Lennie Irvin's Dissertation Defense

Yesterday I attended Lennie Irvin's dissertation defense in room 358. I was taping the defense, and I had a wobbly tripod that required zen mind-over-matter mastery to operate smoothly, so I may have missed some of the finer points of the debate. Anyway, here is my basic understanding and reaction to what I saw.

Irvin used grounded theory to examine effective approaches to grading freshman work. He examined freshman reflection on their work and coded patterns he noticed. One major trend he noted was that students had almost no notion of what "essay success" looked like. In other words, they did not have a clear understanding of the purpose and goals of an assignment.

When freshmen went to make revisions, they often made surface changes such as removing "you" from their work, but they failed to notice more serious issues like logical flaws and structural problems.

Miles Kimball asked why Irvin chose the term "essay success" to describe passing the assignment. Kimball pointed out that school emphasizes the essay heavily, but most students never write essays again after school. This creates an environment where 18-year-old students write something that seems artificial to them, for an unknown audience, in an imaginary situation. With this framework, it's understandable why freshmen tend to do poorly on their writing assignments.

Kemp (one of the members of the dissertation committee) noted that the purpose of writing is not to write for a teacher. Students will one day be writing documents for themselves, for others, for a company, etc., and teachers exist to guide students toward that goal.

One of the things I find problematic with many freshman writing programs is that the programs do not give the writers any sense of rhetorical awareness. This is why I'm going to try to gear my syllabus toward an applicable "real world" project, where maybe writing isn't even the final outcome. I posted a few weeks ago that responsible writing shouldn't exist as its own end. Good writing should always provoke a change or a response in the reader. Great literature like Huck Finn exposes problems with racism and inequality in society. Great memos are clear and initiate changes in policy. Either way, no good writing just exists. Writing is always for a purpose, and the more aware of that purpose that the author is, the better the writing will be. There may still be grammar errors, etc., but many of the structural problems can be cured when the author knows the purpose and the audience of her or his work.

It was a very interesting dissertation defense and I think I can use a lot of Irvin's theory in designing my own syllabus.

The benefits of a digital pedagogy

The articles we read on digital learning environments made me realize a few things about the benefits of using digital technology in pedagogy.

One of the benefits of using multimedia and digital spaces for instructing students is computers give them a better understanding of audience. Perhaps I’m being naïve and idealistic, but working on a computer seems like it gives students a more direct sense of purpose, and thus a better rhetorical grasp on the situation within which they work. Instead of educating students with things like textbooks, tools alien to a student’s world, it makes much more sense to educate them with tools intrinsic to their world, like computers.

Of course, saying computers are intrinsic to a student’s world makes certain assumptions about socioeconomic status and accessibility. Not everyone has access to a computer at home or at school. However, that does not negate the relevance of computers. Computers scan groceries at the store, control air traffic, and are present in a multitude of other aspects in the general public’s life. There is something about knowing computers that gives students a sense of power. Since computers affect so many aspects of their world, understanding and working on computers gives students a sense of control, regardless of their background.

Miller and Shepherd were on to something but then dropped it

While it was a bit unfocused and reached no applicable conclusion, I appreciated the Miller & Shepherd article we read this week. The article starts off with some very perceptive anecdotes about how current events prepared culture for blogs. I think the stories about Princess Diana, Bill Clinton, and Monica Lewinsky demonstrated well the cultural climate that allowed private stories to thrive. We were learning private things about public individuals, while private individuals became public. This phenomenon is certainly not exclusive to the nineties, but other big nineties stories fit this paradigm. Consider the extensive media coverage of the OJ Simpson trial, the rise of reality TV, and the Oklahoma City Bombing. It’s important to understand the implications of this type of cultural climate, because the generation we’re grading in 1301 grew up during this period. If we understand better the moral expectations and norms of the era, we might be able to instruct our students better.

What Miller & Shepherd’s article fails to consider, however, is the great force of collaborative learning as described by Bruffee and Trimbur. Blogs initiated this, but sites like Twitter and Facebook took it to another level. I believe the Internet instantiates collaborative learning, and redefines intellectual property. I bet an overwhelming majority of freshman are on Twitter and Facebook, asking their friends questions, sharing things they learned about Tech and Lubbock, and adding to the communal database of knowledge. I would like to read an essay that considered how the Internet encourages collaborative learning, and if it even does. If we understood that relationship better, freshman composition could take an exciting new turn.

Confessions of a 1301 document instructor

I am dying (metaphorically) grading freshman drafts this week. Wow. When I was grading their shorter work, I thought it wasn’t going to be bad grading just a few hundred more words. But these 1200 word first drafts are so deeply flawed that it takes me forever to press through one of them. It doesn’t help that they are the most boring things I’ve ever read. I often find myself going back and toning down my comments, because my initial comments reveal how irritated and bored I am. One student wrote about the emancipation proclamation being signed in 1963 and I wrote, “1963? So slavery was abolished right around the time the Beatles became popular? You should investigate this connection!” It was late and I was sick to death of grading at that point, but the next morning I regretted sending that comment. I intended it as a lighthearted way to remind the student to proofread, but the student probably thought I was an enormous smartass, and it could have hurt his or her feelings.

