The Future of Composition, and the Future of this Blog

So it’s that time of the semester when I am to pull out my crystal ball, reflect on our readings, and say what’s going to happen.  My crystal ball, I have discovered of late, is not particularly dependable, and never was.  My ability to see into the future is small (hell, sometimes my ability to see into the present is pretty bad, too), and just about the only time I really dependably fire up ol’ Hermione the Crystal Ball is when I’m talking about my kids (all parents, I think, have a wee bit of the soothsayer in them, but it’s less crystal ball oriented than it is just common sense and life lessons, but I digress).  What’s to come in comp studies?

Well, there will be a massive revolt when students discover that there will never be a truly dependable Rosie the Robot maid to write their papers for them.  This revolt will be followed by a similarly disinfranchised set who are still waiting for the flying cars and jet packs.

Students will continue to plagiarise, and teachers will continue to get upset and rend their garments over said plagiarization; however, some inroads will be made, slowly, in the same vein as TurnItIn.com, but the compulsion to cheat and take the easy way will be around as long as we humans tread the earth.

Composition theorists will continue to argue and theorize about how and why we write, and much like the discussions about whether or not we landed on the moon, or if there was a second shooter in Dallas, the discussion will never really be solved to everyone’s satisfaction.  After all, what we are debating when we take up the discussion of how we write is the creative impulse (the same impulse that caused God to create the Earth, if you believe that sort of thing) and somehow, I just don’t really see that getting resolved in a fundamentally satisfying way.

I am better able now to at least understand why I teach a certain way, which to me is very important – I’m a big believer in trying to answer the “Why?” question, which has not always been successful, but that’s just a part of my genetic makeup, I think.

This prompt makes me think of my trip to wash my car recently.  I had the grave misfortune to park my little beater of a Toyota under a tree inhabited by some very incontinent birds last week, and when I returned to it after class, it was quite a mess.  So I decided to swing through the car wash as I headed to the library this weekend.  I pulled in to the car wash, handed the  dude my $5 (which essentially was enough to get me a drive past the car wash with the hopes that some of the damp overspray would hit my car) and drove my poor little beshitted car onto the tracks of the car wash.

The car was pulled along through the car wash on the tracks of the conveyor belt, and I didn’t have to steer, didn’t have to hit the brakes or anything. I just had to sit and watch the foam build up on my windshield (and, unfortunately, bubble through the floor board in the passenger side, which was a new occurrance for me) and let the car wash do its thing.

I think that composition studies is going to continue right along, picking up shiny bits of new technology on the way, sometimes with a surprise or two (sort of like my surprise when the floor of my car burped up soap suds), and we are going to have to hang on and try to keep up.  Eventually, when we all get old enough to retire (and for some of us that time is coming sooner than others), we are going to look back at how things have changed in our discipline, and how other things have stayed the same, and be surprised.  Or not be surprised, because we saw it all coming.  Either way, we are eventually bound to come out the other end, and students will still be writing argumentative essays, and comp theorists will probably still be writing journal articles about who and what comp studies is and isn’t.

Perhaps my Blog-o-Meter is stuck on Cynical, or maybe it’s some of my residual foul mood, but ultimately, even with all the technology and cool stuff that is sure to come down the pike that will change various ways we teach, and various ways students learn, there are still going to be some basic similarities, no matter what.

Students are still going to ask to see what an A paper looks like, and will still try to talk their way from an A- to an A, and they will continue to moan and groan at the idea of researching a paper.  And we will still complain about grading (or at least I will, well into the dark and cloudy future), and we will fuss about students plagiarising, and being late, or cutting class too much…some things don’t ever change.

Oh, and what about the future of this blog?  I won’t delete it, but I’m not promising that I will keep updating it.  I might, but then again, the future is a little murky.

Let’s ask the Magic 8 Ball, shall we?

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In Which I am a Bit Addled.*

I knew I would have to write about this article as soon as I saw the words “Collecting Money Toilet” in the text.  Let me just say that there are a LOT of pictures of Americans posing beside pay toilets in foreign countries out there on the internet…second only to posing next to the Leaning Tower of Pisa as if holding it up is the American clutching his/her crotch beside a public pay toilet in a foreign land.

It seems to me that essentially, Lu’s argument in the article “An Essay on the Work of Composition:  Composing English against the Order of Fast Capitalism” boils down to understanding.  I really enjoyed this article, and am very much looking forward to our discussion in class on Monday.

