Blogging Pedagogy - writing

"Don't Feel So Down": When Your Students Don't Understand Your References

Jeffrey Boruszak — Fri, 10 Apr 2015 18:30:56 +0000

Author:

Jeffrey Boruszak

Image Credit:

Flickr, wumpiewoo, 2010

I recently had a teaching experience I could only compare to being on a sinking ship—like the band on the Titanic, I played my song dutifully as I sunk into the murky waters. With every word I spoke, attempting to explain the material I prepared, I could sense the students’ disinterest, disengagement, and utter confusion. This wasn’t the first time I experienced this sinking feeling of a total misfire while teaching, nor do I expect it to be the last time. And do you know whose fault it was? Julian Casablancas.

Well, let me clarify—it was not Julian Casablancas himself that sunk my lesson, but rather the expectation that my students would know that in the early 2000’s there was a popular band called The Strokes. You see, I was in my introduction to rhetoric and writing class, and the topic of the day was identifying different kinds of evidence and relating them to the main argument. The centerpiece of my lesson was a group exercise involving an op-ed in The New York Times earlier that week. In “Brunch is for Jerks,” David Shaftel argues that Manhattan’s indulgent brunch atmosphere has hit a critical mass, and that the meal’s ubiquity is evidence of widespread gentrification and the failure of the ultra-hip millennial lifestyle. Or, in the words I figured wanted my students to get—“People may think brunch is still cool, but really it’s just two-thousand and late.”

The key to Shaftel’s argument about the hip-ness of brunch is his use of a Julian Casablancas quote at the beginning of his article: “I don’t know how many, like, white people having brunch I can deal with on a Saturday afternoon.” Shaftel comes back to Casablancas two more times in the piece, representing him as an arbiter of what is cool. “Perfect!” I thought, while preparing the lesson. “This example is straight out of the textbook’s chapter on evidence, and between talking about brunch and referencing a hit rock band, I can keep a fairly dry topic upbeat and engaging.”

WRONG. Once we were in the actual class, my students didn’t seem to really be getting to the “cool” part of Shaftel’s argument. I slowly tried maneuvering them to the paragraphs where Casablancas is mentioned. Still nothing. Finally, a student brings up brunch’s cool factor based on another paragraph. Here is my moment—I ask them to find evidence for the article’s argument on brunch’s coolness, but they can’t find it. As the search gets more and more drawn out, I eventually write Julian Casablanca’s name on the board. Crickets. They’ve never heard of this name before. “He’s the lead singer of The Strokes,” I tell them. Then came the moment I hadn’t been prepared for—my students had never heard of The Strokes.

I had been told this would eventually happen. Another professor told me that his students no longer understand his references to The Matrix, and that one day I would struggle after making what I thought of as a still-contemporary pop culture reference to something my students had no idea about.

And so there I was, caught entirely off-guard by a reference that my students just didn’t understand. And in this critical moment, I fumbled the ball. How do you explain what “cool” is, especially when your reference to what is cool is a rock star whose hit songs you suddenly realize came out over a decade before? Now my students seemed more lost than ever. I wanted to just move on—what I had prepared as the crown jewel of my lesson was a total wash. But there was nothing to move on to—I had to deal with “cool” on my students’ terms, not my own.

And so they left the class with bewildered looks on their faces. It didn’t help that my other examples besides Shaftel’s article also failed to hit their mark (one of these exercises was staging a debate over which Austin burger is better—Whataburger or P. Terry’s…except none of my students had been to nor heard of P. Terry’s). The next class I picked up the shattered dregs of my dignity, and gave them a boring Powerpoint reviewing kinds of evidence to reverse the effects of a disastrous lesson.

And so I am left with numerous questions: What do we as teachers do when we fail to connect with our students, especially when it comes to pop culture? It is something that will only get worse as time passes. But more importantly, what do we do when our references fail? How do we recover? For me the answer is now contingency plans—from this point forward, if I use a pop culture reference as a focal point in a lesson, I need to prepare options so that I don’t leave my class confused and bewildered.

But like I said before—despite my best intentions, this will not be the last time I have a lesson that falls apart in front of me. Maybe it won’t be from pop culture references next time. I’m sure that any teachers reading this have had their share of misfires in the past, and the fear of a bad lesson plan is a constant source of anxiety. So maybe the only option is to take a deep breath, and know that no matter how bad any individual lesson goes, there is always room to recover. Just remember to listen to Julian Casablancas: “Oh baby, don’t feel so down…gonna be alright.”

