Lynn Beene is beginning her blog, Beeneblog, using it to catalogue and distribute the Department's Calls for Proposals.
Yay Lynn Beene!
Were you teaching English 102 at this moment in history (English 102 is the course in argumentation), would you abandon your promised syllabus and turn students to the study of the rhetorics of war?
Would you ask them to engage in dialogue? What moves would you make (specifically) to assure that this discussion became productive? How might you define "productive"? How would you prompt writing?
Or would you stick to the Signs of LIfe readings? Or would you introduce dialogue on war by some other means?
We talked about the lack of a good explanation for post-modern. How to speak and write post-modern tries to do just that. It has elements of parody in it, which I appreciate since I'm a plain-speaking kind of gal. Just for fun, check out Mr. T's T'inatorized explanation of postmodern. My god, it's either make fun of it or run away screaming!
Back in MLA's Profession 1996, Leroy Searle, Director of the Center for the Humanities at UWash, expresses concern about assaults made on the funciton of institutions of higher ed. and how students and faculty should respond.
His proposal: required study of institutional culture at the undergraduate level:
“I suggest that universities add a new graduation requirement, an explicitly political requirement, for all our undergraduates. It would, of course, be wonderful if we could first require all faculty members to meet it too, but that would render my suggestion not so much political as wildly utopian. The requirement is simply that students study, in detail, the history of the institution where they pursue a degree. They need to know how it is funded and how it is governed. They need to know the story of the place, with enough narrative particularly to recognize that what surrounds them was built step by step and is not part of some Transcendental Fiat that merely called it forth” (italics mine, 20-21).
WAIT:Isn't that what we're doing in Engl. 640 and to a degree 538? And what does his glib but true remark about faculty participation say about the more widespeard doubt faculty have in exposing graduate students to this kind of knowledge--
"In a graduate class, for god's sake? Are you insane? Never here at UNM's English program: graduate students need to know disciplinary content--that's why they're here."
(Remember, only 3 grads enrolled in 640.)
poetrywhore.co.uk expresses their strong belief that "poetry on the web is a bad idea."
I found something seductive about the approach of Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students... perhaps it was the conjured image in my mind throughout of the ancient Greek learning system, which apparently involved intense structure and rigorous discipline. I like the contextuality of the method of teaching rhetoric as well-- always responding to and using history, myth, and the great works as a jumping off point. The focus on imitation and copying as ways of learning made alot of sense to me. But more than that, I think it is the structuredness and established tradition that has an appeal. Sometimes it feels like teaching writing is a free for all-- too many options, too many theories and practices to choose from. It seems fairly impossible to me to even be aware of all options one has about how to best teach writing and rhetoric. I wonder if the advantages of our system outweigh the advantages of the ancient system? In any case, students might be inspired when they imagine they are part of an ancient system of learning-- it might help them reconceive what rhetoric is and why it is so important. It certainly made me rethink how writing and rhetoric are taught currently.
What would you want undergrad students to do/read in a 400-level education class called "Teaching Writing"?
Let's say you're a new English dept. faculty member at a college in the Northwest. Your students are primarily secondary education majors who enroll in your class to learn about "teaching writing."
What required texts are appropriate for such a course? Anything we've read so far?
And what kinds of learning/writing activities would you ask these students to do?
To teach the evaluation process for a web page, I'd go back to a discussion of "traditional media" (radio, television, print) and discuss one of the most important concepts in media studies, the gatekeeper.
Traditional news outlets serve as gatekeepers, deciding what is "news" and how it should be covered. It can do this because it has credibility, in part, because of the tremendous barrier to entry. To have a TV station, radio station, or newspaper requires a lot of money, so those entities are theorhetically 'vetted' by their need to be seen as a respected source in order to generate revenue. There is a counter-opinion that says traditional media is tainted by its need for revenue and ratings which colors the types of things it covers and how it frames what it covers.
The Paul Wall : Who Are Your Gatekeepers? discusses gatekeepers in depth.