Attention to the interplay between and across one’s language expertise, affiliation, and inheritance, along with attention to individual writers’ understandings of different aspects of their selves and lives, can help us interpret and depict one another’s discursive resources (and by extension, language needs) in terms of not only the “actual” (lived experiences) but also the “possible” (possibilities and prospects) and the “imagined” (desire, hope aspiration), so that we may represent one another’s actions as grounded in the realities of our lives but never predetermined by them. (36)

While the tools at my disposal here at TCU as a graduate instructor are greater than I have encountered in other places, I am frustrated that in my dealings with international students, I seem to have only two:  the mallet and the hoop.  The mallet is what I am expected to use in banging “how to write correctly” into the heads of my students and the hoop is what I hold and expect the students to jump through to get out of my class. It seems that so many of my international students see Intro to Comp as a hoop (flaming or otherwise) they have to jump through in order to get through school – and I’m sure that non-international students see it that way as well.  My exposure to how to successfully teach international students how to write has been limited to my discussions with Gabby (and I feel damn lucky to have those, because really, where in Gabby’s job description does it say, “Educate Laura on how to teach folks not from around here”??).  As awesome as her help has been, I still feel that this is an area of my teaching that is woefully lacking.

Thus, I have no idea about what my international students’ “actual,” “possible,” or “imagined” discursive resources are – and I really don’t know how to go about finding out.  This bothers me – a LOT.

We have been trained to demarcate the world into Developed, Developing, Underdeveloped, Undeveloped pockets, cultures, and peoples and to see jiaos between Us and Them strictly in terms of the Aid We grant to the Development (of Knowledge, Technology, the Market Economy, Democracy) of others rather than also how Our Aid helps stunt Their life opportunities in the name of Development. (46)

This really strikes a chord for me – and she goes on to write about how we as a culture want the “quick fixes” for problems, another problem that drives me nuts.  So many of my students want to know “what do I do to this paper to make it an A paper?” and I want to just shake them and say, “What about the excitement of discovery through writing?  What about the paper that helps you see the world in a different way as you write it?  What about the paper that simply cannot, no matter what, become an A paper?”  This response, however, would likely get me trotted off campus very rapidly, and my SPOTS would be horrible, I’m quite sure.

Sometimes it feels as if I am supposed to fold my students up to fit into a particular envelope, or to become a specific piece of origami artwork (perhaps an origami of a McDonald’s sign).  Whether the student is international or not, I sometimes feel that they (students, parents of the students, public in general) expect me as Composition Teacher to provide students with a set formula for How To Do This Writing Thing Right.  But what’s right?  And who is the final arbiter of Right?

Interconnectedness is something that is massively important to the world today, and through Lu’s article, I’m now thinking about interconnectedness as it relates to language…which is a new idea for me.

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*Wondering why I’m addled, and why the picture of Rocky and Bullwinkle?  It’s because I discovered one of the two characters in the picture above in my bathroom last night as I got ready to retire.  Discovering an outdoor animal in one’s indoor space is a bit discombobulating, and I fear my work has suffered for it today.  Fortunately, the critter paddling about in my toilet wasn’t armed and dangerous like these guys:

Teaching Philosophy

I entered the classroom that day more nervous than usual. This was my first semester teaching first year composition, my first semester at Texas Christian University, my first semester as a doctoral student. It was a semester chock-full of firsts, actually. I spent the semester in a perpetual nervous sweat, but this class period more so than normal because I was being observed for practicum. Somehow I had escaped the performance of this helpful evaluative exercise at either of the two universities where I previously taught. My lesson plan for the day included discussion of the research needed for the upcoming mini-ethnography essay the students would be writing, and an in-class activity I was borrowing from Dr. Hogg. In the activity, I asked the students to place on their desks three items they had with them which they felt were representative of who they were as individuals. They were then to walk around the circle of desks and choose one grouping of items and write a paragraph on the person represented by those items. They were to come to some conclusions about that person based on the items and on that person’s statements and behavior in class. The point of the exercise was that, first and foremost, we cannot make definitive judgments about others based on minimal information. I also wanted to familiarize the students with the concepts of observation and note taking while “in the field.”

As expected, many students placed on their desks things like phones, day planners, and various textbooks. The exercise resulted in an interesting, exciting, and fun discussion between the students as they discussed their guesses (some correct, some wildly wrong) about each other based on the artifacts displayed. I, too, had written a paragraph or two about one of the students, and used it to highlight some of the points I hoped the exercise would bring out. By doing this, I was able to model the positive behavior I hoped my students would engage in: note taking and careful composition. I was also able to model some of the behavior I wanted them to avoid: I jumped to wild conclusions, engaged in massive hyperbole, and made sweeping generalizations. Apparently the exercise was helpful to them, because the papers I received were fairly free from that type of writing.

This was a fun exercise for us to do, partly because it wasn’t fifty minutes of me lecturing to them while they waited patiently for me to run out of steam or for the ending of the class period to mercifully silence me. I still got the point across that I wished to make without lecturing, and did so in a way that helped the concepts stay with them. My own participation in the activity, aside from allowing me to insert the specific points I wished to get across, helped them to also see me as something other than just a voice of authority and person of power in the classroom, but also as someone actively working alongside with them in their production of knowledge. It is this role that I embrace in my teaching, and one that I struggle to embody with each teaching opportunity.

