This fall, I taught a literature course for the first time, and at Queens College, where I’d never worked before. The class was scheduled at 3 in the afternoon on a Friday, and during this time the Queens campus seemed pretty deserted. I dragged my wheely bag around empty floors and stairwells, from my office, to tech services, to the building where I taught. One faculty member observed my class, and the meeting with her that followed was a bright, warm spot of collegiality, advice, and encouragement in an otherwise pretty isolated semester. Then, Weir’s email arrived, and I had that great moment that comes from sharing experiences in a particular profession: “That exact thing happened to me!” Weir mentions students’ tendency to open papers with broad general statements. I had just spent a day with student papers that began with some variation of “Since the dawn of time, humans have thought about the important topic of identity….” I had also spent the day writing in the margins of my students’ papers comments like, “Interesting claim, can you support and develop this with an example, or cite a source?” Weir addresses these issues in this informal email in a way I found very helpful.

Last year, Talia wrote an excellent post about how to get adjuncts (who are isolated from professionalization events because they are already “stretched thin” timewise), to participate in pedagogy workshops. She came up with three great tips for how to reach out and engage adjuncts. Below, I offer Weir’s email as an example of the sort of spirit of collegiality and engaged, attuned teaching that did not wait for a Wiki or a workshop, but just reached out—both to colleagues with whom I can assume he already has a rapport, and to strangers and fellow teachers like me.

Weir wrote:

“…..I wanted to share a “teaching moment,” if I may, and forgive me for jamming up your email at this point in the semester, when everyone has too much to read.So my undergrad students and I (ENG 395W) where talking about the first paragraph of the first drafts of their research papers -”research-,” “term-,” “analytical-,” whatever you call those papers.

And my students are of course in love with generality and with big sweeping introductory moments.  Not in a hostile way: They are convinced of the importance of big contextualizing opening remarks,and why not?  But it leads to first sentences like: “David Foster Wallace develops literature in an artistic way.”  They do think that a general introductory move is important and necessary and basically required.

And so we were trying to figure out how to write an opening sentence that was both specific and catchy, that hauled you into the essay, set a tone, and also got right down to business – just as one example of an opening-sentence-strategy.  And don’t ask me how we ended up talking about marijuana.  Um, I don’t remember?  But suddenly we were discussing all the ways in which folks get busted for carrying a tiny amount of pot on their persons; and one of my students said, “Cops like to make arrests right at the end of their shifts, because it forces them into overtime and extra pay”; and one of my students said, ”Drug busts for a small amount of marijuana are really popular because the NYPD can use those arrests to pump up statistics about how they’re
keeping down crime in NYC”; and there were like 5 students in the room who had information to add, and they mentioned various articles they had read on this topic in other classes and/or on their own.  They cited their sources, in other words.  And everyone in the room, all 17 students, were suddenly talking, with way more interest and excitement than they had shown in our discussion of, well, anything else all
semester.

And it so happens that I’ve been reading Judith Halberstam’s *The Queer Art of Failure* (Duke U Press, 2011), wherein, among other things, Halberstam has stuff to say about pedagogy and the academy, including her assertion – a propos of Jacques Ranciere’s *The Ignorant Schoolmaster* and Laurent Cantet’s 2008 documentary *The Class*(*Entre Les Murs*) – that “learning is a two-way street and you cannot teach without a dialogic relation to the learner.”

“Okay,” I thought, “here’s our dialogic relation,” and I drew my students’ attention to how instantly and fully they got engaged in a conversation in which each student entered into the argument with a specific example: Cops make drug arrests at 5 PM; the NYPD uses drug busts to brag about crime control; etc.  And I reminded them that they had cited their sources.  And I asked them if they imagined that they might begin a paper about David Foster Wallace’s “Good Old Neon” by pointing immediately to a piece of evidence, a moment from the text, an event, a compelling linguistic turn, a critical intervention made by a scholar or critic or writer, etc. Rather than, you know, ”Western Literature has long struggled with the problem of language.”

And I think they got that.

All of which is to say that I have found that the only pedagogical tool I have is ignorance and unknowing, which I perform for my students whenever possible (usually out of necessity!), and that mostly this strategy fails, but sometimes it gives students room to veer away from the topic and demonstrate their expertise in some other area of discourse.  And once in a while, I am able to point out to them that they already know how to do what we are struggling to figure out how to do.”

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.

As I wrote previously, the idea of the communication course first arose in the mid 1940s when WWII veterans flooded colleges on the GI Bill:

The Communication course sprang out of the demands of the armed services during World War II for faster and more practical instruction in the language arts than was being given by existing sources. Such courses in the language arts, according to the armed services, were unrealistic, ineffective, and too slow. Language, from the armed services’ point of view, should be studied as an instrument for communicating ideas in a social system. (Malmstrom 21)

In other words, college communication courses extended military training in communication even after the war was done. Thomas F. Dunn also makes this argument when he states that “During the Second World War, the term communication came into widespread use, largely from the impetus given by the special needs of war trainees whose preparation for receiving and giving military commands, making reports on activities, and directly operations both orally and in writing were not adequately provided by the traditional college training” (31).

Take a minute to look at this 1944 training video on how women can be most productive when using typewriters for the military. The first minute is hilarious, but then, if you’re really interested, you can skip past the history of typewriters to minute 5 where the instruction in how to sit begins:

Early communication courses both served the practical need for expertise in everyday “reading, writing, speaking, and listening” and the desire to ensure the spread of American democracy, or as Malmstrom puts it, “keeping democracy dominant” (23). They could be in a variety of disciplines, as long as the four modes of communication were the focus and were evaluated as ends unto themselves (Malmstrom 22). However, the idea that there should be a systematic emphasis on communication across the entire college curriculum didn’t really emerge until the 1980s.

By 1959, communication courses had diverged in a number of different directions:  “Some courses [centered] themselves around personal awareness and personality development as a means to better expression, others around the media of mass communication, others around the structure of language, and still others around semantics or general semantics” (Dean 80).

As I mentioned in my last post, articles discussing communication courses thin out in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

However, an interest in communication courses returned in the early and mid 1970s, although the emphases were slightly different, falling on questions about how to teach communication to students of diverse backgrounds (such as in Diana Corley’s “An Interracial Communication Course for the Community College”), how to evaluate speeches (such as in Sara Latham Stelzner’s “Selected Approaches to Speech Communication Evaluation”), and how to communicate in business (such as P.H. Hewing’s “A Practical Plan for Teaching Oral Communication in the Business Communication Course”). While the notion of business communication had been around since the early 1940s, articles on that topic really exploded in the second half of the 1970s.

In the early 1980s articles referencing communication courses continued the business communication trend and also highlighted multicultural or intercultural communication (such as in Richard Fiordo’s “The Soft-Spoken Way vs. the Outspoken Way:  A Bicultural Approach to Teaching Speech Communication to Native People in Alberta”). In 1985, an article whose title today seems a bit quaint appeared:  Leon W. Couch and Charles V. Shaffer’s “Development of a Computer Communications Course Plus Laboratory.”

