Expos-i-story: telling the stories of our teaching lives in ENG105

The New York Times recently featured an article by reporter Matt Richtel titled “Blogs Vs. Term Papers” (here):

The debate about academic writing has given rise to new terminology: “old literacy” refers to more traditional forms of discourse and training; “new literacy” stretches from the blog and tweet to multimedia presentation with PowerPoint and audio essay.

“We’re at a crux right now of where we have to figure out as teachers what part of the old literacy is worth preserving,” says Andrea A. Lunsford, a professor of English at Stanford. “We’re trying to figure out how to preserve sustained, logical, carefully articulated arguments while engaging with the most exciting and promising new literacies.”

Kathy Davidson of Duke (and a HASTAC scholar) is quoted, but she’s also written a terrific (and long) blog post about Richtel’s article and the broader context for her claims and her own teaching of writing. You can find that blog post here. In this quote, Davidson describes some of her colleagues’ at Michigan State University and their responses to student writing:

…in the faculty lounge at MSU, I would too often hear some of my most arrogant colleagues (it was a subset, certainly not all:  there were many wonderful teachers in the department) ranting that all kids today did was watch TV, their writing was abominable, they were getting worse and worse, they didn’t care about good writing any more.  Some of my colleagues enjoyed sitting around reading “howlers” from student term papers to one another, laughing at how bad the writing was.   And then they would complain that writing comments on these final research papers was a “waste of time.”   Yeah, buddy:  a waste of your student’s time.  Their tax dollars are paying your salary, buddy!   I found it offensive then, I find it offensive now.  If you are an English teacher and this paragraph feels all too familiar, well, then Change Thyself!

Thanks to Kim Middleton for sending this great piece from The Chronicle of Higher Ed on how watching her son’s soccer has helped her think about her syllabus planning:

And so as I put together these new classes, I’ve been trying to think about, not only the things that students need to take away from the classes, but also sequences that will afford them a similar experience.

Obviously, there’s a world of difference between college students and 8-year-old soccer players. But the idea that a class, or a unit within a class, might work in this same way–that is, be organized around ideas that are immediately useful or clarifying, while simultaneously building skills that ultimately complicate or dismantle that newfound understanding–strikes me as powerful. It turns out you don’t have to teach everything.

You just have to teach enough to help the students start to figure it out on their own.

Useful resources:

1) Bean, John C. Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom.

2) Blau, Sheridan. The Literature Workshop: Teaching Texts and Their Readers.

3) Newkirk, Thomas. “Looking For Trouble.” Available on JSTORE or here as a pdf Newkirk.

4) Salvatori, Mariolina Rizzi and Patricia Donahue. The Elements (and Pleasures) of  Difficulty.

5) Bloom’s Taxonomy (original and revised) available here

Pedagogical Challenges

How to make students accountable/prepared for class/taking ownership over the education—participatory enterprise/ become an independent reader/learner, expectations for grades

idea of claiming one’s own education; moving beyond regurgitation discussion/having their own ideas

teaching close reading and returning to the text

using the language of the text to discuss (terminology, etc.)

critical analysis skills, (summarizing vs. analyzing)

moving beyond the individual towards universal, expectations that students should know this.  Reading: having the text/understanding/finding argument/having a voice.

Evaluation

not being willing to admit when they don’t understand

students may have easier time with visual text

reading has changed, not longer book-based.

Experiment 1:

attitude, comfort zone, love being in the classroom vs. past classroom trauma; forms of instruction/bullet points and scaffolding; “everybody understands this but me (am I alone?), am I expected to know this?  give up/too hard/failure; overwhelmed not knowing how to proceed; assumptions about competencies and passions;

What would have made this better (engagement):  invitation, guidance, instructions, reassurance, rationale, encouragement, opportunity to ask questions, collaborations, example-modeling; establish trust, identify stakes, frame–point to doing this.

Take Away:

How do we give directions?  Multiple modalities, encourage participation.

Awareness of different positions of students vis-a-vis assignment, expectations.  how do student responses in the classroom represent symptoms that are indicative of needing additional support, question asking, etc.?

Process: begin to identify that there is a process (not necessarily a–b), we’re going to try it, go through it.  Value of reflective writing. If we want critical analysis, what are useful methods to engage?

• creation of community (value of social, easier to make mistakes when you know that people aren’t going to misunderstand)
• accountability and investment.  expectation that you’ll have to report back and share.  of course, this is also partially dependent on their position with regard to the text at hand.
• re reading,
• provide models and work making methodology clear.
• students need clear objectives and goals.

community in the classroom: multiple introductions.  Makes it easier to listen to others; opportunities to talk with one another.  voices are heard daily.

assessing the dynamic among students (classroom set up, etc.)

assumptions about pieces that we’re working with will drive the discussion.  Burke “terministic screen”–ways of seeing are ways of not seeing.

navigate between the poles of personal position/reading vs. evidentiary reasoning.

