was intrigued to read about Annette Harris Powell’s use of films in her class. I have watched films in history classes and theatre classes before, but never in a writing course. I have watched films and clips from films that are the movie version of a particular novel being read in a literature course, but never thought of this approach in a writing course. I, however, think the idea is a very good one. In two history courses I took we watched movies dealing with issues discussed in the course then were asked to write responses to the movies, focusing on certain areas. This is a form of writing I do not think we do very often, but is very important. If you are responding to something in a book or an article, such as we do weekly in this blog, you can go back and look over certain passages, but in a film watched in class this becomes much harder to do. Your students will need to pay attention while they are watching the movie so they can provide answers later.
As Harris points out, the majority of the time people “critique” films they simply say if they like the film or not and why. When critically analyzing a film for class students identify with characters or situations and relate. The point of these film studies is not to provide your opinion on the film itself, but what is happing within the film. With films, as Harris says, comes an opportunity for students to engage in pop culture activities. Most books students read do not touch on pop culture and how important it is. By selecting the right movies, we can engage our students in topics that are important without boggling them down with extra reading. Showing a film will also help visual learners because they can see events and people in action as opposed to reading about them.
After writing about a film, as Harris shows us, we can open the activity up farther by having students discuss the film. When responding to characters and situations in films, students are relating to these, and since each student has their own personal experiences to share, they can come to class and discuss how they personally relate to the film. I like that Harris puts her students into smaller groups so they feel more comfortable sharing their opinions. She also gives them questions to think about as a starting off point for the discussions. I think that is important for freshman, not just in a film discussion, but any discussion, because it helps initiate their conversations.
While a film is a very different type of “text” and not one many would think to use in a writing class, I think it provides a valuable tool for student writing and response.
As Harris points out, the majority of the time people “critique” films they simply say if they like the film or not and why. When critically analyzing a film for class students identify with characters or situations and relate. The point of these film studies is not to provide your opinion on the film itself, but what is happing within the film. With films, as Harris says, comes an opportunity for students to engage in pop culture activities. Most books students read do not touch on pop culture and how important it is. By selecting the right movies, we can engage our students in topics that are important without boggling them down with extra reading. Showing a film will also help visual learners because they can see events and people in action as opposed to reading about them.
After writing about a film, as Harris shows us, we can open the activity up farther by having students discuss the film. When responding to characters and situations in films, students are relating to these, and since each student has their own personal experiences to share, they can come to class and discuss how they personally relate to the film. I like that Harris puts her students into smaller groups so they feel more comfortable sharing their opinions. She also gives them questions to think about as a starting off point for the discussions. I think that is important for freshman, not just in a film discussion, but any discussion, because it helps initiate their conversations.
While a film is a very different type of “text” and not one many would think to use in a writing class, I think it provides a valuable tool for student writing and response.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Don't be a sponge; Be dialogic
One very specific underlying theme that resonates within each of the three texts for today revolves around Bakhtin and dialogism in the classroom. Powell argues that the composition classroom is a place that requires students to engage with issues and questions that are often located outside their comfort zone. Powell quotes Bakhtin: “‘One’s own discourse is gradually and slowly wrought out of other’s words’ and inevitably ‘enters into an intense interaction, a struggle’ with other discourses, resulting in a dialogue that offers new meaning” (p. 161). With this “struggle” in mind, Brooke focuses on roles that students fill in the classroom, both prescribed by the academic environment, and the roles used to undermine the “expected” role. Similar to Bakhtin’s “struggle,” Brooke argues that “writing involves being able to challenge one’s assigned roles long enough that one can think originally; it involves living in conflict with accepted (expected) thought and action” (p. 141). In addition, Nystrand argues that “a dialogic perspective on discourse and learning starts with the premise, then, that discourse is essentially structured by the interaction of the conversants, with each playing a particular social role” (p. 8).
Okay, so the teacher should embody a role that is more equal than authoritative, while students should be knowledge-bringers/-interrogators/-makers rather than sponges that soak up prescribed information.
I wonder how difficult this is going to be? It seems so against what my students will be used to (assuming it’s what I went through for twelve years or so), and we all know how hard it is to break habits. I don’t think it will be that hard for me to play the dialogic role (assuming my lack of teaching allows me to start fresh), but I know it will/might be hard for students to accept a different kind of classroom. With underlife (and some of Durst’s experiences) in mind, even the most radical teaching style will probably result in a few students rebelling in some form or another. Assuming this happens, while I at least know why they might rebel/reject/ignore my teaching style, I’m curious as to how I should approach this. I’m worried that I’ll be put on the spot and not know what to say, and thus revert into mumbling something pathetic and rather incoherent. Or maybe I shouldn’t worry about it, and just accept that it happens to everyone and learn from it. I’ll try not to worry…
The distinction between monologic and dialogic instruction (see chart, Nystrand p. 19) helps to generate ways of tackling the shift from what we/the students have known as learning and teaching to the dialogic form of instruction. I think that using blogs, for example, not only allows for extended learning to take place, but also works dialogically because it requires each writer to generate knowledge and questions that respond to and interrogate past learning, current texts, and experience outside school. Other modes of writing may work in this manner, not only because they are “nontraditional” but also because their form may allow students to make meaning in ways they have been unable to do through traditional script writing. Not every student (or person for that matter) has the same learning style, therefore it may be that they do not share a preferred mode of writing and representation either.
Okay, so the teacher should embody a role that is more equal than authoritative, while students should be knowledge-bringers/-interrogators/-makers rather than sponges that soak up prescribed information.
I wonder how difficult this is going to be? It seems so against what my students will be used to (assuming it’s what I went through for twelve years or so), and we all know how hard it is to break habits. I don’t think it will be that hard for me to play the dialogic role (assuming my lack of teaching allows me to start fresh), but I know it will/might be hard for students to accept a different kind of classroom. With underlife (and some of Durst’s experiences) in mind, even the most radical teaching style will probably result in a few students rebelling in some form or another. Assuming this happens, while I at least know why they might rebel/reject/ignore my teaching style, I’m curious as to how I should approach this. I’m worried that I’ll be put on the spot and not know what to say, and thus revert into mumbling something pathetic and rather incoherent. Or maybe I shouldn’t worry about it, and just accept that it happens to everyone and learn from it. I’ll try not to worry…
The distinction between monologic and dialogic instruction (see chart, Nystrand p. 19) helps to generate ways of tackling the shift from what we/the students have known as learning and teaching to the dialogic form of instruction. I think that using blogs, for example, not only allows for extended learning to take place, but also works dialogically because it requires each writer to generate knowledge and questions that respond to and interrogate past learning, current texts, and experience outside school. Other modes of writing may work in this manner, not only because they are “nontraditional” but also because their form may allow students to make meaning in ways they have been unable to do through traditional script writing. Not every student (or person for that matter) has the same learning style, therefore it may be that they do not share a preferred mode of writing and representation either.
Putting Theory into Practice
Now, here comes the hard part about the course:
Having learned about the theories of how we gain/retain language information from Durst, and Crystal, and Zebroski, et al, reading this week's articles from Nystrand and Annette Powell and Robert Brooke (is it just me, or was I the only one thinking of the end of the movie The Incredibles when I read that article?), armed with theories of how we learn language and, specifically, how we develop strong writing skills, comes the truly tricky part. The part where we start considering how we will all, one day very soon, walk into a classroom and start doing it.
The devil, as they say, is in the details.
This concept - getting up in front of a class and actually teaching - isn't scary for me as it may be for some of us. Quite the opposite; once upon a time, teaching was going to be my vocation. 3.5 years of my undergraduate schooling were spent pursuing it. I changed goals at the end of that time and moved into different realms. However, one of the main reasons I returned to graduate school - besides becoming a famous playwright - was for the opportunity to teach. To become a professional in a field I, if not much of American society, respect and value greatly.
Which brings me to one or two observations.
Observation One: There is a method to the madness. Specifically, I'm referring to the method of articles being laid out for us to read. At first, I didn't get it. Why show us these articles now, and these later? Why read THIS chapter of Durst first, and then later, show us the earlier chapter that prefaces and sets up the subsequent? Why this introduction to Bakhtin in Zebroski, in the first reading, and not Crystal, which when I read it seemed a very logical place to start the class?
Observation Two: Learning theory is intertwined with so many fields as to be virtually impossible to boil down to a concentrated theory. (That's not entirely accurate, but I cannot figure out how to express it better than that at this moment. I'll work on it).
I think I'm getting it. Not completely, mind you, but I'm definitely starting to see a pattern. Theories of pedagogy are being reinforced, by this article, and that article, and this author, which references three articles which we will read the following week, and so on and so forth. We are being shown, from the first Durst chapter onward, how a professor's conduct in the classroom makes or completely breaks a student's learning experience. There are strong points being made from Durst to Hartwell and being reiterated in Nystrand about the authority of the teacher being an impediment, a roadblock to the learning process. Hartwell speaks of capitulating the authority completely in the classroom; Nystrand stops short of saying that, but he does report that American classrooms are "orderly but lifeless" (p.3). Teacher control of the discourse is seen as anathema, a problem. It stifles creativity, it stifles discourse, and without discourse, there is only recitation. There is no real learning.
How, then, to control the classroom? Earlier teaching theories I have run across in my younger days and undergraduate classes stressed controlling the classroom. The image of 25 little anarchists racing around a classroom while the teacher is wrapped in duct tape was the image imprinted into our brains. "Don't let this happen to you," they would tell us, as secondary education students. It was ground into us that you had to engage the students, entertain the students, but you did not, under any circumstances, give the students the keys to the classroom. Looking back through the filter of fifteen or so years, it seems that we were being prepared to be court jesters more than teachers, that the hope seemed to be back then that if you were engaging enough, the kids would not view you as an intrusion on their Nintendo time and actually learn something.