Many sources claim that the Writing Across the Curriculum movement rose in the early 1980s (this includes the Purdue OWL website). This is indeed when most articles on WAC were published, but technically, the term was first used in 1965 with the Writing Across the Curriculum Project at the University of London and the earliest articles referencing the movement in America were published in the late 1970s (Steinfatt 461). But, throwing another wrench in the works, in Charles Bazerman, Joseph Little, and Lisa Bethel’s Reference Guide to Writing Across the Curriculum the movement is traced back through the 1970s and then ever further back to 1931, when Alvin C. Enrich presented the findings of a late 1920s study conducted at the University of Minnesota:

Essays collected from 54 freshmen both before and after completing their freshman composition course at Minnesota were reviewed using one of several popular essay rating scales. The conclusions drawn from Eurich’s scholarly research report were that extended habits of written expression cannot be influenced in such a short time… (13-14)

The idea of more comprehensive writing instruction over a student’s entire time at college was proposed in 1931 but was then pushed off for another four decades.

Based on my research, however, WAC and CAC share a startling common ancestor. Both WAC and CAC in American colleges can be traced to a 1969-1970 Writing Across the Curriculum faculty seminar “led by Barbara Walvoord” at Central College (Bazerman, Little, and Bethel 26). This was the earliest WAC seminar in the US, and the philosophy of CAC grew alongside Central’s WAC program as it evolved in the 1970s. As far as I can tell, the seminal paper which discusses communication across the curriculum is Charles V. Roberts’ “Communication Education Throughout the University:  An Alternative to the One-Shot Inoculation Approach,” which was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Eastern Communication Association in April of 1983. Roberts, who is from Central College, lays the groundwork of a CAC philosophy and discusses how it emerged alongside Central’s WAC program. He claims that one or two communication courses are not enough to make students into expert communicators (3-4); rather than forcing students to take more communication courses, the “responsibility for helping students speak, listen, write, and read more effectively” should be “diffused across the academic community” (4). He then claims that Central College is the first to systematically require a communication emphasis across multiple disciplines rather than simply within the Communication Department; he discusses how this developed at Central over the 1970s, beginning with a writing “laboratory” in 1972 and evolving into faculty training in communication evaluation in 1979 (4-5).

Steinfatt mentions two reasons for the growing emphasis in the late 1970s and early 1980s for robust instruction in communication skills:  the first is the National Endowment for the Arts‘ 1983 report entitled “A Nation at Risk” which proclaims that the nation is facing an erosion of educational standards (460). WAC also arose largely in response to this report. The second reason is “the opinion of many corporate executives, expressed in university surveys, in casual conversation with university faculty and administrators, and in grants and bequests, that the number one problem of college students entering the work force, both for the organization and for students’ chances of advancement, is that college graduates ‘can’t communicate’” (460).

In summary, the ways in which communication courses were discussed and theorized shifted with the pedagogical concerns of each decade. In the late 1970s and early 1980s there was an increased interest in communication for business. Both WAC and CAC in America were born in Central College. WAC evolved first, beginning in 1969, and CAC was added on during the 1970s.

Works Cited

Bazerman, Charles, Joseph Little, and Lisa Bethel. Reference Guide to Writing Across the Curriculum. West Lafeyette, IN:  2005. Web. 10 November 2011.

Corley, Diana. “An Interracial Communication Course for the Community College.” Communication in Education 24.3 (1975):  237-241.

Couch, Leon W. and Charles V. Shaffer. “Development of a Computer Communications Course Plus Laboratory.” CoED 5.3 (1985):  14-19. Web. 10 November 2011.

Dean, Howard H. “The Communication Course:  A Ten-Year Perspective.” College Composition and Communication 10.2 (1959):  80-85. JSTOR. Web. 10 November 2011.

Dunn, Thomas F. “The Principles and Practice of the Communication Course.” College Composition and Communication 6.1 (1955):  31-38. JSTOR. Web. 10 November 2011.

Fiordo, Richard. “The Soft-Spoken Way vs. the Outspoken Way:  A Bicultural Approach to Teaching Speech Communication to Native People in Alberta.” Journal of American Indian Education 24.3 (1985):  35-48. Web. 10 November 2011.

Hewing, P.H. “A Practical Plan for Teaching Oral Communication in the Business Communication Course.” Business Communication Quarterly 40.4 (1977):  9-11. SAGE Communication and Media Studies backfile Collection. Web. 10 November 2011.

Malmstrom, Jean. “The Communication Course.” College Composition and Communication 7.1 (1956):  21-24. JSTOR. Web. 10 November 2011.

Roberts, Charles V. Communication Education Throughout the University: an Alternative to the One-Shot Inoculation Approach. , 1983:  1-16. Web. ERIC Database. 11 November 2011.

Steinfatt, Thomas M. “Communication Across the Curriculum.” Communication Quarterly. 34.4 (1986): 460-70. Print.

Stelzner, Sara Latham. “Selected Approaches to Speech Communication Evaluation.” Speech Teacher 24.2 (1975):  127-23. JSTOR. Web. 10 November 2011.

I’m not ready to declare the death of the English language and literature yet, but my faith has been shaken twice in the past week at my local Bay Ridge Starbucks. The first occasion involved a loud group of teenage girls trashing the novel “Catcher in the Rye.”  “Ugh…It is like the worst book ever.” Yeah. It is not even about anything.  Terrible!”  I quickly stifled my first reaction which was to curse them out for disparaging a brilliant book that ought to speak to the alienation they feel as young people.  Instead I just took a deep breath, and imagined myself as a cranky old curmudgeon in a rocking chair muttering about kids these days and just continued writing. Who am I to defend J.D Salinger anyway? I didn’t even know who he was until my mid-twenties.

photo credit: BRNFRRR

Yesterday, it happened again. There I was sitting on the couch working on a grant proposal (edited by my girlfriend whose first language is not English, but whose technical grammar runs circles around my own, but I will get to that…) when four high school students  piled onto the large couch next to me.  The usual teen activities of passing around each others cell phones and talking about fake IDs was soon replaced by a heated debate over what the past tense of the verb “to stay” was. One girl argued at it was “obviously ‘sted’” two of the teens were unsure and didn’t offer opinions leaving only one guy arguing that it was “stayed.” I kept working on my own writing until the group had decided that an impartial arbiter was necessary so the “sted” girl asked me, “you’ll know this, “sted” is a word right? Like they left, but I sted, at his house.” I said no, that the right word was “stayed.” She looked at me surprised.  English was this girl’s first language, and probably her only one.  This wasn’t a case of an irregular form of the verb, just a simple –ed ending. So what is happening?

Could it be that my local high school is particularly awful? Technology is frequently blamed for the impending doom of proper English. I don’t think it is the problem.  There were serious worries about the telegraph ruining English prose by making it terse and choppy. That never happened. As this NPR story shows, the introduction of new communication technologies has not destroyed the English language. As evidenced by the fact that here you are reading my (mostly) proper English.

