Metawriting by Deanna Mascle

My Child will be Left Behind

2012-01-20T08:46:00.000-08:00

My son was both pleased and proud when we found out thathe was one of the select few fourth graders at his elementary school to beenrolled in both advanced reading and math classes. My husband and I were aswell. We were proud that his hard work (and our nagging attention to homework)had paid off, but it was more important to us that he would be challenged tolearn and grow in these classes. The classes came at a great time for Noah as astudent. He had always enjoyed school but was just starting to get a bit boredwith it and there were times in third grade when he got in trouble for talkingor goofing around because he was done with his work ahead of most of hisclassmates. He loved his new classes and teachers and we were pleased that thelessons focused on exploring advanced material as well as taking a morein-depth look at reading and content. He didn’t achieve straight As but he waslearning and working hard while engaged in challenging projects and lessons sowe were happy.

Following Christmas break, Noah came home from school withthe news that the advanced classes would be cancelled and he (and the otheradvanced students) would now spend the day taking classes with his fifth-gradeclassmates. Now, for the first time in his school career, Noah doesn’t want togo to school. He is bored and often left with nothing to do but read or drawbecause he is done with his work or they are covering material he has alreadycompleted. If his attitude has deteriorated so quickly in just two weeks Idread the remainder of the school year.

I was very proud of my son’s initial reaction to thesituation. He wrote an email to his principal protesting the policy and met withthe principal to discuss the situation. Not many 10 year old kids would standup for themselves and their education like that. I only wish his first officialprotest had ended on a more positive note.

Now Tod and I are left with more questions than answers.What can we do to make sure our kid is challenged and engaged in school? Whatcan we do to foster and encourage his love of learning? This is a kid whoregularly asks me questions about history and current events then carries on anintelligent conversation with interesting opinions about those events. This isa kid who taught himself to write HTML code over Christmas break and keeps ajournal and started his own production company with a friend to create videosand games.

I don’t want my son to hate school and not just becauseit makes my life a lot more difficult. I want him to love learning as much I dobecause I believe very strongly that curiosity and quest for knowledge are keysto success in life. I don’t want him to see school as some sort of purgatory wherehe is simply serving time.

As an educator I have been increasingly distraught by thedirection that U.S. schools have taken. I cannot believe how many hours of mychild’s education have already been spent preparing and taking standardized teststo the detriment of real learning and engagement. I continue to be appalled atthe many ways that administrators and politicians undermine the ability of classroomteachers to teach and meet the needs of their students. Until this most recentincident I was able to take comfort from the many wonderful teachers who wereable to work around, through, and under the system to engage their students inthe fun and thrill of learning, but now, as a parent, I fear that my son has learned theultimate lesson of his education and that my child will be left behind.

Setting my class agenda

2012-01-16T13:42:00.000-08:00

Unicycling juggler

I am teaching two verydifferent writing classes this semester and I am excited about my plans but abit worried about juggling the two without dropping balls (combined with theflaming swords and sharp knives I am already juggling as part of myadministrative duties for the National Writing Project). I am teaching first-year writing (aka Writing I or Eng100 at my institution) and professional writing (which is a 300-level class).

I have two primary goalsfor my first-year writing students. I first and foremost want them to developas reflective and self-regulating writers but I also hope to increase theirunderstanding community and collaboration. I think focusing on those twoaspects of writing development will set a strong foundation for their continuedgrowth and development.

Our first week of classes(which officially begin tomorrow) will include elements of both. I willcontinue to use Twitter to help us develop classroom community which includesindividual and class Twitter feeds, introducing ourselves via Twitter, and socializing via Twitter. In addition, I’m asking students to keep a journal torecord their reflections on weekly topics, discuss those topics as a class, andTweet about those topics as well.

Our first weeklyreflection and discussion topic will focus on writers. I posted a prompt on theclass blog that included the National Conversation on Writing’s video “Everyone’s a writer” and some interviews with students about how they define themselves as writers.

My goals for myprofessional writing students are more sophisticated versions of those for Eng100 (at least I’m consistent). I also want my professional writing students todevelop as reflective and self-regulating writers, but our focus in this classwill be on discourse community, audience, and genre.

I am also using Twitterfor this class and they have the same initial Twitter assignments and, in fact,will engage in similarly-structured reflective assignment that includes a cycleof reflective journal posts, class discussion, and Twitter posts.

