Author: preterite

In Logar Province, 2 May

preterite Military, Teaching

The first officer with whom I shared an office (interesting intersection there: officer and office, one holding the other) when I arrived here at West Point was the irrepressible Major (MAJ) S.B., who continues to be a dear friend even though she’s since moved on to other assignments. (She was the one who — all the way from Afghanistan — put me in touch with Lieutenant General Caldwell for the Kairos special issue.) MAJ S.B. has an ear for the wry twist on the military cliché, and I’ve heard her suggest that one “Move out and draw fire” as a way of endorsing a decision to voice a possibly unpopular opinion in a meeting, and ask a cadet if he needs to “Take a knee and drink water” after performing particularly poorly on an assignment. I tried to respond with my own wry or semi-ironic twists on popular clichés about teaching, often noting each day as I left the office for class that I was headed off to “touch some lives,” with the implicit suggestion of a critique of the missionary-pedagogical impulse we sometimes hear voiced in composition studies and in the popular rhetoric around teachers. (Think Mr. Keating and the unfortunate implications of that well-intended representation of the figure of the teacher.) But that’s the thing, maybe: despite the misgivings I’ve voiced in my last two posts about the institutional obstacles to good teaching, good learning, and good writing that I feel I’ve encountered here (and, yes, I do feel they still manifest their presence here, and they are uniquely institutional in nature), the most rewarding part about working at West Point has been the teaching and the everyday lived experience of those clichés of “making a difference” and “touching lives.” I’ve done some good, I think, and much of that good has been owed to the cadets with whom I’ve had the privilege of working.

I’ve been lucky to have had the opportunity to mentor cadets on how to approach the essays they write as a component of their applications for Rhodes and Marshall Scholarships, and in numbers of scholarships won, West Point has most often trailed behind only Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and sometimes Columbia. I’ve helped contribute to that success, but perhaps that’s less of a way of touching lives than it is of being touched by cadet success. I’ve had a cadet ask me to speak at his commissioning ceremony, where he made the official transition from student to officer, and that felt good.

Yesterday, I was reminded of the other side of the work I’ve done here. I got word that a student I taught in my fall 2007 EN101 composition course had been killed on May 2 in Afghanistan by an IED.

When I got that news, I went back to my files and looked over what he’d written to me, and last night, I struggled to write a letter to his parents about how I remembered him.

He came to my course straight out of cadet basic training with the typical tendency toward being tentative that such an experience engenders: after one’s been tested and punished for two months for doing things wrong, there can often be some hesitation to venture any sort of answer or response. But he warmed up, little by little. He came to meet with me in my office. He sent me emails about wanting to do some creative writing, to write stories and poems and character sketches. He told me he did his best writing alone, away from others and away from distractions, and he liked to do a lot of it at once. He was quiet, thoughtful, sometimes a little shy and eager to deflect attention away from himself, but always smart and committed and more than anything else, sincere. Later in the semester, he told me that he had learned “the value of weighing the strength of my opponents’ arguments against my own,” suggesting an intellectual maturation that tried to bridge differences and see perspectives other than his own rather than dismissing them. I didn’t see much of him after that first semester in EN101, but he was always deeply respectful and earnest. In that first semester, he had a somewhat hesitant smile accompanied by a momentary downward flicker of his eyes — a gesture that said to me, “Hang on just a minute, sir; let me think this through” — that set him apart from some of his plebe classmates. Still, as I would see him in the halls in later years, he would develop a confidence and an ease that also set him apart, but it seemed to me a wary ease, a way that he was always taking things in and paying careful attention to what was happening around him. He graduated less than a year ago in May 2011.

My misgivings about the notion of “touching lives” have to do with the ways that they place the emphasis on the role of the teacher. To my mind, having taught here, even a lousy day in the classroom is almost always going to be better than a day not in the classroom: that’s why I do this. But the teacherly experience goes in the other direction, as well. We need to keep in mind the ways we’re shaped and affected by students. To, sometimes, remember.

Beltane

preterite Teaching, Writing

Today is May Day, the workers’ holiday and the Beltane counterpart to my own birthday, Samhain, and Tink and Zeugma’s birthday. They had tuna and catnip and are sleeping off their indulgence, my two nine-year-old girls whose attention has seen me through the estate lawsuits following my mom’s death, my dissertation completion and defense, my first academic job, my first and last military deployment, my year-long engagement and the first four months of my marriage to my wife, the Orientalist. We’ve talked some about the impulse toward orientalism — toward the alienation of difference — in the productive work that West Point asks cadets to perform in thinking and writing about other cultures.

I’m thinking tonight about work, about time, about value. I’ve recently critiqued what I’ve seen as the limitations of the current-traditionalist pedagogy that I’ve tried to revise and move forward, while trying to acknowledge at the same time the strengths I see in the faculty and in the students, who — more than anything else — carry this institution. The biggest difficulty I see, and one of the reasons I think I’ve been unsuccessful, is the perspective here that orients us toward seeing value only in the reified text-as-object. The work of writing (and the work of grading that writing) is to be deplored and ignored here: what matters is the texts-as-objects that students read and the texts-as-objects that students turn in. These texts-as-objects are largely imagined as timeless and beyond intervention: they exist to be assessed and praised and discussed and passed or failed, but are almost never imagined as nascent or possible. We imagine texts here as almost always existing in the perfect tense. As complete. Literary texts are beyond intervention, and are never imagined as under revision or composition.