Teens are not using texting abbreviations when writing college placement exams so it appears according to researchers and I have never received student work with “OMG.” In fact, even text messages students send me often begin “Hello Professor.”  I’m convinced there is enough of a moat around formal English to protect it. Actually, this boundary is enforced by both teacher and student as I learned last semester when I  wrote “LOL” in my comments on a student’s essay. What she wrote was absurd, involving surveying people during a refugee crisis about what their favorite foods are.  I really did laugh out loud. When I handed the papers back, the students giggled at my use of such unprofessional language. I countered that, just days prior, LOL had been added to the Oxford English Dictionary, and therefore my use of it was completely acceptable, though perhaps a sign of the apocalypse. This only got me laughed at for even knowing that bit of trivia.

I still struggle with my grammar, but being in my 8^th year of a PhD, my writing is much better than it used to be.  The problem is that no one ever taught me formal grammar, or at least I never learned it.  The emphasis, especially when I was in high school was on literature and creative writing. When I am feeling grammatically inadequate, I joke that I was taught grammar by hippies:

photo credit: brizzle born and bred

[Flutes playing and birds tweeting in the background] “just write, just get your feelings on paper, don’t worry about the punctuation.” It is partially true. One of my favorite teachers wore Birkenstock sandals, had a ponytail and introduced me to amazing socially conscious books and how to write passionately, albeit without commas. I had a great time writing in high school, got A’s in English, but then got to college and discovered that I was clueless especially when it came to commas and semicolons, and passive vs. active voice… forget about it.

Many students are escaping formal grammar instruction or at least it is not sticking. There is quite a debate over how grammar should be taught, when and if at all.   Some students are not taught it in school or home school.  So unless the “Ellis Christian Academy” extends its K-3 program to college, this little girl may have as hard of a time as I did when I presented my passionately written run-on sentences and lack of punctuation to college professors who were not at all impressed.

So why don’t we teach grammar? And when it is taught, why aren’t students learning it? How can we explain the large numbers of college students who have poor grammar if we don’t blame the usual suspects, technology and “kids are just lazy these days?” What can we do to make sure that students as they are entering the job market can properly write a cover letter, or an email.  I think part of the problem is that no one is telling students why they need to know where a semicolon goes or the difference between “affect” and “effect” (something I learned last year finally, I think…) I explained it this way which got a few wide-eyed looks and raised eyebrows: “if you all don’t learn how to write properly, you will not get hired. Your peers are not hiring you, people like me are, and I am not impressed.”  Ugh…I have become the professors I hated in college.

At last year’s Symposium, during the morning roundtable discussions, my table got into a conversation about how to manage students on laptops in the classroom. Are they really writing? How do you know they aren’t on Facebook? I think I said something like, “well, some days I just have to say: ok, today let’s write with our pens.” Composing by hand in a notebook and directly onto or into a computer are distinctly different processes (for me at least), and I think a lot about how one’s attention span and outlook on the task at hand changes depending on the medium used.

In James’ recent cac.ophony post, he pointed us towards the recent New York Times articles on “education without technology.” While I certainly do use a lot of technology in my courses, I also realize that sometimes we need to unplug. So, for me, the question is not so much about the value of technology (which is more about the teacher than the tool in many cases), but rather an inquiry into how our “Net Generation” students’ brains create and process information.  I can’t help but think of  two early moments in Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains:

1. “In using the word processor, I had become something of a word processor myself” (13).
2. “The very way my brain worked seemed to be changing…But my brain, I realized, wasn’t just drifting. It was hungry. It was demanding to be fed the way the Net fed it–and the more it was fed, the hungrier it became” (16).

It seems like Carr is blaming the “immediate gratification” of the web for impatience or for his own fading attention span. And, I’m not sure I agree with him. Can we really blame technology for the inability to read a book from cover to cover?

When I heard Cathy Davidson speak at the Graduate Center in September, I found myself quickly obsessed with the “invisible gorilla” video we watched (and is referred to in the opening of her newest book, Now You See it).

\”The Invisible Gorilla\”

The video is an experiment made to test “selective attention”–viewers are supposed to count balls being tossed and focus on the act of counting so thoroughly that many viewers fail to see the charming person in the gorilla suit frolicking about. Davidson writes, “By concentrating so hard on the confusing counting task, we had managed to miss the main event: the gorilla in the midst” (2). Some people do see the gorilla, however. Davidson saw it, and I only really noticed the gorilla. Davidson continues, “without focus, the world is chaos…Fortunately, given the interactive nature of most of our lives in the digital age, we have the tools to harness our different forms of attention and take advantage of them” (2). Davidson sees potential in the fact that technology enables us to play with and against distractions and to really discover where our own focus can be most productive.

I began to really think about the classroom and technology, the page and the keyboard, and the student(s). If we all pay attention differently, is there any way to know who sees the gorilla at any moment in the classroom? And, if technology does indeed empower our different “forms of attention,” what does this tell us about the writing process? Do we uniformly move from page to screen?

Part Two:

This semester I’ve been playing around with something that I loosely call “The Artifact Project.” When I bring technology + writing by hand into the classroom, it is often the sort of thing where we watch something (music video, short film, feature film, etc.) and write while watching. The writing can come in a number of different forms–but what I am interested in is what happens when we write (by hand in a notebook) while engaged in paying attention to something else. Initially, I had a number of videos I wanted to show–mostly hip hop videos where there is a combination of narration, word play, and persuasive/jarring images. But, after the first week of classes, I decided it might be more productive to see what the students do. So, every class period we begin with 2 “artifacts”. These things need to be multimedia, class appropriate, and the student/presenter/ researcher needs to come to class with a writing prompt/activity that he or she will guide us through.

What I’ve noticed (some preliminary observations):

1. My students pay attention/focus/observe in a very different way than I do. They notice more.
2. I thought that when given the freedom to have a sort of show & tell (ultimately youtube dependent), the majority of students would automatically go to the music video. They didn’t or haven’t. The students do a lot more research–they’ve found a variety of different relics (or “real” artifacts) from the past to explore–they are really interested in unpacking commercials, in particular–comparing advertising from the past with that of the present.
3. They do understand that technology is not all good. Many of my students prefer to write by hand–they use e-readers and notebooks.
4. When given the opportunity to create their own writing-based activities, students really seem to come up with very analytical tasks–they want to think about what they see specifically versus sweeping assumptions (which populate their formal papers).

So, what does any of this have to do with the gorilla?

I’ve intentionally focused on focus and attention and the role of technology in how I see my students pay attention. I’ve stayed away from cost and privilege. But, the question still lingers…how much equipment belongs in the room? Who should ultimately decide?

I know that I only see the gorilla, but my students see everything at once, it seems, what are the implications of that for a writing classroom? How quickly can we challenge them to move from medium to medium, even if I (as teacher) lag behind?

Yet, when I came to the Schwartz Communication Institute, I wondered about the origins of Communication Across the Curriculum as a movement and Communication Intensive Courses. I’d like to spend two to three posts looking at how the theory behind communication courses emerged and changed over a number of decades.

Using the chart feature of JSTOR’s Data for Research, I first took a look at how many articles have been published each year which contain the term “communication courses.” This does not include all articles ever published, but rather the articles published within publications archived by JSTOR.

The above graph shows the raw number of articles published containing that term. Clearly, most articles that reference communication courses were published in the mid 1940s to mid 1960s.