Our first weeklyreflection and discussion topic for professional writing will explore what wemean when use the term professional writing and what they hope to learn fromthe class. I share some definitions that others have given and then bring itback to the study of rhetoric sharing with them a personal blog of mine aboutrhetoric as well as the "In Defense of Rhetoric" video. I then conclude with aselection of Drucker’s “The Age of Social Transformation” about knowledgeworkers. Hopefully I haven’t set too ambitious of an agenda. I guess I’ll findout this week.

I can’t wait to begin ourdiscussions. Do you think my students are excited, too?

The Importance of the Right Teacher

2012-01-03T10:00:00.000-08:00

Hello, as your writingteacher for this semester I want you to understand a little about why I teachthe way that I teach. Not every student responds to my teaching style and Iwant you to understand what you are getting yourself into while there is still timeto take another class.

I am a big believer thatpeople learn from doing and trying and pursuing their own investigations. Ican’t teach you (very much) – but I can help you learn (a great deal). Teaching does not equal learning.

I have spent myprofessional life writing but I still remember a time when I thought theability to write well was a gift that some people possessed – and that I did not.I know better now but I still secretly (and sometimes out loud) suspect thateveryone else writes better than I do. What saves me from quitting is theknowledge that I know that many people who are better writers – and make theirliving from writing – feel those same doubts. Maybe that makes me a lesserperson but it comforts me nonetheless.

I have learned that thebest way to become a better writer is to write, get some feedback (including myown), think about what I’ve written and that feedback, then write some more. Ihave learned this the hard way in newsrooms and slaving away at magazinearticles and novels and I am still grateful to the many writing groups whohelped me improve my craft.

Each of these beliefsshapes the kind of teacher that I am and the way that I teach. What does thismean for you?

Believing that peoplelearn by doing means that while I will deliberately present you with learningchallenges in an effort to drive your learning experience, I will not give youan instruction manual, recipe, or formula. Rarely is there one magical perfectway to do something so why would I make you learn that way? I’d much rather youwork out the best way for you. This is difficult for many students – especiallythose who want a recipe for getting an A. Another important aspect of thisbelief is that I rarely answer a question right off the bat. I’ll meet youhalfway, but I expect you to give as well as receive. This means that I don’twant to hear that you are confused. I want to hear what you do understand andat what point you got confused as well as what you think/guess. I will neverpenalize you for thinking, but I do get frustrated when you don’t think andsometimes when I’m tired and cranky that frustration shows.

I never believed I couldbe a writer. I totally get the fear of writing that many of you possess and thebone-deep knowledge that you will never ever be a writer because writing iseasy for other people. Let me clue you in. Writing is hard – for everyone.There are days when I wish I could be back hauling kegs of beer and boxes ofchicken parts because that work would be easier and grease burns less painfulthan banging my head on my desk. Yes, there are days when my writing goes wellbut that is not because I have a gift or talent (or secret formula), butbecause I have a lot of experience and practice. I know how to prime the pumpto get the words flowing and I know a number of tricks to help me when the flowstops. There will be a number of writing assignments that don’t result in agrade or have a word count – just an expectation – because I am teaching yousome of those tricks so when the time comes to draft a paper it won’t be aspainful as it has been in the past. This is not meaningless make-work but itmight feel like it at the time.

Finally, I’m going to askyou to engage in a level of thinking about your writing that you have likelynever engaged in before. This is not simply giving the writing process a winkand a nod. This is not going through the motions of peer review. This is honestreflection about what you are doing, why you are doing it, and what you need todo to become a better writer. The key here is not what you need to do to earnan A or whatever goal you have set for yourself, but what will make you abetter writer. Grades come and go but improving yourself is forever and that ismy goal.

Ultimately, you have todecide if you want to really learn how to be a better writer and start workingon that goal or if you would rather take a safer and more straight-forwardwriting class.

Key Influence: Peter Elbow

2011-12-27T08:55:00.000-08:00

Peter Elbow has influencedmy writing and teaching as well as work with other writers for decades.Freewriting and other techniques, such as writing workshop, designed to unlockthe writer within have helped me grow as a writer and a writing teacher.

I continually return toElbow’s work to help sustain writing workshop in my classroom and helping tohelp my students develop agency as well as become better writers. In fact, Ibelieve re-reading some Elbow over winter break may just help me restructure mywriting workshop and get back to the place I want to be with it and help me getout of my students’ way. I think I’ll need to revisit the criterion-basedquestions in particular to help my students give each other better feedback.Thinking it through from Elbow’s perspective I think I see where I strayed fromthe path and mucked things up a bit.

