NOTHING FANCY THIS WEEK.Use this space to post this week's reading response. No worries if you arrive to class and haven't posted. I didn't make this space available until today.
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Interestingly, many of us wrote about the ways the idea of audience is a pretty false one in the writing classroom. That's perhaps the most benign way we can describe it. Villanueva and others suggest that the imagined audience, in the hands of writers uninitiated in the dominant dialect, can be oppressive.
But presenting to a real audience has powerful effects on students. Research in undergraduate research as a high-impact practice (a HIP), indicates that presenting to an audience other than your teacher can have some of the most powerfully positive learning outcomes for students--and can impact their lives beyond the classroom. So for today's in-class writing, sketch out a possible writing experience for the classroom with a real not imagined audience. Let's do this in the magical world of having no principal or parent or school board to report to. Sure there are assignments where you write a local school official or a letter to an editor, but we all know who you are really writing to--your teacher. So let's pull out all the stops. Let's consider the night's reading about audience perils and imagine something that challenges the downside to audience. No rules and no wrong answers. Just good clean fun. Once you've posted, take some time to read what your classmates had to say and then we can talk about it as a group. This week, the readings are split between how writing creates audiences and writers and how writers and audiences create writing. Complicated as that idea is to begin with, the act of imagining audiences and ourselves as writer is. complicated by the myriad forces that influence those acts of creation.
As you post your reading response this week, react to and critique the idea of "audience" and the role it plays in the creation of text, and, to think of it another way, the creation of writers (or at least the writer's sense of who they are as they are writing--their identity). The different scholars this week, (Ede & Lunsford, Moffatt, Elbow, the various scholars in Threshold Concepts , and Villanueva) give us plenty to think about, ideas that expand, complicate, muddle, and develop the roles of readers and writers in relationship to text production. We've spent most of the semester so far talking about what I identify as the single most defining aspect of pedagogy in a writing classroom: how we assess a student's writing, how we talk to them about that assessment, and what it means in terms of how a class is structured.
And I do believe that once you've worked through how you will assess students things like invention and revision--how you do them, why you do them, when you do them, how you count activities related to them--fall into place. But that also doesn't mean that there is only one way to do them. For this in-class writing, talk about either a revision strategy or an invention strategy that you've used, thought about using, or experienced as a student that you felt was really useful. If you can, connect it to some of what you thought/wrote about for this week's readings on revision and invention. Once you've posted your ideas, take some time to read the ideas of others. Be ready to have a conversation about the role of revision and invention play in composition. OVERVIEW: Part of what Writing Studies Pedagogy is always interested in, regardless of what angle they come at it from, is helping students to develop strong habits as writers. This is very difficult. The classroom discourages authentic engagement in this work. The job of the classroom is to prepare students to be able to write without a teacher forcing them to do it (Peter Elbow wrote a whole book called, in fact Writing Without Teachers) in a space where they are forced to write by teachers.
Thus, invention and revision, two parts of the writing process that should be self-directed, are frequently only ever teacher-focused and teacher-driven. But, the idea is, if we as teachers of writing craft invention and revision in ways that students see as valuable, they will, with some effort and a lot of time-on-task, transfer these skills to other classes, other occasions for writing beyond the classroom. This is the idea behind threshold concepts. I think that, certainly, we can all recall the moment when we realized that, like it or not, good writing happens in revision in particular. WHAT TO POST: The readings this week consider the history and practice of both invention and revision in Composition Pedagogy. In your reading response, you may elect to focus on one or the other or both. Consider how one or both of these skills are taught such that students of writing actually move past that threshold and adopt skills that make them stronger writers--you are welcome to talk about the possibilities and impossibilities that are suggested by the readings. Thinking ahead to your ethnography/case studyHello to you All--
I've gotten a few nervous texts about what to post for this week, so I'm addressing that here. This week, I've included in the reading for the week selections from Battacharya's guide to conducting qualitative research. As I said in class, I'm not asking you to read this with the care that you might read other material for our class. I've included this reading so that folks have something to support their work on the upcoming ethnography/case study assignment. I don't know how familiar you all are with this kind of research, and Battacharya offers a good overview and both practical and theoretical guidance. WHAT TO POST: This is not a super formal post. I'm asking you to think and write about what you might do for the ethnography/case study assignment. As you write about, you can include what you feel like you are learning about how to do this work from the reading. You can also ask me questions. I can collect those questions and answer them in class when we meet on the 15th (provided you post with enough time before class for me to do that). Your post doesn't need to be long and shouldn't be more than 300 words max. You don't have to know for sure what you are going to do. You can have a few ideas. When useful, I can give some feedback to you in this space and in class to help you to do your best work. YOU AREN'T REQUIRED TO RESPOND TO YOUR CLASSMATES: But if you have a suggestion that might help a classmate, why not respond? Hope this helps you to focus your response in productive ways. We just can't get away from Comp/Rhet history. This week we read about Basic Writing, an overview and a critically important introduction from the remarkable Mina Shaughnessy from her text Errors & Expectations.
