Composition Pedagogy

CCCC06: Personal Writing

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory

The presentation Sharon and I did with Peter Elbow as respondent came off extremely well, I think. Thanks to Peter’s generous presence (and I love Sharon’s observation that he was taking notes in a Gryffindor notebook), we got a big hall, and we filled it. I clocked my presentation at 17 minutes and some change, with slides (I got two slides behind at one point, but managed to recover), and almost abstrusely theoretical in its Marxian economic analysis of the valuation (in Bruce Horner’s mode) of student writing — and then Sharon turned things around and made our audience gasp (audibly: if you were there, you heard it) in her profoundly moving personal examination of her reaction, and her students’ reactions, to the Gulf Coast disaster that hit her school in Mississippi. And after we talked, Peter got up and offered his response, his account, and synthesized what we’d said better than either of us could have ourselves, in a performance that was — well, if you know Peter, or have seen him talk, he was at the top of his game, and in his mode. Sharon and I were grateful to have him and his audience there, and he really did manage an impressive integration of our two extraordinarily different presentations on personal writing — which was, in fact, very much our point, though we made it in very different ways.

If you know me here, you know I’ve been posting a lot of theoretical stuff about the economic, the affective, and the personal, which is why I’m going to hold off posting my talk for a bit. It condenses and re-works material from my blog posts over the past couple years, and adds some new stuff as well, but I was more than a little proud of my 49 PowerPoint slides, so I’m going to try to sync them to some audio and then put up the text and podcast together.

But definitely pester Sharon for notes on her talk, which was wonderful — and with as many folks as we had in the audience, perhaps somebody (was it you?) took notes on what Peter had to say, and could share them as well?

And, to Peter:

Thank you.

CCCC06: Blogging, Part 2

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Conference Notes

This follows up on yesterday’s post about the blog-related presentations from Quinn Warnick, Margaret Ervin, and Fred Johnson. That panel had a primarily pedagogical focus, while the panel I’ll talk about today had a primarily professional focus — but as I noted yesterday, my point in juxtaposing my notes on these two panels, beyond their obvious shared topic, comes out of Collin Brooke’s observations about the ways in which academic bloggers enact the theories of written knowledge as processual, embodied, and socially constructed upon which composition bases many of its pedagogies. In other words, blogging serves as a site where there’s considerable and highly visible overlap between our professional practice and our pedagogical practice, and as such is rather unique in composition — and (you knew I was gonna say this) that overlap merits further serious investigation.

Clancy’s presentation, “Coalition-Building on Weblogs: Negotiating Innovation and Access in Writing Pedagogy” examined an illustrative case of academic exchange on weblogs that demonstrated how the online scholarly review process — which she called “peer-to-peer review,” possibly John Holbo’s coinage — works in different ways from offline scholarly review. Clancy, as always, was razor-sharp and laser-focused in her presentation, and I wish there were some way to make those vague and mumbly scholars who don’t know how to give a talk go see her present. (I say this as someone who’s given a couple abominably obscure presentations myself.) She’s posted her talk online, so my notes — in the interests of avoiding redundancy — will be a little more in the reader-response mode than the summaries I’ve been trying to offer for other presentations.

The illustrative case Clancy discussed arose out of weblog posts and comments in response to Will Hochman and Chris Dean’s April 2005 Inside Higher Ed  “Hypertext 101” article (Clancy gives links to the subsequent April 4 2005-April 14 2005 discussion here). Hochman and Dean concluded that students and teachers need to “think critically” about technology, a rhetorical position that Collin Brooke strongly critiqued, arguing that we need to start assuming that students are, in fact, already familiar with technology — a position that for me still feels uncomfortably close to technological determinism, but I can certainly see where his critique is coming from. Brooke’s response spurred further responses from a total of 21 people, including Jeff Rice, who argued with considerable merit that the injunction to “think critically” has become a mantra without a referent; we say it so much that we don’t do it (and perhaps, in that sense, it’s performative: we say it so much because we don’t do it?). Sharon Gerald, writing from a very tech-poor community college on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, then brought up the problem of access. Collin responded by pointing out that questions of access can often be used as a sort of rhetorical trump card to shut down discussion, and I agree that there’s the potential for that to happen — but on the other hand, in discussions of technology and access, it might be worthwhile to examine rhetorical ethos.