I cannot stress enough howmuch “Writing Without Teachers” has influenced the way that I teach writing andshape my own writing classroom. Elbow has also helped me gain a betterunderstanding of good and bad writing which fits in well with my focus onwriting self-efficacy. I rely on Elbow’s methods of freewriting as well asediting but I also love the emphasis that he places on confidence and dealingwith anxiety as well as writing to learn.

Elbow’s work has made atremendous contribution to the writer and writing teacher that I am andcontinues to shape my growth and development as a writer and teacher.

Important Influence: Anne Beaufort

2011-12-26T17:31:00.000-08:00

From the moment that Ifirst encountered Anne Beaufort’s work during my doctoral work at Texas Tech Iwanted to learn more. Her ethnographic studies of writers moving from academicto workplace writing and theories of writing expertise have strongly influencedmy teaching as well as my own research.

Learning more about Beaufort’sprofessional history only furthered my infatuation and interest. Like me, shebegan as a classroom teacher and discovered that writing was her first love.She has also written for weekly newspapers and worked in corporatecommunications as well as been involved with the National Writing Project.

It was her work drawingfrom cognitive psychology that led me to pursue my own interest and research inwriting self-efficacy. In addition, her work on context and discoursecommunities as well as the development of writers continues to feed my teachingand research. She continues to be a source of inspiration and knowledge for howwriters are made.

How well did my semester plan work?

2011-12-20T10:20:00.000-08:00

As Robert Burns noted: “The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, Gang aft agley” or the more popularlyknown “The best laid schemes of Mice and Men oft go awry.” While my class plansrarely (I hope) lead to grief and pain or even joy, this quote is apt for myteaching experience. Every teacher knows that the “best laid” lesson plansrarely work out exactly as planned but as WC Fields wisely noted: “if at firstyou don’t succeed, try, try again.” Perhaps it is the second part of that quotethat most applies to my blog post: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, tryagain. Then quit. There’s no point in being a damn fool about it.”

If I want to learn and grow as a teacher then I must evaluate andreflect on the successes and failures of my past classes – and perhaps mostimportant I must learn from them so I can avoid making the same “damn fool”mistakes. I try to keep this in mind every semester as I embark on the 3x3semester evaluation suggested by Profhacker.

First, three things that went well: focus on community, reading groups, andemphasizing reflection. This semester I focused on developing class communityand teaching my students about why community is important (as students and aswriters). I deliberately used Twitter as a tool to build community in my classas well as to teach students about community. I think this worked well and I’mfinally realizing the potential of using Twitter as a teaching tool. I alsocreated reading discussion groups to further support community and to solvesome of the problems I’ve been having with my reading assignment. These were adefinite improvement over letting students go solo and forming them aroundstudent interests solved some of the problems I experienced with past readinggroups. Finally, I placed even more emphasis on reflection than before. Icontinued with literacy narratives as before but I added journals, reflectiondiscussions, and Twitter notes to provide further opportunity for reflectionthroughout the semester. I had used all these in the past but was much moredeliberate about connecting them this semester and I was pleased with how thatworked out.

Now, three things that didn’t work so well: reading groups, writingworkshop, and rubrics. Organizing the reading groups by interest worked reallywell and I think helped students connect with each other and the material in moremeaningful ways. However, I am still doing too much of the heavy lifting hereto organize them. I need to get out of their way and let them do the work. Idefinitely need to micromanage less next semester. Same is true for writingworkshop. I need to orchestrate the process but be careful about stepping in toosoon or they will never learn to do it without the training wheels. Finally, Ineed to redo/rework/reconsider my use of rubrics. I don’t feel they areadequately representing evaluation.

Finally, I plan to restructure both my reading group and writingworkshop assignments as well as redo my rubrics. This last will be the mostchallenging because I’m thinking about making it a collaborative exercise with inputfrom my students. I’m not prepared to totally relinquish my control over thisbut I think making it a collaborative exercise could be a goodlearning/teaching tool which will fit in well with my intended focus for thespring semester. I’m teaching Writing I for the first time in a while and Iintend to focus on not only how we become (more) literate but why it isimportant. Our reading and writing will focus on that topic which still fallswithin my writing-about-writing interest of the past but will allow me to workwith my increasing interest in reflection and community as well as thecitizenship aspect my program assessment requires.