Reynold’s essay this week made me think about the social implications and messages I could potentially be sending students through my commentary. Am I making them feel inferior because I have more education than they do? Am I transmitting paternalistic and oppressive messages to students? Have I become The Man? As I briefly discussed in class, I’m a fan of feminism. I hate traditional gender roles because they limit the number of opportunities available to both women and men. Plus, I think gender roles are arbitrary and they don’t help society run more smoothly (other norms, like “don’t hurt people” increase human civility, and I appreciate those). I also believe that people are equal, regardless of their education level, gender, religious beliefs, etc. Each person has a voice, and a right to their own voice (as long as they don’t hurt people). I think it’s important to perpetuate this worldview through my commentary. Elitist, smartass comments perhaps reinforce negative power structures that prevent students from having a voice.

Sorry about that Beatles comment, student. That was out of line on my part.

Responsible writing doesn't exist for the hell of it, so don't teach it that way.

Winsor’s essay made me pause and reconsider the nature of writing. In school, writing is often compartmentalized from other subjects, i.e. writing takes place in a different period than math, which takes place in a different period than science. This implies that each subject has nothing to do with the other subjects. While some subjects may have less in common with others, language ties them all together.
Students entering college for the first time don’t understand that language and rhetoric are the very elements that construct all their knowledge.

Winsor demonstrates that writing is often not the end process. Students are conditioned to think of turning in copy as the final step. I think good, responsible writing aims for impact, not to exist in and of itself. People spread all the great works of literature, all the great inventions, and all the great medicines through language.

When it comes to reaching a large audience with any type of information, language is indispensable. It’s really the only means we have. The symbols we use to generate meaning become the meaning. Science, mathematics, finance, business, and football all use symbols to generate meaning. Language and rhetoric will forever be inevitable, regardless of the subject a student is going to major in.

If a course were designed to teach students that, and to help them apply it in a practical context, then maybe they might understand better the importance of communicating well. Students have this idea that they’re writing a paper with the simple goal of writing a paper. Then the paper receives a grade, and that’s the end of it. It all happens in a vacuum, separate from everything else in students’ lives. This isn’t how writing should happen, so why does writing instruction happen this way? Instructors need to help students understand writing in a broader context.

Transmitting Underlife

I loved Brooke’s essay on underlife this week. Perhaps some of the things we discourage students from doing in the classroom are the very things that make them good writers. Having one’s own sense of identity and independent thought is a crucial aspect of becoming a competent writer. Once a student’s sense of identity is established through writing, teaching the mechanics of the language should not be as difficult.

Of course, students cannot just have one identity in all their work. They have to shape that identity to the writing’s audience. I’m sure underlife pops up in their writing, too. It did in mine. For my amusement, I liked to hide bizarre phrases or innuendoes in my work as an undergrad. It made me feel empowered, like I had won something. I wrote the paper, but I couldn’t be entirely controlled.

Even now, in meetings or “serious” professional situations, I find myself performing unexpected actions for the role I’m supposed to fill. But then I realize that ironically, other people are performing alternative actions too. The underlife becomes an expected phenomenon within a role someone performs.

I think this is distinctly an American/Western phenomenon. We need to perform roles, but we feel it necessary to perform them with our own sense of style. We want to stand out and be noticed above the others.

It’s really amazing how people behave when they know they’re being watched, and when they’re expected to fulfill a particular role. They both confirm to the role while rejecting the role. It’s a complicated communication process, much more complicated than writing a paper (at least a freshman-comp-level rhetorical analysis). It’s funny how students carefully construct their identity in the classroom but bomb the assignments.

Berlin's Three Categories of Rhetoric

Reading James Berlin’s essay, I wondered why Berlin ordered the categories of rhetoric they way he did. Why is cognitive first, expressionistic second, and social-epistemic third? I think his essay mirrors the evolution of composition philosophy, moving from the early idea to the modern idea. I agree with his basic reasoning, but I think the terms he defines are less clear-cut than he posits, and that an effective writing instructor can blend all three.

Perhaps I’m misinterpreting our readings for this class, but isn’t cognitive rhetoric another form of formalism? After all, it stresses linear, logical progressions, hierarchy, and an adherence to form. Cognitive rhetoric reinforces some of the dated ways of teaching composition. While cognition and adherence to form is a part of writing, it isn’t the whole thing.

