What did I learn this semester in ENGL 5060?
Primarily, I learned that freshman composition isn’t an easy subject. I tested out of ENGL 1301 and 1302 as a TTU undergraduate, and I was happy about that because I felt like the class had nothing to teach me. As a student, it probably didn’t.
However, as a grader, a graduate student, and future teacher, freshman composition has a lot to teach me. The theories behind composition are so complex. Engfish? Underlife? Post-process pedagogy? I’d never considered composition from a teacher’s point of view before, let alone a scholar’s point of view. This class has definitely given me some critical perspective on what composition is (and can be) as well as on what teachers actually are (and should be) doing in the writing classroom. However, I’m left wondering what I will do with those ideas in the future.
When I teach ENGL 1301 next year, I will be teaching according to someone else’s pedagogical standards. After I graduate, I will likely end up teaching at an institution that has a clear standard regarding what should be taught in composition and how it should be taught. Will I ever get the chance to try out a class like Ira Shor’s (which looks challenging, but also like a lot of fun)? How many times in my life will I be given the opportunity to implement my dream syllabus? As we have discussed in class, teachers often don’t have time to read composition theory. By the time I really get down to teaching, I might have forgotten most of the names and terms I learned here. I might get worn out, get jaded, fall into bad habits, etc.
I guess, then, if I could take away only one lesson from this class, I would choose Fulkerson's admonition to practice self-reflective teaching. Whatever else I don't know now or forget later, I can at try not to fall into mindlessness.
Friday, December 10, 2010
Friday, November 19, 2010
Sink or Swim
Negroponte advocates learning by doing. We learn best by “playing with information” which is an activity that computers are uniquely suited for (199). This is a response to an older method of teaching, in which teachers impart facts to students who passively absorb them and consequently don’t know what to do with them (besides regurgitate them for tests). Often, students don’t struggle against this type of teaching. It’s the educational experience many of us grew up with. I didn’t wonder what to do with the 200 technical terms I had to memorize for that high school biology final. I knew exactly what I would do with them: I would memorize them, write them down on the answer sheet, and then forget them. In my small town, biology class was just another site where I could demonstrate my proficiency at memorization. Isn’t getting a good grade the goal of all learning anyway? That’s what I thought. Why think otherwise if you aren’t doing what you’re learning? I would have been better off in a computer class, where they could teach me how to Google what the difference between “phylum” and “genus” is.
Learning by doing (and thus learning to do) is becoming more and more crucial. As Kemp notes, our transition to the digital has caused a similar transition in our learning needs. We no longer need to focus on accumulating knowledge; we now need to learn how to “judge and use” the vast world of knowledge we have access to. If you don’t teach a kid to swim, he will drown if thrown into the deep end of the pool. If we don’t get students to become active and adept users of knowledge, they will drown in the ever-growing sea of information.
Learning by doing (and thus learning to do) is becoming more and more crucial. As Kemp notes, our transition to the digital has caused a similar transition in our learning needs. We no longer need to focus on accumulating knowledge; we now need to learn how to “judge and use” the vast world of knowledge we have access to. If you don’t teach a kid to swim, he will drown if thrown into the deep end of the pool. If we don’t get students to become active and adept users of knowledge, they will drown in the ever-growing sea of information.
Post-Process Pedagogy
On Tuesday we discussed Atkinson and post-process pedagogy. I’d like to write a little about it here to get it clearly set out in my mind.
On this view, literacy is more than reading and writing. It is the ability to critically “read” reality. Without the ability to look at reality in a critical way, students see themselves and the world as a result of inevitable and mysterious “natural forces” and “universal truths” which Berlin told us in “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class” don’t exist. Truth must be “continually decided by all and for all in a way appropriate to our own historic moment” (Berlin 490). As a result of this and other factors, composition becomes “a cultural activity by which writers position and repo¬sition themselves in relation to their own and others' subjectivities, discourses, practices, and institutions” (Atkinson 1532).
Atkinson doesn’t think solely in terms of post-process pedagogy though. He recognizes that process pedagogy is not a bad thing in itself. I mean, how can you conceive of writing instruction without thinking about pre-writing, drafting, feedback, and revision? Atkinson isn’t thinking in terms of a “basic ‘paradigm shift,’” but rather “in expanding and broadening the domain” of how we think about writing (1538). This way he can take advantage of the merits in process pedagogy, while at the same time avoiding the pitfalls that come with engagement in a purely process pedagogy.
