Thus Far My Favorite
critique of the would-be inheritors of Paulo Freire and James Berlin.
As an antidote: Shaughnessy, Smitherman, small doses of Bartholomae. Plus a pin, one prick, to puncture that balloon of pedagogical sanctimoniousness.
12 Beliefs About Teaching Writing
As the XO for our first-year composition course, I've been drafting the staff syllabus, which serves as something less than a template for new instructors and as something less than a guide for veteran instructors. Textbooks and due dates for the major graded assignments are shared requirements, and there are a few readings from the handbook and the rhetoric that we ask all instructors to assign, but beyond that, it's perhaps not as regimented as one might expect at an institution like ours.
Still, in drafting a staff FYC syllabus and preparing to sell it to incoming faculty, I've found myself needing to articulate to myself my core assumptions about the teaching of writing. They follow, and I'd welcome additions or arguments.
- The course starts and ends with student writing, quite literally: writing is the first thing they do upon entering the classroom for lesson 1, and the last thing they do before leaving the classroom after lesson 40.
- Writing is first a verb and second a noun: the activity is always foregrounded before the product.
- Three or four major writing projects, with time taken to engage the diverse components of the processes of writing (generative writing, developing, drafting, seeking and receiving feedback, revising, editing, proofreading, publishing, reflecting) feels about right for a semester. Five feels like too many; two like too few.
- In working with the classical canons, invention and organization always come prior to style and delivery, both at the project scale and at the semester scale. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.
- The course requires both a handbook and a rhetoric. The rhetoric often best serves the earlier functions (invention and organization), while the handbook often best serves the later functions (style and delivery). This tends to set up a rhythm in assigning readings.
- Revision always leaves portions of writing behind. Students, like all writers, will produce writing that they do not publish. That doesn't mean that such writing should be discarded: save it, come back to it, maybe not in this class, but later. Get students used to setting aside portions of their work.
- Difficulty is productive, and should be acknowledged as such. When a student says, "This challenges me and I don't know what to do," we should take this as a point of entry rather than a roadblock. Respond: "How? Why? At what point?" Then respond: "I'd like to hear more about that. Can you write about it?" The worst writing often comes from what is taken for granted; from what is easy. The best comes out of complexity.
- Don't mark error at all on early drafts. (No: really: don't.) On later or final drafts, don't mark every error. For each essay, talk to students before they turn in a later draft about the two or three or four errors they want help with. Go to the handbook for those errors at the later-draft stages.
- One learns to write by writing. The core focus of a course on writing is writing. The direct method of instruction seems self-evident; from those who would advocate alternative methods, I would require supporting evidence. I am suspicious of any syllabus that seeks to privilege a third text -- a reader -- over a rhetoric and a handbook. Such privilege indicates to me both a belief that the material of a writing course is not writing, and a belief that the writing course is a proper vehicle for indoctrination.
- Publication is essential. Writers must have the opportunity to see readers -- not just the teacher -- reading and reacting to their writing. Writing has value, and the value of students' work must be acknowledged, must be celebrated. Point blank: publication makes writing better.
- Major assignments must have links between them. A project begun in an earlier essay should lead in some way to a later essay. Students' written reflections on their projects should foreground those links, and instructors' written responses to student writing must acknowledge and foster those links, as well as acknowledging students' writings as trajectories rather than as strings of individual performances.
- Students should self-assess, repeatedly: metacognition is essential to knowledge transfer. Ask students to write reflections about their essays on the days they turn them in. They'll like being able to call your attention to the ways they've improved, and what they think is best about their essays. You'll like the guide to grading that their reflections offer. Ask them, though, to be not only evaluative but descriptive: understanding how they write, and putting it in writing, will help them as well as you. Take their reflections seriously, and show them that you do so by engaging them and responding to them.
Last Day of Classes
The President came to visit campus yesterday, along with three Chinooks' and two Sikorsky VH-3Ds' worth of Secret Service and support staff, so classes were canceled and we dropped a lesson, making today the last class for two of my composition sections.
On the first day of the semester, I had my students do something called "the envelope exercise," adapted from an exercise one of my grad school colleagues came up with: first, I gave an empty envelope to everyone in class. We read, out loud, two paragraphs from Peter Elbow on freewriting and how to do it. I then asked them to fill in the endings of the following sentences, in as much depth and detail as possible, on a piece of paper. I wouldn't see what they wrote.
Optempo
It's one of the words I think academia could adopt from the military. It refers to the pace of operations, and implies the considerations that such a pace places on all involved, instructors and students. The term implies, as well, the differing priorities for all involved, and the ways that students' priorities are often obscured from instructors', instructors' from parents', parents' from students, and so on.
