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: , , , , ,

The Anxiety of Print This Out

November 1, 2010 By 2 Comments

I have one student this semester whose first paper was one of the most befuddling pieces of writing I’ve ever read—literally every single word must have been a direct thesaurus transfer. I could tell that the student had a lot of really interesting ideas, but had fallen victim to the temptation to “invent the university by assembling and mimicking its language” (Bartholomae), and what was clear to me from reading this paper, was that the language of the university was incomprehensible to this student.

Before we’d even gotten the chance to sit down and discuss this paper in office hours, this same student posted to our class blog. The blog post was excellent—thoughtful and thought-provoking questions about Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” were raised and parallels between Melville and the narrator were drawn (both of which showed a lot of critical thinking and perhaps even some outside research).  In other words, this student wrote one of the best blog posts of the semester.

I have many students who seem to inhabit many personalities as writers—the writer who keeps notes in his/her notebook, the blogger/social media aficionado, and the typed-up high stakes essay and hand in hoping for a good grade writer.  But, this phenomenon is nothing new—it is the “same old song” of multi-modal composing, and what Cynthia Selfe defines as “the literacy of technology,” or in other words, “the way people create and respond to information.” What is new to me, however, is this level of engagement and blogging proficiency. The last time I posted on here, I was trying to figure out why my students that semester were adamantly resisting my desire for us to blog. This semester, the blog holds some of the best writing my students do. In fact, I actually am not really able to imagine teaching without the blogging component because of the success I’ve had this semester.

Some observations:

  1. Students who are reticent in class are often the most active on the blog. Each student must blog at least once per semester, but this semester, students are just blogging whenever they want to–and it is all related to the course material.
  2. Students seem to be quick to comment and to ask each other questions. They also are quick to connect the course material to other things they experience in an average week–whether it be Jersey Shore or Carl Paladino.
  3. This course is a Great Works course. The literature we study is from the 17th Century to the present. The blog has enabled students to really connect with the material in an interesting way–they feel committed to its relevance to their own daily experience, despite the age and date of the writing.
  4. Students love to share media. They will force themselves into unexpected connections just to show their colleagues a youtube clip.

But, back to the writing. Is a blog’s real gift the ability to show students that they too can contribute invaluable ideas into a larger discourse community? How can we encourage students to take the writing they already do on the computer and bring it into their papers–substituting thesaurus-heavy prose for the natural critical narratives that emerge in a wordpress environment?

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

The Humanities Drive; Skills Ride Along

May 4, 2010 By 2 Comments

I am going to reveal a hope of mine; I have long kept this hope closeted, as it seems very likely to bring me disgrace. I hope that Writing Across the Curriculum and Communication Across the Curriculum programs might one day render Composition obsolete.

The development of a specialized knowledge of writing instruction has been one of the most important achievements of higher education in the last forty years. This specialized knowledge of how to teach students to write will remain important. In fact, the incredible utility of this knowledge means that it cannot be confined to specialists! The birth of WAC, analogous to the invention of the web-link, has the potential to completely transform the way we conceive of the essential material of higher education. No longer can we isolate writing instruction to language classes. Could this be the idea that reverses a hundred-and-twenty year trend of increasing specialization in the curriculum?

Okay. So, once again, I have resorted to polemic (here, in the form of a strange sort-of-Hegelean fantasy). However, my conviction is a serious one. The humanities are ill served by the teaching of writing prior to the more fundamental questions. Why are we here, what do we do, how do we form the bases for our beliefs? These deeper questions, which students ponder on their own, are seldom addressed in their course work in Humanities disciplines, even though these are the questions that motivate humanistic study.

I have, tentatively, shared these ideas with my colleagues. The ideas are not well received. “If you can’t write, you can’t think. How can you work on big ideas if you can hardly sort out your words into sentences or your sentences into paragraphs?”

Further confession: I am either so prescient or so far-fetched in my thinking that I even like to imagine WAC and CAC will lead to curricular solutions to the economic problems of today’s higher education in the humanities. There are too many graduate students. Graduate education takes too long. Professorships become scarce as institutions increasingly rely on adjunct- and other temporary appointments. Meanwhile, enrollments continue to climb, especially at junior and community colleges. A caste system has formed where only “the best” professors can teach original courses, and an underclass of highly educated professionals prepare the masses by running them through a byzantine system of prerequisites for contact with the elite specialists.

Specialization in the sciences is important. In the humanities, specialization is like a derivatives market; it takes something that has a basic function, and, in trying to increase the wealth this thing produces, it fouls the thing’s basic functionality.