I remember here a missed opportunity: I went up to the Franklin Delano Roosevelt museum in Hyde Park one rainy day, and saw the series of drafts — four different versions — of that famous speech about attention and value and recession-era economics into which the phrase “we have nothing to fear but fear itself” did not make its way until the final draft. I asked for access to the originals in the FDR library and made copies, intending to show them to my students as evidence, or to ask them to further revise FDR’s speech. The lesson never happened; a casualty of the semester’s obligations. And yet there are so many opportunities here to help students become a part of the Army’s ongoing aggregation and revision of texts, not the least of which seems to me to be the wikified Request For Comment on volumes upon volumes of Army Field Manuals and doctrine. What better real-world exercise, with real and enduring payoff to the Army, could one want? It’s even got its own self-contained assessment measure: what changes made by cadets might make it into the final published version?

I doubt such work would be valued here, though: too close to the real world, and too close to the writing cadets might actually do. It might make a difference, and that would be a problem, because there’s a pedagogy here that insists on its own preservation in a sort of harmless ahistorical amber. The Department will not soon produce anything rivaling the bionic foot that cadet engineers are working on developing for veterans: textual work here is consistently about understanding and appreciation, rather than production. (I’ve lately seen some impulses, incompletely theorized and executed, toward productive textual work that might properly be in the domain of MFAs in creative writing and related disciplines, if such expertise were respected here.) How does the work of writing get done here, on holidays or other days, with or without cats or friends or wives to whom we might read it as we work through it?

I’ve done some time-use studies. With a colleague, I’ve done some correlation studies. But for the most part, we don’t know, and I think we don’t really care to know.

Thoughts on Leaving

preterite Teaching, Writing

I’m leaving this place, bound for another gig that is in many ways my academic dream job come fall 2012, and thinking about what I have and haven’t done here. What have I done? I think I’ve been an insistent voice for recognizing how complex and challenging it is to teach writing, although despite (and perhaps often because of) my insistence, I haven’t always been good at asking people to listen to what I’ve been saying. What haven’t I done? Despite the enormous efforts of other people who I’ve worked with and who’ve preceded me here, smarter and more hard-working than me, and despite what I’ve tried to add to those efforts, I don’t think the understanding or acceptance of writing instruction has changed much here. I get the sense that EN101 Composition is still viewed as an unpleasant slog by many instructors, and still viewed as make-work and drudgery for the students who are too uninspired to appreciate great literature and the instructors who are too dim to teach great literature. I get the sense that writing instruction is still viewed primarily as a matter of didactics in mechanics, as a way of noting those students who are deficient and remedying enough of their deficiencies  that they don’t excessively embarrass themselves, and beyond that as a set of classroom discussions designed to excite students enough about great ideas in great texts that they’ll write something sufficiently interesting that the instructors can look pass the errors and infelicities in that next pile of 60-some papers waiting to be graded. That’s the felt sense I’ve found myself kicking against here, at first in puzzlement and then in concern and frustration and finally in resignation, and almost always too vigorously to help myself gain allies.

We don’t teach the writing process here. We don’t even know what it is. We attend to product, product, product. The required sequence of assignments sets up stacks after stacks of essays to grade, leaving us relentlessly bleary-eyed in commenting and wondering time after time why students wait until the night before they’re due to write them. I think that maybe, just maybe, I might have gotten one or two people to listen to the arguments I’ve taken up from other composition scholars that it’s foolish and entirely counterproductive to fold together feedback on substantive and organizational issues with feedback on style and grammar and punctuation and mechanics: why comment on the latter if the former is going to change anyway? That’s not how professionals write, that’s not how scholars write, but plenty of instructors seem to imagine for the sake of pedagogical expediency that the two can magically be wrapped up into one. If I’ve convinced one or two people to separate substantive review from editing, that’s a victory, and one that I hope might stick. But the habit of writing? I can count on one hand the instructors I’ve met here who are interested or engaged in the regular habit of writing. Most of them are civilians and publishing scholars. For all of the Army’s advocacy for training and for the ways that repeated practice gets one better at something, I continue to be surprised by the apparent belief that daily practice in the work of the primary focus of the composition course is irrelevant to student success — and then, again, instructors are surprised when students wait until the night or the day before an essay is due to write it, and assign and reward quizzes and discussion participation and everything but regular writing.

Part of the reluctance to assign regular writing is the mindset that everything assigned must be graded and evaluated by the instructor. If it’s not graded and evaluated by the instructor, it’s not worth doing, and of course the students catch on to that mindset very quickly, and so they don’t take seriously any activity that doesn’t have a grade attached to it, especially in an environment where there are such considerable burdens on their time. As a result, we get students who don’t exert themselves unless they know someone’s evaluating them. I’m not sure if this is the environment that produces or is produced by the institutional urge toward capital-I Inspiration, but there’s a relationship there between the sometimes corner-cutting spirit of “cooperate and graduate” or “get along to go along” and the idea that our students require incredibly and extraordinarily motivating examples in order to persuade them to want to succeed at the very highest levels. Most of us understand — in ways that students sometimes do not — that performing well is not so much a matter of being brilliant or fearless in that crucial moment as it is a matter of trying to do the good, right thing day after day. A lot of the time, the pedagogy here doesn’t reflect that understanding, which strikes me as deeply strange, because a useful pedagogy of officership — one would think — would be one that turns away from bravura performances and offering models and privileging the “best that has been thought and said” and toward an ethic of doing the right and good thing every day. We don’t do that here, and we don’t do it because of the institutional structures we’ve set up. We reward doing the (sort of) right and good thing on lessons 7, 18, 27, 36, and on the Term-End Examination.

It’s clear that I write this partly in frustration: I love this place, I love the commitment of the students, and I love the commitment of my colleagues. I’ll be sad to leave. But the frustration comes from seeing adherence to tradition working against not only the overwhelming body of peer-reviewed scholarly evidence supporting best practices in writing instruction, but also against fundamental pedagogical common sense. I wish I’d been able to make more of a difference, and I wish I’d figured out ways to have been more persuasive. I wasn’t and I didn’t, and I’ll leave this place feeling that in large part I failed at what I was hired to do.

