Trying to get back in the swing of things (Part II)

As I look over the article, I feel that I have a good framework. There is some work to do contextualizing and, as always, it seems, bringing sources to bear on this work. This morning's plan: to do some reading on literacy and to begin drafting an introduction. I'm thinking that I should be able to draw on work I've already done, with the introduction. We'll see.

Making progress with the introduction and revising research questions and implications. There is a need to contextualize the study a bit--a need for reading?

Just read excerpt from Barton/Hamilton's Local Literacies (in Carter's Literacies in Context). Here is a passage or two that might be of use:

A person's practices can also be located in their own history of literacy. In order to understand this we need to take a list history approach, observing the history within a person's life. (49)

The literacy practices an invididual engages with change across their lifetime, as a result of changing demands, available resources, as well as the possibilities and their interests. (50)

---

So far, I'm having a bit of a tough time re-engaging in the writing process. But, I think this is to be expected when you've been away from it for 2+ months. But, I'm making small progress. The key, so far, is giving myself manageable projects to tackle one at a time.

The Goal: finish this article by the end of the fall 2009 semester and figure out who the hell to send it to!

Back in the Swing

Getting back to work this morning. Having a bit of a hard time focusing. So, two tasks:

1. Reread the manuscript

2. Look into The Journal of Adult and Adolescent Literacy.

Additional Implication

I think I worked my way towards better wording for an implication from this study (while working through my book chapter for the diversity collection). When I return to what I am still calling the TETYC article in August, I need to think about this implication:

While adult students, themselves, constitute an important type of diversity within the writing classroom, the literacy histories and experiences among the adult students in any one class, and within the broader adult student population itself, are likely to be significantly varied and diverse.

Attitudes towards writing...(another implication?)

Early on in the article, I write: 

The professional discursive knowledge that many adult or non-traditional students accumulate in the workplace—the genres they produce and consume, the composing strategies they enact, and the attitudes and dispositions towards written discourse they internalize—can and often do play a role in their transition they make, as writers, from workplace to academic sphere.

It occurs to me now that there may be an interesting small point to make here. In the workplace, writing is usually a means towards an ends--it doesn't draw attention to itself. You do as little as you need to do to get the job done. This is an attitude or an orientation towards writing. The writing is entirely instrumental. This disposition may be translated to academic writing assignments, although, I have no evidence for it. 

Attitudes might come from other sources--anxiety and past history. Is this a point that I might make in the other article, another potential implication:

Adult students are likely to bring a range of different attitudes and orientations towards writing to their academic work. Some bring positive attitudes, others negative, others may see writing as a means to an end.

???

Rethinking Implications

I've been writing for five or six days now. I'm at a furious pace to get through these articles before the summer begins. Which I hesitate to put down in and black and white because somehow it seems better to keep all of this in my head. That's a dangerous tendency, I think. Better to get the stuff OUT of my head--talk it over with myself, here, and with other people. 

In any event, as I've been revising the article in which I sum up the project, lots of interesting things are happening. I'm in the process of continuing to work through the section on workplace writing. I'm implementing Reich's framework of "new work" to help teachers think through the kinds of writing experiences adult students have outside the classroom. I've developed an interesting way of categorizing this:

Routine Production: no one.

In-Person Services: Patrice/Charlene

Liminal: Tony/Diane

Symbolic Analytic: Joe

This is all going quite well. I have written three short bios on students who I otherwise hadn't written about: Charlene (middle-aged, single woman/mom), Zoran (ESL student), Heather (twenty-something). These three really bring a depth to the project and honor the kinds of adult students that one would be more likely to find at a school like RIC, or perhaps at a community college. 

I'm thinking through my implications section a bit this morning and revising a bit. I'm thinking that I'd like to post a revised list of implications. Here is a new, shortened list:

1. Adult students carry with them diverse literacy histories and varied relationships to school and/or academic literacy. While some may carry histories of disappointment and/or failure, others bring stories of success and empowerment (all).
   
2. Many adult students are immersed in complex webs of literacy in their workplaces, where writing doesn't necessarily draw attention to itself but serves, instead, to help get done the work of the day (Charlene/Patrice, Tony, John, Jennifer). 
   
3. Adult students will likely have considerable experience producing specific genres of workplace writing--what Devitt (2007) has called "antecedent" genres. Such genres often come to have considerable hold over adult students' composing practices. Knowledge of antecedent genres may help or hinder adult students in their transition to academic literacy (John, Tony, Jennifer).
4. Because adult students are immersed in a range of professional and/or civic/social communities, they often arrive in the classroom with real literacy problems and goals in hand. These serve as potential resources to be tapped by literacy instructors (Tony, Patrice/Charlene, Jennifer). Similarly, some adult students, when they arrive in the classroom, may already be engaged in self-sponsored literacy projects which could serve as potential resources. (John's blog, Charlene's memoirs).
5. In their capacity as workers and family and community members, many adult students are not just writers, but serve as teachers of writing and/or local writing consultants. (Tony, Diane, Charlene, Patrice).
   

I believe that this list is much better. In terms of what I have done, I have already written #5. I am in the middle of drafting #s 1 and 2. These are the biggest, meatiest sections. I now think that I do have enough material for #4. And I know I have enough material for #3. So, all of this seems manageable at this point. 