I'd then talk about the gatekeepers of traditional media versus the gatekeepers for new media (innumerable search engines, corporate media sites, news feeds, web celebrities, individuals) and explain how each of these entities affects the dissemination of information.
The web opened a pandora's box full of gatekeepers which perform the valuable service of filtering the incredible amount of information bombarding us every day, but at a cost. The web has taken much of the barrier to entry away. Anyone online can be a gatekeeper of sorts, albeit without the potential for revenue that traditional media enjoys (there are exceptions to the no-revenue rule like www.instapundit.com and www.andrewsullivan.com).
Understanding gatekeepers, the services they provide and the bias they introduce in terms of what gets disseminated, is integral to evaluating any individual web page.
From there, I'd talk about how to evaluate a particular site. Who produced it? (How can you tell?) Why is it there (where is it?)? What other pages have they produced and how do those relate to this particular one? What do the site's visuals say about the producer? What does the site's links say about the producer?
As is patently obvious, I'm really a trial-by-fire teacher more then a theorist. I have a real hard time with theory that I can't immediately apply to a classroom experience.
Would you call Bazerman's appeal (see below) an example of "epideictic?
From Bazerman's recent post on the H-rhetor listserv: "Where are rhetoricians, and why aren't they working to create debate on their campuses? At UCSB we have introduced a resolution to the faculty legislature to endorse the statement of over 40 Nobel Laureates. . . . And we have begun a vigorous campus debate. Rhetorical knowledge is of good use in organizing forums and framing questions that provide the opportunity for our current exigencies to take shape into useful rhetorical action. . . . The nation is in crisis and we need good words, spoken well, by good people."
Does B's call fall under Crosswhite's critique (104-109) of epideictic?
And what do you make of the absence B speaks of on the H-rhetor listserv? Is he right?
So I'm warming up to the idea of using blogs to teach students to evaluate information, whether for Sam's English class or a Freshman Comp class. Bookmarking the world: Weblog applications in education illustrates how weblogs could be used in this way. This does along with my role in the "Communications Technology" class I taught so long ago, in that it breaks down "media" into "information" and attempts to get students to evaluate the origin of information and the "view" inherent in any piece of discourse.
DiscoverySchool.com has come up with a good looking guide to vetting online news.
This other blog talks about how important it is to teach critical thinking to
students: Teaching kids about criticizing online sources explains some of the issues of concern in our age of over-mediation.
I'd format a class to include other online information like other personal journals, organizational websites (everyone from the DAR to the KKK), etc..
If it was my class alone to teach, I'd talk about television and radio and print as well, and the media convergence that has changed the way most of us get our information from these sources. I'd also talk about important legal issues like copyrights.
I'd set up a blog for a given class, and that main blog would be a virtual classroom where assignments would posted (with comment), and relevant articles/sites could be posted by teachers or students. In addition, each student would keep their own single-user blog, which later would be analyzed by a fellow student as they analyzed outside material for things like accuracy and "view". Those personal blogs could include pictures or small sound files if they wished, perhaps drawing some of the less-verbal learners.
This is where I am so far....but I'm actually excited about this idea. So much so that my partner is already starting to glaze over when I mention it too much. I take that as a good sign... :)
I’ve already posted this as a response to Sam but want to make "Monday" visible to all as well. Note Carolyn's pedagogy.
Carolyn had volunteered to lead our discussion of articles about writing process. She turned the examination of writing back on us by asking us to examine
one of the claims that Nancy Sommers makes in “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers”--that novice writers are too likely to think of revision as a matter of word choice, whereas expert writers are more apt to make global revisions. She also wanted us to think about an experience that transformed our way of thinking about learning to write. So we all wrote about this for about 10 minutes, and this proved an excellent way to getting us into an analytical mode that insisted on bringing these published writings down to a level of engagement and that put us in touch with our own memories about learning to write and with our own current practices.
