Composition Pedagogy

4Cs: Evaluating Academic Weblogs

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Computers

With my ongoing interest in understanding the pedagogical purposes of weblogs, in understanding what they do with the intersection of reading and writing and how they help teachers to help students write better, this was a panel I couldn’t miss. I wasn’t disappointed: the four presenters offered a really useful and provocative prism through which to start understanding these things. And, actually, I just realized that this is one of the panels who I didn’t ask for permission to blog my notes, which means that I’m going to be sending out some e-mails once I post this.

Bradley Bleck went first, offering the results of a pilot study he performed in his own classroom with an eye to how the technology of blogging might help to enhance student motivation in writing. In an American Literature course, Brad had students use weblogs as daily reading journals, with the hope of fostering inter-student dialogue beyond the “grading black hole” of paper journals. (In writing this, it’s suddenly more clear why Brad asked the questions he did at my presentation, and why I had such difficulty answering them; we’re all familiar with the tension between wanting students to learn for their own purposes but trying to use external pressures and motivations to get them to do so. I can only offer here the neoclassical notions of opportunity cost and the marginal rate of substitution: in a system of finite resources [including time] one does one thing at the expense of another, and the neoclassical economists love to talk about work versus leisure, like how many weblog entries is Jane willing to give up so she can go to that kegger, and what are the grading rewards she gets from doing so versus the social-psychological rewards versus the intrinsic hedonic rewards — because I think most composition teachers want their students to get those intrinsic hedonic rewards, that pleasure in the act of writing itself, but dammit it’s a struggle to make them like it.;-) Brad presented a lot of hard numbers on students’ uses of computers, but maintained some skepticism about some of their responses to his survey questions, as I think any effective teacher-researcher would. The students who liked weblogs the most were, perhaps not surprisingly, the ones who had the most difficulty with other assignments, but the most provocative finding Brad offered was that there was no apparent correlation between student blog quality and other writing ability. Which — as Brad acknowledged — seems like a really strong demand for further research beyond this pilot study.

I don’t think it takes anything away from the excellent presentations that Brad, Anne Jones, and Dennis Jerz gave to say that I thought Derek Mueller’s presentation “Ping: Readdressing Audience in the Blogosphere” was absolutely extraordinary; I characterized it to Clancy as a tour de force, and I won’t be able to even come close to doing it justice here, but I’ll at least attempt to offer a brief sketch of Derek’s ideas.

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4Cs Keynote: Who Owns Writing? Part 1

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Writing

I wasn’t able to ask Doug Hesse for his permission to blog his keynote, but John Lovas knows Doug, so I’ll ask John if he might put me in touch with Doug in order to seek that permission. This entry, then, is posted provisionally, and may be taken down. Any errors and misrepresentations are entirely my own; the eloquence and insight and originality is all Doug’s. I know I won’t be able to entirely do it justice, but I’ll do my best to at least capture some of the progression of ideas and imitate what I can of the style. In that sense, this post is entirely a derivative work.

Doug Hesse begins his Thursday morning keynote address in song; a clear, rich voice singing a stanza from the Marian Anderson spiritual:

My lord what a morning
When the stars begin to fall

He sings beautifully. His first question, accompanied by a PowerPoint slide of the cover of The Album of Negro Spirituals: “Did I have a right to sing from that book?” The contradictory state of Writing today, Doug suggests, might well be characterized by Anderson’s strange couplet: the praise of the first line, the “pretty apocalypse” of the last.

As writing, rhetoric and composition is doing well, but it’s also in danger. Hence Doug’s question, Who owns writing? Ownership, Doug points out, comprises both control and responsibility. He isn’t talking so much about the ownership of individual texts, he notes, but rather about owning the material conditions of writing; its circumstances and pedagogies within (and without?) higher education. Who speaks for writing? Certainly, we know many who would control writing, but are they the same ones who would take responsibility for it — and what might be the various inflections and appearances of that responsibility? What should our discipline aspire to own, and how?