The remaining, unresolved question has to do with the organizational structure and length of the article. It is way past a length which would make it manageable for TETYC. And I don't want to trim it to make it work for that periodical. I thought, yesterday, that I could submit it to CCCs, as this is a completely different piece than the article on Tony I submitted last fall. I still may do this. If not, I think the right direction might be some kind of literacy-oriented journal. 

Now, to work.

Breakthrough!

This morning, I'm reading Anne Beaufort's essay "Writing in the Professions" in the Bazerman book on writing. I stumbled across the following passage:

Subsequent to these early studies, there has been a continual stream of research on workplace writing activities, looking both at professional writing and at blue-collar writing activities (see chaps. 8 and 13, this volume). Blue-collar workers' writing skills have become increasingly important as technologies have driven more record keeping and decision making to those who are directly involved in manufacturing, information-processing, and care-giving activities. (221)

Two books she suggests for research on blue-collar writing practices on the job are:

• Changing Work, Changing Workers (Hull)
  
• The Politics of Workplace Literacy (Gowen)
  

As I have been reading Beaufort's article this morning, I've been thinking of a perhaps better taxonomy for organizing my section and chapter on professional writing. It's the idea of professional vs. blue collar workplace writing that really hit me. And what hit me is that I can draw a kind of interesting line, with my research participants, from blue-collar to professional. 

From:

Lois/Patsy: mostly blue collar (highly documentary)

to: 

Tony: a fascinating transitional state, from blue-collar (patient-care reports) to white-collar or professional (reports, memos, training documents)

Jennifer: also an interesting transitional state, straddling both worlds (because of her access to her husband, the president)

to: 

Joe: a knowledge worker, professional (high-value reports and analytical writing)

I'm thinking that this is a useful way to organize the material and I might draw on Robert Reich's work to help frame this new organizational structure. The point is that--and i guess I am just making this explicit for myself now--that not all workplace writing is the same. Workplace writing is not workplace writing is not workplace writing. What my participants illustrate is a diversity of experience with academic literacy. But what I'm now realizing, perhaps for the first time, in this way, is the extent to which they also capture a diversity of professional status, workplace cultures, workplace positionality, and workplace literacy practices. Interesting.

Implication #5 (student writing projects)

5. Because adult students are immersed in a range of professional and/or civic/social communities, they often arrive in the classroom with real literacy problems and goals in hand. These serve as potential resources to be tapped by literacy instructors (Tony, Patrice/Charlene, Jennifer).

Tony:

How do you decide what needs to be known in those three days and what can be left for later or doesn’t need to be known?

Feedback from new employees. You know, you’re always asking them, when you see them, or when they’re coming up for their 90-day review, ‘what about orientation helped you out? What would you like to see added to orientation?’ Because those are the people—that’s the end product. So, you evaluate the end-product.

You got a document for that?

No, it’s usually an informal thing, I’m working on a document.

---

At the next meeting, I’ll bring a copy of my orientation manual. Every time I rearrange the orientation, I end up changing the whole manual around. It’s still a living document. I don’t have orientation exactly the way I want it yet. What I do is I’ll do small trials. I’ll make a little change, put it out for a couple of orientations, wait a couple months, see how it works. 

Reflections: Day 1 of Summer Writing

Today was my first day of writing, now that the semester has ended. It went well, I think. 

I worked on two things:

1. I had not finished summarizing the transcripts of Heather and Z. This took a good chunk of time. 
   
2. I began writing about Heather, focusing on this implication:

Adult students carry with them diverse literate histories and varied relationships to school and academic literacy. While some may carry the baggage of disappointment and/or failure, others bring literacy and school stories of success and empowerment. When participants in this study were asked to reflect on their experiences with literacy growing up, the stories that they told were compelling and varied.

So, I just sort of dove in with Heather and wrote the same kind of condensed literacy/schooling narrative for her that I wrote of the original three participants. It's about four pages and focuses on home/school literacy. 

Reading about Z and Heather's experiences, I was struck, again, by the richness of the study that was never explored for my dissertation. Heather and Z bring two important things to this study and in some ways, they speak more to the kinds of issues with nontraditional students that I have experienced at RIC. Over the past few weeks, I've been thinking about this a good deal--how different the nontraditional population at RIC and GSC are and how my dissertation really doesn't bring to life the experiences of the RIC students--who are mostly younger and have more complicated life stories. Tony, Joe, Jennifer were all much more established--families, jobs, children, etc. I haven't seen as many of those at RIC. What I have seen is more students like Heather and Z. Young people whose lives have taken circuitous paths. I feel like I speak about adult or nontraditional students more intelligently and knowledgeably and from a stronger position now that I am writing about Heather and Z and now that they are, again, a part of this project. 

The problem I'm experiencing with writing today--so, how do I put this thing together? Am I going to have one big section in the front of the essay with these bio type passages? If so, I can't include all seven participants. At four pages per participant, that section will go on for 30 pages. An important realization, though, is that that could be a chapter, the third chapter, in the book I am now re-conceiving. Again, revised book chapters:

1. Introduction/Overview/Methodology

2. On Adult Students and The Schools Where They Study

3. Adult Students: Life Stories

4. Adult Students: Work and Writing

5. Implications

I am feeling as good about this structure as I have about any structure I've explored yet. I think I'll have a much better sense of how to go about this once I have finished writing this article.

So, anyway, I'm already asking questions about my organizational structure--based on Sohn's article from C's. She had like 9 implications and each was around a page or two. I'm already at several pages with my first implication.