The second graph above shows the number of articles published that reference “communication courses” relative to the total number of articles published on any topic. Again, the obvious peak occurs in the mid 1940s to the mid 1960s.

Happily, the above data concurs with the usual “old school” explanation of the rise and fall of communication courses.

As you can see from the above graphs, the idea of communication courses existed prior to their rise in the 1940s. In his 1987 book Rhetoric and Reality, James Berlin associates early communication courses in the 1930s with Alfred Korzybski’s notion of “General Semantics,” an approach which sought to teach students to discern the ways in which rhetoric can distort reality (10). General Semantics rose “when the United States was concerned about the threat posed by Germany,” and was therefore largely “a device for propaganda analysis” (10). Specifically, Berlin writes that “Semanticist rhetoric was also highly influential in the communications course—the course that combined instruction in reading, writing, speaking, and listening, occupying a large place in the general education movement in the thirties, forties, and fifties” (10).

Yet, as we know, communication courses didn’t really take off until the mid 1940s, igniting what Berlin terms the “Communications Emphasis” which he claims spanned from 1940-1960. To be more accurate, I would argue (based on the data), that it spanned from 1945-1965. As a side note, the Conference on College Composition and Communication was founded in 1949, at the beginning of the wave. And what is the meaning of this rise and fall? The rise was largely occasioned by an influx of WWII veterans who went to college after the war concluded on the GI Bill.  Berlin writes that “the communications approach gave composition courses a new identity, placing them in a special program that carried with it a commitment to democracy and to the welfare of students who had just suffered the horrors of war” (106). These courses were “commonly interdepartmental” and “combined writing instruction with lessons in speaking, in reading, and sometimes even in listening” (93).

Movements in college instruction do not have neat beginning and end points. As I wrote previously, Berlin dates the Communications Emphasis from 1940-1960; he also says that there was a Renaissance of Rhetoric from 1960-1975; and there is a turn towards a student’s personal development and expression which occurs in the late 1960s.

I would attribute the fall of communication courses in the late 1960s to the last development, the rise of a style of instruction centered around a student’s personal growth and expression. This movement is alternately called “subjective rhetoric” or the “expressionistic approach” by Berlin (139). Its beginnings can be charted in the 1966 Dartmouth conference which produced John Dixon’s Growth  through English, a report which emphasized writing as a tool for  “’personal growth’” and “’the use of English studies for building an ‘inner world’” (Dixon qtd. in Berlin 149). I should note, however, that I do not have any evidence to show that the rise of subjective rhetoric caused a decline in interest in communication courses. To argue that one caused the other would likely be a logical fallacy; yet I think it is telling that the fall in discourse around communication courses coincided with the rise in discourse around subjective rhetoric.

Along with this interest in personal expression came attacks on traditional education. Berlin describes how “In a 1967 essay entitled ‘English Composition as a Happening,’ Charles Deemer attacks the university, charging that it is opposed to education because it fragments and alienates students.  Citing such figures as Normon O. Brown, John Dewey, Paul Goodman, Marshall McLuhan, and Susan Sontag, Deemer calls for the composition course to become ‘an experience’ in which the teacher’s authority is removed by having the student become an equal participant in learning” (150).

Naturally, this interest in free expression and in overturning traditional education emerged alongside the various social movements of the late 1960s.

Here, funnily enough, we can see a dramatic rise in the number of articles in JSTOR which refer to “personal growth” beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s (again, this is relative to all articles published).

So the emphasis on communication courses did decline in the late 1960s, but as we can see from the first two graphs, discourse around communication courses came back not long after. In my next post, I want to look at the ways in which communication courses were framed in the succeeding decades. Also, if I have time, I want to examine the beginnings of the Communication Across the Curriculum movement.

I teach in the NYPD Leadership program at John Jay College. This job comes with special challenges that other professors do not encounter. For example, my students, all active duty NYPD officers are often asked to work mandatory overtime. This semester between the September 11 10^th anniversary, increased activity at the United Nations surrounding Palestine’s efforts to obtain UN membership, and lately Occupy Wall Street, there have been many empty seats.

I walk into the class and begin to tell them about the final assignment and simply start, “Don’t write like a cop, and don’t interview them like a cop.” For this assignment, I tell them, you are anthropologists and historians and not the famed officer Joe Friday.[1] For this assignment we need more than “just the facts ma’am.”

When I tell others that all my students are current police officers, they usually look at me confused not knowing whether or not to feel sorry for me. There is nothing to feel sorry about. I love doing this and the cops are some of the best students I have ever had. I have to admit though, I had no idea what to expect when I agreed to join the program last year. Now, each semester, I teach a roomful of officers who are taking classes to finish their bachelor’s degrees. The program is funded by City Council and the content is multi-cultural, anti-racist and fosters professionalism and respect.

In my course on Ethnicity and Immigration I require the students to do a series of interviews with a recent immigrant, and to write an ethnography or oral history style paper about that person’s immigration experience. This puts all of the readings about waves of immigration, huddled masses and the challenges of integration in the context of one person’s life. However, when I tell them to think like anthropologists, most imagine this:

Ethnography doesn't look like this anymore. Bronislaw Malinkowski. Original Copyright unknown

The NYPD is probably the most diverse police force in the world; many of the officers are recent immigrants themselves and very quickly realize that they are learning about their own families as well as other immigrants. Probably the most surprising thing for me is that so far, in each class there are family members of officers who came to this country illegally, sometimes fathers and mothers who were looking for a better life for their children. Often, the officers remember coming to this country themselves either as children or even as adults. It is inspiring to be able to help these officers connect to their own roots and to see them in the process of making their family’s own “American Dream.”

So far, the assignment has been very successful. Last year students interviewed Mexican landscapers, Korean nail salon employees, police officers from the Caribbean and one particularly ambitious student went to a local home improvement store and tried to pick up a day laborer to interview. While effort (predictably) failed and the man all but fled on foot, the student got a firsthand look at the fear that immigrants, especially undocumented ones feel. Even though NYPD does not enforce federal immigration laws and only reports immigration violations when they are discovered in connection with other criminal activity, the man in the parking lot did not know any of that and saw the well-meaning officer as a threat. The young officer told the class the next week, with slightly hurt feelings, because the man was too afraid to speak to him, even though he was out of uniform and doing it for a class.

So what do I mean when I say “don’t write like a cop?” Besides getting a rise out of the students, it is to get them thinking about different types of writing. Of course, all officers do not write the same. Some are tremendously gifted creative writers. One of my students this semester is a published poet while others write in terse, but clear prose that’s more appropriate for police reports than for a social science class. It is not that this style of writing is “wrong,” it is well-suited to the demands of their careers. However, in order to capture the immigrant’s humanity and convey their difficulties, hopes and dreams a different approach is needed. So once again this semester, twenty of New York’s finest will be asking questions of NYC immigrants not about crime but instead about what is was like coming to America and what the American dream means to them.

In nearly a decade of teaching college writing, I have encountered thousands of variations on the above statements.  I might even go so far as to say that the vast majority of students I have worked with rely heavily on generalization and cliché when writing essays, or at least when composing first drafts. When I first began to notice this pehnimenon, I was baffled, and, honestly, a little angry. Why were students subjecting me to essays that said nothing new about anything?

