Archive for the 'Writing Instruction' Category

The Humanities Drive; Skills Ride Along

Published
by
Michael
on May 4, 2010
in Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Higher Education, Pedagogy, To Ponder, What if . . ., Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing Instruction and teaching
. 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?

in defense of traditional pedagogy (?)

Published
by
Diana
on April 14, 2010
in Pedagogy, Writing Instruction and teaching
. 0 Comments

I’m aware that many forward-thinking educators, particularly those of the WAC-oriented ilk, take a critical, if not perhaps disdainful, view of the standard compare-contrast essay. I’m actually not sure what the specific criticisms are, and am hoping this post will spark more discussion about this genre’s merits and problems.

I strongly feel that the compare-contrast essay is, or can be, an excellent way for students to practice, hone, and demonstrate analytic skills. This essay requires them to show mastery and comprehension of material, a grasp of the larger, more abstract concepts, an understanding of the relationship between these concepts, and a recognition of the significance of these similarities and differences.

Apples & Oranges - They Don't Compare
Creative Commons License photo credit: TheBusyBrain

That said, I am often very disappointed in the work that students submit in response to this type of assignment. The majority lack a clear thesis statement, suffer from weak overall organization, show a difficulty identifying the authors’ thesis, struggle with concise yet relevant summaries, and most significantly, seem to break down when it comes to articulating the relationship between concepts. I work hard to help my students make connections between readings, to see multiple perspectives, to understand that every thesis has a counter-thesis, and I’m not sure to what extent I see these efforts pay off in their written work.

Having said that, I ask, am I barking up the wrong tree, clinging to this type of assignment? Is there a better way to help students develop stronger reading, writing, and thinking skills? Perhaps there are ways of framing the traditional assignment that better facilitate the type of end product I am expecting?

(I did use an involved in-class writing assignment today, that was then used for small group work, and which lead to an involved class discussion about relationships between four readings. I think this was successful; however, I’m not sure how that work will be reflected in their formal written assignments.)
Cakewalk Plasma CakeWalk Home Studio Sonar 4 Producer Edition Cakewalk Project 5

Adventures in Blogland

Published
by
Erica
on April 13, 2010
in Baruch College, Blogs and Blogging, Pedagogy and Writing Instruction
. 4 Comments

I currently teach two sections of a Composition II class here at Baruch College. My course theme is “Happiness,” and prior to the semester’s beginning, I’d been thinking a lot about the point that Daniel Gilbert makes in Stumbling on Happiness—that all humans need to have relationships with others in order to feel “happy.” Whether or not I agree with this statement is not as important as the idea that perhaps one way to approach the course theme might be to really think about communication and relationships that are constructed purely by language—not by the physical space of the classroom. So, to make a long story short, I began the semester with the idea that our blog would be an active space where the two sections of the one class could meet, write, and think.

I structured my syllabus so that, out of my 54 students, each week, two students from each section would be in charge of posting to the blog, and two per section would be in charge of commenting. I also provided “optional assignments” that students could either use as prompts for writing, or choose to ignore. But, about a month into our foray into blogging, I still felt disappointed by the space. It even felt tense, a huge problem for a class with the theme of “happiness.”

So I decided to confront them, and the quieter of the two sections surprised me by presenting a very interesting critique of our class blog. I asked the class to begin with a “focused freewrite” in which they needed to reflect on how they were engaging with the class blog thus far. Some comments included:

  • “I hate how teachers think that they can become cool by forcing us to use spaces we think are fun to produce more academic prose.”
  • “The blog is nothing more than another assignment. In fact, you even assign us when to write on it!”
  • “I talk in class, I don’t want to talk at home.”
  • “Aren’t these sites public? I heard that no matter how many years pass, if you write poorly on a blog, you won’t get a job.”

I then asked them to reflect on what a class blog should look like (making it clear that I believe in class blogs and have used them for years with a huge amount of success and student enthusiasm). The responses were not all that different:

  • “Nothing can make blogging for class fun.”
  • “Even if you don’t grade us on the blog, we still know that if we don’t write we’ll get penalized.”
  • “I have my own blog, I don’t need another one to write on.”
  • “Why should we have to participate in a communal blog when you, the professor, don’t do anything?”