Perhaps this is the 'continental divide' we're seeing here, and maybe I'm just now recognizing it. The problem we've all identified in this classroom is the prevailing attitudes and learning modes (or lack thereof) in the incoming freshman, having had 12+ years of recitation rather than engagement. Perhaps what I witnessed as an undergraduate was the building of those flaws. If the problem is so ingrained as to be pounded into the heads of young teachers while they are in training, how are we as university-level educators supposed to correct this?
I don't think we are. To do so would require a fundamental change in how we train our teachers, and even then it would take at least two generations to fix. None of us have that kind of time. The best I can do is sculpt with the clay I'm given, and it's up to me to do my best to turn that clay into a kiln-fired mind, capable of expressing itself with critical writing.
So we come up against what, for me, is the scary part of the course: how do we comprise our lesson plans to actually employ the theoretical ideas we've talked about? How do I come up with a plan to physically teach what we're learning is the most effective way to teach writing?
That's the rub - and that's my focus for the next ten weeks, and beyond.
I'm still attempting to figure out that classroom control thing.
Having learned about the theories of how we gain/retain language information from Durst, and Crystal, and Zebroski, et al, reading this week's articles from Nystrand and Annette Powell and Robert Brooke (is it just me, or was I the only one thinking of the end of the movie The Incredibles when I read that article?), armed with theories of how we learn language and, specifically, how we develop strong writing skills, comes the truly tricky part. The part where we start considering how we will all, one day very soon, walk into a classroom and start doing it.
The devil, as they say, is in the details.
This concept - getting up in front of a class and actually teaching - isn't scary for me as it may be for some of us. Quite the opposite; once upon a time, teaching was going to be my vocation. 3.5 years of my undergraduate schooling were spent pursuing it. I changed goals at the end of that time and moved into different realms. However, one of the main reasons I returned to graduate school - besides becoming a famous playwright - was for the opportunity to teach. To become a professional in a field I, if not much of American society, respect and value greatly.
Which brings me to one or two observations.
Observation One: There is a method to the madness. Specifically, I'm referring to the method of articles being laid out for us to read. At first, I didn't get it. Why show us these articles now, and these later? Why read THIS chapter of Durst first, and then later, show us the earlier chapter that prefaces and sets up the subsequent? Why this introduction to Bakhtin in Zebroski, in the first reading, and not Crystal, which when I read it seemed a very logical place to start the class?
Observation Two: Learning theory is intertwined with so many fields as to be virtually impossible to boil down to a concentrated theory. (That's not entirely accurate, but I cannot figure out how to express it better than that at this moment. I'll work on it).
I think I'm getting it. Not completely, mind you, but I'm definitely starting to see a pattern. Theories of pedagogy are being reinforced, by this article, and that article, and this author, which references three articles which we will read the following week, and so on and so forth. We are being shown, from the first Durst chapter onward, how a professor's conduct in the classroom makes or completely breaks a student's learning experience. There are strong points being made from Durst to Hartwell and being reiterated in Nystrand about the authority of the teacher being an impediment, a roadblock to the learning process. Hartwell speaks of capitulating the authority completely in the classroom; Nystrand stops short of saying that, but he does report that American classrooms are "orderly but lifeless" (p.3). Teacher control of the discourse is seen as anathema, a problem. It stifles creativity, it stifles discourse, and without discourse, there is only recitation. There is no real learning.
How, then, to control the classroom? Earlier teaching theories I have run across in my younger days and undergraduate classes stressed controlling the classroom. The image of 25 little anarchists racing around a classroom while the teacher is wrapped in duct tape was the image imprinted into our brains. "Don't let this happen to you," they would tell us, as secondary education students. It was ground into us that you had to engage the students, entertain the students, but you did not, under any circumstances, give the students the keys to the classroom. Looking back through the filter of fifteen or so years, it seems that we were being prepared to be court jesters more than teachers, that the hope seemed to be back then that if you were engaging enough, the kids would not view you as an intrusion on their Nintendo time and actually learn something.
Perhaps this is the 'continental divide' we're seeing here, and maybe I'm just now recognizing it. The problem we've all identified in this classroom is the prevailing attitudes and learning modes (or lack thereof) in the incoming freshman, having had 12+ years of recitation rather than engagement. Perhaps what I witnessed as an undergraduate was the building of those flaws. If the problem is so ingrained as to be pounded into the heads of young teachers while they are in training, how are we as university-level educators supposed to correct this?
I don't think we are. To do so would require a fundamental change in how we train our teachers, and even then it would take at least two generations to fix. None of us have that kind of time. The best I can do is sculpt with the clay I'm given, and it's up to me to do my best to turn that clay into a kiln-fired mind, capable of expressing itself with critical writing.
So we come up against what, for me, is the scary part of the course: how do we comprise our lesson plans to actually employ the theoretical ideas we've talked about? How do I come up with a plan to physically teach what we're learning is the most effective way to teach writing?
That's the rub - and that's my focus for the next ten weeks, and beyond.
I'm still attempting to figure out that classroom control thing.
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Interactivityation (should be a word)
I'm going to pick up on something Alex touched on, the whole idea of interactivity. I don't think anybody in academia would argue that an interactive class is generally better than one in which the professor stands in front and lectures the whole time (though lectures do certainly have their place in communicating new ideas and knowledge that is simply superior in many cases).
But what I really like about what Nystrand says is this: "A long tradition of research and polemic pitting of teacher versus student as the appropriate theoretical center for understanding curriculum and instruction has precluded our understanding that more basic than either teacher or student is the relationship between them" (6). This is a very important distinction, both from teacher-centered approaches and, perhaps even to a greater extent, from student-centered approaches. The important aspect of a teaching style is not whether it's centered on one party or the other but how good the relationship between the two parties is.
I saw this first-hand in my year of teaching in Korea (not to show off or anything; I still find it amazing that I'm the most experienced teacher in the class). During our week-long orientation, one of the best speakers who came in was a five-year vet of Seoul's ESL program. The thing he said that stuck with me most was "If you have a good relationship with your students, they're going to learn from you." I realized through the year that this was very true; I tried to make class interactive, but in many cases it was simply impossible as I was reduced to teaching the students dialogue straight out of a text book. But what I realized was that if they genuinely liked and respected me as a teacher (not in a buddy sense but in a good teacher sense), they would involve themselves to whatever extent was possible. My demeanor and style, which unfortunately was substantially different in different classes (12-year-olds with ADHD put a damper on your mood), to a large extent determined their attitude about the material and willingness to try, even if it was boring sometimes.
So my haughty recommendation as somebody with very limited teaching experience would be that you involve yourself personally in the well-being of your students. They can tell whether or not you really care. A good relationship with them is everything in their motivation to participate. You don't have to be their best friend, and in fact shouldn't overstep the student-teacher boundaries, but it certainly helps if you show that you're invested in some sense in their scholastic well-being.
Thus spake the snooty guy with one year of teaching experience in a Korean middle school.
But what I really like about what Nystrand says is this: "A long tradition of research and polemic pitting of teacher versus student as the appropriate theoretical center for understanding curriculum and instruction has precluded our understanding that more basic than either teacher or student is the relationship between them" (6). This is a very important distinction, both from teacher-centered approaches and, perhaps even to a greater extent, from student-centered approaches. The important aspect of a teaching style is not whether it's centered on one party or the other but how good the relationship between the two parties is.
I saw this first-hand in my year of teaching in Korea (not to show off or anything; I still find it amazing that I'm the most experienced teacher in the class). During our week-long orientation, one of the best speakers who came in was a five-year vet of Seoul's ESL program. The thing he said that stuck with me most was "If you have a good relationship with your students, they're going to learn from you." I realized through the year that this was very true; I tried to make class interactive, but in many cases it was simply impossible as I was reduced to teaching the students dialogue straight out of a text book. But what I realized was that if they genuinely liked and respected me as a teacher (not in a buddy sense but in a good teacher sense), they would involve themselves to whatever extent was possible. My demeanor and style, which unfortunately was substantially different in different classes (12-year-olds with ADHD put a damper on your mood), to a large extent determined their attitude about the material and willingness to try, even if it was boring sometimes.
So my haughty recommendation as somebody with very limited teaching experience would be that you involve yourself personally in the well-being of your students. They can tell whether or not you really care. A good relationship with them is everything in their motivation to participate. You don't have to be their best friend, and in fact shouldn't overstep the student-teacher boundaries, but it certainly helps if you show that you're invested in some sense in their scholastic well-being.
Thus spake the snooty guy with one year of teaching experience in a Korean middle school.
TEST: How fast do you read in these modes?
When we were discussing Crystal, the topic of how we read came up in class. There was a little debate on whether we look at letters, words, and how fast we recognize word and sentence meaning.
I mentioned that there was an online tool that assesses reading speed and also demonstrates how we can also comprehend reading when words "flash" online.
I couldn't find one site that does both things, but if you have 3 minutes and want to test yourself, check this out.
1.) Go to http://mindbluff.com/askread.htm
It will give you a passage and time how much you read in one minute. Test yourself and note your reading speed.
2.) Go to http://www.spreeder.com/ and paste any text into the box. You can use the JFK speech from mindbluff or I have attached the beginning of Dickens' David Copperfield below.
3.) Go to the "settings" tab in the bottom of the text box and set it to your "reading speed" established by the first test on mindbluff. Hit play and the words will start flashing. Seems slower than your reading speed, doesn't it? You can experiment with changing the speed-- even at very high speeds (500+) you might find that you have decent comprehension and that blinking your eyes has no effect on understanding the words.
SAMPLE TEXT FOR SPREEDER:
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.
In consideration of the day and hour of my birth, it was declared by the nurse, and by some sage women in the neighbourhood who had taken a lively interest in me several months before there was any possibility of our becoming personally acquainted, first, that I was destined to be unlucky in life; and secondly, that I was privileged to see ghosts and spirits; both these gifts inevitably attaching, as they believed, to all unlucky infants of either gender, born towards the small hours on a Friday night.