I believe that a good, successful teacher makes herself obsolete, and it has always been my desire that students would leave my class no longer needing me because they now have the tools they need. I intend that students in my classes learn to think critically, which is less an exercise in thinking and more an exercise in questioning. I want to foster in my students a willingness to question, an ability to engage in habitual doubt versus blind willingness to believe anything they are told. While the above exercise is one which does more to highlight the dangers intrinsic in failing to think critically, I also strive to introduce activities and assignments in class that encourage the students to stretch their questioning abilities. We frequently play Peter Elbow’s “Believing and Doubting Game,” and during our class discussions as well as in their writing I try to coax explanations from them that require serious, reflective thought on their part.

In light of the constantly changing diversity within classrooms, I am a firm believer in the need for instructors to make their classrooms as safe a space as possible. Especially during their first year, students are learning to “try on” new ideas (new for them, anyway), and I strive to create a classroom in which they are comfortable thinking, writing, and talking about new concepts. In order to do this well, of course, the students (and I) must do some reflection on our readings, on our writings, on our conversations. This reflection is important for developing the ability to question and think critically, as well as for the development of better writing. If students do not learn how to reconsider things that they have written, they will have great difficulties in learning how to reconsider faulty ideas they have previously held as well. As I continue to develop my own syllabi throughout the coming semesters, I will include authors who are new to the students and who challenge the students to re-see and re-think their own closely held beliefs.

I want my students to see me as their helper and guide rather than the final authority figure in the classroom who doles out grades by some arbitrary system over which they have no control. It’s a very careful tightrope act that we teachers perform as we both try to share power with our students in an attempt to empower them, while also enforcing necessary rules and, yes, doling out grades. As I work with students on their papers, or their research for their papers, or on the revising and editing of their papers, I provide options for them to try out – various methods of invention, or ways to re-see their papers to make revision less painful – and I make clear to them that not all of these are going to be successful or helpful, but that as they become aware of what works for them, they can become more mindful of these strategies and work to strengthen them.

Just as I see my vita as something I must continually update, I also see my teaching philosophy as something constantly in a state of revision – both the physical document itself as well as the more amorphous concept itself. Each day that I enter the classroom, I anticipate, hope, and welcome challenges from students that will cause me to pause and reflect on the way I do things as a teacher. I tell my students that there are no finished papers, but only papers that are due, and I apply this same concept to my teaching philosophy. I see my philosophy as something I carry with me and revise constantly, both after great reflective thought as well as immediately and on the fly. My philosophy changes from day to day, and from class to class, but the basics remain the same – I want my students to learn not only good writing skills, but that writing is not just a process which results in a nicely formatted MLA paper. It’s also a process by which we come to a clearer understanding of our own beliefs, or a messy and protracted process which helps us to move past previously held beliefs, or a process by which we come to a decision. Writing is much more than just the papers we turn out – it’s an exploratory act, an act of discovery and wonder.

Of Hermeneutics and Tail-Consuming Snakes

Well, this week’s reading was sure a spring break pleaser!  Raul Sanchez’ The Function of Theory in Composition Studies is sure to spark some really interesting conversation in our class on Monday, which in my opinion we should dedicate to the poor souls acknowledged in Sanchez’ introduction:  Sid Dobrin, Julie Drew, and Joe Hardin “who cheerfully endure the rambling and often intemperate e-mails in which I try to work through pesky theoretical problems and who, with equal cheer, let me know when I am writing nonsense.”  I’m surprised that none of those three folks treated Sanchez’ emails as if they were  politely requesting some assistance in obtaining the $51 million owed by the Nigerian government.

I think that I am genetically predisposed to get my academic undies in a bunch whenever I start reading texts that are so dense and choc-full of terminology and concepts requiring the reader to break out various reference books/websites in order to successfully navigate a paragraph.  After having to pause eight times in as many pages to consult the dictionary, the encyclopedia, and my trusty Contemporary Composition Studies:  A Guide to Theorists and Terms, I began to become weary, and I was only just beginning!  This did not bode well for Dr. Sanchez’ future as to my treatment of him in my blog post.

I am frustrated – very, very frustrated – with Sanchez’ treatment of his topic.  I agree with Sharon’s posting, especially with regard to the way he closed his text (I hesitate to say that he finished it).  It was almost as if, having set the snake to eating its own tail in the first chapters, the snake had suddenly reached its own teeth and found them to be hermenutical in nature, thus, “an obstacle” to the process of tail consumption.

I am troubled by much of what Sanchez has postulated; however, there are some aspects I want to discuss that I find to be helpful.  He calls for us to rethink even the most basic of our closely held ideas:

describing writing in the way I am proposing will require composition theory to commit itself to textuality more thoroughly than it has in the recent past.  It will require us to relentlessly and scrupulously bracket all ideas, to place in quotation marks (or italics) every deeply seated and casually assumed concept, even those around which composition studies has formed its intellectual and professional identity, such as rhetoric and  the subject….

I think it is always important and worthwhile to return to older (or newer, even) ideas and revisit our beliefs – what do we believe?  Why do we believe it?  What do we base those beliefs on?  And do those beliefs remain solid in light of new ideas and concepts?  Few would argue this point, I believe.