ProTip: Always Assign “Shitty First Drafts”

Rhiannon Goad — Tue, 03 Feb 2015 18:46:33 +0000

Author:

Rhiannon Goad

Image Credit:

Eagles on the Rise

If you’ve had the pleasure to read it then you probably teach it.

Our sister site, the DWRL Lesson Plans Library, is full of all kinds of gems. But my most successful lesson plan is too simple for me to post over there. Directions: (1) assign Anne Lamott’s "Shitty First Drafts" from from Bird by Bird, (2) watch your students as they start to think about writing as process rather than product, and (3) prepare yourself for “this-is-why-I-do-this” feels.

Lamott's short essay discusses overcoming insecurities through revision, failure as a means to success. It’s funny account of perfectionism, an honest reflection on process.

After assigning this essay, you’ll immediately see an improvement in your students' writing. Over the upcoming months, you’ll start to see a real change in how some students approach writing altogether.

I’ve lost count of how many times students remarked, often weeks after I initially assigned it, that “Shitty First Drafts” totally changed the way perceive the task of writing or that it helped them imagine themselves as writers. Recently, I had a former student tell me that reading "Shitty First Drafts" helpd him deal with some pretty serious anxiety when it came to writing essays.

Not convinced? Conider these two passages:

Students always point out this one: “I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her.” #amen

My personal favorite: “The whole thing would be so long and incoherent and hideous that for the rest of the day I'd obsess about getting creamed by a car before I could write a decent second draft. I'd worry that people would read what I'd written and believe that the accident had really been a suicide, that I had panicked because my talent was waning and my mind was shot.” #same

Try it. Let me know how it works out for you.

Open… Like a Book?: Writing New Media and the Materialities of Textual Production

Amy Tuttle — Mon, 20 Oct 2014 20:10:16 +0000

Author:

Amy Tuttle

Image Credit:

Amy Tuttle

New ideas give way to new methods. And since new media changes the way we link ideas to ideas and ideas to readers, perhaps our experiences with new media should prompt us to reconsider what we “know.” Specifically, educators might be well-served to consider the ways in which new media writing differs from traditional, humanist prose, as this deliberate differentiation could open up (rather than foreclose) epistemological and pedagogical possibilities for the digital humanities.

With new media, a text’s materiality is enacted through the practices of its composition. Thus, rather than seeing new media writing as an analysis of specific media (or of the broad tropes of formal convention that often guide writing pedagogies), approaches to teaching new media might benefit from a focus on writing as a (series of) material, knowledge-making practice(s). Investigations of material practice as it pertains to new media writing have the potential to offer rich avenues for the exploration of the complex ontological and epistemological relationships among subjects, objects, and identity, which, in turn, could lay important groundwork for understanding the digital humanities’ responsibilities to democratized knowledge and invention/innovation.

A focus on the material meaning-making practices of new media writing introduces expanded understandings of what new media texts mean or can mean. In Writing New Media, Geoff Sirc suggests that a move from prose writing and concepts of metaphor toward more open systems of freely associated “collections” of heterogeneous writing affords new media writers the responsibility to make connections (143). Thus, a new media writer can experience a fuller realm of possibility when he or she is not self-conscious about trying to follow and master formal conventions of style. In other words, some of new media’s libratory potential lies in becoming less concerned with content and more conscious of our materials.

Significantly, an increased consciousness of the material practices of new media writing departs from traditional humanist approaches to writing in that new media methodologies and pedagogies might allow for the critical analysis of both a text’s content and the means of its production. More specifically, in attending to the materiality of texts, new media writers work to collapse the hierarchical distinction between textual analysis and textual production—between reading and writing. In other words, new media writing fosters multiplicity, and the material practices that accompany new media writing might help students identify a range of literacies. Additionally, new media texts trouble the academic and disciplinary binaries of alphabetic/visual, “high” culture/“low” culture, and “real” work/“not real” work. Therefore, by refusing to position textual analysis over textual production, pedagogies of new media writing can demonstrate a resistance to binaries of normalization or centralization.

