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.