Recently, John Lovas asked teachers to “to identify the five most important issues or concerns you face when planning a writing course.” It’s a helpful question, especially since I’m starting to think about what I’ll do in the fall. Here are the five concerns I sent to John in my reply; the five things that are most important to me in planning a first year composition course.
- Figuring out what writing skills, methods, values, and practices my assignments serve. (Vague but true.)
- Encouraging multiple motivations for writing, and helping students formulate their own clear and specific purposes for their writing projects.
- Helping students understand and inhabit the perspectives of their multiple audiences.
- Helping students become better readers of and responders to texts –including texts produced outside the class, their own texts, and their classmates’ texts.
- Encouraging self-directed radical revision.
I’ll be curious to see what other responses John receives. And, in an interesting bit of sychronicity, I just took a look over at Steve Krause’s blog for the link to the NCTE Beliefs about the Teaching of Writing, and saw that he’s also chosen to write about John’s question today. It looks like Steve’s take is a little more meta than my own, but I wouldn’t argue with any of his priorities — and, like Steve (#5), I also have a habit of trying to cram too much into a syllabus, which results in the course moving rather quickly.
My own list — well, items 2 through 5 are essentially a checklist for me; a way for me to ask, “How does assignment X help my course achieve this goal for the student?” Looking at things that way, I guess item 1 is sort of my overarching principle, my sine qua non. Item 2 is a bit of a cheat, since it incorporates two different ideas — motivations aren’t the same thing as purposes — but they felt close enough to one another to compress into one item. And item 5, I never feel like I do it well enough, so I’m thinking I might go back to my old practice of assigning several more essays to be written than I assign revisions, so students will be required to make the choice of which essays to revise and which to leave behind. The way I teach now, students revise every essay they write — which, at times, can lead to rather lame or half-hearted attempts at revision.
So what have I left out, ignored, or failed to understand in my above list?
So, before I finished reading your post I thought, “I must ask him how he does #5!” It’s one of my greatest fantasies, but I’m not sure how to achieve it.
I second Cindy–I want to know how you do #5. It’s something I try to do, too, and I’m always curious about how others do it. The other one I’d like to know more about is #2. Are there particular activities you use to help students formulate purposes?
Cindy and Liz, #5 — when it happens, which is rare — tends to happen in individual conferences; it happens when the student and I read her text together and ask: “How could this be something different?” The funny thing is, my time as a fiction writer — my MFA experience in the workshop — is what guides me the most in helping students to ask the most important question of their own texts: “What if?”
What if one combined eastern European folk tales with the U.S. Army’s prescribed methods for calling for fire? What if I’d been required to start an IV on the girl I broke up with? What if we didn’t have to think of writing — our own and others’ — as scarce and solely owned?
But I always want to do more of the “What if?” in class; I always want to encourage students to ask themselves and one another, regarding their texts: “What if?” And I’m getting better at it, very slowly. It means staying very close to the students’ own language, for one thing. And it means asking them to use one anothers’ language, to the point of inhabiting one anothers’ perspectives. It’s a tough double move, because it’s a sort of tunneling inwards into another person’s psyche, and — at the moment of understanding — doing a quick kick-reverse out and saying, “But look where else we could go, too!”
In a 15-week semester, we don’t get to that spot until late in the game. Which leaves very little time to coach students — and ask them to coach one another — on how to make these moves on their own. And this is why I’m so fixated on these thoughts I’ve been having about personal writing: because I think (I hope) the perspectival work I have in mind with such a first assignment might be a way to help the process along more quickly.