So I’m with our author on this point, but after reflecting on it a bit, I am forced to wonder then if he’s not suggesting that we do the very thing we determined in class that so many theorists do entirely too much of:  that sort of navel-gazing comp theory consisting of “Who are we?  Why are we here?”  So even in my agreement with Sanchez, I am forced to take a little of my own writing agency and question.

As to my invocation of the Tail Consuming Snake Muse, I point to this passage:

Derrida claims that grammatology cannot be a ‘positive science,’ that it has no proper object of study precisely because the subject-object conceptual system is in question….But precisely because of grammatology, composition theory can recognize and elaborate the writtenness of the empiricist impulse in order to rearticulate empiricism itself as a form of writing. (8)

My brain immediately after reading this passage.

Sanchez continues:

By redefining concepts as discursive tactics within a general framework of writing, composition theory can move closer toward explaining what writing is and how writing works in the world.

Okay, Dr. S.  I’m with you here.  It’s important to apply reasoning to most anything, I think, and while I think that we have a plenty of explanations of what writing is and how it functions, I think we can agree on this statement generally.

Writing happens, and composition resesarchers can watch it happen and make claims about writing as a result.

Yes, and these claims can then hopefully go towards creating more productive and successful methods for teaching writing in the classroom, right?  Or not?  What is the purpose for these claims you are suggesting can be made?

To do so with the disposition for which this book argues is to map the ways in which, for example, an act of writing can be considered a contingent and impossible attempt to fix meaning.

I don’t like the use of the word “impossible” here.  Maybe “fluid” or something similar?  Because the meaning I might attach to something I have written 10 years ago is going to change, I think, as I change, and my circumstances change.  But one thing that can’t change is the historical moment in which something is written; however, our later understanding of that moment can indeed morph into something altogether different.  Be that as it may, I made meaning with my decades-old writing, and I take some umbrage at the suggestion that I did not.  I see meaning as being similar to the concept of a copyright on a writing:  the meaning comes into being as I create the piece of writing, and that meaning may not be crystal clear to begin with, but through my writing, there is meaning, and it attaches to the text without regard to the attempted negation by others.

It is to show how acts of writing try to present presence, the supposed existence of which is known only through prior acts of writing.

So our current acts of writing – this blog, for instance, is present only because of my prior attempts at writing?

So do we sum this concept up as “practice makes perfect?”

Journal Review: Kairos

A bit of “front matter,” as the saying goes: “kairos” means, according to those in the know, “the right or opportune time.”  Also, I chose to write about the journal Kairos because I was recently involved (along with a bunch of other folks from the English department) in writing a review of a DVD for Kairos, which was published in January.  It was a very painless process, and I can definitely suggest and recommend Kairos as a great journal to submit your scholarly works.

Mission:

Kairos focuses on new media, and the ways we compose for and with it.  They promote “work that enacts its scholarly argument through rhetorical and innovative uses of new media.” They publish primarily “web texts,” or texts written specifically and especially for publication on the web.  The “About” page reflects this mission, in that there are quite a few hyperlinks throughout the page, with links that take the reader to an in-depth description of the referreed process utilized when accepting or declining submissions to a lengthy discussion of Kairos’ “fair use” and statement of copyright page.  Kairos is published in August and January.   Special issues are published in May. They state that their acceptance rate for published articles is roughly 10%.

Topics of Interest

Kairos’ topics of interest are related to technology as it relates to the discipline of English: “(e.g., rhetoric, composition, technical and professional communication, education, creative writing, language and literature).” They also address “media studies, informatics, arts technology, and others.”   Also published are “teaching-with-technology narratives, reviews of print and digital media, extended interviews with leading scholars, interactive exchanges, “letters” to the editors, and news and announcements of interest.”

The sections of Kairos are divided as follows:  Topoi, Praxis, PraxisWiki, Inventio, Interviews, Reviews, and Disputato.

Editorial Review Board

The editorial review board has 41 members, and includes Victor J. Vitanza from Clemson University, who is the Director of the interdisciplinary-transdisciplinary Ph.D. program in Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design.

Also on the board is Anne Wysocki from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Wysocki who wrote the textbook I am planning to use for 20803 in the fall:  compose/design/advocate: a rhetoric for integrating the written, visual, and oral.

Submission Policies:

Kairos is very specific in that they do not want the traditional essay written on Microsoft Word.  They do, however, want submissions that engage the use of new and exciting media:  they ask for “innovative web design, creative formatting techniques, and challenges to the status quo. Submissions should integrate the use of the digital medium as part of their focus—for example, effectively exploiting the possibilities of non-linear texts, creative interfaces, and multimedia approaches. We encourage the use of digital audio and video work.” There is no specific formatting requirement, but instead they provide a number of accepted articles which are representative of the sort of work they are looking for in a publishable essay.  I’m particularly fond of this one.

Deafened to their Demands:  An Ethnographic Study of Accomodation by Michael J. Salvo of Northeastern University is one such “non-linear text.”  Salvo’s essay addresses the difficulties the author witnessed at a university when the needs of a population of students went unmet.  Salvo writes that both the activists on the outside of the institution and the reformers on the inside were unable create the reform needed to meet the legally mandated needs of the school’s population of deaf students.  Salvo’s essay is structured in such a way that the reader can easily jump from topic to topic by clicking on hypertext situated beneath various terms, thus allowing the reader to read the essay in any order he or she wishes.

