ENGL513 Composition Theory & Pedagogy MONDAY UPDATES
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MONDAY UPDATES
1 March 2022
History Precedes Us
Matt C talked about parts of the reading that other folks didn’t touch on (not a critique, just worth noting) when he talked about the history of assessment covered in the Neff-Lippman. I too am always interested in the way so much of assessment has been argued for in terms of its objectivity. I think that, if they do anything, both Inoue and Neff-Lippman challenges the idea of “objectivity” in assessment—though in different ways, as so many of you pointed out. Olivia L wrote, in her response to Kayleigh H, that the history of assessment felt like it ”came in waves”. And she is right. As with all things in education (and everything else I guess) there are trends. I think that’s an important point to remember.
Melissa B reminds us, also, right up front, that assessment, as it has traditionally and in so many, many ways is still crucially connected to determining whether people, students, are meeting the qualifications established by the normative habitus established by cultural and social elites. And, in doing so, she reminds us that even if we wanted to try escape the history of writing instruction in our country, it’s virtually impossible to do so. We do and must carry it with us if we are to enact change in how privilege is distributed in our classrooms and beyond.
Alyssa C wrote rather eloquently about that last point in relationship to Inoue:
“thinking about the imagery of waves and currents also makes me think of the way Inoue is going upstream, indeed perhaps without a paddle, as he fights the churning waters of the way things have ‘always’ been done.”
This is hard work
Brian S wrote the sentence that most resonated with me this week, because it’s so very true for me and has been for my entire career as a teacher: “summative assessments make us cringe.” Much later in the discussion, Kayleigh H wrote that “the assessment of student writing is a practice that can quickly begin to feel overwhelming.” Amen to that sister.
Sarah B, in her thorough and elegant compare and contrast of Neff-Lippman and Inoue, comes to this important point, one that I think is echoed across many of your (our) reactions to the readings on assessment: “both see their students as writers who are in process and in need of individualized attention.” She also writes what I think is another theme that spans many of our in and out class conversations when she says “In short, the history of assessing writing suggests that we’ve done more talking, writing, and theorizing about assessment than actual change in practice.” This is a point echoed in Sarah and Ashley M., in her response to Sarah, both discuss how, however we do this, it takes time, potentially time that we don’t have or don’t feel like we have.
Other Connections Across Inoue and Neff-Lippman
I really appreciated Maura G’s application of Neff-Lippman to Inoue’s student. It felt spot on right that one little note would have made a huge difference. I have come to a place where I find it nearly impossible to respond meaningfully to a piece of student writing if I don’t know where they are at in their own headspace about it. I’m not being dramatic. I rely heavily on my student’s own sense of their writing to guide my feedback. And I hope that by forcing my students (and force is the right word, but because they would rather not do this), to think about their own writing, to find words to describe what is going on in their own writing, I hope I help them to be better writers in the long run.
Like Maura, Matt C and Kayleigh had a nice back-and-forth about the role of specificity in Lippman and overlap with Inoue’s agenda about how specificity is a kind anti-racist practice. This is something that really speaks to me as well. I find my own assignments have gotten more and more specific with each year, and I personally struggle to know if that’s the best more or not.
I appreciated how so many of you saw what Neff-Lippman talked about as “teacher-centered” and what Inoue talked about as more “student-centered” (Ashley, Sarah, Maura, Alyssa). I don’t know that I immediately saw that, but I see it through your reflections.
This Important Work
I really enjoyed reading what you all had to say, seeing how you made sense of it and fit it into your own thinking. Meaningful and thoughtful response that is not only error-centered but future-oriented and student-centered (a lot of hyphens) takes time. As Ashley M identifies as a takeaway from last week’s reading, both authors agree that assessment is an “integral part of teaching writing.”
When I first started teaching I was a TA for a teacher who taught technical writing. I had already been teaching first year writing in my own classroom for a while and had managed grades as best I could without really knowing what I was doing (I had already moved to grade narratives instead of grades alone), but this was the first time I had to grade students under a system not of my own making. I was charged with grading their finished product for a unit I did not teach on direction writing. One student produced a manual on how to make chocolate chip cookies. Now, if you are thinking “you don’t need a manual to make chocolate chip cookies,” well, exactly my point. The whole thing was a disaster. It was a bound, ten page manual, laminated within an inch of its life—like the lamination could kill someone it was so thick. The ingredient list was split over more than one page. Each step had its own laminated page. It didn’t do any of the things good directions are supposed to do. And yet, this young woman and worked her heart out on this project. Based on the criteria of the project, this student earned a “D.” I’m telling you, this broke me. I knew after that experience that I would never have a grading system where a student who was working that hard was going to be penalized that hard. That was the start of where I’ve ended up today.
