Responding to student writing

I have to admit, I left class yesterday feeling rather unsettled. Offering feedback on student writing is the most important responsibility of a writing teacher. Sommers makes this clear and I concur. What I don't agree with, however, is that the only way to offer feedback on student writing is through written comments. In fact, I believe with older students (high school and college level), relying solely on written comments can have deleterious effects on the progress of novice writers who lack confidence and skill. Being in the classroom for the last 15 years, I've seen many, many a student become dependent on teacher's comments. This results, as we discussed yesterday, in the student using such comments as a crutch, revising only what the teacher has asked and not taking ownership over revision (or writing, for that matter) in any way.

I've had far more success using the model we implemented for the book review. First, it holds writers and peer commentors accountable for the feedback they offer. Trust me . . . if students are not evaluated or otherwise held accountable for feedback, fewer than half of them will truly take the time necessary to read their peers' writing critically and offer thoughtful, appropriate comments. More importantly, however, this model fosters conversations about the writing. Written feedback is static and one-directional. Most students rarely take opportunities to follow up with teacher comments written on their work. So the comments are wrapped up in singular reader-centered context and devoid of any kind of writer-centered context. Of course students will misinterpret comments, not know what to do with them, etc.

Fostering a dialogic conversation about the writing, however, avoids such traps. Student and teacher are given the opportunity to collaborate on a piece of writing, problem solving together, exchanging ideas, asking for and offering clarification of those ideas, etc.

In accomplishing the above, too, I think the model I espouse also does something else that is important. It begins to transfer responsibility for learning and writing growth from the teacher to the student. When the semester/year ends, the student is on his/her own. If the teacher has not transferred that responsibility, any kind of progress that did take place could be lost. And that could be very frustrating for student writers.

I'm not saying that writing teachers should never offer written feedback on writing. But I do think that relying solely on, even privileging, written feedback, is short-sighted.

Distant (and not so distant) Voices: Assessing Anson 10 years later

Anson, Chris. "Distant Voices: Teaching and Writing in a Culture of Technology." College English 61.3 (1999): 261-280. JSTOR. Web. 1 March 2010.

"Distant Voices" was written ten years ago by an established composition scholar who was quickly carving a new niche in English and composition studies--that of technology and writing. Because I sat in on a lecture given by Anson this past fall, I thought his article would provide a rich opportunity to look back at our recent past as a way to assess the current state of technology in writing courses and to speculate where we might be heading. This project in looking back attests to just how far we've come in the use of technology. We (academia and, in particular, the discipline of writing) have moved in directions that apparently even a leader in the field could not predict. Moreover, a revisiting of Anson's piece allows us to understand just how wrong many of the "doom and gloom" images of technology invading our classrooms were.

Anson spends quite a bit of time describing at length how a student of the future might engage with technology. His hypothetical scenario features a student who takes a laptop to class to inscribe notes, who uses the laptop to conduct research without ever stepping foot in a library, and who also uses it to access and watch a video lecture of a professor she's never met. The same student sheds the laptop only to go to another lab, located in a satellite campus of a corporate business that specializes in the delivery of online instruction, to submit an essay. The student is a drone to an education, one sponsored by corporate America, that is rather disconnected from the University awarding credit for such courses. The student is alone, isolated, vacant. The description is presented as a "worst case scenario" of sorts and offers a strong warning: "we [academics] must take control of these technologies, using them in effective ways and not . . . substituting them for those contextws and methods that we hold to be essential for learning to write" (263).

Anson gets a lot right with this hypothetical scenario--the reliance on laptops, the use of databases to access scholarly research, the implementation of online instruction. But we haven't witnessed (yet) a corporate takeover of academic campuses and we don't have to go to separate labs to submit work. We can do it from the comfort of our dorm rooms with, yes, that wonderfully mobile laptop.

But Anson gets something else wrong. While I think his skepticism of technology was/is rather healthy, it seems precipitated on an overall distrust of the relationships upon which an education is founded, that among colleagues and between teachers and students. He sees the allure of technology for both faculty and students in its promise to make our jobs and lives easier. He doesn't (and perhaps couldn't) anticipate just how effectively both students and teachers could collaborate online, for instance. Whereas he warns that universities will soon need to establish policies banning online office hours and limiting online instruction delivery, we've seen such technological advancements yield numerous benefits for the academy and the students it serves. Anson suggests that technology has the potential to greaten the divide between the privileged and underprivileged. Ironically, the technologies he warns about, including online instruction, have actually brought once marginalized and disengaged students into the fold. Over the last several years, I have enjoyed the opportunity to teach courses online during the summer. I've had students enrolled in my classes who were working full-time (either because they were paying their tuition without assistance from parents or because they were older students who were going back to earn a degree in later adulthood), students who were out of the country doing missionary work, and students who simply didn't have a car and were unable to make it to campus because of reduced bus schedules. These are all students who would not be taking a summer course had it been offered in a traditional format.

