Composition Pedagogy

CCCC Preview

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Economics

Here’s a brief preview of what I’ll be talking about on Thursday afternoon.

Imagine three doctoral candidates in rhetoric and composition at a large state university. They are friends, and also constitute an informal writing group; meeting twice a month to discuss progress and offer advice on one another’s dissertation chapters and other works in progress. All three have undergraduate loans — one from a religious baccalaureate institution, one from a public baccalaureate institution, and one from a private baccalaureate institution — but one has a teaching assistantship with one section of first-year composition, one has a research assistantship working and writing for a senior scholar, and one has a tuition fellowship and teaches sections of composition and literature at other nearby institutions for income. One is highly active in performing writing for a professional organization; one is a prominent member of several online communities and weblog collectives; one receives tuition remission for her work with the writing center, where she advises undergraduate work-study tutors. One is a returning scholar with a teenage child, whom she regularly tutors on writing assignments; one works with students to contribute to a growing repository of documentation for open-source software; one occasionally makes supplementary income by tutoring high-school students for the SAT. They all use in-class peer response in their teaching, they all have assigned the graded research paper essay to show mastery of a topic at some point in their teaching careers, and they all engage in writing as a reflective learning process for their own benefit. One discovers that a student has purchased the turned-in research paper from one of the online paper mills, and fails the student. Another has two students who turn in the same paper, and fails them both. The third recommends seeking or hiring a regular tutor to her ESL student. The third one assigns ungraded private journals in her class, while another maintains private message boards for her students, and another asks her students to keep public weblogs.

They all go to MLA. They all dazzle the search committees. They all get offers. One doesn’t like any of the offers she receives, and struggles to make a growing name for herself as an independent scholar, publishing and consulting. One likes the impressive salary and benefits that a for-profit online institution offers, and goes to work for private higher education. And one is excited to go to work as WPA-in-training for a small state school.

Nothing described above is remarkable. In composition, we know the things described above as the quotidian work of the teaching and learning of English.

However: their commonality is that everything above is an aspect of economic activity, and represents the immense ways in which which conventional representations of economic activity are deeply impoverished in their suggestions that everything in today’s information economy is about capitalism and market activity. This is mistaken. Not only do we see in the representation of our daily work the inescapable idea that economic activity inheres in market transactions and wage labor performed in the context of the capitalist enterprise; we see as well alternative market and nonmarket transactions, alternative paid and unpaid forms of labor, and alternative capitalist and noncapitalist forms of enterprise.

Capitalism is not the economy, and the economy is not the market.

I’m again using here J. K. Gibson-Graham’s sorting taxonomy of transaction / labor / enterprise and its index of various capitalist / alternative capitalist / noncapitalist forms.

Gibson-Graham, J. K. A Postcapitalist Politics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 2006.

How Not to Teach with Portfolios

preterite Composition Pedagogy

Steve Krause nails it yet again: “Shari Wilson’s” attempt at a critique of portfolio pedagogy in first-year writing courses offers little more than an indictment of her own intellectual and pedagogical laziness. It’s a genre essay, in fact, of a species that writing teachers know quite well; the reactionary kick against process-based pedagogies we’ve been venturing and evaluating for a while now because such pedagogies take us out of our safe zones and don’t match up with the way we’ve always done things. “Wilson” implies a predetermined syllabus, a predetermined evaluation scheme and weighting, and most curiously a predetermined practice of keeping students in suspense and not reading and evaluating their written work and offering suggestions on how to improve outside of “rubrics” and “due dates.” One wishes “Wilson” might acquaint herself with some of the basics of process pedagogy and how to fundamentally engage student writing beyond “rubrics” and “due dates,” and wishes that “Wilson” might as well figure out how to compose a syllabus that states exactly and precisely her expectations of students. As she admits, though, precision of language in a syllabus is something at which she arrives unfortunately late. Such late arrival seems, I’d suggest, to be not so much a shortcoming of portfolio pedagogy as a shortcoming in other areas. So, too, with the indictment of “loopholes”: this seems to be a teacher who has scant idea how to assign and evaluate writing, and blames her failures on a system she’s failed to adequately implement.

The later portion of the essay bears this out, with anecdotal support offered by the picture of peers drinking in bars after norming sessions, and by the use of the word “suffered” that Steve picks up on: what are the standards of evidence here? How do they correspond to the standards of evidence expected from students by the teacher?