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CCCC06: Publish, Plagiarize, and/or Perish?

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Conference Notes

Lila Harper’s presentation on “What We Can Learn about Plagiarism from Master’s Theses” began with the assertion that people working on Master’s theses may not necessarily be familiar with the academic conventions surrounding documentation and plagiarism. She spoke with a particular expertise because of her responsibilities as thesis editor for a comprehensive university: she source-checks and copyedits every Master’s thesis submitted — typically about 50 per year — prior to its placement in the university library. Her initial assumption was that plagiarism would not be a concern, but when she encountered an unidentified acronym in the manuscript, she Googled it, and discovered several pages of unattributed material from another source in the student’s manuscript. Upon further research, Harper discovered that inappropriate use of sources is common among all graduate disciplines. Even skilled writers, she argues, have problems with the appropriate necessary “transparency” of citation (which can sometimes manifest itself as Rebecca Moore Howard’s “patchwriting”). Other problems include poorly worded paraphrases and indirect citation, and many of the confusions writers exhibit seem to be linked to the types of style manual they use. Not so much concerned with the “theft of knowledge,” Harper is instead interested in citation as a method of evaluating the foundations of a discipline’s mode of knowledge production.

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The FaceBook Storm

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Computers, Culture

On Tuesday, March 30, I’ll ask my students to read an introductory collection of essays that introduces the “Adding to a Conversation” essay, where they survey the breadth of research and discourse and written conversation (in academic journals, popular press, and elsewhere) on a topic of interest, attempt to find the lacunae and interstices in that conversation, and add their own perspectives. The current edition of the textbook that I helped our Writing Program to construct includes model or sample conversations about guns and school violence, censorship and youth culture, and debates about stem cell research and evolution. I’ll have left the program by the time next year when they start thinking about revising the textbook, but on March 30, I think I might test-run an initial unit of readings that focus on the recent two-month perfect storm of controversy swirling around the Facebook and notions of academic and pedagogical freedom and restraint, with an eye towards suggesting it as a possible addition to the textbook.

Student Life on the Facebook
Teens’ Bold Blogs Alarm Area Schools
Facebook Face-Off
Facebook Drama at SU
Of Free Speech and Student Materiality
When Journalists Attack!
Facebook, Online Student Networking, and Strategically Designed Student Selves

There are interesting subtle resonances, for me, with the things I’ve had to say about affectual labor and the commodification of identity, so I’ll be curious to see how it plays out and what my students’ reactions might be. Additionally, while I never, ever want to be the kind of teacher who requires his students to read his own texts, I wonder if there might be some way to get that article Casey and I did (if you want to make me happy, ask me for the link) on commodification and online identity in there, since it seems to be on (rather long) hold in terms of publication.

Generation-Gapped

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Economics

Note: I’ve somewhat revised this rather overstated post in response to Kelly Ritter’s generous comment, although I’ve left what I originally wrote intact and visible for honesty’s sake, since I think it’d be unethical for me to here do any retroactive erasing of my mistakes.

Clancy points to a new article on online paper mills from Kelly Ritter, an article that covers much of the same ground and invokes much of the same ideologies as Ritter’s original CCC article. I was intrigued by Ritter’s first article because of the way in which its use of the term “economics” stands as usefully characteristic of composition’s conception of economic concerns: for Ritter, and for most scholars in composition, economy is discursively equated to cash-based market commerce.

(A wonderful exception to this is Amy Robillard’s brilliant January 2006 College English piece, which I hope to have more to say about soon, particularly in terms of the ways it draws together notions of affectual immaterial labor with theories of economy and class.)