Literary Texts and Solipsistic Pedagogies

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory

I’m glad to see Michael Faris has prompted a blog CCCarnival around Geoff Sirc’s “Resisting Entropy”: like Faris and others, I found Sirc’s review essay provocative, and I’m currently reading one of the books he reviews, Byron Hawk’s A Counter-History of Composition. With Sirc’s essay, Jody Shipka’s Toward a Composition Made Whole has leapt to the top of my to-read pile.

I certainly agree with a number of Sirc’s points, especially his indictment of Berlin-inflected politicized pedagogies that seem to take as their primary goal the alignment of the students’ political ideology with the teachers’. Sirc’s critique that while “there have been too-precious lit profs, . . . there have been too-zealous comp-as-critical-pedagogy teachers as well” (510) echoes the spot-on point Peter Elbow makes in “Pedagogy of the Bamboozled.” However, like many who’ve already responded to the carnival, I also take issue with a lot of what Sirc has to say, both about literature and about pedagogy.

Clancy wholeheartedly endorses (“He’s RIGHT,” she enthuses) his position on the place of literature in the composition classroom, asking affirming Sirc’s question, “If you’re not going to teach a course exclusive of outside reading, why not use the most interesting reading there is?” I’m somewhat (not entirely) in agreement with her and Sirc’s strongly implied distaste for Downs and Wardle’s practice of bringing composition scholarship into the composition classroom — it seems like a bit of a self-indulgently grad-studenty practice — but I’m not sure about the “most interesting reading” statement. (I’m with Steve Krause in this regard: if you want to diminish the possible number of future readers who will enjoy Henry James, assign him to freshmen. I say this as someone who enjoys Henry James.) Clancy’s Sirc’s question seems to put a slightly more positive spin on Sirc’s the indictment of “using a literarily thin corpus of nonfiction readings as prompts” (511), and my response to Sirc and Clancy would be: what are the readings that we’re assigning that are so terribly dull? I’m aware that Sirc has taken exception to Bartholomae and Petrosky’s Ways of Reading, but for me, the readings in that collection — John Edgar Wideman’s “Our Time,” Mary Louise Pratt’s “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Susan Griffin’s “Our Secret,” Richard E. Miller’s “Dark Night of the Soul” (hey! That’s composition scholarship!), David Foster Wallace’s “Authority and American Usage” — are breathtakingly sexy and engaging and beautiful and smart and cool. When I remember myself as a college freshman, I wish I’d had the good fortune to encounter texts like that in the FYC course I took, in which we focused on literature, and wrote essays about Hamlet and “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”: it felt rote and dull, like we were being made to take our medicine.

That medicinal approach is what I think Clancy is pointing to when she notes “that not everyone talks about composition pedagogy with the passion and seriousness that Sirc does, the warnings that if composition cedes any territory to literature, then first-year writing classes will become literature survey courses using essay exams, or worse, author-title-significance quotation-based short-answer exams. The dreaded slippery slope.” Alex Reid acknowledges a similar concern when he talks about his writing program’s instructors who are forbidden from “turning composition into a literature course. The primary concern is that such courses would lack a focus on writing. A secondary concern is that graduate students would turn such courses into versions of their dissertation projects. . . And one of [the primary concern’s] interesting assumptions is that courses in literature don’t pay (much) attention to writing.” From my experience at West Point and elsewhere, I’d revise that last statement to say that courses in literature often don’t pay (much) attention to how writing gets produced: the writing-as-product is assumed to simply exist, an artifact of an encounter with language to be evaluated, graded, and returned, with the point of focus being on the presumedly beautiful object of analysis, rather than on the student’s act of writing. That’s why we moved away from the literature model. As Steve Krause contends, “It’s not that literature cannot be an engaging part of a first-year writing course; it’s just that a first year writing course shouldn’t be about literature, and it turns out there are a lot of texts and subjects and ideas that can ennoble and enrich students’ souls and minds other than literature.” My sympathies are again with Steve: first, we can like certain texts as an aspect of teaching first-year composition (FYC); second, the study of capital-L Literature has no exclusive hold on being ennobling and enriching. But arguing about whether or not we’re engaging “the most interesting reading” indicates to me that we’ve missed the point: the focus of an FYC course should not — must not — be on the outside texts that we introduce. The focus of the FYC course should be on student writing, and to that end, literature is going to be a distraction. This is the flip side of the problematic that Sirc engages: what does it look like to teach composition? Is it mentoring-as-you-go, the Donald Murray method; is it about the process and work and circulation of writing, as Sirc takes aim at with his indictment of the uses of peer review in pedagogy; is it about forms, products, models?

There’s a strong implication in Sirc that it is about models, and I reject that focus on models for a couple of reasons. First, for all Sirc’s would-be radicalism, I think the focus on texts-as-models is inherently conservative, just as a focus on canonical literature is inherently conservative. Sirc notes that he “wouldn’t expect, for example, to learn vocal technique by listening merely (or even mainly) to recordings of other music students; I would need to listen and learn from Caruso, Bjoerling, Corelli, Doming” (516), suggesting that one learns to write by reading the great old texts. I disagree. To paraphrase one of my mentors, Charles Moran, I favor the direct method of instruction: one learns by doing. As I tell the West Point cadets I teach, if you want to be a better runner, you run; if you want to be a better shooter, you shoot; if you want to be a better writer, you write. Occam’s razor places the burden of proof upon those who would argue otherwise.