Berlin names expressionistic rhetoric second. Expressionism happened further along in the development of teaching composition, but it too is inadequate to explain the whole of writing. I think Berlin named expressionistic rhetoric second to serve as a bridge between cognitive and social/epistemic rhetoric.

Social/epistemic rhetoric serves as a kind of next-level hybridization of the two previously discussed forms of rhetoric. It incorporates logic and cognition with the writer’s self to make a third other, a social environment, which includes self, others, and a logical/material foundation.

Berlin argues that social/epistemic is the most responsible route to take when teaching (okay, so I’m oversimplifying him a bit), but I feel like each rhetorical form has its place, and that they don’t need to be necessarily separate. A skilled writing instructor will use the correct type of rhetoric for the correct teaching occasion.

Instructor Commentary as Discourse

This week’s readings made me reevaluate some of my commentary on freshman work. Both Bruffee and Hartwell made excellent points about how students learn writing. After reading Bruffee, I began to take a much less authoritative stance in my commentary. Instead of handing out absolute truths from my ivory tower, I began to ask questions and frame comments, aiming to be more conversational than prescriptive. For example, I’d ask the a student “can you convince the reader that ‘specific examples’ is a rhetorical device?” Before I would write something like “your words choice is too vague to write a meaningful rhetorical analysis.” I wonder which approach is more effective. I think that leading a student to her or his own conclusions is a much gentler and more helpful way of meaning making.

However, since I can’t see students' reactions to my comments, it’s difficult to know exactly what kind of impact my comments have. I worry that students don’t care enough to ponder my questions, and that they look at my commentary and become frustrated, thinking, “you’re supposed to tell me what to do.” If this is the case, then the students’ whole mental map of education is flawed. Education is ultimately about having intelligent conversations, but it isn’t modeled that way, especially throughout elementary, middle, and high school. In those models, students are supposed to shut up and listen to the teacher. This sets up a flawed power structure where students necessarily feel inferior when they might have fresh and new perspectives on things.

As a grader, I feel powerless to combat the years of faulty institutional training students may have received. I feel damned no matter what course of action I take.

Truth vs. Praxis

As I read Maxine’s article, I wondered why her winds of change haven’t blown across freshman composition classes yet. Perhaps some of the resistance to her “revolution” is rooted in larger perceptions about the role of the university in society. I read an article for foundations of technical communication this week that illuminates a possible reason why freshman writing courses have been so bastardized within the English department and within academia.

According to a book by Merrill Whitburn called “Rhetorical Scope and Performance,” the ancient Greeks conceived of a university as an institution that pursued Higher Truth. Results and utility were the concerns of the peasants, and these concepts hindered the search for Truth. Teaching something “practical” was considered lowbrow and outside the responsibility of the university. People learned practical skills by working in apprenticeships or out of sheer necessity.

This divide still exists today. Universities still require students to fulfill a certain number of general education classes so that students can graduate with some sense of Truth. If a university does not have general education requirements, then it’s a trade school, and trade schools don’t have the ethos of a university.

Within the humanities, the attitudes fostered by Platonic and Aristotelian models of the university still softly exist. Teaching freshman composition forces teachers to abandon their quest for Truth. Perhaps this is one of the reasons nobody wants to teach it, and why writing instruction has remained so stagnant over the years, and why poor, poor Maxine never saw the winds of change ruffle her crisp sails. I liked the cut of that woman’s jib, I really did.

Beholding Freshman Writing Ethically

This Thursday’s discussion about Shaughnessy reminded me of one of the fundamental principles of rhetoric: know your audience. Before reading Shaughnessy, I didn’t know my freshman audience as well as I should have. My relationship with them was weighted with assumptions. I assumed that everyone was like me and could write if they tried. Writing always came easily to me and I usually received good grades on my papers. If I didn’t do well on a paper, it was often because I didn’t try. So I assumed that these freshmen all weren’t trying. Granted, many of them aren’t trying, but I understand them better. Reading those examples on pg. 391 of the writer who tried ten times to start was like reading a poem. Somehow it explained exactly why writing was so hard for that person. That person couldn’t see past her or his own flaws to see the bigger picture. I’ve often felt that way (my entire middle school and high school social life, for example).

Furthermore, I began to examine my assumptions about how to look at writing. I look for flaws. Before reading any student’s essay, I had the mindset of “what’s wrong with this writing?” This is the approach my teachers took, so naturally I assumed it was right. But think about only looking for flaws. This tunnels your vision and you miss a lot of greatness and beauty both in life and in writing. Sometimes a better approach is to examine what’s good first, then comment and encourage the writer about her or his strengths. When you encourage the good, perhaps the bad ebbs away naturally, and the student has a much more positive learning experience.