Carolyn then had us direct our attention to the board, where she’d mapped out the three views of composing that Faigley devises. We spent some time defining these “views” and comparing them with our own sense of how composing really happens. We were not all that taken with the Flower, et al. models, because they seemed all too descriptive, lending themselves very little to the practicalities of teaching writing—or at least not addressing very well the bridge between knowing the models and doing something effective in the classroom.
We all remembered having performed or been asked to perform what looks to have been expressivist writing. Carolyn recalled that this model had been frustrating for her, and that the transformative experience in her writing life came in an economics class when the professor asked her to summarize and synthesize material presented in the class and she found that she was really very good at it, thus transforming her own sense of herself as a writer.
Sam was interested in the phenomenon of developmental processes, in writing as a matter of cognition and cognitive development, of age perhaps, and of maturity. He also brought to the table some of Faigley’s work on the “self” as a function of how people (e.g., the writing teacher) respond to writing—thus engaging the social view of writing. Sam was also interested in Habermas, a name that will come up repeatedly in our readings.
Carolyn talked some about the kinds of writing she had asked students to do in the history course she had taught.
It’s interesting to me that neither Carolyn nor Sam has been a student of literature, but I don’t think I expressed this in class.
We did not get around to addressing Joseph Harris’s chapter on process, although Carolyn, I think, had prepared an entry-way into this critique of the process movement. I hope we can return to Harris in the next few weeks.
What we know as modern-day practice in compostion studies owes its life to our historical knowledge of a single course: the first-year writing course.
Can you think of any other single course in the history of higher education that has been the subject such historical interest and scrutiny? (Stay with me here.) If no, might that have something to do with our preoccupation with and valorization of "lore" and its function in compostion studies--and why it will continue to be an instrumental feature of the discipline of composition studies?
Does Comp's resistance from hostile attacks about its disciplinary legitimacy come from the symbolic funciton of first-year writing courses and the voluminous lore that's emerged from our teaching it?
Is there a way of "disciplining" lore so that it doesn't suffer from the practice/theory split? Have we disciplined lore? has it accrued that kind of power, leverage? And is that why Faigley is so critical of the commodificaiton of teaching practices? Does he recognize the power of lore operating in a way that undermines comp's politcal and social intuitiveness?
The Bush Administration is afraid of the
power of poetry. (from AlterNet.org) The bottom of this article shows why the Bush Administration wouldn't have been thrilled to hear from Emily Dickenson, Langston Hughes, or Walt Whitman anyway.
Some of the poetry that was supposed to be presented to Laura Bush is online at Poets Against the War.
I don't think there's anything wrong with how resume-writing is taught, though I think some other issues need to augment things.
Faigley seemed to disagree with the very purpose of a resume.
He denounced the commodification of people when a teacher suggests that a resume sells the writer as a valuable product and seeks to demonstrate how a given person could be valuable to a company. The Faigley section about resume-writing implied that the resume format obliterated the writer's experience of 'self' by recommending the 'you' perspective and the elimination of agents. Faigley also said that resumes were often muddy with constructions that elevated mundane tasks to the level of complex processes and thus reduced the value of the resume to begin with.
I do agree that résumé's are a stylized form of communication, the Kabuki theater of writing assignments. I also agree that resumes are written to pander to the reader and to explicate the value of a potential employee. DUH! That is the whole purpose of a resume. I'm sorry that Faigley thinks it's icky, but how can someone make a hiring decision if they do not see the value in a given potential employee? Resume-readers are in the seat of power during the hiring process usually, and to imply otherwise is disingenuous. The language of a resume is also one of action, where agents are there but are in an implied "I" rather then cluttering up the page.
I like the resume format because for me it's a form of short-hand.
As a sender of resumes, I know that I need to put a lifetime of experience into a limited space, usually one page. In the education world, vitae's can drone on for days, but outside of academia it is looked down upon severely.
As a reader of resumes, who has sat and paged through hundreds of resumes, I've found that the stylized format allows me to quickly 'weed out' people with unacceptable skill sets.