I need say nothing here, on the first head, because nothing can show better than my history whether that prediction was verified or falsified by the result. On the second branch of the question, I will only remark, that unless I ran through that part of my inheritance while I was still a baby, I have not come into it yet. But I do not at all complain of having been kept out of this property; and if anybody else should be in the present enjoyment of it, he is heartily welcome to keep it.
I was born with a caul, which was advertised for sale, in the newspapers, at the low price of fifteen guineas. Whether sea-going people were short of money about that time, or were short of faith and preferred cork jackets, I don’t know; all I know is, that there was but one solitary bidding, and that was from an attorney connected with the bill-broking business, who offered two pounds in cash, and the balance in sherry, but declined to be guaranteed from drowning on any higher bargain. Consequently the advertisement was withdrawn at a dead loss—for as to sherry, my poor dear mother’s own sherry was in the market then—and ten years afterwards the caul was put up in a raffle down in our part of the country, to fifty members at half-a-crown a head, the winner to spend five shillings. I was present myself, and I remember to have felt quite uncomfortable and confused at a part of myself being disposed of in that way. The caul was won, I recollect, by an old lady with a hand-basket, who, very reluctantly, produced from it the stipulated five shillings, all in halfpence, and twopence halfpenny short—as it took an immense time and a great waste of arithmetic to endeavour without any effect to prove to her. It is a fact which will be long remembered as remarkable down there, that she was never drowned, but died triumphantly in bed, at ninety-two. I have understood that it was, to the last, her proudest boast, that she never had been on the water in her life, except upon a bridge; and that over her tea (to which she was extremely partial) she, to the last, expressed her indignation at the impiety of mariners and others, who had the presumption to go “meandering” about the world.
I mentioned that there was an online tool that assesses reading speed and also demonstrates how we can also comprehend reading when words "flash" online.
I couldn't find one site that does both things, but if you have 3 minutes and want to test yourself, check this out.
1.) Go to http://mindbluff.com/askread.htm
It will give you a passage and time how much you read in one minute. Test yourself and note your reading speed.
2.) Go to http://www.spreeder.com/ and paste any text into the box. You can use the JFK speech from mindbluff or I have attached the beginning of Dickens' David Copperfield below.
3.) Go to the "settings" tab in the bottom of the text box and set it to your "reading speed" established by the first test on mindbluff. Hit play and the words will start flashing. Seems slower than your reading speed, doesn't it? You can experiment with changing the speed-- even at very high speeds (500+) you might find that you have decent comprehension and that blinking your eyes has no effect on understanding the words.
SAMPLE TEXT FOR SPREEDER:
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.
In consideration of the day and hour of my birth, it was declared by the nurse, and by some sage women in the neighbourhood who had taken a lively interest in me several months before there was any possibility of our becoming personally acquainted, first, that I was destined to be unlucky in life; and secondly, that I was privileged to see ghosts and spirits; both these gifts inevitably attaching, as they believed, to all unlucky infants of either gender, born towards the small hours on a Friday night.
I need say nothing here, on the first head, because nothing can show better than my history whether that prediction was verified or falsified by the result. On the second branch of the question, I will only remark, that unless I ran through that part of my inheritance while I was still a baby, I have not come into it yet. But I do not at all complain of having been kept out of this property; and if anybody else should be in the present enjoyment of it, he is heartily welcome to keep it.
I was born with a caul, which was advertised for sale, in the newspapers, at the low price of fifteen guineas. Whether sea-going people were short of money about that time, or were short of faith and preferred cork jackets, I don’t know; all I know is, that there was but one solitary bidding, and that was from an attorney connected with the bill-broking business, who offered two pounds in cash, and the balance in sherry, but declined to be guaranteed from drowning on any higher bargain. Consequently the advertisement was withdrawn at a dead loss—for as to sherry, my poor dear mother’s own sherry was in the market then—and ten years afterwards the caul was put up in a raffle down in our part of the country, to fifty members at half-a-crown a head, the winner to spend five shillings. I was present myself, and I remember to have felt quite uncomfortable and confused at a part of myself being disposed of in that way. The caul was won, I recollect, by an old lady with a hand-basket, who, very reluctantly, produced from it the stipulated five shillings, all in halfpence, and twopence halfpenny short—as it took an immense time and a great waste of arithmetic to endeavour without any effect to prove to her. It is a fact which will be long remembered as remarkable down there, that she was never drowned, but died triumphantly in bed, at ninety-two. I have understood that it was, to the last, her proudest boast, that she never had been on the water in her life, except upon a bridge; and that over her tea (to which she was extremely partial) she, to the last, expressed her indignation at the impiety of mariners and others, who had the presumption to go “meandering” about the world.
Friday, September 19, 2008
Class interaction
There seems to be a consensus amongst the various authors we've covered that an interactive classroom is preferable to one where the teacher dominates the classroom discussion. Interaction and participation prompt students to make connections and form conclusions themselves. As a result, they develop a deeper, more lasting grasp of the issues being discussed.
But I'm glad that Martin Nystrand makes the distinction that quality student interaction is not measured simply by how much students talk. Nystrand states that, "many lively discussions are not really so free-formed but, like recitation, can be orchestrated by "right" answers, hidden agendas, and preordained conclusions" (7). I'd wager a guess that one of the reasons the "fishbowl" activity described by Durst failed was because students were simply being asked to play a role. Their own opinions on teen pregnancy were overshadowed by the awkward task of playing characters with predetermined points of view.
Nystrand sums his argument up by stating, "In short, how students think--indeed the extent to which they really need to think in school--and consequently what they can learn depend a lot on how their teachers respond to their students' responses" (29). This is a tricky tight-rope to walk because as Nystrand (echoing Bakhtin) states earlier, "it is conflict, not harmony, that fuels response: The struggle of multiple, competing voices is the irreducible social fact of all discourse" (18).
This brings me back to the notion of "right" answers. Students, by and large, will not be looking to expand and enrich their perspectives during classroom discussions. They will be looking for the right answer, and one potential shortcut to the right answer is "whatever the teacher believes is right." I've been debating with myself about revealing my own political and social perspectives to my students. I'm not sure that it's even possible not to let on where I stand on various issues.
It is interesting for me to think back though to my own freshman experience. I was very conservative. My views generally paralleled those of my parents. I remember feeling rather affronted when I came into contact with the progressive views of my liberal arts professors. Ironically, my own views are now considerably left of center and I'll be teaching students who, as a whole, will more than likely come from a more conservative base. I have no interest in bending their beliefs to align with my own. What I am interested in is making sure that they believe what they believe for well founded and thought out reasons. Hopefully our in class dialogue will lead to this, as opposed to attempted shortcuts to being "right."
But I'm glad that Martin Nystrand makes the distinction that quality student interaction is not measured simply by how much students talk. Nystrand states that, "many lively discussions are not really so free-formed but, like recitation, can be orchestrated by "right" answers, hidden agendas, and preordained conclusions" (7). I'd wager a guess that one of the reasons the "fishbowl" activity described by Durst failed was because students were simply being asked to play a role. Their own opinions on teen pregnancy were overshadowed by the awkward task of playing characters with predetermined points of view.
Nystrand sums his argument up by stating, "In short, how students think--indeed the extent to which they really need to think in school--and consequently what they can learn depend a lot on how their teachers respond to their students' responses" (29). This is a tricky tight-rope to walk because as Nystrand (echoing Bakhtin) states earlier, "it is conflict, not harmony, that fuels response: The struggle of multiple, competing voices is the irreducible social fact of all discourse" (18).
This brings me back to the notion of "right" answers. Students, by and large, will not be looking to expand and enrich their perspectives during classroom discussions. They will be looking for the right answer, and one potential shortcut to the right answer is "whatever the teacher believes is right." I've been debating with myself about revealing my own political and social perspectives to my students. I'm not sure that it's even possible not to let on where I stand on various issues.
It is interesting for me to think back though to my own freshman experience. I was very conservative. My views generally paralleled those of my parents. I remember feeling rather affronted when I came into contact with the progressive views of my liberal arts professors. Ironically, my own views are now considerably left of center and I'll be teaching students who, as a whole, will more than likely come from a more conservative base. I have no interest in bending their beliefs to align with my own. What I am interested in is making sure that they believe what they believe for well founded and thought out reasons. Hopefully our in class dialogue will lead to this, as opposed to attempted shortcuts to being "right."
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
When Activities Don't Go As Planned
I thought the Durst chapter 5 was so interesting because it showed real-life examples from the classroom and brought to light some of the things we will struggle with. I found the group role-playing activity on sex education the most interesting. What Sherry is trying to do is (especially because she is not the traditional type of teacher) is help her students move beyond “safe” topics. Where she is trying to move past the politically correct, public school approved topics her students are fighting her. They are clinging to what they have learned for the past twelve years and so discussing sex education for them is more of a light-hearted funny topic. They do not see the serious discussions and implications behind the topic. Durst discusses this lack of maturity in the chapter. Where many instructors just have students write about controversial topics Sherry took it a step farther, with less than encouraging results. I think in Sherry’s defense this was an even better way to approach controversial topics because it makes the students speak out loud and assigns them rules instead of making them show their true feelings. If each character is researched well enough the conflicts on the topic will still be present, but those who are not comfortable expressing their true opinions on the topic do not have to do so. I think it all comes back to the idea of what the student thinks the teacher wants to hear. On controversial topics students, as Durst says, hold back their ideas and thoughts on a topic. If students, however, is not too familiar with the instructor they most likely are subduing their opinions because they don’t, at the very least offend the instructor, and, in their worst-case scenario receive a bad grade because of their opinions.
I’m glad Durst did relay the story of the disastrous group role-play because it shows that Sherry is at least trying new and different approaches with her students. It also shows that while this experience may have been less than adequate, it is still a learning experience for Sherry and the students. The students even responded as to why they didn’t think the activity went as planned. The best thing was Sherry did not miss a beat and tried a new activity the next week. Not every project, paper idea, or activity is going to be a success, but, as Durst shows, it is not necessarily the fault of the teacher or the students, and there will always be a new project or paper the next day.