I was thinking that perhaps I'll need to get a bit more creative and maybe space the biographical sketches out throughout the piece, weaving the other implications and the biological sketches together in a kind of collage. The other thing I find myself thinking about is that it's going to be hard to keep this to the appropriate page length for TETYC and that I perhaps need to investigate other publication venues. 

Work and Writing section/chapter

I'm thinking about how to organize a section of the essay on work. It seems like an obvious place to start is to move from the least complex to the most complex (paraprofessionals to Joe?). Perhaps I could break it down according to kinds of writing:

(Is there a taxonomy I could borrow?)

• Documentation (all)
  
• Professional Communication (all)
  
• Analysis and Recommendation (Joe)
• Training and Education (Tony)

Genre theory 

activity theory

Implication #7 (students as teachers)

7. In their capacity as workers and family and community members, many adult students are not just writers, but serve as teachers of writing and/or local writing consultants. (Tony, Diane, Charlene, Patrice, Z, Heather).

Sarah:

We had a Mac in the house before a PC. It came into the house after the business closed. We didn’t have one growing up, didn’t have one while I was in high school. We had a typewriter, I’m pretty sure we had a nice typewriter. My mother had always aspired to be a writer one day. And her mother had always wanted to be a writer and she didn’t have more than a jr. high education. My mom is presently writing what she believes are her memoirs. I inspired that. Which is funny—that I inspired that, when she’s the one who got the ball rolling in the first place.

How did that happen?

I had just finished writing a short story for a class. But it took on more of a life of its own. I’m thinking about trying to get it published. So, that inspired her, the fact that my experience was successful inspired her that she should get on the ball. I showed my short story, in the process, with her. Then she said, ‘I need to start writing.’ So, I gave her Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones. I gave her that book to read. It was a required book for The Writing Process, a course I took here.

She writes everyday. I think it’s more of a catharsis. I think she’s going back far—like to the teenage years. She’s shared some of it with me, not all of it. She’s writing it in chapters, in thinking that it’s going to be a book, she’s writing it like a book. She’s writing everyday.

Goran:

I was a tutor over at NHTI during my last year there. I was tutoring in the learning center. I was helping people with MS Office and C++. I had a bunch of people who had English as a second language and I was helping them and I was also helping everyone else who would ask for help. It was good for me because I could relate to them because I had been in the same position. And it was good for me to improve my English. The Director of the Learning Center actually awarded me for my work there.

Your job at the Learning Center, were you specifically there to help people who had English as a second language?

No.

Who was it for?

To help everybody who needed help. In any subject. I was helping some people—she was from China. I was helping her to write her papers in English. Even though that wasn’t really my job.

What was your job?

To help people with computers. How to use MS Word, Excel, Powerpoint. How to do C++ programming. I was helping them to use a tool to accomplish their work. But I always went a little overboard to help people. I guess that’s my personality.

Taking a Stab at Drafting

Today, taking a stab at beginning to draft the article for TETYC. I'm beginning with the implications that I sketched out way back in February, at the conference in Texas. The first step, I think, is to figure out what to write about first. I have these implications--some are bigger than others. I need to search for an order here. How shall I present them? Here goes:

1. Adult students carry with them diverse literacy histories and varied relationships to school and/or academic literacy. While some may carry the baggage of disappointment and/or failure, others will bring literacy stories of success and empowerment (all).
   
2. Many adult students are immersed in complex webs of literacy in their workplaces, where writing doesn't necessarily draw attention to itself but serves, instead, to help get done the work of the day (Charlene/Patrice, Tony, John, Jennifer). 
   
3. Adult students will likely have considerable experience producing specific genres of workplace writing--what Devitt (2007) has called "antecedent" genres. Such genres often come to have considerable hold over adult students' composing practices. Knowledge of antecedent genres may help or hinder adult students in their transition to academic literacy (John, Tony, Jennifer).
   
4. Conventions of authorship in the workplace are different from those of the classroom and unless instructed otherwise, adult students are likely to transport workplace conventions to the classroom (Tony).
   
5. Because adult students are immersed in a range of professional and/or civic/social communities, they often arrive in the classroom with real literacy problems and goals in hand. These serve as potential resources to be tapped by literacy instructors (Tony, Patrice/Charlene, Jennifer).
6. Similarly, some adult students, when they arrive in the classroom, may already be engaged in self-sponsored literacy projects which could serve as potential resources. (John's blog, Charlene's memoirs).
7. In their capacity as workers and family and community members, many adult students are not just writers, but serve as teachers of writing and/or local writing consultants. (Tony, Diane, Charlene, Patrice).
   

Are there others? There may be some that come up along the way. But for now, that's a pretty good list, I think. The next task is going through and thinking who can illustrate these implications. I've begun this. 

Titles:

The Things they Carry: The Literate Lives of 21st Century Adult Learners

Summary, Frederickson and Bay

Libby Bay's 1999 TETYC article reports on a survey Bay conducted at her home institution, a community-college in New York, "to explore the reasons mature persons take a life step once confined to the young, the difficulties and satisfactions they experience, and what colleges can do to respond to their needs" (305). There is much to learn about the life experiences of adult students in this article. But Bay's survey focuses on questions related to adult students educational background, development, and plans and does not focus specifically on literacy development or the transition to academic discourse.

Great quote: "If anyone has stories to tell it is the returning adult student." (306)

---

Nontraditional students need special assistance in overcoming writing anxiety. (top of article, 115)

In her TETYC article, Elaine Frederickson draws on her experiences teaching writing to nontraditional students to A) speculate about why such students are often "silent" in the composition classroom, and B) to offer suggestions about how to move such students to voice.