I agree with Faigley when he notes that the stylizing can be taken too far, to the point where the original purpose of the resume becomes obscured. That would be a bad resume. :)
When I've tutored people in writing resumes, I've always told them what's been successful for me and what hasn't. I've even asked employers why they pulled my resume from a pile. What I've learned is this:
1. It is INTEGRAL to make sure that one's 'self' shows up in that resume, through careful choice of language, small doses of humor, and the cultivation of 'voice'. Stylized doesn't mean robotic and generic, and I think that's where most teaching of resume-writing falls short. Even when describing basic responsibilities, the use of language and portions of one's experience highlighted often can provide a great insight into a candidate. This is a delicate process, but a very successful one.
2. Most resumes aren't proofread by an outsider, and they should be. I throw out resumes that contain mistakes in spelling or big mistakes in grammar.
I don't think there's anything bad about the traditional teaching of resume-building, but I do think it could use some augmentation in terms of proofreading, format suggestions (like saying there's more then one), and the insertion of one's own voice. And, get rid of that stupid "objective" thing at the beginning....
stephanie
Michael--
I’ll be interested in seeing how you “plot,” if that makes sense, the story of the 640 pedagogy course saga. Who or what will be the protagonist and who are the antagonists? What are the scenes of its development?
Our references to Faigley’s McDonald’s assignment analysis—and
our thoughts about that “move” he so adroitly makes from time to time---remind me that during my dissertation process,
Faigley strongly urged me to do a personal narrative (which I did embed in my diss but it wasn’t too striking and didn’t reflect the kinds of agon I was feeling). I remember that he gave me several examples, hoping to elicit this kind of writing from me—and this leads me to believe that these “moves” he makes from time to time may have a common thread: the deliberate “articulation” between the techniques and routines of pedagogy (conduct-producing activities) and a person’s (an individual’s unique) experience of these school rituals. This “articulation” could be in the form of narrative. So . . . . I’m thinking that as a Coda to your dissertation, you might narrate just HOW you became so knowledgeable about the institutional/cultural entailments of English Studies. How did you come to know as much as you do about the politics, structures, cultures of English as a “mere” graduate student. This narrative (or other form of articulation) is that very graduate student knowledge that has been a part of your studies—in other words, positioning the graduate student as expert (like the McDonalds’ employee) and investigating just “how” she comes to know what she knows.
Think about the implications of Stephanie and my responses to the idea of Sam’s purported “freedom” to develop courses and curriculum. S. and I echo (by our demonstration of enthusiasm) the Ohmann lament about “accountability,” preferring a certain autonomy and the assignment of “responsibility.” Michael brought us
back to earth. In addition, I note the impulse to believe that it is possible to choose a good pedagogy--with emphasis on “choose” and “good.” Althusser would argue that “choice” is hardly possible and that our teacherly selves emerge within existing discourses on being a teacher. Foucault would argue that whatever our “choices” of pedagogical strategies, we are “active sites” in the production of existing power relations, hardly “empowering” our students.
One of the conventions of blogging is providing an easily-scannable first page (the KISS screen is the first screen). It's best if you organize your thoughts into smaller paragraphs, with the first paragraph being the 'point' of your post, and subsequent explanatory paragraphs appearing in the 'extended entry' section of the 'new entry' page.
That way, people can get a more immediate 'feel' for what is going on with the blog, and the detail can appear on its own page.
The class period began with a general discussion of what we, as individuals, held as the definition of "theory." Or, more generally, what we think theory is. Among the answers were such statements as threory is a set of values upon which a person bases her life. These values are transformational in that, as a person works to manifest their theory, they are personally changed. Another idea about theory was that it is a set of assumptions. These assumptions accumulate and collect, ultimately acquiring a more solid identity.
Along with ideas about theory itself, the class postulated on what is traditionally said to "oppose" theory. This list contained such items as intuition, practice, and research. Though this list was created with input from the class, we never had an opportunity to discuss it.
