I want to better understand the dialog emerging from what I call, and what others before me have called, the "4 Corners" of English: Rhet-Comp/Literature/Creative Writing/English Language and Linguistics; Second Language Acquisition Theory. As someone who sees themselves at the crossroads of this polyphonic chaos, I am hoping to use the dialog created here to glean insight into possible caveats of teaching writing that emerge from one's discipline and the way those caveats compete/complement/conflict with other teachers' approaches. I am also interested in the way such approaches are received by our students.
Specifically, I'd like to use this blog as a space for instructors to reflect on their pedagogical approaches to the teaching of freshman composition.
I hope you enjoy this project as much as I believe I will, and that, together, we can learn a little something about our own teaching methodologies, and teaching freshman composition more generally.
The main questions I'd like to focus on this week are:
What are you doing in your first-year writing courses?
How are you doing it?
Why are you doing it that way?
As you post, please make sure and identify your discipline: RCTE/Lit/ELL;SLAT/CW within your respective English department.Thank you all,
Cassie Wright
1st year PhD student, RCTE
Graduate Associate in Teaching
10 comments:
I am in the RCTE program. I feel committed to preparing my students for the rest of their academic career. In order to be successful in higher level coursework, they need to learn critical thinking and how to write within their academic discourse, which is audience awareness. Ideally, I would teach freshman composition using academic essays and student essays. I don't want to use the broad statement that literature cannot be used to teach academic writing; it can, but it seems so distant from the tasks students are asked to do in writing assignments. However, if we show them through student essays and academic essays what is expected of them, how they work and don't work with regards to audience and rhetorical appeals, I feel this helps students understand academic discourse. They are not all going to become writers, they are not all going to become English majors, and they are not all going to develop a love of literature. But if I can get them to recognize an argument and write one with solid support, I feel I have done my job.
First of all, RCTE-r. When I teach FYC, I bring my tools from my pedagogical training as a high school teacher. Yes, they are in college now, but this year is the transitional year for the "traditional" student. This means that I write explicit lesson plans with abstract objectives and concrete goals for each class meeting. These objectives and goals are negotiated at the beginning of the semester between the students and myself. I have certain standards/benchmarks that I know they need to meet, and they have other ones. While I would like to tell you that we meld these two equally-- we don't. Generally, they are overloaded with their new found freedoms and responsibility. Furthermore, they are used to the teacher-led directives that they experienced in HS.
I must admit that my class probably looks like what the other post (S.Z) dislikes, which is activity based, structured lessons. This is not to say that these structures affix me and my students into traditional patterns of lecture/notetaking. Instead, I try to decenter the classroom so that the students are engaged for at least 75% of the classtime. And I try to not just make it "discussion based" because that can lead to very limited engagement for a majority of the students. I use small group discussions, collaborative writing, writing stations, in-class writing, and other activities to keep the students "doing." Again, this comes from 5 years of HS teaching. I find this limits a lot of classroom management problems, and also keeps them attending class without the shaking stick of "grade deduction."
In ENGL 101, I select texts (visual, film, essays, literature, poetry, musical etc) for us to analyze. Usually, I start with reader-response just to get the students comfortable with talking and sharing in class. However, I usually take this reader-response analysis and push it towards other formats. I have them free write on these ideas often. Then, they use these "free writes" to expand an analysis.
As they begin drafting, we discuss/ critique writing process strategies. Usually, this starts with thesis and organization. Then, we discuss paragraph organization. After they have a full draft, we discuss style, tone, and revision.
Through each subsequent assignment, I slightly change the assignment to guide the students into more complex analysis, including considering context and audience and incorporating secondary sources.
English 102, however, is completely different for me. And I actually prefer the curriculum of English 102. Maybe I should save this for another post, Cassie??
And I should also state, for the record, it's been 2 years since I taught any FYC.
The comments are great; keep them coming.
Becca, you can post next week if you like. I will be sending out new/more questions in about a week, so if you feel you still have something to say about 102, post away!
Also, everyone please keep in mind that, though our posts are individual by technicality, we're creating an interdisciplinary polyphony, wrestling with the often unmentioned "contact zone" that is the inherent differences in teaching pedagogy and how this creates tension/synergy/dynamism within our Writing Program and the English Department at large.
That said, if you post and someone responds to it, feel free to post back, ad infinitum.