I’m glad Durst did relay the story of the disastrous group role-play because it shows that Sherry is at least trying new and different approaches with her students. It also shows that while this experience may have been less than adequate, it is still a learning experience for Sherry and the students. The students even responded as to why they didn’t think the activity went as planned. The best thing was Sherry did not miss a beat and tried a new activity the next week. Not every project, paper idea, or activity is going to be a success, but, as Durst shows, it is not necessarily the fault of the teacher or the students, and there will always be a new project or paper the next day.
A leftist revolution is (unfortunately) not in my job description
Daniell did a great job of discussing contrasting issues within rhetoric/composition under the framework set down by Lyotard. Daniell explains Lyotard’s argument that, “in the modern age knowledge is justified, or legitimated, through narrative” (p. 393). She uses Lyotard to discuss issues of interest to us: “The conflicted politics of composition studies over the last two or three decades, the relationship of theory and ideology, the ethical questions of research, the problematics of separating the spiritual from academic study” (p. 394).
First off, I would like to point out the connection made by Daniell between her questions of ideology and Farrell’s argument that “if African American students learned the standard forms of to be, they could then think propositionally, thereby raising their scores on standardized IQ tests” (p. 397). Not only does this quote (I’m going to assume it’s an honest representation of Farrell’s argument) argue that there is a connection between thinking propositionally and a high level of intelligence, but it also makes standardized IQ tests the litmus test for intelligence. A standardized test. Not only do I despise these tests personally, because I have a difficult time with them, I think they are the anti-education. Standardized tests reduce the knowledge students need to learn to basic memorization and do not take into account different learning styles and literacies. These tests set students up for failure. But they do keep ETS in business, so who am I to argue with capitalism?
Enough ranting.
Back on topic: Daniell explains how Street argues that “literacy is never autonomous, never separate, never innocent or neutral, but always embedded in and embodying the practices, beliefs, and values of a culture, always therefore ideological” (p. 398). I think this argument is something of great importance to us as teachers. We need to be aware of our students’ literacies and where those literacies come from. They are not singular skills, independent of the students’ beliefs and histories, but instead stem from life experience. Rather than assuming the grand narrative is the key, instead, we should look at how the little narratives are at work in our students’ writing, and understand how “the dominant tradition is not the only one, that counter-traditions run along side, that history [and literacies?] is usually more complex than it is presented” (p. 407).
With Daniell as a framework, I think Durst’s case studies make great examples of the little narratives at work. The four students he chose to look at in great detail are vastly different in their life experiences, beliefs, writing and literacies. Each student is asked to “lay an interpretive framework onto their subject matter, to critique the ideas of others as well as their own ideas, to develop their own understandings and opinions, and to support these with carefully considered and appropriate arguments and evidence of different kinds” (p. 94). These requirements allow students to use their own lives and beliefs to inform and drive their work.
While the previous sentence sounds great and I’m optimistic that it might actually occur in my classroom, I do understand the reality of the situation. Students’ concerns may be at odds with mine. For example, Durst explains that, for some students, rather than solving a problem within their paper topic or question, “the problem they actually attempted to solve was that of writing a paper for their English class” (p. 114). This points to something I still struggle with myself at times, the contradicting desire to further one’s knowledge and the hope for an excellent grade. For many students, grades have been touted as paramount for 12 years, and so it is difficult to convince them otherwise. I am still trying to figure out how to navigate this particular possibility, and I’m hoping I can make the transition a smooth one for my students.
First off, I would like to point out the connection made by Daniell between her questions of ideology and Farrell’s argument that “if African American students learned the standard forms of to be, they could then think propositionally, thereby raising their scores on standardized IQ tests” (p. 397). Not only does this quote (I’m going to assume it’s an honest representation of Farrell’s argument) argue that there is a connection between thinking propositionally and a high level of intelligence, but it also makes standardized IQ tests the litmus test for intelligence. A standardized test. Not only do I despise these tests personally, because I have a difficult time with them, I think they are the anti-education. Standardized tests reduce the knowledge students need to learn to basic memorization and do not take into account different learning styles and literacies. These tests set students up for failure. But they do keep ETS in business, so who am I to argue with capitalism?
Enough ranting.
Back on topic: Daniell explains how Street argues that “literacy is never autonomous, never separate, never innocent or neutral, but always embedded in and embodying the practices, beliefs, and values of a culture, always therefore ideological” (p. 398). I think this argument is something of great importance to us as teachers. We need to be aware of our students’ literacies and where those literacies come from. They are not singular skills, independent of the students’ beliefs and histories, but instead stem from life experience. Rather than assuming the grand narrative is the key, instead, we should look at how the little narratives are at work in our students’ writing, and understand how “the dominant tradition is not the only one, that counter-traditions run along side, that history [and literacies?] is usually more complex than it is presented” (p. 407).
With Daniell as a framework, I think Durst’s case studies make great examples of the little narratives at work. The four students he chose to look at in great detail are vastly different in their life experiences, beliefs, writing and literacies. Each student is asked to “lay an interpretive framework onto their subject matter, to critique the ideas of others as well as their own ideas, to develop their own understandings and opinions, and to support these with carefully considered and appropriate arguments and evidence of different kinds” (p. 94). These requirements allow students to use their own lives and beliefs to inform and drive their work.
While the previous sentence sounds great and I’m optimistic that it might actually occur in my classroom, I do understand the reality of the situation. Students’ concerns may be at odds with mine. For example, Durst explains that, for some students, rather than solving a problem within their paper topic or question, “the problem they actually attempted to solve was that of writing a paper for their English class” (p. 114). This points to something I still struggle with myself at times, the contradicting desire to further one’s knowledge and the hope for an excellent grade. For many students, grades have been touted as paramount for 12 years, and so it is difficult to convince them otherwise. I am still trying to figure out how to navigate this particular possibility, and I’m hoping I can make the transition a smooth one for my students.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
[capital]S[lower case]tructure[space]thoughts
I was struck by something of a connection between today's readings from Durst and Daniell (that's how human brains work, after all; everything is patterns, like my parenthetical asides when I accidentally distract myself). Durst's fifth chapter focuses on students' struggles with writing two of the essays in the class, particularly because "there was no ready-made format for students to apply" (102). Case-study student Cris (which would be an excellent band name) particularly struggled with the ambiguity of moving from a personal narrative topic to an explicative paper and later a problem-solution paper, because "she was not sure how to bring her powers of narrative and humor to the assignment (103) and "she...had no idea what information to focus on or how to organize it" (105).
I connected these words to two passages toward the end of the Daniell article: First, that "Literacy isn't one thing, and we have learned that it is more accurate to speak of literacies than of literacy" (405). And second, "The little narratives underscore the fact that we are teaching actual not abstract students to write, not just for the next professor but for life in the culture" (406).
These two passages from Daniell seem to contradict each other somewhat. On the one hand, students will have multiple literacies coming from different backgrounds and experiences. On the other hand, we are teaching these "actual not abstract students" in our own particular way and according to our own particular (academic) literacy, and necessarily so since in a pedagogical sense we do not contain multitudes but are teaching a class of 25 or so students at the same time. Teaching them to write "for the next professor" hints at an overarching literacy that must be learned in order to move within the field.
Given this conflict, is it any wonder that students, especially first-year students, struggle when not given definite structure for their papers? Coming from multiple literacies but entering a single academic literacy, a situation in which they don't have a definite idea of how to build a paper is naturally rather terrifying.
Durst later quotes Mark Edmundson, who says of college students "There's little fire, little passion to be found...strong emotional play is forbidden" (112).
Again, is this surprising given the conflict of literacies and the stress of trying to meet the foreign demands of academia?
I would argue that this very conflict is what produces successful college students. The pull between their literacies and ours is not necessarily negative. In fact, it can and should be positive once it is negotiated, as the student develops an understanding of negotiating foreign literacies and the teacher gains at least pieces of dozens of new literacies with each semester. Five points for anybody who's still reading. I think I've finished with my point.
I connected these words to two passages toward the end of the Daniell article: First, that "Literacy isn't one thing, and we have learned that it is more accurate to speak of literacies than of literacy" (405). And second, "The little narratives underscore the fact that we are teaching actual not abstract students to write, not just for the next professor but for life in the culture" (406).
These two passages from Daniell seem to contradict each other somewhat. On the one hand, students will have multiple literacies coming from different backgrounds and experiences. On the other hand, we are teaching these "actual not abstract students" in our own particular way and according to our own particular (academic) literacy, and necessarily so since in a pedagogical sense we do not contain multitudes but are teaching a class of 25 or so students at the same time. Teaching them to write "for the next professor" hints at an overarching literacy that must be learned in order to move within the field.
Given this conflict, is it any wonder that students, especially first-year students, struggle when not given definite structure for their papers? Coming from multiple literacies but entering a single academic literacy, a situation in which they don't have a definite idea of how to build a paper is naturally rather terrifying.
Durst later quotes Mark Edmundson, who says of college students "There's little fire, little passion to be found...strong emotional play is forbidden" (112).
Again, is this surprising given the conflict of literacies and the stress of trying to meet the foreign demands of academia?
I would argue that this very conflict is what produces successful college students. The pull between their literacies and ours is not necessarily negative. In fact, it can and should be positive once it is negotiated, as the student develops an understanding of negotiating foreign literacies and the teacher gains at least pieces of dozens of new literacies with each semester. Five points for anybody who's still reading. I think I've finished with my point.
My Important Daniell Paragraph
I found the Daniell article both very informative and very interesting but a couple of the paragraphs seemed to stick out to me. I had known a small amount of background on Freire, but I had never read him or really read much criticism on his work. I usually, whether through my own personal background or perhaps the schooling I had as an undergrad, seem to be drawn to the economic, power and just generally Marxist elements of a text, and I had yet to really give extensive thought to those same elements applied to both teaching students in the classroom and the concept of literacy. Freire, who I admit I should have probably read at some point in the past, works through these ideas and I find the work interesting to say the least. I do like how Daniell brings me back down to Earth in this respect by pointing out the obvious that on the general scale of things, American students attending a college are hardly heavily "oppressed", but the information in the text is still interesting.
