Writing at Exeter?

I often joke that although writing may have been invented some five thousand years ago it was discovered only about twenty years ago, at least in American public schools. But this was not true of Exeter, where writing to know was thriving long before I arrived there in 1955. Oh, they assigned more lit crit papers than they should have, and kept students writing in a narrower range than they read, but some English teachers there understood that self-development is central and that the best way to achiever good exposition and essay is to cultivate personal writing first. So some of them pioneered in teaching autobiographical and investigative writing along with creative writing, not as specialties or electives but as staples. When I left Exeter after ten years to work with public schools, it was very much because I couldn't bear that such a small portion of American youth should get educational opportunities that all ought to have. (20)

From James Moffett's "Coming Out Right" In Taking Stock: The Writing Process Movement in the 90s (Tobin/Newkirk)

Everyday Literacy

In addition, the literacy practices of people who write extensively in their everyday lives have not been studied very much. (Barton, Literacy: An Introduction to the Ecology of Written Language, p. 173)

Footnote:

Barton and Padmore. 1991. "Roles, networks and values in everyday writing." In D. Barton and R. Ivanic (eds). Writing in the community. London: Sage, pp. 58-77.

Sheridan et. al. 2000. Writing ourselves: Mass observation and literacy practices. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

Brandt, D. Writing for a Living: Literacy and the Knowledge Economy.

On English Teachers (bibliography)

Conroy, Pat. My Reading Life. New York: Nan A. Talese, 2010.

Conroy writes a good deal about an English teacher who influenced his life.

Revising Syllabi

Hi Chidsey:

I am writing off list...I was moved by your post to WPA on revising your eng 111 course. You close your post with: "Anyone else have this ritual of revising their FYC syllabus almost
every year? Anyone else have reservations about it?"

I have now been teaching FYC almost every year since 1997. In the beginning, I really thought that I was working towards "getting down" my syllabus so that I would never have to revise it again adn could focus on other things. I remember telling my advisor, my first year of grad school (Ph.D.) that I thought I was finally figuring out how to teach FYC. His response was hilarious, upon reflection. "Oh really," he said (he had been teaching the course for probably 30 years at that point. "Do tell!"

Anyway, I continually revise my syllabus--almost every year, every semester. Factors which have influenced this process:

1. Institutional (e.g. my first two years on the tenure track, at two different schools, I was given two different textbooks, books which could not have been more dissimilar, and told to use them at least for the first year, to get a sense of "how we teach comp here")

2. Personal Interest (e.g., I am trying out Doug Downs and Elizabeth Wardle's writing-about-writing approach this term)

3. Shifting pedagogical/theoretical orientation (e.g., The first five or so years that I taught, Don Murray's _The Craft of Revision_ was my staple in FYC. Now, it's hard for me to imagine ever assigning that text in an FYC class).

4. Professional Development (e.g., I think that for those who teach mostly FYC, there is a desire to try things that others with more clout, for lack of a better word, might be able to do in upper-level or special topics courses. This is happening with me write now--I am teaching a 200-level Expo Writing course on food that I could easily imagine being a 300/400 level "rhetoric of" type course. But, because I am junior faculty at this point and not getting a 300/400 level topics course and because, at least for now, there are NO courses in comp or rhet over the 200 level in my Dept, I load up my 200 level Expository Writing course with stuff I wish I could be doing elsewhere).

Hmnn...this is all interesting and something that I've thought about in a kind of unstructured way for a long time but never really written about. I wonder...who else has written about all fo this? Do you know? It seems like something we all must go through...revisiting the FYC course.

Thanks for listening and for getting me writing!

Male Students and Literacy Narratives

Reading a terrific piece this morning (that I wish I had had the foresight to write):

Launius, Christie. "Brains versus Brawn: Classed and Racialized Masculinity in Literacy Narratives by Rose, Rodriguez,Villanueva,and Gilyard." CCC 61:2 (Dec. 2009): W283-W309.

A brilliant project that got me thinking about my Murray project. She organizes her article into three sections, looking, first, at how the conflict between working class masculinity and school/literacy begins in each of the narratives, how it is managed, and then how it is resolved. She has insight things to say about each of the narratives--the way that Rose and Rodriguez leave their working-class masculinity behind and Gilyard and Villanueva work to maintain and incorporate it--I think she points out that Villanueva never quite gives it up and Gilyard works towards a both/and stance. She writes:

Just as they argue against assimilation, their narratives reveal that they believe it possible and desirable to maintain aspects of working-class masculinity while obtaining an education. (W302)

And

Of the four writers, Gilyard and Villanueva were the most successful at performing working-class masculinity and are the two whose narratives express a desire to maintain it; by contrast, Rodriguez and Rose admired working-class masculin- ity as adolescents, but didn’t really fulfill its mandates, a fact which I believe informs their rhetorical efforts to divest it of its power and potency. (W305)

In the end, Launius attempts to draw implications for those who work with working-class male (and female) students.