Take what you want from what I’m about to say next, but I doubt it’s not something you’ve already heard: I think assessment is the most important teaching we do in the classroom, whether we want it to be so or not.
And so if doing it right takes time that might be used in other ways, I’ve got to give up that time and do it right.
22 February 2022
Hello to you all--
I write to you in transit from my hometown in Ohio to Massachusetts. The enforced focus of plane and train travel has given me the opportunity to read with care your thoughtful contemplation of what Asao Inoue offers to those of us engaged in or interested in studying literacy instruction.
I think that, overwhelmingly, I notice both deep interest in his project and a healthy dose of skepticism, not necessarily about the merit of the argument but about the ability to, as Megan G put it, implement these strategies in a “practical or time conscious way” in a current K-12 classroom. Many of you echoed Megan’s concerns in various ways that I would sum up as the feasibility of implementation in the face of all the things that, specifically to K-12 educators in this instance, but more generally, to anyone engaged in literacy instruction because we are all held accountable to forces beyond our classrooms—the frameworks, standardized testing in all its many forms. Maura G talked, in particular, about the demands that standardized testing places on K-12. I thought Brian S did a particularly good job of talking about the effects of standardized testing—he brought the idea of the trickle-down effect of tests like MCAS that Inoue talks about into our conversation, and that’s an important part.
Matt C brought to the discussion this important point from Inoue, not unconnected to what I start to say about the quote Brian pulled: Classrooms discipline both teachers and students. Alyssa C paraphrased a version of this: we impact the classroom and the classroom impacts us. In other words, we are enmeshed in the same forces that our students are caught up in, and that is what makes for pedagogies that oppress rather than liberate.
This is, I think, is very important to contemplate. As Brian also reminds us, Inoue is not blaming teachers nor is he saying that they are racists. He’s saying that we have all—all of us—been educated in a white racial habitus construct that privileges some student behaviors and vilifies others. A point I want to add here is that it is, as our discussion and reflections indicate, very hard to think and teach our way out of this way of thinking. Very hard. A point so many of you brought up.
But, as Ashley M wrote about so eloquently, Inoue gives us seven—count them seven—ways to think about our classroom spaces, and he does not privilege one over the other. He tells us, very specifically, as Ashley points out, that we can and should start where it makes sense to start, where it is manageable.
As I read your responses, I can locate two places where I think folks feel like it is possible to start: transparency about evaluation and inviting students to shape what the assessments look like. Many of you, too many to count, asked, fairly, what assessment meant to Inoue. I think this is a question very relevant to K-12 since assessment so dominates your day-to-day classroom life. Shauna C and Olivia L were both drawn to thinking seriously about how we can bring our students into their assessments. It’s totally work, for sure, as Ashley M also wrote about—when you bring something in you are going to have to force something out. The question every teacher has to decide is if it is worth it or not. Melissa B and Kayleigh H wrote a lot about what transparent teaching practices actually look like and actually accomplish. Maura G talked about Inoue’s idea of “distributing privilege” equitably. And transparency in how we assess student performance seems to me to be job one in that work.
One thing that folks seem to shy away from is the idea of valuing labor over quality—which, ultimately, is one of the key ways that Inoue operationalizes his “ecology”. Not Matt C though, who I hope will talk more with us about how he has employed labor-based grading in his own K-12 classrooms. I admit my bias here since I moved to labor-based grading for all of my classes about three years ago. I do not do it the same way that Inoue does it—with spread sheets and accounting for time, though I do tell students how much time I think each part of an assignment should take them. A quick scan of my own syllabi shows that I create lists of tasks that need to be completed. Tasks do not need to be done well to count. They need to be done. Because I have faith that if a student completes the list of tasks, their writing will move forward. It may not be perfect, but it will move them ever closer to those “thresholds” as writers and readers that I am hoping to move them toward.
For my own journey towards the most equitable classroom experience I can offer my students, to one where the stifling effects of years of grades are mitigated and authentic learning happens for them as readers and writers, I cannot say that this is easy work. I will say that in terms of the emotional labor of teaching, I have found this move towards labor over what I see as an arbitrary and entirely subjective, no matter how many rubrics you come up with, as profoundly more rewarding for me as a teacher. It has allowed me to focus on the real work of the writing classroom—critical literacy.
But I get where Sarah B is coming from. I do. SEAE is not going anywhere anytime soon. I am thinking about this a lot lately because I have some students whose writing is nearly incomprehensible. And standardized testing, as so many of you talked about, is not going anywhere anytime soon.
And it is also true that what Inoue writes about feels revolutionary. I actually think it is. But I don’t know that the only way we can implement some of the pedagogical processes in ways that, as Sarah talks about, relevant to our local communities, has to mean overthrowing the entire system first. I believe in work arounds within the system until the system buckles to those work arounds.