After consideration, Creative Writing GAT S.Z. has asked that I re-post her commentary. Here is her revised version:
***Quoting S.Z.***
I’m really glad to answer this question. I spent more than twenty years as a working writer – a national political columnist, an essayist, an author of books, and a reporter who had produced innumerable articles – before I had the luxury of coming back to school to work on my fiction. As someone with a very traditional education from a girls’ prep school, I had AP credit in English and I already knew how to write essays when I entered college, so I placed out of composition. I learned to write by reading, and by writing essays all through high school on The Iliad (snore), King Lear, MacBeth and Howard’s End. This is the way I think writing should be taught, along with a creative writing component that fosters creativity and is extremely supportive.
I did go through the rhet comp program’s training when I came to UofA, so I realized that times had changed. A lot of what I heard in the ten-day training – which was far too long – struck me as bullshit. When I googled “learner-centered” teaching, which was presented to us as a kind of Maoist state religion, I discovered that it hadn’t produced results, and that this had been true since the 1970s. But it seemed to have a stranglehold on education.
When I met the students, I realized why. An enormous industry had grown up to meet a post-literate generation of kids on their own level, instead of trying to bring them up to the level of literacy of previous generations. The latter might be an impossible task, given the societal factors that discourage people from reading, but I’m not sure exactly what learner-centered education is training people to do. There did seem to be a faint hope that one might inculcate people with a certain amount of skepticism and critical intelligence, which they certainly need in our advertising-saturated society, so that was where I went with my classes, particularly in rhetoric.
Before I go on, let me say that while I might sound like some kind of right-wing Christian, No Child Left Behind person, I’m not. I’m a progressive, liberal to left-leaning. I jokingly call myself a tax and spend liberal from New York, or an eco-feminazi (thank you, Rush Limbaugh). Occasionally, I quote a woman in New Orleans who, upon meeting me, said, “You’re one of those cactus-kissers, aren’t you?”
This might help you to understand that when I learned what the discipline of rhetoric is -- something that I hadn’t known before and which our ten-day training never defined for us -- I used Neil Postman’s fantastic book Amusing Ourselves to Death in my 102 class. This is the kind of book that would have changed my entire world view if I had read it at eighteen or nineteen. It changed my entire world view when I read it at forty-something! I give Joanne a lot of credit for taking the chance of letting me use it.
The kids in my 102 class uniformly hated it, except for one guy who was on the six-year plan and was already twenty-two or twenty-three and on his way to med school. In other words, the one student who had discernable intelligence. These kids would have been much better off with a graduate student who had a background teaching middle school, someone who could make up “activities” for them. The fact that I was working on a book about Hurricane Katrina while I was teaching the class might have held some faint interest for some of these kids, so the class wasn’t an utter failure, but it was pretty bad. Ironic, since you might have thought rhetoric would have been my thing. I don’t know what that indicates. Maybe that when you’re deeply involved in your own classes, and writing a book on deadline, your students tend to sense that they aren’t getting your full attention?
I did much better teaching honors classes. I told the kids at the outset that our classes would be like dinner parties, and that the goal was to entertain ourselves and learn something, and in the best case scenario, that would be something important. I designed a course called Literature of War, and we tried to gain some insight into the nature of war, reading works that ranged from Jane Goodall on violence among chimps to War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, by former war correspondent and former Harvard Divinity School student Chris Hedges. We read All Quiet on the Western Front, Dispatches, and Jarhead. I think the goal of answering questions about war, and the timeliness of that enterprise, gave the class more urgency. I also think the multidisciplinary nature of the readings, and their overall variety, gave each student at least one work he or she liked. They wrote papers on subjects like the erosion of the nation state, and girls kidnapped by guerrilla armies.
In this course, I felt that I was doing what college is supposed to do: prepare people to participate fully in their society. I had tried to do this in 101, where I had my students read Nadine Gordimer and Langston Hughes, to little effect, and I had tried to do it in 102. But only with my honors kids did I feel that I was successful.
What do you do with kids who don’t have it going on intellectually? I don’t know. I guess you rhet comp people will have to figure that one out; perhaps you already have, or believe that you have. I still don’t think pandering to their weaknesses is the answer.
It may be that the Enlightenment, as we know it, really is over. But I don’t think we can go back to the Middle Ages, when only the elite knew how to read. So until something better comes along, people damn well better read, whether they do it online, on a Kindle, or on the toilet (with a copy of Harper’s).