This piece is terrific and would serve as an excellent piece of (rhetorical, feminist, critical, literary) analysis for me and my students. Furthermore, it suggests an interesting approach to organizing readings in a future course on men and masculinity.

---

Also, just rediscovered "She Toiled for A Living: Writing Lives and Identities of Older Female Students," a chapter by Mary Hallet. It might be worth revisiting this piece and thinking through a similar piece "of Older Male Students." It hasn't occurred to me, but it might be interesting to talk to male students--think about Brad or Joe and their stories of growing up and school, reading and writing and the place these activities held in their lives.

Composition as Opposition

I'm thinking today of a project that has been on my mind since graduate school and I've just stumbled upon this phrase: composition as opposition. Opposition. To whom? To what?

To traditional notions of writing

To grammar or explicit grammar instruction

To the phonies (Murray/Macrorie)

To the academy itself (we teach how to not what to)

To authority! (Murray/Macrorie)

To our literature colleagues

This is what expressivism offers or offered me in my early to mid-20s. It fit so nicely with my movement out of literary study. Much of this is about authority, a romantic notion of the self? The need to oppose authority.

Questions: why do expressive notions appeal to much to new teachers of writing, like my former self?

An interesting quote from Paul Butler: I think we all begin in expressivism and then we grow up.

What are the possibilities for this project? What kind of analysis? What is meant by an oppositional stance? Who has theorized this? Who do I go to? Those early, angry, passionate years in the journals? What do we have to learn from them?

Marjorie embodies this ethos in a way. And somewhere in here, the transformational trope. Bringing students and others over to our side. Drinking the cool aid. Interesting. It would be interesting to browse CCC or CE from 1971 forward and try to get a sense of whether this oppositional stance really existed or whether I'm imagining it.

Opposition to the current traditionalists, who are the authority figures...

Growing up a process baby.

The conflation of the terms process and expressivist.

In a post to the WPA, 1/6/10, Rich Haswell coins the phrase:

Very much in the anti-establishment, crap-detection, remove-the-social/cognitive-blinkers tradition of the late 1950s and 1960s.

Training Graduate Students to talk with faculty about writing

Just came back from an impromptu meeting with Randy DeSimone. He showed me a writing assignment he gives. Clearly he drank the cool-aid. He says it all goes back to Toby Fulwiler and the workshop he did here years ago. Interesting to think about how we get faculty members to drink the cool-aid or not. Faculty in other disciplines who have had their teaching transformed by process pedagogy and those who have not. How do we get faculty to change their orientation towards writing and then to change their actual classroom practice? Now there is a question worth asking and looking into...

There might be a project in here somewhere.

When Ideas Come

Intrigued by the way people experience moments of discursive epiphany...

Brotto is surrounded by skepticism. And she herself told me that it might take till the publication of the D.S.M.-VI, probably two decades from now, for science to establish sound norms for women’s desire. But all the logical entanglements and reasons for doubt haven’t worn her down in her work on the manual, not at all. Just before we met in August, she said, she slid out of bed in the middle of the night once again, struck by a moment of clarity, and added one of the criteria.

Women Who Want to Want (NY Times, 11/24/09)

Is it Teacher Research?

I'm thinking tonight about the opportunity I have this spring, teaching two sections of FYC at RIC, to write about teaching writing. A few years back, I read a book called I'm the Teacher, You're the Student, written by a conservative history teacher at Emory University. In the book, which was, I think, organized, simply, by weeks (1, 2, 3), this guy walks you through teaching a history course--the questions he asks about the work, the students, everything. He sort of lays out the internal conversation that is in his head as he makes his way through the semester. He's a bit of a veteran; he's been at it for some time, so he has all kinds of interesting reflections on history, the teaching of history, students, college, etc. (even writing!)

I'm thinking that I might write a similar kind of piece, not sure how long, documenting my experiences teaching writing. Now, the questions: his book was written for lay-readers and was likely written because he already has tenure and didn't have to worry about crossing over to mainstream audiences. The book lacks any sort of reflexivity or methodology. It would not be considered scholarly, I don't think.

