Revising in the age of backspace

While writing this essay, I took notes from Moran’s article, went back to some material that I wrote for a class last semester, and looked up another essay that Moran had mentioned using the online archive JSTOR. I wrote down chunks of thoughts and, at the end of the process, strung them all together with a little revision and some globs of transition. Because I didn’t write this all in one sitting, I stumbled across some information on a couple of weblogs that I read which pertained to this essay’s topic and threw them in with everything else. To accomplish all of this without the aid of my laptop and an internet connection would have required a trip or two to IUPUI’s library, and some days of waiting while information was ordered from other libraries. I would have had to cart around a pad of paper with a pen. Oh, and I would have had to order transcripts from a National Public Radio interview and talk to an individual (the blogger) about his conversation with the poet laureate Donald Hall.

There is no question that technology offers teachers availability to more applications of good, age-old principles. But are there also some drawbacks to a high-tech classroom that need to be considered and, if possible, mitigated? There are the obvious questions of equality when it comes to access to technology, and plagiarism, and different comfort levels … but does technology enable students to become better writers, does it help teachers help students to be better writers?

Does technology make us less responsive, more pro-active, both positively and negatively, to students and the immediate and unique context of each classroom?

Does technology make us poorer revisers because we don’t have to re-write the whole thing all over again? We can hunt and peck and pick and choose our changes, which then tend to be more grammatical than thematic?

On the weblog “Working With Words,” blogger John Ettorre notes that writer James Salter said, “There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.” Technology needs to be discussed in the classroom not only in the context of aids to learning, but in the very real context in which the students live, work, think, and experience life. The sped-up news cycle, the instant access of cellular contact, the constant availability of information even as the population’s trust in traditional information sources erodes: these are the issues that can be discussed, assimilated, or combated through the intentional, considered saving of thought—writing, in other words, by whatever means necessary.

“People always ask how much of your time is spent researching and how much of your time is spent on writing? But nobody ever asks me how much time I spend thinking. And writing is thinking,” historian David McCullough told NPR's Diane Rehm. He was explaining he never apologizes for using a manual Royal typewriter, which he bought second-hand in 1965, and which he called “a magnificent piece of American machinery, built in 1940.”

In 1964, John Lord described good writing as “a constant weaving up and down—between the concrete and the abstract, as well as a constant forward movement from a beginning through a middle to an end.” Writing on-screen provides the writer with the ability to quickly move back and forth, even move sections of text back and forth, to not only produce text that is both concrete and abstract, but to think and write both concretely and abstractly.

In “The Shape of Text to Come: The Texture of Print on Screens,” Stephen A. Bernardt describes the modular, hierarchical nature of onscreen text: “It borrows heavily on the evolved strategies readers possess for interacting with printed texts, but provides a more fluid, changeable medium, so that the text itself becomes an object for manipulation and change” (173).

Still, the mind moves more quickly than the hand. How will writing change when writers no longer need to type, but simply speak? The final degree of this shift seems impossibly challenging to writing: when the thoughts of a writer are transferred directly from his mind to a medium in which they can be maneuvered. Pre-writing could become obsolete and writing might become a process of extensive revision, hacking through the reams of thoughts. My roommate in college had an early version of dictation software—his parents spent a lot of money on it, no doubt visualizing him pacing his dorm room late at night, hands clasped behind his back, academia tumbling from his lips. The reality was wonderfully profane. He was never able to accurately calibrate the software to his voice and the results looked like a translation from Korean to Zulu to English with a lot of four-letter words included (presumably the software’s frustrated additions). My roommate also struggled with revising his work: because he had to go back and fix so many grammatical errors he rarely had enough time to address the thematic issues of his essays.

I was able to attend a discussion by Sydney Pollack about his screenwriting, in which he said that “All writing is rewriting,” meaning that one is always editing and reforming the story that occurs first in one’s mind. Donald Hall, the last poet laureate, advised writers to “Revise endlessly. Never show a poem to anybody else until you have worked on it yourself for a couple of months...or a couple of years. Depending on how long it takes.”

While Moran touched on a number of good points, he also creates problems for himself by approaching current (1998) technology as though it would be static for some time to come. His lingo—on-line writing instead of onscreen writing—would have been dated when he wrote the article, and some of his opinions are frankly objectionable. I would not like to run his idea that men are “hard coders” while women are “soft coders” past the women in my IT department. I don’t think I would make it back to my cubicle alive. Teachers need to be very careful not to approach current technology as fixed and they need to be even more careful about appearing to have “mastered” technology. Chances are that at least one student in every classroom will know more about technology than the teacher, and most students will be more comfortable with the social aspects of technology. What teachers should do is foster an environment in which students are able to contribute to a general pool of knowledge about technology which the teacher can then use in applying good writing principles.

Literary critic and historian Walter Ong noted that writing is, in a sense, a technology; that pens and paper, or keyboards and hard drives, are parts of machines which allow the user to save thoughts, to leave an imprint for future use, and to exist in more than one place at the same time. Ong suggests that because the writer’s audience is further away, in time or space or both, “A surface inscribed with information can neutralize time by preserving the information and conquer space by moving the information to its recipient over distances that sound cannot traverse.” It is a fascinating idea that writing allows us to be in more than one place at one time—that our actual thoughts may outlast us and may be easier for future generations to discern than our other social contributions. Ong’s insistence that writing is a technology which promotes a “delta effect” of ideas certainly prefigures today’s media-driven world in which the themes of history multiply endlessly for each niche group, and the blogosphere provides instant contact with the world.

But technology does provide more interconnectedness—which can be good for communally aware pedagogies like feminism, cultural studies, and critical teaching. I stumbled across the interview with Donald Hall when I did a Google search for the David McCullough interview. Completely serendipitous and at odd angles to where I originally saw this short essay headed. Could this be a metaphor for a classroom? The Buddhist believes, or so Dan Brown tells me, that all of us know everything already and learning is simply a process of remembering what we had forgotten we knew. How can a teacher Google a class?

It would be a good idea for teachers to reinforce with students the idea that writing is thinking—it is not filling a page with scribbles or a screen with symbols. Barbara Couture notes that “We pay a price…by reducing those acts that make us uniquely human—speaking and writing—to a device or technology to be mastered, ignoring their more central role in shaping the way we are and live.” When I write about the difference between page and screen and the difficulty in describing how marks are made on (or in or at) a screen, I’m reminded of the Saturday Night Live “Celebrity Jeopardy” skit in which host Will Ferrell as Alex Trebek implores the contestants to “write anything and you win…please, I’m begging you, just put a mark on the screen…”

And one comes across the most amusing things with the aid of technology. After reading the Donald Hall interview I checked Wikipedia to find out who the present PLOTUS is (it’s now Kay Ryan), and discovered a short history of poets laureaute. Apparently, the salary has varied, but traditionally includes some alcohol. Ben Jonson first received a pension of 100 marks, and later an annual "terse of Canary wine." Dryden had a pension of £300 and a butt of Canary wine. Could I have developed something that amusing by myself? Does technology dull us?

So, my essay today is scattershot, mostly on purpose, as I have intentionally distracted myself with the technological attractions at my fingertips. But now my dog is distracting me.

There are some worthwhile thoughts on public vs. private in blogging (and a nod to Douglas Adams) at http://byzantium.wordpress.com/please-read-this-first/.

Do SAT scores accurately predict graduation rates?

I'm not sure if we'll be discussing the issues surrounding basic writing during any of our remaining evenings together, but there was an interesting op-ed piece in today's New York Times about whether SAT scores predict graduation rates more accurately than high school grade-point averages. You can find the editorial here.