This essay has three purposes: to congratulate those who have contributed in personal or public ways to the changing needs of nontraditional students, to make public some approaches which have worked for me, and to encourage further efforts toward improving and reporting on programs which benefit these important members of our classes. (115)

What can be done to lessen fear in the writing classroom? (117)

Frederickson provides a series of recommendations such as frequent small group work (with occasional same-sex or same-race groupings), the creation of a feeling of community, teachers accept stylistic variations in student writing, frequent writing practice and an absence of censured, deferred grading, journal writing, frequent positive feedback, encourage personal writing, individual student-teacher conferences

The various causes of silence...lack of power in the academic setting, feeling outnumbered by traditional-age students, a conscious choice to resist a system which they oppose, a lack of feeling of trust/support,

Teachers who understand the complexity of students’ anxieties and make an effort to overcome them can enable student success. (121)

4/10 (one more)

Thinking a bit, this morning, about how to begin the next article--the one for TETYC. 

I've read a few items by the editor this morning that suggest that the place to begin is probably with what has already been said--in TETYC:

I was heartened to see that the essays appearing in the preceding three years routinely cited work previously published in TETYC. In fact, roughly one-quarter of the ninety-three articles included at least one citation referring to TETYC. That’s a trend I wish to see continued in future manuscript submissions. (TETYC March 2009)

But my point is that TETYC serves dinner family-style, and a conscious effort to speak with and to (and sometimes back to) our other authors constitutes passing the academic peas and carrots to one’s tablemates. If I were to make a list of my pet faves (or whatever the opposite of peeve would be), making a conscious effort to join that dinner time conversation would be right near the top. (TETYC 35.1)

So, it seems as though a place to look might be backwards, to what's already been said. I have at least four pieces that explicitly address adult learners.

Now I have two more to look for:

Thompson, Merle O’Rourke. “The Returning Student: Writing Anxiety and General Anxiety.” TETYC 10.1 (1983): 35–39.

Thompson, Diane P. “Introducing Adult Students to Writing about Literature.” TETYC 16.1 (1989): 37–39.

Frederickson, Elaine. “Silence and the Nontraditional Writer.” Teaching English in the Two Year College 25.2 (1999): 115-121.

Bay, Libby. “Twists, Turns, and Returns: Returning Adult Students.” Teaching English in the Two Year College 26.3 (1999): 305-312.

Jeff Sommers, in his email to me, which I write about in a previous post, also provides other potential writers who have dealt with this topic. 

4/10 (from Brad's Transcript)

In regard to writing, what would you say your goals are, as a writer—are things you would like to do that you can’t do earlier or things you want to improve on?

Absolutely. Mechanics. I want to be able to write a sentence correctly and not look like an idiot. I want to be able to get my point across without being wordy or—I want to learn how to write clear and concise and be mechanically correct—commas where they should be, punctuation where it should be.

In terms of getting your point across—it seems like you’re talking about two different things there. If the comma is in the wrong place, it throws off the reader a bit, but to say that you want to get your point across—if you were making an argument about something, a thesis—

Whether it’s a persuasive type or information-type piece of information—I think mechanics play a big part of it because if it doesn’t flow smoothly, grammatically or mechanically, it throws the reader off because the reader is trying to make sense of what they just read. So, if it doesn’t flow nice and smoothly, I think it’s more difficult to get your point across because, in any type of presentation, powerpoint being a huge thing, if every slide was presented differently, instead of one slide has fade and another slide has the text coming across like it’s a typewriter, for that moment that the person is trying to figure out what the change is, because it’s not the same—there’s always that expectation that you kind of, when you read something, you expect it to kind of flow grammatically and mechanically—and there isn’t, like, if half-way through a sentence, somebody put a period, it’s going to throw the whole thought process off and you kind of lose the meaning. It’s kind of like educating—for every second that they have to figure out that there is a change and what the change was, they’re not engaged in the learning process.

So what you’re saying is—your point, what you are trying to communicate, gets lost if someone is slowed down by the feeling like, ‘well, that wasn’t a complete sentence’ or ‘boy that sentence went on for a long time.’ If they’re thinking that, then they’re not thinking ‘what’s the point he’s trying to make here and what are the reasons he is using to support his point?’

Right.

Are there particular kinds of documents that you want to create better—you do a lot of writing for your work already. You’re a pretty competent writer in that domain. Are there certain kinds of writing that you want to be better at? Is it certain genres?

I would like to be able to write articles and papers and research-type papers, as we kind of talked about. A lot of what I do is research based. One of the things in my field, to raise you to the next level is to be published.

Published where?

Articles, journals, almost like what you’re doing, maybe not so much on that scale. Just to be published—when people are published, people seem to be noticed more and even a little bit more respected—even if I don’t agree with what you’re saying. I’m not trying to become a celebrity or anything like that, but when you go to apply for a job and you sit down for an interview and you say, ‘I’ve been published. These are the articles I’ve had published.’ I think it really bodes well for something you believe in. Like this project you’re doing now, you may publish an article from it and I think it kind of lends to your repertoire so to speak.

So, it sounds like what you’re saying is that the field—you must be reading journals and magazines that are professional in nature and so one of your goals would be to find a way to write a piece that could be published in the professional literature, around paramedics, EMS, those sorts of issues?

Absolutely.

