Preterition

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 —

• Civic Writing.
• Analyzing Texts Through a Cultural Lens.
• Collaborative Writing for Multiple Audiences.
• Photo Essays.
• All the World Is a Text.

— 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?

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.