The author of the piece, Peter D. Salins, a political science professor and and former provost at State University of New York, notes that, "For some years now, many elite American colleges have been downgrading the role of standardized tests like the SAT in deciding which applicants are admitted, or have even discarded their use altogether. While some institutions justify this move primarily as a way to enroll a more diverse group of students, an increasing number claim that the SAT is a poor predictor of academic success in college, especially compared with high school grade-point averages." Salins concludes that SAT scores do provide an accurate measure of whether or not a student will get a degree or not

I'm not sure that I agree with Salins, although the numbers he presents seem to support his conclusion. For one thing, some of my friends in high school who did poorly on their SAT/ACT tests went to a state school for a year or two to improve their grades and then transferred to a private college--usually one which they could not have attended right out of high school. It seems that Salins' metric would not count those students as having graduated.

There is also the issue of how the education benefits the student. From a purely business-oriented focus, schools will obviously want to keep students attending and paying for their classes for a full four years. But a student may attend a couple of years, land a job that they're happy with and leave. Or decide to travel, or enter the military or peace corp, and defer graduation until they finish. SAT scores may be a good metric to use from a school's cost-benefit analysis, but may not be best for indicating how many students in an incoming class will actually benefit from the schooling they are paying for.

Results from SurveyMonkey and Reflection on Technology Presentation

After a long day of teaching high school or middle school, most teachers inevitably reflect on their successes and failures of the day’s lessons. Was that activity or lesson the best way to engage students in the material? Did the students practice the skills they need to be able to perform on their own? Did the students practice the skills they need to build up to more advanced skills?

After presenting to a group of colleagues last Tuesday in our class meeting, I reflected on a completely different set of questions. Did my classmates learn anything from the activities we did, or were the activities ineffective? Did classmates leave thinking about technology as a powerful tool in the classroom or as another “bell and whistle” to entertain students with? In order to receive some immediate and honest feedback, we asked the class to anonymously fill out a short survey on surveymonkey to answer some of these questions. I wanted to share with you the responses of two of (what I deem to be) the most important questions we asked on the survey so that you too can benefit some our mini-research using surveymonkey.

How would you describe the difference in composition between handwriting a response and typing a response?

This multiple choice question offered the following responses to describe the difference in the composition process of handwriting a response and typing a response: none, negligible, noteworthy, and significant. Of these four choices, 0% chose none and negligible, 72% described the difference as noteworthy, and the remaining 28% described the difference as significant.

If the difference in the composition process is at least noteworthy, if not significant, then teachers need to take this into account in how they assign writing tasks. If students approach the page differently than the way they approach the virtual page, students need to be familiar with both contexts, not just one. As an AP teacher, I know that my students must handwrite their essays for the AP exam in May. Would it not be a disservice to AP students if teachers required students to write their first drafts on a computer rather than requiring them at least half the time to handwrite their first drafts?

Is there anything we didn't discuss today (regarding technology) that you want to know more about?

The responses to this question varied, from one person saying “lots” to another apologizing for being brain dead and without suggestion. The responses I found most interesting acknowledged technology as a way to break open the doors of our classrooms and make the world our classroom. Here are two suggestions from the survey:

Response 1: Possibly video-conferencing with, for example, an author of a book, etc.

Response 2: How can we easily and quickly create a podcast for students who miss class?

Both authors of these responses are looking to connect to people outside of the classroom, namely a professional or a student who misses class. While I am, by no means, an expert in technology, I encourage the author of response #1 to look into Skype. It is free software to connect you to any other computer in the world (as long as that person also uses skype) to talk for as long as you like. You dial a number (much like on a phone) on your computer. This is an especially useful to contact people in foreign countries. No more international fees, people! Use skype instead…plus if they have a web cam, you can talk with them and see them, too.

For author #2, there are a number of programs to make podcasts. If you have a Mac, it’s easiest to use Garage Band. If you have a PC, check out Audacity. It’s free and does pretty much the same thing as Garage Band. While the idea of podcasting in a classroom is great (I’m currently developing a project in which the students create podcasts), I’m not sure it’s the best tool out there for quickly catching students up with missed work. Would you be videotaping your lessons and then posting them online? If so, you don’t need to make a podcast to do that.

Download these free programs and play around with them. When you have a specific question, there are usually pretty good resources online that can help you solve your problem. If you do feel more comfortable with learning technology as a “guided tour” rather than as a game you just start playing, I know that Mac stores offer weekly tutoring sessions when you purchase a membership. While I personally don’t have the time/money to invest in this kind of thing, my school has bought one membership for a year, allowing the teachers at our school to share the membership. I think the idea of a school purchasing one membership to share is a pretty good one if the faculty who are taking advantage of this program are fairly tech-savvy. For faculty who need a little more time to catch on to new programs, they may find that one session is nowhere near enough time to really learn a program well enough to use it in the classroom. I went to a “one-on-one” (one teacher, one student, one hour) to learn how to edit and publish podcasts. While I went to learn how to produce and publish, I of course took note as to how I was being taught. My “instructor” sat next to me as I sat at the computer. He asked me to guess as to how to find the program, where to find the right buttons for record, play, rewind, etc. He did not touch the mouse or computer for the whole hour. When I couldn’t find something, he would give me a hint like, “Look toward the bottom-left of your screen.” He would not even point his finger. This initially made the experience somewhat frustrating, as I felt that I was wasting part of my hour looking for things he could have easily pointed out, but after my session, I understood that this was an effective way of teaching technology because it builds confidence in us as students of technology, that we are capable at guessing how to learn a program. In some sense, the one-on-one confirms that the way I usually learn technology may be the best way: just play with it.

The Basic Writers Among Us

I've been putting off writing this post for awhile now, almost two weeks, and I wonder, why? Probably because I am so busy dealing with the basic-writer reality that I don't have as much time to sit down and write about that reality (though I am obliged to do as much).

And perhaps it is because I am conflicted about who basic writers are. Our class discussion certainly proved that "basic" is relative. It was good of Jake and John to remind us that Harvard, as well as IUPUI, as well as nearly other higher education institution, has a group they consider basic writers (even if they do not term them such). Can these writers possibly be the same? I sincerely doubt it--a Harvard (or other prestigious-league college) basic writer might be the same as my IUPUI "average-level" writer--might even be more skilled than some of them. What makes someone "basic" in a situation depends on the level of skill desired from them ultimately. So this whole game of terming "basics" is a grand game of relativism.

The relativism continues at IUPUI, in part because students self-place into their first-year writing course. As one student reminded me this semester when we were discussing social class, people tend to opt for the middle so they don't stand out or think too much or too little of themselves. I think that's a really astute observation, and I'd like to extend its application to IUPUI writing placement. Students don't want to call attention to themselves, so they opt for the middle, "regular guy" choice--W131. And they can pretty well hide in the middle, until it's time to turn in any kind of writing to the instructor and suddenly, the jig is up.

"Hey, you're a basic writer!"

Not that I would ever say that. Not that I could. The realization is essentially only for me, and now I'm scrambling to figure out how to cope with the new reality that half of my class is struggling with writing.

And that's what I'd like to avoid. I scramble, now, because I'm new to teaching and I've never before had to cope with the discovery of an unanticipated, altered reality (at least not in the context of a writing class I'm teaching).