That sounds pretty appealing. I like the idea of students learning to think critically about the world, and then learning to frame those thoughts in appropriate rhetorical terms. If we wanted to employ pedagogy like this in our own composition program at TTU, I guess we would have the students stop doing rhetorical analysis (at least as their main focus) and start engaging with article content. We might want to change the topic of assigned readings to something related to social issues that students would be interested in (I don’t think they are interested in the development of the English language).
I’m trying to imagine how our students would perform in a system like that. It’s difficult to do.
On this view, literacy is more than reading and writing. It is the ability to critically “read” reality. Without the ability to look at reality in a critical way, students see themselves and the world as a result of inevitable and mysterious “natural forces” and “universal truths” which Berlin told us in “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class” don’t exist. Truth must be “continually decided by all and for all in a way appropriate to our own historic moment” (Berlin 490). As a result of this and other factors, composition becomes “a cultural activity by which writers position and repo¬sition themselves in relation to their own and others' subjectivities, discourses, practices, and institutions” (Atkinson 1532).
Atkinson doesn’t think solely in terms of post-process pedagogy though. He recognizes that process pedagogy is not a bad thing in itself. I mean, how can you conceive of writing instruction without thinking about pre-writing, drafting, feedback, and revision? Atkinson isn’t thinking in terms of a “basic ‘paradigm shift,’” but rather “in expanding and broadening the domain” of how we think about writing (1538). This way he can take advantage of the merits in process pedagogy, while at the same time avoiding the pitfalls that come with engagement in a purely process pedagogy.
That sounds pretty appealing. I like the idea of students learning to think critically about the world, and then learning to frame those thoughts in appropriate rhetorical terms. If we wanted to employ pedagogy like this in our own composition program at TTU, I guess we would have the students stop doing rhetorical analysis (at least as their main focus) and start engaging with article content. We might want to change the topic of assigned readings to something related to social issues that students would be interested in (I don’t think they are interested in the development of the English language).
I’m trying to imagine how our students would perform in a system like that. It’s difficult to do.
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Feminism and ENGL 1301
In late September, we went to a Professional Development Workshop to talk about time management. Three guest professors were there, and they all gave us their tips and tricks for managing our (and their) hectic lives. I remember Dr. Spurgeon’s talk most clearly. Partly, that’s because she based her rules for survival in academia on Columbus’ rules for survival in Zombieland. Gosh, I love that movie. Another reason her talk stuck with me was that some of her advice was directed primarily at female students. “Don’t be afraid to say ‘no,’” she told us. When someone asks you to serve on such and such committee, don’t be afraid to refuse if you really don’t have time. In our culture, women tend to say yes. Yes, I’ll do that. Yes, I can take care of that. We’ve been raised to be accommodating. But don’t fall into that trap! Know when to say “no.” She then gave us a polite, non-combative verbal formula we could use to refuse these hypothetical coworkers.
There is a certain amount of truth to that sentiment. My mom and all three of her sisters, for instance, are all compulsively accomodating. There’s more to the issue though. Take Gloria Anzaldua, who was a feminist as well as a member of a traditional Hispanic community. How do you reconcile your beliefs, your sex, and your heritage? Or take the term “feminazi” (thank you, Rush Limbaugh). A militant feminist. Man hater. Is this a “right” and “accurate” term for certain kinds of feminists, or is it just crass and offensive?
Most of these ideas are really too complex for me to deal with adequately here, so I’m going to drop it now. The point is that issues of gender and sex are still relevant. They exist, even in 2010. As for injecting these issues into First-Year Composition—well, it’s happening this semester. I was grading peer critiques last night, and I came across one that dealt with a Draft 1.1 that analyzed “Who Wants to Marry a Feminist?” by Lisa Miva-Jervis. Later, I came across another one (I graded a lot last night). The article is concerned with dispelling the myth of the feminist as a “hairy-legged man-hater.” Talking about feminism can be tricky, but the two drafts I read seemed to be fairly straightforward rhetorical analyses. I found no impassioned arguments for or against feminism. The critiques seemed fairly neutral too. Are our freshman getting more mature? Maybe, maybe not. After all, I did only see two drafts based on that article. But is it wrong for the article to even be involved with ENGL 1301? We’re asking them to analyze rhetoric rather than argue content, but that seems like an article that lends itself to content-based consideration anyway. How can you read that and not think about sexism? So, are we socially engineering students?