It is also important to note the model of online instruction Anson paints is more akin to correspondence courses in which students work at their own pace, never having contact with a faculty member or peer. Grading is done not by teachers, but by evaluators responsible for evaluating hundreds of papers at a time. Thankfully, such a model is rather removed from the direction "distance" education has actually moved in. In my online classes, for example, students worked in groups on projects, they had weekly deadlines to meet and they all had individual contact with me. And, importantly, I graded their work. That said, in reading some of my students' posts, Anson's model of distance education poses a greater risk in the public schools. I wonder what an equivalent article might look like if written now for high school teachers and administrators.

The final warning offered by Anson involves the danger technology poses to the disciplinary status of composition. Writing from within an English Department (in an English journal, nonetheless), Anson fears his hypothesized model for distance education could further disenfranchise composition studies, relegating it even further to a status as a service unit for the University. That hasn't happened (or not to any great extent than it already was a service unit), but that may have far more to do with the fracturing of English departments we saw in the late 1990s and which continues today. Anson could not have predicted that composition programs would become independent departments, creating PhD programs in writing and rhetoric, and, rather successfully, filling a gap in undergraduate offerings and majors. It cannot be denied, however, that technology has facilitated such momentum. As technology evolved, so did the need to create courses that could both theorize such advancement and give students opportunities to practice its applications in a critical manner. Who better to fill this need than compositionists?

As much as I can sit here at my computer and point out where Anson plain got it wrong, I have to admit that even today I have colleagues who shun electronic media, online instruction, and digital writing in their classes because they possess fears similar to those Anson projects. I haven't any answers, but I do wonder what becomes of education if and when teachers stop educating themselves. We--teachers--will not survive if we resist technology. That is a point Anson makes clear.

Post Process Pedagogy: or the ivory tower meets the wrecking ball

I wish we could get away from labeling things "post." It is so . . . oh, post-post post-modern. Labeling something with "post" doesn't make us seem smarter or even subversive. Instead, it demonstrates our lack of creativity. So let's just call things by what they are (and not by what they are not). Yes, Jacques Derrida is rolling in his grave right now.

So here's the thing about post process pedagogy. It isn't so much anti-process as it is pro-writing. The post process folk don't necessary dislike process, but they recognize that writing process in and of itself is not a static, universal thing. In other words, there is no The Writing Process. So to teach writing process as a single, linear system for students to master is short-sighted. It will not teach students to write better; it may not even teach students to write more efficiently. I could not agree more. The first time I encountered writing process was in high school. I was writing my first 20 page research paper and I was required to submit a thesis statement, followed a week later with notecards containing my research, then an outline, and then a paper (noticeably absent was the requirement that I submit a revised paper). I hated writing these papers. I had no voice in them and I was writing for my teacher (who hated me, as we've already established). I didn't learn anything about writing from this research project, which is a shame since I spent six weeks on it. I learned a bit about Ibsen's _A Doll's House_ but ask me now to recall even the plot of the play and I'm sure I'd get wrong a great many details.

The only thing the writing of the paper, the outline, and the notecards did for me, was make me not procrastinate. I guess this is a good thing, but I probably would have written the same paper had I written as I always had: the night before in a frenzy of adrenaline, worry, and caffeine. I am not a better writer today because I was forced to master The Writing Process.

So how do we teach students to write if, as the pp folk (and I) suggest, process is not the answer? (This is my question for organizing discussion) According to Kant and his cronies, we can't teach writing because writing is an activity, not a body of knowledge we can consumer, teach, master. And here is where I differ from the post process folk. While I agree that writing is an activity, and I buy into the idea that it is public, indeterminate, and situational, I actually do believe we can teach writing. How? Well, we first teach students how to interpret the rhetorical context/situation of every writing task. We teach them the skill of analysis (of audience, purpose, and occasion) and reflection (of their own decisions as writers), so that they stop writing in an academic vacuum, as I did in high school. And then, we allow them to write and write often. I find it odd that students do very little writing in writing classes. I find it equally odd that students read and discuss published works, but are never given opportunities to discuss their own writing in writing classes.

