The Academic Crisis of Audience

September 12, 2011 By 3 Comments

When a tenure-track faculty member in English at George Mason publically remarks that “The student essay is a twitch in a void. A compressed outpouring of energy (if we’re lucky) that means nothing to no one,” we as educators get a sense that we are in trouble.

In “What’s Wrong with Writing Essays,” from the open-access Hacking the Academy, Mark Sample goes on to advocate for more public forms of writing as well as for repurposed essays–that is, assignments which involve critical thinking in the form of different, often mingled media.  Sample envisions his students not as “miniature scholars” but as “aspiring Rauschenbergs, assembling mixed media combines, all the while through their engagement with seemingly incongruous materials, developing a critical thinking practice about the process and the product.”

My immediate response to his derision of the essay form is ambivalent.  On the one hand, I agree that the traditional academic essay often feels alienated from audience and from author–it has a sense of being projected into the void.  On the other hand, I have written and read many well crafted essays which made me ecstatic, proud, even joyful.  There can be some great moments of discovery in the void.  However, thinking back on these, I wouldn’t call them authorless, audienceless, or monotonous.  Rather, they were all written by a student deeply engaged with the material, and they were directed to a caring faculty mentor.  The question that I would like to pose, then, is whether this is a real crisis, and if so, what are its parameters and pressures.

First of all, I would like to point out that we, at CUNY and nationwide, are in an atmosphere where higher education is increasingly being looked at in terms of its value in the job market.  Part of the reason for this is that, despite adjunctification, the price of higher education has risen quite dramatically while average wages have stagnated.  When students must break the bank to fund their education, the life of the mind begins to look like this:

In this environment, departments which don’t offer a high real world value struggle to stay “relevant.”  This has played out in particularly ugly ways as foreign language programs have been shut down and the graduate Fulbright-Hays program has been defunded.  However, it has also played out in rather positive ways as humanities scholars have woken up and realized that it is no longer enough to ventriloquize one another’s arguments in closed-access journals.

At the same time as higher education is being questioned from a financial standpoint, the ways in which knowledge is produced, evaluated, and disseminated have undergone revolutionary changes, at least for those highly fortunate ones who are literate and who have free access to the World Wide Web.  The question then becomes why people should bother going to school when they might design their own curriculum and test it out in life’s laboratory.  I would thus read Mark Sample’s provocation as a symptom of this rather painful moment–as a move to regain cultural relevance.

Communication across the Curriculum presents opportunities for students to master, interrogate, and modulate between different literacies and modes of communication.  Low and middle stakes writing in the form of private reflections or public blog posts give students the chance to situate themselves in relation to a number of different, often overlapping, networks.  Unfortunately, in academia and in life, not every task can be completed in the form of a Rauschenberg combine, a pastiche of different elements.

Yet, I would like to suggest that behind every polished product is a smoothed-over assemblage of seemingly disparate elements.  In a strong sense I agree with Sample.  As educators, one of the most valuable gifts that we can give students is the space to work through some of the tensions they feel between their own intellectual expression and the different communicative forms imposed upon it.  For example, I believe that if I am teaching a basic composition course, I do my students a disservice if I don’t teach them the standards of the college essay.  I also do a disservice to them if I reify the college essay, if I fail to discuss and critique some of the reasoning behind said standards.  In the end, though, I disagree with Sample’s final assertion that text, or specifically the college essay, cannot be ambiguous or woven from different elements.  By rejecting the essay Sample risks imposing his own hierarchy of modal value, his own idea of multimodal form, on student expression.  Although he is staging the conflict as a drama between forms, what is really at play is a drama of audience, the dramatic question being “Who will read my boring old essay?”  Behind that question lie insecurities about who is paying attention to scholars in the humanities.