Even though the Freire section was the first one to catch my eye, I find another paragraph the most important in the essay in reference to Teaching College Writing. On pg. 404 Daniell states;
"As the little narratives proliferate the grand narratives seem to lose their power. The little narratives offer other images of what it means to be or to become literate in this culture ands its various subcultures. They show people reading and writing for specific purposes: for entertainment, for personal growth, for identity formation, for community, for privacy, as well as for problem solving, for receiving and transmitting information, for economic advancement, or for political empowerment of oneself or of one's group."
This concerns every person teaching in any classroom setting, not simply within the English department where we may be teaching "literary texts" but any class that involves student reading and student writing.
When looking at these little narratives in relationship to our classrooms in the spring, we all need to understand what purposes our students will or have entered the into reading and writing. In our classrooms, where we will likely have a diversity of majors, reading experiences, writing experiences and in some cases a variety of literacy, whether oral communication or written communication. Once we have established student background in reading or writing and subsequently had a "quantifiable" way of seeing their backgrounds, we then have to think about the context in which they have become able to read or write. I had never thought about the agendas of reading and writing.
Perhaps naively or perhaps simply overlooking it, I had always, in a way, just seen reading and writing as what it was; reading and writing. I hadn't thought about the ways in which people acquire these reading and writing skills. In the classroom we could have students reading and writing simply for the grades, for the advancement (whether cultural or economic) within society, we may have students writing with the objective of improving those skills for further use, or we may have students taking the course (maybe not in College Writing I or the required courses) who are taking a class simply for the entertainment of reading or writing. If a student enters the class room with any of these particular intentions in mind they will take the courses differently than other students. For example, I would imagine if I had any English majors in my course, that they may be more interested in the personal growth, or educational aspects of reading and writing than would a person from another major. I took a Great Books II course as an undergrad for entertainment purposes, I had always enjoyed reading for leisure and thought the course would be a nice break from my Pre-Med courses at the time. I enjoyed the class so much that I switched my major after the semester, but I also know that when I entered that classroom I expected something different from entering classrooms as an English major. I think that is an important distinction to realize about the students in our classrooms.
Even though the Freire section was the first one to catch my eye, I find another paragraph the most important in the essay in reference to Teaching College Writing. On pg. 404 Daniell states;
"As the little narratives proliferate the grand narratives seem to lose their power. The little narratives offer other images of what it means to be or to become literate in this culture ands its various subcultures. They show people reading and writing for specific purposes: for entertainment, for personal growth, for identity formation, for community, for privacy, as well as for problem solving, for receiving and transmitting information, for economic advancement, or for political empowerment of oneself or of one's group."
This concerns every person teaching in any classroom setting, not simply within the English department where we may be teaching "literary texts" but any class that involves student reading and student writing.
When looking at these little narratives in relationship to our classrooms in the spring, we all need to understand what purposes our students will or have entered the into reading and writing. In our classrooms, where we will likely have a diversity of majors, reading experiences, writing experiences and in some cases a variety of literacy, whether oral communication or written communication. Once we have established student background in reading or writing and subsequently had a "quantifiable" way of seeing their backgrounds, we then have to think about the context in which they have become able to read or write. I had never thought about the agendas of reading and writing.
Perhaps naively or perhaps simply overlooking it, I had always, in a way, just seen reading and writing as what it was; reading and writing. I hadn't thought about the ways in which people acquire these reading and writing skills. In the classroom we could have students reading and writing simply for the grades, for the advancement (whether cultural or economic) within society, we may have students writing with the objective of improving those skills for further use, or we may have students taking the course (maybe not in College Writing I or the required courses) who are taking a class simply for the entertainment of reading or writing. If a student enters the class room with any of these particular intentions in mind they will take the courses differently than other students. For example, I would imagine if I had any English majors in my course, that they may be more interested in the personal growth, or educational aspects of reading and writing than would a person from another major. I took a Great Books II course as an undergrad for entertainment purposes, I had always enjoyed reading for leisure and thought the course would be a nice break from my Pre-Med courses at the time. I enjoyed the class so much that I switched my major after the semester, but I also know that when I entered that classroom I expected something different from entering classrooms as an English major. I think that is an important distinction to realize about the students in our classrooms.
Thinking About the Iceberg
Both of Monday's readings, the Shuy and Hartwell, were quite illuminating for me. The iceberg metaphor, though it is something I had never thought about previously, it is something that I did realize in a tacit way. Hartwell's distinction between the "dumb" ways of viewing literacy and "those of us who see literacy as instead embedded in social relationships, a matter of metacognition, metalinguistic awareness and deep experiential learning" (6) was particularly illuminating for me. I was particularly struck by the idea of "metacognition" and "repair procedures." This is something that I would characterize as being "below the iceberg," and of crucial importance to any type of learning involving literacy. I'm sure that all of us have experienced this at some point. I am especially thinking about reading Theory...and I mean Theory with the big T. Although it feels, at the time, like a most horrifying experience, not understanding, I've always felt that by realizing that you are not understanding, that on some level you must be learning something. This is also a skill that, at least in my experience, I have always taken for granted. So I like the distinction that Hartwell makes between these ways of approaching literacy. I wholly agree with the above-quoted statement. I have an extremely difficult time thinking that by simply marking up essays with red pen, (which I think only serves to escalate student anxiety levels) and not finding a way to offer real avenues toward improvement for students, and harping hour after hour about comma splices is going to give a student what they've come to a freshman writing class to learn.
I have also been putting a lot of thought into Shuy's discussion of "natural learning." I find his argument for teaching writing following a more natural trajectory very persuasive, along with his point that traditionally this is taught exactly backwards: "For reasons unclear and almost incomprehensible, we have developed a tradition of teaching reading , writing and foreign language which goes in just the opposite diretion--from surface to deep, from form to function, from part to whole" (107). I think that he couldn't be more right about the fact that the way that we are formally taught these skills is exactly the opposite of how we would acquire them outside of the institution of the school or academy. This led me to think again about the Durst chapters that we read in the beginning of the semester. In Durst discussion of the students' self evaluations in chapter 3, he relates how negative the students are about their writing ability. And what does it all come down to for the students? Grammar, mechanics, usage....I find this intensely interesting. I think this has less to do with the students' actual skills as far as grammar etc. goes, and more to do with their previous experiences with writing and in courses that teach writing, from the very beginning. In my own experience, particularly before college, and even in some beginning English courses in undergrad, quite a bit of emphasis was placed upon surface phenomena and not so much on the deeper aspects of writing--formulating arguments, coherence and cohesion. There was even one time in a freshman writing class (not at Kent) that I was basically informed that an essay was "crap" (in so many words) and that I had to rewrite it or take a D or an F. I was at a loss for what else to do, because I had written it exactly how my high school English teacher had taught me, so I rethought what the essay in terms of argument, not focusing so much on the surface aspects (of course I wasn't thinking about it in those terms now, but in retrospect I see that is what was happening) and I ended up getting an A. The fact that Durst encounters this anxiety about grammar and mechanics, and most often with student essays that are not really that error ridden, tells me that they have probably only been taught in a top-to-bottom way, and deeper skills have been left unacknowledged. I see this as a sort of proof of Hartwell's argument--that this has become a tradition. Students' previous experience with the red pen have probably instilled a fear of grammar within them, and with this kind of fear I question how much attention the students themselves have been able to give to the development of their deeper skill sets, and how much time they can afford to dedicate to the argument itself when so much time seems to be wasted on trying to avoid the red pen. I think it might be a question of anxiety. No one wants to see that red pen all over the place and then sit back and wonder if there is anything at all you could ever do to fix it, especially in the cases where the teacher him or herself is hard-pressed to explain what awk or monot means and what to do to avoid it the next time.
I do not propose any way to avoid what has become a tradition, I think that we will all encounter this (probably repeatedly). I think it will be our challenge as teachers to find a way to remove some of that focus on surface level skills. It's not that I think that grammar is unimportant, but I think that it should not take precedence. I mentioned in another post, a comment to a post of Lindsay's, that maybe using portfolios as an evaluative tool and emphasizing the writing of many drafts and utilizing peer editing and one-on-one or small group conferences in class would provide an opportunity to address, yet not dwell upon, surface level errors that are habitual, both in the class and in individual students. I think that spending a small amount of time of these issues, and possible putting student anxiety to rest in so doing, would be a way to go about a more "holistic" approach to teaching writing. I don't see a good reason for harping on comma splices in a first or second draft, but in the final few weeks of class prior to portfolio submissions, a little attention might be directed to the surface issues, but for the majority of the semester it would be more important to focus on critical thinking, the development of arguments and issues of cohesion...more "big picture" writing issues.
I have also been putting a lot of thought into Shuy's discussion of "natural learning." I find his argument for teaching writing following a more natural trajectory very persuasive, along with his point that traditionally this is taught exactly backwards: "For reasons unclear and almost incomprehensible, we have developed a tradition of teaching reading , writing and foreign language which goes in just the opposite diretion--from surface to deep, from form to function, from part to whole" (107). I think that he couldn't be more right about the fact that the way that we are formally taught these skills is exactly the opposite of how we would acquire them outside of the institution of the school or academy. This led me to think again about the Durst chapters that we read in the beginning of the semester. In Durst discussion of the students' self evaluations in chapter 3, he relates how negative the students are about their writing ability. And what does it all come down to for the students? Grammar, mechanics, usage....I find this intensely interesting. I think this has less to do with the students' actual skills as far as grammar etc. goes, and more to do with their previous experiences with writing and in courses that teach writing, from the very beginning. In my own experience, particularly before college, and even in some beginning English courses in undergrad, quite a bit of emphasis was placed upon surface phenomena and not so much on the deeper aspects of writing--formulating arguments, coherence and cohesion. There was even one time in a freshman writing class (not at Kent) that I was basically informed that an essay was "crap" (in so many words) and that I had to rewrite it or take a D or an F. I was at a loss for what else to do, because I had written it exactly how my high school English teacher had taught me, so I rethought what the essay in terms of argument, not focusing so much on the surface aspects (of course I wasn't thinking about it in those terms now, but in retrospect I see that is what was happening) and I ended up getting an A. The fact that Durst encounters this anxiety about grammar and mechanics, and most often with student essays that are not really that error ridden, tells me that they have probably only been taught in a top-to-bottom way, and deeper skills have been left unacknowledged. I see this as a sort of proof of Hartwell's argument--that this has become a tradition. Students' previous experience with the red pen have probably instilled a fear of grammar within them, and with this kind of fear I question how much attention the students themselves have been able to give to the development of their deeper skill sets, and how much time they can afford to dedicate to the argument itself when so much time seems to be wasted on trying to avoid the red pen. I think it might be a question of anxiety. No one wants to see that red pen all over the place and then sit back and wonder if there is anything at all you could ever do to fix it, especially in the cases where the teacher him or herself is hard-pressed to explain what awk or monot means and what to do to avoid it the next time.
