My Pedagogy Statement, version 2

Looking back at my first Pedagogy Statement (Jan. 27), I see how much I have learned in this class. I am now certain that technology needs to be used in the writing process. Furthermore, I wouldn't use literature (you know, the "classics") as the basis of my writing instruction process. My experiences working with high school students have led me to believe that there needs to be a lot more teacher & student collaboration upfront (in the process of discovering a topic, conducting research, and forming an opinion) than time spent at the end (in grading).

I would like to create a process of writing instruction that models the process of writing itself. Good writing does not come from a disengaged writer, and I don't think good writing instruction comes from a disengaged teacher. The teacher and student must be in it together, with learning possible for both. This requires a basic foundation of dignity and respect, as well as shared goals and commitment to the process.

I would like to use technology in the pre-writing or pre-visioning part of the process. Perhaps blogging and texting would be useful in topic selection and opinion statement. Of course, computers are invaluable in the research process. I think the annotated bibliography is a wonderful tool in the pre-visioning stage, and would teach and require it.

Most of the students I work with begin by looking for a topic they think the teacher will like. Then they look for quotes that say something tangential about the topic. They they write the paper. They they look for facts they can cite. Then, if forced, they take a position. Most of the time, they are inclined to write reports, not essays or papers, and it's impossible to find the writer in these reports. I want to teach my students to have a voice and make their position known in their writing. They can't do that if they aren't investigating the conflicts inherent in their topic, so they need to be taught that as well.

I want my students to know about good writing by reading and studying examples of it, but not necessarily literature. I am impressed with a lot of the short fiction (Flash Fiction) I have been seeing lately, and there are hundreds of fabulous articles that would serve just as well in the writing classroom. And who can leave out poetry? I don't think it is all that important what is the subject, I think it is important that the work be well-written. There's no doubt in my mind that we all can learn from good examples.

I believe peer review and workshopping, when handled properly, can be invaluable to the revision process, so I would include them always. Furthermore, I believe guided self-reflection on the work is a powerful tool, and it is one I would also include.

I think my processes would be fairly time-intensive, for both teacher and student, but I think they would yield many benefits, to both the writing and to the student's future as a writer. It is important work -it should take some time.

Kathleen Blake Yancey

As past president of NCTE, Kathleen Blake Yancey recently authored a report called Writing in the 21st Century. In that document, she explores how technology is starting to take writing in a different direction. The new methods of writing (email, text message, and blogs) allow people to engage in self-sponsored writing, something that belongs to the writer and not to any school or job. It seems that people have a desire to be heard, and technology gives them an outlet.

Yancey asserts that people not only write to share their ideas and encourage dialogue, they write to participate in society. Technology is taking the place of "the commons". Yancey's corollary idea is most fascinating. She predicts that in the 21st century, writers will become writers not through formal instruction, but through an "extracurricular social co-apprenticeship."

Yancey says we need to move past a sequential model of composition (spelling, then grammar, then writing) and away from our print-based models of writing to welcome the use of technology and encourage the development of complex thinking. This will be challenging, because it requires teachers to abandon many of their go-to classroom strategies and to question their practices. For instance, could there be a place for visual elements in a formal composition? Is there any need to use a red pen on a student's work? Could writing be a subject of its own, separate from English concerns like spelling and grammar?

Lots of ideas here. I'd like to know more.

Cynthia Selfe

I once heard that English majors were a unique kind of nerd - and they thought there were better than the other nerds.

Over the years, among English students, grad students, and professors, I have sensed a certain resistance to technology, not just from the older people. There is a romanticism to English - reclining on a garden swing while reading from a beautifully-bound volume of essays, hand-writing a 3-inch thick manuscript in a dimly-lit attic, banging away for hours on a manual typewriter, spending years "in the stacks" in libraries, shopping for the proper pens and paper, etc. We love to pretend we are Jane Austin. Are we afraid that technology will steal the soul from our beloved language arts?

In a 1999 essay from College Composition and Communication, Cynthia Selfe said,

"A central irony that has shaped my professional life for as long as I can remember goes something like this: the one topic I actually know something about - that of computer technology and its use in teaching composition - is also the single subject, in my experience, best guaranteed to inspire glazed eyes and complete indifference in those portions of the CCCC membership which do not immediately open their program books to scan alternative sessions or sink into snooze mode."

I don't think they are bored - I think they are afraid.

It is interesting to note that Selfe didn't set out to become a computers in composition guru. She was in the right place at the right time and didn't shy away from a challenge. She says, "Someone showed me how to code my dissertation on the university mainframe because I didn't have enough money to have it typed. So in 1980 that made me a specialist. At my first job, PCs were just coming in; I've had a career contemporaneous with personal computers in education."

I'm in awe of this woman!

Erika Lindemann

Rebecca's presentation came at an opportune time in my life, and I am particularly intrigued by the debate on literature as the vehicle for teaching writing.

In undergrad, I took a class called THE RUSSIAN NOVEL. In 1 semester, we read Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, and War and Peace, and wrote a paper on each. I will concede that this was a literature class, not a writing class, but the writing part was pretty intense, and included conferences and multiple revisions of the 4 required papers. It was a very difficult class, mostly because of the sheer volume of reading and then because of the richness of the literature, which demanded some study of history and religion. I did get all the reading done, but I know there were many who didn't. I also knew a number of people who didn't write all the papers, and perhaps didn't pass the class.