Thanks to our intrepid ENG 105 instructor Julie Demers for sharing this innovative approach to collaborative research:

In-Class Researched Essay

My class created one big researched essay! Before their research began in earnest, one day I brought decided we would learn about argument and counterargument as a full-class activity. I brought in two sets of 19 articles I’d found on student dress code, supporting both pro and con. I looked in all the same places the students would in the research process (from Google to EBSCO) and found official hearings, journal articles, newspaper articles, school rules.

We started in small groups, 2 groups for and 2 against. They had to create their own arguments for or against school dress codes and consider counterarguments. Then, all of them got together into one big ‘for’ group and one big ‘against’ group and shared resources and what they’d come up with so far. Each large group created a giant poster of how they would set up this essay on whether they were for or against the dress code. (This exercise was mainly for argument and counterargument, but I also asked them to briefly outline it.Then each half of the class presented to the other.) Then they presented their “essay” to the class.

Pre-class Thoughts

The lesson is: a) educational, b) engaging, c) potentially absolute chaos.

What I Learned

Upon Megan’s suggestion, I’m thinking if I were to do this again next semester, I would have them each bring one article to class. This way, they are engaged even before coming to class and each have had to go through the searching process and would have found an article they would be knowledeable about.

It went pretty well, particularly with my first class. (We have some fun-loving people in that group who don’t mind sharing their opinions.) I thought maybe they didn’t need the full class period, so I gave my second class a freewrite and we talked about their initial ideas before we began the project. This took a bit of time because everyone has an opinion on this. So I feel their final products (once they got into the big group) were a bit rushed.

I had a couple of surprises. One of these was that I’d assumed they would be picking up articles, swapping, skimming, and not really reading each but just looking for their information. But to my surprise, they each choose one initially and settled down quietly to read that piece all the way through. That gave me a little hope that, when it came to their research, that they wouldn’t just bounce from site to site as much as I’d thought. (Or maybe this was different in some way, having a limited selection of materials.)

I would do it again, with modifications—possibly giving them more time and having them research a piece themselves.

We began our conversation discussing the various ways we think of and use portfolios within our own classes. From these observations, we realized that portfolios can serve multiple purposes:

• Key words associated with portfolio evaluation are selection, collection, and reflection
• Some of us require students to submit all drafts in order to see evidence of their evolution as a writer
• Portfolios are an opportunity for students to see how all the small components fit together into a larger holistic project
• Portfolios provide a chance for writers to see and reflect on both their own processes and their own progress as a writer
• Might there be ways to disrupt the cliched narrative of progress?
• Asking students to provide specific textual evidence of their own writing to support any claims they’re making about their work
• The power of reflection and a final reflective letter (the metacognitive work)
• Providing specific questions to guide this final letter
• Portfolio used either as a learning tool or as a professional “body of work”; perhaps it can be both?
• The challenges of traditional print portfolios to encompass multimodal work online (blogs, videos, etc.)

We won’t meet as a group again this semester, but feel free to stop by my office or email me with any questions or end-of-the-semester concerns.

Our next Teaching Community is Monday, 11/28, from 12:00-1:00 in Marcelle Hall.  We’ll be talking about portfolios–what they are, how they work, and why they’ve become associated with writing assessment “best practices.” If you currently use a portfolio to assess student writing, please come with some tips and strategies that you’ve found helpful. If you don’t use a portfolio method of assessment now, plan to come with your questions and ideas! Below are some resources to start with:

Here‘s a brief summary of key points from NCTE’s “What We Know About Assessment”:

1) Multiple assessments are needed for an accurate portrait of the academic achievement of all students.

2) High-stakes testing may be detrimental to student learning and motivation

3) Assessments need to take into consideration both traditional components and elements that may be different for 21st century student work

Here is the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCCs) current position statement on Writing Assessment:

1. Writing assessment is useful primarily as a means of improving teaching and learning. The primary purpose of any assessment should govern its design, its implementation, and the generation and dissemination of its results.

2. Writing is by definition social. Learning to write entails learning to accomplish a range of purposes for a range of audiences in a range of settings.

3. Any individual’s writing ability is a sum of a variety of skills employed in a diversity of contexts, and individual ability fluctuates unevenly among these varieties.

4. Perceptions of writing are shaped by the methods and criteria used to assess writing

Assessment in the Classroom

In a course context, writing assessment should be part of the highly social activity within the community of faculty and students in the class. This social activity includes: 

• a period of ungraded work (prior to the completion of graded work) that receives response from multiple readers, including peer reviewers, 
• assessment of texts—from initial through to final drafts—by human readers, and 
• more than one opportunity to demonstrate outcomes.