I do not propose any way to avoid what has become a tradition, I think that we will all encounter this (probably repeatedly). I think it will be our challenge as teachers to find a way to remove some of that focus on surface level skills. It's not that I think that grammar is unimportant, but I think that it should not take precedence. I mentioned in another post, a comment to a post of Lindsay's, that maybe using portfolios as an evaluative tool and emphasizing the writing of many drafts and utilizing peer editing and one-on-one or small group conferences in class would provide an opportunity to address, yet not dwell upon, surface level errors that are habitual, both in the class and in individual students. I think that spending a small amount of time of these issues, and possible putting student anxiety to rest in so doing, would be a way to go about a more "holistic" approach to teaching writing. I don't see a good reason for harping on comma splices in a first or second draft, but in the final few weeks of class prior to portfolio submissions, a little attention might be directed to the surface issues, but for the majority of the semester it would be more important to focus on critical thinking, the development of arguments and issues of cohesion...more "big picture" writing issues.
Monday, September 15, 2008
Reduction Junction, What's Your Function?
I found the choice of writing assignments very interesting for this class. The first piece, Patrick Hartwell’s “Creating a Literary Environment in Freshman English: Why and How” uses the second piece, Roger Shuy’s “A Holistic View of Language”, as a reference. Interesting. Here is the argument, and here is the theory behind the argument. What I really found interesting is that, while I had issues with a few of the pieces of the argument of the first piece, I found the second piece to be informative and illuminating. The source article was better, in my mind, than the descendent.
The centerpiece of Shuy’s article is his “iceberg theory” of how we learn language. He’s right. 10% (give or take) of how we learn language can be measured, or seen. The other 90% - that which ties meaning to the phonology, morphology, and the syntax of the language – is harder to gauge and not measurable with any type of reliability. Shuy’s take on the constructivist vs. reductionist theories of teaching language makes sense, as does his view of “holistic” teaching. By adhering to reductionist principles of breaking down the language to the smallest, most easily digestible units, language teachers neglect the interactive nature of language and omit the true power of language as a malleable tool for communication and comprehension. As we’ve seen in our previous readings from Crystal, syntax matters greatly in the identification of meanings of words and phrases. To remove the word from the sentence is to remove the ability to understand through syntax.
What seems to make the most sense to me in Shuy’s article at this point is the Natural learning concept, how modern teaching practice has flip-flopped the natural procedure of how we learn language. “For reasons unclear and almost incomprehensible, we have developed a tradition of teaching reading, writing and foreign language which goes in just the opposite direction – from surface to deep, from form to function, from part to whole.” Here is where I will offer a possible reason for this switch, something that is extremely comprehensible, which may be an unsolvable problem for teaching writing in the modern day classroom:
Politics.
I have not done hard research on this subject, and I don’t believe any of us have – side note here: I also find the attempt of language teachers to follow the practices of hard science interesting, and partially flawed, but I’ll get to that later, hopefully – but it does seem to me that the political realities of life in America in the late 20th to 21st century have really skewed the language teaching process. The reason for the flip is something Shuy touched on but did not explain further, when he discussed the reductionist mode of teaching. He discussed “measurables.” This is the key to the problem.
When English teachers were not held accountable by anything except the final outcome of the student – they are now able to read and write fluently in this language we call English – learning could take on the proper learning cycle. It takes place in different locations of the brain, as Crystal mentioned, and the learning modes are different. Reading and writing are, initially, separate entities. Eventually in the developmental process they tie together. They do so in one of Shuy’s “Iceberg” levels – deep learning. That cannot be easily quantified. And it certainly cannot be placed on a standardized test. It cannot be gauged, counted, ranked, or given any sort of standing that an administrator, a politician, a PTA board could point to and say “this student is doing well.”
And if we cannot say that, we cannot, by proxy, say “This teacher is doing well.” And by proxy, “This SCHOOL is doing well.” And of course, the final argument in the train – the final logical conjunction – “Your TAX DOLLARS are being well spent.”
The realities are that we are in a societal flux. Language depends upon interaction to master (more on this later as well). We learn less from a classroom and more from our environs. The problem is not just our teachers. In fact, I doubt it’s the teachers at all. They make wonderful scapegoats, it’s great to point a finger at them and their unions come election time, but the fact is, the need to quantify teaching results has flipped the entire system upside down. Constructivist, reductionist, holistic – just names that mask a deeper problem, a societal one, a complete eduction principle broken by political realities of the time. Hartwell mostly misses this in his article, and Shuy sideswipes it, identifying the symptoms in his article. I’ll get to Hartwell later, maybe. Of all the things I found in this reading, this is the one realization that jumped out at me the most.
The centerpiece of Shuy’s article is his “iceberg theory” of how we learn language. He’s right. 10% (give or take) of how we learn language can be measured, or seen. The other 90% - that which ties meaning to the phonology, morphology, and the syntax of the language – is harder to gauge and not measurable with any type of reliability. Shuy’s take on the constructivist vs. reductionist theories of teaching language makes sense, as does his view of “holistic” teaching. By adhering to reductionist principles of breaking down the language to the smallest, most easily digestible units, language teachers neglect the interactive nature of language and omit the true power of language as a malleable tool for communication and comprehension. As we’ve seen in our previous readings from Crystal, syntax matters greatly in the identification of meanings of words and phrases. To remove the word from the sentence is to remove the ability to understand through syntax.
What seems to make the most sense to me in Shuy’s article at this point is the Natural learning concept, how modern teaching practice has flip-flopped the natural procedure of how we learn language. “For reasons unclear and almost incomprehensible, we have developed a tradition of teaching reading, writing and foreign language which goes in just the opposite direction – from surface to deep, from form to function, from part to whole.” Here is where I will offer a possible reason for this switch, something that is extremely comprehensible, which may be an unsolvable problem for teaching writing in the modern day classroom:
Politics.
I have not done hard research on this subject, and I don’t believe any of us have – side note here: I also find the attempt of language teachers to follow the practices of hard science interesting, and partially flawed, but I’ll get to that later, hopefully – but it does seem to me that the political realities of life in America in the late 20th to 21st century have really skewed the language teaching process. The reason for the flip is something Shuy touched on but did not explain further, when he discussed the reductionist mode of teaching. He discussed “measurables.” This is the key to the problem.
When English teachers were not held accountable by anything except the final outcome of the student – they are now able to read and write fluently in this language we call English – learning could take on the proper learning cycle. It takes place in different locations of the brain, as Crystal mentioned, and the learning modes are different. Reading and writing are, initially, separate entities. Eventually in the developmental process they tie together. They do so in one of Shuy’s “Iceberg” levels – deep learning. That cannot be easily quantified. And it certainly cannot be placed on a standardized test. It cannot be gauged, counted, ranked, or given any sort of standing that an administrator, a politician, a PTA board could point to and say “this student is doing well.”
And if we cannot say that, we cannot, by proxy, say “This teacher is doing well.” And by proxy, “This SCHOOL is doing well.” And of course, the final argument in the train – the final logical conjunction – “Your TAX DOLLARS are being well spent.”
The realities are that we are in a societal flux. Language depends upon interaction to master (more on this later as well). We learn less from a classroom and more from our environs. The problem is not just our teachers. In fact, I doubt it’s the teachers at all. They make wonderful scapegoats, it’s great to point a finger at them and their unions come election time, but the fact is, the need to quantify teaching results has flipped the entire system upside down. Constructivist, reductionist, holistic – just names that mask a deeper problem, a societal one, a complete eduction principle broken by political realities of the time. Hartwell mostly misses this in his article, and Shuy sideswipes it, identifying the symptoms in his article. I’ll get to Hartwell later, maybe. Of all the things I found in this reading, this is the one realization that jumped out at me the most.
Sunday, September 14, 2008
The "Neat" Thing About "Creating a Literate Environment in Freshman English"
Patrick Hartwell’s Article “Integrating Theories for Teaching Writing” puts theory to practice with his writing style. His article is not weighed down with a superior vocabulary. Hartwell speaks to his reader as he speaks to his students. At one point he says, “Third, these guys assume that literacy is a ‘single thing,’ again, ‘out there.’” He writes as if he is having a casual conversation with his reader, much like how he approaches his classes. He dismisses the idea of the teacher having the authority in a classroom and I think this is a very important part of his essay because he not only states that he thinks the teacher having all of the authority is crap, but he gives numerous examples as to why he thinks this is true. He talks about how much a teacher can learn from their students, not just what a student can learn from a teacher. What I like about Hartwell’s article is how he doesn’t try to have all of the answers. He does say what is wrong with how English is taught, but he doesn’t say this is how it should be taught instead. I think if he did that would completely go against everything he is trying to say. All he can do is show us some ways he thinks things can be improved. One of my favorite ideas is his dialogue journal. He has students write down what they read and discuss in class, their views in literacy and college in general, their own experiences with literacy, and their concerns about grades. He really wants to know what students think about their own literacy but also about the class overall. I think when you have students not just write down their ideas, but you then respond back, in a conversation style like Hartwell does, you get more input from the students. If they know but voicing their concerns they are not just voicing them with any response, but that you will try to help them, they will be more vocal. I also think that, especially for students who are shyer, that writing down their concerns is easier for them than bringing those concerns up in person with the teacher. I also like how he has his students interact with professionals outside of the classroom then creates papers and projects that deal with these experiences. I think it helps students not only see how people interact outside of a classroom, but when you create assignments based on these outside experiences it also creates new audiences for the students to write to, and gets away from the mundane papers they are always writing. Towards the end of the article Hartwell writes “The neat thing is that, once kids get this kind of insight-‘oh so that’s the way it is’-nobody can ever take it away from them.” This is such an interesting, clearly obvious thing I never thought of. You can’t take away the relationships you create with your students and the way that you help improve their writing. They may forget the dates of a Civil War battle two weeks after they take the test, but something that changes their writing for the better is something that can’t be taken away from them, and I think that, as Harwell would say, is really “neat.”
