WARNING: Reading this is a presentation spoiler.
The first commandment: Thou shalt not be boring.
No matter what composition pedagogy I choose some students are always going to be into it, either because they want a good grade or because someone’s already taught them to enjoy writing.
My goal is to reach the students who don’t or can’t already write, those who aren’t favorably predisposed. The Chronically Bored.
How best to do it?
Teach to persuade–>convince or associate–>discover?
The current guide for instructors vs. mystorian and hip-hop pedagogies (Ulmer & Rice).
This online guide for instructors will change but it’s worth critiquing in order to detail what my pedagogy will and won’t entail.
The current guide says that “papers” produced by composition students should be:
1. …on questions about which reasonable people can disagree,
2. …that can be read with respect and interest by an audience of strangers, some of them quite well-informed,
3. …that can’t be produced in a single sitting, but involve a campaign of research, drafting, and revision extending over several days.
It also says that “papers” should not be: “[those] in which students compare their mothers to 1954 Fords, summarize a biography of Sylvia Plath, or describe an event that changed their lives.”
I have no real problem with #’s 2 & 3, but I think that #1 (reasonable people disagreeing) is too narrow to insist on.
First of all, who’s to say who’s reasonable.
Second, the kind of assignment I’ve often seen produced as a result of students being urged to stake and defend a debatable position is flat-out BORING. These papers are boring as hell to read and I have a feeling they’re boring to write. What student believes what he writes in ENG 1000 about abortion or legalizing dope or the living wage is really going to convince anyone of anything? Especially when the only other person reading it is not reading to be convinced but reading to assess? What student believes her analysis of Lord of the Flies matters to anyone in the end? Often it doesn’t even seem to matter to her.
Because people are lazy
, the stake-a-position assignment lends itself to facile positions and a lack of student and instructor engagement with the work. In my experience good writing is affective (either to the writer or reader). I have almost never been affected by a student staking a position. The stake-a-position essay is most effective/affective when written by someone who matters. This is not to say students don’t matter, but it is to say they normally haven’t accumulated the knowledge, experience, and status needed to persuade society writ large.
So why go through the motions when we can do something more meaningful?
In their rawest forms the mystorian and hip-hop pedagogies may produce work that reveals its full meaning only to the writer. This is fine with me. I’ll take self-affectiveness over none any day of the week. What I like about these juxtapositional pedagogies is that they acknowledge writing as a process of discovery and association. Writing is not simply to defend. Writing is to discover. Students should discover something about themselves and their worlds that they didn’t already know, after the writing process. They will leave the comfortable for the uncharted. They will need to assimilate information in such a way to persuade others of their written view of the world. This view should be accessible to any intelligent reader. This is a type of convincing that does not involve staking out a premade position. The position becomes the destination and not the point of departure.
Disclaimer: It is probably possible to teach writing by teaching to the thesis, but in my view this would wiolate the 1st commandment, not to be boring.
What medium?
Assumption: Writing online is less boring to students than writing papers. (See Yancey’s “Made Not Only in Words”: “Don’t you wish that the energy and motivation that students bring to [blogs, video, images, email, instant messaging] they would bring to our assignments?”)
Even if this assumption is wrong, given identical prompts, I don’t see how online work could be more boring than papers.
Students will post all work to MizzouWiki.
The benefits include no paper; conserving trees and room in my backpack; the potential for a holistic view of the revision process and not just two snapshots in time, as with the dual submission system; students able to see one another’s work (i.e. the audience is the entire class); more constant and helpful feedback from classmates & instructor.
The greatest possibilities for the wiki in composition are in the revision/feedback loop. All feedback in my class will be given on the “discussion” page or in emails. This negates the problem detailed by Sommers in “Responding to Student Writing”: the instructor marking up a first draft with a confusing mix of symbols, incomplete sentences, and end-commentary. I see this in the writing lab all the time: classic examples of contradictory messages. “Students are commanded to edit a sentence to avoid an error or to condense a sentence to achieve greater brevity of style, and then told in the margins that the particular paragraph needs to be more specific or to be developed more” (150).
Since I will never be “marking” on “paper”, this problem is largely avoided. Errors in style, diction, and usage must be addressed in a more holistic and generic manner (i.e. “Here is an example of nonstandard usage, ‘x,’ here is the fix, ‘y,’ now apply ‘y’ to all further x’s”). The bulk of the feedback and all student-student feedback will be public and intended to “direct genuine revision of the text as a whole” (151). Students will be directed not to critique their peers’
grammer
(sic.), but to ask questions which the work provokes. The intention is to get away from the dual pitfalls of peer review: grammar-checking and simplistic value judgments (the like/don’t like phenomenom).
Revision on the wiki is more organic to the actual process of successful writing than the dual submission, paper system.