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4Cs: Owning Knowledge

preterite Class (Meta), Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Economics, Openness, Writing

I gave my presentation this morning, along with Krista Kennedy (as read by John Logie) and Charlie Lowe. Charlie was in his usual relaxed, easygoing talking-through-the-points mode, while John did a fine job of reading Krista’s stylistically compelling sophisticated theoretical essay. I didn’t do quite so well, largely because I was trying to talk a point-by-point presentation for the first time; in the past, I’ve always read my presentations from papers, and I do a fair job of that, I think. But my lack of comfort with the talking-through-the-points format was highly apparent in my voice, in the somewhat rushed delivery, and in my hesitation to deviate from those points. As is the case with students whose papers display a marked increase in correctness errors when they grapple with materials or genres unfamiliar to them, my presentation was marked by my delivery’s evidence of my inexperience with the genre. Which is disappointing; with the preparation I put into this, I would have liked to have done a better job.

If you check out the presentation, you’ll see that it’s highly inductive and paratactic, and those qualities are only accentuated by the cuts I made after rehearsing it and having it come out at around 22 minutes: I tried to get rid of the points that seemed least essential, but that resulted in a highly “gappy” feeling in a number of places. What I was trying to do in the presentation was simply to look at ownership issues as connected to student writing through an economic lens, in the hopes that such a lens might help the audience see how student writing — when considered and practiced as “open source” rather than as scarce and solely owned — can give an increased and more diverse valuation to the labor of everyone (students, teachers, researchers, and the various permutations thereof) in the community of first year writing. An additional difficulty, I think, is that the complexity of the theoretical stuff I was trying to present actually really doesn’t lend itself to the and/and/and qualities of parataxis, and is much more easily understood via the subordinating conjunctions of hypotaxis. Which I knew intellectually, but — since I’d never tried to do a presentation like this before — not practically.

On the good side, these points comprise the core logic of Chapter 5 of my dissertation, so I’ve got my revision work laid out for me. I’ll also say that I think my classroom focus served as a nice complement both to Krista’s flights of Deleuze and Guattari high theory and to Charlie’s explicit working-through of the implications of the Open Source development process for composition, and this seemed to play out in the really excellent Q&A that followed our presentations, where a lot of people offered insightful and provocative comments and questions (including several from Bradley Bleck that I couldn’t answer, which gave me considerable material for future thought) linking Krista’s rhizomes, Charlie’s development process, and my own concerns of valuation. So sometime in the next week or so, I’ll be cleaning up the presentation some; right now, I’m grateful to Charlie, Krista, and John, and to all the folks who joined in the discussion.

Doctor Chadwallah (who was apparently attending incognito, and who Krista explicitly referenced in her presentation) offered no questions, to the regret of many who were present.

4Cs: Weblogs as Social Action

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Computers, Writing

I’ve had a much busier conference experience than I did last year, attending a whole lot of presentations and wanting to attend even more. I won’t blog all the ones I go to — sometimes I like to just sit and listen — but I’ll do my best to do justice to the ones I do take notes on. I’ve been trying to ask people for permission to blog their sessions, with — for the most part — success, but I’ll acknowledge when I haven’t been able to ask presenters for permission. As always, it’s great seeing colleagues in the halls and sessions, folks I haven’t seen in a while, and I’m particularly glad to put more faces to names that I’ve known only by their writing.

Anyway: went to the first session of the conference with Lanette Cadle, Daisy Pignetti, and Clancy Ratliff talking about thinking of weblogs as social action. Good stuff, and raised some really interesting questions for me about the different rhetorical and/or pedagogical uses to which weblog writing gets put.