And let me remind you: that sort of works. I said in class that Inoue doesn’t exist unless process pedagogy exists. And I mean that. Think about it. There is not one of us in this classroom that hasn’t been taught and not teaches process. But in the early 1970s, process was revolutionary. Thus, despite the challenge that Inoue’s ideas present in implementation, I am committed to explore them and to helping others to explore them as well.
14 February 2022
This update is coming to you via email, and is housed on the Monday Update page on our class website for future reference.
I wanted to close out our historical discussion of Composition Studies. What I most hope folks take away from our discussions of the past two weeks is as follows:
Well, what I really want to say is that I have so much to say about this field that I’ve made my career in that it all comes out jumbled and a mess–and in part that is because the field of Composition is often a jumble and a mess–but, I believe, in the best sort of way. But, for the sake of this course as a course, I think that there are some big bunches of ideas that are important to understand:
A little bit more on some of the above and in your words: Deficiency, for a very long time, has thus defined the discipline. And not just for students. As many of you pointed out in last week’s discussion board posts, Crowley has a particularly low opinion of the way that FYW has taken hold (in the 80s and 90s) in the US university. Sarah Bond called it Crowley’s cynicism and Kayleigh Holt identified Crowley’s description of FYW as a necessary evil. Brian Seibert also talked about how the course, a drudge, was taught by, as Crowley identifies them, least prepared and least accomplished faculty. Crowley wonders aloud how it is possible that any learning happens.
Sarah Bond, Melissa Batty, and Matt Cutter all spent some time thinking about the purpose of FYW. Sarah rightly pointed out that it we–all of us K-12 and Postsecondary–are still and always trying to figure out what proficient looks like–and this has put tremendous pressure on FYW to do a lot of under-appreciated heavy lifting at universities. The goal, as Melissa and Matt make clear, however, is also always contentious. Melissa points out the ways that FYW is just another class in a long line of classes meant to increase homogeneity among populations and indoctrinate students into societal norms and values enforced by elites. There is no getting away from this truth, particularly if we read Crowley’s take on what has happened to Composition in the years after process. But there is also no denying that FYW, as Matt pointed out, has moved many many members of underrepresented, undervalued, often persecuted populations into not just the middle class, which is a dumb and arbitrary metric, but into a place of personal power where they can make decisions about what is right for them in their world–what they fight for, how much they are willing to fight, etc. We can want it to be one or the other, but we should come away from our discussions knowing that FYW, like any pedagogical space, is imperfect.
Ashley Merola reminds us by quoting a less cynical than usual Crowley insightfully that FYW is complicated because it is not about the past or what has already been learned, but what can be learned: FYW cares about skills over content, change and the development of the student, and is future oriented (not about knowledge or content being passed down one generation to the next).
I would argue, that those of us engaged in the work of Composition are interested in empowering our students to be in control of their lives. Which brings me to a final point: the role of the teacher, in both K-12 and FYW. Fitzgerald argues that this is the goal of teacher-training at Nornal Schools and that the field of Composition should pay attention to that. I heartily agree.
Other bits about teachers: Olivia Limoncelli points out that there is, always, the desire to blame the teacher–K-12 and FYW take the hit here nearly equally. Olivia, Maura Geoghegan, and Megan Griffin all contributed a version of talking about a disconnect between K-12 education does and what the college writing classroom does. Almost all of you spoke of a desire to bridge that disconnect. I get that, but I also think that we need to recall the readings from the worst week about Threshold Concepts. There are always new thresholds for writers to move past. Why should they show up to college done with walking through them.
As I say above, I think that valuing pedagogy–teaching–is on the upswing in Composition. Part of this is because the university has figured out a way to essentially monetize teaching–and by monetize I mean turn teaching into scholarship, the lingua franca of academic life, by something called The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, better known as it’s acronym SOTL (pronounced “sotal” like “total”). Brian Seibert talked about how Fitzgerald’s article makes clear that Normal Schools made teaching an area of study because they could see a product–teachers to staff public schools. I think SOTL has done that for the wider university, and, in that way, validates some of what Composition has been doing for as long as it’s existed.
I don’t know that this clears anything up. But I hope that as we enter this next part of class–understanding what the field values at this particular cultural/historical moment, that you can think about and revisit some of these ideas. And not just for historical reasons but because I see these things and continuing to deeply affect the discipline–both its theory and practice.