I was really intrigued by this conversation and thought a lot about it. Why all the resistance, particularly from a class that is on the quiet side, but is also full of students who email me regularly? And, was the other section just being nice? Did they agree? If so, why didn’t they voice their discontent as openly? And, perhaps most importantly, where did I go wrong? What next?

James Hoff posted on a similar topic a while back. He made the interesting point that “despite our increasingly technological lives, or perhaps because of them, the creation and conservation of technology-free spaces where people can, and are encouraged to communicate face-to-face, free of distraction, with nothing more than their unique temperaments and their private store of knowledge and eloquence, seems more and more important to me.” Were the students reacting against the technology or against the pedagogy I’d laid out? To assign or not to assign…is that the real question?

My general belief is that students tend to enter a Composition classroom dreading the act of writing, let alone spending an entire semester doing just that. When I ask my students if they write outside of class they usually uniformly say “no.” But, they also uniformly admit to authoring thousands of text messages, instant messages, emails, blog posts, Facebook comments, etc. And, these things are all forms of writing. So, by using a blog I want to enable students to see “academic writing” differently, to lower the stakes perhaps, or to at least allow them a space where writing for school can masquerade as being fun.

I decided to change the environment. Not the look of the blog, but the look of my pedagogical hand. I sent both classes an email announcing the “rebirth of the Happiness blog”! An excerpt:

  1. The main purpose of this space is for all of us to share ideas and thoughts, and to start conversations across classes. This is an informal writing space—write on what you want, how you want to, just make sure you keep it class/school appropriate.
  2. From this point onwards, there are no specific “blogging” or “commenting” assignments. Since we all lead active lives and must have a lot on our minds, let’s use this space to share some of these things—many of which will organically relate to the theme of our course. Share things you’ve seen, heard, read that you found exciting. Share ideas you might be having. Pieces of creative work…Use videos, images, etc…In other words–just post. Enjoy. Have fun. Play with language.
  3. You are each assigned to blog at least once this semester, and comment at least once, and that schedule still stands. I would encourage you to blog and comment more than that of course.
  4. I will participate in this blogging endeavor in the same way that you do. I’ll make the occasional posts, sharing things that I find interesting, appropriate, exciting. And, I’ll say hello in the comment boxes.

The result—students are posting actively, unpredictably, visually. They are commenting and talking to each other in the comment boxes (although still not as much as I’d hoped). They are sharing Youtube videos, analyzing songs, reviewing movies, etc. The students who say little in class have been posting the most frequently. They are writing well and writing frequently. They are voluntarily sharing their critical ideas about readings from class. So, my lingering question is: can a transparently optional assignment really do that much harm?

Outsourcing

Published
by
Kai
on April 12, 2010
in Grading, Pedagogy and Writing Instruction
. 2 Comments

call center
Creative Commons License photo credit: vlima.com

After reading a recent NYTimes article on a company that provided assignment grading for professors, I was struck by my own ambivalent feelings. Having taught writing intensive courses for many years, it seemed like a welcomed relief to be able to send those papers off to professional services and receive them back corrected and commented. “The graders working for EduMetry, based in a Virginia suburb of Washington, are concentrated in India, Singapore and Malaysia,” and go so far as to match the tone of voice requested, whether constructive, formal, informal, encouraging, etc.

The idea, according to EduMetry, is to take paper grading off of our shoulders so that we can better dedicate ourselves to teaching, which I must say is not a bad one. Rarely has traditional paper grading been a rewarding experience for me, and even more rarely has it been a truly educational experience for the student. It seems often to be one of those tasks that belong more to academic folkloric culture than a real pedagogical tool. It’s painful, takes a lot of time, and gives very little return on your investment…

On the other hand farming out grading would in a sense maintain the status quo of paper writing by allowing professors to avoid thinking about the real use of writing in academia. Instead of being rethought and made integral to the teaching practices,  the papers would become some external requirement evaluated by outside graders, and would have no other meaning for the students themselves. Papers would join the ranks of the outsourced products we consume, both in terms of writing and now in terms of correcting.