Lanette Cadle began with Jill Walker’s now-canonical definition of the weblog and then described her study focusing on the “personal” weblogs of girls between 15 and 22 at LiveJournal. Sixty-seven percent of the 4.35 million LiveJournalers are female, even though women are historically underrepresented on weblogs. According to Cadle, these women are remediating (to use the term Bolter and Grusin have given a new currency that intersects in problematic ways with how Mike Rose and other scholars use it) the historical genre of the diary: the weblog, Cadle suggests, is the paper diary plus links. The rhetorical activities on these girls’ weblogs include “Daily log[s], vents and raves, links, comments, quizzes, memes, and images,” and in an interesting aside, Cadle distinguished these activities from those of “the information-conveying political weblog.”

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What Do Weblogs Do?

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Computers, Rhetoric, Writing

I’ve been meaning to respond to Clancy’s post on assessing student weblogs for a while, but in and around reading Wayne Booth and not having fully sorted out my own thoughts on student weblogging, it took me a while to get around to it. I was going to post this as a comment at her place, but it looks like there are some technical difficulties going on over there as I write this, so here goes.

Clancy notes that my post a while back on the Ask MetaFilter thread on life-changing experiences got her thinking about how writing teachers who ask students to maintain weblogs evaluate what their students write. Her considerations of the nature of assessment when applied to weblog writing, while not a response to me :-), offer a lot to think about. Clancy seems to me to make two major points: first, what she thinks the weblog should do, “which is primarily to enhance community in the classroom, but then they invariably end up learning a lot about audience and rhetorical practices by engaging in the conversation, too.” Second, how she evaluates that writing — and it sounds to me like she’s arguing that her grading policy (essentially, just participate) places primary importance on the community-enhancement function, and the latter part — what students learn about rhetoric by engaging in that participation — will come naturally out of the first and needs or bears no evaluation of its own. (Is that fair, Clancy?)

In my own pedagogy, I’m still a little uncertain about what it is that weblogs teach students in the classroom.

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Credo

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory

At Kairosnews, Clancy recently pointed to “some likely caricatured” characterizations of things that “go without saying” in the field of composition offered ten years ago by Bob Connors, and asked: “Ten years later, how has the field of composition changed? Has it changed at all? Are these still the issues?” I think they’re important questions Clancy’s asking, and I think the characterizations offered by Connors are worth reproducing here. (I’ll be on the job market in the fall, and so one task between now and then will be to revise my teaching philosophy — and thinking about Connors’s characterizations seems like a productive way to start.)

According to Connors, “very different things seemed to ‘go without saying’ before lunch and after lunch.” Here are the before-lunch characterizations:

  1. Our most central task as literacy educators is understanding and acting on issues of the cultural and ideological contexts of writing.
  2. The “process” (expressivist/cognitivist) paradigm of teaching and research is naive and outmoded, and we have to move beyond it.
  3. Individualism and concepts of personal agency are delusions, and we must avoid being trapped by them as we consider issues of literacy education.
  4. All meaning is constructed socially, and our choice as educators involved working to further that construction with or striving to further that construction against the grain of the larger culture’s ideologies.
  5. The goals of literacy pedagogies should thus be to assist adaptation to existing academic realities through teaching conventions or to work for social change through analyses of economic and cultural forces.
  6. For either of these purposes, the personal essay is a questionable form and is proof of the low status of composition.
  7. Being middle class is a somewhat ignoble status and an unsophisticated goal to wish for our students.
  8. Most composition teaching is naive if not destructive.

And after lunch, “it seems to go without saying that:  

  1. Our most central task as literacy educators is teaching students to write more effectively for themselves and for their other classes.
  2. Students are genuine individuals who have real needs, desires, and agency. So are we.
  3. The process paradigm of teaching is a kind of default setting for us, what we all naturally assume and use, the methodological sine qua non underlying all other pedagogies we try out.
  4. Meaning inheres in feelings and emotions, which may be constructed socially but which are felt, acted on, and written about individually.
  5. The personal essay is a central genre from which many others can grow.
  6. Being middle class is a reasonable thing to want or to propose for our students, and most of us are and always will be inescapably middle class.
  7. Most composition teaching does help students, if the teacher truly cares about helping students.