10 February 2022
Hello Folks--
First off, here is the link to the Inoue questions that we developed in class on Monday. This is a repeat of the link on the syllabus and that I put in the chat on Tuesday's class: docs.google.com/document/d/1ZnWbYJVveMNQu-iN0Xy14mn7dnLFFSPre3Qu666CbJc/edit?usp=sharing
Here are the group assignments for the other chapters in Inoue:
Chapter 1 & 5 Chapter 2 & 5 Chapter 3 & 5. Chapter 4 & 5
Brian, Maura, & Olivia Alyssa, Megan, & Sarah Ashley, Kayleigh, & Matt Melissa & Shauna
This is a repeat of an email about the Great Class Profile Scavenger Hunt of 2022: ENGL 513 Edit:
THE GREAT SPRING 2022 ENGL 513 CLASS PROFILE SCAVENGER HUNT
__________plays a lot of video games, loves The Pearl by John Steinbeck and horror movies, is a mostly indoor person who is also an outdoor person and will soon be a newlywed.
__________broke 60 seconds in the 400 meter race in college (super impressive. Also, they were part of their college’s 4x400m relay that placed 3rd in the league and 7th in New England and seems rather close to Taylor Swift.
__________ earned a Bachelor of Arts from Emerson College, after internships at Barefoot Books in Cambridge and Penguin Books in New York, realized publishing was not where it was at. Our colleague enjoys coaching Somerset’s high school tennis team, drinking tea, and playing with an Australian Shepherd dog Koji.
__________is the advisor for the Stoughton High School newspaper, tackling their third graduate class in BSU’s MAT program, caring for their roommate, Sam the cat, and mastering the hobbies of baking and crocheting.
__________has been teaching for 21 years, recently moved from Boston to New Bedford, loves the proximity to the ocean, and cares for three very old and vociferous cats.
__________’s favorite movie series is The Avengers, followed by, a sci-fi mind boggler, Interstellar. They like going to the gym and sharing positive quotes and is a pro-punner, making such bad jokes that her students groan and beg her to stop.
__________’s goal is to become a university professor, and metaphorically speaking, set fire to the imperialistic institution of higher education and the English canon.
__________ is interested in a variety of activities and began watercolor painting during the pandemic, loves being in nature, particularly by the water, and enjoys walking on the beach alone and going on hikes with others. Tea over coffee.
__________ is a libra, loves to travel, favorites include Amsterdam, Las Vegas, and, remarkably, Disney World. Our colleague escapes to worlds of adventure in various RPG games, listens to punk/alternative rock, and watches much too much horror.
__________ does not have kids, but does have three little sisters, who are 12, 7, and 6! Their taste in movies is perhaps not for the faint of heart: horror and psychological thrillers.
__________ will soon be a proud homeowner (and koi pond owner) in Middleborough. After graduating from BSU, briefly worked at a warehouse before realizing they wanted to become a teacher.
8 February 2022
I wasn't sure where to put the powerpoint slides from last week's class, so I'm posting it here for posterity sake. I'm also including the slide from this week's class so you can see the progression.
1 March 2022
History Precedes Us
Matt C talked about parts of the reading that other folks didn’t touch on (not a critique, just worth noting) when he talked about the history of assessment covered in the Neff-Lippman. I too am always interested in the way so much of assessment has been argued for in terms of its objectivity. I think that, if they do anything, both Inoue and Neff-Lippman challenges the idea of “objectivity” in assessment—though in different ways, as so many of you pointed out. Olivia L wrote, in her response to Kayleigh H, that the history of assessment felt like it ”came in waves”. And she is right. As with all things in education (and everything else I guess) there are trends. I think that’s an important point to remember.
Melissa B reminds us, also, right up front, that assessment, as it has traditionally and in so many, many ways is still crucially connected to determining whether people, students, are meeting the qualifications established by the normative habitus established by cultural and social elites. And, in doing so, she reminds us that even if we wanted to try escape the history of writing instruction in our country, it’s virtually impossible to do so. We do and must carry it with us if we are to enact change in how privilege is distributed in our classrooms and beyond.
Alyssa C wrote rather eloquently about that last point in relationship to Inoue:
“thinking about the imagery of waves and currents also makes me think of the way Inoue is going upstream, indeed perhaps without a paddle, as he fights the churning waters of the way things have ‘always’ been done.”
This is hard work
Brian S wrote the sentence that most resonated with me this week, because it’s so very true for me and has been for my entire career as a teacher: “summative assessments make us cringe.” Much later in the discussion, Kayleigh H wrote that “the assessment of student writing is a practice that can quickly begin to feel overwhelming.” Amen to that sister.
Sarah B, in her thorough and elegant compare and contrast of Neff-Lippman and Inoue, comes to this important point, one that I think is echoed across many of your (our) reactions to the readings on assessment: “both see their students as writers who are in process and in need of individualized attention.” She also writes what I think is another theme that spans many of our in and out class conversations when she says “In short, the history of assessing writing suggests that we’ve done more talking, writing, and theorizing about assessment than actual change in practice.” This is a point echoed in Sarah and Ashley M., in her response to Sarah, both discuss how, however we do this, it takes time, potentially time that we don’t have or don’t feel like we have.