So what can a teacher do? I'm considering developing a survey or some kind of assessment tool to help me understand where my students are at before I even begin the semester. This would be for the first day. Yes, asking for a writing sample is good (this is what I was instructed to do as a new W131 teacher), but it's limited. I'd like to know more about the students' backgrounds--what have they been taught? what do they like to write? what do they hate to write? what are their working definitions of different (often misunderstood) terms like "revision"? etc etc. I'm still thinking about this, but something has to be done up front to discover more quickly where students are, so I can more effectively cope with it.

The next question becomes, what happens when you have 24 kids, some just barely making sense on the page and some ready to move up to the more advanced considerations of writing?

(I acknowledge that this post is a "well, duh" for some of the veteran teachers. It's not for me, not because I wasn't cognizant that this mixed-level reality wasn't possible, but because it's actually, finally, happening to me and I really do need to make decisions about how to cope. That is all.)

Technology in the Classroom: A Biased View

I admit it—I have a strong bias toward information technology in the writing classroom or any classroom for that matter. I also have some caution in its use as well. For the benefit of context, I think we all know that information technology is everywhere—it has in some ways become nearly transparent. It lives in our midst, sometimes in unrecognizable ways—at times we are its master and at times we are its slave. It is not going away; will not go away. Our students have access to it and are using it for various reasons at younger and younger ages.

About my bias—just a few words about where I’ve come from may highlight my bias toward technology. I have a degree in computer programming technology. I worked several years in corporate information systems teaching employees how to use fourth generation programming language to retrieve and format departmental data. I also spent time maintaining an online “end user help” system for a business management system network. Further, I have developed online self-study programs for employees who work in technical fields. Thus, you can see the source of my bias. From my experience, I can say without a blink of the eye that information technology and information systems surround and support nearly every aspect of work in the workplace. Information technology is accepted and used by nearly all employees in the business where I worked.

Therefore, as a teacher, I view technology as an invaluable tool for managing the information I need as a teacher. My assignments are created electronically, my grades are submitted electronically, and I communicate with my students electronically. My students word process their essays (electronically) so, in effect, they are technology users as well. In addition, through information technology I have at my fingertips a world of resources to call upon at a moment’s notice. At the campus where I teach, every classroom is equipped with a computer, Internet access and overhead projection equipment. So, if you also teach in an environment like this, I say “go for it”. Use these tools to bring the outside world into your classroom.

My caution about the use of technology in the learning environment has to do with the amount of time students spend reading text online versus from a printed source (book). While attending the Indiana Teachers of Writing Fall Conference (2008), I sat in a discussion titled “Transporting Kids into the ‘Reading Zone’”. While the focus of the discussion was about teaching reading as documented in Nancie Atwell’s The Reading Zone, Dr. Faye Plascak-Craig, a psychologist from Marian College, spoke a little about brain research and adolescent brain development regarding prolonged periods of reading text from a page versus text from a computer screen.[i] According to Dr. Plascak-Craig, research is showing that the adolescent brain responds and develops differently based on the source of the text. Prolonged reading of text from a computer screen inhibits brain development in ways that keep students from achieving “the reading zone” as they read. Entry into this “zone” is desirable while reading a book since it serves to transport the student into the story coming from the book. Given this, they are better able to develop deeper meaning from what they are reading—they personally experience the story and the characters in the book. She prefaced her comments by saying this is a new area of brain research and concluded by urging teachers (and parents) to consider the amount of time students spend reading text from a computer screen.

[i] My recounting of Dr. Plascak-Craig’s presentation is anecdotal, as I am recalling it from memory and do not have a handout from her session. What I remember most about her talk is the undesirable side effect of the large amount of time adolescents spend in front of electronic sources such as televisions and computer screens rather than reading from books.

Basic Writing Pedagogy - Deborah Mutnick

Do the keys to the world await those who successfully maneuver a way through their freshman composition course. By proving their grasp of language (reading, thinking and writing), and their abilities toward academic writing in the freshman composition course, they are free to pass through the gate to other academic endeavors. But, what about the student who can’t “untangle the syntactic and grammatical knots made in the effort to write correctly? (186). Are the writing problems these students bring with them to the university so great that success in the university is beyond their grasp? Does the university turn them away or provide resources that prepare them to succeed?

Deborah Mutnick’s essay provides a glimpse of the work that is being done by universities to address the needs of “basic writers”. She begins with a history of basic writing pedagogy, its theorists and theories, why it must be included in the university’s curriculum, and a context for its spin into the political realm—into the hands of policy makers and bean counters.

Mutnick explores Mina Shaughnessy’s work. Shaughnessy believed that enrollment in basic writing courses would alter the students that enrolled in them as well as the institution offering the courses. Shaughnessey was committed to looking at social, historical and political causes for student under-preparedness. She believed the university had a responsibility in undertaking the education of under-prepared student’s. She also believed in the democratic values represented by open admissions and believed that basic writers were educable. She saw error in writing as following a logical pattern. She refused to accept theories of developmental models that basic writers were cognitively deficient or immature. Also among Shaughnessy’s contributions is a development scale, not only for students but for teachers themselves.

By the late 1970’s, research began focusing on composing. Sondra Perl studied unskilled writers and suggests that over-attentiveness to errors errors undermined writing fluidity. While David Bartholomae acknowledges his debt to Shaughnessy, he helped shift the emphasis of instruction from grammatical to rhetorical concerns. This shift moved the focus from surface error to semantic and critical content.

Starting in the 1980’s, a “social turn” in composition theory emerged that looked at social and cultural differences of students. Pat Bizzell’s research suggested that basic writers must adopt academic culture and its discourse over their own culture and language. David Bartholomae suggested that basic writing is used to introduce students to academic discourse.

On the political side, a great effort is being made to mainstream basic writing instruction in the face of institutional decisions about the fate of basic writing instruction in universities. Recent trends toward this effort include the Studio Model, where groups of students and a teacher meet once a week to discuss assignments; Mainstreaming, which focuses on socio-cultural and language diversity to teach writing; and the Yogurt Model that allows students to participate in a writing studio for as long as they need to in order to complete assignments.

The Ubiquitous Writing Center: A Unique Pedagogical Space

As a freshman composition teacher I thank the Writing Center at my campus for all it does for students (and me). In the limited amount of classroom time I have with my students, it’s impossible for me (or my students) to create the kind of individualized space they may need and receive from a Writing Center tutor. Taking a customer service point of view, the Writing Center is accessible, user friendly and on-target with the services it provides. I like the Writing Center’s focus on the student writer himself/herself, and not necessarily on the texts they bring with them. Writer Centers fill a critical role by providing opportunities for continued skill development through their one-on-one tutorial sessions. Within this space, students have opportunities to explore, ask questions—and most important of all—get immediate feedback on issues that are important to them.

From a bigger picture view, Writing Center tutorials offer one way to help students bridge any gaps they may face as they try to fit themselves into the academic discourse groove. In a discussion about reading and writing in Facts, Artifacts and Counterfacts, David Bartholomae talks about “feelings of powerlessness that students face when they are presented with a text and are asked to do something with what they read (22). He observed that “the real problems were due, to a greater degree, to their limited knowledge of academic discourse” (22). With the focus on student-centered individualized instruction, Writing Center services are one way to help students overcome these kinds of feelings about academic discourse.

Computer-Based Grading: Good or Bad?