If composition teachers are going to use literature as the thing the students write about, they can't be sure everyone will have had the same reading experiences. So they have to pick some piece of literature for everyone to read. Wouldn't it be great if the teacher could be assured that everyone who graduated from high school in the U.S. had read Hamlet or The Great Gatsby (or how about something written in the teacher's lifetime, or the student's)? The teacher could then really teach writing, and there wouldn't be any burdensome reading for the students (although all would have to re-familiarize themselves with the text). Slow and poor readers are truly penalized in college; many of them are quite smart, but lack that quick eye and mind that good readers have.

I'm with Lindemann - there is no need to be teaching literature when you are supposed to be teaching writing. And there is no need to saddle students with a bunch of reading that takes up most of everyone's time, and leaves little energy for working on writing. I'm sure there are plenty of subjects students can write on, and there's shorter and more accessible literary work that could be used, if necessary.

Kenneth Bruffee

Thanks, Thomas, for a very thorough presentation on Kenneth Bruffee. I was inspired to go to an early article by Bruffee, from College English, in 1984. The article, Collaborative Learning and the 'Conversation of Mankind', let me to a very interesting statement about writing:

"If thought is internalized public and social talk, then writing of all kinds is internalized public and social talk made public and social again. If thought is internalized conversation, then writing is internalized conversation re-externalized."

I think Bruffee is saying that thought is talk going on inside one's head. I can't completely agree - I have many thoughts that are beyond language, and I would struggle mightily to force them into the restrictive bounds of talk. Surely Bruffee is not saying that thought is entirely socially constructed.

It seems logical and obvious that language is socially constructed, so any study of the language arts would be improved by using social tools, such as peer tutoring and collaborative learning. Working in a high school, I know how much the students and staff learn from each other. I have no doubt that the peer tutoring movement's most prized achievement is the Writing Center. I know many people who have benefited greatly, some as student writers and some as tutors.

Richard Lanham

I especially like Lanham's idea that the term rhetoric should be retired, and perhaps communication could take its place. He had this to say in a 1996 interview:

Rhetoric, for most of its 2,500-year history, was the name for how the Western world taught its children to speak and write, and to think about speaking and writing. We might think of it as teaching “the art of expression,” or more grandly “the means of conscious life.” Nowadays, we call it “communication,” and its importance is, I think, universally acknowledged. The historical study of rhetoric has been the discipline that tries to chart this ground and lead us through it. We could, and maybe we should, just drop the word rhetoric as too soiled and use communication or some other word. What I’ve been trying to do, in The Electronic Word and elsewhere, is to project the computer’s expressive world onto the screen of that history. Digital expression is the latest chapter in a long history, and it makes much more sense when viewed in terms of that history. (Davis, Rod. Computer Greek: an Interview with Richard Lanham. American Way, 29.22)

I'm very interested in thinking more about how digital technologies are part of the long history and tradition of rhetoric. Perhaps a day will come when we no longer refer to "visual rhetoric" because there will be a visual component to everyday rhetoric - only likely to happen in digital environments.

I also have been considering learning styles and how they apply to rhetoric. In the days of Plato, argument was in the form of spoken words. I assume that auditory learners would have done well with this type of rhetoric. Later, when printed material was readily available, good readers gained the upper hand in rhetoric. With digital technologies, there are opportunities for visual learners, auditory learners, and good readers. It might change our definition of "smart".

Dr. Hugh Burns

It was a real pleasure to have Dr. Burns in class last week. His low-key approach and thorough coverage of the history of rhetoric were very helpful to my understanding. Maybe I can catch up to all you brilliant and well-educated scholars . . .

I was especially interested in Dr. Burns’ rhetorical theories as they apply to computers and composition, and so I went looking for what some other people have said about the work Dr. Burns has been doing for so many years.

In his 1987 essay The User-Friendly Fallacy, Fred Kemp makes a compelling case for the type of research and programs that Hugh Burns was working on. Kemp addresses the User-Friendly Fallacy (the notion that computers must seem to behave like humans in order to have maximum efficiency in the teaching of writing) and exposes its limitations in helping student writers. He focuses on the pre-writing process, and holds up Dr. Burns’ TOPOI program as a model for helping students explore and define their topic and their argument, and thus improving their writing.

Kemp says, “. . . programming effort should concentrate on the nature of the thought prompts, the sequence and structuring of the prompts, and the response review mechanism. The writing instructor must direct the programmer, and instructional effectiveness must direct the technology . . . but people continue to expect that sophisticated instructional programs should, in some way, be more human, more like computerized teaching assistants complete with lively patter and foolproof electronic grading. As long as instructional software is judged in terms of the power of the technology - that is, on the basis of how human it makes the machine or how clever the program mechanism is - open-response software will continue to seem modest and unexceptional, especially in light of the powerful technical achievements of text analyzers and word processing.” (College Composition and Communication, Vol. 38, No. 1, February 1987. 32-39.)

I recall Dr. Burns talking about how the heuristic approach to writing software asks open-ended questions that are only designed to help the writer dig into the topic more thoroughly, and perhaps offer the writer opportunities for a creative look at existing information.

I see this as a way to teach writers how to think better, which is certain to lead to better writing. Dr. Burns says, and I agree, that writing software needs to be a lot more than a spelling and grammar checker. The above-mentioned article also shares the results of a small study conducted by the author. One of the findings was that students who participated the open-ended questioning process of pre-writing had, to some degree, internalized the process after a number of times. Then their writing improved permanently. I think that is a profound result, and worthy of further exploration.