There will still be the problem of certain students waiting till the night before work is due to begin it, but I think the wiki works to mitigate this tendency. For one, students are able to view their classmates’ work-in-progress at any time. Some of them will be prompted to keep up with the Joneses when they see they have fallen way behind the curve. The exposed nature of the wiki will prompt better and more revision by harnessing natural competitive urges (i.e. the urge not to look like a fool in front of one’s peers). Granted this will cause some stress, but I’ll take that over boringness.
I am not so concerned with the hypertext possibilities of the wiki. It’s fine with me if students want to link out or in, but I’m not going to require they do so. I’m a sucker for linearity (in the strictest possible definition: reading from point A to B). Students will be challenged enough by the work without having to worry about extra dimensions. But if they want to link they can.
Dr. Rice’s was the first truly interactive syllabus I encountered. I am constructing something similar. Through the course page on the wiki, students will be able to access the syllabus, the class blog, writing prompts, their author pages in the wiki (used for posting their work), and a compilation of resources for research; in short, all class materials other than the textbook. The wiki provides a centralized, intuitive, and flexible framework for assigning and posting work.
What form to write?
The cumulative project vs. A series of essays.
Each student will produce a cumulative project rather than a series of disparate essays. I was taught to compose with the latter method. It remains viable but the former has the distinct advantage of being less boring.
I am less bored when I feel that what I’m doing matters.
Also, when I feel that what I’m doing is less artificial and more natural. In a series of disparate, equally weighted essays, each matters about as much as the other. When I’m done with one essay, I wipe the slate clean and start on the next. The “mattering” is strictly linear. However, in an accumulative series of projects, the person doing them will become more and more invested over time. The “mattering” has the potential to be exponential.
Text only or image & text?
This is a no-brainer. We live in a highly visual age where images are easily reproduced and anyone with a laptop has the potential power of a major publisher. For many, especially those who don’t love to read & write - my target audience - images are less boring than text. Many composition theorists have written persuasively about the utility of including images in the writing class.
Students will begin the project by choosing three images of personal importance.
The first project will be personal exposition: explaining with words the importance of the images. I’m sure I’ll get a lot of generic responses here, but I have built in some specificity to guard against this (i.e. “tell an anectdote that explains how this picture was taken”; “focus on a specific visual detail in the picture and why it captivates you,” etc.).
Students will choose one picture and determine (or guesttimate) the date on which it was taken. They will then research something that happened that day in history, picking one historical event (momentous or not) and learning as much as they can about it. They must incorporate this research into their personal exposition. The focus here is on making associative connections. This phase of the project owes a lot to mystory and hip-hop pedagogy.
In the third assignment, students continue to refine their work into a strong and unified narrative. This narrative can be linear or non-linear. Fictional elements can be introduced at this point to provide unifying “bridges.”
At the end of the semester, students will produce a final draft and present their work to the class.
I envision the end-result as a blend of expressionism and cultural critique that incorporates both image and text. The expressionistic element derives from the personal exposition; the cultural critique from the forced link to a historical event (or hopefully events). I am not concerned with the “cultural conclusions” that students reach - I have no overt political or ideological agenda other than to make them aware that they don’t exist in a vacuum, to teach critical and logical (as it applies to writing) thinking, and to show them how to make meaningful associative connections between the seemingly random noises that surround us.
The project will be more grounded in narrative
than most of the mystorian compositions that I have seen created by students, specifically those online at Ulmer’s website. In this sense, the students will be creating fairly traditional, linear compositions.
To textbook or not?
I have decided to. Mostly because I’m lazy. In fact, totally because I’m lazy.
I’ve been able to find readings in Picturing Texts that I can make work, so this is the book I’m going with. If students want to be ambitious and read the whole text, they can, but I’ll only be assigning the most relevant 120 pgs. We may also do some in-class reading of short, relevant pieces outside the textbook.
How to teach, day to day
This part is the fuzziest because I am still fleshing out my schedule, and also because I’ve never taught before so I don’t yet know what will and won’t work for me.
In general I want to:
Remember the power of underlife and use it to my advantage.
Not make school suck.
Spend about a 1/3 of class time writing.
I put in the request for a computer lab classroom, and I really hope I get it. Either way, the project will be done online. If I get the lab, in-class writing will also be done online. I’d like to do at least a short in-class assignment almost every session, relying heavily on the in-class assignments to guide class discussion. This could range from addressing common errors in usage, to what is meant by “style,” to why we should even bother learning to write. Direct applicability to the cumulative project would be a big plus.
Discuss readings and why they apply to what we’re doing.
I will, however, try to refrain from too much Q&A on the reading, or straight lecturing, as I find these to be the most boring teaching techniques. I anticipate fielding a lot of questions about the project. I anticipate a lot of unanticipatable happenings. And Eric running into my classroom to scream something unintelligible.
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