The crisis of audience with regards to faculty publication is expressed in John Unsworth’s “The Crisis of Audience and the Open Access Solution” in the same Hacking the Academy collection.  Unsworth states that the “humanities scholar…has an imaginary audience” and offers hope that this imagined audience might materialize through open access publishing.  Our urge to publicize and “make relevant” our own work to wider audiences has been catalyzed by the demands and skepticism of students; as a result, many faculty members have begun to craft lesson plans and assignments involving analyses of popular culture and appeals to non-academic audiences.

Are public, repurposed, or popular culture assignments a solution to the ennui of academic writing?  Yes, inasmuch as they guide students in the development of their intellectual identity and in their comfort with different modes of communication.  Ideally, such assignments would help students develop their voice and situate themselves in various forms of communication so that they might forge their own purpose, their own message.  Only when that work has been done can the traditional essay form be fruitful for both faculty members and students.

One final thought:  as educators, we should strive to at least be conscious of and explicit about what pressures we are transferring onto our students, lest our own anxieties fall upon them too heavily or without explanation.

Filed Under: Education, Higher Education, Low-Stakes Writing, Pedagogy, Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing Instruction

“They just won’t do the reading!”

October 2, 2009 By 2 Comments

I recently tried to do a writing exercise with two groups of students that wasn’t as successful as I’d hoped, largely because I naively expected the students to have done the reading that their professor had assigned, and had based the exercise largely on this false assumption. “Whoa, I am really out of practice,” I thought to myself. “How could I forget that you can’t rely on students to do their homework?” Although these weren’t my own classes, I viscerally flashed back on the frustration I often experienced as an adjunct, when my own students came to class not having done the reading. I hear this all the time from instructors: “They just won’t do the reading!”

Although part of the problem of students not reading may be attributed to their busy schedules, poor time management, or mere laziness, when I try to put myself in my students’ shoes, and think about the times when I have slacked off on doing all of my reading, what it often came down to was that I did not do the reading when it seemed like it was a waste of time. I remember being frustrated when lectures seemed to merely repeat what the texts said, as well as when the readings seemed irrelevant to class discussions, exams, and assignments.

As an instructor, my gut instinct is to say, “But, but, it’s good for you! Trust me!” Or to explain the pedagogical relevance of all the readings on the syllabi. I’m not sure if that is the best strategy, though. I wonder: how can we better convey to our students that there is a reason why doing their assigned reading is important? I have a sneaking suspicion that the answer lies in the creative writing mantra “Show, don’t tell.” That is, rather than painstakingly explaining to your students why it is important for them to do their homework, teach in such a way that your students see for themselves that the texts you have assigned them to read have value.

In my duties as a Writing Fellow, I’d like to make a push for instructors to use writing as a means of “showing” the benefits of reading. According to WAC philosophy, there are numerous reasons why we advocate for students to be writing more frequently in all of their classes. Here’s just one: by writing about what they are reading, students will feel more invested in the texts their professors have assigned, and professors will have written proof that the time they spend putting together a syllabus is not a waste of their time.

Filed Under: Low-Stakes Writing, Pedagogy, Writing Across the Curriculum

Confronting Tom Cruise in the Classroom

September 15, 2009 By 5 Comments

The Cruiser
Creative Commons License photo credit: xrrr

My course on the history of the Vietnam War necessarily contains a great deal of visual media, most often in the form of newsreel footage and clips from documentaries. However, since the Vietnam War has inspired dozens of fictional Hollywood films, I also have students watch clips from several of the most canonical films on the subject.  As any instructor knows, showing a “movie” in class has its advantages and pitfalls, the latter most often expressed in a sort of collective disengagement from an academic mindset, as students naturally fall into the more passive role of viewer.  How do we break through that passivity and get students to engage critically when watching a form of media that they are accustomed to consuming as entertainment?