It's an administrator's term; a pace set by staff syllabi and due dates, by objectives and phase lines. But what academia knows and doesn't admit, and what the military seems to know and admit and sometimes gauge better, is how optempo works on all involved. There are measures of optempo, and I'd like to see them more widely considered. I'd argue that when we construct outcomes statements, one of the things we need to consider is optempo, for instructors and students alike. Not only how much students are writing, and in what form, but how much instructors are responding, and how swiftly instructors are able to return feedback on students' drafts. Certainly, that's a matter of employment and staffing logistics, but it's also a matter of syllabus planning, especially when programs are offering or requiring staff syllabi.
It's what makes me think I've overplanned this semester: in trying to map out my students' writing, I've failed to map out my own work in relation to that writing. I've tried to do too much, and the way I've paced my own work in relation to the syllabus I've set has been short-sighted. That's something to think about when I lay out the calendar grid for next semester and next year: not only where my students are going to be, but where I'm going to be.
It's odd for such a concern to come up so late; that it hasn't come up before. That optempo has always seemed like a given; something unalterable.
Isn't it?
Academic Category Error
People in my academic discipline sometimes conflate "military" and "war." From what I've seen of the broader scape of academe, that's not uncommon. In listserv discussions, interactions at conferences, calls for proposals, and hallway conversations, there's a common assumption that any association with the military must commit one to a monolithic and intolerant ideology supporting all war, always, in all contexts.
Two nights ago, on Monday, Eugene Jarecki showed up on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart promoting his new book. (Jarecki wrote and directed the award-winning 2005 documentary Why We Fight, which -- while voluminously researched and attempting to provide the appearance of scrupulous fairness -- mostly did a very good job for 99 minutes of proving that Jarecki agreed with the cautions offered in Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex" speech: to paraphrase a number of critics, the movie was an op-ed piece, not investigative reporting.) He had some good things to say about today's links between the defense industry and American foreign policy, and with Stewart's prompting and assistance, he made a number of solid points fully and clearly in the nine minutes or so that he had.
Stewart's a breezy interviewer, and I think Jarecki would have fared better with a more deliberate pace, perhaps even with being asked to read a passage from the book out loud, NPR-style, though that seldom plays well on television. (Would that it did.) I say this because Jarecki was invited here to West Point to talk to people -- cadets and faculty -- about his movie after its release, and accounts of those conversations have traveled, some of them making their way into his new book, and some of them making their way into our Dean's annual address to faculty -- all faculty, military and civilian -- where I first heard them two months ago. I quote here from Jarecki's book, The American Way of War, published ten days ago:
Located in wooded isolation some 50 miles north of New York City, West Point is very much in its own intellectual orbit, not entirely removed from the workings of the American defense establishment, yet not entirely in sync with them either. On my first drive there, I recall the incredulity with which friends and family reacted when I called from the road to tell them where I was going. They were surprised that a military academy would even show a film like Why We Fight, let alone invite a self-acknowledged critic of U.S. defense policy, to address its best and brightest.
As it turns out, this incredulity reflects a prejudice that sweepingly and mistakenly equates bad foreign policy with those entrusted to implement it. While soldiers come in all types and no single generalization can be made, one finds inspiring abundance on West Point's faculty of responsible thinkers who feel a responsibility not only to train their cadets in the military arts but to educate them more broadly about the strengths and weaknesses of the nation's foreign policy system.
Jarecki's words are a careful and instructive counter to the myopic conflation I describe above. When our Dean read those words, and conveyed them to the faculty with an argument about their importance, they helped me see something more about teaching at this place, and about why I'm teaching here and want to continue to teach here. The engagement with diverse and critical perspectives that Jarecki describes is something I've seen here far more than at any other college or university I've attended or taught at, and seen especially with a remarkable openness in the classroom.
It's remarkable the things cadets are unafraid to say and the criticisms they're unafraid to make, reasonably and professionally, and how calmly and precisely they're able to disagree with one another on loaded issues, and then think nothing of it and move on to celebrate and support one another. (Mostly.) In my class, they've just finished a unit on multi-modal argument, with more than a few of them giving presentations on similar or identical topics in rapid succession, and the kaleidoscope of perspectives has been refreshingly more wide-ranging than some of the homogeneous arrays of ideological and rhetorical commonplaces I've seen elsewhere. And in many ways more liberally accepting; more embracing of what Benjamin Franklin called "all these scatter'd counsels." That ideological diversity and tolerance strikes me as one of the most valuable assets that a democratic nation might promote in its military, and one that I wish I might see more of in academe's broader scape.
Kairos CFP: dot mil
Here's part of my excuse for not posting much lately. Alexis and I are pretty excited about it. And I might be soliciting some of you, dear readers, for contributions.