The parts and the whole
Hartwell and Shuy both point to the importance of viewing literacy/writing/learning practices holistically and contextually. Rather than tout the supremacy of the final artifact (a piece of “good” writing), both authors, again, argue the importance of (to borrow Shuy’s terminology) a holistic view of literacy (learning, writing, etc). In addition, they point out the importance of the integration of the underlying (a.k.a: beneath the iceberg) aspects of literacy and learning. Hartwell argues the “surface features of literacy are less important than their metalinguistic and metacognitive concomitants, and those concomitants are deeply embedded in a social world” (p. 9). Likewise, Shuy says, “by seeing the evidence analytically, part of a contextually relevant whole, rather than synthetically, a totally different interpretation [is] possible” (p. 102). This is an example of the difference between seeing a student text as five paragraphs of independent and awkward sentences, or understanding the text as a part of a larger context, that of the writing and learning process (and cultural, historical, social aspects) involved in producing such a work.
The need to translate these theoretical and pedagogical arguments into classroom practices is crucial to the teaching of writing (to an effective and equitable teaching of writing, anyway). Again, the notion of a holistic approach to teaching writing entails the writing process as a whole, rather than simply the means to a “good piece of writing.” I do not want my students to mimic the grammar, semantics, and form that Strunk and White deem to be good writing, but instead, I’d rather they be engaged in the creative process and learn the skills to be effective communicators through various modes of writing.
Hartwell makes a great argument that really gets at the core of the importance of the writing process as a complex set of practices: “the more we try to transmit isolate skills, the more we block students from mastering them – and from mastering the deeper knowledges that are much more important” (p. 9). Again, this points to Shuy’s argument about analytic vs. synthetic analysis in relation to evidence in context. If we go through our students’ papers with the ubiquitous red pen and mark each sentence, phrase, or word as “awk” independent of the context (the entire paper), then I know that learning will not happen. This type of analysis is “synthetic” and goes against understanding the writing process as a set of complex meaning-making practices.
I guess this answers my question during class concerning the appropriate time for making syntax and grammar corrections/suggestions: either not at all, or at the end of the writing process.
The need to translate these theoretical and pedagogical arguments into classroom practices is crucial to the teaching of writing (to an effective and equitable teaching of writing, anyway). Again, the notion of a holistic approach to teaching writing entails the writing process as a whole, rather than simply the means to a “good piece of writing.” I do not want my students to mimic the grammar, semantics, and form that Strunk and White deem to be good writing, but instead, I’d rather they be engaged in the creative process and learn the skills to be effective communicators through various modes of writing.
Hartwell makes a great argument that really gets at the core of the importance of the writing process as a complex set of practices: “the more we try to transmit isolate skills, the more we block students from mastering them – and from mastering the deeper knowledges that are much more important” (p. 9). Again, this points to Shuy’s argument about analytic vs. synthetic analysis in relation to evidence in context. If we go through our students’ papers with the ubiquitous red pen and mark each sentence, phrase, or word as “awk” independent of the context (the entire paper), then I know that learning will not happen. This type of analysis is “synthetic” and goes against understanding the writing process as a set of complex meaning-making practices.
I guess this answers my question during class concerning the appropriate time for making syntax and grammar corrections/suggestions: either not at all, or at the end of the writing process.
Friday, September 12, 2008
What's wrong?
In Monday's two readings, I was struck by a parallel between them which I realized also parallels most of the readings we've done for class. Both Hartwell and Shuy, as well as Durst, Zebroski and most of the other theorists we've read on the subject of pedagogy, agree that there's something fundamentally "wrong" with the way teaching currently works. From Hartwell's discussion of "dumb" theorists to Shuy's assertion that "it is widely recognized that the schools are not doing an adequate job of teaching literacy and language skills" (103), they all seem to be of the opinion that the system is currently flawed in numerous grievous ways; in fact, they never even posit this as a fundamental supposition for their work, assuming that the basic faultiness of the system is a truth taken for granted by their readers.
I will allow that English education as is has its share of flaws. I didn't learn a thing from my sophomore English teacher in high school, I avoided taking senior English in my high school by substituting in college courses, and I had a few other gripes along the way with how certain classes were structured. Nevertheless, I did manage to learn English and even become (relatively) successful at it.
I am curious as to whether broad, sweeping assertions of the inadequacy of the status quo in education are really necessary and positive moves that should be taken as such or if they simply represent a general urge to feel as if we're making "progress" in academia. After all, nobody wants to say we're teaching the same way now that we taught fifty years ago. The very idea feels so non-progressive. All the theorists we've read make good points about how classrooms could become more interactive, more social, more true to what students will actually experience. But I feel like someone should speak up on behalf of the status quo. Hooray, status quo!
Shuy says "For reasons unclear and almost incomprehensible, we have developed a tradition of teaching reading, writing and foreign language which goes in just the opposite direction (compared to his concept of how we learn)--from surface to deep, from form to function, from part to whole" (107). The way he puts this idea, it sounds bad. But what if it works? What if not everyone learns the same way in every situation? Doesn't there have to be some reason that things developed the way they did, beyond just "reasons unclear and incomprehensible"?
I will allow that English education as is has its share of flaws. I didn't learn a thing from my sophomore English teacher in high school, I avoided taking senior English in my high school by substituting in college courses, and I had a few other gripes along the way with how certain classes were structured. Nevertheless, I did manage to learn English and even become (relatively) successful at it.
I am curious as to whether broad, sweeping assertions of the inadequacy of the status quo in education are really necessary and positive moves that should be taken as such or if they simply represent a general urge to feel as if we're making "progress" in academia. After all, nobody wants to say we're teaching the same way now that we taught fifty years ago. The very idea feels so non-progressive. All the theorists we've read make good points about how classrooms could become more interactive, more social, more true to what students will actually experience. But I feel like someone should speak up on behalf of the status quo. Hooray, status quo!
Shuy says "For reasons unclear and almost incomprehensible, we have developed a tradition of teaching reading, writing and foreign language which goes in just the opposite direction (compared to his concept of how we learn)--from surface to deep, from form to function, from part to whole" (107). The way he puts this idea, it sounds bad. But what if it works? What if not everyone learns the same way in every situation? Doesn't there have to be some reason that things developed the way they did, beyond just "reasons unclear and incomprehensible"?
Roger Shuy hits upon an issue that continues to concern me as I prepare to teach. Shuy, who was a composition teacher himself, admits “I can well remember the ambiguity behind which I hid my scribbled, cryptic remarks on the papers of my students. My briefly noted monot or awk screamed an authority and logic which, if the student had only challenged, would have crumbled with only the vaguest definitions and explanations.” (105) In terms of defining good writing, I've generally found myself taking the Potter Stewart approach: I know it when I see it. So I'm in the same boat as the younger Shuy. I too will easily be able to pinpoint when my students' writings are monot or awk, but if pressed as to why this is the case, then I'm going to be in a tight spot.
How do you define good writing? It's always struck me that written language is such a complex machine that any attempt to encapsulate 'good writing' will be either hopelessly vague or so enormously specific as to be unwieldy. Shuy gives examples of such failed readability formulas, like the notion that short is easier than long. This is a clear oversimplification since “two short sentences can be less compressible than one long one with clear connectives.” (107)
Shuy's general argument is in favor of a holistic, or constructionist means of learning. This approach to learning stresses context as vital to understanding and utilizes a bottom-up rather than top-down methodology. Shuy sees constructivism as beneficial for teaching reading, writing, and foreign languages.
Regarding foreign languages, “This research show that good language learners begin with a function, a need to get something done with language, and move more gradually toward acquiring the forms which reveal that function.” (106) I can definitely see how this would be the case. If I have a tangible goal in mind, i.e I need to learn to ask for and understand street directions in a foreign language, then I will be much more likely to experiment, form mental connections, and gain an overall grasp of said language than if I were to study conjugation tables or lists of words in isolation.
However, I don't see how this relates back to “good writing.” Let's say that my students begin their papers with a function in mind. They think to themselves, “I will argue that Whinny the Pooh is actually evil,” or whatever. They write paper after paper, consciously keeping the function of their papers in mind. Presumably they will acquire form along the way. But is this really the case? And even if it is, how does that help us understand what good writing, or good form is? I'd argue that a paper can make an overarching, sound argument even if it does have problematic variations in the amount of inference required from one sentence to the next.
I'm not trying to punch holes in Shuy's armor here. I'm genuinely curious. It seems to me that Shuy is purporting to answers one of my major questions and I simply can't wrap my brain around what that answer is. Am I fundamentally misunderstanding something here? Does anyone else have an insight?