Textural Textuality:  a personal exploration of critical race theory, by Joyce Walker, is an interactive essay about critical race theory.  The first screen shows a bus arriving, and above it are the words, “Wait for the bus.”  As the bus “arrives,” the text arrives beneath it, with the final word (“through”) set off in red.  There are various links throughout the essay, along with pictures, text, and other interactive multimedia.  Early into the experience, there is a description of the various interactive possibilities available to the reader.  Each new page offers new opportunities, and no two reading experiences are the same…much as I would anticipate that no two personal explorations of critical race theory are the same, either.

Kairos is a great journal to explore – I don’t say read, because the essays themselves are not necessarily all to be read.  There are film clips, cartoons, and textually based essays presented in decidedly non-textually based ways.  There are blogs, commenting capabilities, wikis…this is a very entertaining journal.  I encourage my classmates to visit the website and explore – they might have some great ideas as a result.

2/28 Freestyle entry: In which I frantically freestyle about our feminist readings for the week!

(As an added bonus…here, have some alliteration with your blog post title!)

First, I wanted to post a video that I happened to watch right after we had our discussion in class (albeit a wee bit off topic) about the technical changes coming (and that are here) regarding books.  This is Jon Stewart interviewing Jeff Bezos, from Amazon.com.  The interview was highly entertaining and very informative, and I learned a number of things:  first, that  Jeff Bezos’ laugh is awesome, and also, that said laugh is truly a full body laugh (he nearly whacks his forehead on the desk during the interview a number of times).  Aside from the entertainment factor, it’s terribly interesting to see that there actually is a market for this sort of thing – the Kindle 2 sells for an incredible amount of money (to my mind), and I can see it having a certain amount of a market, but I’m not going to dash out an buy one tomorrow.

Okay!  Blog entry begins now!

I really enjoyed this week’s readings, and I think we are going to have a great conversation during our next class.  I think the reading I resisted the most was Maxine Hairston’s article – I found myself constantly flipping back to the first page of it, thinking, “WHO wrote this?” and then “WHAT year was this published?”

Maybe I’m one of those ideologues she’s not so fond of, maybe that’s my problem with her article.  I think that a big part of college is coming face-to-face with ideas, concepts, people, and situations we have never entertained before, and that part of an instructor’s job is to teach students not to shut themselves off from those things, but instead to treat those opportunities as learning possibilities, opportunities to expand the mind.

When she said that students are not willing to reveal their religious beliefs in the classroom, I nearly fell over.  If I had a dime for every time a student whipped out the scripture to lecture me at TWU and UNT, I would be a wealthy woman.  It got to the point where I had to specify in my syllabus that the textbook used in class was the text I expected them to cite in their papers – nothing else.  The students I have encountered in my time teaching have absolutely no problem stating that they are Christians, and most of them have a very skewed idea about religion in the United States and the rest of the world.

Ultimately, I think that this article has not held up well to the test of time – it was published in 1992, and all I could think as I read it was, “Boy, I wonder what the Maxine Hairston of 1992 would make of the current state of affairs?”

But as to the core, basic argument she is making, I’m thinking that she’s correct.  I might want to encourage my students to be a bit more adventurous in their news sources (or to actually be interested in the news) and suggest that they watch something other than Fox News, or read a paper other than the local one.  But I’m never, ever going to demand that students subscribe to my own personal beliefs.  If asked, though, by a student why I think something, or believe something, I will do my best to explain it.

I really enjoyed “Feminism in Composition:  Inclusion, Metonymy, and Disruption” by Joy Ritchie and Kathleen Boardman.  I am struggling, however, with their discussion of metonymy, and I hope we manage to get to that during class.  I went to the trusty dictionary.com Web site, where I was told that metonymy is “a figure of speech in which one word or phrase is substituted for another with which it is closely associated, as in the use of Washington for the United States government or of the sword for military power.”  I’m not sure I understand this aspect of their essay – maybe I need to revisit the essay and re-read it, but I was less than satisfied with this thread of their discussion.

I’m curious also about this quote:  “Our own interest in diversity and multiplicity makes us curious about the possible uses of ‘excess’ as a trope for feminists in composition of the present and future” (606).  I’m struggling to see where I have used “excess” in my own classroom, or even how that could pertain to a feminist pedagogy.  Or is excess merely being used here as another way to say (as George W. Bush did) that we need to “make the pie higher”?