Oliver Stone‘s 1989 film Born on the Fourth of July often ends up being a critical text in my course, simply because the narrative (and the ways that director Oliver Stone presents that narrative) engages some of the war’s most fundamental historical issues. The film also, however, stars Tom Cruise, a celebrity with a considerable amount of pop cultural baggage whose name often elicits rounds of giggling from students.  Since my goal is to avoid having them fall into the passive receiver role of pop culture consumers, I find it is useful to play along with the jokes for a bit before subtly steering the discussion into more “academic” areas.  In a matter of  five minutes, a joke about Cruise jumping on the couch on Oprah can become a conversation about  American male celebrities, which leads us to John Wayne, which leads into issues of American masculinity and directly into the critical aspects of the film we are about to watch.

Despite these pre-watching efforts though, students often can’t help but get caught up in what they are watching, particularly when it takes the form, essentially, of an action film.  This is why I think it is vital to avoid turning on the movie and letting it run for more than five minutes at a time.  After all, if you are asking students to consume this text in a different way than they are used to,  it is important that you present the text in a different way.  One way that I found effective is to break the film up into tiny clips that are watched and then written about (or discussed) in low stakes exercises.  This way, students are constantly forced out of the role of viewer and back into their role as critical thinkers approaching a text.  Even if that text includes Tom Cruise and machine guns.

Here’s a quick clip from another Oliver Stone film, Platoon (1986), followed by an example of the kind of free writing prompt that I have found useful for stimulating discussion and leading into more complex writing assignments.  By limiting the viewing experience to this short scene, one that has been selected carefully for its density of critical material, I hope to focus the students’ attention on just a few important elements.  As you can see from watching the clip and reading the prompt below, assignments like this contain more than enough historical, sociological, and ethical issues to keep everyone busy and, more importantly, to demonstrate how to begin unpacking the complex mechanics underlying popular culture:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in_dNxlnFKA&feature=related[/youtube]

Exercise

The character Barnes is presented as the ultimate cynical warrior, immune even to death, and his character is contrasted with Taylor and Elias, who are ostensibly “good” warriors.  What makes a soldier “good” or “bad” in the context of this scene?

Barnes’ statement “there’s the way things ought to be, and the way things are” seems to apply to the Vietnam War and history in general.  Do you agree with his attitude?  Why or why not?

Filed Under: Low-Stakes Writing, Pedagogy Tagged With: , ,

How do we deal with writer’s block again?

February 10, 2009 By 2 Comments

Students often approach me to get advice on how to overcome this writing disaster. I got bored with my old explanations and ‘googled’ it only to find an extensive and impressive list of solutions on Wikipedia. “Challenging negative thoughts about one’s skill or ability to write” – isn’t this a good one? This ‘challenging’ can be immeasurably difficult if one’s experience with writing hasn’t been very positive in the past. Let’s rethink again the amount of red ink we spend on each paper and the tone of our comments!

The last thing I want to do in this post is pretend that I never question my writing abilities. What can and in my case does effectively dissolve this negative thinking is reading. Somehow, as I move from sentence to sentence, even in the most familiar of pages, I’m made aware of my skill to think, to feel, and to formulate my thoughts and feelings in language. Once I’ve consciously gone through this process, I feel inspired to write.

The Wikipedia page includes a list of “dramatic depictions of writer’s block,” among them Shakespeare in Love and Stranger than Fiction. I’d add another list – literary depictions of writer’s block. And, perhaps, one more – professional writers’ strategies for overcoming writer’s block. Here is how it goes for Hemingway: “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” How is this for a first-day low-stakes writing activity?

Filed Under: Feedback, Language, literature, Low-Stakes Writing, Writing Instruction

The Frame Strategy

November 11, 2008 By 1 Comment

In Engaging Ideas, John Bean discusses “the frame strategy” for use with small groups. “Using this strategy, the instructor gives students a mapping sentence that predicts the shape of a short essay but not the content. Students have to create content topic sentences to head each predicted section and develop a supporting argument for each one. Often the instructor can include in the task a blank tree diagram or an outline indicating the slots that students’ ideas must fit”

This sounds very interesting to me, but rather challenging. Even though he provides an example, I still can’t quite envision how to actually do this. It seems like it would require a lot of prep before hand: envisioning a full essay and mapping it out. I also can’t quite picture how students I’ve worked with would take to the task.