Postpartum Depression and suffering from the End-of-Semester Blues

2011-12-19T10:34:00.000-08:00

Grades were due thismorning at my institution and that may be a contributing factor in my end-of-semesterblues. I hate assigning grades to papers and to students, but unfortunately itis a necessary evil. I would rather focus on helping my students learn and growas writers, but too many other forces (including my students) demand that Iassign a grade. Perhaps if we could find a way to measure and quantify thatlearning and growth I would feel better about the grades that I assign, howeveras scholars of writing studies know, that learning and growth is not confinedto the 16 weeks they were assigned to my class and does not show up in easily quantifiable ways.

I can use my own hard-wonexpertise to study a variety of data sources and evaluate the successes andfailures of the semester which can help me (if not my students) move past thosegrades. I hope this process will help move me out of my current funk which Idescribe as postpartum depression or the end-of-semester blues, but I just can’tsummon the energy to do so. I should also be cleaning my house and wrappingpresents, but I don’t see either of those tasks getting done today.

The U.S. National Libraryof Medicine defines postpartum depression as the depression that occurs inwomen after giving birth. While it may be caused by changes in hormonal levels,it can also be caused by nonhormonal factors such as lack of sleep and worriesabout her ability as a mother. I can certainly sympathize with both of thosefactors at this point in the academic calendar and so feel justified in usingthe term to describe my current state. I am lacking sleep and worried about myability as a teacher.

I’ve also read thatpostpartum depression is also caused by a period of grief and mourning. Whilethe birth of a child is certainly cause for celebration, it is also the deathof the dreams and possibilities that the expectant mother held. It is also theloss of a closeness that can never be recaptured. In time, those losses willfade in importance as new dreams and possibilities center around the child anda new relationship is forged. I think teachers experience similar losseswhenever a class ends. Certainly this is the point when we must accept that allthe dreams and possibilities that existed at the beginning of the semester havenow either been fulfilled (or dare we hope exceeded) or fizzled into somethingwe neither expected nor wanted. Fortunately, we can start anew in the nextsemester, but that doesn’t seem like much of a consolation prize when we aretired from the end-of-semester grading onslaught and worn out from dealing withthe angst of our students. Maybe tomorrow I’ll be better equipped to look backobjectively at the Fall 2011 Semester and begin looking ahead to Spring 2012.

Studying how writers become writers

2011-11-30T09:42:00.001-08:00

My research studied how one group of Appalachian women became writers. I followed this group during their year-long experience with a National Writing Project Summer Institute in order to better understand this process of becoming a writer and the role of writing self-efficacy and writing apprehension in this development.

I pursued this project because I think we can do a better job of fostering writing development. I define myself as a rhetorician and like Wayne Booth, in The Rhetoric of Rhetoric, I consider myself a student of rhetoric. My favorite definition of rhetoric is borrowed from Andrea Lunsford who defines rhetoric as "the art, practice, and study of [all] human communication." I agree with Booth that the quality of our lives – indeed our survival – depends on the quality of our rhetoric. Rhetoric can, and does, change the world. However, decades of working with writers, both as a professional writer and as a teacher of writers, has taught me that many lack confidence in their ability to communicate effectively. This is what drives me to study the process of becoming a writer and the role that writing self-efficacy and writing apprehension play in this process. Cheryl Geisler defines rhetoric as a productive art and says that rhetorical inquiry should "make a difference in the world". She asks how we can create a better society through the pursuit of rhetoric.

An important step toward this goal of a better society is fostering the growth and development of future rhetoricians. Many people do not consider themselves writers and do not believe they can become writers. Often writing instruction does little or nothing to change these beliefs as it focuses on the development of specific skills and writing in specific contexts – rather than attending to the growth and development of the writer.

We can, and should, do both. The process of learning and developing new skills can actually support the growth and development of a writer if we are mindful. My dissertation study is a good example. A National Writing Project Summer Institute is primarily a learning community. While participants are heavily engaged in the practice of writing they are also demonstrating and researching professional practices. While writing activities take place every day of the Summer Institute, they do not play a dominant role every day. Some days are focused on practical demonstrations and discussions while other days are focused on research and study of professional issues. However, at the end of three weeks of this activity, most of the 17 women involved in my study experienced a decrease in writing apprehension while underdoing the transformation to writer. Even more important was that they maintained that confidence level during the following year. This matters to me, and I hope to others as well, because my study confirms the research of others that as apprehension decreases evidence of self-regulating activity, such as goal setting and metawriting, increases as does agency and self-efficacy. Writing self-efficacy not only plays an important role in the development of a writer but self-efficacious writers continue to grow and develop because they are self-regulating.