Methodologies of decentralization can untether writing from its content, and as a result, new media has the potential not only to support existing social and cultural theories and practices of writing, but also to disrupt and change those positions, leading to potentially significant (and sustainable) long-term social change. Both students and teachers (and every combination of the two) occupy a variety of subject positions within a single class setting, and, in the best possible cases, the reconfiguration processes inherent in the material practices of new media have the potential to shift the focus from what things mean to how things mean. Therefore, teachers of writing must consider how pedagogical theories of writing and the “everyday practice” (to use de Certeau's term) of writing work (or don’t work) together in relation to the larger, more systemic issues regarding the nature and value of various kinds of scholarly work.

Imitation is the Sincerest Form of ... Learning?

Duncan Moench — Mon, 07 Apr 2014 12:26:59 +0000

Author:

B. D. Moench

Image Credit:

By Traitrnator

Traditional Art / Drawings / Portraits & Figures

Awhile back I remember reading that, early in his career, Hunter S. Thompson began every morning typing word for word full chapters of The Great Gatsby. At one point in his early twenties, apparently, he’d typed out the whole book multiple times. As with most things Thompson, his friends and colleagues were baffled. When asked “why?” Thompson said “I want to know what it feels like to write something great.”

Now there’s two ways to respond to this: 1) Thompson—who was just as famous for his drug use as he was his pioneering “new” journalism style—was a lunatic and this habit represents just one more quirk to ad to a landfill of quirks or 2) Thompson, who, succeeded in spite (rather than because) of his drug use, had indeed stumbled onto something.

As you’ve probably guessed at this point, I chose the later; and, I decided to test out the thesis on my students. In my 309K course, after their first full paper assignment, many students were struggling with rhetorical analysis. As per usual, many just couldn’t quite get their heads around how analysis is supposed to look. What do you expect? What am I supposed to say? How is analysis different than opinion? What do you mean by “focus on the rhetoric”?

In the past, I’ve found that the best way to answer these questions is to meet with students one-on-one and illustrate, with concrete examples, how their papers are polemical rather than analytical or evaluative rather than substantive. After a bit of instruction most students tend to get the hang of rhetorical analysis and turn out decent work by the middle of the semester. But, with Thompson on my mind, I wondered if there might not be a better, and quicker, way to give students the feel for rhetorical analysis. So, I decided to ask my students to do something — something they, surely, have never been asked to do by a teacher before: copy another person’s work word for word.

I asked my students to take out Lunsford’s Everything’s An Argument (8th ed.), turn to page 108, and read David Brooks’s Times column “It’s Not about You.” After giving them a few minutes to complete the reading, I then asked them to read student Rachel Kolb’s analysis of Brooks’s essay entitled “Understanding Brooks’s Binaries.” Once they finish reading, I ask them to log-in to their nearest computer and open up a Word file and then type the piece word for word. Most students were shocked and I had to repeat myself multiple times.

“Yes, I really want you to copy her essay word-for-word, and, then print it out with your name on the top….give it the title "Imitation Exercise."”

As the class began typing, I surveyed the room and explained that I felt typing Kolb’s words—which are by no means perfect, but certainly competent—would help them not only see, but also feel, how analysis worked on the page.

I started the exercise with about 15 minutes left in the class and most of the students weren’t able to finish in time, so I allowed them to send it to me before the next class session. So far, most of the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Many of my students have commented that the exercise really helped them get a better feel for what was expected in rhetorical analysis. I have to say that their paper revisions were significantly improved across the board, and, in many cases far more than I expected. It’s worth also mentioning, that, thus far, no students have confused the intention of the exercise in any fundamental way. I haven’t received any papers copying whole phrases from Kolb’s work or, even cutting too close to her text, which, really, would be almost useless, since she is of course analyzing a completely different piece of rhetoric. I highly recommend giving an “imitation exercise” a try.

If you already require Everything’s An Argument, Kolb’s paper won’t require any printing; an exemplary work from a past student, or the edited student essays reprinted in the back of the textbook Critical Situations would work just as well. The key is making sure to have the original piece they analyzed to pair with the paper.

If you give it a try (and it works) don’t thank me, thank HST … and, if it fails spectacularly, please also direct the necessary blame his way as well :)

Collaboration and Chaos

Cole Wehrle — Sun, 02 Feb 2014 16:46:08 +0000

Author:

Cole Wehrle

Image Credit:

Cole Wehrle

As long as I’ve had the pleasure of teaching in one of the DWRL class rooms I’ve flirted with the idea of using Google Docs in a classroom setting. In-class writing assignments are certainly nothing new, but Google Docs made it possible to transform what was a space for quiet reflection into one that demanded open collaboration.