Are “Wilson’s” complaints evidence of the failure of the exhaustive and compelling rationales offered for portfolio pedagogies by Pat Belanoff, Kathi Yancey, and others in composition’s canonical pedagogical literature? Hardly. And, in fact, “Wilson’s” complaints offer zero evidence of any awareness of such literature. Lazy and uncritical teaching and failure to base one’s pedagogy in established scholarship does not indicate that a discipline’s long-standing and well-founded attention to various aspects of pedagogy is lazy and uncritical. It stands, rather, as evidence of nothing more than its own lazy and uncritical nature, and blames the student for the inadequacies and shortcomings of the teacher.

Most of us, “Shari,” try not to do that.

Reading Adam Smith, Part 1

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Economics, Rhetoric

Here is the first sentence of The Wealth of Nations:

The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniencies of life which it annually consumes, and which consist always in the immediate produce of that labour, or in what is purchased with that produce from other nations. (Smith lix)

Edwin Cannan footnotes the second word, “annual,” in the following way:

This word, with “annually” just below, at once marks the transition from the older British economist’s ordinary practice of regarding the wealth of a nation as an accumulated fund. Following the physiocrats, Smith sees that the important thing is how much can be produced in a given time. (Smith lix)

From Smith and Cannan, it’s quite clear: we must understand value as existing in and delimited by time. (This is why economic productivity, as a sort of value judgment about the quality and intensity of a nation’s workers, is measured over time.) So how do writing teachers talk about time? One obvious way, of course, is in our talk about process. Some of us even incorporate something like a Labor Theory of Value into the way we evaluate student writing, proposing to students that the work they put into composing stands in some relation of value to their performance in the course and the ultimate gradebook worth of their compositions. For writing teachers who base their pedagogies upon the process model, the Labor Theory of Value — for all its problems — is an economic reality in institutions that require grade-based valuation.

We’re familiar with the problems presented by the Labor Theory of Value. We know that Adam Smith tried to get away from it, David Ricardo promulgated it, and Karl Marx tried to re-think it. We know that contemporary mainstream economics has discarded it as thoroughly flawed and problematic, choosing to focus instead on the notion of marginality and how producers and consumers react to fluctuations in supply and demand at the marginal frontier. But I’d contend that the categories of “producer” and “consumer” are themselves too-easy oversimplifications in today’s information economy, and contend further that the notions of supply and demand are wholly inadequate in addressing the things that we can best characterize in economic terms as non-rivalrous experience goods: which is to say, essays.

I understand and largely agree with the critiques that have been made of the Labor Theory of Value, and I have strong reservations about how to enact the difference Marx draws between necessary and surplus labor. At the same time, though, understanding Time as the space in which Labor takes place seems to me an essential component of thinking about how the Value of that Labor gets used or appropriated. So here’s a question: if you’re a writing teacher, does part of your grading involve the Labor Theory of Value? Do you give students credit for the Time they take to do drafts, to do revision? And — if so — why? (I’ve got a tentative answer, but I’m curious to hear yours.)

Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations. Ed. Edwin Cannan. New York: Random House, 1994.

Spies Wanted

preterite Academia, Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory

I’ve been going through this year’s CCCC program, and there are way too many things that I really want to go to: sixteen panels, two SIGs, one workshop, and one caucus. And that doesn’t even include the panels whose times interfere with one another.

Which is the reason for this post. With my scholarly interests, there’s no way I can not go and see session C.26 on “Textual Transgressions Online: Plagiarism and Fraud in Weblogs and Wikis,” but my colleagues (two Majors and a Lieutenant Colonel) are presenting at the same time at session C.11 on “The Role of Discourse Communities in the Composition Classroom at the United States Military Academy,” which — while I can easily ask them about their presentations — I’d be curious to hear what sort of questions get asked, given the preconceptions many academics have about the military. And I’d be even more curious to hear what Daisy Miller has to say about our Cadets at session C.14, as would my colleagues. (Why would the two panels that deal with my specific institution be scheduled at the same time?)

So if you have any interest in either of the latter two panels, I’d be grateful to hear whatever impressions you might have of them in a couple months. I’m very much looking forward to (once again) posting my notes and impressions of the sessions I’m able to attend.