I remember a professor who graded papers using the track changes option on Microsoft word, and who preferred to receive paper submissions by email.  At first, I felt apprehensive about this kind of approach to grading papers, especially because one's privacy isn't secure.  I also wondered if it was going to be thorough enough and if replacing text-based grading with computer-based grading was something the professor used for his benefit.  It was certainly a faster and more efficient method of grading for him.  When I got back my first paper, I was pleasantly surprised.  I opened the word document, and at first glance, the red marks were alarming.  When I paid closer attention to what my professor was doing, I found that, fortunately, my paper wasn't being edited like most of the other papers of gotten back, instead, it was being critiqued.  Most of the red marks were the result of elaborate comments typed out in the margins that branched out at the end, or at a particular point, of almost every paragraph in the paper.  

Currently, and in the past, I've received papers that have been edited from beginning to end, followed by an exposition of how satisfied or dissatisfied the professor was after the last paragraph.  Sometimes the writing is not legible and other times I find coffee stains and residue of food on it.  Though this has been the traditional approach to grading, I think a change would be good, even if it feels drastic.  If students want to discuss the grade, a professor doesn't have the luxury to be tutor in a writing center, and doesn't have the luxury to go through every paragraph, elaborating its drawbacks or strengths.  Even if the writing is illegible, professors feel annoyed when they are asked to repeat what they wrote.  Computer-based grading, at least the kind I've had experience with as a student, can avoid all that.  The difficulty imposed on a teacher to transition from text-based grading to computer-based grading may be profound, but benefits to students, I believe, far outweighs the difficulties. 

Response to “Technology and the Teaching of Writing”

Though personal computers have been affecting mainstream society since the early 1980s, I think it was my generation, the early 20-something crowd, that’s been the educational transition group. In grade school I was writing reports about dinosaurs in cursive, and in middle school I was double-spacing Revolutionary War essays and taking full advantage of the word count feature. And now my little sister, a teenager herself now, tabs between her Google searches for non-Wikipedia sources and Facebook comments.

Charles Moran’s essay brought up the idea of the computer becoming as common as the pencil in the writing classroom, and I think this kind of movement, for good or for ill (and Moran certainly doesn’t paint the technology movement as a writing panacea), will continue until every student has a laptop on his/her desk. While I think this shouldn’t be something to be avoided, I feel that a lot of the writing formats and processes that are outlined in standard writing are being ignored in our step to technology. This spans the ideas of email, electronic revision, online discussion, and other forms of writing we take for granted when we learn the rules of composition, which originated on the paper page. It seems like no one is taking proper time to get students attuned to these tools. Maybe we feel that students will fill in these gaps, or maybe we’re not too sure of the rules ourselves.

Take email for example: I’ve been using email since AOL was considered a new and exciting step into the World Wide Web. However, I’m still unsure of its language and expectations, especially since I became a graduate student at IUPUI. uMail has become an integral part of communication between myself, my teachers, my department, my job (which has its own LISTSERV), and several community newsletters. Even today though I still struggle in deciding whether or not to include “Signed” or to just type in “-Dane” at the end of the email. Do I even need to address the person’s name in beginning? I’m obviously more formal with communicating to new people, but I often waffle on the rules with familiar superiors.

And to be a bit “meta” here, it’s taken me a bit to loosen up on my writing style for this blog. Only recently have I tried to ask for feedback and to ease up the traditional response format. Perhaps this isn’t such a problem for blog-savvy people, but it was a noticeable difference for me, especially in an academic context.

Some would say that these are minor issues in the grand scheme of technology in the classroom, and that much of the language and expectations will come about based on the relationships between the sender and receivers online. But I think these issues lead to a bigger issue of cognitive separation of technology’s purpose in the classroom. A computer is more than just a computer: for every individual, it’s defined by the tasks it does regularly. For my dad it’s a really big calculator and email chain receiver. For my sister it’s a non-stop social network. We can get into a rut with what we assign the computer to do for us, and while many of us have solidified what the computer means for us in our personal and business hours, I don’t think we’re comfortable with it yet in an academic context, especially as a tool to push students to become better scholars.

Research takes the biggest hit here for me. I agreed with all of Moran’s findings on searching for articles online. Even if there are plenty of databases and sites to be the exception, I’ve never associated the internet to be a place of lengthy discourse and critical thought. Many students still find it okay to quote Wikipedia as a primary source, or bend their essays to quotes from articles appear first in their Google searches. I’m a member of many message boards, ranging from hubs for my friends to shoot the breeze in and political boards that have thousands of members. Common memes get thrown around to reflect the boards’ cultures, but a prevalent one is “tl;dr.” It’s an abbreviation for “too long; didn’t read,” and it’s typed to show another poster’s annoyance at someone’s previous comment. Sometimes it’s a wall of text with no paragraphs, and sometimes someone just writes too much for the reader. Others will just say they don’t have time to read the poster’s “novel” and will mock them. I don’t mock these posters, but I actively scroll away from posts and articles that have too much text in them online. In a cyber world where cable connections, search engines, instant messages, and streaming media are now commonplace, I feel that the internet is a culture of “tl;dr,” and not conducive to students’ research.

With the proper context, I think the “tl;dr” culture can be somewhat overridden in the classroom. Little exercises can really get students into using the computer as an academic resource, and not a compositional shortcut. One resource that gets ignored by many new students is the interlibrary loan system. In choosing between a comprehensive journal held by another library and a mediocre .pdf article, the student will most likely choose the later, as they’re more familiar with .pdf files. What if on the first day of the class, the teacher had them all register into the interlibrary loan system, and had them order a book for in-class credit? What if the same thing was done with registering for a wikispace, or a blog? If these things are taken as seriously in the classroom as Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, perhaps students will use them as a natural part of the class. While it’s not critical that every class has a LISTSERV and a blog with everyone using them (these things will never replace one-on-one peer discussion), I feel it’s important to show the class a stable routine early, and to make sure no student is left behind when technology enters the composition classroom.

While I don’t pretend to have all the answers, I do believe as teachers we need to figure out some definitive roles for the computer role in the classroom. What is it supposed to do? What is it not for? In church people are traditionally quiet and reverent, and at work we often treat customers much differently than family. But too often on computer lab days I see more than a handful of students typing replies on their social networks during a teacher’s lecture, perhaps imitating note-taking, perhaps not even feigning that. Here in the classroom, students still see computer the same way they do at home. As a teacher, I see that as perspective that needs changed the most in the classroom. I’m still feeling out my own limits of technology as a teacher (I really don’t want to be “the PowerPoint guy”), but one thing is certain: Facebook will be blocked from the network when my class starts.

Technology

The copyright date for this semester's textbook is 2001. The chapter on technology and writing pedagogies refers to another "current" reference, dated 1998.
In my life, I've seen the hand-held calculator, once a novelty, go from over $100 to $10. It was my mother's "big" gift to my father one Christmas. We all played with the thing of course, discovering that when you typed in "0.7734" and turned it upside down, you had a pretty snazzy way of greeting someone. I was 20 or so when the fax machine came into being as the latest, greatest mechanism of communication at the bank where my mother worked.
Is it any wonder that technologies once considered novel and cutting edge, in just a few short years, either evolve into more streamlined systems or become archaic and useless?
The real novelty of technology is not found in the nuts and bolts, the mechanics and design of the artifact; more salient to this blog entry are the shifting approaches to our electronically-based communication, driven by that technology coupled with our very human need for contact.
In his chapter, "Technology and the Teaching of Writing," Charles Moran addresses the concerns of online communication -- specifically e-mail: "... e-mail as a medium evokes intimacy, up to and including virtual online sex. ... How do we (as teachers) maintain appropriate authority online?"
I do believe that things have changed significantly since Moran's piece. We have learned over a short time how to manage online behaviors -- ours as well as others. The novelty of an artifact tends to bring out the experimental kid in us. But a shift eventually occurs, possibly through a combination of familiarity and maturity (and perhaps some regret): the novelty of the artifact which once elicited less than stellar behavior then shifts to the novelty associated with critical thought and empathy. When we begin to get comfortable with online communication, we concern ourselves with the receiver of the message.
As learned pupils of the technological age, we have also become adept at managing the behaviors of others: through trial and error, we are able to frontload online communication criteria with user-savvy guidelines. We can manage expectations through our technical communications skills to demonstrate how best to convey one's thoughts efficiently. We can gain practical control over our lives, and emotional control over others by ignoring an e-mail. And we can limit the impact of another person's online behavior by simply deleting a message.
Perhaps the biggest technological challenge facing any teacher is encouraging students to distinguish among a growing number of resources, and to develop a keen sense of what is safe and what is reliable. And we should all be cautioned against assuming a child is tech-savvy, when nothing -- not even a computer -- can abbreviate the natural process of growing up.