When I talk to other faculty, they often express the same confusion: why do undergraduates feel the pressing need to talk about what has been going on since the dawn of time? And, more importantly, how can we stop them?

My early attempts to battle this kind of language failed miserably. I would mark papers with vague terms like “vague” or highlight a passage and write a general phrase like “general.” I might even circle a cliché and write, “Avoid cliché.” None of this had any effect, so I began devoting class and conference time to more specific explanations along the lines of “your essays should be specific.” Yet still I received papers that began as does this sample essay on The Great Gatsby: Many Americans long for a big house and lots of money. This is the American Dream. The American Dream is what Americans quest for.

photo credit: remediate.this

Lately I have changed tactics. I am waging war on cliché, and my first strategy is frankness. Confronting students honestly about how awful this kind of writing has yielded surprisingly frank response form students: many admit they know exactly what they’re doing, they just don’t know how to fix it. Consider the following conversation with the author of the above “American Dream” author.

Me: (underlining every sentences) None of this is necessary, because you aren’t saying anything new or interesting about America, and you repeat yourself over and over. It’s all just….
Me in my head: Be Nice! Don’t say bullshit filler nonsense. Don’t say bullshit filler nonsense.
Student: It’s just bullshit filler nonsense.

When a student comes out and admits to writing filler, I feel elated, because admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery. Another oft-copped-to issue is not having anything to say.  Here is another sample conversation with a student author who constructed her essay around the thesis “The Great Gatsby teaches us that money doesn’t buy happiness.”

Me: Did you really have to read Gatsby to learn that money doesn’t buy happiness? Had you never heard that before encountering this novel?
Student: (sheepishly) No.
Me: Do you think Fitzgerald wrote the great American novel just to prove an old saying?
Student: Not really
Me: So why do you want to write a whole paper around this idea?
Student: I didn’t know what else to say.

So why do students feel like they have nothing else to say, and why do they continue to write bullshit filler nonsense even when they recognize it as such? The reasons are, of course, complex; below are possible explanations–starting points to help understand why it is so difficult to move beyond trite language.

1. Students are told to generalize.
When I was in sixth grade, I learned that essays should look like an hourglass: the introduction and conclusion should be general, whereas the body of the essay is where I give specific examples.  My students often repeat this lesson: an intro needs to generalize, because you can’t just launch straight into your evidence. And this is quite true. Problems arise , however when students interpret “general” to mean “the whole wide world,” rather than “this paper in general.” An introduction needs to tell the reader what a paper is going to say in a general way. For example, “This essay explores the problems professors face in communicating why cliché is an ineffective rhetorical strategy” is a general statement at about the right scale for an introduction.  However, when we tell students to make their introduction general as a way of easing the reader in, they turn to the entire world, which is a difficult entity to sum up in a few words.

I like to tell a class, “I release you from the burden of having to talk about everybody in the universe! Don’t worry about the whole of history, just worry about your paper!”  I think this should come as a relief, but nobody ever looks comforted by these words. Instead they seem confused. Which leads us the my second point:

2. Professional writers and scholars generalize all the time, so why can’t students?
I recently asked my students to read a Michael Pollen essay that claims certain farming practices have shaped the American diet and led to the obesity epidemic. Pollan stakes a large-scale claim about American food culture, but he does so within an accepted rhetorical framework.  Students asked to make similar claims about food culture might simply say it differently, noting that “People eat too much fast food,” or “Farming is important to society.”

The difference between the students’ claims and Pollan’s lies in a very particular manipulation of language: Pollan generalizes about specific society (America in 2011) and specific farm practices (i.e. the overproduction of certain crops like corn). Recognizing the difference between these types of generalities comes with experience reading criticism. Writing in a way that recognizes that difference requires even more experience with cultural studies. Pollan is just such an experienced author, and so he deploys generalization to construct an actual argument about agricultural corporate organization and its effect on how consumer attitudes towards food. I trust that his statements will be backed up with actual evidence, including studies and writing, and that he has spent hours analyzing data to come to this conclusion. Of course, an undergraduate writer has not put in the labor reflected in such nuanced generalization, and so cannot manipulate language quite as deftly. Which brings me to a final observation.

3. Constructing an original argument is a skill.
Differentiating between pointed and pointless statements means having a point of view.  Assignments frequently ask students to state a claim—articulate a thesis—and argue in support of that claim. Coming up with a good claim is daunting, but if the claim is something we pretty much accept is true—that, say, food is important to society or that Americans want to achieve the American dream—then a student can’t “do it wrong.”

Again, releasing students from burden might not be helpful: if I say go ahead, do it wrong, say whatever you want to say about this topic, I get a surprised reaction. “You want to hear MY opinion?” And of course, I’m not interested in opinion, I’m interested in argument. Tell me your analysis, tell me your interpretation, tell my your reading of the material. And here is the crux of the problem: not knowing the difference between fact, opinion, and analysis/interpretation makes it difficult to have an original point of view. First-, second-, and even third-year undergraduates might not yet have a firm grasp on exactly what it means to analyze as opposed to repeat facts or give opinions; that’s in part what they are in college to learn. It takes time and effort to develop these skills. And so those of us who teach writing have no quick fix. In some ways, we have to take a step back from the educational process, be active witnesses, let young writers figure out for themselves what is cliché and what is innovative, what is summary and what is interpretation. Yet all the while we can encourage original thought. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but hard work pays off. And as they say, slow and steady wins the race.

Considered to be one of the most notable experiments in the field of social psychology in particular, and perhaps even the research world in general, Milgram originally set out to examine the question of why people obey authority, even when doing so contradicts some of their fundamental morals and conscience. In this research, an innocent participant was given the role of a “teacher” who had to punish the confederate “student” with an alleged electric shock of increasing intensity every time the student would make an error on a memory task. The teachers were constantly prodded by the experiment to continue, despite some of their blatant resistance and genuine concern whenever the student would receive a shock. Milgram’s question: how much would people follow the command of the authority, or in this case, the experimenter, even when it meant “harming” another human being?

Although the methodology used was questionably ethical by today’s standards, Milgram’s conclusions were a shock to many: about 65% of the participants in his experiment went as far as administering the strongest voltage available.

While 50 years have passed since Milgram’s original experiment, we, as a society, would like to think that we have moved on, and that what Milgram found in his laboratory doesn’t pertain to the way we think and behave. After all, we are a society in which individualism is a value, and doing our own thing and going against authority is key. If put into that same experiment room, we would surely act much differently.

Yet has much changed? Have we really moved on and learned from research such as Milgram’? Or, is it simply human behavior to act as Milgram’s subjects did? One can hardly imagine that in today’s day and age anyone would conform to authority to such an extent that his or her own conscience would suffer. After all, we are much “smarter” today than we were back then…

In thinking about these questions, I’d like to bring attention to world of street art. Many street artists have often found their inspiration creating art that represents society’s dire dependence to authority and conformity. In their eyes, as in those of many similar skeptics, we continue to act like Milgram’s subjects, albeit in a more disguised way. We continue to obey like authority, act like everyone else, and believe it is the right way to exist. Commercialization, they argue, is simply a means to this end. We are constantly being bombarded of how we should think, feel, and act, and indeed we follow.