Ritter proposes that “the advent of digital technologies that allow access to completed papers… has created valid concern among faculty, especially among those involved in the teaching of writing” (25), constructing digital reproducibility as the lightning to Walter Benjamin’s Dr. Frankenstein, with the monster being Plagiarism Itself. The problem, however, lies not merely with the technology: rather, “student patronage of [online] paper mills is reinforced… by students’ disengagement from academic definitions of authorship” and by “their overreliance on consumerist notions of ownership, especially in Internet commerce” (26). For Ritter, the brain of Frankenstein’s Monster, and its destructive potential, is embodied in the “consumerist” economic ideologies of today’s students.

But what are “students’ definitions of authorship”? Are today’s first-year composition students, in their literate practices, as venal and avaricious as Ritter makes them out to be?

I don’t think so. Look at (as Danielle Nicole DeVoss has done) the hundreds of revisions of the Star Wars Kid video; look at (as Casey Burton has done) collaboratively-authored fanfic and commons-based peer icon creation; look at, again, Robillard’s recent examination of Young Scholars. As much as I admire the rigor of Ritter’s work, it seems immediately apparent to me — particularly given her prominent citation of Bartholomae — that she has no desire or intent to inhabit the emerging perspective of today’s student. (Added after her comment — see below: Kelly does, in fact, clearly seek to understand the emerging perspective of today’s student, such being the purpose of the assignment she proposes.

In fact, Kelly Ritter, you’ve been generation-gapped. Today’s information economies of individuated production and consumption, and their constituent students as economic agents, have left you fulminating without a target in their wake. (Added after her comment — see below: OK, that direct address really came across as being in full-on attack mode. And it’s unfortunately vague, as well.)

For Ritter, the student’s values must bend to the will of the academy, and the academy can apparently never shift to accomodate alterations in societal values brought about by technological and economic change: the culture of the academy always drives change in the culture of the student, and never the other way around. This, in itself, is an ideology of mass capitalism; a superannuated ideology — and is it any wonder that the students Ritter writes about so wholly reject an ideology that makes no attempt whatsoever to engage their (Lessig, Barbrook, Benkler) values?

In fact, Ritter’s repeated assertions that first-year composition lacks a subject might surprise teachers and scholars in nationally-recognized writing programs who have long argued with force and rigor that the subject of the first-year composition course is, in fact, writing. But perhaps that is illustrative of the values Ritter brings to her pedagogy — which is, after all, the subject of her essay. I might suggest that a teacher who thinks her course doesn’t have a subject will likely send a strong message to students about the value of the work in that course. (Added after her comment — see below: I stand corrected.)

But what is the value of that course? What’s it for? Ritter describes “the highly valued commodity of academic agency that academia seeks to bestow on students and employers” (47), and makes the problem quite clear: she constructs academic agency as a commodity for exchange, rather than seeing students as literate agents already critically producing culture. Ritter’s economic ideology — that the only value for the product of the labor of writing is its exchange value — is, in fact, precisely the thing that creates the problem she seeks to critique. When she argues that “Our task as writing faculty is to strike a balance between helping students to become literate professionals and shaping their writing consciousness in ways still palatable to our own ethics” (32), she presumes that students have no ethical agency of their own. (Added after her comment — see below: OK, I overstated that some, although it still seems to me that there’s an opposition being drawn, with the old-school ethical stance of faculty being privileged over students’ emerging ethics of the remix culture and the economy of individuated production and consumption.)

Wrong answer.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: students are political, economic, and ethical beings, and they don’t shed that status when they cross the transom into the classroom.

Kelly Ritter would do well to recognize that. (Added after her comment — see below: she does recognize it, and in fact she suggests that it’s strongly implied by her argument.)

Immaterial and Abstracted?