OMG! Write w/o my Blckbrry?

Charles Moran “Technology and the Teaching of Writing”

I found this article interesting because technology is a prevalent issue in our society and therefore in our teaching. As technology becomes more integrated into our lives, we see the ramifications of this integration in our classrooms, such as students text messaging during class or using the Internet or composing a freewrite on their laptops. So, I figured for the purpose of this response I will move through Moran’s article and respond to what interested me.

First, Moran raises an interesting question. Should the government spend more on training, hiring, and paying teachers, or is it more prudent to spend money on adding technology (computers, networks, etc.) to schools. While the use and essentially the need of technology seems to be growing exponentially, I’m not sure it warrants the money that governments are spending to put it into schools. Teachers are what teach the students, right? So what message is being sent to students, parents, administrators, and teachers if money (large amounts) is spent on technology rather than paying and training the teachers who teach? It would seem that teachers (for the benefit of students) should be the priority.

Another question I found myself asking was, if technology is so powerful how do we (teachers) use it to help our students? While this question is a loaded question, I think it is one that most of us have. Exploring Moran’s article didn’t really answer this question to my satisfaction, but perhaps the class discussion will yield more. Oh, I digress.

Moran’s article discusses the possible differences between paper-based and computer-based writing. This highlights another question, how does technology affect the social aspect of writing? Moran states that technology can affect writing in a few ways depending on medium being used—email, online discussion, etc. But I wonder what technology does to students in a writing classroom, especially one held in a lab, in regards to socialization.

Another point I found interesting in Moran’s article was that teachers may need to be teachers of word processing—not teachers of computer literacy (207). While teachers may need to help students discover the nuances of word processing, I think that sometimes (whether it is our job or not) we are teaching students computer literacy. Many students, even with the prevalence and pervasiveness of technology nowadays, don’t have any idea what to do with technology and computers. I suppose that these ‘lost’ students could be because of the “wealth gap,” as Moran calls it. Richer students may have more experience with technology, while poorer students may not have very much experience with technology. How can teachers help close this gap? I’m not sure.

I know that I’m surprised when students admit they don’t have home access to a computer. Since technology is so available to most people, I sometimes forget that there are people who don’t have regular access to a computer or the Internet. In fact, I recently had a student ask me where to buy a computer because she had never bought one before. She also wanted to know how to connect her printer and the Internet once she got her computer. Now, I’m pretty savvy when it comes to technology, but the connection questions were not in my job description. And honestly, I didn’t think that I could help her being so far removed from the actual physical hookups and software she would be working with in her home. It’s not like I get paid to make house calls. In class, I try to get students write on paper as often as possible to take the technology pressure off students, but I do have students who bring their laptops to class.

Other parts that I thought were interesting were the discussion of gender and race, and the e-mail discussion of issues with language (spoken & written vs. electronic; informal) and intimacy. I could see race affecting technology adaptiveness more than gender, mostly because of the ‘wealth gap’ Moran refers to. As for email, I have noticed many of the things Moran has mentioned. Students often use a very informal tone in their emails. I don’t think they see anything inappropriate with the informal tone. I also notice that students sometimes use abbreviations usually found in IM chats in their emails or even in their typed papers. To me, this shows the fluidity of technology into different parts of our lives. Furthermore, I agree with Moran that technology does make teachers essentially more readily available to students. I often tell students that I don’t get to my email after 5PM nor do I get to check it on the weekends. Even with these parameters students still email me at all hours most days.

I think this subject warrants more research.

Technology and Teaching

I plan on posting a more complete essay on our blog after Tuesday's discussion, but after getting this week's reading I was chewing some thoughts. Look how far our technology has come since 1998...leaps and bounds. The questions and fears presented here, at times, seem so far in the past. The questions about this thing called Electronic Mail (e-mail) for instance. How would it contribute? How would it change the student/teacher relationship?

I especially liked the statistics concerning the availability of computers for students. A few students had their own PC, some could borrow from friends and still some students could try and gain access to the "very few public access terminals that the university provides." (218) Who would have thought that our system would become so reliant on computers? We have so many computers on this campus that there is even overflow into the hallways in the very building where we hold our class.

I don't think that anyone could have predicted that technology would progress as quickly as it has, and that it would have such a huge impact in such a short time period. Take for example our class blog. There has been some great writing done here this semester. It has in no way taken anything away from the need and importance of our class meetings, and if anything it has enhanced the whole process of our discussions.

It is difficult for me to remember what it was like before computers were so common. When I started as an undergrad in 1998 computers were already fairly common on campus. I was not any good with them, but I still could use Microsoft Word or whatever it was at the time to write papers, print them out and turn them in. No type writer or carbon paper for me. With time I came to understand them, and sometime in 1999 I bought my own. It just blows my mind how dependent we are on them now, and how different and more difficult life would be without them.

WAC / WTL / WTC

Before reading Susan McLeod's essay, I had only a very vague notion about what writing across the curriculum was all about. My simple understanding of this pedagogy was based on attending a couple of meetings with high school English teachers who were discussing how they might start working with teachers in other disciplines to address issues with student writing. The discussions made sense to me at the time. Who better to work with fellow teachers to address student writing problems than teachers who teach writing? However, as I read the WAC article, I learned how little I actually knew about this pedagogy.

Writing-to-Learn
That writing can be used as a tool to help students learn is an under-statement. Through writing, “students explore and assimilate new ideas, create links between the unfamiliar and the familiar, mull over possibilities, explain things to the self before explaining them to others” (152). While writing-to-learn assignments may take a variety of forms, the most common is journal writing. Journals provide a way for students to informally record what they’ve learned about a subject. McLeod explains that WAC write-to-learn assignments have two major characteristics. The assignments must be student centered and promote active learning and critical thinking. They must also be reflective in nature. It is the reflective nature of journals that provides the teacher insight to student learning. Writing-to-learn assignments are never graded. The role of the teacher in these assignments is that of coach or facilitator.

Writing-to-Communicate
Writing-to-communicate assignments focus on writing to an audience in order to inform. These assignments are crafted and polished pieces of work. They are reader based rather than writer based, and use the formal language of the discipline involved. Since different disciplines have their own writing conventions, the role of the teacher in these assignments is focused on “helping students learn the discourse of the discipline” (154). Writing-to-communicate is also referred to as writing-across-the disciplines (WID).

Conclusion
I’m not sure how the group of teachers I observed resolved their problem. My wishful thinking now is that had I stuck around a little longer, I possibly could have seen this pedagogy take shape in a high school setting. I’ve never taught K-12, but after reading McLeod’s article, I’m even more convinced that WAC is a good idea.