From a practical standpoint, I began to look for original thought in freshman papers. I found that amidst all the predictability and clichés, many freshmen had something unique and original to say, or at least something they hinted at saying but felt they couldn’t through their Engfish-laden prose. When I found an original thought, I would comment on it and tell students this is a good idea, and to explore this theme more deeply. I also found that the approach of looking for the positive rather than the negative made me less grouchy when grading. I still gave the same letter grades, but I personally felt much better.

Erasing Toxic Writing Philosophies

I believe that freshmen already have their own philosophy of writing before they start 1301. However, these philosophies are often toxic. Students think writing wastes their time and they won’t need to write. It would be fascinating to read a study about freshman attitudes toward writing, but even without reading one, I can often tell a student’s writing philosophy through the way they write. When I read an assignment, I can tell whether or not a student cared about her or his work. I can tell if a student has proofread or not, for example.

In my mind, the ideal form of teaching is where the student comes to the teacher, not the other way around. As a teacher, one needs to adjust unhealthy student writing philosophies, but I think it’s important for students to think they arrived at this conclusion on their own. It’s an Inception moment. If a teacher brings students to a point where they have a healthy philosophy of writing, that teacher will produce writers.

But what is a healthy philosophy of writing? Must it lie within the four taxonomies? Within the taxonomies, I subscribe to a combination of romantic and rhetorical. Beginners should write to become self-aware, and once a writer is self-aware, she or he can make rhetorical/social contributions. I don’t think that the cognitive approach necessarily helps, because I don’t believe imitating expert writing behavior is going to help novice writers. And the formalist tradition is too formal, because it’s paralyzing to new writers. I just learned the reasons behind proper comma use last semester. Before that, I had an intuitive sense of how to use a comma and just faked it. The point is that grammar is such a complex subset of rules that it should not obscure clear thinking or idea flow.

So as a future writing instructor, I think that would be my goal: to inspire kids to become romanticists and then rhetoricians. How to practically and effectively implement that idea is something that perhaps only experience can teach.

Disclaimer: This Post May Contain a Small Existential Crisis

While I read the Kitzhaber article, it struck me how little has changed in freshman comp since the 60s. We discussed this in class, too. The problems Kitzhaber describes in his article (a lack of teachers, scholarly texts, content organization, and aims) still haunt modern composition programs across the nation. I wondered if the reasons freshmen couldn’t write well in the 60s are the same reasons freshmen can’t write well today.

English educators read this article, shake their heads, and lament, “nothing’s changed.” But a lot of things have changed. We have the Internet, cell phones, satellites, the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, cable, and many other technologies/social movements that have shaped our lives. Freshman comp, in spite of all this, has all the same problems. My existential crisis occurred when I thought “the freshman writers that endured this program in the 60s are now running the world. These are the same people that society and academia said were not literate as freshmen. So if these people have made such an impact, is freshman writing even important?”

People who have a good idea must communicate it in some way or another, whether that be building it, sketching it out as a blueprint, or telling someone else how to do it. Are these modes of communication linked to writing at all? If so, how? Does it even matter if people can write? Are the measurements we’re using to gauge these student’s communication performances obsolete? If a student can communicate a message, does it matter how eloquent it really is? Generally, I equate a lack of literacy with a lack of cultural progress. But our society has progressed rapidly, and it continues to progress. How can this happen while freshman comp remains the same crusty old class? What is going on? How does it affect my role as someone who loves writing and English?

Taxonomy of Instructional Emphasis and my own writing journey

Yesterday’s discussion about the Taxonomy of Instructional Emphasis opened my eyes to how the way I learned to write provided models of how I might teach writing. As a teacher, I believe it’s very important to be aware of the benefits and dangers of teaching things the way I was taught. I saw a lot of parallels between the taxonomy and my personal writing journey.

My first exposure to composition was in sixth grade, and it was indeed a very formalist approach. My teacher was a fervent disciple of the five-paragraph essay. She first made us outline our essay via a complicated structure of bubbles, lines, and boxes, and then she graded the outline. When we wrote, she stressed the importance of putting your thesis at the end of your introduction, using a list of “special words” she gave us as transitions (first, second, last, next, consequently, etc.), and using a concluding sentence at the end of each paragraph. She also gave us lists of words we could use in our thesis and our conclusion. Ultimately, I think this stifled my personal writing style, making it manufactured and generic.

She maintained an iron grip on our writing processes, and I followed her methods until about midway through college. I outlined everything and had a clear thesis and conclusion in mind before I did anything else. I thought that was the first step in the writing process. Ultimately, however, I realized it made me a very slow and brittle writer. If my research pointed toward something different, I lacked the skills to adapt. I found that when I free-associate and write an expressive, romantic rough draft, my brain arranges data and a thesis is often waiting for me. Shifting from formalist, to expressive, then to cognitive was a major breakthrough in my writing. I haven’t yet reached the level of social, but I hope to arrive one day. I wish my middle school teacher had alerted me to options in the writing process. I’ll be sure not to be such a control freak with my students.