Scaffolding and Revision in Business Policy

May 14, 2013 By 1 Comment

Granted, this is not the most beguiling blog post title. However, I was inspired by Priya’s recap of her work  and decided to share my own musings about my first year as a Communication Fellow. My reflections quickly landed on scaffolding and revision, two foundational principles of Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC). As a New Yorker I am not a fan of scaffolding. As an educator, I am a big proponent.

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Unwelcome scaffolding in Soho.

I have worked with three different professors who each teach Business Policy (BPL 5100) in very different ways. BPL 5100 classes require a final group presentation on a particular company, but this assignment is presented and evaluated differently professor to professor. While one professor might require a 40-minute presentation that includes an extensive explanation of financial indicators in an effort to determine if purchasing the company’s stock is a good recommendation, another professor might assign students a specific “critical issue” for a company and ask students to talk for twenty minutes about how the company could most effectively address the issue.

This semester I worked with Professor Cornelius Marx and I have been struck by how much assignment design has influenced student work. Professor Marx uses the “critical issue” premise, which helps focus students’ research efforts towards developing a strong argument. The key for me, though, is that Professor Marx assigns a paper in which the students, as a group, write up their research (an industry analysis, a list of possible alternatives for the company, recommendations for which alternatives to pursue, and implementation plans for those recommendations). Students submit revisions to help clarify their argument, add or remove feasible alternatives, and improve language skills. The paper is due long before the oral presentation and receives its own grade.

I asked Professor Marx about his approach and he explained that he’d made this pedagogical decision two years ago to help students avoid procrastination and to improve the overall quality of their work. He shared his perspective with how these WAC principles have worked in his classroom:

This increases the workload for me but the quality definitely improves. If the paper is put to rest before the oral is begun, the oral inevitably improves because they know their material much better… Of course there are still teams that do it at the last moment but the average quality of both paper and presentation has improved.

Because students came to their oral presentation rehearsal knowing more about their topic and their vision for the company, we were able to spend the rehearsal discussing the fundamentals of good public speaking: converting the written paper into listener-friendly speaking notes, connecting with the audience through eye contact and vocal clarity; proper introductions and conclusions; using transitions, internal previews, and summaries to create group cohesion; and the importance of consistent PowerPoint design.

As a former Teaching Fellow and current adjunct instructor at Baruch, I’ve often wondered if my students were really “getting it” and if scaffolding and revising were worth my additional efforts. It has been a heartening revelation to watch a more experienced professor’s pedagogical process and see its clear benefits.

Filed Under: Baruch College, Business, Pedagogy, Uncategorized, Writing Across the Curriculum

MUTUALISM- A Lab in Parts

January 15, 2013 By 1 Comment

A few months ago I posted a brief interview with with Professor David Gruber, with whom I’ve been collaborating as a Writing Fellow at the Institute.  So, for those curious about this communication intensive science “experiment,” below is a timeline documenting the semester’s trajectory for one of the labs, including the final video the students created.  Even if you’re not so interested in the process, you might want to take a peek at the video (skip to the second to last entry) — it might be the best use of Lionel Richie I’ve ever seen!

Happy 2013 to all.

Filed Under: Baruch College, Blogs and Blogging, Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Pedagogy, Process, Resources, Science, Technology, Writing Across the Curriculum

Blogging as Bridging and Writing to Learn: A First Draft Look at Two Promises of Education Blogging

December 6, 2012 By 1 Comment

I don’t read blogs with comprehensive regularity…but as a student of urban education policy it’s difficult NOT to notice that there are notable education thinkers who are leading conversations about what to do about public schools via their own blogs. In preparation for this post, I spent some time looking through blogs by authors with whom I am well familiar. I’m using this post to ponder what opportunities the blog format offers powerful thinkers with powerful ideas.

In February 2007, the Bridging Differences blog was launched featuring exchanges between education historian and policy analyst Diane Ravitch and Deborah Meier, social justice educator and one of the founders of the small schools movement in New York City. I had read Ravitch’s seminal text on NYC schools, “The Great School Wars” (1974) as well as Meier’s book about Central Park East in East Harlem “The Power of Their Ideas” (2002).