BASIC WRITING & MINA SHAUGHNESSY Shaughnessy was a part of the movement at City University of New York that, in the years following open admissions, when new kinds of students (newly immigrated, working class and working poor, women, people of. color, adult learners, multilingual readers and writers) flooded the US college and university landscape. While Shaughnessy has been critiqued, sometimes unfairly, for her focus on error, her humanity and humane approach that welcomed students into the classroom and made the effort to invite them into the wider literate world is never in question. WHAT DO I MEAN BY "DEFICIT THINKING" One of our earliest conversations in our class was about the ways we talk about writing and writers is bound by deficit thinking--in other words, the persistent belief, that has existed for seemingly ever in the US education landscape as traced by "why Johnny Can't" articles and the articles it spawned and continues to spawn, that students are bad writers rather than embracing the idea that writing is simply hard, takes time, requires reasons to do it, that "good writing" is, in many ways, a highly subjective idea. And, of course, if we think about "bad student writers" it precipitates a whole bunch of assumptions: the student isn't very smart; they aren't trying; they don't pay attention; they don't care, etc. WHAT TO POST: For this post, as the syllabus said I would ask: How do the theories, practices, ideologies that inform Basic Writing speak to the idea of deficit thinking about student writers. In what ways does Basic Writing champion student writers? In what ways does it potentially diminish their learning experience? Post your response to this question. Take time to read the posts of your colleagues. Be prepared to discuss what you notice in our class discussion when we talk as a full class. Use this space to post about this week's readingThis week's reading gives an overview of what assessment looks like in the field of Writing Studies--primarily the way it has evolved over time in post-secondary writing classrooms (and, I would argue, that that discussion paved the way for other disciplines in the university to consider assessment).
WHAT TO POST: When considering "assessment" in the field, I think that there is a difference between assessment and responding to student writing--they are connected but they are not the same. For this week's post, please post a reading journal that considers how this history of assessment connects to or contrasts with Inoue's ideas about assessment? Do you see any connections? ONCE YOU'VE POSTED: Again, because we are doing this class asynchronously, please respond to at least one of your colleagues. Identify the ways they either agree with a point you make, disagree with a point your make, or in some way extends/builds on a point you make in ways that makes you think more deeply about the reading. Use this space to post one of your annotationsIf we were working on this in class, I would have asked folks to volunteer to allow me to life edit their annotation in front of the class. This kind of workshop is not a kind of workshop that you would do at the start of the semester with most students. It's a kind of workshop that requires a great deal of trust, because it can feel pretty brutal when done live. But when you've established trust in a classroom, this kind of workshop can be very powerful. Everyone learns something--the students who volunteer to have their annotations workshopped are helped, but all of the students watching the editing learn a lot too.
For our purposes, in an asynchronous setting, what I will do is comment on each of your annotations. My comments will be focused on three things: 1) I will look at sentences for clarity and brevity--because that is what makes a great annotation, potent, brief writing; 2) I will ask questions if I don't understand something about what you wrote; 3) I will make suggestions about organization for, again, brevity and potency. WHAT TO POST: Please post one of your annotations from one of your articles. Remember that there is help on writing your annotations located on the assignment page for the reverse annotated bibliography. In class on Tuesday, we brought to an end our largely historical discussion of the field of Rhet/Comp. We t talked about the role deficit thinking plays in the field and how, in some ways, we can understand the field as in contrast to writing classrooms that focus on error rather than possibility. We talked about the centrality of teaching and of first year writing to the field, certainly in the beginning, but, also, how during the 80s and 90s there was backlash against the "school marm" idea of what the field was about (Crowley).
We Also read the introduction to Asao Inoue's Antiracist Writing Assessment Inoue is a strong example of the kind of scholarship that the field is concerned with now. Here we see legacy--the way he positions writing instruction against ideas of error and deficit, the way he is even talking about a classroom and about teaching and how to teach writing, a concern for representation and diverse students and their success (which really is just the obvious continuation of ideas that were present in Elbow, Murray, etc). We see what has lasted as an area for research (writing instruction) and what has changed (what that instruction looks like). To really dig deep into current scholarship in the field, this week I've asked folks to read Chapter five and one other chapter. I am repeating the groups and the chapters everyone is reading here: Chapter 1 & 5 Chapter 2 & 5 Chapter 3 & 5. Chapter 4 & 5 Brian, Maura, & Olivia Alyssa, Megan, & Sarah Ashley, Kayleigh, & Matt Melissa & Shauna THE PROMPT: Check out the questions that we developed in class on Tuesday night based on discussion of the introduction to Inoue by clicking on this link (same one as I put in the chat on Tuesday and also available on our syllabus and class update page). As you read your two assigned chapters, see what your chapters offer as answers to these questions. As you post, you might focus on one question you think he addresses a lot in your section or you might focus on a few questions. It's unlikely that any one chapter will answer all of the questions. Post a reading journal that explores how Inoue answers one or more of these questions. In-class, you'll have time in these small groups to share notes about the most important ideas in your chapter. You should be prepared to share that information with the rest of the class. We'll have a discussion about the ways our questions are answered (and perhaps not answered) in the further chapters of Inoue's text. |
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