Self-assessment should also be encouraged. Assessment practices and criteria should match the particular kind of text being created and its purpose. These criteria should be clearly communicated to students in advance so that the students can be guided by the criteria while writing.

Kathleen Blake Yancey has emerged as one of the foremost scholars when it comes to portfolios. Here’s a passage from her book Portfolios in The Writing Classroom:

A portfolio pedagogy is sensitive to process, and we see this in several ways. First, without neglecting the product that a writer creates, a portfolio pedagogy…seeks to include and validate processes used to create it. Accordingly, within a portfolio classroom, it is commonplace to ask students to include evidence of various processes that contribute to a single work: note-taking, brainstorming, looping, drafting, redrafting in response to review, for instance. This evidence is valued for what it says about ways that the writer approaches the task and about ways that the writer is developing cognitively, as well as for the part it plays in the composing of any one specific piece. (4)

Here‘s an interview with Yancey on e-portfolios.

The most current version of portfolios is that of the electronic or “e-portfolio.” The CCCCs has created this document outlining the principles and best practices associated with eportfolio use and assessment.

From Florida State University’s First-Year Composition program comes this information about portfolios:

 Writing portfolios provide an orderly presentation of a disorderly process, for they are the culmination of a semester‘s worth of student work. When compiling a writing portfolio, student writers learn that revision is a long-term, recursive process. As they share drafts with peers, tutors, and their teacher, these writers become aware of a variety of audience needs. Through reflection on and response to such conversations, students revise their work into a portfolio representative of their best academic prose. In this classroom, the teacher works as both advocate and evaluator, helping writers select and present work for the end of semester evaluation in the portfolio. And when student work is ―published‖ in this manner, writers can take pride in their own maturity of expression. Surveying a completed portfolio, students realize that they have written a lot (portfolios often contain many layers of drafts) and that they did grow as writers from the first day to the last day of the class (last papers look more expert to writers than first papers); students, literally, become practicing writers. These are only a few of the ways students benefit from preparing portfolios.

Portfolio evaluation isn‘t necessarily easier for teachers; it is, however, a useful evaluation process for any workshop classroom. In such a writing classroom, teachers want to guarantee that writing evaluation includes both ―measurement (or grading or ranking) and commentary (or feedback)‖ as described by Peter Elbow (“Trustworthiness in Evaluation,” Embracing Contraries: Explorations in Learning and Teaching, New York: Oxford, 1986, 231). In such a writing classroom, teachers make an effort to assure that evaluation goals match class goals, thereby avoiding what Linda Brodkey calls practices that contradict curriculum (“Modernism and the Scene(s) of Writing,” College English 39 [October 1988]: 414).

Check out Rebecca Moore Howard’s comprehensive bibliography here for further resources.

Geof Hewitt’s useful A Portfolio Primer: Teaching, Collecting, and Assessing Student Writing

We opened with a discussion about late semester malaise and challenges with our students. They’re tired and we’re anxious about accomplishing our goals and ensuring they leave our class having learned something and written a “good enough” researched essay.

Part of this anxiety is about plagiarism: the fear that in their exhaustion, students will “just turn something in.”

Students at this point in the semester feel that what they have left to learn is grammar and citation style. “it’s the conversation you can have.”
One idea: connecting structural errors to associated thinking problem (these students don’t see).
An exercise: have them identify their argument and claims, etc. Could do it with a partner – can you identify these aspects of your partner’s writing.

Strategies to prevent or pre-empt plagiarism:

• Fear tactic: scare them (tell them they won’t pass the class if they do it)
• Explain what it is (and all its complexities), talk to them about it and tell them what it is in its various forms
• Show them how it can end up being more work to plagiarize
• Remind them that we can recognize and distinguish their writing “voice”
• Construct a researched essay versus research paper  as a preemptive strike in the form of personal writing/beliefs
• Disrupt their belief that we are asking them for an “academic voice”
• Consider multiple drafts as a kind of “show your work” exercises (like in math – show your thinking as you would in a math equation) / reverse outline
• Break down research process info manageable stages. Compartmentalize the steps. Analogy of “building your muscles” before doing an activity.
• Revise and refine research question based on initial research — it’s a recursive process.
• Provide lots of in-class time to practice paraphrasing (see exercise from purdue OWL)

How do we get them to narrow their research topic and ask a “good” question. Get them out of pro/con mode versus discovering an interesting, controversial angle to explore?

Our next Teaching Community meeting is on Monday, 11/14 and our topic is a big one….plagiarism! In preparation for this discussion, please peruse the following articles. In addition, plan to bring in and share one specific exercise, assignment or writing prompt that you use to help your students learn about citation practices (and pitfalls):

• While citation and documentation are crucial, are educators too often emphasizing the wrong things? Check out this article from The Chronicle of Higher Education about citation obsession:

“Bibliographic citation has apparently eclipsed perfect grammar and the five-paragraph theme as the preoccupation of persnickety professors.