Finally, in a flourish of freestyling (albeit slightly manic and random as it is), I’m jumping over to “The Arts of Complicity:  Pragmatism and the Culture of Schooling” by Richard E. Miller.  He asks “why is it that this image of the teacher as liberator of the oppressed, upon which Freire’s pedagogy relies so heavily, has had such a perduring appeal? Or to put this another way, working in the spirit of Freire’s own pedagogical practice, what can we learn by problematiziing our community’s most cherished self-representations?  If we aren’t in the business of liberation, uplift, and movement, however slow, towards a better social world, what is it we’re doing in our classrooms?” (657).   It seems that if we put Miller with Hairston, we’re going to get some sort of meltdown – is Miller saying we should do more of the sort of thing Hairston is saying absolutely not to?  I think what Miller is asking is ultimately a very important question, and one that I am very interested in pursuing.

Apologies for the scattered post – however, when one freestyles, one must expect a certain amount of scatter, I think.

Week 7: In which I am confused as to our prompt, and ultimately choose to buckle to class consensus, in a blatant embrace of Greg Myers’ concept of ideology and Marxist reality within the composition classroom.

For some reason, I thought that this week’s prompt and next week’s prompt were to be flipflopped on the syllabus, and that this week would be a freestyle week. When I went to the blogs of my classmates, I found a couple of things to be both reassured and confused about: first, that I am not the last person posting this week (go me!) and secondly, that I’m likely wrong about the prompt, because my esteemed colleagues are addressing the prompt rather than cartwheeling and somersaulting willy-nilly into the land of the Free Style Blog Response.  Thus, this week’s title.

Blogging is not a totally new situation for me, because I have had a number of blogs in the past (the first one being brilliantly – or so I thought at the time – entitled, “Is There a Blogger in the House?”). ITABITH never fell victim to that most dread and deadly wasting disease of the personal blog: the “I have nothing to write, here are some song lyrics instead” virus. I mostly wrote for my own entertainment, and just for fun (and to rant on the not so rare occasion that I was angered or disgusted by the previous presidential administration). My blog died the unfortunate death of non-anonymity when it was discovered by my ex-husband. I took it out back and shot it, similar to the ending of Old Yeller, and swore never to blog non-anonymously again.

With a personal blog, I used mostly a conversational tone as I would with my friends, and I generally tend to do that now, rather than to write in the more formal academic discourse I would use in a paper, for instance. I realize that a professional blog requires many different rhetorical decisions on my part, not the least of which being that a professional blog should probably have a real photo of me, if a photo is to be used, rather than that of a cartoon rat voiced by Patton Oswalt in a Disney film.

However, in this situation, with me occupying the spot of Blogger more so than Graduate Student Writer, I have gone with the slightly less formal tone, because that’s the tone I carry into the classroom, and I consider this blog an extension of the classroom and the discussions we have there. As far as an element of a compositional theory that has been helpful to me in this experience, I have to say that I am finding Kenneth A. Bruffee’s discussion of thought, conversation, and writing to be very interesting. Maybe not as helpful as our readings about audience (and our subsequent discussions), but certainly (a) thought provoking and (b) a reading for this week.

Thinking about the audience for this blog, and the Ede and Lunsford chapter we read last week, helps me in my writing because I think about my classmates and what we will discuss in class and how I can hopefully further that discussion . . . and who is bringing the food this week.  I try to think less about Dr. Kill as the audience for this blog, because I find that that inhibits my voice (nothing personal, Dr. K.), the voice that I am attempting to keep true and honest to me as a student conversing with fellow students, rather than as student, trying desperately to write an academic sounding paper and sounding pedantic and obnoxious.

But this thinking is really a dialogue I’m having with myself, according to Bruffee’s article, and my writing about it is somewhat removed from how I really think about it – or maybe it’s even closer to the true thought processes running through my head, I’m not sure. The thinking I do occurs as a conversation in my head, which is a form of a filter of sorts, but then it goes back through another filter, moving that dialogue closer to the socially acceptable and slightly more complex realm of the written word. This is interesting, yet really, really problematic to me – first and foremost because I’m not convinced that this is really what’s going on. I know I don’t think in full sentences – sometimes I think in sentences that more resemble sentences as constructed by a dyslexic crack addict functioning on no sleep and a diet of Krispy Kremes and black coffee. I endeavor not to speak this way, although I wonder sometimes, since I do get such blank looks from my students on occasion.

But the point of Bruffee’s article is not so much how we think and why we think that way (although it is important to his point), but instead deals more with the concept of authority in the classroom, and rethinking the concept of learning, seeing it more as a social process than an individual exercise. It involves allowing the students to take their own authority, and be active in the process of creating knowledge: “But if we think of learning as a social process, the process of socially justifying belief, then to teach expository writing seems to involve something else entirely. It involves demonstrating to students that they know something only when they can explain it in writing to the satisfaction of the community of their knowledgeable peers” (434).

What does that have to do with how I go about writing my blog? I see the exercise of blog writing in the classroom as an opportunity of sorts for the student to engage in this sort of activity – by offering the blog as a new way to create student responses, it opens up the opportunity for students to then bring a bit more of their own knowledge/experience/personal fairy dust to the exercise, and does a bit of the important undermining that Bruffee writes about. Who says it’s not acceptable to write a bit less formally in this particular form of academic discourse? It’s a blog, isn’t it? So I can alter my standpoint of Stuffy and Pretentious Graduate Student to that of Grad Student Who Blogs, to her audience who also blogs, and is not in the least stuffy nor pretentious, but instead pretty cool and includes those who blog about pie.