Well, there may not be anything necessarily wrong with “fitting in” to the molds society has carved out for us. In fact, sometimes it’s required. For example, take the world of business, a place near and dear to my heart as an instructor of several business classes. To be able to succeed in a place like corporate America, individuals must think, feel, and act like all others who have gotten ahead in times prior. Put in another way, individuals need to conform and obey the rules that have been set forth, leaving little room for creative expressions of individuality.

So I ask the question of how can we, educators of undergraduate students (and business students in particular) who are at the brink of entering worlds like Corporate America, properly educate students how to communicate and express themselves with their own voice, while still fitting into this mold? How can we encourage them to be their own people, but not appearing too different that they won’t be able to succeed?

As a crucial part of college education (and as other writers have noted), it is necessary to teach students the basics and have them conform the rules until some comfort is reached and students can feel confident in expressing themselves uniquely. However, based on my own experiences, it appears that students never fully disengage from this generic mold, but rather learn it and stick to it without really exploring their own selves and style. The reasons why this occurs can be plenty, ranging from specific educational experiences and instruction that has encouraged this type of communication, to fear of not landing a good job if doesn’t do exactly as told, to the external pressures of a society which (implicitly) values conformity.

Thus, despite it being over 50 years since Milgram’s original experiments, it is easy to see that perhaps very little has changed about the ways in which we, as individuals, fundamentally behave. While that research may have taught us to be more knowledgeable and stop to think before following fascist regimes, we might also want to think about the implications the research still has for other areas of our lives. As educators, it is our job to ensure that students do receive a quality education like everyone else, yet also free themselves of the confines of our instruction.

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.

A student recently described English professors to me: “You know, they speak perfectly, and slowly but not too slowly, louder than regular but not too loud.” I began to think about teachers’ presentation and what this says about the way we view our roles and establish (or don’t establish) authority. In “Elements of the Academic Essay,” Gordon Harvey (a director of Harvard’s writing programs), defines stance as “the implied position of you the writer to the readers and subject” of your essay. I use Harvey’s list of thirteen concisely described elements when I teach writing, and this week I’ve went back to his definition of stance as I grappled with my annoyance at David Brooks—someone who has been give a lot of authority and space in national dialogue. I’ve looked to “stance” for a way to analyze a speaker’s presentation style—vocal cadence and gestures—as well as their written style. In this so-called, self-called moderate’s style, you can witness the performance of rationality.

Though reasonableness or rationality has long been considered the sine qua non of ethical and political communication by scholars who write on republicanism and democracy, Iris Marion Young and Martha Minow claim that the criteria by which the reasonableness of speech is judged is not based on any culture-transcending ethical objectivity, but is actually tied to dominant culture of white, upper class, male, Western identity. This may explain why public speaking guides tell you to avoid distracting mannerisms, such as playing with your hair, but not adjusting your glasses.

David Brooks has been ably mocked by bloggers for the way he frames national debate. He has an entry in the dickipedia, McSweeny’s published a nice parody of Brooks’ favorite rhetorical tactic of broadly categorizing all of the U.S. population into two groups, and then nicknaming them with a homespun stereotype (for example, some people are Applebee’s people.)  But lately I’ve watched him with the sound off, and this allowed me to focus on his gestures and his facial expressions, and to see how his stance in terms of presentation style more clearly. In videos, you can see Brooks gesture right, gesture left, then wave both his hands at his sides. In this interpretive dance of David Brooks, you can see him valiantly keeping himself straight and centered while the remarkable strong winds of the straw men of his own making batter him from both sides. This stance claims a lot of authority, while also projecting humbleness: this is what I find so annoying. It is a rhetorical power move, claiming the central, rational position, and it is part of what allows Brooks to write on everything from Socrates to the health care plan to what motivates people.

"Figure 4: The Ass Kissing Strategy"

Mark Gaipa created cartoon depictions of various ways authors position themselves in relation to the authors they cite (in “Breaking Into the Conversation: How Students Can Acquire Authority in their Writing.”) In one cartoon, a tiny “David” stick figure goes up against an imposing author “Goliath.” Making your own drawings, as we did in Sean O’Toole’s WAC workshop last year, are helpful way of getting perspective on one’s stance. I’d like to see a series of cartoons of the different ways teachers position themselves in relation to their students, their subject, and the rest of the world, and how we construct and lever authority.

http://doctortext-info.blogspot.com/2009/08/techniques-for-custom-research-paper.html

How much writing did you do as a first semester undergraduate? 15 pages? 30? 22? 2?

How much should a first semester undergraduate write?

I’ve been thinking about the answer to that second question since I met with a student— I’ll call her Jane—in the midst of a routine day of individual appointments with Introduction to Theatre students. Immediately after I had made an introduction in her class in the early days of the semester, Jane emailed me seeking general feedback on her writing– she is a transfer student from another CUNY college, and is eager to take advantage of Baruch’s resources now that she’s here. Unlike the majority of students who utilize the services we offer when supporting THE1041C, Jane wasn’t panicked about a soon-to-be-due assignment, but wanted a kind of general consultation on her academic writing skills. I asked Jane to send me some samples of her written work, and she told me that so far, she only had blog assignments.

When we met, we spoke about her approach to these blog entries; it was clear that she had given them some thought, but her sentence structure was often confusing, and it took me repeated readings to fully grasp her meaning. In most of her blog entries, she was beating around the bush of her argument or main idea. This isn’t an uncommon problem; I face it all of the time in my own writing, and it is among the biggest issues that our students face.

Jane’s eagerness to write more was what was uncommon. As we talked, she peppered me with questions. How could she improve her writing? What should she be doing differently? What kinds of exercises would help her improve her writing on her own? I had never before had a student actively seeking additional written work, so I asked her about the assignments she had coming up in the semester. I discovered that Jane was not being asked to write very much at all. Out of four classes, her longest assignment was a four-page paper. After talking with her a bit more, a few questions kept popping up:

How do we negotiate the balance between boldly experimenting with new technology and maintaining certain (old) standards of rigor? This question comes out of the sheer lack of quantity (yes, not always quality, but important nonetheless) of writing that I saw this student being challenged with, thanks to word-capped Facebook and blog assignments. Often, adventurous faculty members are juggling many different assessment elements at once– course blogs, maybe a course wiki, too, and then oral presentations, low-stakes writing in class, plus quizzes and finals. Your syllabus is busting out before you’ve even gotten to factor in class participation. So it’s not hard to imagine that having students write  extended essays might be what gets lost in the shuffle.

How do we make the assignment diversity feel relevant, not random? Jane was a little self-conscious about her blog posts, confessing that she wasn’t sure of the expectations in terms of formality. But, as I gave her feedback on them, she also defended herself; these weren’t really evaluated, she explained, they were just graded on the basis of whether she had done them or not. She felt they were an after-thought, and so, that’s how she thought of them: after. (Click here for my own reflections on the challenges and triumphs of course blogging, here for a course blogger superstar story, and here for much more about the phenomenal Blogs@Baruch and profs who are using it to thrilling ends.)