The format of Bridging Differences was (and remains) letter writing. The letter exchange reminded me of what Rilke wrote Franz Kappus. It was universal and personal at the same time. Bridging Differences did not just provide an important space to discuss differences in thinking about urban education. It modeled how leaders in education could work collaboratively to get at differences that arise, not necessarily to erase them, but to understand them. The success of Bridging Differences was also its ability to bridge audiences. Professors Ravitch and Meier come from different experiences in public schools and their joint blog allowed for connections across their seemingly disparate worlds.

Bridging Differences is now continuing with Pedro Noguera, author and director of the Metropolitan Center for Urban Education at New York University. The Noguera-Meier Bridging Differences, like its predecessor, allows for different perspectives on the same topics to be expressed. It also demonstrates how these thinkers are knitting their travels and experiences into their responses to each other. I have been a student of Professor Noguera and am excited to learn more about what is speaking to him when he writes “Dear Deborah”.

Diane Ravitch has now started her own blog and you feel like you’re in her home or in a circle of friends she has gathered when you read along. Ravitch offers her own reflections but also scans the field for the top stories, reposting newspaper articles, reports, calls for support, and other critical concerns that have come her way. In this way she serves as a “connector” to the rest of the blogosphere. Sometimes she takes readers’ comments and turns those into blog posts, giving voice to those who are not as well heard as she is. She travels between many genres: storytelling, letter writing, bullet points (you name it) which makes her writing, not just the content, interesting to read.

Ravtich’s new form of expression offers an important “work-in-process” counterpoint to her publications. Her blog serves as an instructive tool to see a powerful thinker writing to learn! In Writing Across the Curriculum (I was a former WAC fellow at City Tech) we promote writing as an exploration of one’s own ideas versus as an already-thought out composition. I am now getting to see the pieces of Ravitch’s work out of which greater histories, grander narratives are written.

The promise of education blogging, to me, will be in the affordances for bridging and writing to learn.

Filed Under: Education, Writing, Writing Across the Curriculum

Baiting the Hook

September 25, 2012 By 1 Comment

Every other week during the semester the Institute staff meet to discuss the various projects and initiatives of the Institute, and the responsibility and concerns of the Fellows. But before those bi-weekly meetings, we Fellows — in desperate hope and ragged solidarity – also informally exchange techniques for moving our dissertations along, share strategies for carving out time to write, and commiserate over the slow growth that conjuring words often is, all whilst shoving as many free sandwiches into our faces that the boundaries of respectability allow. As Lauren, former vaunted Fellow now making her mark elsewhere, reminded us: writing is hard work and must be practiced. Amen, sister. But what if you have a problem sitting yourself down to write? Ok, forget sitting, but what if you are the sort of person who despite the best dissertational advice given, still resist engaging the writing process? And let’s be honest, every one of us has at times, been this person.

I am quite often a reluctant writer, always an anxious public speaker, and an ever unsure academic. So how then do I manage my responsibilities as a Communication Fellow and doctoral candidate? Anxiously and uncertainly for sure, but also strategically, using the tools that I have learned as both a Writing Fellow and now as a Communication Fellow. I detail here a few of the strategies that have been most useful to me in the long process of transforming my dissertation into a solid, nearly breathing, stack of words.

First, some things that haven’t helped move my writing along: panic and fear; frantic consultation of books on writing your dissertation in minutes a day; renewed, but ever-weakening, resolve; deadlines whether short or long term; contracts, bribes and ultimatums.

What has helped are those approaches (typically WAC based) that  involve manipulating the “stakes” attached to my writing – while both lowering and raising the stakes can move writing along, the trick is knowing when to use which strategy. Unsurprisingly, when my anxiety is at its highest (typically in the early stages), lowering the stakes works best. I have found that moving away from the blank screen to be a crucial part of dialing down the stakes. It is a lot easier to tell yourself, though, that the initial quality of your dreck writing doesn’t matter, than it is to actually believe it, especially when you must procedurally “save” your work somewhere in the computing environment. To help convince myself of truly lowered stakes, I often begin new chapters or sections, by writing my thoughts and notes long hand. Scribbling on a notepad, especially in pencil, offers some freedom for thoughtful exploration and eases me down winding conceptual paths that still feel private and protected.  Later transferring these notes to the screen then eases me into the revision stage (another stage of writing I tend to avoid like the plague). And apparently, I am not the only one.