The underlying question in all this seems to be regarding the status of the paper itself and its actual use. Do we continue assigning traditional papers that offer little pedagogical experience, or do we revise the role of writing and the various forms it can take in the classroom? Services like EduMetry do meet a demand, but is that demand not related to a very uncreative idea of what student papers should look like?

Dare to use (and teach) the semicolon! ;;;

Published
by
Lauren
on March 10, 2010
in Punctuation, Writing Instruction and teaching
. 0 Comments

semi
Creative Commons License photo credit: mag3737

As a Writing Fellow, I work with students who are having trouble structuring their essays, or need help clarifying their thesis statements, but sometimes I cannot help but address grammar problems. Yesterday I had some extra time with a student, so I gave him some feedback on a recurring grammar issue I noticed when I looked over his draft essay: rampant misuse of commas and semicolons! In speaking with him, it became clear that he didn’t really know what the difference was between a comma, semicolon, or colon, or when it was appropriate to use them.

As far as commas go, I taught him the “pause” trick. Read your sentences out loud to identify where you naturally pause, and that is where the comma(s) should go. When you read, your sentences out loud, it often becomes clear, when you’ve put in unnecessary commas. [When you read [pause] your sentences out loud [pause] it often becomes clear [pause] when you’ve put in unnecessary commas.]

Unfortunately, I did not have any neat tricks up my sleeve to explain semicolon usage. In the draft that the student showed me, his semicolons should have been commas; they did not connect two independent but related clauses that could stand on their own as complete sentences. “Get rid of them,” I advised. “If you don’t know how to use them, don’t use them at all.”

This got me thinking: I can help students identify when not to use the semicolon, but how do I teach them when it is appropriate to use? I’m a sociologist, not a grammarian! I’ve never had a formal grammar lesson myself, and cannot articulate all the rules of grammar, despite implicitly knowing and using them when I write. When I told the student to err on the side of caution by not using the semicolon, I realize that I was also erring on the side of caution in my proscriptive, rather than prescriptive, advice.

I was discussing this last night with a friend I ran into on the way home from the subway. My friend, who is absolutely not a grammarian either, reminded me about her favorite podcast, Grammar Girl. “I used a semicolon for the first time in my life this year, after listening to the Grammar Girl podcast about them,” she told me. By finally learning the rules about the semicolon, she finally felt confident about using them. Now, I’ve never been afraid to use the semicolon, but I’d like to feel more confident about teaching its usage. So, off to Grammar Girl I go.

How personal is too personal?

Published
by
MichaelJ
on November 17, 2009
in Pedagogy and Writing Instruction
. 1 Comment

Like a hip-hop video
Creative Commons License photo credit: Torley

Since my last two posts have focused on administrative kinds of issues (professional development and assessment) I thought maybe I should write about something a little more practical this time around, something more directly related to teaching. In attempting to incorporate more writing into my sociology/social psychology courses I often ask or at least encourage students to write about themselves as part of an assignment. Depending on the assignment this usually yields some interesting results and students seem to love writing about their identities and experiences. I think this especially makes sense when it somehow involves students learning to think critically through thinking about the individual in relation to the collective or applying sociological concepts. I also tend to think that assignments asking students to reflect on their experiences or place in the world are somehow more engaging although I’m not sure this is always the case.

Most of my students respond well to this type of assignment; others respond a little too well. While I do my best not to ask invasive questions or give assignments that might bring up overly emotional issues that are difficult to handle, there are always a few who write about some really intense personal issues. Suffice it to say my experience in human services has come in handy more than once. Although I have never had a student complain and many enjoy the opportunity to write about experiences or identities they’ve really never had a chance to talk about, I still end up feeling some anxiety about giving this type of assignment. Am I asking too much of them? What does this kind of disclosure mean for the teacher/student relationship? Of course, many of us in the social sciences are hyper-aware of these issues in our research but what about in our teaching? I would love to hear some reflections on this and, having pretty much taught only in the social sciences, I’m curious if this issue has come up for folks teaching in other disciplines.