At least, it was theoretically possible. While useful for all kinds of list-making and brainstorming, the promise of Google Docs, as a productive space for real-time collaboration seems largely illusory. As anyone who has ever tried to write a CFP at the same time knows, what results is mostly frustration and confusion. It might be easier to have everyone shouting over a laptop.

So I tabled the idea until, a few weeks ago, I found myself reading about the idea of the “flipped-classroom,” which had become the pedagogical-tactic-of-the-month and was generating lots of buzz on various blogs and op-ed pages. For those who missed the wave (or have yet to catch it), the idea is simple and counterintuitive. Teachers, usually working in small groups, record all of the classroom lectures and send them to students so they can stream them at home. Then, when the students come to class the next day, the teacher will help them with their homework. This has been applied to subjects as diverse as algebra and American history, and many teachers are finding that the “flipped-classroom” has allowed them to tailor their class to the needs of individual students without sacrificing content.

I was intrigued by the concept but was unsure how to apply it to a writing class. When I was a journalism student we routinely had to produce short articles in the space of a 75 minute lab class, but it was a demanding experience and seemed unfair to give it to students in a basic writing class. About that time I realized that Google Docs might provide the answer. If it was too much to ask a single student to produce a research summary in a 75 minute class, perhaps it was somewhat more reasonable to ask it of a group.

Before the class I asked my students to look over two sample research summaries, one very good and the other very bad. Then, during the next class period we began by coming up with two lists of what qualities made the good research summary good and the bad example bad. I then played a short video, passed out a transcript, and asked each group of 3-4 students to produce a good research summary using Google Docs on that video. After a few minutes, when they had set everything up, I casually mentioned that they had to turn it in by the end of class. No late assignments would be accepted.

Panic ensued, complaints were levied, but, after they realized that this was not a point for compromise, they began dividing the work and approaching their job systematically. The activity had forced them all into the 11^th hour crunch, but this time both their classmates and I were on-hand to help. Over the next 45 minutes the students bombarded me with concise, earnest questions about phrasing and grammar while helping each other frame and format their citations. By the end of the class every single group had produced a finished research summary and it was likely the best batch of short papers I’ve ever received.

I’m not sure how to apply the activity to a longer paper, but it certainly seems like an avenue worth exploring.

Thank You, Mr. Putin

Cole Wehrle — Sun, 22 Sep 2013 05:00:00 +0000

Author:

Cole Wehrle

Image Credit:

Cole Wehrle

When I talk to fellow teachers about students in Rhetoric 306, the complaint is curiously uniform: students struggle with limiting their engagement with a source to the level of rhetoric. Though the distinction between a particular argument and the subject of that argument can seem perfectly clear to teachers in the field, it’s a divide that continues to puzzle students, sometimes deep into a semester. I think the problem owes quite a bit to the structural design of most rhetoric classes, which initially emphasize summary and other descriptive modes over analysis: hey teach students to map then, shortly after ask them to hypothesize.

This semester, while teaching my 309: The Rhetoric of Independence, I opted for a somewhat different approach. Because many of the students in 309 have tested out of the department’s Introduction to Rhetoric course, I wanted to be sure to provide all of the students with a basic background and vocabulary in the discipline before we moved on to our particular subject. In order to do this I designed a heavily abridged version of that introductory class which fit into two 75-minute classes. Of course, two class periods can hardly equal the scope and depth of 306. Nevertheless, collapsing 306 into such a small space allowed me to experiment.

My first decision was easy. Instead of moving from summary to analysis I would instead begin by glossing over the critical vocabulary (ethos, pathos, logos, etc) used in analysis and then move into their argumentation around their subject’s rhetoric. We spent some time applying this vocabulary in a variety of exercises which asked students to engage deeply with advertisements (both political and commercial). After about 45 minutes the students had a pretty good sense of what to look for and we moved on to the second step. Here I began with a simple conceit. After watching a Romney political add I announced to my students, “One rhetorical function is more critical than all the others.” I then divided them into groups and had them work on figuring out which was the “correct” element. Then, as the groups presented their findings, I put them in conversation with the discordant opinions of their classmates and allowed space for rebuttal. By the close of the second day of classes, just about everyone had a strong sense of the elements of a work that were “fair game” and how to build an argument around those elements.