Another low stakes strategy I rely on involves “speaking onto the page” as Peter Elbow advises in his latest book and recent Symposium talk. I also use this technique in the workshops I do in BPL courses to illustrate the directive role of the audience (e.g., asking students to write a letter or email to a close friend or family member). One specific exercise asks students to answer a question drawn from their assignment multiple times, but for two different audiences of their choosing (e.g., investors, shareholders, consumers, job seekers, management, their mother), and then we compare/discuss their responses. I highlight the diversity across and within those audience categories and the ways students do and don’t tailor their responses to a specific audience.

In the early stages of my own work, mentally shifting the audience away from an academic discipline or department, has also helped me make conceptual headway by both reducing the mental and emotional stakes attached, and by engaging the processes and benefits, associated with unplanned speech.

On the other hand, these coaxing methods are usually only strong enough to get me out of the early writing stages, but not bridle me to the revising and editing tasks, the last 100 miles that I am walking now. Stay tuned for part two of this post in which I discuss, and solicit, more walking strategies. But for now, what are your strategies for baiting the writing hook?

Filed Under: BLSCI, Low-Stakes Writing, Symposium, Uncategorized, Writing, Writing Across the Curriculum

Blogs@Baruch Milestones: Part 1, Active Directory Integration

September 14, 2012 By 1 Comment

“Milestone,” cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo by Dandelion And Burdock: Link.

This past summer saw a number of important milestones for Blogs@Baruch, Baruch’s online publishing platform, which we at the Schwartz Institute launched in 2008 as part of a Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) initiative. Initially, the idea was to give faculty members an option for teaching on the open web and to offer blogs as occasions for more student writing, particularly for low stakes assignments. In the spirit of WAC, we argued (and still do) that any opportunity students have to write and to receive feedback, is potentially an opportunity for them to grow as writers. Many faculty members did embrace B@B precisely in this way, but it became clear shortly after launch that the system would evolve in ways we didn’t expect. In addition to course blogs, B@B now hosts a broad range of sites including department and program websites, community resource sites for faculty, Z*Port, an e-portfolio system and professional network for MBA students (launching soon), publications (including the Writing Center’s iMagazine, Baruch’s award winning Dollars & $en$e, and the College’s alumni magazine), student projects, the Colege’s last strategic plan, online CVs, and many others.

Early in the summer, we broke 10,000 users and now there are almost 12,000. By all accounts, this makes us one of the biggest and most active academic online publishing communities anywhere. In early August, after about a year of development and planning and all kinds of back and forth with our colleagues at BCTC, we successfully added Active Directory (AD) integration to Blogs@Baruch. This means that Baruch users can now log into and publish on Blogs@Baruch using their Baruch IDs — the IDs they use for all of the College’s other web services (except for BlackBoard, which requires users to open a CUNY Portal account). Users no longer need to create local accounts to use B@B. And finally, as of a few weeks ago, B@B users can now log in to the system using a quick link on the Baruch College homepage — from the same drop-down menu they use to access a number of other essential services including the student information database, the e-roster system, student, faculty and staff email services, Blackboard, and the CUNY Portal.

So why and how is all this important?  In this post and the one that follows, I’ll try to make sense of these milestones as they relate to the history, development of Blogs@Baruch as well as to the political and institutional implication of its growth and wide scale adoption at Baruch. First, Active Directory:

While AD integration provides a valuable bit of convenience for users, it is significant in several other ways as well (Luke Waltzer, who ably took the lead on the AD integration project with Tom Harbison and Craig Stone, has already reflected on some of these here, as did Jim Groom in the context of University of Mary Washington’s UMWBlogs).  First, this was a very heavy lift that took lots and lots of planning and preparation and an unprecedented collaboration between the Institute and BCTC, which spanned most of the last year. One major challenge was to associate all the unique local accounts with existing Baruch AD accounts. We were able to accomplish this relatively simply thanks to a tremendously useful plugin created for this migration by the one and only Boone Gorges, who was extraordinarily helpful throughout this entire process.

Part of what was valuable about this long process was learning how to work with BCTC. Of course there were bumps in the road, miscommunications and the occasional clash of personalities, but, in the end, we managed to figure out how to work as a team and succeeded in doing something which, let’s face it, is very hard to pull off. That we did manage to pull it off, speaks to the dedication, patience and perseverance of the people involved and bodes very well for future collaborations, of which I hope there wil be many.