Instructional Technology

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Computers

The institutional powers at my school are terrified of the Web. All of the useful online tools — grade books, attendance records, even Blackboard — are only accessible via a school-issued computer and Virtual Private Network. Course web sites have to go through various layers of approval and changes have to be sent through an extradepartmental authority.

In some ways, I understand why: here, we’re a .mil as wel as a .edu, and there have been considerable .mil hacking embarassments in the past, including one incident last semester that DoD responded to in typical fashion by shutting down practically everything on the .mil network for two days; the proverbial locking the barn door after the horse is gone.

But still: making a course LMS unavailable except via VPN that one can only access via one’s work computer with smart card properly inserted? That’s paranoia past the edge of ridiculousness. Are we somehow worried that the Chinese are going to hack Blackboard and insert subtle anti-Taiwanese and pro-planned-economy rhetoric into my lesson plan on film, Istanbul, stereotypes, and composing cultural alterity? Is Al-Qaeda going to weaken my students’ moral fiber by making them think that plagiarism is more complex and sophisticated an issue than the MPAA’s anti-theft intellectual propery rhetoric suggests? (Oh, no. Wait. I already do that.)

One challenge I’m continuing to run into is the hierarchical and monolithic nature of IT here: the Army gives all the students and all the faculty their computers, and only certain programs and practices are approved. I can’t count on students accessing the course web site via Firefox on their Ubuntu laptop at the local coffee shop: here, it’s IE, Windows Vista, and 802.11i (!) all the way, no matter what. So I can encourage them to use Open software, but really, when Uncle Sam gives you all the corporate stuff for free, incentives and evangelizing become a bit more difficult. And I can’t exactly fight Uncle Sam on this stuff.

But still. It’d be so, so nice to have simple, secure FTP access to courseware of my choice on campus websites. To have a path to Perl and my own /cgi-bin.

Top Rhet/Comp Schools?

preterite Academia, Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Rhetoric

A military colleague asked me today for advice about doctoral programs in composition and rhetoric. This colleague has a M.A. in English and several years of experience teaching and administrating writing courses, and is thinking about taking early retirement from the military and wondering where to go and what factors to consider. Of course it depends what areas you’re interested in, I said, and noted that it’s generally not a good idea to pursue a PhD without full funding from the institution (ideally with a 1/1 load for the TAship and the opportunity to teach and design a variety of courses) and health insurance, and it’s awfully nice (from my experience) to have a TA union, and so on. But programs themselves? Well, there are published and online guides, I know, but my colleague got me thinking, and so I’m curious as to what the proverbial word on the street might be:

What, in your opinion, are the ten best PhD programs in rhetoric and composition?

Of course, the criteria themselves for ‘best’ are open to debate, and again, it depends on what one’s scholarly interests are. I’d certainly expect to see Ohio State, Penn State, Purdue, UT Austin, Michigan State, Carnegie Mellon, and Syracuse at or near the top of a lot of lists, and I’ve got strong feelings about the excellence of other programs as well — Pitt for its unique and compelling cultural studies approach, and UMass and UNH for their deep (and evolving) historical investment in the process approach — so I’ll ask: what do you think? What would your top 10 be, and what would you say their particular areas of excellence are?

Where do you admire?

Term-End Examination

preterite Composition Pedagogy

It might not surprise some to hear that an institution as tradition-bound as mine has — yes — a final exam for first-year composition courses. Three and a half hours, with readings given twenty-four hours ahead of time. In some ways it makes sense, since future officers will certainly be faced with highly time-sensitive writing tasks, but beyond that rationale, the deeper reasons seem to not extend far beyond the philosophy that that’s the way it’s always been done, and that it wouldn’t be college without final exams. None of which I wholly buy, but the deeper problem is that I’m part of a writing program that’s undergoing some profound changes in bringing its theoretical underpinnings and pedagogical practice up to date, and one of those changes is a much-needed increase in the attention to revision — and a heavily weighted three-and-a-half hour one-shot fire-and-forget writing task assigned to all sections seems inimical to that increased attention. I don’t think the powers that be here will let such a thing go in the near future, so I’m thinking it’d at least be nice to re-orient it a bit; have it something like a writer’s retrospective essay that students can write in that three and a half hours, quoting and citing liberally from the writing they’ve done over the course of the semester, and set it up as an introduction to their final portfolio.