Is there a journal or a title of a journal that you could give me—when you’re reading through it you’re thinking, ‘well, I could write something for this publication.’

Yeah, actually—that publication for the National Association of EMS Educators: Domain Cubed.

Right, we talked about that publication.

I’ll email you the article. That publication or The Journal of Emergency Medical Services, there’s a couple of publications that I’d love to try to get published in.

Are these professional journals where people are publishing research that they’ve conducted or where people are talking about different practices they’ve tried in their classroom or in the practice of EMS?

A little of both. You don’t see as much research publication as you do new things and old things that are coming back into style—new equipment, new techniques. They’re not so much a study that’s been published.

So, someone might write about a particular procedure that might be useful for other EMS people to try?

Yeah. Or, issues such as driving or worrying about advanced life-support before you’ve taken care of basic life-support. Stuff like that.

So, it’s people who are doing it, practitioners, writing about it?

Yes.

You want to become one of them?

I do. I think that it bodes well—

Have you tried?

No, not yet. It’s kind of the old, before I send something in to be published, I want to at least have it close—cause I know they all get, you send in an article and they say, ‘yes, we’ll publish it’ and they go through and tell you which corrections they’d like to see made so you go and make the corrections and send it back and it goes back and forth a couple of times. It would be difficult to accept—if it were to come back and it’s all marked up and you’ve got to make all these changes, I’d be like, ‘oh…’

So, are you waiting to get through The Writing Process course in the hope that that course will help prepare you to write a piece that’s going to be more likely to get published?

I am. Absolutely. The content is there, but it depends on who is doing the editing for it. If you’re looking at an editor and he’s going to edit it and you’ve got tons of grammatical and mechanical errors, is it even going to be worthwhile—they might say, ‘maybe this guy is not where we thought he would be.’

But let me ask you this—do you have ideas?

I do.

So, you’re reading through these articles or you’re at work doing your thing and you think, ‘jeez, I could write an article about that and I could see it being published in that’—because, you’ve read Domain Cubed for a while?

Yeah.

You have a sense of what they like and what they publish and sort of the flavor of the magazine? So, you have had some ideas where you have though, I could see myself pitching that idea to them and I could see where that would fit for them?

Yup.

Have you started writing anything?

No. Well, I have a couple things—I have a few things, outlines jotted down. But, it’s kind of like, before you publish something, if something is going in a way that is good for the field, and what you publish might slow it down because it’s published at the wrong time—I think that’s part of my hesitation. There are certain things that are building up in EMS—a direction that EMS is going, but like anything else, if you put the cart before the horse, it slows it down a lot. So, you kind of—I want to introduce it at the right time. So, it’s kind of like I was before my time.

But I was thinking back to our first conversation when you told me that one of your goals was to be on the ground when EMS begins to blossom into a bigger educational enterprise than it is now. It would seem that, if that’s the case, you would really need to be able to write articles that would be published—because if you want to be a part of that professional organization, usually the way that professional organizations function is that certain people are writing and disseminating information to other people, and if you want to be one of the people disseminating information, you’ve got to be able to write.

Absolutely. Like I said, when it comes down to being published—I’d hate to see it where you publish a piece and everybody goes ‘wow, absolutely’—but then it slows down the whole process. Don’t forget, this is a national magazine, it’s not like it’s just a local or regional—it’s a national magazine. So, if you publish an article and everybody jumps on board before it’s time—

When you say jumps on board before it’s time—what exactly are you referring to?

Well, we talk about, let’s say, in education—you publish a piece on technical writing and everybody’s like, ‘yeah, we should do it.’ So, the first course you get in college is a technical writing course instead of, say, The Writing Process. Everybody has got to have this. And they kind of forget about The Writing Process-‘we’ll pick that up later.’ Well, you really do need this course before you do that—but everybody…you write such a great article on technical writing that that’s what the mainstream is now. ‘Forget about that, we can round that out later on, this is what you really need now.’ And you kind of just slowed down the whole process. Certain things need to be introduced at a certain time—it’s kind of like building a house, you need to have that good, solid foundation. If you’ve got the window guy pitching you the best thing about windows and you’re like, ‘sure, I need those windows now.’ You buy the windows, now what do you do with the windows?

But, you’ve had some analogies that help me understand what you’re saying—but what is the actual content of your situation with the field—what are you afraid of…you have ideas of where you think the field should go, but you’re feeling like, the field may not be ready yet?

My biggest thing is that I believe that paramedic education and EMS, in general, should be taught in a post-secondary—at a college level, they should be taught at the college level. But the systems are not set up for it yet. You go to Florida, Florida would be a great regional thing to touch upon how good—and what it does for the profession in Florida because all paramedic programs are associated with the community colleges. Up here, there’s only one paramedic program that’s associated with a college. The rest of the 5 or 6 programs are all certificate programs. I think that you’ve really got to build it up and wait for the—the advanced scope of practice, they tried to have an advanced practice paramedic, which they were going to make at a bachelors—you had to have a bachelors degree in it. Well, that failed because the educational infrastructure wasn’t in place. You’ve got to have the infrastructure in place prior to implementing those type of changes. And they didn’t have the infrastructure in place.

So, you’re saying, why write an article advocating for the requirement of a bachelor’s degree for all paramedics going forward if the colleges and universities aren’t prepared to offer that?