Has anyone done this before? Could you let us know how you prepped the task, what it was exactly, and how it worked out? Thanks!

Filed Under: Group Composing, Low-Stakes Writing, Pedagogy

Teaching Writing Intensively (and Often)

September 19, 2008 By 7 Comments

It happens at the beginning of every semester. Tucked into my tiny mailbox are a stack of about fifty blue and white student evaluations. The scantron sections of these evaluations, where students “rate” their professors in several categories on a scale of one to seven, never seem especially helpful to me. After all, it is inevitable that some classes will go better than others from semester to semester. And even when the students are responding to a specific prompt, such as “was the course material presented clearly” it is only natural that many of them are going to respond to their overall sense of the course, which is not limited to my instruction but includes their relationship to the course material—whether or not they “like” poetry, for instance—and the experiences, good and bad, that they have had with their fellow classmates. These evaluations, more cynically, as has been shown by many studies, are also often informed by the students’ own sense of whether or not they will receive the grade they wanted or feel they deserve. Because I am a demanding instructor and a moderately tough grader I often feel like I am actively sabotaging my student evaluation scores, which regularly tend to be on the cusp of the departmental average.

As most of us would agree, however, school is not about teaching, but about learning, and I have a feeling that many a “good” teacher is not necessarily helping their students to be good learners, and often the students themselves are the last ones to realize this, especially in classes like literature where quantitative measurements are impossible. How many times, after all, have we heard our students say to each other: “you should totally take a class with professor so and so, he’s a really cool guy”? For me, the point of teaching has always been very simple: make sure that the students think and learn, and it is the open response sections of the student evaluations that I actually find most helpful when re-evaluating the methods I use to achieve this goal. Sadly, most students skip this part of the evaluation, but those who do respond often offer a constructive view of their own experiences and struggles in the class. Many students say nice things, some occasionally complain, and others less frequently express anger. I have come to realize that those expressing anger are usually unhappy about the fact that the course was too difficult, that the reading was too boring, and most often, that there was just too much writing. In fact, one of the most common laments I have heard from my literature students (who are generally required to write two 10 page essays over the semester and regular 1-2 page informal responses for each class) is that it is unfair for me to require so much writing in a class that is not writing intensive.

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Filed Under: Higher Education, Literacy, Low-Stakes Writing, Oral Communication, Pedagogy, Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing Instruction

EduTweeting

March 7, 2008 By 3 Comments

Here at the Institute we’re just starting to think about experimenting with microblogging, 140 character posts called “tweets” within a social network or out in the wilds of the Internet. Just in time, here’s a short video from the Chronicle of Higher Education in which a Professor describes using Twitter, a microblogging service, with his students.

This video is a follow-up to an earlier article in the Chronicle on the use of Twitter in education. For other takes on Twitter, see see this academic article and Howard Rheingold’s discussion of why he’s hooked on microblogging via Twitter. Links via Chris Lott.

Filed Under: Blogs and Blogging, Higher Education, Low-Stakes Writing, Pedagogy, Technology, Web 2.0

Assigning Journal Writing

December 18, 2007 By 2 Comments

 In my freshman composition class, my instructor required that we fill up a certain number of pages in our journals by the end of the semester.  He specified that we could write “Don’t Read” across the pages with things of very private nature.  Once I taught a composition class to a group of older students who had been out of college for a long time and froze every time they needed to write a paper. I thought it would be useful for them to keep a daily journal for a couple of weeks at least.  And, yes, I did something I probably wouldn’t do now – I said they could write “Don’t Read” over certain pages.  The things I did get to read revealed great thinkers and writers.  Many who were against journal writing at first continued writing in their journals till the end of the semester.  They shared personal, not necessarily private things; they shared things that could be easily put in and add tremendous depth to their essays.  Journal writing became a great extension of the writing they produced in class, not an appendix to it. 