CUNY Sidesteps a Pedagogical False Dilemma

Published
by
Talia
on November 13, 2009
in Writing Instruction
. 5 Comments

Worried about the low literacy levels and poor writing skills of college graduates, composition professors have spent decades debating the question: Should college writing courses teach content (critical reading and in-class debates about social and cultural topics) or form (essay design, paragraph arrangement, and sentence-level syntax, grammar, and vocabulary)?

To my mind, they’re chasing a red herring.  Once we’re actually in the composition classroom, we inevitably combine form with content, regardless of our theoretical pedagogical standpoint.  Anti-content-ers like Stanley Fish pretend that content-rich composition courses rely on “the theory that if you chew over big ideas long enough, the ability to write about them will (mysteriously) follow.”  Of course, no one would base a curriculum on such an idiotic notion; rather, some instructors teach composition through thematic readings with the understanding that shared background knowledge will help students build more complex arguments; others use essays about “big ideas” as models students can emulate in their own writing.  Few anti-content teachers would deny the importance of building a knowledge base or following good writing models.  Conversely, even those pro-content composition instructors who strenuously declare, “I do NOT teach grammar,” ultimately are forced to attend to sentences in one way or another.

The Freshman Inquiry Writing Seminar at City College of New York, profiled this month in Inside Higher Education, has provided a curricular counterpart to my claim that writing courses always combine form with content.  The six-credit seminar links a content instructor from one of the disciplines with a writing instructor from the English department, often a Master’s or MFA student.  So, the students learn about a subject–examples include “Energy” and “Comic Books and Conflict”–and they learn how to write about that subject.  Form enriched by content, content supported by form.

Of course, I would prefer to see universities take the writing instruction side of such courses a little more seriously; as the article explains, the content instructor is often the “real” (full-time, tenured) professor and the writing instructor is a contingent laborer.  But that’s a topic for another blog post.

I Encourage Students to Torture Their Enemies!

Published
by
Talia
on October 21, 2009
in Pedagogy and Writing Instruction
. 1 Comment

Several semesters in a row, I taught Dante’s Inferno as part of a broad humanities survey.  In case you’re not familiar with the epic, the protagonist (also named Dante) travels through the Catholic hell and describes the excruciating torture experienced by the many sinners he sees there.

Standing at the Gates of Hell

Creative Commons License photo credit: country_boy_shane

My writing assignment asked students to analyze how the punishments match the sins committed.  It was so tedious.  I quickly realized I was sucking all the interest and fun out of an actually interesting and fun text.

So the next semester I made the writing assignment a bit more transgressive: “Have you ever told someone to ‘go to hell’ (or wanted to tell someone that)?  Describe the scenario.  What did the person do wrong?  Use quotes and interpretations of Dante’s Inferno to describe what their punishment would be and why.”  The assignment still met my pedagogical goals (to have the students think critically about the text and articulate connections between its parts), but the students’ answers were so much more engaged, and reading the essays was much less a chore for me.  Plus, as an accidental sort of value-added bonus, I think the assignment allowed the students to experience the cathartic, semi-therapeutic effects of imaginatively punishing people who’ve wronged them—an effect that Dante himself certainly relished in imagining his hell, which is littered with his personal enemies.

In later semesters I expanded this assignment to ask students to consign various historical and contemporary figures to the appropriate circles of Dante’s hell.  This added a component that I hadn’t originally considered, because it turned into a mini-lesson on both current events and notorious “sinners” from history.  It was also fun!

My only problem is, not every text I teach seems to lend itself to writing assignments that both achieve my goals (for them to become sharper critical thinkers and analytical writers) and engage students creatively.  Any ideas?  Anybody else trying to design these double-duty writing assignments?