Other Connections Across Inoue and Neff-Lippman
I really appreciated Maura G’s application of Neff-Lippman to Inoue’s student. It felt spot on right that one little note would have made a huge difference. I have come to a place where I find it nearly impossible to respond meaningfully to a piece of student writing if I don’t know where they are at in their own headspace about it. I’m not being dramatic. I rely heavily on my student’s own sense of their writing to guide my feedback. And I hope that by forcing my students (and force is the right word, but because they would rather not do this), to think about their own writing, to find words to describe what is going on in their own writing, I hope I help them to be better writers in the long run.
Like Maura, Matt C and Kayleigh had a nice back-and-forth about the role of specificity in Lippman and overlap with Inoue’s agenda about how specificity is a kind anti-racist practice. This is something that really speaks to me as well. I find my own assignments have gotten more and more specific with each year, and I personally struggle to know if that’s the best more or not.
I appreciated how so many of you saw what Neff-Lippman talked about as “teacher-centered” and what Inoue talked about as more “student-centered” (Ashley, Sarah, Maura, Alyssa). I don’t know that I immediately saw that, but I see it through your reflections.
This Important Work
I really enjoyed reading what you all had to say, seeing how you made sense of it and fit it into your own thinking. Meaningful and thoughtful response that is not only error-centered but future-oriented and student-centered (a lot of hyphens) takes time. As Ashley M identifies as a takeaway from last week’s reading, both authors agree that assessment is an “integral part of teaching writing.”
When I first started teaching I was a TA for a teacher who taught technical writing. I had already been teaching first year writing in my own classroom for a while and had managed grades as best I could without really knowing what I was doing (I had already moved to grade narratives instead of grades alone), but this was the first time I had to grade students under a system not of my own making. I was charged with grading their finished product for a unit I did not teach on direction writing. One student produced a manual on how to make chocolate chip cookies. Now, if you are thinking “you don’t need a manual to make chocolate chip cookies,” well, exactly my point. The whole thing was a disaster. It was a bound, ten page manual, laminated within an inch of its life—like the lamination could kill someone it was so thick. The ingredient list was split over more than one page. Each step had its own laminated page. It didn’t do any of the things good directions are supposed to do. And yet, this young woman and worked her heart out on this project. Based on the criteria of the project, this student earned a “D.” I’m telling you, this broke me. I knew after that experience that I would never have a grading system where a student who was working that hard was going to be penalized that hard. That was the start of where I’ve ended up today.
Take what you want from what I’m about to say next, but I doubt it’s not something you’ve already heard: I think assessment is the most important teaching we do in the classroom, whether we want it to be so or not.
And so if doing it right takes time that might be used in other ways, I’ve got to give up that time and do it right.
22 February 2022
Hello to you all--
I write to you in transit from my hometown in Ohio to Massachusetts. The enforced focus of plane and train travel has given me the opportunity to read with care your thoughtful contemplation of what Asao Inoue offers to those of us engaged in or interested in studying literacy instruction.
I think that, overwhelmingly, I notice both deep interest in his project and a healthy dose of skepticism, not necessarily about the merit of the argument but about the ability to, as Megan G put it, implement these strategies in a “practical or time conscious way” in a current K-12 classroom. Many of you echoed Megan’s concerns in various ways that I would sum up as the feasibility of implementation in the face of all the things that, specifically to K-12 educators in this instance, but more generally, to anyone engaged in literacy instruction because we are all held accountable to forces beyond our classrooms—the frameworks, standardized testing in all its many forms. Maura G talked, in particular, about the demands that standardized testing places on K-12. I thought Brian S did a particularly good job of talking about the effects of standardized testing—he brought the idea of the trickle-down effect of tests like MCAS that Inoue talks about into our conversation, and that’s an important part.
Matt C brought to the discussion this important point from Inoue, not unconnected to what I start to say about the quote Brian pulled: Classrooms discipline both teachers and students. Alyssa C paraphrased a version of this: we impact the classroom and the classroom impacts us. In other words, we are enmeshed in the same forces that our students are caught up in, and that is what makes for pedagogies that oppress rather than liberate.
This is, I think, is very important to contemplate. As Brian also reminds us, Inoue is not blaming teachers nor is he saying that they are racists. He’s saying that we have all—all of us—been educated in a white racial habitus construct that privileges some student behaviors and vilifies others. A point I want to add here is that it is, as our discussion and reflections indicate, very hard to think and teach our way out of this way of thinking. Very hard. A point so many of you brought up.