Audience: in which I am overwhelmed.

I totally took the title to this posting from Angie’s blog last week, because yes, I am very, very overwhelmed.  Thinking about audience has a tendency to do that to me.

As I write this, I think about the audience for whom I am writing (Dr. Kill, my classmates, others on the internet who might have so much free time that they would read this without being required to do so for grading purposes, etc.).  Any time I think or do or behave as “student,” I try very hard to also connect it to my identity as “instructor.”  How can I pass on to my students the importance behind audience?  I understand how easy it is to simply think about audience in terms of instructor/grader/person with power, but I also know that I am not doing a good job if I don’t help my students to think about their audience as something other than just me.

Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford’s article, “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked,” is both helpful to my thinking about this topic, and simultaneously a hindrance to it (I say hindrance because there’s just so much here to think about, and it’s all so important, and trying to think about it all, at one time, makes my brain run in circles yelling). 

Ede and Lunsford give us two major concepts:  audience invoked and audience addressed.  Audience invoked is aimed more at the thinking of the audience as an imaginary construct:  “Those who envision audience as invoked stress that the audience of a written discourse is a construction of the writer, a ‘created fiction.’ They do not, of course, deny the physical reality of readers, but they argue that writers simply cannot know this reality in the way that speakers can” (82-83).

Audience addressed is a concept which endows the audience with an equal (if not greater) amount of power to the writer:  “Those who envision audience as addressed emphasize the concrete reality of the writer’s audience; they also share the assumption that knowledge of this audience’s attitudes, beliefs, and expectations is not only possible (via observation and analysis) but essential.  Questions concerning the degree to which this audience is ‘real’ or imagined, and the ways it differs from the speaker’s audience, are generally either ignored or subordinated to a sense of the audience’s powerfulness” (78).  In my own writing, I think of audience as concrete, and as having their own bag of issues that they bring to the reading of whatever I write – they might have beliefs that I share or reject, they might have expectations of the writing I am doing which are true or untrue, but they have those characteristics in some form.  It seems short sighted to ignore the very people for whom you are writing, and I think that really what happens more often than not (when there are problems in writing) is that the audience is not so much ignored as it is misunderstood.

I say all that to then also include another quote from Lunsford and Ede, which I think is ultimately more important than either of their definitions regarding audience:  “One of the factors that makes writing so difficult, as we know, is that we have no recipes:  each rhetorical situation is unique and thus requires the writer, catalyzed an guided by a strong sense of purpose, to reanalyze and reinvent solutions” (87).  Audience is always fluid – the concept is fluid, the actuality of it is fluid . . . but it seems that students especially see audience as something concrete and carved in stone.  Our job is less to teach them a good definition of audience, but instead to teach them how to bend and flex with the different embodiments of “audience” and think about it from a more fluid manner.  As Amy wrote, part of our jobs (as I see it, and as she sees it, I think) is to teach students critical thinking skills – the habit of questioning.  That habit needs to apply to audience as well – audience cannot remain static, just as writers can’t.  With each purpose that we bring to our writing, we have to understand our audience is going to be different.

What seems…

…really new about the process movement? and where does it seem to return to, borrow from, and/or adapt from composition theories of the past?

I suppose that if I were going to go just on my gut (a la Rumsfeld, and we saw how well THAT worked out, didn’t we?) I would say that as far as what seems really new about the process movement is our focus on the larger part of the process, versus the smaller. Maybe that’s just restating the obvious (there are known knowns, and there are unknown knowns, and all that) but right now, there is a larger “student centered” movement in schools (specifically universities) and I can see how this conceivably could fit in/grow from/walk with the process movement.

However, putting aside the Rumsfeldian Gut Statement, and looking a little more intensely into the readings we did for this week, I see that teachers of writing, when embracing the process-centered approach, need to look at themselves as no longer the center of the classroom (not that anyone reading this blog would ever do this, or ever has, but I am very sure that we have all known an instructor who is very enamored of what he or she has to say, and can hold forth on that topic – whatever that topic might be – for quite some time). The instructor has to step back from his podium and allow the student’s process to be the primary teacher, rather than him.

Reading A Short History of Writing Instruction was quite an experience – I frequently battle the feeling that I am running to catch up with my classmates, as I haven’t had many classes based in rhetoric, so I appreciated having the opportunity of a brief exposure to the historical aspect of our discipline. I knew generally that early writing instruction was more favorably inclined to the strict, unbendable rules, those sayings with “never” and “always” and “do not” in them. Portions of A Short History certainly reinforced that notion, and I can only imagine what some of those poor, benighted, early instructors might have thought if faced with Donald M. Murray’s Implications (especially number 6, that “Mechanics come last”).

But then, I have to think that perhaps in their own way, those very early instructors were on to something. By giving students something to look at as a good piece of writing, something to imitate, we are giving them something to strive for (I hope) and once they can reach an understanding of why one ending to a paper is better than another, then they can find ways to do these things with their own ideas.