Researching Community

2011-11-14T11:23:00.001-08:00

The focus of my currentwork is community. In particular, I am interested in the role that technologyand social media play in our understanding of and participation in communities.It is important that we increase our understanding of the concept of communityand how people live, work, and communicate within and among today’s networkedand global communities.

Technology and socialmedia have had a tremendous impact on the shape and definition of community.Social networks have made the boundaries separating communities porous and easilycrossed as well as made it easier to create our own communities. It is crucialto my roles as a technical communicator, teacher, and researcher that Iunderstand how to work in these spaces. I believe that further study of the “social literacy skills” that Cargile Cook advocates for technical communicatorsas well as the “civic mechanisms” promoted by Spinuzzi can increase ourunderstanding of working, teaching, and researching in networked environments.

Digital Community and Social Media

Toward this end I amcurrently engaged in a study of my writing students’ dual struggle with digitalcommunity and social media. As a teacher, I believe it is important to developa strong classroom community although doing so in an online class can bechallenge. Therefore, I am studying the pedagogical implications of this workand our use of both social media and course management software to create alearning community. I also seek to help my students develop an understanding ofthe discourse communities they will join. However, as a researcher I am also interestedin their struggle to identify and join professional communities using digitaland social media tools as I believe their experience can expand ourunderstanding of this issue. This work has led to conference proposals forComputers and Writing, Computer Connection (part of the Conference on College Compositionand Communication), and the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing aswell as a proposal for the special issue on social media for Technical Communication Quarterly.

I see technicalcommunication as a natural bridge between rhetorical tradition and cutting-edgetechnology. As a result, I am working as a technical communicator to create a digitalnetwork to support the work of my National Writing Project site. This work willalso inform the article proposed for TCQ. This includes a study of thecommunity and the ways that social media has helped and hindered communicationand social capital as well as a self-study of my own growth and development asa technical communicator.

Agency and Writing Self-Efficacy

While I am stillinterested in agency and writing self-efficacy, the topic of my dissertation, thisfocus on community is what excites me the most at this time. I have continued to collect data from eachgroup of writers that I teach with the intent of conducting a longitudinalstudy. This work is the foundation for an upcoming presentation the Conferenceon College Composition and Communication as well as the research project I amdirecting for my undergraduate research assistant. We are currently consideringpublication venues for her work. In addition, I recently responded to a callfrom Business Communication Quarterlyfor strategies to teaching writing and used this work to support myrecommendations. Finally, I am interested in exploring the intersections andconnections among community, social capital, agency, and efficacy and suspectthat I may find I have not moved as far from my original research as it appearsat this time.

Do I really want a Tablet for Christmas?

2011-11-09T04:52:00.000-08:00

Just for the record. I’m not a bling kind of girl. I am atechnogeek. However, I am also of Dutch-descent which means I don’t spend moneylightly. Unfortunately, this does diminish my technogeek chops to some extent.

I admit that I was plagued much of this Fall semester byiPad envy. Even as friends and colleagues demonstrated the many wonderous appsfeatured by the device I contemplated my chances of getting away clean if Iknocked them over the head with my knapsack and snatched their iPad away fromthem. I dreamed and discarded any number of dastardly plans to acquire one formyself as the weeks passed. I informed my husband that all I wanted forChristmas was an iPad and then, even as the words fell from my lips, I reallyconsidered whether I wanted an iPad enough to justify that blow to our familybudget. Hmmm.

It was only a few years ago that I suffered from iPhoneenvy. As the owner of a $25 Go phone not only the device but the plan necessaryto support it was a daunting expense. I was able to defeat that green-eyedmonster with the purchase of an iPod Touch and never really looked back. LastChristmas I did upgrade to a $50 Go phone to make it easier to text but thereare only a few occasions when I wish for an iPhone. Clearly I dodged a bulletthere. Remembering the iPhone virus was enough to send me out to do my homeworkand to really ponder why I want a tablet and what I hope to do with it.

While I admit there are many nifty educational andteaching apps, the simple truth is that I teach predominantly online and so Iwon’t be toting my Tablet into class. I also agree that Tablets are muchhandier than many other forms of technology for meetings. While I do go to anumber of meetings I tend to tote a little notebook that fits handily into mycoat pocket rather than any form of technology. If I feel the urge fortechnology my iPod Touch nestles quite nicely beside the notebook with no extrabags necessary.

So if I’m not going to use it extensively for myon-campus work then what do I plan to use it for? I do plan to use it for ane-reader. I have resisted earlier e-readers because I just couldn’t see layingdown that amount of money for a device that has only one function – and afunction that other devices I already own can serve. However, as a mother I amfrequently in a car or on a bench (if I’m lucky) or on the floor somewherewaiting for some practice or event to conclude. It would be handy to have aneasy way to carry my reading with me for those regular occasions as well asmore infrequent travel for professional and personal reasons.