But, as Ashley M wrote about so eloquently, Inoue gives us seven—count them seven—ways to think about our classroom spaces, and he does not privilege one over the other. He tells us, very specifically, as Ashley points out, that we can and should start where it makes sense to start, where it is manageable.
As I read your responses, I can locate two places where I think folks feel like it is possible to start: transparency about evaluation and inviting students to shape what the assessments look like. Many of you, too many to count, asked, fairly, what assessment meant to Inoue. I think this is a question very relevant to K-12 since assessment so dominates your day-to-day classroom life. Shauna C and Olivia L were both drawn to thinking seriously about how we can bring our students into their assessments. It’s totally work, for sure, as Ashley M also wrote about—when you bring something in you are going to have to force something out. The question every teacher has to decide is if it is worth it or not. Melissa B and Kayleigh H wrote a lot about what transparent teaching practices actually look like and actually accomplish. Maura G talked about Inoue’s idea of “distributing privilege” equitably. And transparency in how we assess student performance seems to me to be job one in that work.
One thing that folks seem to shy away from is the idea of valuing labor over quality—which, ultimately, is one of the key ways that Inoue operationalizes his “ecology”. Not Matt C though, who I hope will talk more with us about how he has employed labor-based grading in his own K-12 classrooms. I admit my bias here since I moved to labor-based grading for all of my classes about three years ago. I do not do it the same way that Inoue does it—with spread sheets and accounting for time, though I do tell students how much time I think each part of an assignment should take them. A quick scan of my own syllabi shows that I create lists of tasks that need to be completed. Tasks do not need to be done well to count. They need to be done. Because I have faith that if a student completes the list of tasks, their writing will move forward. It may not be perfect, but it will move them ever closer to those “thresholds” as writers and readers that I am hoping to move them toward.
For my own journey towards the most equitable classroom experience I can offer my students, to one where the stifling effects of years of grades are mitigated and authentic learning happens for them as readers and writers, I cannot say that this is easy work. I will say that in terms of the emotional labor of teaching, I have found this move towards labor over what I see as an arbitrary and entirely subjective, no matter how many rubrics you come up with, as profoundly more rewarding for me as a teacher. It has allowed me to focus on the real work of the writing classroom—critical literacy.
But I get where Sarah B is coming from. I do. SEAE is not going anywhere anytime soon. I am thinking about this a lot lately because I have some students whose writing is nearly incomprehensible. And standardized testing, as so many of you talked about, is not going anywhere anytime soon.
And it is also true that what Inoue writes about feels revolutionary. I actually think it is. But I don’t know that the only way we can implement some of the pedagogical processes in ways that, as Sarah talks about, relevant to our local communities, has to mean overthrowing the entire system first. I believe in work arounds within the system until the system buckles to those work arounds.
And let me remind you: that sort of works. I said in class that Inoue doesn’t exist unless process pedagogy exists. And I mean that. Think about it. There is not one of us in this classroom that hasn’t been taught and not teaches process. But in the early 1970s, process was revolutionary. Thus, despite the challenge that Inoue’s ideas present in implementation, I am committed to explore them and to helping others to explore them as well.
14 February 2022
This update is coming to you via email, and is housed on the Monday Update page on our class website for future reference.
I wanted to close out our historical discussion of Composition Studies. What I most hope folks take away from our discussions of the past two weeks is as follows:
Well, what I really want to say is that I have so much to say about this field that I’ve made my career in that it all comes out jumbled and a mess–and in part that is because the field of Composition is often a jumble and a mess–but, I believe, in the best sort of way. But, for the sake of this course as a course, I think that there are some big bunches of ideas that are important to understand:
- Composition has always had a love/hate relationship to “teaching” as something valuable and important. Sometimes the profession has actively tried to distance itself from teaching and from FYW. I think we are in a moment of celebrating pedagogy. The students are, as always the beneficiaries or victims of this.
- At its best, FYW can be libratory. At its worst it is stuck in the deficit mindset that gave birth to it.
- Composition is almost always playing defense–against the literature departments and faculty who see FYW as a necessary evil, against a culture that thinks we aren’t teaching students the right things–or are some kind of pinko-commy socialist agenda pushing monsters–and that has shaped the discipline.
- Another way to put it: Composition as a field of study is relatively new by the standards of the University. We were originally housed in the newly developed English departments at elite institutions like Harvard as a fix to the deficiencies professors saw in student writing.
- But also, I don’t think the only history we need to adhere to is the one that starts at Harvard. Normal schools represent two things that Composition values: the idea of literacy instruction as a public good and a public responsibility, and that good teaching doesn’t just happen, you need to learn about it and get good at it.
- Finally, we don’t agree on what the field is about or should be about. I sort of like that, but for folks new to the study of the field, it’s annoying. We are caught up in what “successful writing” looks like (genres), how to teach it (pedagogy), what work it does in the world (effects), how to study it (ethics). It’s a lot.
