From Johnson’s essay: “the ways our students experience our pedagogy” (624)

Important to understand what we ask students to do by imagining their reactions, responses, positions. How do they experience our pedagogy? What kind of assumptions do we make?

The essays ask: at what point do we need to do a better job understanding how students view our requirements?

And, as Skorczewski writes, when are we doing the same thing we ask students not to do (use of cliche)?

Or as Corder writes, when are our expectations unrealistic?

Or as Harris and Skorczewski write: how can we create a pedagogy of response to better work with student lives and understandings, to better negotiate the identities students are asked to live (and live outside of school)? How can response serve the larger intellectual goals of writing as each of this week’s readings asks?

Response is one focus of the week’s attention to students.

Some patterns:

• pleasure
• cliche
• responses (as remake, redo, new version)
• back to process
• expectations (Corder)
• pain
• underlife
• Identity- this time, the student’s identity: STUDENT or WRITER
• Ideology. How we view students is ideological

Responding to student issues

Doing student work.

1. From Cliche to Archetype.

McLuhan: “The writers of composition texts have made much of the cliche as they understand it. They are right in saying that the cliche ought to get great critical attention. . .The simplest definition of cliche is a ‘probe’ which promises information but very often provides mere retrieval of old cliches” (55).

Skorczewski: “What is wrong with them, I ask myself, as I grade yet another concluding paragraph riddled with cliches? What is wrong with me?” (221)

To address Skorczewski’s essay: Take a cliche you have encountered in student writing in the Writing Center. Treat it as a probe - a way of discovering new information - without retrieving old cliches.

2. Remakes

From Harris: “competing versions of the same text” work as a way to get at issues of language (582).

From his book A Teaching Subject:

“To really change the teaching of writing, it seems to me that a view of process must go beyond the text to include a sense of the ongoing conversations that texts enter into – a sense, that is, of how writers draw on, respond to, and rework both their own previous writings and those of others” (68).

Write a short narrative of a recent experience you’ve had as a writer - student or otherwise. Swap. Create a “competing version” (parody, remake, altered edition, excerpt) that reworks the one you read via your experience.

3. Research

Johnson: Pleasure must be a part of research. Brooke: student identity as writers rather than as student writers. Underlife activity is key to this identity.

Design a pleasure-oriented research project that works from the notion of a student underlife.

–

Brooke
– the expectation of student (be a student) and of writing (be a writer)? How to negotiate?
The complexity of what we mean by student, writer, or teacher. I.e. – what identities or ideas circulate through any of these terms and why should we think about them and their interactions?

Recognizable activities –
Thus we don’t recognize at first but that can have value (144). What are other activities we can add besides chatting in class?

Think of Davis’ breaks

Including by 145 – the tendency to give the teacher what she wants
150 more complication of voice – by bottom, a few suggestions for students to develop “voice” (seminar like workshops – which Macrorie raises and one on one talks). What else?

Voice as sampling? Or
152 how to get student to not just be a student. By end, voice, writing, etc tied to identities. Underlife is one. What are others?
Media the one I am drawn to…

Johnson
School as institution – produces feelings, ideas, thoughts (circulates), captures moments (violent, but also pleasurable) – how important is that to pedagogy?

Can we see school – the site of production – as neutral? Think of Macrorie here 208 – freshmen course kills writing , or Corder “sitting at his desk” trying to do his own assignment. The places of work.

623 How does hatred of school inform composing?
624 or how can we consider authorial pleasure? (bottom section)
And learning to write is not always dreadful!
626 first task: get a student to enjoy composing
without resorting to magical language
627 and by thinking through Covino’s magic as wondering
629 but the pleasure and becoming of expressivism (Macrorie) has been deemed unprofessional, and something akin to Brooke’s “underlife”
631 and renegade rhetorics
635 – and like other essays – looking for middle ground – renegade and dominant
637 renegade rhetoric as laughter
638 instead of over-emphasizing “academic discourse” as trope, focus on cracks and fissures
640 cutting holes into authority – not cutting out authority
and the discussion of masochism – Johnson’s point that the desire for closure is tied closely to the desire for pain; eidos (an ideal) tied to pain and pleasure at once
642 the only pleasure is when something is done – how can we succeed if this is the only place of pleasure?
And again – the quest for a perfected text becomes so fetishized that the process (we see this idea over and over) which is invention is ignored
i.e. – what is the pleasure of discovery? Discovery as research?

646 too much pressure for perfection prevents becoming (Corder’s generative)

how do you include pleasure as writing? Using other ideas presented – margins, seminar-stance, underlife…?

Corder
What I learned – what do we learn from what we assign?
Doing one’s own work
331 some of our best assignments do not elicit a need to write

If dull faces: Put some threads together – as advice, as reflection, as overview.
Write out as series of ideas/instructions
What are the main points here as understood through the patterns – how do they function as instructions for teaching
Student vs Writer / obligation vs pleasure ….what else?

What about when Corder - pressed for time - pulls from work he’s already done despite his knowledge of invention?

Skorczewski

221 author’s of understanding the world:

what is wrong with them when they use cliches?

222 why do we respond in cliches as well? Our comments are often cliches

223 contact zones

224 the moment we think the student has used “critical thinking” (figuring out the “other”) may just be acquiescence to our own commonplaces

225 cliche may reserve space for student at end of work

226 the safe house/contact zone issue

227 cliche may in fact serve as a critique of the classroom/ part of overall struggle of IDENTITY

230 cliche may be a testimonial for participation in multiple communities - our rejection of cliche is a rejection of one specific community student belongs to

231 writer creates breaks and spaces (a theme we here in many of these essays)

232 we produce commonplace forms

233 particularly when we see students as either mimicking the dominant culture or resisting it (CLICHE)

the student’s commonplaces (everyone has a right to their own opinion) mirrors our own critical commonplaces

234 critical thought can be OUR safe house

What are the unstated rules of my pedagogy? - find through REVISION

235 in that process of IDEOLOGICAL revision we can address reactions to our students’ writings (OUR responses). Pedagogy as response.

236 what annoys us the most in student writing reveals a lot about our own ideologies

Harris

577 student writing as intellectual practice

578 no link b/w learning a critical practice and acquiring critical consciousness

579 Shor’s students who resist “open” pedagogy by opting out / they have demanding lives

580 Shor focuses on level of ideas rather than how to do close work with texts

581 composition always tries to PRODUCE students who will be in the academy

582 working of criticism remains mysterious. How do people produce such writings? / we should focus on unstable elements of writing, what everyone else wants to push aside

one way is to work with competing version of the same text

583 a particular usage of literature

EXAMPLES: how students may work through their responses to texts (text and text that is not compare/contrast)

588 revision as social process of response/ sense of intellectual project

590 an ongoing intellectual project

591 materialist approaches (response to texts) rather than spiritual (democracy/morality)