Second, focusing on literature brings up questions of the necessary scope of a FYC course. If one of the starting points for the ways of talking about how literary texts get produced is Aristotle’s Poetics, and one of the starting points for talking about how persuasive texts get produced is Aristotle’s Rhetoric, then I would trace one of the starting points for the vocabulary of literary criticism — which constitutes the basis for any literary approach — to Longinus and On the Sublime. That’s way too much ground to cover in an FYC course. Sirc, I’m fairly certain, is aware of these distinctions, given the mocking way he dismisses the value of publishing student writing because it “is generated from such a third-degree simulation scenario [that] the only use value [he] can see in such counterfeit scrip is in the board-game world in which it was generated” (516). There’s an obvious nod in such dismissal to what Scholes in Textual Power characterized as the problematic distinction between “literature” and “non-literature” and their simulacra in the “pseudo-literature” of the creative writing classroom and the “pseudo-non-literature” of the composition classroom (7).

But if one is going to make such distinctions, one has to take into consideration questions of purpose and scope. In a 15-week semester, you simply can’t teach an introduction to literature and its accompanying methods and an introduction to composition and its accompanying methods and and introduction to creative writing and its accompanying methods. It doesn’t work. I like to think that my MFA in creative writing might give me some authority in this regard: there’s so much work to do in helping students see how to produce and talk about producing poems and stories, and there’s so much work to do in a literature class in helping students see how to figure out how poems and stories work and what they do, that there’s no possible room for what we do in a composition course. We teach the habits of a writer’s investigative imagination and discovery; we teach how to manage and sequence prose; we teach audience and purpose and how different types of writing do different things (and I think exploring and extending Britton’s taxonomy still holds considerable use here); we teach how to seek out the kinds of feedback and input that will help you revise (and I here wonder that if Sirc is so opposed to editorial input, then what business does he have sitting on Clancy’s dissertation committee?); we teach (most importantly to me) the work and habits and rhythms of becoming a good writer and help students set up the rhetorical spaces in which that regular work has to take place. In accomplishing those tasks, there’s so much to do that I cannot see how any sort of literature- or creative-writing-inflected pedagogy can take place: I’ve got too much to do in my FYC course, not too little.

These objections I’ve raised to Sirc’s arguments lead me to agree with Alex Reid’s summing-up that “this is less about texts than it is about methods. There are two mainstream composition pedagogies that come under critique here. The first is the avowedly political, James Berlin-inspired, cultural studies classroom [and] . . . [t]he other is the even more conventional writing process pedagogy that is only modestly political in its claims for empowerment. What these pedagogies share is an abandonment of affect, imagination, voice, and experimentation for an emphasis on a more mechanistic, predictable, and replicable writing practice.” Now, I’ll admit that my pedagogy is likely vulnerable to some aspects of that second critique: I do believe in the value of habit and regular work that could be characterized as “mechanistic, predictable, and replicable.” At the same time, I certainly don’t think I’m abandoning “affect, imagination, voice, and experimentation,” and for West Point cadets — especially for the plebes — the FYC classroom can be an exciting place where they have the freedom to do risky things and write about what they like and what they imagine and what actually interests them, but it’s also a place where they learn that to do so effectively, to do justice to the things that excite them, takes work — and when they put in that work, they can produce astonishingly good texts. And they like seeing those astonishingly good texts.

In fact, thinking about how student writers value one anothers’ finished products leads me down another pedagogical path. Sirc, in criticizing Joseph Harris, says he “could never teach. . . a course” that “use[d] student text as the primary focus” (516), and and expresses his dislike for the ways such “courses are focused on the artifice of peer response, rather than on an actual writer’s single most important need, the notebook” (517), explicitly contradicting his enthusiastic endorsement of Shipka’s grasp of “how much of a writer’s work is done while walking, watching TV, doodling, shopping, listening to music, even daydreaming in class” (514). That grasp is what I try to capture in the reflections (or production narratives) that I ask students to write on the days that they turn in their assignments. I think I’d like to revise my own pedagogy somewhat so that students not only pay attention to one another’s completed texts, but also to one another’s production narratives, to share their reflections with one another in order to attend to the ways good writing gets written, and how much it’s bound up in the material contexts of individual writers and their interactions with their worlds.

That’s what Sirc ignores. He admits that he’s “received good feedback from editors, but never such that [he] radically rethought a piece or even did more than tweak” and that “[o]utside feedback never really enters into what [he’s] doing” (518). Good for him: the lone genius, beyond critique or response. But not all students have that genius: some actually have something to learn, and want to learn. Not all students are English majors with an instinctive love for Henry James. And I reject the projection of Sirc’s solipsistic pedagogy onto all students.

Production Narratives

preterite Economics, Writing

A couple of weeks ago, I was walking toward a car with someone in the field and mentioned the pleasure I’d taken in being a part of the production process that helped move her article from acceptance toward publication. It was a cool, damp, overcast afternoon, and we talked about the production process: how we correspond with authors, the various checks and edits that get made once a piece is accepted for publication, and the real-life material contexts in which that work gets done. Academic buildings crowded bare trees behind us, and in front of us a hill sloped down with roads and paths to a narrow river. Our conversation took place among meetings and introductions and arrivals and conversations and meals, the recounting of the enjoyment of the work of production taking place in its own situated material contexts.

Here’s a portion of the story I told in that conversation: two summers ago, I was on a road trip; the Orientalist and I traveling by car from New York to Michigan to Pittsburgh to Delaware to the Assateague National Seashore for a wedding, and then back up to New York. I had academic work to do, and brought along my laptop, an AC inverter to power the laptop from the car, and an old iPhone 3 that I’d jailbroken to broadcast its cellular data connection as a wireless hotspot. I was doing editorial work at 65 miles per hour, uploading and downloading draft files and making changes and asking via email for specific corrections and adjustments, and at one point, I found myself finishing up the edits by evening lamplight and firelight on a picnic table at the Cape Henlopen State Park in Lewes, Delaware, just outside the tent we’d set up, within peaceful earshot of the Atlantic surf. That was the pleasant memory of the production process that I shared on that cool, damp, overcast afternoon, two years later and thousands of miles away.