AD integration in WordPress at colleges is still a fairly rare thing though becoming more common. While desirable, it is a serious bear. Many institutions, especially those whose instances of WordPress have lots and lots of sites and users opt to not bother with it, partially because the tools for associating local WP users with AD accounts didn’t exist until now. When we first started experimenting with blogging in the curriculum in 2006, AD integration was initially a precondition for BCTC’s full support of the project. After playing around with the only available and very buggy AD integration plugin and after having been pitched by a now defunct Silicon Valley firm which offered to provide AD integration on an enterprise scale for approximately $30,000 for 1,000 users, we recognized AD integration as cost prohibitive and decided to move on without it. Now, not only have we achieved AD integration at very minimal cost but, thanks to Boone’s hard work, have now developed and shared tools that enable other institutions to do what we did with very little or no cost at all.

There has been some talk lately (see the posts by Luke and Jim (as well as the comments)) about the political implications of integrating open source projects like B@B and UMWBlogs, built on free software and borne of an edupunk spirit and a will to democratize ed-tech, with an institution’s official authentication system. I intend to spend some time on this and what it means to finally be able to access B@B from Baruch’s website in my next post. To be continued.

 

Filed Under: Baruch College, Blogs and Blogging, BLSCI, Technology, Writing Across the Curriculum

What are the Principles of Communication Across the Curriculum?

February 27, 2012 By 2 Comments

The philosophy of Writing Across the Curriculum is well-established. Key concepts include writing to learn, scaffolding assignments, low stakes v. high stakes writing, and addressing high-level issues before low-level issues. I think that the principles of Communication Across the Curriculum are not as clearly laid out–perhaps because communication encompasses written, oral, and electronic forms, and is thus harder to essentialize into pedagogical concepts. CAC is the child of WAC, but at the same time CAC incorporates WAC.

I don’t think that WAC principles can be translated into CAC principles, though there is a great overlap. However, it is an interesting idea to consider what “low stakes speaking” or “speaking to learn” might mean.

I wonder whether the practical guidelines for speaking and electronic communication simply take precedence over the notion of a teaching philosophy for CAC. There are so many guides out there on public speaking, many of which offer excellent pointers for students. Actually, one of my favorite pieces on public speaking is Michael Ellsberg’s dissection of what makes Bill Clinton so much more charismatic than Bush in this debate:

I also like Tim Ferriss’ no-nonsense discussion of how to prepare for public speaking (the short answer is it takes a lot of work to do it right).

But aside from classic tips on public speaking, what are the pedagogical principles of CAC? What kind of guidelines should teachers go by? When I was teaching, I often assigned presentations, but I generally didn’t give my students the time or space in class to practice.

I’d like to challenge anyone reading this to respond with a suggested principle or two for CAC. These should be pedagogical concepts, as opposed to mere “tips” on speaking, writing, or electronic communication. Here are my ideas:

1. Students should be asked to speak in a variety of modes–giving prepared answers to discussion questions, creatively responding to an immediate question, or giving a formal presentation.

2. Preparation should be emphasized as a part of oral presentations, and if possible should be incorporated into the grade. For example, time might be given in class for students to practice presenting in small groups, grading one another based on a set rubric.

3. Students should be given assignments that ask them to address a variety of audiences from a variety of mediums.

4. Models of effective communication should be given to students and discussed in class. Strategies for addressing common problems, such as anxiety surrounding speaking or writing, should also be presented and discussed.

5. Electronic tools should be utilized in the service of best communication practices. For example, blogs can be used for low or medium-stakes writing, and software such as GoogleDocs and wikis can be used to improve collaborative efforts.

Coming up with CAC-specific principles makes me realize that in many classrooms there are a number of  different and perhaps contradictory elements in play. WAC believes in “writing to learn,” but then, Writing in the Disciplines teaches that students must “learn to write” in the form and language of their disciplines. Similarly, students need to be able to discern the difference between CAC and CID…communicating across the disciplines and communicating in the disciplines. This makes me think that number 6 on my list should be “Specify the communicative norms of each discipline.”