Still, they had yet to put it into writing, and I was unsure what text I should assign them. I knew I wanted it to be a print source. Though videos, photographs, and print advertisements teach easily, they engage with a different subset of skills that can leave a student off-balance when he or she encounters a knotty print source.

And then I read Putin’s op-ed in the New York Times (which can be found here). With all the art of a first-year rhetoric student, Putin drowns his audience in panoply of argumentative ploys. There is almost too much fodder to wade through, and, what’s more, it’s rendered in a crisp style that hardly makes it beyond its 2^nd page.

What’s more, the ongoing crisis in Syria is so confounding, morally ambiguous (and frustrating) that forcing students to anchor their arguments at the level are argumentation comes as relief. “Don’t worry guys,” I told them at the end of class, “you don’t need solve the problem on the ground, just on the page.”

Oral Presentation by Peers

Coulson — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 05:00:00 +0000

Author:

Doug Coulson

Image Credit:

Jbrazito's Photostream

I’m teaching an upper-division rhetorical theory course about legal rhetoric that requires students to write a 2,500-4,000 word research paper in which they rhetorically analyze two or more opposing arguments regarding an evidentiary controversy in a forensic dispute (typically this will be a trial or similar proceeding), and critique or extend a particular theory of forensic rhetoric as it applies to the rhetorical analysis they provide. This is a staged writing assignment that begins about a thirdd of the way through the semester and is concluded at the end of the semester. During the second half of the semester, I have students deliver oral presentations on the papers in progress.

This semester, rather than have students present their own papers to the class, I've paired them with a peer and asked each to present the other's paper instead. The detais of this exercise may be found here. After participating in such a peer presentation format myself at a professional workshop, I became convinced that such a format could facilitate a deeper level of peer review and collaborative learning as well as facilitate classroom discussion regarding the writing process in undergraduate and graduate student environments as well. No classroom technology is required for this assignment, although a media consolae/projector facilitates students who want to use technology in their presentations.

The assignment requires students to deliver an 8-12 minute oral presentation to the class (1) restating their peer’s paper, (2) identifying the conversation in which their peer’s paper is situated, and (2) offering constructive feedback or questions regarding their peer’s paper that might be helpful for the class to discuss to assist the author. Their peer in turn delivers a presentation regarding their paper. After each presentation, a brief Q&A period is permitted for the class to discuss the paper and ask the author questions if desired. The author may respond to questions during this period, but otherwise the author is discouraged from intervening to explain their work during the presentation but encouraged instead simply listen to the restatement and commentary offered by the presenter and the class. Part of the pedagogical value of the assignment is to liberate the author from the defensiveness that often accompanies presenting their own work and allow them to carefully listen to their peers' interpretations and comments on their work.

Students are encouraged to approach the presentations as writer sharing a peer’s work with fellow writers and to not be overly formal. The presentations are required to follow a formal outline, contain the content called for by the protocol below and be in the order set forth in the protocol, and be delivered within the stated time limits. When the time limit is up, the presentation is stopped. Students are allowed but not required to use audio-visual materials during their presentations as long as they’re not used to substitute for extemporaneous commentary.

The protocol I provide to students as an arrangement device is to spend the first 4-6 minutes describing the paper and identifying its central arguments and contributions. What appears to be the central question that the paper seeks to address? How would the presenter state the author’s central argument or thesis? How does the author develop the paper? In what debates or discussions does the paper situate itself? What does the author contribute to the conversation the paper engages? The presenter is then asked to spend a couple of minutes identifying the evidence and methods the author uses to support the claims made. Finally, the presenter is asked to conclude with 2-6 minutes of constructive feedback identifying one or two broad areas in which the paper might be improved and raising issues for the group to discuss to assist the author.

The assignment is graded based primarily on the basis of completion, contingent only on the students meeting the minimum requirements that the presentation follow a formal outline, contain the content called for by the protocol and in the order set forth in the protocol, and be delivered within the stated time limits.