I think journal writing can be a great learning tool and not just in a composition classroom.  We know that many professors do not see the value in encouraging students to relate their personal experiences to the readings.  And, journal writing is certainly not a common practice outside of the composition program.  But it is no news that the making of new meaning is always connected to the previously gained knowledge and experience, to the things that go on in the students’ lives currently.  Why not let our students make that connection not always on the spot in the classroom, but in their personal writing space? 

Filed Under: Low-Stakes Writing, Process, Writing Instruction

Making the Process Work

October 12, 2007 By 2 Comments

Inspired in many ways by Luke’s post, I asked students in my Great Works tutorial whether they would want to share their thoughts and questions on our Blackboard discussion board.  To my slight surprise (this class is already very demanding of their time – they come to the 90-minute tutorial every week and often attend the Writing Center) they overwhelmingly agreed.  I see that despite the product-oriented writing instruction or perhaps because of it, students long for a safe space to share their thoughts in.  They really seem to understand the need for a process to take place before any product can be put out.  For this reason, I think it’s a great idea to have the tutorial in the first place, as it provides plenty of room for that process to develop.  In a similar way, the Writing Center with its “I Write” campaign, which seeks to give student writers a sense of empowerment, is also a comfortable Baruch venue where academic professionals serve as facilitators not judges of their writing efforts.

  I hope that Blackboard discussions would be valuable for my group of Great Works students.  Some of them need a lot of support in language areas, and they are the ones who would probably benefit most from these online discussions.  However, I’m afraid they would also be the least forthcoming participants.  Can those of you who have experience initiating blogs suggest ways to reach out to most diffident participants? 

Filed Under: Blogs and Blogging, Cross-Cultural Communication, ESL, Low-Stakes Writing, Process

Great Works Faculty Development Seminar

September 5, 2006 By 1 Comment

Last semester, Communication Fellows assigned to the Great Works program at Baruch designed and facilitated at a three-session faculty development seminar. We met three Friday afternoons during the semester, with about 12 faculty members. The group explored ways of using communication across the curriculum (CAC), and participants shared ways of constructing communication-intensive assignments (including writing, speaking, and computer-mediated communication), techniques for responding to student writing, ways of using low-stakes writing to enhance the learning experience (as well as to enhance writing skills), and other topics of interest. I can only speak for myself, but I found the sessions to be engaging, useful, and fun.

This semester, there will be a new Great Works Faculty Development Seminar. You can get all the details and fill out an application here. As the application states,

This semester, we would like to continue the program by bringing together Great Works faculty members again to explore and share strategies for using written, oral, and technology-facilitated communication activities in their classrooms as tools for learning.The program will again function as a semester-long seminar, facilitated by the Institute’s Great Works team. Participants will meet three times during the semester. Between sessions, we will maintain contact via a blog, and participants will be asked to do some reading and preparation for each session. Each of the meetings will be three and a half hours long, including two 90-minute working sessions and a half-hour working lunch. We will conduct each meeting as a roundtable discussion and will rely upon the faculty to lead by sharing their experiences and expertise with others in order to generate ideas for teaching with communication-intensive methods.

Last spring, the Great Works Faculty Development Seminar participants communicated between sessions via Blackboard–in part, so we could talk about the usefulness of the medium in our classes. I’m pleased to report that this year, as the description states, the group will be keeping in touch via a blog. In addition to sharing ideas and methods that work, faculty willl also have a chance to try out blogging and see how the medium might work for their classes.

If you’re a Great Works faculty member (full-time or part-time), please apply. The deadline is Friday, September 8th (though obviously, if you see this later, please contact us via the links on the application anyway). There’s a stipend to compensate you for the time spent in meetings (three 3.5 hour sessions, with lunch provided) and doing some preparation in-between the sessions (reading, thinking, blogging). We hope you’ll join us!

Filed Under: Baruch College, Blogs and Blogging, Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Faculty Development, Low-Stakes Writing, Technology
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