What a colossal waste. Citation style remains the most arbitrary, formulaic, and prescriptive element of academic writing taught in American high schools and colleges. Now a sacred academic shibboleth, citation persists despite the incredibly high cost-benefit ratio of trying to teach students something they (and we should also) recognize as relatively useless to them as developing writers.

…What I advocate here is not to dispense with teaching students how to use sources but rather to abandon our fixation on the form rather than the function of source attribution. Here’s why: We cannot control how much time and effort students invest in a particular writing assignment; we can only influence how they distribute their energies. Professors’ overattention to flawless citation (or grammar) creates predictable results: Students expend a disproportionate amount of precious time and attention trying to avoid making mistakes. Soon, they also begin to associate “good” writing with mechanically following rules rather than developing good ideas.”

• And this recent article discusses the pros and cons of plagiarism detection software programs like Turn It In.

In reference to The Citation Project: Rebecca Moore Howard “calls for a “fundamental shift” in how writing is taught. Professors should focus more on starting the research process collaboratively with students, she says. They should select a few complex sources and explore them with the whole class.

“What that means is not rushing students quite so quickly in their first semester in college into writing a 25-page research paper written from 15 sources,” she says, “but rather taking them through the process of engaging with those sources first.”

• From Inside Higher Ed comes this report:

“The study’s results… may be significant in helping college instructors consider the three choices to fighting plagiarism: the “moral suasion” approach, as in honor codes; the “law-and-order approach” of detection software and penalties; and the “educational approach” of teaching students what they should and shouldn’t do. He said that while the research results favor the educational approach, that would only work with a change in faculty attitudes. “College instructors do not generally view issues related to educating students about plagiarism as part of their core responsibilities…”

• And here‘s Jonathan Lethem’s famous 2007 Harper’s essay on plagiarism:

“Any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The citations that go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read; they are quotations without inverted commas. The kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances—is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral caliber and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment.”

• And finally, this thorough article from IHE here.

We started our session by jotting down goals we have for having our students do research:

• Deep reading, not skimming sources (maybe reduce the number of required sources. Annotate an article as an exercise in lieu of or along with an annotated bibliography assignment. Another suggestion is to identify a narrowed range of subjects to narrow their research process)
• Assessing credibility of online sources (maybe have them find sources earlier on the semester)
• Recognizing differences between claims and evidence
• Have them get excited — inner spark of curiosity
• Start with a research question and what makes for compelling “good” question. And maybe put their research question out into the world – pose it to people they know.
• Help them to join a scholarly conversation when they are “outsiders” to that conversation.
• Getting them to pinpoint why they disagree with a source. How to identify underlying assumptions and implications of an argument.
• Teaching student a life skill: how to find answers to questions that they have in the future (and assessing credibility of the answers)
• Developing exigency in their topics.

• Small groups pose research question and groups respond with what they want to know about the topic. Or one friend, faculty member and family member that they can pose the question to.

• Running amuck with a great deal of structure. Create a corral based on topic and structure of the course but within that they choose a topic.

• Remind students they are going to write about this for 5-6 weeks. Start with what is going on in students’ lives as a potential topic.

The theme for our next Teaching Community meeting (Monday, 10/31) is on on guiding students through the research process. In preparation for that discussion, please bring in one assignment, activity, or writing prompt to share. In addition, please peruse the following material:

When it comes to identifying the kinds of skills we’re hoping to teach, Dartmouth College has a good overview here:

Purdue’s Online Writing Lab (OWL) is always a wealth of information here:

Perhaps even of more interest is how the traditional “research” paper has made the news in the last few years:

An article from The Chronicle’s Wired Campus:

Despite the wealth of information available on the Internet, a recent study suggests that many students lack basic research skills.

According to the latest Project Information Literacy Progress Report, 84 percent of students say that when it comes to course-based research, getting started is their biggest challenge. The three sources cited most often by students were course readings, search engines like Google, and scholarly research databases. Only 30 percent asked a librarian for research help. The online survey polled 8,353 students from 25 college campuses nationwide.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/students-lack-basic-research-skills-study-finds/28112

From Inside Higher Education (IHE), librarian Barbara Fister wrote a compelling blog post entitled “Why The ‘Research Paper” Isn’t working” here and a follow-up post below:

“I think we could get a lot more mileage out of requiring well-chosen evidence in all kinds of writing and verbal discussion and learning how to extract the main point from sources and write about them clearly without those tasks being contained in a generic “write a 10-page paper” prompt. Aren’t there other more exciting models out there, like a well-written essay The Atlantic or a nimbly-argued opinion piece in Salon? These are forms of writing that don’t take pains to erase the authorial voice and yet draw responsibly from sources.”

Read the rest of this article here at Inside Higher Ed.