I would also like to use a Tablet for casual web browsingand email checking. I can do this from my iPod Touch but there are some thingsit would just be easier to do with a larger screen. And, quite honestly,despite the fact that we have three computers in our home I am still sometimesleft without a device. How this is possible I’m not sure (there are only 3people living in our home) but there you go. I hope adding another device willbreak that deadlock.

I do expect that I will use the Tablet for entertainmentpurposes as well. I love my Touch for music and also frequently use Netflix todownload movies and shows. I would expect a larger screen would enhance thatexperience.

So, if I largely will use my tablet as an e-reader, webbrowser, and video player, then is it really worth $500 to me? I decided not.But I knew that I wanted something and so began my search for a viablealternative. In the end I was left with two much less expensive options –costing only about as much as my Touch – the Amazon Fire and Barnes and NobleNook. However, this meant another difficult decision. Both devices are so newthat I don’t have any friends who possess either. So how do I choose?

The Nook has a lot more storage with capacity to expand butthe Fire has a USB port and the Cloud so not sure how much of that is a realissue. It is unlikely I will want to tote my whole library to a locationwithout Wifi after all. Gizmodoreports that when they compared the two devices that Fire ran faster andsmoother but Nook has a better battery life. But as I don’t imagine marathonreading or viewing sessions so that will likely not be an issue.

The entertainment options of the two devices aredifferent. Not sure how to even compare. Yes, we are currently Netflixsubscribers which would suggest we go with a Nook but I’m not sure if we willmaintain that relationship – or that Netflix will survive its recent poorservice decisions. We’ve already cut back and are contemplating another.

The only other big difference is that Barnes and Noblewill offer in-store support for their Nook while Amazon support will need to bedone at a distance. How much of this is a factor for me? I think it is a biggerissue for my parents (who are also in the market for a Tablet this holidayseason). My friends with Kindles haven’t reported problems so I’m not sure itis an issue.

What do you think? Have I adequately considered all myoptions? Tell me what I should ask for this Christmas!

Releasing students into the wild with digital presentations

2011-11-07T14:30:00.000-08:00

I just posted the final assignment for my online writingclass and I deliberately left things a bit loose and vague because I want mystudents to explore and experiment. I’m already anticipating this will freakout some of my students, but I hope that most will enjoy the challenge. Rightnow, as I contemplate my newborn assignment and dream about what the futurecould bring I am excited about the possibilities. Of course, the challenge willbe working through that post-partum period after my students deliver theirprojects.

I have always had some sort of culminating project and/orpresentation for my writing classes. In my early years as a teacher that was aportfolio but for the past few years that has meant a project, such as a blog.However, I wanted to allow more room for creativity and individuality, so whileblogs are still on the table I’m hoping to get a wide variety of projects. Isuggested they consider genres such as cartoons and brickfilms as well as moretraditional types of presentations.

I have only two requirements for their projects. First,as they have been researching and writing about the communication requirementsof their profession they must stay with that topic, and second, theirpresentation must be publicly available on the web and include interactiveelements.

Some suggestions I have made to create and/or share theirprojects include:

· Squidoo

· Popplet

· Pearltrees

· Omeka

· Storify

· Posterous

· Prezi

· YouTube

· Flipsnack

· Slideshare

· 280slides

· Google docsPresentations

· Sliderocket

They have already done extensive research and writingabout their topic over the course of the semester, so while they certainly canbring in additional information that is not necessary. I am also jumpstartingthe project through some journal prompts. Am I wrong or right to let mystudents go wild with digital presentations? Should I give more structure andguidance? Have I overlooked or included tools I shouldn’t? What do you think?Share your thoughts about your own digital project assignments.

Abandoning audience awareness

2011-10-31T10:15:00.000-07:00

I spent the weekend crafting proposals for the ATTW Conference and TCQ’s special issue on Social Media – and this after spending the previous weekend crafting a proposal for Computers and Writing. While this might sound like an overly ambitious program for the spring (two conferences in addition to my already accepted panel for Cs plus a journal article) let me hasten to assure you that everything but the Cs presentation is connected to the same topic and the Cs presentation is based on my dissertation work. So yes, this is ambitious, but not entirely crazy. Of course you can talk to me after C and W to see if I still think so. That is assuming I can still speak coherently.