Both of those stories — the conversation and its internal flashback — are production narratives. They’re reflective stories about how texts (and the material and immaterial relations and contexts and labor that permit and constitute and shape them) get produced. I like production narratives, and I use them in my teaching: for every major assignment students turn in, I ask them to write a reflection about those material and immaterial relations and contexts and labor. For them, it’s actually a somewhat familiar genre, especially when I ask them to make the self-aware turn toward metacognition: as Kathi Yancey’s wonderful book and other studies have convincingly demonstrated, metacognition promotes knowledge transfer, and the Army makes use of that positive relationship in its systematic use of After-Action Reviews, or AARs. The cadets have all done AARs and know how they work and use AARs to refine and improve their process as well as to make what they’ve learned stick, so I sell the reflective production narrative to them as a form of AAR.

Beyond fulfilling those purposes of knowledge transfer, though, I think Kairos also points out in compelling ways how production narratives function as scholarship. The Inventio section is one of my favorite sections of the journal (well, in addition to the one that I’ve recently been promoted to editing — thanks, Cheryl and Doug!) because of cool, smart, charming webtexts like Susan Delagrange’s “When Revision is Redesign” and Daniel Anderson’s “Watch the Bubble” and the ways they demonstrate the pleasures of the text in demonstrating, analyzing, and performing how scholarship gets produced. Kairos describes the section as “focus[ing] on the decisions, contexts, and contributions that have constituted a particular webtext. Inventio authors include, alongside or integrated with their finished webtexts, materials that help them articulate how and why their work came into being.” Again: critical, reflective production narratives. But I’ve also started to see my own scholarship turning in that direction as well: I’ve recently sent off an extended economic analysis of how the Army’s plagiarized field manual was produced that attempted to account for the material and immaterial relations and contexts and labor that demanded and constituted and shaped that significant piece of doctrine, and I’ve got articles in the works that perform a sort of time-use study of the production of other pieces of scholarship, as well, and the Orientalist and I are starting to work on a study that attempts to account for the relationship between faculty time, scholarship, teaching, and student time in quantitative terms. So, yes, again: critical, reflective production narratives about how scholarship gets produced and — at a more abstract level — how education gets produced.

I’m a little uneasy, though, about the quantitative focus of that last study I described, because I think it departs from my particular economic focus on the fundamental purpose of what production narratives do. Production narratives are a way of paying attention to and making qualitative sense of the work and experience of composing and producing. They’re texts that operate on other texts, including ourselves, because information is an experience good. Experience goods are not always going to be quantitatively commensurable, and this fact is what I think constitutes the mistake Victor Villanueva makes when he declares that economic analysis requires mathematics and numbers, and more seriously the fundamental and crippling flaw to Richard Lanham’s The Economics of Attention. The process of production and the attention that accompanies that process are both activities that transform and aggregate; as such, they respond poorly to zero-sum quantitative economic analysis. If we’re paying attention to the value of composing and how it happens, we’re talking about information that is qualitative at its core. That’s part of what makes production narratives so appealing as irreducible experience goods.

Writing with Students

preterite Composition Pedagogy

There’s been a thread running on the Writing Program Administrators’ listserv lately about the virtues of writing with one’s students. The idea is that doing the assignments with students — writing what you assign them to write, when you assign them to write it — has considerable pedagogical benefit for both student and teacher. I’m familiar with the idea and endorse it, and have been ridiculed (here, if memory serves, in the comments) for doing so. I think the resistance to the idea of writing with one’s students that such ridicule suggests necessarily involves notions of mastery: perhaps the teacher is too smart, too well-educated, too familiar with the topics he or she teaches to do something as wasteful as writing with one’s students. Certainly, in my classroom — where we write for at least 20 minutes out of every 55-minute lesson day, for 40 lessons — I can see how a visitor might say, “But why aren’t you teaching?”

What does that question mean? Why am I not delivering knowledge? Well, yes, sure; compositionists mostly know enough to wave away the lecture model, to follow Freire in avoiding the banking model. Knowledge doesn’t simply transfer from the teacher’s mouth to the student’s ear via the medium of language. Why, then, are we not engaging in the social-epistemic model of knowledge-building via discussion or group problem-solving activities? Well, we are, in part: there’s that other entire portion of class when we’re not writing, and that’s a lot of what we do. I’m particularly fond of the group problem-solving (and problem-posing) activities as applied to specific rhetorical situations and strategies: students in groups of three talk over and write out strategies for engaging a particular rhetorical situation, and then (in my technologically privileged environment) we throw those strategies up from their laptops onto the six large-screen monitors around the perimeter of the room and talk about their relative advantages. Often, following Peter Elbow’s idea of the journey out (from the individual to the social) and then the journey back (from the social to the individual), we’ll go back to 750words.com and do some follow-up writing after the group activity that I then encourage them to incorporate in some form into their essay drafts. But yes: the primary focus and the pedagogical center of classroom work is on the activity of composing. That’s because I believe that students can learn more from a well-designed writing activity — from actually doing the work of writing — than they can from anything else that other people can tell them, including me. Practice matters. Habit matters. I know from experience that the best thing I can do as a writer and scholar is to write. (To paraphrase Charlie Moran: I believe this argument is sufficiently self-evident that the burden of proof lies on those who would argue otherwise.) Still, though, I see plenty of composition classrooms where teachers talk about ideas for 55 minutes and where teachers assign writing as homework. Where and when do they anticipate that writing will get done? Why do they anticipate that writing will get done? How do they anticipate that writing will get done? After all our empirical studies of what happens when we teach writing, isn’t the act of writing what we should be teaching in our classrooms?