Students have reported some anxiety both as author and as presenter of a peer's paper, particularly regarding losing control of the presentation and not being in a position to defend their work as author or mischaracterizing their peer's work as presenter. My experience is that students take the presentations more seriously when presenting a peer's work than when presenting their own, however, and in some ways experience less anxiety because they don't have to defend their work. They also appear to value the experience of hearing a peer restate their paper's content. Requiring them to read a peer's paper in sufficient depth to deliver a presentation regarding it has also proved educational about the writing process.

All in all I've been impressed with the results of peer presentations as opposed to author presentations of student work in the classroom. It offers presentations with some perspective for the benefit of the class and offers student authors a much deeper experience of peer review of their work while liberating them to carefully listen to how a peer is reading and interpreting their writing. It also challenges presenters to develop their skills of offering metacritical commentary for a larger audience. Students have approached the assignment with great care and discipline, and I expect the format contributes to this improved presentation ethic over author presentations.

Social Writing: Done with the One-on-One

Cole Wehrle — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 05:00:00 +0000

Author:

Cole Wehrle

Image Credit:

Photo by Corand Poirier via Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (reference #P48,S1,P23104)

It’s been a few months since we had Criterion co-founder and innovator extraordinaire, Bob Stein, on campus, and since his visit I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the things he had the say. For those of you who missed it, Stein was showcasing a few new projects related to the future of the book, centered on the idea of social reading (you can hear Zeugma’s great interview with him here. Essentially, he argued that our understanding of reading is stuck in the 19-century and that technology has opened up new avenues for all kinds of new reading practices that could transform education. He wasn’t just talking about distribution modes like ebooks either. Instead, he was suggesting ways in which the book could be read and discussed community: discussions would flow beyond the classroom and a student would never have to face a difficult text alone. While, the technology that enables this kind of seamless discussion isn’t quite ready yet, I’ve been thinking about the concepts behind Stein’s idea. How did it apply to my teaching practice? Were there ways in which I could test some of these notions out in a first-year rhetoric and writing course (RHE 306)?

My first thought was writing itself. In 306 I spend a lot of time talking to students about their experience typing. It never takes long for the horror stories to come out: the all-nighters, the embarrassing typos, the misunderstood prompts, and, perhaps above all, the terrible blank page, ticking clock, and languishing page requirement. Of course, all of these problems are “student problems” and, though the isolation of writing is critical to its mastery, there are also ways in which the structure of 306 feeds into its less-than-welcoming appearance. In most courses a student’s work is a private affair, graded under cover of night (well, for most of us) and then discussed with hushed voices in tiny cubicles. But maybe it doesn’t have to be this way. This spring I began instituting formal writing groups in my 306. I borrowed this from my experience in Journalism School. Instead of one-on-ones, I decided to block longer meetings with small groups of between four and five students. Every student would have to read all of the other papers in their group and be prepared to share a comment on their writing. Praise doesn’t count. This sounds a little mean, but it’s not hard to keep it in the spirit of good fun. There’s a bad writer in all of us and the best way to root him out is to acknowledge his existence. I usually started meetings by finding terrible sentences that I had written in my own undergraduate papers. We would laugh together and then diligently pick apart the writing. Then, one student at a time, we would look at awkwardly phrased sentences, silly typos, and all kinds of convoluted language with that same care. At first this can be a little off-putting, but the slight embarrassment and knowledge that other people, your peers, will be reading your work, can be a very helpful motivator, and its not hard to keep things light-hearted when you have that much material. These meetings have proven so useful that I began to work them into the in-class peer-review workshops and my grading methods. On a recent paper I decided that instead of providing any marginal comments I would write each student a letter about their work, offering general instructions for improvement but without any specific prescription. Then, in the peer workshop I sat my students in a large circle and instructed them to take out an extra copy of their paper. Some students had expressed anxieties about their own proofreading, so I decided to help them defamiliarize their own writing. We began a “rapid line edit.” I had each student pass their paper to the person on their left then check for one thing about the paper. On the first pass they circled every main verb (and emphasized weak verbs with sad faces or extra circles). On the second pass they found the longest sentence and the shortest sentence in the paper. On the next pass they looked for thesis statements, then topic sentences, then transitions, et cetera. In each case classroom discussion flowed naturally from the exercise and, perhaps because of the open environment that we had built in our small meetings, students seemed comfortable asking questions like “What exactly is a main verb?” or “What is the difference between a Topic Sentence and a Thesis?”. And, as I clarified my terms and taught short lessons on grammar students cheerfully volunteered broken and beautiful passages alike. At the end of class I handed back my letters to each student with their grade and they went home with my comments, and a copy of their paper filled with all kinds of zany marginalia that could guide their revisions.

