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.

Mapping Community

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:38:54 +0000

Author:

Matt King

Image Credit:

Augustus Koch

In my RHE 309S: Critical Reading and Persuasive Writing course at UT Austin, my students are spending the semester studying communities of their choice. The first paper asked students to "map" their community, charting the people, places, events, social practices, and issues that help the community define and organize itself while also examining arguments made about the community. This assignment resembles one of our main first-year writing assignments which asks students to map the arguments made in response to a specific critical situation or issue. Focusing on communities, however, students might examine multiple relevant issues and also texts that aren't primarily argumentative.

One of the main challenges of the paper was arrangement: how can students demonstrate the ways that the constiuent elements of a community shape and respond to one another and the ways that arguments circulate within and around the community, further affecting its contours? Stasis theory was helpful in terms of organizing the arguments made about the community, and we also spent time in class creating mind maps to conceptually organize the various aspects of our communities (the Digital Writing and Research Lab has several lesson plans outlining specific mind mapping activities and assignments). These tools were helpful but abstract, and students ultimately found another component of the assignment more helpful in terms of getting a sense for the organization and development of their communities in time and space.

In addition to the written analysis of texts by and about the community in the paper, this assignment also asked students to produce a map or a timeline using Google Maps or Dipity (you can find the assignment description here). Google allows you to overlay content onto its maps, marking locations of interest and adding annotations, links, and embedded media, and Dipity's timelines offer similar opportunities for composing multimedia texts. These digital writing environments allowed students to engage their communities and relevant texts in new and often more productive ways. Many students felt that, after working on their maps and timelines, they were better prepared to map the broader contours of their communities in prose.

For example, one of our most challenging concepts for this assignment was kairos, attending to shifting contexts over time. Students could develop a sense for ways that an argument might respond to a recent event, but beyond this, kairos was difficult to wrap our heads around. The timeline activity proved particularly helpful here, as students were able to create representations that captured how their communities had changed over time. In a quick glance, we could see how different events and developments led to shifts in a community's priorities, its place in the public sphere, its sense of stability and cohesiveness, and its broader orientation toward the world.

Looking at some of these projects in greater depth gives a sense for the opportunities made available by mapping community in multimedia spaces. A student considering the remix artist community charted a history of recording technologies, the rise of the DJ, and the spread of dance halls going back to the phonograph. What would have taken up too much time and been too broad for the perspective of the paper became an insightful overview that placed remix artists in a long tradition of social practices organized around recorded sound. A student focusing on human trafficking explored global responses to this human rights violation by attaching policies to specific locations. In her paper, this student produced the most sophisticated analysis in the class, demonstrating a nuanced understanding of the relationship between specific groups within the community, their mode of response, and place, an understanding facilitated by her ability to map these relationships on a map. A student looking at the community invested in nanotechnologies traced relevant advancements back to the use of Damascus steel in swords, a practice whose techniques "created carbon nanotube fibers within the blades, giving the swords unparalleled strength and flexibility."

Maps and timelines offer students different logics and processes of engagement, translating communities from static entities to assemblages unfolding in time and space.

Blogging Pedagogy - arrangement

Teaching and Writing

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Mapping Community

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