So, could I write such a book or at least an article? Possible readers:

1. Professors in other disciplines.

2. Future teachers of FYC.

On one level, I know I could and know I would enjoy writing such a piece in a non-scholarly way.

But another part of me wants to think about this as a project of teacher research, so perhaps I should look into this term. Do I want to design an actual study, get IRB approval, all that?

I have a model for what such a project could look like if it were non-scholarly: the guy who wrote the book on what it's like to teach a history class. But what about people who have studied their own pedagogy and classrooms in a more scholarly way, with a methodology and rationale and all of that? Who has done that, if anyone?

This would fall under the heading of making the best out of a difficult situation.

Under the Influence

I'm thinking about the way we fall under the influence of pedagogies and writing theories. I'm thinking about the ways in which our assignments serve as evidence of our theoretical/methodological orientations. Was it James Berlin: "We all teach the writing process, the question is which process we're teaching"? Something along those lines.

Take my Research Project 1 from ENGL 230, fall 2009. This hit me just the other day, that this assignment straddles two ways of seeing or of thinking about writing. How so? On one hand, I am asking students to go out and talk to a professional person, to learn about the kind(s) of writing he or she does on the job. This assignment is a reflection of the new me and by new me, I mean, the me that thinks about discourse communities, activity theory, rhetorical genre theory, Beaufort, World's Apart, etc. I want students to listen to someone talk about the role of workplace writing in their experience. Workplace writing, in and of itself, this is something that belongs to the new me.

But then, in the middle section of this assignment, I fall back on the old me. The old me is write-to-learn, process, Murray, reflection, Bonnie, UNH, etc. So, there is this section:

In the section of your Progress Report called “Work Completed,” draw on your interview transcript and the documents your participant shared with you to respond to the following questions:

1. What was the most interesting thing you learned about a) the work your participant does, b) the role of writing in your participant’s work?
2. As regards the work and the writing your participant does, what surprised or intrigued you?
3. What additional questions do you wish you had asked or would ask, now, having had some time to type up the transcript and reflect on the interview process?

Now, here, I am asking students to reflect, and this is good, but what I AM NOT asking them to do is to tie their reflection to Writing in the Real World or to any of the terminology that they have been learning. This is a HUGE error on my part (and if I'm smart, I'll revise that assignment sheet before they do this part of the project). In these questions, I fall back on those three portfolio reflection questions (what did you learn, what surprised you, what would you do differently?) that Bonnie first gave me way back in 1996! If I was thinking like the new me, I would have asked a different set of questions. I would have asked, for example, what did you learn about the unique communication patterns of the discourse community of which your participant is a member? I would have asked, what are the specific genres of writing your participant produces in his/her discourse community? I might have asked the students to inquire about the low-status or high-status texts that their participant produces. I might have asked them to ask about...and here it is, right? I could have asked them draw on the five knowledge domains--I could have and should have had the students organize their questions (and so it's not just this part of the assignment that is the problem, but also the interview questions themselves)--I could have had the students ask questions about the kinds of subject matter knowledge, rhetorical knowledge, genre knowledge, writing process knowledge and discourse community knowledge their participants have gained in their particular workplaces. I should have made an explicit connection between that diagram on p. 64 of the book and the interview questions and also the write-up of the report. Instead, I fell back on three questions that are very familiar to me.

So, what I'm intrigued by tonight is the idea of liminal states--of the way we fall under the influence of theories, of how hard it is to shake a theoretical or pedagogical orientation. The assignment sheet for Research Project 1 is a fascinating illustration of my own theoretical/pedagogical movement or transition or journey--and perhaps of the way it is not yet complete.

So, I'm thinking about assignment sheets, the genre of the assignment sheet and what they reveal about our journeys--where we have been and where we are going. Who has done research on the genre of the assignment sheet (and now I'm thinking like the new me again)? It's the things that are inscribed on those sheets, what we see when/if we read them between the lines, as I am able to do with my own for Research Project 1.

Professional Writing and WAW?

Is this useful for WAW?

See p. 33-35 in Rhetorical Genre Studies and beyond...

These theoretical notions [activity theory, situated learning, legitimate peripheral participation, communities of practice] are directly relevant to the study of novices learning genres of, and integrating into, professional workplace communities. (35)

Just Brainstorming

As I continue to work on this article--THE article I should have written from the work in my dissertation--I find myself wondering, what's next?

I am in year 2 on the tenure-track. I have three years to go. There is time, if I start now, to get another project (or two) going. But there is also the question about whether to take this current project to the stage of book proposal--and the question of what that book would look like.