This is not – NOT – to say that I think imitation is a great way to teach, or the only way to teach. But by holding up one form of writing, and allowing students to determine for themselves why it works, or doesn’t work, is (I think) ultimately a pretty good way to go.

Is this maybe what Murray means when he writes that “the text of the writing course is the student’s own writing”? After all, what we teach is really rather ephemeral, once we shelve the idea that all writing read by another person must be error-free. If the purpose of having someone else read our writing isn’t so that he can find the mistakes, then what’s left?

Reading for pleasure, for purpose, for intent, that’s what’s left. And that’s why audience is so important, and why the shift from spoken argument to written argument is still so important to think about.

So I suppose that in my own convoluted, Rumsfeldian manner, I’m saying that the importance of audience awareness is still critical, just as it was for those early Greeks and Romans, and even if the audience is a “fiction.”

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The pictures in this post came from this blog – the writer is involved in a Renaissance Classroom in Second Life.

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Dr. Dictates

I find myself returning throughout this week’s readings to two pedagogical concepts:  that of the imitation of the writing of others and the custom of “dictates.”  During my time in college in the late 80’s, I was indeed a victim of the custom of dictates, which is probably why I find this so fascinating.  I had no idea that there was a history of this – I simply thought that this was a style of teaching peculiar to this particular instructor.  Of course, the imitation of the writing of others was a skill taught to us as well, it just didn’t seem quite as . . . well, odd, for want of a better term.

Dr. Dictates (I have completely forgotten her name* – I can remember how she looked, standing in front of the classroom, but her name is apparently lost to me.  Maybe it will come back by the time I finish writing this, but for now I will just call her Dr. Dictates, because it fits) taught Civil Litigation I and II, and her class was the first time I recall purchasing a book, EVER that cost more than $20.  It was nearly $60, and it was a book of forms, which when you think about it, sort of fits with her teaching style.  She would stand (sometimes sit) at the front of the class, not moving, behind a table, with her notes on a yellow legal pad, and read . . . them . . . very . . . slowly . . . so . . . that . . . everyone . . . could . . . get . . . every . . . word.

Did I mention this class was at 8am?

While this pedagogical style has a bit going for it, I think, in specific situations, I have to say I am not really a fan of it.  The reasoning the text gave for this style included the difficulties in obtaining text books and stated that the point of the exercise was to give the students an opportunity to become “familiarized . . . with the physical practice of writing and instilled codes of formal English” (184).  In retrospect, I’m not entirely sure that either of these applied to my situation.  Clearly the issue of a text wasn’t a problem – we had a book, it just wasn’t used to impart knowledge but instead to provide us with templates for complaints, answers to complaints, various types of discovery, etc.  It was a book we were expected to take into the workplace and use daily.  Perhaps Dr. Dictates had become accustomed to dictating because she was also an attorney, I’m not sure (but that’s sort of what I suspect). I can say that I think it helped me in preparing for some job-specific tasks, but not that it helped me to better understand grammar, sentence structure or other aspects pertinent to writing.  But then again, that wasn’t the point.  So taking dictation longhand, which is what we did, can be a good way to learn certain skills.

As to the imitation of other writers – well, that was just a given.  We were taught how to take from other briefs and pleadings, and after all, legal writing is nothing more than a set of new details placed into one of the forms from my civil litigation book.  Everything looks the same, no matter what state you are in, so an individual writing style was not necessarily something that we were encouraged to develop.  We were taught how to correctly quote (citing cases – a skill that I still have, btw, and which lead me to developing my quirk about where the punctuation goes relevant to underlining, quotation marks, italicizing and other formatting things), but we weren’t necessarily taught that plagiarizing is bad.  I recall being told at one point that what we did was, by nature, plagiarizing, and that it was not just okay but necessary.

The difference between my early training for the legal field and the training I am receiving now seems very similar to the difference between the dissenting academies and the standard universities.  According to our text, “dissenters embraced a comparative method of instruction, in which ‘conflicting views of controversial issues were presented, and then students researched and composed essays arguing their compositions,’ a method ‘consistent with the dissenters’ belief that free inquiry would advance political reform and economic and moral improvement.’  In so doing, they rejected the conservative approaches to classical language instruction then dominant” (192).  It seems that it is at this time that we begin to value content over style, at least a little bit.

I have never tried to teach via dictation and I don’t think I ever would, whether it was germane to the topic I was teaching or not . . . thinking about this sort of pedagogy makes me think of this scene where everyone eventually becomes a tape recorder – when we take the humanity, originality, and heart out of our teaching, we lose the vital part of our pedagogy.

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*After I finished this, I still couldn’t recall Dr. Dictates name, and realized that I had done a pretty fair job of making her sound like a terrible teacher.  Her name is Carol Dickey, and she is (I think) now the head of the department at my old community college, so she wasn’t as bad as I made her out to be.  She was actually a very sweet lady, and I learned a lot from her.