Absolutely. Absolutely. You’re talking about critical care and taking it to the next level—well, before the next level is in place, you really need that infrastructure, you need to get some programs up and running and really make it work. That’s my thing and the articles that I’ve penned out are really the things I’d like to do—kind of some foresight, looking down the road some, and saying that now that this infrastructure—this is the right time to publish this article because it’s just going to be a catalyst to take it to the next level. I think a lot of it is timing. Timing is everything.

So, your writing goals are really closely tied in with your professional goals?

Absolutely.

This is a different track of questioning—what’s your sense of how you learned to write?

Or didn’t learn?

Sure.

I kind of think that I did just enough to get by in school. I didn’t have to be spectacular, just sort of went through the motions—or, you look like you’re going through the motions and it’s kind of a rite of passage. But overall, for the longest time, until I got into this field, I really didn’t have to write. There wasn’t a whole lot of writing except for reports or journal entries and those were one, maybe two sentences long. So, if you don’t use it, you lose it. So whatever I did learn in high school was pretty much gone. Now, being in this profession where I’m actually publishing memos, it’s kind of a thing where you don’t want to look too awful at writing because you’re a manager—it’s the assumption that people in offices should know how to write. And it really doesn’t look well for you or the guy who hired you if you don’t live up to those expectations. It’s really difficult. It’s kind of embarrassing.

So you feel as though you’ve risen to a level of responsibility in your field—we were joking about this a week or two ago—to a managerial position. I was asking, are you the paperwork guy. If you were just the guy out on the truck, making calls, the writing you would have to do would be fairly minimal?

Yeah. Because everything is one sentence.

But now, you’re the guy in the office, you’re in a managerial position. What you’re saying is that in some ways your writing skills don’t measure up to that title?

Absolutely.

That must be hard.

And you can even get through college fairly easy—well, I won’t say fairly easy…it’s easy for me because I’m married, so I have my wife edit all my papers. So, yeah, she edits my papers, but—

How do you deal with that situation where you have to write a memo and a lot of people are going to see it and you feel like your credibility as the trainer is on the line if you send out a memo to people and they can’t understand it?

I have my boss edit it—‘here, proof this for me.’

And he’s okay with that?

Yeah, I don’t send out that many memos. I try not to. So, it makes it difficult.

But you’re doing powerpoint presentations in front of groups—you have to establish a level of credibility.

But, powerpoint presentations are easy because everything is bulleted. You’re not writing compositions in powerpoint and if you are, you’re doing it all too wrong. Public speaking is not that hard for me.

So, powerpoint is manageable because it’s small chunks?

Yup.

But if you had to write a couple page report with multiple paragraphs, that would be a different situation?

Absolutely. Absolutely. And for me, like I said, in order for me to write mechanically and grammatically correct, I need to see it, I need to look at sentence structure and see the sentence structure—to me, it’s visual.

(short discussion about teaching—mention of Vygotsky, reflection, questioning and scaffolding, classroom dialogue—he’s making the analogy with his ability to analyze or pick apart how someone teaches with the issue of analyzing or picking apart how a sentence is constructed)

What about in general—not your experience, but just generally, what is your sense of how people learn how to write?

Trial by error. People who do a vast amount of reading, I think really pick it up a lot more. Because, what do you do? You look at sentence structure as you’re doing it. For me, I read for content—now, I can look at a sentence and go, ‘yeah, that’s a long sentence.’ But, a lot of people—I think a lot of people learn by reading because you’re looking at sentence structure, you’re looking at something that is complete. How do you learn architecture? You go look at buildings that are already built.

You read a number of different journals—do you feel like your writing has improved as you’ve done more reading?

Um, a little bit.

Do you read as a writer?

No, I read as a sponge. I’m looking for the point. But if I could learn to read as a writer—then I could look at things from a multi-directional area—I can look at content and I can look at sentence structure.

But you must read as a writer to some extent if you’ve begun to—in order to imagine how you might pitch a particular idea to a particular publication, you must be reading as a writer, to some extent, because otherwise you would be coming up with ideas that would never have a chance getting published—do you know what I’m saying?

I do. You’re right. When I read, I read as a writer not so much as mechanics—as far as punctuation and stuff like that, but how ideas flow—how do you move from one subject through another, to another, to come to a conclusion. I read for the flow of the information, as opposed to—and you’re right, even in a professional journal, in articles, the topic, the transition from idea to idea has to flow—it can’t be abrupt change. And even when there is an advanced change, there usually is an advanced organizer to key you in on this change—

Sub-headings.

Right, sub-headings, but advance organizers, ‘next we’re going to talk about…’

Transitions.

Right. It makes that transition that much smoother.

If you’re noticing those things, you’re reading as a writer because if you were to write an article and try to send it to domain cubed—there are a number of different genres within what appears in that magazine, maybe a how-to, a profile, so, if you are reading as a writer, you are noticing genres—you’re noticing that one article is put together one way and another is put together a different way and I’d like to put my article together this way, but I need a model for that so I’m going to look at how this guy did it and I’ll try to make mine fit into a similar kind of format.

Right.

That’s reading as a writer.

Well, there’s so many different aspects of writing and for me, because I’m so deficient in the mechanics and the grammar, that’s what—I’m like, that’s my—I don’t want to say fear—but that’s my biggest stumbling block. The things that you are comfortable with—the things you enjoy, those aren’t as blatantly obvious to you as…if we talked about swimming and you liked to swim, you’d kind of get excited, let’s go jump in the water. But if you couldn’t swim, and I said, we’re going to go scuba diving in the Caribbean—what’s going to happen to you now? You’re going to have serious palpitations. That’s kind of thing—when we talk about writing, I’m always envisioning the worst. It’s like flying—people are nervous about flying, what are they thinking about?

