Composition Pedagogy

I’m grateful for the enthusiastic feedback on my proposed lesson plan. Our class exercise in pre-emptive plagiarism seems to have worked rather well.

Some further background: my Essay 3 unit is an assignment that asks students to familiarize themselves with the range of discourse, rhetorical positions, and possible arguments on a topic of their choice; to use library research to examine the parameters of the contemporary conversation on that topic; and then to build upon that research and add their own fresh perspective to that conversation in an essay directed at a specific audience of their choosing. (Please don’t call it a “research paper”: that term implies to me a certain vague purposelessness.) On Tuesday, I briefly described how we started, by examining a couple brief and diverse samplings of already-ongoing conversations and talking about the range of ideologies and rhetorical strategies apparent in those samplings.

After that introduction and some work proposing and focusing various possible topics, I gave the instant plagiarism assignment. Students had about 10 minutes to Google their topics or search the plagiarism-facilitating site of their choice, paste the most useful sections into a word-processing document, and then another 15 minutes to massage the text, shifting sections around, making notes on transitions, “making it flow.” Presto. Instant plagiarized draft. They saved their work to the lab machines, and their homework was to (1) read a sample student essay in the same genre (and on the same topic as one of the conversations they’d already examined) from the Writing Program’s Best Essays Anthology from a previous year, and (2) write a quick one-page no-sources assertion outline draft of their essay, to bring with them to class.

So the idea this far is to get them to do some initial focusing research while also making a point about plagiarism, and then to scaffold upon that initial research, getting them to put together an argument and structure in their own words without relying on any sources.

We began today with them writing some quick reactions to the sample student essay they’d read, with a particular focus on the author’s assumptions in relation to other possible positions, and on the author’s stance in relation to audience.

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I’m stealing an idea from The Happy Tutor here (though I can’t find the comment where he originally suggested it — help me with the cite, Phil?), and I hope it might make for a nice introduction to our first-year writing documented essay / research paper assignment.

Some background: as many writing teachers know, the documented essay on the topic of the student’s choosing (i.e., figure out what you want to write about, research it at the library, and support your argument with library sources) is often the easiest essay to plagiarize. In some syllabi, such a writing assignment is often placed unfortunately close to midterm exams, or — worse yet — at the end of the semester, offering stressed and desperate students yet more incentive to find ways to minimize their work. And yet it’s a genre that students need to learn if they’re to succeed academically.

Here’s one way to start. I ask students to read a couple brief sets of articles from a variety of rhetorical perspectives on a topic of of interest — topics this semester were school violence and standardized assessment — and talk about them as (Burkean) conversations. So they juxtapose Charlton Heston’s Denver NRA address with Gloria Steinem’s “Supremacy Crimes” with an article from an abnormal psychology journal on school violence in the context of Columbine, and evaluate the stances and rhetorical strategies of the articles; what gets said, who says it, and what’s not said. Then, the mission I ask them to undertake is to enter a conversation of their choosing, and to use library research to productively extend that conversation. Discussion of possible topics and angles follows, along with students’ preliminary writing charting the parameters of the already-existing discourse on the topic.

Here’s where it gets fun: after students’ small groups put some thoughts up on the board, we read through the Writing Program’s Statement on Plagiarism out loud, and discuss it, making sure everything’s clear about the policy.

And then I hold a plagiarism contest. I give students exactly five minutes to plagiarize their chosen topics as a wholly stolen essay using Google. (Yes, this is a computer lab assignment, but easily transferred to homework.) The assignment works like this: you’ve got five minutes to steal the first draft of your essay. Using Google, find and steal the three URLs (or, if you’re good, more) and copy and paste the relevant section of the document after the URL. Paste them all together into something that looks like a semi-logical sequence. Save your plagiarized first draft when I call time. For the last portion of class, perhaps twenty minutes or so, I ask students to massage what they plagiarized into semi-coherent essays, though those essays are obviously still not of their own composition.

In the following day’s class, I’ll ask them to revisit their pseudo-plagiarized texts, compose statements of how their own perspectives go beyond that of the texts, and work on using their own ideas and examples as transitions between the portions of supposed plagiarism, as well as putting together subordinating and connecting conjunctions for quotations. And from that, they’ve got the beginnings of an essay, as soon as they put in the citations, from which we’ll begin a discussion of academic originality.

What do you think?

What happens if you demand that students do the work of plagiarism up front, and then self-consciously foreground it?

More job market stuff — looks like I’m following Clancy’s lead here. I’d be grateful for feedback, if you’re so inclined.

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In her end-of-semester evaluation of a first-year composition course I had taught, one student offered the following teasing characterization of my pedagogical approach: “Practice! Practice! Practice! Write! Write! Write!” I grinned when I read it, partly at that teasing quality but mostly at the accuracy of her characterization. As a teacher, I focus on the enactment of education, the self-aware doing and re-doing that constitutes learning, the inherently difficult labor that brings one toward sharper facility and deeper knowing. This difficulty is pedagogically useful, and students’ work in engaging with difficult texts—writing them or reading them—is highly productive educative work.