When did we stop encouraging students to aspire? That’s a major turnaround in American life, and I think it’s a very negative one.
I do think the answer may be bigger than academic fads. I actually find hope in the changes now going on in the U.S. Every time I go to Africa, I’m struck by the political sophistication there. I’m not talking about the educated classes, but by the guy selling Fanta on the street; so-called ordinary people. They seem a hell of a lot smarter than the “average” Americans I meet.
Africans need to understand politics: for them, survival is at stake. For the past five years, I’ve had a sense of unreality about American life. As painful as the current economic crisis is, especially for people already on the margins, this is the first time I’ve felt that we were dealing with reality as a nation. This sounds big and amorphous, I know. But I think that necessity may force people to pay attention.
As a scholar in the RCTE program, I feel compelled to respond to "SZ." First, I am offended that SZ refers to the ten-day training at the U of A as "bullshit." This strikes me as unprofessional and unwarranted. The U of A teacher training program is one of the oldest and most well-established in the country, and it operates on an extremely limited budget within a very short time to train teachers. SZ comments that her "googling" revealed that "learner-centered" teaching "hadn't produced results." First, I am confused by what she means by "producing results." The goal of learner-centered teaching is NOT to push students through the system like an assembly line, nor to merely stamp their work as satisfactory and move them along. The goal of this kind of teaching is to dismantly hierarchical models of schooling, to de-center the idea of teacher as central authority, and to empower students in their own learning. These are not things that are easily measured in "results," but are rather changes in attitudes and the sharing of knowledge. Second, perhaps "googling" is how people conduct research over in Creative Writing, but here in rhet/comp we use scholarly texts, which consistently show learner-centered teaching to be a best practice for instruction in classes both large and small. Furthermore, learner-centered teaching does NOT have a "stranglehold" on education, as evidenced by the abundance of large lecture classes or of standardized testing on the K-12 level. I am offended that she sees learner-centered teaching as "fad," because it has been around since at least the 1970's and because of its social-justice orientation should be ever more important to us in our current society. I am also offended that she takes such a patronizing tone towards her students. Likely, the reason they didn't take her class seriously was that she herself didn't.
Because SZ found it appropriate to disparage my field, let me take some time to disparage hers. Full disclosure: I am a refugee from creative writing, having received both a bachelor's and a master's in that field. If SZ can be taken as an example of the teachers in that field -- distanced, cynical, self-righteous -- I am greatly concerned about the pedagogy happening there.
Here's a post from a Lit GAT in our department.
***Quoting Anonymous***
What is your discipline: Lit
> What are you doing in your first-year writing courses?
I am teaching 101+ - that is, 101/197B - so the focus is the literacy narrative,
which was their first assignment but also more or less defines the readings that
I selected for the first unit - "Autobiographical Notes" by James Baldwin and
"Reading Fiction" by Richard Wright, both from STORY AND ITS WRITER - and the
film that I selected for the second unit - FINDING FORRESTER. I also chose a
Black American writers theme for the texts. The rest of the assignments mostly
follow what I taught in 101 last year, that is, textual analysis, contextual
analysis, and then a portfolio consisting of a revision - this time of each of
their literacy narratives - and a reflective argument about their progress over
the term (that is, they are supposed to convince me that they achieved something
related to writing during the course).
> How are you doing it?
I think that I mostly covered that.
> Why are you doing it that way?
I create a theme because I like the courses that I teach, in terms of content and purpose, to feel unified and directional. I chose the reader because I think that the pairing of writings and writings about those writings by writers
is a great choice for a course based on the literacy narrative.
> Do you think your discipline in any way consciously affects your approach to teaching writing; if yes, how?
No. I learned to teach at a school that had less division between the
disciplines, in my opinion - plus I learned a little about rhetoric as an undergrad and loved it.
And here's one from another RCTE-er, Katie Silvester.
***Quoting Katie***
1) I'm a recently admitted PhD student in the RCTE program.