Benefits of Paper Workshops

Stephanie Odom — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 20:13:10 +0000

Author:

Stephanie Odom

Image Credit:

DigiDreamGrafix.com

This spring I’ve been teaching RHE 310: Intermediate Expository Prose for the second time. The first time I taught it was two years ago, so I had plenty of time in between to think of ways to improve upon my first effort. I love teaching this class. I’m not sure I’ll get to teach a class like it in my new job, but I will definitely try to work in the practice of in-class paper workshops in future classes. Workshops are a cornerstone of RHE 310, and in this post, I’d like to describe how I run workshops, what I think works well, and what I will change in the future.

First, a little context about the class is in order. RHE 310 is a class about style. Instructors (usually graduate students) teach the class in many different ways, but practicing the prose style and genre conventions of a number of types of writing is usually the norm. When I was first planning how I would teach the course, I wanted the students to be able to select the type of writing they wanted to master. I didn’t feel entirely comfortable selecting styles for the whole class since I didn’t want to make pronouncements about what style/s of writing were superior to others and didn’t want to spend time on genres and styles that were uninteresting or unimportant to students. (I have since come around to re-thinking that stance and would feel more comfortable teaching a range of pre-selected styles now.) So, in my class, each student selects a prose model that they admire and the assignments give them opportunities to analyze and imitate that model. The range of models students have chosen has been incredible, as have their creative imitations.

As I said, workshopping is a key part of this course. The first time I taught it, the requirement was that everyone submit writing--any writing--for the class to comment on. Many students submitted imitations of their prose model. These models included magazine writing, sports reporting, technical guides, academic philosophy and film articles, and many more. But in that first attempt, I didn’t require students to provide an example or of describe the writing style they were going for, and that made our workshops ineffective at times. Students would offer advice based on what their general understanding of “good style” was, and the writer being workshopped would reply that their choices were justified based on the type of writing they were practicing. The students would shrug and trust that the writer was correct.

This time around, I changed the workshop submission template to give students a space to describe and/or provide an example of their prose model, which could be the main one they were working with that semester or anything else. Having the opportunity for students to read high quality examples of that type of writing has made our workshops more effective. During the workshop, when someone has a question about whether the writer’s choices are appropriate, it’s easy to turn to the target prose and analyze it to see whether the more experienced author made that choice. For example, we’ve talked a lot about pronoun usage and what that means in terms of rhetorical distance. If the student writer makes I-statements and someone asks if that is an appropriate choice (sometimes invoking the “I heard you should never use ‘I’ in papers” rule), we revisit the target prose and see if that author used the first person pronoun. This is one of several analysis and imitation techniques I’m able to model during workshops.

Other such techniques that I hope they internalize and take with them include reading prose out loud, making a reverse outline of their or another writer’s text, getting a thought down in rough form and playing with the style later, and just generally getting others’ input about clarity and style. I’m lucky that the students in this semester’s class are respectful and forthright, so I don’t need to do a lot of delicate balancing of egos or communication styles. Especially in the early part of the semester, students were nervous about getting their writing critiqued, but that feeling has subsided after seeing how their peers are not dismissive, rude, or totally off-base in their comments.

In this class, I love how these workshops expose students to a wide range of writing styles, some of which they will themselves write someday but others that they won’t. The range gives us the chance to see how writing varies and how what’s “wrong” in one rhetorical situation is “right” in another one. For example, one student wrote a reflective essay about a baseball game that he wanted to publish as a sports column. His style is casual and blunt, two qualities that you often see in sports writing. We talked about how in his case, it was acceptable to use slang words and even profanity in story telling, and how he created dramatic interest by using a series of short simple sentences, whereas in other workshops, we had worked with the writers to combine simple sentences into more complex ones to lend a more sophisticated tone. We’ve seen how in science writing, the passive voice is standard and appropriate, but in personal statements, we want to see more first-person pronouns. It’s also been helpful for writers to get feedback about where their readers want to see more evidence, what they think the argument was, and how they personally responded to the piece.