An Assignment Inspired by our Basic Writing Discussion

The basic writing pedagogy seems to be loosely held together by scholars who theorize why it is difficult for some people to write. Some think it is a lack of, or underuse, of cognitive abilities while others think it has more to do with a lack of attention to grammatical rules. After learning about a few more theories in our class meeting last Tuesday, I believe our discussion merely confirmed the fact that writing is a difficult, complicated process that requires students to perform multiple skills and achieve multiple goals at once.

While we discussed the qualities of a basic writer, I had a mini-epiphany about my AP composition students. Thus far, I have treated these students as the “cream of the crop” of high school writers rather than as basic writers in a college course. While this realization may seem minor, I believe it is a paradigmatic shift in the way I’ve thought about teaching writing to these students.

The next day, I was going to give back my students’ 1984 essay tests, in which the majority of them did not exactly excel on. Most of the students did not develop their ideas enough to sufficiently answer the question, some still veered off into plot-summary land where they feel comfortable reporting what happened in the novel rather than arguing a point/position, and only a handful of students organized their responses sufficiently. Rather than talk about what they needed to do next time on their tests (since that rarely seems to be effective in changing their writing habits), I decided to give them class time to go through their essay and make an outline that describes what the essay does (rather than what the essay says). For example:

Body Paragraph 3
1. stated relation to development of argument, made a claim of progression [Orwell develops this uncertainty and disorientation of the reader by interrupting the main narrative through the motif of dreams and memories]
2. stated CAUSE of cause-and-effect relationship of motif in relation to structure of plot and MADE DISTINCTION btw. dreams and memories[Orwell uses the memories to send the reader back in time to Winston’s childhood and pre-BB days, but his dreams are enigmatic when reading the novel for the first time. The reader must guess whether the dream is about the past, the future, a figment of Winston’s imagination, or part of his psyche]
3. stated EFFECT on reader[reader’s sense of time and reality is as uncertain as Winston’s]
4. provide evidence [discuss issue of the reality of Winston’s “false” memory]
5. stated EFFECT on plot structure [Motif yields a cyclical plot structure rather than a conventional linear structure]

After the students finished their outlines, they received an outline of my response to the same essay question. For my outline, students were instructed to take a pink highlighter to color in the steps taken that help keep the paper cohesive, unified, and organized. Then, students were to take a yellow highlighter to color in the steps taken that help prove the point of the paper (evidence). Next, students used a pen to draw a line from the ideas that “spill over” from one paragraph into the next. Most students were able to see a pattern develop as to where the organization sentences are in a paragraph and where the evidence typically lies. After they finish this process, they then examined their own essays, and again used the pink highlighter, yellow highlighter, and pen to perform the same exercise. Students were then asked to write a paragraph in which they compare and contrast the frequency and placement of “organizational sentences” and “evidence sentences” in their outlines and my outline. The last step of this process was to have students set three writing goals: one primary and two secondary. These writing goals will be used to assess their next writing assignment (which they handed in today).

As the students performed this exercise in class, I was delightfully surprised to not hear any groans. Students seemed to appreciate having the time to “figure out” what their current writing habits are so that they can keep the good habits and get rid of the weak habits. Students were instructed to be honest with themselves and report what they actually did rather than what they hoped they would’ve done. I told students if they found themselves rambling for three sentences, then they should include it in their outline, so they can see when in an essay they tend to ramble.

While I initially designed this exercise thinking of my students as basic writers who need some direct instruction in organizing and writing papers (in a non-five paragraph essay kind of way), I found that this exercise requires students to perform analysis, synthesis, evaluation, and meta-cognition, all tasks that are considered high-end critical-thinking skills. If students perform these tasks well, would this suggest that perhaps basic writing is not a cognitive problem, but rather something else?

I was torn about the idea of using their own writing goals as the start of their personal rubric for grading their writing. This method will probably make grading much more difficult and possibly more susceptible to parental criticism. However, I hope to find that by letting students set their own goals for writing, it will help them break down the complicated process of writing into smaller, more manageable goals and help them see themselves as writers.

I’ll let you guys know how it goes after I’m done grading this next set of essays!

Shaughnessy, you and your basic writing scholar friends twist my brain

“On the Academic Margins: Basic Writing Pedagogy” by Deborah Mutnick

Mutnick’s article on remedial courses/remedial writing instruction is interesting. She moves effectively through the start of basic writing instruction to the considerations instructors and administrators need to think about present day. While her article highlighted key players and their contributions, I felt left with more questions than answers from this survey and history.

First and foremost, in all the readings we’ve read for class, including this one, I don’t think that basic writing has ever been defined. As a teacher, I would like to know if my composition classroom falls into the basic writing category Mutnick discusses. The lack of a definition leaves teachers, who are new to this pedagogy, on the outside. While I’m sure this omission was not on purpose, I wonder if this is how basic writing students feel as they enter into academics. Additionally, I wished Mutnick had defined Open Admissions students. While I have an idea of who they are, a definition would have been helpful.

Mutnick sets up the essay’s journey through basic writing by first discussing Mina Shaughnessy, who is a leading scholar in this pedagogy. Shaughnessy’s points are thought provoking to consider. I found Shaughnessy’s comment on the decline of literacy of the affluent most interesting (Mutnick 184). I never considered that the decline of literacy in the upper echelons of society could cause literacy to become a privilege rather than an entitlement. Firstly, if literacy is to be an entitlement, why are there still large masses that are illiterate? Secondly, is literacy for the affluent still on the decline? In today’s society, literacy (as far as reading maybe even writing) may be viewed as declining, but literacy in other areas (media/visual—which is a newer definition of literacy) is probably on the rise. But is this (traditional literacy) decline only affecting the affluent? And how does the decline in the more affluent populations affect the “traditionally illiterate”? Does it? Furthermore, how does the rise in newer literacies affect literacy overall? Shaughnessy may have written her pieces years ago, but in a new light, new time; I believe they become relevant again.

Continuing with Shaughnessy, Mutnick discusses her article Errors and Expectations. This discussion also raised a few questions for me. Based on her (Shaughnessy) experience at CUNY, she developed a theory that “errors made by basic writers are a key to their development as writer” (Mutnick 186). My question is, does Shaughnessy mean that if the error was a certain type of error then the writing was at a certain point as a writer? Or diagnosing the error patterns would be the key for the writer to move past those errors? I think only further reading might help answer these questions. Another point from Shaughnessy was that,
Errors represent the writer’s attempt to systematize language, to approximate the standard written code in the absence of adequate instruction and practice. The teacher’s responsibility, therefore, is to understand the logic of the writer’s errors in order to untangle the syntactic and grammatical knots make in the effort to write correctly. (Mutnick 186)
While I understand the basic premise of this point, I am again left with a question. If a teacher looks at the errors, to understand the logic of the writer, is she looking at context? If the context is being addressed, is the teacher still looking for errors? Should she be? Perhaps I do not understand Shaughnessy’s point all that well.

As Mutnick progresses with her article, I found a few more points that raised questions for me. Why would Bartholomae and Petrosky assume that academia is “an ideologically neutral zone”? (Mutnick 191). Is this assumption based off a view of idealism and academics? Another question arises from Brodkey’s statement “To teach is to authorize the subjects of educational discourse” (qtd. in Mutnick 193). In this case, does Brodkey’s authorize mean prescribe or assign? If yes, does this limit a basic writer in any way, if a teacher is to follow this notion? Then again, perhaps the “authorization” empowers basic writers to explore educational discourse and transcend a student’s background.