By the time I finish this article, I think I will feel as though I have milked the project for a good deal of what it is worth. What next?

Ideas:

• Adult learners in the comp classroom (a one semester ethnographic project)
• College writers transitioning into workplace writers (a 2-3 year project)
• Adult learners writing in the academy (a longitudinal, multi-year project)
• WID project, writing in accounting (a one semester or more project)
• A project which involves writing teachers at the post-secondary level, engages them in discussion about the public nature of what they do, publicly invented new classes.

Perhaps I should begin drafting the next project this semester, so I can get something new up in the air for A) next year's CCCC's proposal and/or B) the International Conference on Writing proposal. But what? Who should I talk to about this? Who can I talk to?

And then, of course, there is the issue of study design and getting IRB approval, which would be necessary for any/all of these ideas.

I'm thinking that one way of doing this could be:

1. Finish the "Carry" article this fall--send out for publication.
2. Initiate the conversation with Jane this week about working together next term (depending on her course schedule) on writing with accounting students.
3. Begin drafting an IRB proposal to find perhaps a dozen graduating seniors from various discplines to follow as they transition from college to work in 2010. I'm thinking of something along the lines of Anne Beaufort's work with "Tim" in College Writing and Beyond. But just focusing on the last semester and the transition to work--a series of interviews, the first one coming just before the graduate and then perhaps quarterly after that?

Getting the Word Out?

Fell asleep last night thinking about why it seems that 40+ years of research has changed so few minds about what writing is and how we learn it. This ties into an earlier idea I had, after talking to Brooke one day, feeling like her idea of who an English professor is is not who I am. Then, stumbled upon this quote today. The passage appears in Graf/Birkenstein's _They Say/I Say_. They are quoting the Connors/Lunsford study of error in student writing. In this passage, Connors/Lunsford are quoting Peter Elbow:

And certainly our noting of errors on student papers gives no one any great joy; as Peter Elbow says, English is most often associated either with grammar or with high literature--"two things designed to make folks feel most out of it." (p. 117 in Graf/Birkenstein)

Masculinity and Harvard Comp

An Open Source radio show that gets me thinking about my project on masculinity, the turn of the 20th century, TR, and the establishment of comp at Harvard:

Jackson Lears on Obama's Sorrows of Empire

And a book that I might check out: Rebirth of a Nation (Lears)

Lydon's summary:

In Lears’ rueful reconsideration of the story, Teddy Roosevelt reemerges as the poster-face of the era: the first captain of American empire and true ancestor of the bathetic George W. Bush.

The first Gilded Age and its lingering effects are almost reducible to a contest of ideas and temperaments between a great teacher and his student who became a giant president.

“Unless we keep the barbarian virtues,” Teddy Roosevelt wrote in 1899, “gaining the civilized ones will be of little avail.”

Masculinity and Harvard Comp

If I ever get back to the point where I am going to tackle a project on gender and the first Harvard writing course, I might take a look at:

"Rhetoric for the Meritocracy: The Creation of Composition at Harvard (1976)" by Wallace Douglas. See The Norton Book of Composition Studies, p. 74)

Also:

Godkin, E.L. "The Illiteracy of American Boys." Educational Review 8 (1897): 1-9.

4/5 ANOTHER PROJECT

Come to find out that a good deal of the CCC 33.3 issue (October 1982) was devoted to adult learners. This might be useful if I ever get around to a project on discursive constructions of adult learners in composition studies. Here is the paragraph from the "Editor's Note" from that issue:

The October issue continues the exploration, begun in May, of ways to respond to students' writing. And it begins the examination of an increasingly important concern among teachers of composition: the activities and needs of adult writers-adults returning to college and adults on the job. (251)

3/2 (2) (ANOTHER PROJECT)

This project I've been getting more and more interested in, lately, the public nature of teaching--the way that you are doing something where you are trying something out for the first time, in front of an audience of people. It could be something as small as an in-class activity or as big as a new class. Here's a quote from Barbara Gleason from a piece I found online that captures what I'm getting at: 

When we walk into a writing class for the first time, most of us, whether we're new or experienced teachers, feel at least some apprehension. Why? In part because teaching involves performance: both our successes and failures will be largely public.

I wish I had seen a book on public failure or maybe it's public experimentation. Trying new things out publicly seems to be such a big part of what I do when I teach, I can't help wonder how other writing teachers deal with this, what others have written about it. There may be a new project here.