What also makes this less crazy is that I have spent a lot of time in recent months reading and thinking about these ideas and then discussing them with my friends Lora Arduser and Kim Elmore (who also happen to be collaborators on ATTW and (just Kim) TCQ). Kim and I have talked about this issue with Lora’s students and I have also discussed this topic with my own students. In fact, this work has inspired changes in the way I teach audience.

What I have been focused upon is the issue of community and I have approached it from a number of different angles. Back in July I wrote about “What Is Community” and then in August I wrote about “Community and Social Capital” as I tried to understand what constitutes a community and why some communities thrive and succeed and others fizzle and fail. However, that led to still more questions, such as how one joins a community which led to my September post “Community: Jumping to become a full-patch member.”

It is easy to see from these posts (and the litter of references in them) that I have been thinking about these issues a great deal in recent months. I have been thinking about them as a technical communicator and researcher, but also as a teacher and I have reached some conclusions that have dramatically changed the way that I teach and think about written communication and how it should be taught.

Scholars in composition and technical communication have long agreed that audience is a central rhetorical concern. Ede and Lunsford argued that audience plays an important role in the writing process and the creation of meaning and contended that understanding audience can “help us better understand the complex act we call composing.” Of course the problem is that understanding audience is extremely challenging for both novice and experienced writers. Ong asked: “How does the writer give body to the audience for whom he writes?” This continues to be an important question today. While Ong’s “fictional” audience and Ede and Lunsford’s “invoked” audience have informed my work, I was not satisfied. Johnson’s “involved” audience provided further inspiration and some intense conversations with my collaborators have resulted in a new assignment for my students.

I have decided not to focus on audience per se because I worry that is too limiting and one-dimensional to be useful and is, in fact, a one-way channel of communication that is, I believe, part of the problem. Porter argues against determining a “fixed meaning” of audience and I want to give my students (and myself) a much more flexible and responsive notion of audience with which to work. I don’t believe that imagining, invoking, or (even) involving the audience is enough. The writer must do more than address their audience – the writer must engage with their audience. The only way for this to truly happen is by joining the community. This does not require “full patch membership” but it does require shedding their status as an outsider.

We have laid the foundation for such work in my class this semester by studying their chosen communities as outsiders and developing the “social literacy” that Cargile Cook argues is important, but we are now embarking on a project that I hope will begin bringing them across the boundaries and into the community. This involves learning more about the “civic mechanisms” Spinuzzi claims are essential for communities. My hope is that combining this knowledge of social literacy and civic mechanisms will help my students transcend the need for audience. Stay tuned as this could all crash and burn.

In the meantime, I will continue to read and reflect. Spinuzzi’s recent blog post about “network rhetoric” and Ronfeldt’s “In Search of How Societies Work” will certainly provide fodder for my next round of reflection.

Community and Genre: Teaching Writers About Context

2011-10-10T13:30:00.000-07:00

Two of my three primary goals as a writing teacher are to help my students develop an understanding of genre and discourse community. I continually struggle to delve deeper than simply addressing audience awareness so they can learn about discourse communities and the process of becoming a full member as well as how communities shape the genres they uses.

This semester that process, or learning experience, began with building our class community. This was important to me for reasons I outlined in a previous blog post, Creating A Classroom Community, but essentially because I believe it will improve their experience with this class and help them become better writers. The first half of the semester was focused more on working with sources and building our class community, but in the second half I am more than a bit nervous about moving the issue of discourse community front and center to our discussion and work. This nervousness is in part because I haven’t fully worked out all the details yet but it is also the result of my fear that I cannot break this complex topic down effectively for my students which might simply be my fear that I am taking on too much for a general education writing class. Stay tuned!

I began the discussion of discourse community with a journal prompt for my students. It was a rather complex prompt in that I asked them to watch a brief video about Community and Genre and then read my reflections about the process of joining a community in my blog post, Jumping to become a full-patch member. It has only been a few days and so only a handful of students have posted yet but so far those responses have been good. They seem to understand the points I’m making about community and are able to pull examples from their own experiences. The next stage will be to discuss these issues as a class. It will be interesting to see where the discussion leads.

In the meantime, they are also engaged in two writing assignments that will feed our discussion and (hopefully) their understanding of discourse community and genre. They are currently working on literature reviews of peer-reviewed journals about professional training and communication needs of their intended professions. The intent is to develop a base of knowledge about the expectations and requirements of their field. Their next assignment will be to interview two professionals in their field to help them develop a fuller picture of those expectations and requirements. Toward the end of the interview assignment we will engage in another journal post and class discussion to further deepen their understanding of discourse community as well as to engage in some more specific discussion of genre.