Kairos Summer 2010 Special Issue
dot mil: Rhetoric, Technology, and the Military
Guest Editors: Mike Edwards and Alexis Hart
This special issue of Kairos seeks to investigate the intersections between technology, rhetoric, and the military, as well as the connections between the military and literacy instruction. During World War II, College English published four articles (February 1944, May 1944, March 1945, May 1945) explicitly concerned with connections between literacy instruction in higher education and the contemporary military. Today, in a time of ongoing conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan and anxieties about military action in Iran, such connections merit renewed attention. Furthermore, advances in communications technologies have complicated those connections. ARPANET, the first packet-switching network and direct predecessor to the global internet, went live as a Department of Defense project in 1969, and the intersection of networked rhetorics and military affairs has evolved in intriguing ways since. For example, email, web video, cell phones, video games, weblogs, and other digital technologies have become increasingly available as well as increasingly controversial within military contexts. For this special issue on rhetoric, technology, and the military, examples of possible topics of investigation might include, but are not limited to:
How soldiers', sailors', airmen's, and Marines' access to 24/7 networked communications technologies has changed the rhetoric of conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
Online alternative news sources and their influence on public perceptions of conflicts.
How digital technologies complicate concerns of operations security (OPSEC).
The Army's ban on weblogging by soldiers without command approval.
The rhetorics and aesthetics of military-themed video games.
Distance learning for deployed soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines.
The use of just war theory, torture, protest, and other military-related subjects as topics for argument essays in first-year writing courses.
Corporal Pat Tillman and the public uses of the rhetorical canon of memory.
The rhetoric of PowerPoint in command briefings.
The use of netwar strategies by insurgency groups and conventional military organizations.
Media representations of the ethics and rhetoric of the "revolt of the generals."
The rhetoric of recruiting.
Online "swiftboating" and the place of military service in political rhetoric.
The rhetorical framing of conflict in documentaries and news reports, as well as in first-hand accounts from on-the-ground warfighters.
Submission Guidelines:
For this special issue, we seek submissions for all sections of the journal (Topoi, Praxis, Reviews, Interviews, and Disputatio). We ask that contributors visit current and previous issues to determine which section best matches your work.
Topoi: Extended scholarly analyses related to the special issue theme.
Praxis: Longer classroom spotlights and brief digital tool-use narratives related to the special issue theme.
Reviews: Individual or collaborative reviews of books, media, and other texts of interest related to the special issue theme.
Interviews: Interviews with scholars doing work related to the special issue theme.
Disputatio: Short digital texts that invite or incite further commentary. This section operates like letters to the editor in more traditional journal venues; however, these texts take native digital forms, even if rudimentary in nature.
Additional Guidelines:
Please consult general submission guidelines at http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/cfht.html.
Kairos can accept most web-ready file formats (check with the guest editors if you are unsure). Please keep in mind that this excludes word-processing documents.
We prefer URLs for review purposes. If you do not have access to open (or password-protected) webspace, please contact the guest editors in advance of the submission deadline to arrange alternate means of delivery.
We cannot accept email attachments larger than 2 megabytes (MB).
Queries to the guest editors are welcome in advance of the deadline. (Responses may take up to a week.)
Submission Deadline (Proposals): November 1, 2008
Contact both guest editors with a proposal via email. (Subject line: "dotmil submission: YOURNAME".) The proposal should include a 1-2 paragraph explanation of the webtext's topic and argument; a 1-2 paragraph description of the webtext's structure, design, and associated technologies (including a URL and/or images, if authors wish); and a brief annotated bibliography. Authors will receive confirmation of submission, via email, within 2-3 days.
Publication Timeline:
Proposals due: November 1, 2008
Acceptance notification: December 1, 2008
Full webtexts due: March 1, 2009
Revised webtexts due: October 1, 2009
Publication date: May 15, 2010
Teaching Bartleby
In addition to Advanced Composition, I'm teaching Intro to American Literature this semester, and enjoying it. We're into the nineteenth century now, short fiction, and I'm rediscovering pleasures I'd long neglected. "Bartleby the Scrivener," as fundamental as it is, is one such long-neglected pleasure for a rhetoric and composition specialist.
I'll confess: the first time I read it, as an undergrad, I didn't get it. Didn't understand any aspect of it. Wouldn't engage it.
The second time, coming back to it, reading it for pleasure, I was delighted. It was in a secondhand book with "Benito Cereno" and "Billy Budd" and I'd been on a Pynchon paranoid fiction kick after Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow and my friend M. said there was more of that weird, freaky paranoid stuff going on in "Benito Cereno" and I ought to check it out, and I did, and then remembered that I'd wondered what the big deal was about "Bartleby," and re-read it in a sitting, as well. As with Moby Dick and The Scarlet Letter, I was perhaps more surprised than I should have been by how much more I got out of it on a second visit. This isn't a terribly original or interesting observation, I guess: the first time I encountered it, as a student, it was an Important Text; the second time I encountered it, as a reader, it was something else, something different. So it's nice to be teaching it, and nice to be spending two class days on it.