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Computers, Economics

In Terms of Work for Composition, Bruce Horner notes that “one argument made against teaching ‘on-line’ is that the process of placing coursework on-line not only restructures that work, allowing for greater control and scrutiny of faculty performance and course content and intensifying the work of teaching, but it also better enables institutions to claim ownership of those materials and take possession of faculty’s knowledge and course design skill embodied in the course materials” (6). There’s a lot embedded in this quotation: Walter Benjamin’s argument about reproducibility restructuring schemata of value, relationships of exploitation in academia, and concerns of ownership. But the most important argument here is one that’s familiar to any scholar familiar with the work of Lawrence Lessig: the digital technology of copying — of reproducibility — profoundly alters relationships between creator and consumer, between maker and remaker, between the original source, the mix, and the remix — and its subsequent derivations. It makes the individual and personal expertise of the teacher public and claimable.

Contrast this to the conventional classroom situation in which, according to Horner, “the student’s self […] is imagined as fixed, uniform, and autonomous, even when it remains inaccessible to the student, rather than being seen as socially produced, the site of struggle between official and practical consciousness played out in the material process of writing” (40). Here, in the first context Horner describes, the classroom “is imagined” as a neutral, abstract space, as is the persona of the student. The second context Horner describes is an attempt to imagine that classroom context for the embodied student as more material and concrete. What happens, though, when we attempt to apply either context to the “online” scenario described above? For Horner, in either case, the (necessarily material, particular, and concrete) act of placing a text (a class, an essay) online seems to result in its increasing abstraction. The text, in Horner’s eyes, enters the online equivalent of the utopian no-space Joseph Harris critiques as the uselessly abstracted “discourse community.” And here I return to the point I recently made: that abstracted online utopian no-space, in the discourse of composition, is figured both as “the economy” and as “the classroom.” The three are not congruent, certainly — but in the shape of the discourse that embodies them, they are unignorably isomorphic.

The problem with this, of course, is that we know from Harris, Lu, and others that the classroom is hardly an immaterial and abstracted space. The same holds true for the economy, as Gibson-Graham, Ironmonger, and others demonstrate. Why, then, does Horner suggest that the simple act of moving a text from the classroom to the Web somehow makes that text more abstracted, immaterial, and commodifiable? Is publishing the equivalent of commercialization; does placing more eyes on a text make it necessarily less material, less concrete, and therefore more easily subject to commodified market-based exchange? I don’t think so, and I think Clancy Ratliff’s research stands as strong evidence why not: from my scant understanding of some of the projects she’s worked on, Clancy’s work investigates the abstracted representations of gender roles assigned to online discourse, and proposes that such representations are largely mistaken in light of the concrete evidence of female bloggers: to be crudely reductive, Clancy proposes that in many women’s public blogging practices, the personal is indeed political (and, I’d add, material and embodied) when it goes online. The blogosphere, contra Horner, is a concretized and personal space for its users, and in its materiality and engagement is deeply and necessarily political.

My goal here is to perform the analytical about-face, and take Clancy’s insight concerning the blogosphere and apply it to the overlapping representations of the classroom and the economy. More on this soon: yes, I’m back to my practice of working through dissertation chapters on the blog, and I’m happy with where Chapter 4 is going.

Present and Future, Scarcity and Value

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Economics

In my dissertation’s Chapter 4, I’m arguing that the classroom work of students may be seen as carrying economic value beyond that of the commodity, particularly in the production and digital circulation and reproduction of student writing: in short, students are not the “preeconomic” beings Susan Miller describes. In order to make that argument, I’m looking at two spheres — the classroom and the economy — not as the generalized abstracted spaces of pedagogical and economic discourse, but as specific, embodied, heterogeneous, and material spaces.

In Terms of Work for Composition, Bruce Horner makes a distinction between work and labor: in our discourse, he suggests, “work” is immaterial, scholarly, commodified; “labor” is material, pedagogical, and more resistant to commodification — and so also less valuable than “work.” (As is typical of composition’s discourse on economy, Horner’s analytical focus here is on the work of teachers.) According to Horner, the materiality of scholarly writing (as opposed to teaching) is often obscured, and the more that materiality is obscured, the more the scholarly work is made to seem an individual autonomous intellectual product performed independently of any interaction with other intellectuals — and therefore more ownable (6-7). By implication (and, yes, I’m aware that this is a familiar point), composition’s focus on teaching is expected to be more material and less commodifiable, and therefore less valuable in its non-ownability.