One of my chief goals in the classroom is to make that work and its value visible. In her work on learning and difficulty, Mariolina Salvatori describes the “necessity for the knower […] to understand herself in the act of understanding” combined with the “necessity for a […] thinker to expose a text’s fissures” and to explore those fissures as moments of productive possibility. I see important parallels here to the radical self-conscious inhabiting of another’s perspective in what Peter Elbow has called “the believing game” and to the similarly radical self-conscious questioning or critique of another’s perspective in Elbow’s “doubting game.” Both of these sets of moves are processual and recursive ways of understanding or constructing cultural texts, and in their difficulty and self-awareness, they make learning visible.

The self-awareness of such work is an inward-turning technique, but for both Salvatori and Elbow—and for my students, as well—it is always coupled to the outward-turning, interactive uses of writing. I ask my students to understand that the cultural texts they consume and create, and their meanings, are inherently social. A classroom example of these coupled understandings is in my two-on-two approach to peer review: rather than having students draft individual peer response letters to one another based on their texts, I have teams of two students collaboratively write those letters, asking them in their initial paragraph of response to stay close to the author’s ideas (i.e., “believing”), then in a second paragraph pointing out the most startling or interesting moments in the text, and in a final paragraph raising questions based on those moments, (i.e., “doubting”). In writing these response letters collaboratively, students find that talking together through their responses makes it easier to write a response, and also models for them the ways intersecting perspectives can socially construct new knowledge.

A second example of class work that performs the self-conscious interaction between the individual and the social is in the class weblogs I ask my students to keep as an online alternative to journals. At the class weblogs linked from <http://rhetcomp.net/113>, students write posts on assigned topics and on topics of their own choosing, and comment on one another’s posts. Sometimes they receive outside feedback as well, as when I had them to respond to a difficult excerpt from Thomas de Zengotita’s Mediated, and de Zengotita left a generous comment of his own in reply to their weblog responses. Delighted, some of them asked if they could put up final drafts of their essays as Web pages, in the hopes of continuing the intellectual dialogue. They found value in the ways that their weblog work made learning visible; a value for writing that went beyond a mere grade.

I see a necessary heterogeneity of value in the writing classroom. There is, of course, always the grade and its attendant pressures; the necessity to help students develop the writerly skills necessary for survival in school and career. As the interaction described above indicates, though, I hope as well to help students develop an appetite for and sense of pleasure in the writerly act of intellectual exchange that works through difficulty to create new knowledge; that makes visible the value of personal, academic, transactional, poetic, social, or experimental writing—but always deeply respectful of the work that goes into that writing.

We had a terrific discussion in my FYC section today, and I’m still excited about it, to the point where I feel guilty that my students so greatly exceeded my expectations: how could I have dared to underestimate them so?

We wrapped up Essay 1 and they turned in their final drafts with letters to me reflecting on the process of writing the essay. One student, whose classroom adversarial stance makes me grin every day and warms the vile, burnt and stunted little spleen in my chest that passes for a heart, accepted my offer and addressed me in the salutation of her letter as “Dear Needlessly Cruel Pedagogical Oppressor,” while another — OK, I’m embarassed to admit how much this pleased me — opened the letter with the Dead Poets Society standing-on-the-desk appellation (see the comments: the name rather than the act) the students gave to Robin Williams.

I love this job.

It was a wretched iron-gray thunderstorm of a rain day, and I’d expected to spend the last forty-five minutes of class on a dull plod-through of definitions of “text” and “difficulty” and the productive intersections of such, using the first section of Gertrude Stein’s “How Writing Is Written” as an applied model of such analysis, with me being the note-taker and facilitator and recording the discussion on the whiteboard.

They collaboratively knocked it out of the fucking park.

In ten minutes, we had a wealth of terrific material from them up on the board plus totally unexpected brilliant analyses of stuff that I’d (rather stupidly) thought was gonna take thirty minutes of teacherly guidance. In twenty minutes, we had an insightful class-authored summation and critique of Stein’s argument regarding contemporaneity that I’d put off until Tuesday on the syllabus (PDF). And by minute thirty, I had to put a halt to their fantastic riffing on Stein and pop music in order to give the homework.

I love this job.

So here we go again. Now that it’s fall, I’m excited to be teaching again, although setting up all these student weblogs and getting them running smoothly has been a substantial task. That’s actually one of the things that I like about having student weblogs running in a centralized space, though; the coordination and attention to detail. Maybe there’s a little bit of what Donna would call the managerial mindset going on there, which wouldn’t be a bad thing: the Army trained Sergeant Edwards to be a logistician, and the times I was happiest were when I was running convoys and coordinating missions, making sure the right trucks went to the right places with the right cargo and the right soldiers. So there’s some pleasant overlap between what I do now and what I did then.

While we’re on the topic of composition, I feel obliged to observe that Joanna’s been handing out a lot of gifts lately, so I thought a composition-related gift for her might be appropriate.

And it’s such a cool picture that I couldn’t resist.