 

Filed Under: cac, Pedagogy, Writing Across the Curriculum

Thinking Through Animals at the Westminster Dog Show

February 16, 2012 By 2 Comments

The emerging food movement, which has gained so much prominence in the past few years, is, surprisingly, entering the canon of composition curricula.  At Queens College, the new topics-focused first-year composition curriculum has an entire course devoted to “food.”  Last semester, following the layout of the composition reader I was using, I taught a unit of my first-year writing class on “the culture of food.”  We read essays on agricultural overproduction, the obesity epidemic, and vegetarianism.  But I have found, through my own experience and through listening to colleagues discuss their classes covering food, that it’s a difficult topic for the writing classroom.  Analyzing one’s political relationship to food requires a level of self-awareness beyond analyzing advertisements, mass-media, and education, all of which are cultural modes often explored in general composition courses.

It seems to me that at the heart of the food movement is a reconsideration of how we eat animals.  That is, we need to eat less meat and pay closer attention to how we treat the animals raised for slaughter. I hesitate to use the term “animal rights” because it sounds controversial, as though I am suggesting animals deserve the same rights as humans. Obviously, they don’t: they don’t get to vote or access public schools. But “animal rights” really refers to an idea that animals deserve to live out their lives in dignity, protected from abuse or exploitation. The question, then, is what constitutes abuse or exploitation. In the interest of full disclosure, I will admit that I have very leftist views on this topic. I stopped eating meat twenty years ago, when I was twelve and when vegetarianism was still uncommon. I am also the kind of insufferable consumer, recently skewered on an episode of “Portlandia”, who grills the egg vendor at the farmers market on just how “free range” the free ranging chickens are. Are they pastured eggs, or just cage-free? Because I only eat pastured eggs.

On Monday, I attended the 136th Annual Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show at Madison Square Garden.  I had never been to a dog show before, but my interest was sparked a few months ago when the New York Times Magazine published an article on the bulldog. Apparently, the bulldog’s breed standards, set in this country by the American Kennel Club, have led to questionable breeding practices, which produce a good-looking specimen beset with health problems and a reduced life span.  I was shocked to learn that a society devoted to dogs would sponsor, even demand, unhealthy practices.

I went to the dog show to explore this seeming paradox: that those who care most about dogs might not, in fact, care about their health and well being.  I had an image of the dog show as a place devoted to animal welfare, with booths set up supporting adoption or distributing information on canine care.  I was mistaken. While I don’tdoubt that everybody in attendance cared about their dogs, they clearly did not share my definition of “love” for animals. I saw more than one owner standing next to their show dog wearing a full-length fur coat.  To me, this seemed the essence of irony; at an animal-focused event, a participant was sporting a clear signifier of animal cruelty.

But according to a friend’s mother who was in town just to attend the show, the participants are only concerned with status, which explains the fur coats. My friend’s mother is a dog lover who regularly goes to dog shows, not as a participant but as a spectator.  Because I was new to this world, I had a million questions for her, the main one being, “why does anybody participate in this?” Her answer was simple: ego. She explained that that the animals’ wins are “power trips” for the owners. I asked her if she’d ever want to get involved. “I think it seems like a bad life for the dog,” she said. “They are treated like objects. I just like to go to watch.”

I, too, liked to watch. Mostly, I liked to look at cute dogs and discuss with my friend which ones we would most like to own, if we ever lived in apartments big enough for dogs. But it felt weird to admit that, though we recognized the animals were being treated like objects, we could take pleasure in the proceedings. The level of objectification seemed in some ways harmless, since these dogs were clearly healthy and cared for. On the other hand, pedigree breeding, which breeds for extreme traits, does lead to health problems. This leads us back to the question of what constitutes animal abuse and exploitation. According to PETA protestors, the answer is: The Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. But for most of us, it is something less clear-cut.

Negotiating just how sensitive we should be to the objectification or improper “use” of animals is no easy task. The complexity of the issue runs to the heart of the human ego, which might be a touch too heady for a freshman seminar oriented more towards organization and clarity of writing. On the other hand, composition courses often aim to unsettle students’ world-views just a little, at least enough to get them thinking critically. And it would do us all well to think critically about how we share this world with the millions of other species on it, including the more adorable ones.