Studio H

Published
by
Luke
on October 8, 2009
in Baruch College, Higher Education and Writing Instruction
. 1 Comment

Professor Vera Haller gave Tom and me a tour of the Baruch Journalism Department’s spanking new Studio H yesterday. We were blown away. The room, made possible by a generous donation from the Harnisch Foundation (overseen by Baruch graduate William Harnisch, class of 1968, and his wife Ruth Ann) provides a space for our talented journalism instructors to explore the future of the field with their students.

studioh

The room features 24 new large screen iMacs, loaded with the latest productivity software. A quarter of the machines have dv-decks, a dozen have microphones, all have nice Sony headphones, and students can arrange to borrow HD cameras for their assignments. The faculty workstation controls a beautiful projector and two flat panel displays, which can be tuned show cable news or the screen of any computer. JBL speakers in the ceiling provide terrific sound.

What struck Tom and I most, however, was how the space was laid out, with workstations on the exterior and a seminar table in the middle. Talia’s post last week wondered about the impact of computers on the writing classroom. Space was conceived in Studio H in such a way that everyone can see what everyone else is doing… there’s simply no hiding. The class can move from the workstations to the table for discussions, editing sessions, or workshops. This flexible approach to classroom design is terrific, and reflects the goal of the Journalism Department to create a newsroom-like atmosphere for the students.

In a conversation with Vera, we imagined an assignment where students could watch a YouTube clip of a breaking news story — a press conference, perhaps — and then attack it like a newsroom would on deadline. This is not a new assignment idea, but Studio H allows faculty members to more realistically mimic the conditions of a news room, with noise, movement, openness, connectivity, chaos, and even a large digital clock counting down to deadline. What a great example of how space can create pedagogical opportunity.

Congrats to the Baruch Journalism Department and its students on this wonderful new addition. We have a long history of supporting the department’s blogging and multimedia reporting initiatives, and their students do fantastic work. We look forward to seeing and helping publish the work that Studio H helps makes possible.

The Cost of a Character

Published
by
Tom
on October 1, 2009
in Language, Twitter and Writing Instruction
. 1 Comment

As an editor for the Radical History Review, I spend a lot of time counting characters (text characters that is).  Duke University Press, the publisher of the journal, allows a fixed number of journal pages per volume.  Short of typesetting an article, the most accurate way for RHR editors to estimate the length of a given article or entire issue is to count characters (yes, spaces count, and so do footnotes).  Occasionally we have a space crunch toward the end of a volume and the pressure is on.  If there is a huge overage, the game is political, determining which authors might be willing to postpone publication of their piece to a later issue.  If it is a smaller amount, authors and editors are forced to tighten the text or remove/shrink images.  It doesn’t take long before the cutting war becomes a word-by-word battle where every character counts (and the hefty penalty fee assessed by the publisher for overage looms large).  When we begin constructing an issue, the 600,000+ character space seems vast,  but as it comes down to the wire claustrophobia sets in.

Unlike a Twitterer bending to duck a 140-character limit, the journal author/editor can go only so far with creative solutions since the text must adhere to the Chicago Manual of Style and Merriam-Webster Dictionary.  Although the dictionary is growing it doesn’t allow for the creative abbreviations being pioneered by twitterati.  It usually means following Strunk and White’s advice: “Omit useless words.”  Not surprisingly, the intense editing done under the character-limit gun tends to yield excellent results.

As we help our students discover the value that comes along with the frustrations of editing, I think that space constraints can play a valuable role.  When a student shortens a text or tweet, they are employing some of the same skills necessary for communication efficiency in other contexts.

New technologies are not the first to put a price tag on characters.  An Op-Ed in the New York Times over the summer pointed to some humorous abbreviations invented by penny-pinching telegraph senders facing 15-character and 10-word limits.  I am intrigued by the expressions that the editors of the “The Anglo-American Telegraphic Code” (1891) deemed worthy of inclusion.  Some of them are not phrases I see often these days (“can you recommend to me a good female cook,” abbreviated “CRISP”); others are (“taxation is oppressive”, “ORGANISM” for short).

Here is an excerpt, including some other abbreviations you may choose to use in your next tweet:

ABANDONEE Abandoned in a sinking condition
ABETTING Everything depends on the ability with which it is (they are) handled.
ABUSAGE His (their) absence is rather mysterious.
ACESCET Has met with a trifling accident.

I see that this post is already at 2775 characters, so I best stop here.