But if we understand the distinctions Horner makes as taking place in specific, embodied, heterogeneous, and material spaces, rather than as the generalized and abstracted objects of discourse, the barrier between classroom and economy collapses. They are, together, an overlapping space, and in that space, writing has economic value. Of course, this has been understood in American history since Article I Section 8 of the Constitution and the Copyright Act of 1790. Despite this understanding, though, Miller’s characterization of the “preeconomic” student is the one that has dominated representations of the higher education classroom, even though the intent of the Copyright Act of 1790 — an explicitly economic document — is characterized in its very first line as “the encouragement of learning.” In this light, the words declaring the intent of the Constitution’s Article I Section 8 bear revisiting: “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” There’s a tension there, between the phrases “exclusive right” and “limited times.” “Exclusive right” carries a synchronic concern and an attention to the economics of the present moment, while “limited times” makes clear a diachronic concern with economic change and an attention to the future. And the conventional representation of the purposes of the composition classroom is diachronic: it looks to economic change in the future, and at its most crass, suggests that the dominant purpose of education should be to help students be competitive in a global information economy. On the other hand, scholarship — Horner’s “work” — is understood synchronically, in its concern with the present production of knowledge.

Neoclassical economics, with its essential assumption of scarcity, and its assumptions about how the tastes and values of individuals shape economic activity, is largely synchronic in character. It’s concerned with the present. Marxian economics, with its goals of economic change, is largely diachronic in character. It’s concerned with the future. Neoclassical economics, however, has lately been much vexed by the ways in which the information economy disrupts conventional assumptions of scarcity. As Lawrence Lessig often points out, some resources — like information — take on more value the more people use them, and the less commodified or expensive they are, the more people will use them. (Note that I’m using the meanings of value and price as distinctly independent of one another here.)

These ideas about work and labor, present and future, scarcity and value, are at the core of my dissertation’s Chapter 4, but as is likely apparent, they’ve also had some influence on my teaching lately. When we understand that there are values other than that of the dollar, Siva Vaidhyanathan assertion that copyright “is supposed to be an economic incentive for the next producer, not a guarantee for the established one” takes on some interesting implications for the writing students produce in the classroom.

Remixing Composition

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Openness, Writing

A bit past our semester halfway point, I asked students to (anonymously, if they chose, as many did) evaluate the course: what they were or weren’t getting out of the class, which types of work were most and least useful to them, which aspects of my teaching practices were least or most productive. The results were informative and helpful, and also fairly consistent. What was most helpful were their perspectives on what types of writing they already felt fairly comfortable with, and what types of writing they felt hadn’t yet been adequately addressed in the class.

As I recently described, Essay 1 asks students to choose a personal context, to examine their own relation to that context, and to draw some conclusions about that relationship, supported by examples from experience. Essay 2 asks students to engage with a difficult text in the sophisticated ways that academia expects, to understand and then move beyond its argument and draw broader conclusions, and to support those conclusions using accepted forms of citing textual evidence. Essay 3 asks students to chart the complex rhetorical and logical interrelationships among a group of texts on a given topic, to analyze those relationships, and then to make an argument to a specific audience based on that analysis, supporting their arguments with examples appropriate to their audiences. Essay 5 will ask students to perform an analysis of their own writing both within and beyond the context of the course, looking not only at their own writing since September, but also to the past and future and synthesizing possible trends and tendencies. Looking at those assignments, and at my students’ progress, I anticipated (correctly) that they’d probably be burnt out on citation-format stuff by this point in the semester, and also that there might be a desire for more engagement with the nuances of style and questions of genre, since they seem to be doing quite well in terms of their writing’s content and structure. (More evidence that they really are a bright bunch this semester: in semesters past, working with students on structural concerns in their essays has sometimes felt like the teacherly equivalent of pulling teeth.)