Can we teach code-switching within online social networks? Jane was not assigned any papers in her Sociology course, either. The class has a Facebook wall, where they post pertinent links and have lively conversation about readings and class discussions—even the organizing logic of the course is debated on the Facebook page, which looked to me to be a healthy and vibrant online commons. Still, the Facebook page comments are either 250-300 words or 420 characters. Since Jane is likely using Facebook to communicate with her friends and contacts, too, how will this Sociology professor go about making the distinction between one mode of commenting and another?

Could Jane’s lack of high-stakes writing assignments have to do with work-avoidance on the part of her Instructors (and so what if it does)? Are Jane’s assignments—blog posts about 18^th century acting techniques and Facebook comments in response to Sociology theory– examples of radical teaching, or just radical avoidance of the time-consuming task of reading through an 8-10 page (or 10-15 page) academic paper? None of her classes culminated with one of those. (In her Math class, Jane had no writing. In her Great Works class, the bulk of assignments were short—very short, 150 word assignments identifying a certain theme in the literature they were reading.) As is the norm within CUNY, half of Jane’s faculty is adjunct; adjuncts are generally only getting paid for one hour of work outside of their time in the classroom. A Facebook page can easily be monitored in one hour of work, so having students compose 420 characters at a pop could seem like a good way to minimize faculty labor while shaking up the tired old models, too. But there is a vast qualitative difference between infusing your syllabus with a diversity of learning objectives through multiple learning styles and creatively trying to avoid grading 10-page papers from 30+ students.

Are Jane’s assignments  preparing her for future employment challenges? The ability to communicate short, coherent messages is a fundamental expectation of many, many jobs. Just this year, at my “side gig,” I found myself parsing copy for a website, brochure, and even the 140 characters allotted for a web advertising button. These kinds of tasks will await Jane in every one of the fields she expressed interest in pursuing.

Still, these jobs will also expect the ability to sustain an argument (or inquiry into a topic or question)—exactly what is exercised in writing the long essay. Indeed, my friend who does just the kind of work Jane is interested in—communications for a policy organization—is called upon to write everything from one-page letters to the Mexican parliament to lengthy research reports on human rights abuses in Cuba. He is generally not the one tapped to write the blog posts or tweets for his organization, but someone else there is. So if we are giving students Facebook comments and blog posts as assignments, what kind of an evaluative standard should we use to ensure that they’re not just throw-away writings, but reach the kind of level that may one day be expected of them professionally?

I’m not advocating that we willy-nilly unleash a bevy of high-stakes writing assignments on our students, or mandate a standard number of pages of “academic writing” expected of each student. This post is appropriately full of questions, not answers. (And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Write-to-Learn strategies can and should be employed with incredible effectiveness.) And yet, it seems fairly clear that I saw something else happening in Jane’s coursework, and that something seems to be connected to a very worthy kind of experimentation on the part of her instructors. We can’t draw hard and fast conclusions from any one student’s anecdotal experience– and it is important also to mention that Jane was absolutely inspired by many of her classes and professors, and she was motivated to master their individual challenges. And yet, the question nags– what could explain this?– that an undergraduate could be writing so little? And what would you recommend to Jane?

]]> http://cac.ophony.org/2011/03/03/stitch-and-ink/feed/ 1 http://cac.ophony.org/2010/11/08/sweetness-hubris-and-the-advanced-research-essay/ http://cac.ophony.org/2010/11/08/sweetness-hubris-and-the-advanced-research-essay/#comments Mon, 08 Nov 2010 20:46:23 +0000 Linell http://cac.ophony.org/?p=4722

A friend told me recently that it was a tradition for Jewish children introduced to religious study to be given honey, so they’d associate it with sweetness and joy.

I’m teaching a class on “The Advanced Research Essay,” which is really a workshop on how to write a thesis paper. I’m leading this workshop as I work on finishing my dissertation, and halfway through the semester my students and I are very much in the same boat.

They’ve finished their annotated bibliographies, they’ve worked hard to assimilate and categorize books and articles on their topics. Now they have to pull their heads out of the waters of research, and turn to their thesis—go from broad and inclusive to incisive and narrow focus. At this stage in my research, I became a bit obsessive-compulsive. Asked a simple question like “What are you studying?” I’d use a word like “empathy” and have to run through a trail of citations from Kant to Hannah Arendt. Grad school can do this to you, and as a fellow fellow and I said last week, second exams train you not to make succinct claims without following every word down the rabbit hole. I think this is partly what accounts for the logic of titles that Alessandro pointed out. The colon is like “towards”, (another class title and dissertation title favorite). Rather than making a statement, or asking a question, we say we’ll go in a direction, or go around. We’d never dream of, you know, declaring something. That would be so…pedantic. I’ve been trying to think of the most daring titles I admire. The Great Gatsby: it dares to say its protagonist is great, and also to tell you its subject is just a guy. And, The Human Condition. Not On the Human Condition, or Towards the Human Condition: fill in the blank. So, we’re not all Hannah Arendt and F. Scott Fitzgerald. But I realized that during their annotated bibliographies, not only had my students lost a lot of hubris, but they’d also lost some of the idiosyncratic attachment and associative logic that brought them to their topics in the first place. So, I went back to The Craft of Research, by Booth, Colomb, and Williams, my grad school freshman text, and pulled out a fill-in-the-blank assignment:

1. Topic: I am studying _____.

2. Question: Because I want to find out ______.

3. Significance: To help readers ______.

Many of my students exhibited what I recognized as insecure-student syndrome, rattling off the now ingrained phrases and logic of their readings. We had to talk about real, idiosyncratic questions; and in getting to the impetus for their work, we sometimes realized the original question, or deep unease that made the private string of lights under this tent of citation, was too personal to talk about in class. That too was worth recognizing. “Death and literature” is indeed a naïve topic for a career, but maybe interests should be on a larger, less sophisticated scale than career strategies. If not, there are so many jobs which do not provoke the question “So what are you working on?”

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?

In developing a support system for the communication-intensive introductory Theatre Arts class, Hillary, Linell, and I envisioned offering many of the same services that we had offered to the Zicklin School of Business’s CICs—helping the students brainstorm and organize their presentations, reinforcing good public speaking and performance practices, and setting up rehearsal workshops. But despite the fact that Theatre profs assign plenty of oral presentation assignments, relatively few students showed up to work on them, preferring instead to come and revise written assignments in our open office hours.

Turns out, the teachers echoed this preference. Some instructors reported that they are satisfied with students’ presentations and performances, but that their students need more help with their writing.

Plus, as Suzanne has pointed out, we academics sometimes aren’t held to very high standards in our own spoken communication. This all made me wonder: are we holding student writing to higher standards than student speaking?

And such a simple question opens a series of others: Is it unfair to provoke our students’ anxiety with high-stakes presentation assignments, or is that just a part of life they have to learn to deal with? Is it simply the physical presence of the performer that makes us feel guilty about handing out low grades on presentations (and the physical distance of the writer that gives us a feeling of license to criticize student papers)? Since, anecdotally speaking, it appears business professors assign presentations as high-stakes, culminating assignments, and writing as shorter, lower-stakes assignments, is the privileging of writing over speaking discipline-specific? Do liberal arts professors sympathize more with the diffident good writers than with the charismatic good performers because that’s how they see their younger selves? Is that last question too autobiographically revealing?