Well, yes. I’m sure I’m being somewhat unfair: when teachers — myself included — talk about heuristics or strategies or approaches, we’re teaching writing. I’ve got a potted 20-minute talk that uses a mnemonic device (SEAR: situate, embed, analyze, relate) that I hope helps students remember the things they need to do in incorporating quotations from sources into their own writing. Later in the semester, I often come back to that topic of working with sources using Joseph Bizup’s BEAM (background, evidence, argument, method) taxonomy. So, yes, I “teach,” for vexed values of that term. But for me, the work of composition is almost always best done in class, where we can talk about it — and the work that supports that teaching can always be done outside of classes. If it’s discussion, discussions can be handled asynchronously on blogs. If it’s reading, well, most reading to my mind is best done outside of class, but there is still often considerable pedagogical benefit to working with reading during class, especially early on, so one can assess how best to help each student, including those who might not read as carefully or as slowly (yes, slowly: many of my students have a difficulty with reading too fast) as some of their classmates.

Teaching writing happens when students are writing and teachers can talk to them about that writing. If the writing doesn’t happen, there’s no point in worrying about the teaching, because teaching isn’t going to happen. That’s why I ask my students to write in class. And that’s why I write with them, both in class and out of class, and in 750words.com, where I require them to write. If I’m going to value the work of writing as the coin of the pedagogical realm, I’d better do it all the way.

The Pilot Course, Wrap-Up

preterite Composition Pedagogy

Yeah, I know: I’ve been going on about this for a while. This is the last entry. I think I’ve said and thought enough here to be able to turn these entries into an article, and I’ll have the IRB permissions to do it. I’m happy about that. As I’ve noted before, I think this is the first large-scale project I’ve been able to implement that’s drawn together my process-oriented pedagogy and my scholarly interest in the rhetoric of technology as it plays out in composition and connect both through my work on the economics of immaterial labor and a renewed attention to the labor theory of value. In other words: everything clicked last semester, and I’m trying to figure out why and how, so I can develop this approach (which, according to our blind tests and number-crunching, is empirically and statistically successful, and I think that’s no small claim) into something that might in some small way be adaptable or generalizable to other college writing courses.

The Framework I’ve been trying to apply to what we did last semester describes eight “habits of mind essential for success in college writing” and then offers five approaches or forms of experience that “can foster these habits of mind”:

Rhetorical knowledge — the ability to analyze and act on understandings of audiences, purposes, and contexts in creating and comprehending texts. (In my class, we get pretty good at that: we write for multiple and various real-world audiences for various purposes and in various contexts, and I’ve encouraged students to send off their end-of-semester real-world documents to the audiences who they thought were both most in need of being convinced and in the best position to make a difference. In so doing, I’ve benefited from the cadets’ confidence in themselves, but I’m also one of the people who helps to build that confidence.)

Critical thinking — the ability to analyze a situation or text and make thoughtful decisions based on that analysis, through writing, reading, and research. (This is the criterion I hate for its bland, euphemistic triteness. Is anybody in academia opposed to “critical thinking”? Of course not. It has no positive opposing term. It’s a fancy way of saying, “Just be smart,” or — for many instructors — “Agree with my political opinions and endorse the ways in which I unmask for you the grim and terrible functions of hegemony.” Too often, the would-be Freirean pedagogue simply becomes a counter-Freirean, substituting one set of banking-method perspectives for another. Yes, one can critique, but if you’re going to critique, you’d better be pluralistic in doing so, even if you don’t like the answers you get. I avoid use of the phrase “critical thinking” because it’s a hackneyed term and a more-or-less empty signifier, but I do demand that students engage multiple perspectives and carefully evaluate the motivations that stand behind the sources they engage.

Writing Processes — multiple strategies to approach and undertake writing and research. (Yes, the approach we used in last semester’s pilot course did this in a huge way: we showed and worked with our students on multiple approaches and processes and then asked them to engage them in enormously flexible ways, trying out one approach after another and carefully monitoring and self-monitoring what worked and what didn’t work. The first and most important thing: we wrote, every lesson, and we wrote a lot. Students got good at composing fast; at putting together words. That’s a first and foundational skill, and perhaps more than anything else what helped them to succeed. They admitted as much, nearly unanimously, in their anonymous evalutations at the end of the semester: if you’re going to learn to write well, the first step is writing, and writing regularly. The next step was to try it out in various ways and with various approaches. That engagement with the multiple processes and approaches — the various forms of work for composition, but most of all with the down-in-it work of actually composing — is precisely what leads me to mistrust any compositionist who self-characterizes as “post-process,” as if we can simply glide over or elide that absolutely essential attention to how we do what we do. If someone self-characterizes to me as “post-process,” my first question in response will likely be: How many of your students still write their papers the night before they’re due? Uh-huh.)

Knowledge of conventions — the formal and informal guidelines that define what is considered to be correct and appropriate, or incorrect and inappropriate, in a piece of writing. (We have here our share of would-be grammar nazis — often self-identified, and often unable to adequately explain what they mean by the term “grammar” and how it might differ from punctuation, mechanics, or usage — who are mostly as ill-informed as they are at any other institution as to the proper use of the subjunctive voice, the particulars of em dashes and en dashes as opposed to hyphens, or why certain students struggle with the use of determiners. Perhaps because of that, I work hard to illustrate to my students how such conventions are always dependent on context, and work hard with junior faculty and with other departments to talk about how conventions shift according to context and audience.)