How do you define good writing? It's always struck me that written language is such a complex machine that any attempt to encapsulate 'good writing' will be either hopelessly vague or so enormously specific as to be unwieldy. Shuy gives examples of such failed readability formulas, like the notion that short is easier than long. This is a clear oversimplification since “two short sentences can be less compressible than one long one with clear connectives.” (107)
Shuy's general argument is in favor of a holistic, or constructionist means of learning. This approach to learning stresses context as vital to understanding and utilizes a bottom-up rather than top-down methodology. Shuy sees constructivism as beneficial for teaching reading, writing, and foreign languages.
Regarding foreign languages, “This research show that good language learners begin with a function, a need to get something done with language, and move more gradually toward acquiring the forms which reveal that function.” (106) I can definitely see how this would be the case. If I have a tangible goal in mind, i.e I need to learn to ask for and understand street directions in a foreign language, then I will be much more likely to experiment, form mental connections, and gain an overall grasp of said language than if I were to study conjugation tables or lists of words in isolation.
However, I don't see how this relates back to “good writing.” Let's say that my students begin their papers with a function in mind. They think to themselves, “I will argue that Whinny the Pooh is actually evil,” or whatever. They write paper after paper, consciously keeping the function of their papers in mind. Presumably they will acquire form along the way. But is this really the case? And even if it is, how does that help us understand what good writing, or good form is? I'd argue that a paper can make an overarching, sound argument even if it does have problematic variations in the amount of inference required from one sentence to the next.
I'm not trying to punch holes in Shuy's armor here. I'm genuinely curious. It seems to me that Shuy is purporting to answers one of my major questions and I simply can't wrap my brain around what that answer is. Am I fundamentally misunderstanding something here? Does anyone else have an insight?
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Some of the things that caught my attention in the second set of Crystal readings:
1) Grammar isn’t just structure and diagramming sentences, but instead it is connected to meaning through patterns and sequences. Rather than looking at grammar as a tree chart or parsed sentence, Crystal goes beyond traditional definitions and argues the importance of understanding grammar as a key element to the construction of meaning. He argues, “The aim of grammar…is to give structure to meaning” (p. 185).
2) How we make meaning through language is connected to grammar, but also to semantics and the medium of linguistic transmission (these three things comprise Crystal’s levels of inquiry related to language structure on p. 183). Within semantics we can understand how meaning is both expressed and understood. Crystal also emphasizes the importance of understanding the way meaning is conveyed between participants (i.e. speech, writing, signs, p. 183).
I am most interested in the third level, the medium of linguistic transmission and how this relates to meaning-making. As I noted above, Crystal focuses on speech, writing, and signs to discuss the third level, and I’m interested to see how this plays out in the classroom. He has already set the stage for multimodal representation and communication by introducing these three aspects of linguistic transmission, and I’m interested in the modes that he has “left out” (probably due to the fact that he’s focusing on linguistic language, not necessarily visual, non-linguistic texts).
While linguistic analysis of language is important to how we understand our meaning-making and communication in general, I think that it is also necessary to look at the non-linguistic aspects of communication that we use to convey meaning. I’m sure we’ll get to this, so I won’t beat it into the ground (too much), but I do want to point it out.
3) The other thing that caught my eye was the discussion concerning discourse and the idea that “language [is] a dynamic, social, interactive phenomenon” (p. 260). It is so important that we understand the fluidity of language, rather than seeing it as static and unchanging. The point Crystal makes about language as an identity marker (in the chapter about dead languages) is something we often do not think about (I know I don’t always explicitly recognize this). I hope I can help my students to understand how important their language is to their identities, and yet I’m still trying to figure out how to do this (writing assignment ideas, anyone?).
1) Grammar isn’t just structure and diagramming sentences, but instead it is connected to meaning through patterns and sequences. Rather than looking at grammar as a tree chart or parsed sentence, Crystal goes beyond traditional definitions and argues the importance of understanding grammar as a key element to the construction of meaning. He argues, “The aim of grammar…is to give structure to meaning” (p. 185).
2) How we make meaning through language is connected to grammar, but also to semantics and the medium of linguistic transmission (these three things comprise Crystal’s levels of inquiry related to language structure on p. 183). Within semantics we can understand how meaning is both expressed and understood. Crystal also emphasizes the importance of understanding the way meaning is conveyed between participants (i.e. speech, writing, signs, p. 183).
I am most interested in the third level, the medium of linguistic transmission and how this relates to meaning-making. As I noted above, Crystal focuses on speech, writing, and signs to discuss the third level, and I’m interested to see how this plays out in the classroom. He has already set the stage for multimodal representation and communication by introducing these three aspects of linguistic transmission, and I’m interested in the modes that he has “left out” (probably due to the fact that he’s focusing on linguistic language, not necessarily visual, non-linguistic texts).
While linguistic analysis of language is important to how we understand our meaning-making and communication in general, I think that it is also necessary to look at the non-linguistic aspects of communication that we use to convey meaning. I’m sure we’ll get to this, so I won’t beat it into the ground (too much), but I do want to point it out.
3) The other thing that caught my eye was the discussion concerning discourse and the idea that “language [is] a dynamic, social, interactive phenomenon” (p. 260). It is so important that we understand the fluidity of language, rather than seeing it as static and unchanging. The point Crystal makes about language as an identity marker (in the chapter about dead languages) is something we often do not think about (I know I don’t always explicitly recognize this). I hope I can help my students to understand how important their language is to their identities, and yet I’m still trying to figure out how to do this (writing assignment ideas, anyone?).
Social and Gender Issues in Writing
I was really intrigued to read the chapter on the social issue. Crystal deals with social class, social standing, and gender in this chapter, and I think each is equally important when it comes to speech and how we relate to that particular person. Clearly our American society has a preferred, superior speech and that is “news talk” which so many in the public eye strive for so they do not sound like they are from a particular region of the country. It seems that so many people still associate someone’s accent to their intelligence or social standing which is obviously untrue, yet we still do it. I was appalled my first week here when I sat with a girl at lunch who, after talking to me for a few minutes, asked where I was from because she said I did “something weird” with one of my vowel sounds and added an extra syllable to it. When I told her I was from Pittsburgh she told me the vowel sound I used made me sound like a “hick.” I was so offended, especially when I try not to use “Pittsburghese” as often as possible. She, however, spent the next ten minutes or so pointing out the funny and horrific things people from Pittsburgh say. This relation between certain words and whom I was seemed very offense personally, but also made me think she clearly did not know me at all.
The association between the words someone uses and their social standing is something we dealt with for so many years, and is something we still read about in novels, especially those from 19th century Britain where authors like Austen and Dickens rely heavily on this. You can tell the “lower class” people by their dialects and how they speak in the novels, but although that is not how it is today, people still hold onto to those ingrained ideas. Today, some of the richest people in the world do not speak intelligently, say, maybe, Paris Hilton for example. I would hope and think we all are better at what we say and how we say it than she is, yet she is socially superior to us in the eyes of other Americans.
I also liked how Crystal discussed how we talk to certain people because I think we do it so unconsciously most of the time that we don’t even realize it. How you address a boss and how you address a best friend are very different, yet I never think about it while I am talking to either. It is something we learn as we grow up, just like the views we have on someone’s social standing connected with their language. As Crystal puts it, your specific roles dictate how people speak to you, which I found to be very interesting. Your role as a mother means your children speak to you differently than your parents do who speak to you as a daughter. It is something I think we can hear in other people, such as a friend addressing your parents instead of you. I can notice a change in a friends tone and the formality of their voice, yet it is something I hardly ever notice in my own speech.
Gender and its relationship to language is always so controversial. I remember my senior year of high school the topic came up in my English class when we were writing papers and the teacher told us to just use “men” to represent men and women because it was recognized to represent both, meaning God created “man” to mean men and women. I do not see a problem with using men to represent both sexes in higher levels of writing. I think children need to be taught the difference and to use both while they are younger and in school, but I think when we grow up and understand that using men does not necessarily mean we are just addressing men, but both men and women, it becomes the simpliest solution. As Crystal says, using men and women, or girls and boys is too formal and too wordy, especially if it done more than once each pararagh, and without using men and women we must restructre our senteces to create plurals in order to combine both genders into a common form. I just think that if we all recognize “men” to mean more than just “men” it would be the easiest solution, instead of creating a word to mean both genders, as some have suggested.
The association between the words someone uses and their social standing is something we dealt with for so many years, and is something we still read about in novels, especially those from 19th century Britain where authors like Austen and Dickens rely heavily on this. You can tell the “lower class” people by their dialects and how they speak in the novels, but although that is not how it is today, people still hold onto to those ingrained ideas. Today, some of the richest people in the world do not speak intelligently, say, maybe, Paris Hilton for example. I would hope and think we all are better at what we say and how we say it than she is, yet she is socially superior to us in the eyes of other Americans.
I also liked how Crystal discussed how we talk to certain people because I think we do it so unconsciously most of the time that we don’t even realize it. How you address a boss and how you address a best friend are very different, yet I never think about it while I am talking to either. It is something we learn as we grow up, just like the views we have on someone’s social standing connected with their language. As Crystal puts it, your specific roles dictate how people speak to you, which I found to be very interesting. Your role as a mother means your children speak to you differently than your parents do who speak to you as a daughter. It is something I think we can hear in other people, such as a friend addressing your parents instead of you. I can notice a change in a friends tone and the formality of their voice, yet it is something I hardly ever notice in my own speech.
Gender and its relationship to language is always so controversial. I remember my senior year of high school the topic came up in my English class when we were writing papers and the teacher told us to just use “men” to represent men and women because it was recognized to represent both, meaning God created “man” to mean men and women. I do not see a problem with using men to represent both sexes in higher levels of writing. I think children need to be taught the difference and to use both while they are younger and in school, but I think when we grow up and understand that using men does not necessarily mean we are just addressing men, but both men and women, it becomes the simpliest solution. As Crystal says, using men and women, or girls and boys is too formal and too wordy, especially if it done more than once each pararagh, and without using men and women we must restructre our senteces to create plurals in order to combine both genders into a common form. I just think that if we all recognize “men” to mean more than just “men” it would be the easiest solution, instead of creating a word to mean both genders, as some have suggested.
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