A little bit more on some of the above and in your words: Deficiency, for a very long time, has thus defined the discipline. And not just for students. As many of you pointed out in last week’s discussion board posts, Crowley has a particularly low opinion of the way that FYW has taken hold (in the 80s and 90s) in the US university. Sarah Bond called it Crowley’s cynicism and Kayleigh Holt identified Crowley’s description of FYW as a necessary evil. Brian Seibert also talked about how the course, a drudge, was taught by, as Crowley identifies them, least prepared and least accomplished faculty. Crowley wonders aloud how it is possible that any learning happens.
Sarah Bond, Melissa Batty, and Matt Cutter all spent some time thinking about the purpose of FYW. Sarah rightly pointed out that it we–all of us K-12 and Postsecondary–are still and always trying to figure out what proficient looks like–and this has put tremendous pressure on FYW to do a lot of under-appreciated heavy lifting at universities. The goal, as Melissa and Matt make clear, however, is also always contentious. Melissa points out the ways that FYW is just another class in a long line of classes meant to increase homogeneity among populations and indoctrinate students into societal norms and values enforced by elites. There is no getting away from this truth, particularly if we read Crowley’s take on what has happened to Composition in the years after process. But there is also no denying that FYW, as Matt pointed out, has moved many many members of underrepresented, undervalued, often persecuted populations into not just the middle class, which is a dumb and arbitrary metric, but into a place of personal power where they can make decisions about what is right for them in their world–what they fight for, how much they are willing to fight, etc. We can want it to be one or the other, but we should come away from our discussions knowing that FYW, like any pedagogical space, is imperfect.
Ashley Merola reminds us by quoting a less cynical than usual Crowley insightfully that FYW is complicated because it is not about the past or what has already been learned, but what can be learned: FYW cares about skills over content, change and the development of the student, and is future oriented (not about knowledge or content being passed down one generation to the next).
I would argue, that those of us engaged in the work of Composition are interested in empowering our students to be in control of their lives. Which brings me to a final point: the role of the teacher, in both K-12 and FYW. Fitzgerald argues that this is the goal of teacher-training at Nornal Schools and that the field of Composition should pay attention to that. I heartily agree.
Other bits about teachers: Olivia Limoncelli points out that there is, always, the desire to blame the teacher–K-12 and FYW take the hit here nearly equally. Olivia, Maura Geoghegan, and Megan Griffin all contributed a version of talking about a disconnect between K-12 education does and what the college writing classroom does. Almost all of you spoke of a desire to bridge that disconnect. I get that, but I also think that we need to recall the readings from the worst week about Threshold Concepts. There are always new thresholds for writers to move past. Why should they show up to college done with walking through them.
As I say above, I think that valuing pedagogy–teaching–is on the upswing in Composition. Part of this is because the university has figured out a way to essentially monetize teaching–and by monetize I mean turn teaching into scholarship, the lingua franca of academic life, by something called The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, better known as it’s acronym SOTL (pronounced “sotal” like “total”). Brian Seibert talked about how Fitzgerald’s article makes clear that Normal Schools made teaching an area of study because they could see a product–teachers to staff public schools. I think SOTL has done that for the wider university, and, in that way, validates some of what Composition has been doing for as long as it’s existed.
I don’t know that this clears anything up. But I hope that as we enter this next part of class–understanding what the field values at this particular cultural/historical moment, that you can think about and revisit some of these ideas. And not just for historical reasons but because I see these things and continuing to deeply affect the discipline–both its theory and practice.
10 February 2022
Hello Folks--
First off, here is the link to the Inoue questions that we developed in class on Monday. This is a repeat of the link on the syllabus and that I put in the chat on Tuesday's class: docs.google.com/document/d/1ZnWbYJVveMNQu-iN0Xy14mn7dnLFFSPre3Qu666CbJc/edit?usp=sharing
Here are the group assignments for the other chapters in Inoue:
Chapter 1 & 5 Chapter 2 & 5 Chapter 3 & 5. Chapter 4 & 5
Brian, Maura, & Olivia Alyssa, Megan, & Sarah Ashley, Kayleigh, & Matt Melissa & Shauna
This is a repeat of an email about the Great Class Profile Scavenger Hunt of 2022: ENGL 513 Edit:
THE GREAT SPRING 2022 ENGL 513 CLASS PROFILE SCAVENGER HUNT
- READ the profiles of your classmates on the CLASS PROFILE PAGE for our class (available by clicking on this link).
- Cut and paste this worksheet into another document or an email.
- Match your class member to the right description (will probably take hours of your time).
- Email me with your completed worksheet and earn a free week of reading journals just for playing.