Mutnick’s essay yielded plenty of food for thought. While I’m not sure if my questions can be answered via our class discussion, I’m sure that they will help me think about (further) composition and the pedagogies that shape it. [You know pedogogies just made me think of the work hoagies.]

Style vs Standardization

Deborah Mutnick explains, “In Errors and Expectation, anticipating composition’s use of methods of literary criticism to read student writing, Shaughnessy analyzes thousands of CUNY placement exams, categorized under the chapter heads ‘Handwriting and Punctuation,’ ‘Syntax,’ ‘Common Errors,’ ‘Spelling,’ and ‘Vocabulary.’  On the basis of her experience at CUNY, she believed that the kinds of errors made by basic writers are key to their development as writers."  Ever since I can remember, I’ve struggled with English grammar.  This is probably because attempting to write correctly, or attempting to write without mechanical errors, makes me nervous during the writing process.  In the past, I never considered the writing process as a thought process – a process that gives students the freedom to write whatever they please during the beginning stages.  On the contrary, the writing process never gave me a feeling of intellectual liberation; it was simply one of the most daunting experiences of my life.  Instead of thinking about what I was saying, I was obsessed with trivial things like, “Is this comma in the right place, should I be using passive voice here, or have I used the right preposition?”  Writing papers, expressing my views, and documenting my thoughts was all a terrible nuisance.  Focusing on all these trivial errors, of course, deterred the thought process, potential substance, and individual voice I could bring to my papers.  To this day, I don’t enjoy writing as much as I enjoy reading and discovering new ideas.

I adamantly believe that if I were taught writing as a method of expression in a particular language instead of as a prerequisite for standardization in the academic world, I would have enjoyed writing.  Instead of teaching the mechanics of “standard” English, why not teach students the nature of the language, demonstrating, for instance, that passive voice is an inversion of a verb and noun phrase in a sentence; that writers choose this method of syntax for particular purposes, which should not be characterized as correct or incorrect; and that writers make these choices to develop style.

When did some composition teachers eliminate free choice from the writing process?  I wonder if students are making fewer choices today and are doing more of what I religiously did: searching for ways to conform to a standard grammatical formula.  Mutnick references, “The key conclusion he [Hartwell] draws is that error is not a linguistic problem but a ‘problem of metacognition and metalinguistic awareness.’  In other words, written language functions as both statement and linguistic artifact, demanding of the reader an ‘awareness of language as language.”

 

Response to “On the Academic Magins: Basic Writing Pedagogy”

America, as the story goes, is the land of opportunity for all peoples, and in today’s high-skilled world, postsecondary education has become the go-to gateway for that truism. Of course, with opportunity comes the potential failure. Survival of the fittest. Not everyone is going to make the basketball team or live off their own business, and the higher we go in education, the more this fact becomes apparent. The real issue comes in when we ask ourselves if this proposition is on even ground for everyone in college. Because though every classmate deals with the same requirements, none of them came from equal financial, cultural, or educational backgrounds, and though ignored by some, I feel this is the issue that basic writing pedagogy takes on. During my relatively limited experience as a tutor and educator, finding a way to “catch up” basic writers have been my most disheartening experiences in the field. They often want to work so hard to be the academic writer, and I don’t know what issues to address first, when to step back from their writing process, and when to cut the strings entirely. Mina Shaughnessy, the god mother of this pedagogy, asks how much society is willing to pay to salvage itself. To this I say we must pay as much as it takes to even the playing field in money, but the real question to me comes when I wonder how far should we as teachers go to achieve this, especially when the difference cultural inflections come into writing.

Despite some cultural issues I had with the essay, I admired what this pedagogy stood for at its core: Treating the outsider as a writer with different experience and experiences, and not as a remedial case. Remedial is a dirty word in this essay, and I can’t blame them for that. The more I learn about these pedagogies, the more my find that writing is a psychological battle as much as anything else. By default, students in a basic writing classroom don’t consider themselves good writers. Rather than grammar drills, though, it’s more important to get them into the rhetorical aspects of writing, especially in filling the deficiencies of analysis and synthesis. They need to feel like they are part of the academic life, and they need to feel like they are an active participant of the Burkean parlor.

I’ve recently begun teaching Image Analysis in Scott Weeden’s W131 class, and I’ve been learning and re-learning the dialectical segment of this pedagogy a good bit. While I encouraged discussion of selected ads (that they got to choose from on my PowerPoint), I would find myself going into a directive-mode of speaking more times than I liked. I learned to back off more in the second class that day, but I still know I could have done more to involve the class in the work. A good example of this was when I told the class what we’d be doing for class the following week. A better way of going about it was to ask them what we’d being doing for Tuesday, and then clear up any holes they have. It mirrors the teacher’s responsibility to understand the writer’s grammar logic, but it’s the same for any part of the class. Get a discussion going, and then ask how it could relate to the assignment. Let the realization come to the students and their writing will come out stronger every time.

This pedagogy also addresses one of my biggest challenges with basic writing students: Revising papers written in the voice of a student’s dialect. During the Indiana Teachers of Writing Conference, I attended the Different Voices in the Writing Classroom workshop. There were some guiding principles for keeping language diversity in the classroom, such as accepting all languages as valuable and meaningful, and inviting students’ home languages into the classroom. In smaller groups we reviewed papers written by such students. The teacher who was working with him in the writing center said she didn’t know what to do with him. He was from Jamaica, but had spent some time in America as child. Unfortunately, he went back home just when he was adjusting to the American public school system, and didn’t come back until he was an adult. His essay, “My First Writing as a Child” was wonderful and tragic. If it was taken line-by-line and put into poetry, it would have worked itself into a rhythmic conversation. But it was an essay, and he was writing how he talked: Flighty yet descriptive, cheery yet unorganized. There were no lead-ins, no topic sentences, bad spelling, bad grammar, and no grounding of the audience. It was beautiful on its own merits, but as an academic essay it was almost beyond repair.

The instance calls back what Mary Epes discovered about basic writers: They are unable to perceive errors on the page. Unfortunately, there were no writing specialists available to help the Jamaican writer find the logic behind his errors, much less spend time understanding the academic format and voicing in papers. There were people in my group that said besides surface cleaning of grammar, the paper was fine, and we had no right to infringe on his manner of speaking. This bothered me greatly, as I saw writing effectively as writing that reached out to many people. This meant writing in the manner most people would understand and respect, which this paper had not reached yet, especially if the audience for this paper was for his professor. I also added in the group to what would occur when he wrote a cover letter or business letter to an employer. It was a discussion that gave me more questions than answers on balancing culture with academia’s expectations, and it didn’t give me much time to write in my notes. However, I did write one line that still sums up my feelings about the experience: Expressing yourself only goes so far.

However, the workshop also showed me that there were ways to involve students’ home lives into their writing while not letting go of assignment requirements. One of Scott Weeden’s students wrote a paper about questioning faith in God in the voice of his grandfather, then in the academic voice, and then an analysis of both. The first part is stream-of-speaking dialogue of the grandfather with punctuation and paragraphing, and I could really tell the writer was trying to channel his grandfather’s Southern mannerisms and sayings. In the analysis he wrote about how he asked his mother for help in describing what kind of person the grandfather was, as well as him realizing how much society judges us on our vocabulary. It strikes a fine compromise of culture/college language, and I’d like to incorporate it into my own classroom one day.