There is a certain amount of truth to that sentiment. My mom and all three of her sisters, for instance, are all compulsively accomodating. There’s more to the issue though. Take Gloria Anzaldua, who was a feminist as well as a member of a traditional Hispanic community. How do you reconcile your beliefs, your sex, and your heritage? Or take the term “feminazi” (thank you, Rush Limbaugh). A militant feminist. Man hater. Is this a “right” and “accurate” term for certain kinds of feminists, or is it just crass and offensive?
Most of these ideas are really too complex for me to deal with adequately here, so I’m going to drop it now. The point is that issues of gender and sex are still relevant. They exist, even in 2010. As for injecting these issues into First-Year Composition—well, it’s happening this semester. I was grading peer critiques last night, and I came across one that dealt with a Draft 1.1 that analyzed “Who Wants to Marry a Feminist?” by Lisa Miva-Jervis. Later, I came across another one (I graded a lot last night). The article is concerned with dispelling the myth of the feminist as a “hairy-legged man-hater.” Talking about feminism can be tricky, but the two drafts I read seemed to be fairly straightforward rhetorical analyses. I found no impassioned arguments for or against feminism. The critiques seemed fairly neutral too. Are our freshman getting more mature? Maybe, maybe not. After all, I did only see two drafts based on that article. But is it wrong for the article to even be involved with ENGL 1301? We’re asking them to analyze rhetoric rather than argue content, but that seems like an article that lends itself to content-based consideration anyway. How can you read that and not think about sexism? So, are we socially engineering students?
Technical and Creative Writing
Winsor's "Invention and Writing in Technical Work" was really interesting to me. She writes that engineering work is traditionally seen as coming before and largely determining its written representation in the form of a report (Winsor 843). So we tend to think that there is no creativity or invention involved in technical writing.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have creative writing. For instance, this semester I’m writing a textual history of Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. It’s a fantasy novel in which another universe is envisioned—complete with an imaginary world map (consisting mainly of islands), distinct imaginary cultures, distinct imaginary economies, etc. Think LOTR and Narnia, only more Taoist and less British. In an essay describing her creative process, Le Guin writes the following:
"I did not deliberately invent Earthsea. I did not think ‘Hey wow—islands are archetypes and archipelagoes are superarchetypes and let’s build us an archipelago!’ I am not an engineer, but an explorer. I discovered Earthsea” (Le Guin 49-50).
This is kind of interesting. The traditional view of technical writing is that it is a report on the real work of invention. It doesn’t involve much creativity in and of itself. Le Guin characterizes her writing as discovery rather than invention. Earthsea was already there (in her unconscious), and writing about it constituted a “discovery” of that universe rather than a creative “invention” of it. The main difference between the two is that engineers report on concrete objects and Le Guin is reporting on a fictional object.
As we find out, however, technical writing is deeply involved with the engineering process. The students Windsor studied used writing to “recall, juxtapose, and trigger ideas,” to serve the purpose of “establishing and validating group knowledge,” and just generally as a method for “attaching writing to the object as a way of thinking about it” (Winsor 846, 853, 849). If we keep reading Le Guin’s essay, we find that she wrote notes and preliminary short stories in order to “discover” the people and geography of Earthsea. Her process sounds like it involves recalling, juxtaposing, and triggering ideas to me. It also sounds like she used her short stories to attach writing to her fictional object, so as to solidify her way of thinking about it.
I found the parallels between the two interesting. To me, it indicates that technical writing is not on the opposite end of the spectrum from creative writing after all.
Le Guin, Ursula. “Dreams Must Explain Themselves.” The Language of the Night. Ed. Susan Wood. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1979. 47-56.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have creative writing. For instance, this semester I’m writing a textual history of Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. It’s a fantasy novel in which another universe is envisioned—complete with an imaginary world map (consisting mainly of islands), distinct imaginary cultures, distinct imaginary economies, etc. Think LOTR and Narnia, only more Taoist and less British. In an essay describing her creative process, Le Guin writes the following:
"I did not deliberately invent Earthsea. I did not think ‘Hey wow—islands are archetypes and archipelagoes are superarchetypes and let’s build us an archipelago!’ I am not an engineer, but an explorer. I discovered Earthsea” (Le Guin 49-50).