Connors then concludes: “How are we to meld these multiple personalities? Perhaps we do not need to worry about it too much. They are our heads and our hearts, and they do not work well apart from each other.”

Clearly, some of the premises are intended to function in pairs. My “central task” as a literacy educator? I don’t think it’s “understanding and acting on issues of the cultural and ideological contexts of writing,” but I don’t think one can teach “students to write more effectively” without doing so.

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Life-Changing Experiences

preterite Composition Pedagogy

Via MetaFilter, a thread on life-altering experiences. To paraphrase some of the thread’s respondents, I couldn’t stop reading: the experiences MeFites describe are shockingly compelling.

But here’s the meta-moment for teachers of first-year writing: for many of us, the question Jeremias asks is a familiar one. It’s often asked in the semester’s first writing assignment, with the given rationale being that students will find it easy to write about matters familiar to them.

There’ve been plenty of critiques of such a rationale. I’m very much in agreement with the reservations Joe Harris has expressed about the personal essay — the worry that grading, in some ways, becomes an evaluation of the self that the student represents on the page — but after reading the MetaFilter thread, one of my responses to the Personal Essay assignment has become a recognition of and revulsion at my own voyeurism.

I mean, I look at some of the MetaFilter responses, and I look at the innocuous question with which Jeremias prompted such responses, and I’m floored — although the openness of the MetaFilter respondents and the closeness of first-year writing respondents really ought not to be surprising.

I wonder if this could be one of the ways in which blogging might change the pedagogical practices and written products of first-year comp.

Economics & Critical Pedagogy

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Economics, Education, Writing

In a recent entry, I asserted that composition has taken Paulo Freire and turned him on his head, substituting the neoclassical economist’s embedded-in-capitalism perspective for the Marxist’s economic analysis of capitalism, and asked: how did this happen? How did composition, in adopting critical pedagogies as its default models for instruction, come to decide that the economic aspects of such pedagogies were to be avoided? Part of this, I think, comes out of the work of one of the most prominent proponents of Freirean critical pedagogy. Composition, and the field of education in general, owes an immense debt to the theoretical work of Henry Giroux in translating Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy into educational applications for an American context: Giroux is a rigorous and prolific scholar (his curriculum vitae [PDF] goes to 75 pages), and one of the most prominent critical pedagogues working today. Interestingly, however, Giroux’s later work has done much to turn Freirean critical pedagogy away from economic concerns and towards cultural concerns: in a 1998 interview, Giroux notes that his recent ‘work gives less emphasis to class as a universal category of domination’ (142), and this seems to be because Giroux sees formulating cultural concerns in economic terms as problematic: "Reformulating social issues as strictly individual or economic issues, corporate culture functions largely to cancel out the democratic impulses and practices of civil society by either devaluing them or absorbing such impulses within a market logic. No longer a space for political struggle, culture in the corporate model becomes an all-encompassing horizon for producing market identities, values, and practices" (1.2)[i]. We can take from this contention that Giroux would prefer the opposite circumstance, by which one replaces political struggle in the economic sphere with political struggle in the cultural sphere.