One thing that wouldn’t work with that, though, unless we did some re-tooling, is that the finals are blind-graded and group-graded: each essay gets read three times by three different instructors. What that means for me right now is that at 0735 this morning, 61 of my cadets opened up their laptops in the four classrooms I was managing and logged on to the Academy’s secure wireless network, received the writing prompt, wrote their essays, and submitted them electronically. At 1105 their time was up, and at 1300 I got together with 21 of my colleagues and did calibration (i.e., grade norming) for a little over an hour: we all looked at three common essays, discussed them, and arrived at a consensus on what we’d give them. After that, it was me and the computer screen until my eyes couldn’t take anymore, with a deadline of 1500 hours tomorrow for completion of the grading of the 183 blind essays I received (some of us have more, some of us fewer, depending on how many FYC sections we teach). And believe it or not, most of the cadets were smiling as they finished their essays, and it was really nice to get to shake their hands, wish them a happy holiday, and ask them how they felt about what they’d written. In fact, I’ll boast a bit, about two things: first, one cadet I worked with over the course of a couple months earlier in the fall won a Marshall Scholarship. Which is pretty rare — he was one of around 40 selected from the entire country — and pretty cool. Second, another cadet who had struggled considerably early on in the semester — when I asked him about what he’d submitted for the final — beamed and grinned ear to ear and said, “Sir, I think it’s the best thing I’ve written.”

You can’t not love that.

But OK: before the boasting, I was talking about final exams. And here’s what I’m thinking, especially given Bradley’s recent comment: if my institution, bound in tradition as it is, won’t let go of the final exam requirement, and if the writer’s retrospective essay might fly as a substitute for what we’ve got in place now, wouldn’t that be a strong argument as well for moving to wholly electronic portfolios, with the final exam writer’s retrospective serving as a sort of rhetorical cover sheet for the portfolio? We’ve got the technology, after all, and the institutional will to use it: I think the only opposition might come from those deeply invested in the write-on-demand philosophy, who might argue such an assignment would be too easy to prepare for ahead of time. But there is a sufficient diversity of things students can say about their own writing, I think, that it would be sufficiently easy to vary the prompt from year to year in ways that might still sufficiently foreground the importance of revision and reflection on one’s own writerly practices.

Have you experimented with such assignments? What are your thoughts?

A Lesson

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Politics, Writing

Imagine you’ve been working with your students on productive strategies for paraphrasing and summarizing. Imagine you’ve been working with them on properly formatting their quotations and lists of Works Cited, as well. Imagine that you offer them a passage from a text and a set of ways of using that passage that are either (1) acceptable, (2) plagiarized, (3) erroneous, or (4) both plagiarized and erroneous. You ask them to work in pairs to come up with evaluations and rationales for those evaluations.

Does the fact that one pair of students uses the scissors, paper, rock method of evaluation to arrive at their decisions indicate to you that this is (1) the last class on a Friday afternoon, (2) the last class on a Friday afternoon, or (3) the last class on a Friday afternoon?

My boss came by and stood in the door and watched while this was happening, and we couldn’t do anything other than laugh. The cadets in question already had the answers, and were clearly making fun of the instructorial panopticism. I don’t know how to adequately describe the situation, aside from saying that my boss is both a PhD scholar and an Infantry branch Lieutenant Colonel, and all eyes in the classroom immediately noted his rank. And as for the cadets in question: well, if you’re going to get in trouble for doing something, and you’ve been spotted doing it, why stop?

There’s something about the authoritarian structure here that promotes a counterhegemonic engagement in (a very few) certain students; an engagement I’ve seldom seen elsewhere. And I’ll confess: I like that engagement.

Monuments

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Openness

In some ways, I may have it easier than instructors at other institutions when it comes to the question of plagiarism: here, our plagiarism policy is graven in stone.

Literally.

Here, plagiarism as a violation of the honor code becomes a matter of who one is, a performance of identity, as the intersection of an economic interaction (the appropriation of someone else’s written labor) with the affectual response to experience (that dreadful desperate sensation of feeling overwhelmed by work combined with the moral nausea at thinking of betraying ideals).