Abilities to compose in multiple environments — from using traditional pen and paper to electronic technologies. (We totally rocked this last semester. We worked in pencil and paper, on laptops, across multiple information systems for multiple purposes. I opened lesson 1 and closed lesson 40 with the use of pen and paper and 63 sealed envelopes; in between, we worked with Microsoft Word, 750words.com, email, chat clients, Zoho.com, Blackboard, beta-testing the Eli peer review software, blogspaces, presentation software, movie editing, wikispaces, and that reminds me that I need to test out Etherpad analogues this semester. In fact, we changed environments so often that students got good — or perhaps were already good — at changing environments.)

Conclusions? The work of writing has value. Students get better at it by doing it in various ways that focus their attention on the very specific contexts in which they write. And this pedagogy — a pedagogy of writing as work, of writing as regular work — works.

The Pilot Course, Part 4

preterite Composition Pedagogy

I started to offer some additional detail in my last post about how the technology- and writing-intensive version of our plebe composition course that I led and co-piloted last semester supported the “habits of mind” detailed in the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing document developed and produced by the Council of Writing Program Administrators, the National Writing Project, and the National Council of Teachers of English.

Here’s the short version: the adaptability across multiple information systems that the pedagogy we developed in our eight sections and the regular, rigorous, and reflective practice and instruction in writing that we gave our students (1) aligns well with nationally accepted pedagogies and outcomes and (2) produced a positive and statistically significant correlation between how much students wrote and how well they performed on blind-graded end-of-semester writing assessment measures.

In other words, what we did worked. Here’s how we tried to develop the other four (out of the total of eight) habits of mind that I started to describe last time.

Persistence – the ability to sustain interest in and attention to short- and long-term projects. (As Clancy pointed out, this is the habit of mind in which our students have perhaps the most significant advantage: at the nation’s premier and highest-ranked military academy, where our students compete for Rhodes and Marshall scholarships with students at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, we don’t lack for high-initiative self-starters. Our students are trained and temperamentally inclined to do what they’re asked. The plebes come straight out of the military basic-training rigors of “Beast Barracks” into our classrooms, and many of them have express their adherence to the maxim, “Fake it ’til you make it”: the notion that even if you can’t yet do it, keep trying and going through the motions until you can. That attitude is a remarkable asset in the classroom, especially when they’re also consistently urged to take advantage of every resource possibly available to them, including instructor advice. If I encourage them to do something, and model it convincingly, they’ll do it, and give me reports long after they’ve departed my course about how well they’ve done. I kind of love that.)

Responsibility – the ability to take ownership of one’s actions and understand the consequences of those actions for oneself and others. (Perhaps more than anything else, this is what sets Academy students apart from others. The demand for persistence and initiative, coupled to the forthrightness necessitated by the cadet-run honor system and its implementation of the Cadet Honor Code, and the command structure set up in the Corps of Cadets in which cadets take on increasing responsibility for the actions of cadets in classes below them as they advance through the ranks from plebe through yearling and cow to firstie, all lead to a system in which personal responsibility is foremost. Cadets eagerly give credit to those who have helped them out, and seek recognition for their actions. When they fail, they’re almost always the first to acknowledge it, and typically follow up that acknowledgement with a request for advice on how to improve. They own their actions, and they give full credit — good and bad — to the actions of others, as well.)

Flexibility – the ability to adapt to situations, expectations, or demands. (This is another advantage I’d argue Academy students tend to possess over others. Before they get to our FYC classroom, they’ve gone through Beast Barracks. The Army’s developed plenty of ways to help them learn to “Improvise, adapt, and overcome.” And their instructors run the range from cuddly civilian nice-guys to officers cycling into West Point fresh out of command of a Ranger or Special Forces unit. We demand that cadets excel in all three domains — athletic, military, and academic — rather than just one. And their strengths in the athletic or military domains can contribute to their performance in the academic classroom in surprising ways. They tend to understand the idiosyncrasies of the rhetorical situation in ways that some instructors at more conventional institutions might not anticipate.)

Metacognition – the ability to reflect on one’s own thinking as well as on the individual and cultural processes used to structure knowledge. (I’ve tried to actively promote reflection-as-metacognition in the service of knowledge transfer since I arrived at West Point, but I worry that I’ve been largely unsuccessful, in part because the Army’s institutional structures and discourses have to a degree co-opted research on reflection and metacognition: it’s become an often contentless buzzword here. The Army does After-Action Reviews and thinks of it as metacognition, rather than paying attention to the constraints and processes that led to a given outcome, and that leads in turn to the ways many of my students don’t want to think about constraints and processes, but only about actions and outcomes. Method and motivation seem sometimes not to matter, even as we pay them lip service in the interest of reflection. The best thing I might do, I think, would be to keep a dual-column index of my end-of-paper comments and their end-of-paper reflections for all their assignments, and maybe even to make it a triple-entry notebook, with their reactions to the intersections between the first two columns in the third column.)

So: the pedagogy in the pilot course I’ve led has promoted, I think, significant advantage on the part of students here in many of the habits of mind that lead to success in postsecondary writing, and I’ve got a ways to go in some other areas. I’ll talk next time about how I work in terms of the five approaches the Framework recommends in order to promote those habits of mind.

The Pilot Course, Part 3

preterite Composition Pedagogy

I’m going to continue here my response to Clancy’s recent comment that I started in my last post. The new semester is underway, and with it not quite as much freedom as I had last semester — I’m teaching EN302, our Advanced Composition course for cows (juniors), rather than EN101, our Composition course for plebes (first-year students), and the course leadership is different and the course structure is more regimented. Still, I’m engaging in most of the same writing-intensive practices (I’m requiring students to write in 750words.com every lesson day, where I’m currently composing this blog entry, and requiring them to write 30,000 words to earn a C) and some of the same technology-intensive practices (we’re using the Eli peer review application again this semester, for which I’m very happy; as I’ve said before, if you’re a writing teacher and you haven’t yet tried it, you really should: it’s that good) that I piloted last semester. Here’s the basic point I’m trying to make: my approach both last semester and this semester brought together my process-based pedagogy, my interests in digital technologies, and my scholarship on the political economy of writing instruction in a remarkably integrated way. It all fit together, and I’ve got the numbers that show that it worked, and I’m very happy about that.