Let every graduate teach what he wants, but have him also armed to teach writing. Instead of, “how can you work on big ideas if you can’t write a sentence,” let it be demanded, “how can you build advanced knowledge, if you can’t teach basic writing?” The system of levels and prerequisites will fall away. The humanities will drive, and skills will ride along.

Is this really such a disgraceful idea?

Filed Under: Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Higher Education, Pedagogy, teaching, To Ponder, What if . . ., Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing Instruction Tagged With: , , , , , ,

This is not thinking

December 2, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Last summer a student in my public speaking class said that “Cloverfield” was ‘pretty good for an action movie.’ And then he said, ‘I mean it’s a disaster movie, which is a kind of action movie.’  I asked him to tell me what an action movie is as a form or genre, what its properties are. This led to a conversation in which we put the film into context, so rather than just sketch the plot, describe a spectacular scene or two, and name the actors, we talked about the form of a disaster film, its history, and the range of locations and themes it has traversed so far.

When I was an undergrad, my professor Heidi Krueger sent us to look at pointillism paintings at the Moma, then read Gertrude Stein’s attempts to translate pointillism into writing. Stein dispersed units of description throughout a paragraph the way Seurat’s paintings disperse dots of color throughout the frame. After years of reading transparently, without reflecting on the mechanism of the forms of writing, this exercise was a kind of “Matrix” moment for me. I began to see the way forms and genres impose structure, and I began to see representation as a kind of translation of experience or thought which is never complete or direct. In any translation there is adaptation, even distortion, and maybe even loss. I guess translation can be alienating, as well. And I wonder if this is what might be partly what is happening when I hear students mimic the style of the texts they’re assigned in class, or the style of their professor’s lecture.

At the Writing Across the Curriculum Conference last week, two fellows described teaching with different forms. In her class on personality psychology Valerie Futch highlights the way research questions and methodology determine results by assigning personality questionnaires to her students. Doug Singsen taught a class on comics in which he assigned his students to diagram a page, indicating different logics connecting one frame to another: character-to-character, aspect-to-aspect, etc. I was struck by the way both of them seemed to foreground the form, of comic or psychological study, and the way this foregrounding moved their students past a book-report kind of absorption and summarization, to an awareness of the way form works as a kind of structuring logic.

I’ve heard the phrase “writing is thinking” in my experiences with Writing Across the Curriculum, and after the last WAC colloquium I thought about other kinds of work that friends of mine have described: photography, contracting, pattern-making. If these are all forms of thinking, maybe we could say that writing is the academically consecrated form of thinking. Or, that writing is a representation of thinking, one that requires translation into a specific form.

I’ve noticed a tendency among students to parrot or mimic the style of the texts they use in class, and I wonder if this is because for them, unlike grad students and professors, writing is not thinking. Instead, expressing thinking through writing might for some students be an act of extreme translation, from the thinking they already do (in forms other than writing) into the form of writing. After all, academics write and read all the time, we think in it like fish in water. Writing and text is perhaps transparent to us, but more or less opaque others.

The conversation with my student about “Cloverfield” made me want to integrate other forms that we all encounter all the time into academic work, as a way to make the structure opaque to both student and teacher, and allow different levels of competence and levels of analysis into the classroom. I’d like to assign students to write “Cloverfield”  in the form of the first few pages of Pride and Prejudice; or draw the argument of an academic essay as a comic strip; or make a news report of a poem, explaining logical, structural mechanisms across different forms.

In my first year as a WAC fellow, I’ve learned about integrating journals and blogs into academic assignments, and this seems like a great way to connect writing to the thinking that students are already doing outside of college. (If we agree that people generally write emails, and read blogs).

Photo by Shannon Ebner.

Photo by Shannon Ebner.

I could think of them all these forms as representations of thinking. That’s the way that Derrida and post-structuralism has real world resonance for me. I wonder if by making several forms opaque, we might give students a sense of analytical and expressive competence, which could provide a kind of transition to academic writing. And I wonder if an alienation from popular forms like movies, songs, and news reports might work well with an alienation from academic forms like essays. So we could spread the alienation around, and categorize writing as another form of thinking among many. After all, we arrive at college already schooled in, even experts in, movies, songs, and news reports. And with Blogs@Baruch available here it is possible to integrate many forms into an assignment, or ongoing assignments in a class. (The Baruch blog projects I’ve peeked in on, from classes on food, Chaucer, journalism, etc. are compelling to me, and I imagine they would be to students too.) What if there was a class that didn’t focus on a specific content, but instead was about forms. Is there? I gathered from the WAC colloquium that teachers are assigning writing exercises that highlight the methods and styles of different disciplines, but I’m looking for ways that other teachers might be doing this kind of work. It is my current dream class, working title: “Forms, Forms, Forms!” or maybe, “Post-structuralism and You.”