Which is why I’m so interested that my hometown newspaper has picked up the recent and ongoing discussion of how appropriate technological and profit-based responses are to such matters. One wishes those who have picked up the Post story or responded to its branches in other venues (I won’t link to the ugly, bigoted, redneck parochial crap that the Wichita Eagle allows to remain on its site) might have first read Rebecca Moore Howard’s insightful and compelling rhetorical analyses of our ongoing discussion of plagiarism. One wishes those who have picked up the Post story might have consulted folks with some expertise on the topic of writing, writing instruction, and plagiarism — but of course, as Howard points out, the issue of plagiarism is all too easily argumentatively reduced to judgments of instructors good versus students bad, students steal versus scholars borrow, neutral technology versus ethical decisions.

Take, for example, Platypus Matt’s repeated assertions in the Kairosnews threads (I know Matt, and I like Matt, and I figure he knows that here I’m not dissing but disagreeing) that “the victim” in cases of plagiarism is “the teacher.” Student bad, teacher good, innocence violated by rapacity. But how is the teacher “the victim” of plagiarism? How has the teacher lost or been injured? Matt quite explicitly dismisses the notion of the value of student work, and instead clearly constructs plagiarism as a concern of authority and pride: the student pulled one over on the teacher. The only way in which I could agree with such a perspective would be by asserting that I expect to always be in a position of knowledge and experience superior to that of my students — and that’s an assertion I’ll never make. Matt’s arguments seem to me to evacuate student writing of its implicit value as work.

Yet, at the same time, I’m very much inclined to agree with Matt’s strong critique of the discursive equation of writing to property. Writing isn’t scarce and solely owned intellectual capital, as Matt rightly points out: it’s in fact, a complicated amalgam of productive and distributive processes. Writing is produced by a complex interaction of social relations, labor, and technology; so, too, do those same factors of technology, labor, and social relations interact in profoundly complex ways to distribute writing. In both the production and the distribution of writing, we see information as necessarily constructed by human labor, and therein lies our concern with its appropriation.

The problem that I see is that TurnItIn.com performs precisely that same appropriation while simultaneously uglifying our relationships with our students. TurnItIn.com is an inherently suspicious technology of surveillance, sending to our students the message that none of them are sufficiently trustworthy in our eyes. I suppose I could be accused of having the luxury of that big stone monument and everything that goes along with it to rest my indulgence upon — but I’ve felt the same at other institutions, as well. More importantly, though, TurnItIn.com appropriates the value of student writing for the sake of its own profits, while at the same time criminalizing students for the very same practice. In other words, TurnItIn.com stands as a monument of staggering hypocrisy — and that’s not a monument I’m going to erect in my classroom.

Cliché in the Classroom

preterite Composition Pedagogy

It’s always the one section that gets me. This semester, as with any semester, the students on their own have their idiosyncratically varying degrees of earnestness, wittiness, cynicism, engagement, playfulness, and what-have-you — but I’ve got one FYC section in particular that, when you get them together in the classroom, just hits that critical mass and they play off one another and crack wise all class long. And they clearly know I like it — this is the same section that called my bluff on the morse code thing — so there’s a comedic undercurrent just waiting to bubble over from the moment class starts.

Today, we were doing peer editing, with a little added mini-lesson at the start of class about proofreading for cliché. I made the usual points about cliché often serving as an act of linguistic belonging, as not-necessarily-empty signification of shared values and vocabulary, and so as necessarily contextual, but much of the purpose was to engage with some of the tired Army phrases they’ve been relying upon to excess: “squared away,” “drive to succeed,” “dedicated leader of character,” “drive on,” “rise to the challenge,” and of course “hooah” stand as prominent examples. We came up with some obvious examples of clichés from celebrities and politicians — “That’s hot,” “Stay the course” — and then I asked for volunteers to offer some of their own.

Silence.

Teacherly coaxing on my part.

Continued silence.

More coaxing. More silence. Expression of mild frustration on my part. Finally, from me: “C’mon. What’s wrong? Can’t you come up with anything?”

First cadet: “I think the cat’s got their tongue, sir.”

Second cadet: “I agree, sir. You’re kinda opening up a whole big can of worms here.”

I mean, they’re good. And they kept it up, too, lading the ongoing discussion with all sorts of clichés, Army and otherwise. I think part of the point I was supposed to get was an indication of resistance; of them saying, in effect, “Look, Mr. Civilian Professor, we’ve just spent three months acclimating to this discourse community and learning its terms of value, and now you want to come in and mess with that?” I’m imagining some sort of archetypal version of the student hypothesized in David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University” come to life, striding off the page and flipping all of academia two raised middle fingers.