2 & 3) I've divided my 101 curriculum into 3 units in compliance of UofA instructor guidelines. My first unit centered on cognitive dissonance and encountering difference at the US/Mexican border. I offered my students 2 assignment choices. My orginial paper 1 assignment encouraged students to think different about textual analysis by allowing for a reflective reader response approach to our assigned texts. I'd call it a hyrid paper, a mixture of both personal response and textual analysis. The alternative assignment was created to allow students to participate in an actual trip to the border sponsored by Hispanic/Chicano Student Affairs. Students who wished to participate in this visit could have written their papers on this experience as opposed to a text covered in class. Unfortaunately, none of my students participated in this trip. My second unit centered on spaces and culture. We've been looking at how certain spaces influence the certain activities that occur within that space. I've also been asking students to think of spaces as being influenced by different cultural norms, values, or myths. Their 2nd paper asks them to analyze one of the spaces we discussed in class and to argue how the space works to reinforce or resist some aspect of culture evident in the text. Again, I have offered an alternative assignment which encourages students to consider their own spaces in place of one of the spaces we covered in class. My 3rd unit is under construction, but it to will examine culture and difference. I've contacted DR about setting up a student exchange with the international students. I want students to use this exchange as evidence for a text in context paper.
In addition to discussing and writing about themes of difference and culture, I spend about half a unit specifically dealing with writing strategies. I've been working on integrating media into these minilessons and workshops. One lesson that went over really well was a specific vs general lesson where my students and I edited Miss Teen USA's pageant responses (as seen on youtube) to be less general and more specific. I then related this exercise to their own writing.
4) Why am I doing it this way? I guess I've designed my curriculum to reflect my personal interests and teaching philosophy. I'm a returned Peace Corps volunteer so issues of culture and difference naturally interest me. But, I also consider these issues central to how we develop critical thinking skills particularly in our increasingly international learning environments. And, of course, critical thinking skills and awareness of socio-cultural contexts are integral elements of successful writing.
5) Of course, I think that RCTE influences my participation in GAT responsibilities. As RCTE students, we're under a lot of pressure to be good teachers. RCTE as a field also encourages a consciousness of socio-cultural learning contexts, so I think my teaching is especially informed by my field. But, I think this is true of all "English studies" fields and I personally appreciate sharing TEAD group space with teachers from other fields like lit and creative writing. I've learned a lot about how to design a solid textual analysis assignment from a member of my TEAD group whose degree is in lit, and I've learned a lot about how to encourage my students to love writing from a creative writer in my TEAD group. So, I think all the fields bring something to the table.
Hi, Faith:
Just wanted to clarify what came up when I googled learner-centered pedagogy. I found a lot of scholarly stuff, and I was particularly struck by a long-term multi-million dollar federal study that showed very poor results from learner-centered pedagogy. I also made a few calls to experts in the field. I'm very much an advocate of social justice. I just don't think dumbing down education is the way to train citizens of a republic.
Also, my comments are my own and not meant to represent anyone in the creative writing program, or any other person other than myself. I did find, however, that when I expressed my initial shock at the cult-like nature of the Writing Program's 10-day training, virtually every professional woman I know -- women of a certain age, all of them, and all professionally quite accomplished -- shared my feelings.
I would also say that "bullshit" is probably the most valid criteria I can think of.
You might want to reconsider the self-righteous comment in light of your problem with this important factor in judging most things in life.
I am probably still far more of a journalist than a creative writing sort, and I have spent many years honing my "bullshit detector." I did find that many of my colleagues in literature and creative writing also have managed to develop these finely tuned instruments. Rhet comp people seem to lack this organ. That's probably why they're so employable!
I should probably amend my rather irritated post in response to "Faith" by saying this: Learner-centered pedagogy is no longer revolutionary. It is the orthodoxy, and has, from what I can tell, pretty much been in the driver's seat in American education for thirty years. During that time, students have become less literate -- shockingly sub-literate, in fact. Learner-centered pedagogy may not be responsible, or it may not be sufficiently effective in combating this problem. But if my primary work was creating literacy I would certainly be questioning my methods -- not just tinkering at the edges but looking at them from the ground up -- given the poor performance of students.
Perhaps this makes more sense.....Anyway, just an outsider's perspective. As a journalist, the whole rhet comp thing seems like it's become an industry, a social experiment that came out of the 60s and is now a cash cow, providing billions of dollars in research funding to academics that might be better used bringing free education at the primary and secondary level to people in other countries, or upping teacher pay and resources in underfunded schools in our own country. Most of the scholarly work seemed horrifically self-referential, jargony, and geared to counting angels on a pinhead. Of course important general principles came to the fore in the educational revolution of the 60s and 70s, but those battles seem won now, and it might be time for the next iteration.
But, again, I'm really just giving you guy's an outsider's take on this. I thought it might be helpful to hear the impression of someone from outside the club.
Happy trails.
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