We then moved on to a discussion of what we liked or disliked about any of the readings. That is, we were encouraged to share, not so much from apurely academic standpont, but from a more immediate, visceral perspective. One student mentioned that she particularly appreciates the ethnography project that Zebroski incorporates into one of his undergraduate courses. He uses this project to replace the traditionally required research paper. As a class, we seemed to agree that the ethnography project contains many positive features that make it preferable to the traditional research paper. Among these positives, as Professor Romano mentioned, is the idea that the student steps into the role of "expert" during her process through the project. That is, she is responsible for choosing specific pieces of information out of a large pool of data and presenting this data in an intelligent and informative way. The student is, in essence, teaching the instructor and the other students about the culture or sub-culture she chose to observe. In a traditional research paper, students are not normally encouraged to think of themselves as the source of information. Rather, they are in the subordinate role of learning about what other people have already mastered. Another student commented on the reading that made reference to E.D. Hirsch, Jr. While he said that, having read Hirsch's book, Hirsch presents a number of very reasonable arguments, he doesn't accept Hirsch's endorsement of filling students' heads with a very specific, regimented canon of information.
We moved from a response to the texts based primarily on value judgements to a more critical, analytical approach to specific sections of the texts. We chose to look more closely at Zebroski's book. The comment was made that he seems to offer little in the way of theory in general and also of Vygotskian theory in particular. Professor Romano explained that Zebroski is essentially agianst prescription. That is, he disagrees with those English departments that force any type of curriculum, criteria, or standards on their instructors and students. He supports , instead, an approach to both writing and teaching that derives its strength from the, as Zebroski would claim, fact that teaching is an organic process, a creative, dynamic interaction between the people involved in the classroom.
At this point, those students teaching undergraduate composition courses voiced their uncertainty about what they are supposed to be teaching their freshman students. Are they supposed to instruct their students from the framework of a particular composition theory, or is it important to the department that they take a more relativistic approach, responding to the needs, desires, and histories of their particular students? Professor Romano agreed that, as an administrator who is partially responsible for what is "sanctioned" by the English department, she is intrigued, and somewhat bemused, by this question as well. We investigated the possibility that this "dilemma" could be overcome by fulfilling the department's need for a particular structure and form of assessment, while, at the same time, incorporating more student centered projects.
Professor Romano concluded the class by offering a particularly interesting idea that Zebroski articulates in his book. She referred to the part of Zebroski's text in which he speaks of the composition class itself as being a composition or a work-in-progress. That is, she said that she is stimulated by the idea of approaching one's teaching, and the development of one's curricula, as if it were itself a composition, and, therefore, in need of revision, creativity, receptivity, awareness, and motion in order to be a success. It is good to be reminded that if we, as teachers, are going to teach our students to apply a particular theory to their reading and writing, then we, too, must apply that same theory to what we create.
There was much talk about writing process in our readings. How do people write? I saw a lot of this: there was a bunch of research about how successful writers go about writing, and there was much research that said that just porting those successful strategies to struggling writers didn't work either. I wondered also if it was logical to figure out how successful writers went about developing their processes and perhaps finding a way to implement that?
I fear that such an enterprise is hopeless, really, and here's why. Computers are complex machines, but compared to the human mind they are simple. Computers are ruled by 1's and 0's. Something is either on or off, black or white.
People are the most complex of complex systems, bringing together physiology, psychology, environment and chance all interplaying against each other in endless ways, with an unlimited number of potential outcomes. To adopt one process or one journey leading up to the formulation of one process doesn't take into account the uniqueness of factors that go into learning and expressions of learning.
And, what if someone just sucks as a writer naturally? What if an individual is just as incapable of writing a pleasing sentence as I am of solving a differential equation? Can we really teach bad writers to write measurably better? Can we give them the internal 'voice' that tells them what is clear and what isn't, which is really what many writers use to navigate the language with finesse? Only to a degree, I think.
All the process in the world won't substitute for talent, though talent can sometimes be improved by process (and sometimes ruined by it).
What do you think?