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Quotidian Terminal

preterite Asides, Composition Pedagogy

In a comment to a semi-recent post of mine, Joanna mentioned the day-to-day of the end of the semester. To which I can only say: yes, yes, yes. As much as I love teaching, it’s the end-march now, and we all know it, final papers and exams and the last endurance-rush to grades. When I was a smoker, it was yellow fingers and caffeine and bleary eyes from too much typing, scant sleep and parties too and trying to cram everything into not enough days. My freshman year, Carnegie Mellon was generous: they keyed the on-campus soda machines to a quarter a can, and stocked up on Jolt Cola. No such luck here, but the computer lab monitor is a little more easygoing as long as the students make at least an attempt to hide the cups of coffee they bring in, and most of us are smart enough to keep the cups down out of sight on the floor. The brittle weariness starts to feel like a J. G. Ballard story, and like you they’re all tired, but then you get those last-minute glimmers, the students who suddenly decide to compete with one another on how many weblog entries they can do, the ones who know they’ve worked hard to help their classmates and their classmates recognize it. That’s it, for me; that’s what always makes Fall semester better than Spring semester, because it gets so dark and so cold here in New England, and there’s that terminal sense to the quotidian activity of the semester’s end, the windy nights when I’m on campus until 8:30 and my car ices over, the dim early mornings — but, yeah, it’s about us, all of us, and the writing, and that’s a good thing.

Composition’s Economic Silence

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Education

Our word “liberal” — as in the term “liberal education” — comes from the Latin root word for “free,” liber, via its derivative liberalis, meaning either generous or noble, or, more broadly, pertaining to or worthy of a free man. It is important to note, however, that the Roman class status of the free man (a citizen) was quite different from the class status of the freedman (a former slave). In literature, the most famous Roman freedman (libertinus) is the wealthy and hilariously vulgar Trimalchio of Petronius’s Satyricon, a character easily recognizable even today as embodying the most distasteful aspects of the nouveau riche: massive economic privilege combined with a complete lack of cultural sophistication. According to Harold Johnston’s 1903 The Private Lives of the Romans, “neither the freedman nor his son could attain true social equality with the free citizen,” despite the fact that

The free persons employed in the offices of the various magistrates were mostly libertini. They were paid by the State, and, though appointed nominally for a year only, they seem to have held their places practically during good behavior. This was largely due to the shortness of the term of the regular magistrates and the rarity of re-election. Having no experience themselves in conducting their offices, the magistrates would have all the greater need of thoroughly trained and experienced assistants. The highest class of these officials formed an ordo, the scribae, whose name gives no adequate notion of the extent and importance of their duties. All that is now done by cabinet officers, secretaries, department heads, bureau chiefs, auditors, comptrollers, recorders, and accountants, down to the work of the ordinary clerks and copyists, was done by these ‘scribes.’ (The “Civil Service”)

The libertini carried on the economic work of the Roman empire, and yet for that reason, they were considered not to have the quality of being “liberal”: according to Volume 1 of the 1907 Catholic Encyclopedia, “The expression artes liberales [. . .] does not mean arts as we understand the word at this present day, but [. . .] are called liberal [. . .] because they serve the purpose of training the free man, in contrast with the artes illiberales, which are pursued for economic purposes” (Knight, Lafort, Farley). Precisely because the liberal arts have no immediate practical or economic utility, they are considered appropriate for those fortunate enough to have been born of high (free) social status, and inappropriate for those who have attained social status via upward class mobility: they are declared to be somehow above economic concerns because of the very way in which they are embedded within economic concerns.

After two thousand years, we still use the word “liberal” in describing the “liberal arts education” offered by many elite colleges and universities. Clark Kerr quotes Cardinal Newman’s vision of a liberal arts university education that “aims at raising the intellectual tone of society, at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national taste, at supplying true principles to popular enthusiasm and fixed aims to popular aspirations, at giving enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age, at facilitating the exercise of political powers, and refining the intercourse of private life” (3). According to Kerr, such an understanding came out of Newman’s experience at Oxford, and constituted the historically English model of the university dedicated to providing education for men of culture. At less elite colleges and universities, we understand — at institutions perhaps unable to rise above merely economic concerns — the liberal arts are referred to as the “humanities.” This is the term used by Sharon Crowley, who remarks that “The point of a humanist education, after all, is to become acquainted with the body of canonical texts that humanists envision as a repository of superior intellectual products of Western culture” (13), or Matthew Arnold’s “best that has been thought and said.” In these characterizations of a certain type of education, we see still the Romans’ strange tension of declaring something free from the scope of economic concerns because of its very relation to those concerns.

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