Filed Under: Literacy, literature, Media, Pedagogy, Writing Across the Curriculum

Assessment: the dirty word

November 3, 2009 By 1 Comment

Now seems like as good a time as any to reflect on something that’s been on my mind for a while: assessment. While maybe not the most exciting topic, I think it’s a really important and prevalent one. To be clear I’m referring to program assessment here, not assessment of student writing. Until last year my only experience with and training in assessment was through working at community-based organizations, specifically programs for youth that incorporated education and work readiness as well as several other elements. While this experience had its ups and downs, last year I figured out pretty quickly that assessment means something very different in the university context. I, of course, saw assessment and the implementation of Writing Across the Curriculum at CUNY as a great marriage. Faculty in different disciplines trying out different pedagogical tools? Lots of written products, i.e. data? Opportunities for different people to get together and talk about their teaching experiences, what works and what doesn’t? Great! I really did not expect the resentment and lack of cooperation I received when I began to talk to faculty about these issues.

Rather than focusing on all of the problems and tensions around these issues within some (not all) universities, I thought I might mention a few basic elements often emphasized by community-based organizations:

First, assessment should be truly collaborative or it can quickly become extremely divisive. Transparency seems really important here. Asking for all kinds of information about someone’s classroom, students, and teaching without being clear about how that information will be used can be a great way to alienate faculty members.

This leads to the second point, which is that assessment should serve as a means of improving the overall quality of education in a particular department or discipline or university rather than as a policing mechanism. While it’s important to be aware of areas that need improvement, highlighting best practices is equally, if not more, important.

Finally it seems important to start and finish with the people actually doing the work, in this case, faculty members teaching writing and using writing as a teaching tool. Being aware of the needs of these folks allows the assessment to be more than charts and graphs. This way the information gleaned from this assessment project can be put to practical use. This is also a good incentive for faculty members to cooperate and provide useful data. It can even make it possible to enlist their help more directly. While faculty and administration often have different priorities, they don’t have to conflict. I think both groups have some stake in assessment and, if designed and implemented properly, it can help both meet their goals.

Filed Under: Administration, Assessment, Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Writing Across the Curriculum

“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

Draft Learning Goals for Writing and Speaking

June 25, 2009 By 1 Comment

I was reminded today that I once drafted a set of learning goals for writing and speaking at the undergraduate level for a project headed up by our office of advisement and orientation. While these goals implicitly inform the curricular support and development work of the institute, they have not been codified beyond the document I created in 2006 (before I learned about Bloom’s taxonomy). These goals have not seen the light of day beyond their very limited original context. With that, I thought I’d post them for discussion. Take a look and let us know if you find these useful and/or whether you’d recommend revisions. Here we go:

By the end of their undergraduate experience students should be able to:

  • comfortably pose pertinent questions to faculty both in and out of class
  • demonstrate proficiency in a number of everyday written genres (email, letter, etc.)
  • demonstrate sensitivity to audience in oral and written communication – write and speak in a manner appropriate to audience – articulate similarities and differences in addressing different audiences (email to peer vs. email to faculty, conversation with parent vs. conversation with prospective employer)
  • demonstrate awareness that all communication is purposeful – each individual communication is meant to accomplish a particular goal or set of goals – sensitivity to purpose
  • grasp rhetorical purpose of own written work (what is this paper, email, memo, etc. meant to accomplish? What do I need it to do? What should it accomplish?)
  • articulate how they might go about accomplishing purpose of given communication (in order to accomplish X in my email to my professor, I need to make clear that Y and establish Z before making the argument that A)
  • work responsibly and productively as a member of a group – to communicate appropriately with all group members
  • comfortably speak before an audience – impromptu and prepared presentations
  • articulate own understanding of how they can become better communicators (what do I need to work on to become a better writer/speaker?)

Discuss.

Filed Under: Assessment, Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Oral Communication, Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing Instruction

James Paul Gee on Learning and Games

December 4, 2008 By Leave a Comment

From Edutopia, the website of the George Lucas Educational Foundation, an excellent interview with James Paul Gee, a linguist who has become the leading authority on video games and pedagogy and who gave a great talk at the CUNY Grad center last year. Enjoy.

Filed Under: Assessment, Grading, Media, Technology, Writing Across the Curriculum
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