So to Kant and to Breuch, I say "yes we can!" We can teach the background (beyond grammar), we can teach students how to make good decisions as writers, and we can teach students how to assess those decisions when all is said and done. We can use student writing (and all the reflections on those decisions we made when writing) as the course content. And we do not have to abandon process entirely, but we give it to students as a tool. And we can allow them the freedom to work outside or beyond that tool when they are ready. And instead of calling what we're doing post process, let's call it "the fish feathers approach to writing" --which has about as much meaning as "post process."

Rocket Science or Something to do with Best Practices?

I've come to expect a degree of whining and resistance in my GWRTC 103 classes, and, frankly, I understand it. GWRTC students are freshmen; freshmen often have limited experience with the expectations of college professors regarding workload and motivation. They also don't fully understand how workload and motivation equate to success. I do not expect to encounter such behaviors in an upper level class, however, and I am rather baffled and disheartened that I'm dealing with them in a class for teachers. So, let me begin to answer the question that seems to be on the minds of several students: What on earth does learning about the history of rhetoric have to do with learning how to teach writing effectively?


We teach a writing process that is firmly rooted in the offices of rhetoric described on p. 27. Yet we call it by different terms and have conflated a few of the offices. Why would we have done such a thing? What has happened in the last two centuries that would have precipitated such a change? Yes, I know. I am answering my question by posing more. Socratic method, anyone?

What do we gain by such dialectic anyway? What do our students gain, more importantly?

And then I guess there is the issue I raised last week about a teacher's responsibility in this, the 21st century. We are not merely responsible for teaching our students how to write. We are responsibe for teaching them responsibility, for teaching them how to be good citizens and contributing members of society. Didn't the Sophists, Socrates, Plato, and even Aristotle have a bit to say about the relation between rhetoric and virtue? Hmmm . . . something else to ponder.

Finally, here is one rather immediate reason it might be helpful to study rhetoric in a teaching writing class. (and I mean this more in a "big sister" kind of way than in a "I'm evaluating you" kind of way) By studying rhetoric, we learn about foundational principles such as rhetorical proofs, importantly, ethos. And ethos, you'll recall, refers to one's credibility. So, how much credibility does a teacher-in-training have if he/she whines about class assignments and doesn't bother to try to think for him or herself about why the material is important to a future career in teaching? (Yes, this is a rhetorical question.)

See you in class!

Teachers Expectations

The challenges presented by today's inclusive classrooms often lead teachers to teach "to the middle." How might this harm students?

Teaching to the middle is common when a teacher has 100+ students; in fact, such an approach is likely the rule these days instead of the exception. But I have seen the detrimental effects of such a practice.

My nephew, who is in his first year of college, is quite intelligent. He scored well enough on his SATs to receive scholarship offers from several local colleges. But he was a C student. Whenever his mother would admonish him for not doing better, he'd complain that he was bored or that the teacher thought "everyone in the class was stupid." He began to resent his teachers for not believing he (and everyone else in the class) could do better. But Paul was lucky. He had the support and resources at home to be successful. What about those students in the class who didn't have books at home? Or those who struggled to meet the demands of a curriculum that was not tailored to their needs?

I've also experienced first hand in my own class room the results of what I call the "feel good" curriculum of the late 1980s and 1990s (what Williams refers to as the "self esteem movement"). During my second year of teaching, I gave my AP English students a poem by Nikki Giovanni called "Ego Tripping (There may be a reason why)." The poem narrates several great moments in the rise of Western Civilization and attributes such progress to the presence of women. But during the class discussion of the poem, one of my students said it was about the fickle nature of women. I responded that the student was misreading and asked him if he had read the author biography that introduced the poem. He, of course, had not. This was a smart, confident student. I was not surprised that he stayed after class to talk to me about the poem. But I was shocked by his perspective of the situation. He said to me, "How can I be wrong? It's literature. I'm allowed to interpret it any way I want." I didn't know how to respond. Surely there are wrong interpretations of litature--those that can't possibly be supported by textual evidence and those that run counter to everything we know about an author and his/her oeuvre. But somehow, this student had been led to believe that anything goes in literary analysis. His teachers' refusals to tell him "no, not exactly" cheated him and prevented him from developing a fairly essential life skill--critical thinking!