__________plays a lot of video games, loves The Pearl by John Steinbeck and horror movies, is a mostly indoor person who is also an outdoor person and will soon be a newlywed.
__________broke 60 seconds in the 400 meter race in college (super impressive. Also, they were part of their college’s 4x400m relay that placed 3rd in the league and 7th in New England and seems rather close to Taylor Swift.
__________ earned a Bachelor of Arts from Emerson College, after internships at Barefoot Books in Cambridge and Penguin Books in New York, realized publishing was not where it was at. Our colleague enjoys coaching Somerset’s high school tennis team, drinking tea, and playing with an Australian Shepherd dog Koji.
__________is the advisor for the Stoughton High School newspaper, tackling their third graduate class in BSU’s MAT program, caring for their roommate, Sam the cat, and mastering the hobbies of baking and crocheting.
__________has been teaching for 21 years, recently moved from Boston to New Bedford, loves the proximity to the ocean, and cares for three very old and vociferous cats.
__________’s favorite movie series is The Avengers, followed by, a sci-fi mind boggler, Interstellar. They like going to the gym and sharing positive quotes and is a pro-punner, making such bad jokes that her students groan and beg her to stop.
__________’s goal is to become a university professor, and metaphorically speaking, set fire to the imperialistic institution of higher education and the English canon.
__________ is interested in a variety of activities and began watercolor painting during the pandemic, loves being in nature, particularly by the water, and enjoys walking on the beach alone and going on hikes with others. Tea over coffee.
__________ is a libra, loves to travel, favorites include Amsterdam, Las Vegas, and, remarkably, Disney World. Our colleague escapes to worlds of adventure in various RPG games, listens to punk/alternative rock, and watches much too much horror.
__________ does not have kids, but does have three little sisters, who are 12, 7, and 6! Their taste in movies is perhaps not for the faint of heart: horror and psychological thrillers.
__________ will soon be a proud homeowner (and koi pond owner) in Middleborough. After graduating from BSU, briefly worked at a warehouse before realizing they wanted to become a teacher.
8 February 2022
I wasn't sure where to put the powerpoint slides from last week's class, so I'm posting it here for posterity sake. I'm also including the slide from this week's class so you can see the progression.
25 January 2022
Good Afternoon--
If you are reading this, you are enrolled in ENGL 513 Composition Theory and Pedagogy with Lee Torda. Our class meets online synchronously on Tuesday evenings from 6:00 to 8:40 PM. Welcome to our class. I feel so passionately about this topic and am so grateful for the opportunity to work with the K-12 community on literacy instruction.
This welcome message is being posted on Blackboard and has been emailed to all registered members of the course.
First things first: Click on this link in order to attend our class. Alternatively, you can cut and paste this link into your browser:
https://bridgew.zoom.us/j/96904615117?pwd=dngxNGZMZk5UVHFrbGU1YW9PS29MZz09
This zoom link is the link we will use for the entire semester. It is also the link you will use for office hours or any other meeting you might have with me.
For this evening’s class: I know that some faculty give students work to do in preparation for the first class, but I am not comfortable with that model. In tonight’s class, 1) we will go over, as one does, the syllabus for the course, policies, etc, and I will orient the class to how we will function as a synchronous, online class; 2) we will read and discuss the article you can access by clicking on this link. I am not asking you to read it now (though you are welcome to). It’s not a long article and you will have time to read it in our class. The article is a 1975 article entitled “Why Johnny Can’t Write,” a phrase you may have heard used. This is the article, now quite famous, that started that; 3) we will work on the least invasive ice-breaker I can think of, but one that I think is vital in an online synchronous class.
I am not sure that that our first class will run for the full 2 hours and 40 minutes, but I think that it will certainly last a full two hours.
FINALLY, I DON’T USE BLACKBOARD: if you are reading this message on Blackboard, please be aware that this is the only course message that will be posted to this space. I do not use blackboard to manage my courses. I have a class website that houses all information for our course. You can access that website by clicking on this link or by cutting and pasting this link into your browser: https://www.leetorda.com/.
If you visit the page, you will notice that the zoom links to attend class and office hours are also embedded on every page o the site. At the time of this email, I am not sure that I will have made our ENGL 513 links live, but they will be by class time. We will spend the first part of our class meeting learning about how to use the website (but as people who use websites all the time, I don’t anticipate that this will be much of a thing).
A Note About Texts: I’ve gotten a few emails about texts for the course so I thought I would just address this here. I will make the information for our texts available to you on our class website and you are welcome to purchase the entire text if you feel they would be useful to you. But I am a firm believer in low-cost/no-cost classes, and ours is no different. I will make all texts used in the course available electronically.
Looking forward to meeting you this evening and working with you this semester.
LT