But we’ve talked about the mechanics and the grammatical piece—but the thing I’m talking about, reading a professional publication and imagining an article that you might submit to them—what we’re talking about is the rhetorical aspects, the purpose, the audience, the genre, the context—and I guess what, at the same time that I try to be sympathetic to what you’re saying, but the rhetorical aspects seem so much more complicated to me, and the rhetorical aspects you seem very savvy in understanding them. It may just be because of who I teach—I have many students who could put together a paper without a single error that makes no point. And says nothing new and doesn’t conform to certain genres and doesn’t consider its audience at all. Those, to me, are the big things that I feel like I need to teach those students. So, I look at you and I think, ‘this guy has THE PIECE—to me, it’s like (drawing) if this is mechanics on level of importance and this is understanding rhetoric. So, when I hear you dwelling on this I keep saying, yeah, okay, okay. But I keep trying to highlight—look what you understand about this one—rhetoric—that I value so much. But I also don’t want to devalue what you’re saying.

That comes easy to me because I guess I do enough reading on that. So, if somebody says, ‘wow, you did that really good.’ Your backhand is perfect. But if you play to one side of the court, favoring the backhand, mostly everything you are going to do is a backhand. So, if that’s your style and you’re always doing backhands, you’re like, yeah, that’s the easy part, it’s my—

Forehand!

But what do you do? That’s why your forehand is weak—you compensate to play your best side. But when somebody goes to you, you’ve got such an awesome backhand, well, thanks, but the backhand comes naturally to me.

Right, that doesn’t help me.

---

What interests me about this passage (from Interview #5):

1. Brad brings real-life writing goals (to write for a professional journal) and projects ("Well, I have a couple things—I have a few things, outlines jotted down.") with him.
2. Brad is already a participant in a professional/academic discourse community (EMS Education--he mentions two journals that he reads). Like me, he is a consumer in the community, but not yet a producer.
3. Brad has rhetorical knowledge about how (academic/professional) discourse communities, in general, operate or work. 

Tentative title of the TETYC article: The Things They Carry: ???.

3/10

Update: I am in the middle of an ongoing project of reviewing the transcripts of the five other adult students about whom I DID NOT write in my dissertation. This has been an interesting process. There is a richness in these transcripts that really adds to the project in some important ways. As i go over these transcripts, I can't help feeling how much was left out of my dissertation project. This project has gone through so many stages--I have to keep convincing myself that this is all just part of the process and that the amount of time it's taking is completely normal, given all that I have going on. 

I think that carefully reading through Kathy Sohn's C's essay really clarified my project for me and how I wish I had had that essay to read while I was working on the project itself. In her book, she focuses, as I did in my dissertation, on three participants in the study--but she draws on all the participants, throughout the book, even though she's only focused on 3 of them. In the article, she focuses on the group of seven or however many there are. Essentially, she just draws a series of general conclusions/implications based on her case studies. Here they are (these fall under the heading "Literacy practices since college"):

• Literacy for the Appalachian women in this study served different purposes than it might in the larger population.
  
• Academic literacy in the form of expressivist writing enabled the women after some initial difficulties to tell stories they had not been able to tell, moving them from silence to voice.
  
• The women in this study illustrate the intergenerational effects of literacy in multiple directions. 
  
• The women in this study chose traditional occupations because not many nontraditional jobs exist in the immediate region, because a depressed economy does not offer many jobs for either gender, and because in doing so, they were able to preserve their families.
  
• Achieving academic literacy for working-class nontraditional women is a double-edged sword, fraught with obstacles that might seem insurmountable to traditional students, but one that ultimately liberates women from abuse and other ills.
  
• Academic literacy did not destroy community for the women in this study. They overcame poor public school experiences, constraints of gender, and dead-end jobs to get a college education, adapting academic literacy to their own purposes, and maintaining the common sense they valued. 
  
• Whether they got a job or not, the women continually praised the college for helping them to move from silence to voice.
  
• The women are making their voices heard by using literacy in their jobs, community, and homes. Knowing the power of literacy, they are invested in the concept of lifelong learning.
  

As I continue to work on this project and begin to shape an article which draws on all the case studies I conducted, I recognize the way that I shaped the dissertation, perhaps unfairly. I chose the three most...interesting? literate? I don't know what, participants in my study. I must have done this for a reason--perhaps because they had the most amount of writing to show me from outside of school. Yes, I think this may have had something to do with it. But I lost something there, too. There is a richness to the cross section of 8 participants that is lost. Those 8 participants more closely resemble the bigger picture and more accurately capture the adult student population than the three I chose to write about. How so? There are two moms in that group--both paraprofessionals. Both, admittedly, living at or near poverty. Both raising children by themselves--one the result of a divorce, another the result of a spouse's death. These women reflect important issues and are an important part of the study. There is also one non-native speaker. This is important. And there is one twenty-something. This is important. So, there is a richness that was lost in excluding these participants. I need to bring that richness back. 

So, I stand at the point now where I have two projects going on simultaneously:

1. Revising the manuscript for CE. Have not yet really begun this work yet.

2. Drafting the new manuscript, which, if I am to be honest, is the manuscript I should have written a long time ago, but didn't quite know how to write. Kathy Sohn has shown me how (I wonder who showed her). Currently, I have two more students whose transcripts I must summarize before I can begin writing. I've already begun mapping out my implications. The question this article will address seems to take me back to the question I was asking when I first conceived of the project: What do we need to know about the literate lives of today's adult student population? 