In the interest of space, I’ll briefly list here other practices that I’ve found facilitate productive discussion and some that I’ll change in the future.

What is working:

Having writers upload their papers to our class wiki 24 hours before their workshop (by 9:30 a.m. on Monday for a Tuesday class) to give classmates time to comment.
Asking everyone to post at least one positive and one constructive comment on the wiki before class to prime them for participating.
Distributing printed copies of the paper even though we can all read it on the projector. This is not necessarily for the writer’s benefit since receiving 18 marked-up copies of their writing can be overwhelming, but it’s been great for keeping everyone else more engaged with the writing.
Speaking with each student about their participation during our midterm conference and letting them know if I want them to participate more or give others a chance to speak, and what I think their strengths as a participant are.

What I will likely change:

Spending 20 minutes instead of 30 minutes on each student to give us more time to analyze and imitate at least one additional type of writing as a class.
Requiring everyone to revise their writing based on our feedback so that the stakes are higher and they practice weighing conflicting comments against each other.
Practicing close line editing techniques, though this is a maybe. Some students are doing this anyway and I’d like to be more involved in what they are suggesting, but I would rather they practice minimal marking and ask questions for clarification instead of making changes to the papers. Depending on the goals of the course I’m teaching, I may or may not encourage line editing.

Learning how to run a writing workshop is a valuable skill for anyone who will be teaching composition, and it requires practice and being open to change. It focuses the class on student writing instead of polished professional writing, it opens up the writing process for discussion, it teaches students that getting feedback on their writing is not going to kill them, and it lets them see how different readers react in different ways and that that’s ok. I will definitely be using this pedagogical tool in future classes and I hope my description of it here gives others some ideas about how to use it in their classes, too.

Teaching and Writing

Delacroix — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 17:00:14 +0000

Author:

Julia Delacroix

Image Credit:

Michelle Tribe

So I went on the job market this year, and one of the questions that kept coming up was how I saw my teaching and my scholarship fitting together. I’m working on a dissertation on early American poetry and have taught poetry classes, so some of the connections are pretty obvious. But this semester I’m teaching 306, and while my students would certainly freak out (by which I mean feign sleep in spectacular and dramatic attitudes of disinterest) if I busted out some Puritan funeral elegies, I have been thinking a lot about the parallels between the writing they do, which has them emailing me questions about paper 2 at one in the morning, and the writing I do, which has me up reading emails at one a.m. and avoiding my dissertation.

Here are two things I’ve noticed this semester:

1. My students really, really, really want me to give them a template for how to organize their papers. It frustrates them that I seem to know how each of their papers should be organized, but I won’t tell.

2. I really, really, really want someone to give me a template for how to organize my dissertation chapters. Each chapter I’ve written has been torn apart and restructured at least twice. It’s tedious work, and frustrating, and it pushes me to animal metaphors: It’s like trying to stuff a cat into a cat-sized wetsuit. Or I feel like a small dog trying to grab a beach ball in its teeth. I don’t know why the metaphors are animal, but they always are.

As a result of our parallel experiences (and I’m embarrassed to admit this, but here goes): I have an empathy for my students than I’ve ever had before. I’ve always liked them, so I’ve always felt sympathy for their frustration, but I’ve never really been able to identify with it. I like writing; it’s why I study writing for a job. Sure, I saw writing as a challenge, but a pleasant one. Maybe because I always knew I could figure out what I needed to say if I just kept at the paper I was working on.

Somehow that didn’t seem to apply for the dissertation; not for me at least. There was a fear of failure, that maybe this couldn’t be done, that maybe these ideas wouldn’t pan out. That was new to me, and that made everything much more difficult. I recognized the feeling, though; it was one my students had described to me many times over conferences, as we talked our way through their work together. Unfortunately for my students (but, you know, good in the long run) my newfound empathy was accompanied by a realization: whenever I couldn’t organize a chapter, or a section, or even a sentence, it meant I didn’t have it. The ideas were there, but they were blurrier than I’d realized or hoped, and it was in the thinking through of the organization that the ideas themselves crystallized. I couldn’t figure out what I needed to say until I started to say it.

So that’s why I feel confident saying no, I won’t give you a template for your paper. No, not even for the introduction. But yes, you can get this done if you just keep working at it. And when we meet to talk your paper through and I tell you I know where you’re coming from? I really do.