This is kind of interesting. The traditional view of technical writing is that it is a report on the real work of invention. It doesn’t involve much creativity in and of itself. Le Guin characterizes her writing as discovery rather than invention. Earthsea was already there (in her unconscious), and writing about it constituted a “discovery” of that universe rather than a creative “invention” of it. The main difference between the two is that engineers report on concrete objects and Le Guin is reporting on a fictional object.
As we find out, however, technical writing is deeply involved with the engineering process. The students Windsor studied used writing to “recall, juxtapose, and trigger ideas,” to serve the purpose of “establishing and validating group knowledge,” and just generally as a method for “attaching writing to the object as a way of thinking about it” (Winsor 846, 853, 849). If we keep reading Le Guin’s essay, we find that she wrote notes and preliminary short stories in order to “discover” the people and geography of Earthsea. Her process sounds like it involves recalling, juxtaposing, and triggering ideas to me. It also sounds like she used her short stories to attach writing to her fictional object, so as to solidify her way of thinking about it.
I found the parallels between the two interesting. To me, it indicates that technical writing is not on the opposite end of the spectrum from creative writing after all.
Le Guin, Ursula. “Dreams Must Explain Themselves.” The Language of the Night. Ed. Susan Wood. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1979. 47-56.
Friday, October 29, 2010
Underlife & Life in General
"No one but the complete fanatic completely associates herself with only one role—instead, the self is formed in the distance one takes from the roles one is assigned. In such an analysis, activities which aren’t ‘on task’ become as important as activities which are, for besides the task itself there is also always the formation of identity” (Brooke 723-4).
Brooke's discussion of identity was written primarily to help us understand the purpose of “underlife” behavior in writing classes. However, it got me thinking about identity more generally, especially in relation to growing up and becoming a professional academic. I started to think about the line between “fun” and “responsibility” and how blurry it really is. The tasks we perform as part of our obligations to our jobs, our family, or our school are always perceived as being in a different category from the tasks we perform just because we want to—even if they are the same tasks. For instance, I used to love Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. As an undergraduate, I took a class on 19th century marriage plot novels and formally studied the text for an entire semester. I’m sad to say that I haven’t picked it up since then. Whatever I loved about it had been squashed by its cooptation by the academic institution. Another example: I used to love to play house. I used to revel in planning how I would organize all the cool appliances I would own and what fantastical shapes I would trim the hedges in. Now I actually have a house (with hedges), and keeping up with it is probably one of my least favorite activities.
As Brooke points out, the reasons behind this have to do with our sense of identity. Each “role” we take on as part of our life-responsibilities is useful for its purposes, but also limiting. One of my professors this semester, Dr. Hawkins, recently remarked that one major part of being a graduate student is learning to juggle responsibilities—to take off our “ENGL1301 Grader” hat and put on our “Textual History Researcher” hat, and then take that off an hour later and don our “Homemaker” hat. All these hats we have to wear can cause us to lose perspective. We need a space from which to negotiate the way these roles shape our lives. This is the space in which we do “fun” things—things no one tells or expects us to do, but that we do nonetheless. That's the stuff that liberates us from our limiting roles as graders, researchers, and homemakers.
Having an underlife isn’t only important to becoming a good writer. It’s also important to being a sane, successful person—especially in the world of professional academia.
Brooke's discussion of identity was written primarily to help us understand the purpose of “underlife” behavior in writing classes. However, it got me thinking about identity more generally, especially in relation to growing up and becoming a professional academic. I started to think about the line between “fun” and “responsibility” and how blurry it really is. The tasks we perform as part of our obligations to our jobs, our family, or our school are always perceived as being in a different category from the tasks we perform just because we want to—even if they are the same tasks. For instance, I used to love Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. As an undergraduate, I took a class on 19th century marriage plot novels and formally studied the text for an entire semester. I’m sad to say that I haven’t picked it up since then. Whatever I loved about it had been squashed by its cooptation by the academic institution. Another example: I used to love to play house. I used to revel in planning how I would organize all the cool appliances I would own and what fantastical shapes I would trim the hedges in. Now I actually have a house (with hedges), and keeping up with it is probably one of my least favorite activities.