But on this issues of cultural linguistics in writing, I found myself siding with David Bartholomae more than anyone else. That may seem odd, since I mentioned earlier some people ignore political and cultural aspects of student writers and Bartholmae seems to throw in with that lot. But the difference is that Bartholomae and his colleagues isn’t trying to transport students from their cultures’ linguistic rules -- they’re just making them more comfortable as academic writers. I took umbrage with Tom Fox’s view that this was enforcing a neoconservative view of literacy; literacy is a craft as much as an art, and like any craft, one must conform to the rules and skills before they can stand out in their chosen field.

I readily admit I am part of the “dominant culture” of college -- a white, middle-class male, and that gives me privileges in life that I often don’t see. But what would happen if the college had a new dominant culture to it? What kind of curriculum and lessons of rhetoric would change? It’s hard to look into the future, but I would venture to say the core goals of the disciplines would be the same, but the methods may change, just as if another culture took over an automobile plant both in the assembly line and in management. In the end, everyone in the factory is still making cars.

Basic writers, if they come from a minority dialect, will probably have to change the way they write to reach a higher level of discourse. And that’s okay. I often told my tutees and students that there is a writing voice and a talking voice, and the former is often more formal because we’re not always sure who’s going to read it, but also because of the social expectations. I tell them how in my town, people would say “you’uns” (a variation of “ya’ll”), but I wouldn’t put that word in my paper, as it could exclude audiences not from my region. But basic writers can be academic people and still have their culture intact. Scott Weeden’s example essay and the other assignments in the essay show this again and again; our culture is our rhetorical resource and our special angle of vision, but for a cogent university dialogue, we must reach at least a middle ground in everyone’s academic lexicon.

I realize this view may come off as a little hardline, but this essay does make me want to consider the views and experiences of people “outside the margins” more than ever. I’d really like to read some comments from the people on this blog to widen my perspective on this issue of different cultures in basic writing, even if they are just personal stories. No matter what, I think we can all agree that we need to get rid of the stigma of the remedial class in the student’s eyes and turn it into a place of empowerment for everyone in attendance.

WAC and Writing Centers

Many interesting posts to go along with a lively presentation by Kim and Keva. Let's start with WAC or WID or WTL (writing to learn)--whatever acronym suits you. Jake's memory of not having much writing in other content areas and Davinia's memory of having lots of it are both accurate. Some K-12 schools and some universities have made writing in all areas a major goal and done lots of good professional development to help teachers enact writing as a way to learn and a way to communicate learning. You will find, however, that implementation is uneven. I think pre-service teacher education needs to emphasize writing in all disciplines, and the mentoring of new teachers should do the same. Every K-12 school and every university should have WRITING and READING across all areas as a key goal and should assess their progress in these areas continually. (That's not to say that speaking, performing, art, and other ways of learning should not also be emphasized. The sad fact is, most classes engage students in such a limited range of activities that it's a wonder anyone learns anything in school.)

The National Writing Project, by the way, mentioned in the WAC article, is indeed one of the best ways for teachers and schools to learn more about writing. That's because NWP emphasizes that teachers themselves must write (and be active learners), and NWP does professional development the right way: lots of hands-on learning, teachers teaching teachers, best practices demonstrated, not just presented, and making PD (and learning) FUN! Perhaps that's where some writing-across-the-curriculum efforts fall short. Writing in formulaic, limited ways that simply reinforces students' dislike of writing is about as bad as multiple-choice and true-false tests.

Now, to Writing Centers. Those who have worked in Writing Centers testify to their glory. (Thus you see Jackie, Keva, Dane, Davinia, and Paula speaking from first-hand experience, and noting the diversity of ways that writing centers and peer tutoring centers work, and even questioning some Writing Center principles as we move into new frontiers of learning and literacy.) I too worked in the Writing Center, in my case as a Ph.D. student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I loved that work! For one thing, it was better than an additional class as a TA--no papers to grade, no classes to prepare. But that's a side benefit. The work itself is so enriching. To work with students of all levels, from first-year to graduate school, and on writing in all disciplines and genres, taught me so much about the range of writing in a university. I had to learn how to ask good questions: what is the assignment? what is your purpose as a writer? who are your readers? where are you in the process? what are you struggling with now? Also, I learned to take good notes for a writer--perhaps outlining the writer's revision plan, or jotting down the writer's spoken brainstorming for new ideas or for a thesis. There is no way to be purely Socratic, to never offer a suggestion or give an "answer," but it is a fine line to dance on. "Hand me that draft, give me an hour, and I'll return a nicely organized, well-edited paper that should at least get you a B+." That's not how it works. No fix-it shop, indeed. But sometimes to help someone become a better writer, you have to demonstrate a move.

Some of you have read Mike Rose's Lives on the Boundary, in which he talks about a college professor who demonstrated for him well-constructed, thoughtful sentences. We can learn by imitation. So it's not good to do the writing for a student, but occasionally an example, a possibility, can be helpful. It might be wise at first to offer an example on a different topic than the student's paper. That way, you are truly teaching, not doing the work for the student.

So go for it, people! Talk to Tere Molinder Hogue about taking a Writing Center tutoring course and if it works well for you, you may end up working in our UWC. And keep learning about WAC so that you may be able to help faculty in all disciplines learn about the joys of writing as a way of learning. Seriously: there are good opportunities out there, K-university, for smart people who can teach writing, direct writing centers, and/or do professional development in the area of writing. And don't forget the National Writing Project along the way.

Writing Center Pedagogy: A Pragmatic Process Theory

Ah, Writing Center Pedagogy – this is where I’ve come to feel most at home this semester, owing to my participation in the Writing Center Seminar. As Hobson points out and Keva reiterated in her presentation, there are likely as many methods of enacting Writing Center Pedagogy as there are Writing Centers throughout the country, and it is rare for professors whose students make use of this resource to understand either its activities or purposes. They often believe it is a “fix-it shop,” a place where students can get help to “clean up” their grammar and mechanics, but this is in reality generally one of its lowest priorities. In fact, within its literature, these concerns are often defined as “lower-order concerns” or LOCs. What most Writing Centers endeavor to do is to help students with the organization and development of their ideas, termed “higher-order concerns” (HOCs).

James Moffett puts forth a process-oriented enactment of writing center pedagogy in the chapter entitled “Learning to Write by Writing” in his 1968 Teaching the Universe of Discourse where he also explicates the importance of students interacting with other students: one “may write off the comments of a teacher … but when his fellow human beings misread him, he has to accommodate the feedback” (195). His theory follows that of language acquisition, based on the same principles of feedback and trial-and-error that is our most natural mode of learning. “Ideally,” he says, a student’s “writing would be read and discussed by the audience, who would also be the coaches. Their response would be candid and specific. Adjustments in language, form, and content would come as the writer’s response to his audience’s response” (193).

But where does the teacher fit into this pedagogy? Doesn’t having students review each others’ papers invite incorrect revision? Like Keva said in her presentation, the teacher should guide students not to correct each others’ papers, but respond to them. Students are more than qualified to point out lack of clarity and frequently can identify problem areas but not know how to fix them. This is where the expert comes in. What is most valuable about this method is that students seek out the teacher’s knowledge out of need; it comes as a solicited response to a direct, personally motivated question. Moffett explains: “the teacher … helps students to interpret their initially vague responses and to translate them into the technical features of the paper that gives rise to them…. This amounts to sharpening response while keeping it paramount” (196). By aligning in-class activities with both natural feedback and trial-and-error processes, writing center pedagogy can be a highly pragmatic method to enact otherwise nebulous process theory.