One way into talking about why I think it worked is for me to respond to Bradley’s question about how I “addressed whatever writing of essays they did outside of the in-class writing.” To put it in crude economic terms, I valued both the labor and the product: out of a 1000-point syllabus, 450 points went to the the final products of the four homework essay assignments, and 160 points went to their 750words.com daily writing assignments. I gave them a minimum of 20 minutes in class every lesson to work on their daily writing assignments, for which I often gave them prompts designed to help them build their homework essays, and I encouraged them to recycle their daily writing into their homework essays. I’m still somewhat surprised at what a success the simple act of giving students at least 20 minutes in class every day to write was, but it really shouldn’t be surprising: butts in seats is what gets writing done, much more so than talking about writing. My thinking here is that the immaterial labor of producing and organizing information is much more responsive to the labor theory of value, especially given that immaterial capital — the product of immaterial labor — is an experience good.

That takes me to the “habits of mind” that Clancy asked about. Clancy’s referring to the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing document jointly developed and produced by the Council of Writing Program Administrators, the National Writing Project, and the National Council of Teachers of English. That document (which merits attention if you’re not already familiar with it and reading this blog) outlines eight “habits of mind essential for success in college writing”:

Curiosity — the desire to know more about the world. (In most conventional composition classes, class discussion is what tends to drive and foster curiosity. Because we did more writing than talking in class, and because I didn’t do a very good job of promoting the use of the class weblog for out-of-class discussion, I think this habit may have suffered somewhat. The fact that plebes were coming to EN101 straight out of “Beast Barracks,” West Point’s version of the Army’s basic training, where curiosity and a spirit of inquiry were the absolute last things to be fostered, didn’t help matters.)

Openness — the willingness to consider new ways of being and thinking in the world. (Again, more discussion would have likely promoted this more, but I also think that the course readings we select should promote openness. To me, that’s one of the few shortcomings of Downs and Wardle’s “writing about writing” approach: it focuses on only one aspect of the world. On the other hand, the way we used Eli for carefully crafted anonymous peer review work did some good work promoting openness.)

Engagement — a sense of investment and involvement in learning. (I think this is one of the hardest things for any curriculum to promote. West Point’s mission, in part, is to “educate, train, and inspire” future Army officers, and that requirement to inspire is fundamentally rhetorical, and what creates engagement. It means being involved in cadets’ lives and activities, as well as persuading them of the importance of the connections between their classroom pursuits and what happens beyond the classroom.)

Creativity — the ability to use novel approaches for generating, investigating, and representing ideas. (Recently, I’ve tried to promote this habit more and more by requiring cadets to compose and deliver multi-modal, multi-media presentations involving graphics, music, video, speech, and text, and directing them away from the familiar, comfortable, and terrible Army PowerPoint standard. Initially, they’re lousy risk-takers, but once they figure out that being risk-averse is actually a hindrance and a danger for future military officers, and once they realize that I’m requiring to try out new methods, they’re pretty amazing.)

That’s the first four, and I think that’s enough for tonight. I’ll talk tomorrow night about how I’ve tried to promote persistence, responsibility, flexibility, and metacognition.

More About the Pilot Course

preterite Composition Pedagogy

Clancy responds to my last post by noting that she “completely agree[d] with [me] that it never would have worked without a group of strong students,” and writes that she could “imagine that at a lot of places, upper administration might shut down a project like this if faced with complaints from students and/or parents.” As I prepare to depart this place at the end of this academic year, I’m feeling a little conflicted about the assumptions she makes about my students. Do I think that West Point cadets are that much better than students I might encounter elsewhere? Perhaps in some ways yes: every student I teach is nominated for excellence by a member of Congress, and that’s part of what makes this place magic, and part of what makes it so intensely rewarding to teach here.

But the answer’s more complicated than that, too. Clancy’s comment makes me feel a little awkward, because I don’t think I ever actually said that our pilot course “never would have worked without a group of strong students.” And I want to believe that the approach I’ve developed, with its deep theoretical and pedagogical investment with the notion of the value of work, could work elsewhere.

At the start of the semester, I sold our approach to the cadets with every bit of persuasive enthusiasm I could muster, because I knew they’d be suspicious. Writing every day in class? Writing 750 words every lesson day, just to earn a C?

A funny thing happened. They figured out that writing 750 words is easy. They figured out that they can do it on demand. And the most important thing that has happened — and it only happened recently, for some of them — is that they figured out they can write. For me, that’s huge. That’s the battle I’ve been fighting since I first started teaching composition. Every semester, I had the students who were sure they couldn’t write, and so they didn’t. They didn’t write until it came down to crunch time and they had to write their essays the night before the final drafts of those essays were due, and they did. Until this semester, I got those essays all the time. You know what they look like, because you’ve seen them. They’re essays produced at the last minute by students who are certain that doing so is the only and best way of writing. Those essays are why they hate writing.

What’s happened this semester, though, is that writing has become almost like athletic performance: it’s a matter of getting it done, putting in the practice, and pretty soon, practice translates into improvement. There’s value in the work of doing. In August, I asserted my primary reservations about most university-level writing instruction: that it’s “too easy to allow the classroom work associated with composition courses to focus on activities other than writing,” and that

Read more