As Brooke points out, the reasons behind this have to do with our sense of identity. Each “role” we take on as part of our life-responsibilities is useful for its purposes, but also limiting. One of my professors this semester, Dr. Hawkins, recently remarked that one major part of being a graduate student is learning to juggle responsibilities—to take off our “ENGL1301 Grader” hat and put on our “Textual History Researcher” hat, and then take that off an hour later and don our “Homemaker” hat. All these hats we have to wear can cause us to lose perspective. We need a space from which to negotiate the way these roles shape our lives. This is the space in which we do “fun” things—things no one tells or expects us to do, but that we do nonetheless. That's the stuff that liberates us from our limiting roles as graders, researchers, and homemakers.
Having an underlife isn’t only important to becoming a good writer. It’s also important to being a sane, successful person—especially in the world of professional academia.
Friday, October 15, 2010
Teachers Really Are Awesome
Near the end of “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class,” Berlin remarks that he deems social epistemic rhetoric to be the “most worthy of emulation in the classroom” (682). From our class discussion, I suspect most of us also liked his position. However, he also says that social-epistemic pedagogy is “the least formulaic and the most difficult to carry out” (682). Most of our discussion of Berlin’s “liabilities” seemed to center on the difficulties that the system or the students would present to us as hypothetical teachers trying to implement a successful social-epistemic pedagogy. How exactly can we create a pedagogy that does not replace the student’s with the teacher’s, but still frees them (to an extent)? How can we all transcend the limitations of the traditional classroom? There are answers to these questions, but none of them are easy.
And here we are now. We are grading for a freshman composition program that I do not think is based on Berlin’s notion of social-epistemic rhetoric. We all could quit, but we’re not going to because we haven’t gotten our degrees yet and we need the money. Most of us, I think, will end up trying to work within the system. Like Dr. Kemp, we could encourage alternative forms of student interaction with tools like the MOO. Like certain free-thinking undergraduate professors I had, we could escape the classroom by conducting our classes in locations other than the assigned one—in the library, in the courtyard, at the Lubbock Lake Landmark. Whatever we do, though, there will still be big problems to contend with. Working within systems we don’t necessarily believe in can be a soul-sucking enterprise. Rising to the challenge of continually creating courses that are “always open-ended, receptive to the unexpected, and subversive of the planned” and effective to boot can be exhausting—especially if the students don’t engage with the course no matter what you do (682).
I'm not trying to be a complete downer here. Berlin’s essay simply made me think about the fact that to be a teacher, you need positivity, patience, endurance, and a deep devotion to learning just as much as you need a grounding in the “history and theory” of their profession and a self-reflective teaching pedagogy. The realization makes me really wish that I'd given more of my teachers an apple (or a Dr. Pepper, or a pack of cigarettes, as the case may be) on the first day of school.
And here we are now. We are grading for a freshman composition program that I do not think is based on Berlin’s notion of social-epistemic rhetoric. We all could quit, but we’re not going to because we haven’t gotten our degrees yet and we need the money. Most of us, I think, will end up trying to work within the system. Like Dr. Kemp, we could encourage alternative forms of student interaction with tools like the MOO. Like certain free-thinking undergraduate professors I had, we could escape the classroom by conducting our classes in locations other than the assigned one—in the library, in the courtyard, at the Lubbock Lake Landmark. Whatever we do, though, there will still be big problems to contend with. Working within systems we don’t necessarily believe in can be a soul-sucking enterprise. Rising to the challenge of continually creating courses that are “always open-ended, receptive to the unexpected, and subversive of the planned” and effective to boot can be exhausting—especially if the students don’t engage with the course no matter what you do (682).
I'm not trying to be a complete downer here. Berlin’s essay simply made me think about the fact that to be a teacher, you need positivity, patience, endurance, and a deep devotion to learning just as much as you need a grounding in the “history and theory” of their profession and a self-reflective teaching pedagogy. The realization makes me really wish that I'd given more of my teachers an apple (or a Dr. Pepper, or a pack of cigarettes, as the case may be) on the first day of school.
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