Last Friday evening I had the pleasure of attending a reading and Q & A with American poet Diane di Prima, best known for her association with the “Beat Generation” of writers from the 1950s and 1960s, but whose prolific poetic output spans over the past half century.  Di Prima is the current poet laureate of San Francisco, and her visit to New York corresponded with the release of a set of chapbooks by CUNY’s Lost and Found Poetics Group.

During the Q & A, the audience of Serious academics asked Serious questions of the poet, hoping, ostensibly, for Serious answers. But Di Prima is too much of a mystic poet to offer that kind of straightforward analytical dissection of her life and work. The sometimes comically awkward discussion nonetheless provided many thought-provoking exchanges, the most intriguing of which concerned di Prima’s ideas about the creative process.  The poet described how she often sleeps with a notebook at her side, waking many times through the night to record fragments of poems received to her through dreams. With her mind close to the mysterious well of creative imagination burbling in the subconscious, di Prima discovers a deeper, “truer” poetic voice.  Thus, rather than describe a specific set of methodologies for writing, di Prima characterized her creative process as a nearly religious experience.

While I can’t say that my dissertation is being spiritually dictated from the universal Godhead, I can identify with di Prima’s overall point about creative inspiration coming at odd, unpredictable moments that seem to have little to do with my actual conscious thoughts.  I’ve made some of my most significant “breakthroughs” (if they can be called that) about my dissertation while in the shower, on the subway, or lost in thought in the new snack aisle at Duane Reade.  And yes, I’ve even had revelations about how to finish a chapter (or start a new one) in my dreams.  You’re telling me you haven’t dreamed about your dissertation?

What I’m wondering is how to communicate this idea to students.  While we are often able to give our students many straightforward methods and specific techniques for developing their writing and oral communication skills, how do we teach them about the kind of creative inspiration di Prima describes?  If part of intellectual development is learning how to open your consciousness to “receive” ideas from hidden parts of the mind, how does that process get written into our pedagogical practices? Should writing classes include sessions on meditation, astral travel, and dream journals?  Am I turning into the high school teacher from Beavis and Butthead?

Earlier on in a given day, Herzog and several members of the Campa tribe in Peru must hurry along a rugged trail from one part of the jungle to another.  He later reflects on the experience:

“I have often paid close attention to the way [the Campas] move; it is a bit like a slalom, in which they have already spotted the next obstacle—a protruding root, a dangling liana, a thorny branch—and circumvent it with a graceful turn of the entire body that starts two paces in advance and merges with the rapid trot, never interrupting the overall movement, whereas Europeans stop, advance in fits and starts, stumble, hesitate.  Once an obstacle has been smoothly skirted, the next one has already been registered, and the steps toward it all contribute to a flowing, economical circumvention.  Their torso bends, and their feet, I noticed, tend to go up onto rather than over an obstacle, provided it is stable.  It is better to step onto a loop formed by a vine than to get one’s foot caught in it, and meanwhile the eye remains fixed on the objects one can grab onto in steep, slippery places without being stuck by a dozen thorns.” (164)

My audible outburst upon reading this: “parkour! he’s inadvertently describing parkour!”  Does everyone know about parkour?  (Also called “free-running”.) Originating, as a defined thing, in France some 13 years ago, it’s a self-described “discipline” involving lots of risky-looking running, leaping, vaulting, and climbing through (usually) urban spaces.  AmericanParkour.com offers this core definition—“Parkour is the physical discipline of training to overcome any obstacle within one’s path by adapting one’s movements to the environment”—and then elaborates, explaining, for instance, that parkour requires, “consistent, disciplined training with an emphasis on functional strength, physical conditioning, balance, creativity, fluidity, control, precision, spatial awareness, and looking beyond the traditional use of objects.”  The central idea is to learn to move more smoothly and aesthetically through physical space, drawing on your body’s innate creaturely capacities and appropriating would-be obstacles into your course instead of avoiding them.  An initiate into this discipline becomes a “traceur” or “traceuse,” someone who traces out new, more efficient, more interesting paths.

Though rarely with any identifying tag attached, it’s made its way into movies and commercials, for obvious reasons of spectacle.  Parkour’s most glorious moment in the pop culture sun, which many of you will remember, was probably the epic “pas-de-dude” foot-chase sequence at the beginning of Casino Royale (the chase features one of parkour’s legendary founders and traceurs, Sébastien Foucan, who you may also recall seeing some years back in Nike’s “Angry Chicken” commercial).

At a glance, the whole thing is easy enough to dismiss as a pseudo-sport or a fad or another instance of boys showing off.  Parkour is kind of awesome and also, somehow, kind of dorky and embarrassing, since its adherents will always look like clamoring, artificial poseurs (more French!) next to the Peruvian Campas, for whom fluid, efficient movement is more expedient, more authentically bound up with a whole way of life.  Yet I don’t think the phenomenon should be dismissed.  It is, after all, a legitimate—if poignant and/or futile—effort to revitalize the human animal through new habits of thinking and action, ways of doing things that fuse the practical with the pleasurable. (Read an extensive New Yorker piece for a consideration of parkour in these and other respects.)

These ideas about movement—the descriptions and the posited philosophy—felt eerily familiar.  Isn’t much of this the very language we use to describe good writing?  In fact, what most excited me about the Herzog passage, I realize now, was not the initial jolt of the parkour association but the meta-thought that followed much later: Herzog’s sentences about the Campas’ movement were enacting the very same sort of obstacle-negotiating fluidity under consideration (or at least the translator’s renditions in English did as much).

I want to put forth, very provisionally, a hypothesis about parkour’s affinity with writing, “affinity” because I think the comparison goes well beyond mere metaphor.  Each is a human activity—inextricably an art and a skill both—that requires habituation and aims for the elaboration of continuous, compelling, and effective sequences.   Parkour and writing seem to be correlated in a very tight analogy, down to the moment-by-moment anticipations, shifts, and circumventions, and I wonder if thorough and lively reference to actual human movement—rather than only to abstract principles and lateral examples of “good-writing-to-emulate”—might not usefully inform writing pedagogy.

We call a successful speaker of a language “fluent,” invoking, I suppose, the fact that she possesses open channels whereby thought can flow out directly as speech; the person doesn’t have to mechanically translate parsed bits by parsed bit, but rather holds forth in a stream of words.  And conversely, when evaluating student writing (or looking at our own writing) we know too well the catch-all sense that something is “awkward,” meaning, of course, that it doesn’t flow as forcefully, as gracefully, or as effectively as it could.  To move with and in language is always a matter of negotiating fairly complex terrain—a jungle, whether Amazonian or urban, is precisely the most apt conceit (a writer could never really be said to “sprint in a line across a salt flat”)—thus, perhaps if we presented and discussed more examples of people physically negotiating complex terrain, students would begin to better grasp the analogous movements and adaptations and effects of writing.

PS- Here’s one more clip, for kicks.

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?