And I was right. Their written responses to the mid-semester evaluations indicated a strong interest in tone and style and the authorial motivations for deploying certain stylistic strategies, an interest in the rhetorical strategies associated with other genres (including, from several students, concerns with film and visual literacies), an interest in textual juxtaposition, and from an overwhelming majority of students, an interest in doing “creative” work. This last interest is somewhat problematic, for two reasons: first, to be blunt, College Writing is a course in the essay. But that first reason supposes that essays are somehow less creative than other genres — which is, of course, the second problem.

And so their responses — along with some insights from Joanna, Amber Engelson, and Amanda Carr — led to my new Essay 4 assignment, where I ask students to remix a text.

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Contemporaneity

preterite Composition Pedagogy

In sending out variously tailored job letters and cvs (hm: would that be curricula vitarum?), I’ve realized that I’ve been lucky in the diversity of courses I’ve had the opportunity to construct and teach. Like most folks in my position, I’ve taught the first-year writing staff syllabus at my various institutions, but up to now, I hadn’t understood how few institutions encourage deviation from that staff syllabus. In my MFA and PhD careers, I think I’ve been fortunate to have been given free rein (after a trial run with the staff syllabus) to develop my own ideas about how first-year writing should be taught, and also — by participating in curriculum design committees — to have those ideas affect institutional values. And it’s good, as well, to look at my cv and see that I’ve done things beyond comp; that I’ve designed 200-level experimental writing courses, themed introductory literature courses, 300-level cultural studies examinations of the effects of digital technologies on English studies, and creative writing workshops.

But comp is where I live and my first love. Whatever else I might do, it always comes back to the classroom, and to the theory and practice of teaching first-year writing.

Which is what’s nice about the institution where I’m currently teaching and finishing my dissertation. There’s a strong programmatic attention here to developing good teachers, and part of that attention shows up in the fact that the program’s staff syllabus leaves Unit 4 open to the individual teacher. Unit 1 asks students to make connections between individual experience and societal context, to develop an attention to the recursive nature of writing and response, to critically analyze the particulars of personal experience that are often taken for granted, and to maintain a careful attention to the ways in which audiences might respond to representations of personal experience. Unit 2 asks students to engage with difficult academic texts and analyze the ways in which those texts respond to readerly expectations, and to cite such texts via quotation and paraphrase in service of an original argument that goes beyond the argument of the texts. Unit 3 asks students to examine the overlapping textual conversations on a variety of contemporary topics and then to choose their own topics and use library research to chart and evaluate the parameters of the discourse on that topic in order to secure a position from which they might originally and productively add to that conversation.

And now I’m at Unit 4, and for the first time since 1998, I don’t know what to do. On the part of the program, the openness is an excellent teacher-training move, but for me — with a brilliant bunch of students this semester — I’m having a hard time with figuring out what type of assignment would be most useful to them. As a class, their most significant struggles have been with logical transitions between paragraphs (i.e., carefully using connectors like “however” and “therefore” rather than just repeating words or phrases) and with stylistic innovation (i.e., not sounding purposefully bland), but those are both concerns that we’ve lately addressed in conferences. Furthermore, they’ve demonstrated considerable facility in working with library sources, and a few of them have said they’re tired of doing stuff that they’ve shown they already know how to do.

So if you were me, how would you challenge such a smart bunch? What necessary pedagogical goals for a composition class do you see as missing from my second paragraph, above? (Following this unit, unit 5 is a reflective essay that asks students to perform a retrospective evaluation of their writing over the course of the semester.) What does my syllabus fail to ask them to do that they need to be able to do? What might you suggest for possible Essay 4 assignments?

Here are some from my fine colleagues —

— but none, to me, quite fit my students. They’re brilliant, critical, and ahead of the cultural curve; they’re pop culture before pop culture happens, and at the same time deeply critical of cultural moments five minutes in the past — and, finally, they’re deeply self-conscious of their own quality of contemporaneity.

How might I ask them to critically revise or remix that sense of contemporaneity?