Careful What You Ask For

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Presenter

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

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

The irritating voice of reason

April 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: Presentations, teaching, Writing Instruction

Facebook: The Third ‘R’?

March 30, 2011 By 3 Comments

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 18th 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?

Filed Under: Assessment, Education, Writing Instruction Tagged With:

Stitch and Ink

March 3, 2011 By 1 Comment

Earlier this week, at the first Great Works faculty roundtable of the semester, talk focused on strategies for teaching close reading. Unanimous nodding broke out when John H. mentioned the importance of asking students to write out, on paper, the very lines of literary text they’re grappling with. Something about the intimacy of bringing one’s hand, mind and ink into sync with a given stretch of words–so that inscription belongs as much to the student as to the Great Works anthology–seemed essential. Hours later and a few blocks away, I found myself cramped into the 5th Avenue window display at the Graduate Center, arranging small, hand-made books to draw attention to the the Third Annual Chapbook Festival (www.chapbookfestival.org) — taking place March 2-5 both at the GC and at other locations throughout the city. The Festival celebrates, per its name, chapbooks–small publications, usually of poetry, ranging from the simplest construction of sewn sheets to elaborate, collectible editions–produced outside the machinery of commercial publishing. The colorful, beautiful little books in the window–etched, embossed, embroidered, delicately made–seemed to belong to the same universe as the practice of writing out lines of text — both not-so-lost arts.

Filed Under: Art, Language, literature, Uncategorized, Writing Instruction

Sweetness, hubris, and the advanced research essay

November 8, 2010 By 2 Comments

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?”

Filed Under: Pedagogy, Process, Scholarship, Writing Instruction

The Anxiety of Print This Out

November 1, 2010 By 2 Comments

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

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

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

Some observations:

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

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

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

Writing, Speaking, Discipline, and Guilt

October 27, 2010 By 1 Comment

True phone
Creative Commons License photo credit: Florian SEROUSSI

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?

Filed Under: Presentations, Writing Instruction

Teaching something no one understands

October 19, 2010 By 4 Comments

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?

Filed Under: teaching, Writing Instruction

Parkour Poetics

October 6, 2010 By 6 Comments

For the past couple months my bedtime reading has consisted of passages from Werner Herzog’s Conquest of the Useless, his recently published journals from the three wild, setback-ridden years it took to make the film Fitzcarraldo (1982) (the one that involved actually dragging a steamship over a small mountain, etc.).  Herzog’s writing is marked by an observational and detail-obsessed intensity one might associate with either a scrupulous scientist or a naturalist mystic.  It’s fascinating stuff, and I’ve marked-up and dog-eared hundreds of discrete moments that have stood out along the way.  Several weeks ago, though, one particular paragraph elicited a more uncommon response: startled recognition.

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.

Filed Under: To Ponder, Writing Instruction Tagged With:

The Humanities Drive; Skills Ride Along

May 4, 2010 By 2 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is this really such a disgraceful idea?

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