3/3

Wrote Jeff Sommers of TETYC to ask about how to search the journal for pieces about adult learners. In his email back to me, he writes:

The May issue of each year has an index to the articles that have appeared during the year. That may be helpful. I'm sure there was an essay by Lynn Quitman Troyka many years ago that was helpful and probably still has value. This year's May issue focuses on teaching English during a time of war and those essays explore the challenges of teaching veterans. I also recall an essay by Janet Lucas in the past 2 years or so about the challenges of working with students whose writing reveals very private matters; her case study is of an adult student who had served time in prison for murder.

I don't know if that's helpful to you or not. When TETYC essays focus on students, it is often the case that some of those students are adults. I don't recall publishing anything in the past 3 years of my term that explicitly names "adult learners" as the focus.

If that last sentence isn't an invitation to submit my work to him, I don't what is. 

3/2

An interesting review article, by Lynn Z. Bloom, in JAC, of Jeffrey Sommer's Teaching Writing to Adults closes with this paragraph:

In fact, the main trouble with Teaching Writing To Adults is that it isn’t Lives on the Boundary. It is Sommer’s fate to have published an adequate but arid volume on how to teach writing to adults in the same year that Mike Rose’s brilliant and humane work appeared on the same subject. Teaching Writing to Adults does the job, but it is Lives on the Boundary that will linger, indelibly, in our hearts and minds and classrooms.

Is there something in this new article that needs to be said about Lives on the Boundary?

Sohn is talking about the power of expressivist pedagogies...do I want to do something with this, suggest that for some, connecting with professional writing might be more meaningful than writing about the self? What are the complications of asking adults to write about the self?

The questions I'm asking: What do we know about the literacy histories and current literate practices of adult students?

How do we define adult students? It seems as though some classification work should be involved in this piece? See Merriam and Caffarella?

Article:

Section 1: Why are adult students in school? Overview...draw on what my students say, mix in research.

Section 2: Description of study

• Includes description of what I did and why.
• Overview of participants
• Table with composite data
• Explanation of research cite
• Explanation of interviewing process

Section 3: Academic, Professional and Community Literacy (overview)

Section 4: Organized around implication statements and draws on all seven research participants. (Sohn writes: "Acknowledging once again that these findings are not generalizable, I highlight the major arguments" (432) and offers 8 arguments/implications of her work. Her implications engaged issues of literacy, education, family, work.) See post for my "Implications."

Section 5: Wrap-up/conclusion.

So, now, the question is--is Sohn's framework the right one for me? Do I have the implications that she has? There will be a considerable amount of work to do to go back and revisit the transcripts of the other 5 people I didn't write about in my dissertation. But that work could be interesting and useful. The question is--should the article focus on 2-3 learners, in particular, or should it focus on the whole gang?

Outlining Implications

1. Some adult students arrive in the classroom with real rhetorical or literacy problems in hand and in mind. Rhetorical situations, often stemming from the workplace, may follow such students to school. These serve as potential resources to be tapped. 
   
2. Many adult students are immersed in a complex discursive web in their jobs, where they use writing to get work done in a variety of ways and writing is always connected to "getting things done."
   
3. Conventions of authorship in the workplace are quite different from the classroom and students may transport these conventions to the classroom. 
   
4. Adult students will have varied relationships to academic literacy instruction and various literacy histories--while some of them will bring stories of negative experiences with literacy, some will not. Some, in fact, will have very positive associations with literacy and literacy instruction. In any event, these histories will invariably shape the literacy work one asks such students to do.
   
5. In their capacity as workers, many adult students are not just writers, but serve as teachers of writing and/or local writing consultants. 
   
6. Adult students will likely have considerable experience producing specific genres of professional writing--antecedent genres. Because of the frequency with which they produce them, such genres come to have considerable hold over adult students composing imaginations. Adult students may sometimes mistakenly (and unknowingly) draw on their knowledge of these alpha or dominant genres in their academic writing. These genres may or may not serve as useful antecedents for the academic genres writing teachers invite students to produce in composition classrooms. 
   
7. Some adult students, when they arrive in the classroom, may already been engaged in any number of self-sponsored literate endeavors--these could serve as potential resources for the teaching of writin (John's blog). 
8. School implications: the path is not linear or neat.

BIG ONES:

Writing teachers who work with with adult or mixed (traditional and non-traditional) student populations need to know something about professional writing in order to meet such students where they are and to understand the rhetorical universe in which they swim when they are not in class.

A discussion of the needs and experiences of adult and non-traditional students should be a part of any conversation addressing issues of diversity in the writing classroom (i.e., TA training or graduate education). 

Research with adult student populations has shown that adult students need their coursework to be relevant to their lives. While assignments which ask such students to draw on their own personal experiences may work well with such students, they may also seem like an imposition, especially if the instructor is younger than her charges. Like their instructors (and like most Americans), most adult students are committed workers, who spend most of their waking hours at their jobs and whose lives have come to revolve around their work. Writing teachers who work with adult or mixed (traditional and non-traditional) student populations should try to view their students' workplace literacy practices and knowledge as resources to be tapped, not obstacles to overcome, in the writing classroom. 

There was an article about workplace ethnography...this was the only essay I saw which attempted to engage adult students in a way which I think could really succeed, by tapping into their professional knowledge and experience.