Today was the first, and I stole the idea for my lesson plan from a colleague, who'd used it to great success. Minor modifications on my part, but it went like this: for homework, I'd asked them to read the story in its entirety, and told them to be prepared to lead discussion in class today, and to come to class with notes on motivation and action in the story to help them do so.
I brought my laptop to class, which I'd never done before. (Each classroom has its own dedicated computer.) I set it up on my desk. In the seconds before class started, I said to them something like this: "You've just read a story in which someone, with a screen between him and the other characters, fails to do what they expect of him, and in violating the expectations customary to their relationship, causes disruption and concern."
And that was All. I. Said.
Not a word more. Not a single word, for the rest of class.
I typed notes, fingers flying to keep up with copying what they said, and yes I sometimes grinned or couldn't stop myself from nodding. And some of them got mad, or frustrated, and some of them disengaged, but a few of them got into it, and discussion ebbed and flowed without me speaking a single word for the entirety of the class period.
I posted the notes to the course site when class was over, and from the notes -- five pages, single-spaced -- it was clear that they came to the discussion remarkably well-prepared, and managed to talk out a lot of the tough points of the story. Sure, it was hard to keep quiet: immensely difficult, for them and for me, for one section more than another. Fun, too, though, and productive, once they got what was going on. But I asked them to lead, and they led. And we'll use those notes as a starting point for the second class session.
I also have the luxury that they're cadets, though; that they're motivated and obedient, and I wonder how well that'd fly with Michelle's students, or Joanna's, or Collie's. How does the line between expectation and compulsion shift from classroom to classroom, from one institution to another? Sure, I'm a boundary case, a marker, an outlier: are there other boundary cases? Where would or wouldn't my Bartleby act fly -- and why?
Those Are My Feet
I'm meeting with a student and talking to him about the presentation he's working on, which has to do with the pros and cons of soldiers publicly disclosing personal information on the internet, and I've got a bunch of windows open on my screen from my previous meeting. And the cadet looks up, and sees a YouTube screengrab of a puppy, and says, "Can you hit the back button, Sir?"
I hit the back button.
"I think that's me in that video."
OK. The video plays: soldier's feet, cute golden lab, black nose and lips, all nippy.
"Sir, those are my feet. That's Bambi, the puppy my platoon adopted in Iraq."
And yeah. It's totally him. It's his voice.
In the Valley
In this week's New York Times Magazine, my colleague down the hall asks:
It's a form of the question I've been asking myself in the year since I came here, and it's a question she's been asking herself much longer. I admire the way she extends the questions she poses into a meditation on the purposes of teaching, and I admire the conclusions she draws as well. Her article is the most thoughtful representation I've seen of what it means to teach here, of what it means to teach English here, and of what the productive complications teaching here might bring to the teaching of English. She's working from the perspective of the teaching of literature, and some of the ways I look at concerns associated with the teaching of writing here are somewhat different -- but for much of what she wrote, I found myself nodding my head and saying, "Yes, yes, yes."
The essay well describes what we do. I'm interested to hear what you might think, reader, especially if you work in rhetoric and composition, or are at all curious about this place. Check it out.
Starting Again
I taught my first class of the semester on Monday. It felt good -- it always does -- to be back in the classroom again. New semester, new duties, new responsibilities: the bureaucracy here is the temporal equivalent of a gas, expanding to fill the available time. Which means I don't have much time for leisure reading, but I'm riding my bike to and from work when the weather permits, and getting up early (5:15) to do PT before going in around 7. I'm trying to do the job stuff when I'm at work -- I got some good work done in the office this summer, helping out with a Kairos issue (I won't mind at all if you tell me how cool that logo is, and -- while certainly partial -- I really like what Steve did with his article), submitting one article for publication, and working on another, plus two more to go -- and leave it behind as much as possible when I come home in the evening, but I know with the first batch of papers to grade, that'll change. Still, I'm feeling well-adapted: I was one of the lead people working on our FYC curriculum over the past year, so I'm somewhat satisfied with the way we've worked the syllabus, and have much more comfort with the mesh between my expectations and my institution's expectations than I did last year -- to be blunt, it's been a bit of a battle, and I felt like I took some flak last year. This year, I know the ropes, I know the responsibilities, and I know how the cadets are. Again, I love the plebes -- the freshmen -- because of their openness, their willingness, and their enthusiasm, but it's also interesting to me that the cows -- the juniors -- that I taught last semester are now back as firsties with full firstie privileges, so I'll run into them in their civilian clothes when I'm in town running errands. I'll be mentoring some cows for the Marshall and Rhodes scholarship applications, and I'm mentoring a senior as a part of a pilot academic advising program, and that feels good as well. So: a new start, and I'm hoping it's a good one.