Filed Under: Culture, New York, Writing, Writing Across the Curriculum

The Digital I & Thou

December 7, 2011 By 3 Comments

At a recent faculty roundtable, a familiar conversation surfaced: why do students incorporate the rhythms, abbreviations and tones of digital communication at all the wrong moments and in all the worst contexts–using emoticons in requests for paper extensions or text-speak in formal essays, for instance? A core complaint runs through this line of questioning: technology has ruined students’ ability to write. And as familiar as these dilemmas are, so too is one potential pedagogical response: the problem is not texting or emailing or twittering; it’s learning to teach students to move competently and consciously amidst various modalities, to identify and name types of writing and forms of mediation, and to practice when and how to deploy them.

When I first taught freshman composition, I was charged with covering the five primary rhetorical modes. Of course there have always been more than five, but the contemporary moment demands that we re-direct our gaze toward the reality of an infinite body of modes (even if we continue to insist on the tidy and classical handful of five: they can still be useful). This doesn’t mean that every classroom must embrace and welcome tweets and texts and slang into its culture and content, but rather that even if we want to limit the language-types circulating in our classrooms or in our students’ essays , we’re going to have to name them, collectively, first. “The ability to write” does not constitute one undifferentiated field, and as teachers we must liberate ourselves from that fantasy.

I’m curious to hear about strategies others have uncovered for teaching multiple fluencies. One of the challenges of living up to the promise of this pedagogical approach is that the very assumption of audience that underlies the conventional conception of rhetoric has been thrown into deep disarray.  To whom is a Facebook status update addressed? Is it to an individual, to some parcel of one’s collection of “friends,” to some imaginary conglomerate Other, or an aspect of oneself?  I’m quite sure that in many cases both the identities of speaker and audience are unknown. Perhaps one route of entry into the new rhetoric of communication is via a return to, and revision of, an elemental study of self and other: one that accounts for student, teacher and screen.

 

 

Filed Under: Teaching, Technology, Writing, Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing Instruction

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

Careful What You Ask For

April 7, 2011 By Leave a Comment
As a strangely apropos segue from my previous post about the potential dwindling of long-form writing assignments, I am happy to announce an upcoming event at the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, organized by Linell and myself. We have invited Dr. Ken Nielsen to spend the afternoon with us in an interactive workshop session that attempts to tie together questions of designing writing assignments and communication-intensive pedagogy. Can we have it all? Can we have it all without running ourselves ragged?

Dr. Nielsen will be returning to his old stomping grounds for this special event; he is a proud graduate of the CUNY Graduate Center’s PhD program in Theatre, and a former Assistant Director of Writing at Queens College. He currently teaches in the Writing Program at Princeton University. We hope you can join us for an afternoon of questioning and strategy sharing.

Careful What You Ask For:  Designing Efficient Writing Assignments for Communication-Intensive Courses

Wednesday, April 13, 3-4:30pm, 137 East 25th Street, Room 323

Writing assignments are one crucial way to manage the quality of writing instruction in classes that are supposed to teach both content and communication skills. By carefully designing assignments of varying degrees of difficulty—from simple low-stakes in-class writing to the final research essay—and implementing them throughout the semester, writing becomes not simply a mode of evaluation but of learning. When we analyze writing assignments from across the curriculum it often becomes clear that the reason our students are not performing to their fullest capability is partly due to the assignments they are given. The old warning to be “careful what you ask for, because you may end up getting it,” will guide us as we discuss our own writing assignments, balancing and incorporating writing with oral communication, and using the assignments strategically to balance our own workload.

Presented by the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute and led by Dr. Ken Nielsen, Lecturer in the Princeton Writing Program, this hands-on workshop will address best practices in writing assignment design. Participants are encouraged to bring a copy of one of their writing assignments to this workshop.

Tea and refreshments will be served. Adjunct faculty will be paid at the non-teaching rate for their participation.

RSVP by email to hillary.miller [at] baruch.cuny.edu

Presenter

Ken Nielsen, lecturer in the Princeton Writing Program, has taught communication-intensive theater classes at Baruch College, writing-intensive American literature and composition classes at Queens College, and is currently teaching his interdisciplinary writing seminar, “Secrets and Confessions,” at Princeton University. Nielsen was previously the Assistant Director of Writing at Queens College.

Filed Under: Baruch College, BLSCI, Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Faculty Development, Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing Instruction Tagged With: , , , , ,
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