That is where my comfort level ends. I have three more assignments planned to wrap up the semester – an analysis, a final (which is usually some sort of reflective and/or analytical essay), and a culminating project that ties the lessons of the semester into a neat package. In the past I’ve had them analyze degree programs or a professional organization’s code of ethics or best practices but at the suggestion of a colleague I’m leaning more toward some sort of community analysis. Of course how we’ll do that I’m not yet sure. I’m also struggling with whether or not to make these projects/assignments collaborative or solo (or give students the choice). I’ve got a lot of thinking to do about this. Would love to hear about how others teach their students about discourse community and genre.

Community: Jumping to become a full patch member

2011-09-27T09:53:00.000-07:00

As I prepare to talk about discourse community with a colleague’s class, I was struck by the many qualities that very different communities share whether they are professional communities, communities of faith, or social communities. This thought struck me as my husband and I watched the documentary series on Gangland on The History Channel. My colleague has invited myself and another rhetorician to explain our own recent wrestling with the definition of community. What makes a community and why do people want to join? Humans are social animals (which also makes us rhetorical animals but that is another post) and we seek out connections with others. These connections result from a variety of different common bonds that may shift, break, or strengthen over time depending on how we (or circumstances) change. Some of the essential elements that determine the strength (and longevity) of the bond include interactivity, shared interests, meaningful relationships, and a sense of history.

However, just because we want that connection does not mean that others want to connect with us. We can sit at the same lunch table with a tight clique but that does not mean we can join their conversation in any meaningful way. Every group has rules concerning membership. Gangs make their membership rules quite explicit. Recently, while watching Gangland I was struck, in light of my own recent study of communities, by the way that gang members describe the different levels of association. The Wolf Pack Motorcycle Club describes the levels of club affiliation on their web site. These are very similar to the levels described by gangs. Of course, moving from one level of gang affiliate to another usually involves much more violence and frequently physical and emotional trauma (not to mention lawbreaking).Frequently that ritual involves jumping.

I can compare these levels of membership to a personal aspect of my own life. I am a “Full Patch” member of a church. My grandparents (both sets) and parents were born, raised, and married in this denomination and I formally joined as a teen (with a ceremony following an initiation process). My husband and I were married in this denomination and up to now have raised our son in it. At different times we have been a “Friend of the Club” to other churches – either through collaboration between the churches or to attend a special service or event. This made it easier when we began considering another church home to become a “Hangaround” as we explored our options. We do not know whether or not we will progress to “Prospects” let alone “Full Patch” but I am sure that those moves will involve a formal process or ceremony of some sort. I’m fairly certain it won’t involve a jumping. Although my previous experience with this did include a verbal jumping of a sort. It wasn’t verbal abuse but a close questioning of my beliefs. While not painful, it was a similar demonstration of my ability to join that community.

Similarly, a professional organization I study has levels of membership. This organization has public events, just like the Wolf Pack has rides, and there are a number of people who attend these functions from time to time which would make them “Friends of the Club.” Then there are people who attend events and state an interest in joining some day which would make them “hangarounds.” This organization has a formal application process for “prospects” and a year-long initiation before they can become “full patch” members. Again, no jumping but certainly a trial of sorts.

I think the primary reason people join a community is to give shape and meaning to their lives and to belong to something bigger than themselves and of course going through this membership process also helps build those common bonds among community members. Those bonds and those “stories of solidarity” (as mentioned by Miller) that emphasize their shared history and interests are what shapes a community.

You can lead a student to her journal but you can’t make her reflect – or can you

2011-09-23T06:03:00.000-07:00

I believe strongly in the power of reflection to help writers learn and grow, but there is one problem with reflection as a tool for change – humans are lazy and thinking is hard. We don’t always choose the path of least resistance, but most of the time we want to see clear rewards linked to that greater challenge. That means it is up to me – the writing teacher – to make my students understand that the time and energy they spend seriously reflecting on their writing will be rewarded. Reflection in my writing classroom incorporates four tools or sets of tasks: journals, tweets, class discussion, and literacy narratives.

At various points over the past decade I have used journals in my writing classes, but it was not until I threw myself into the “Writing About Writing” movement that I found journals really worked for me in terms of seeing students learn and grow from their use. In the past, journals tended to be cluttered with minutia about students and frequently referred to writing in only the most superficial ways. However, more recently I have taken to requiring fewer journal entries (perhaps 10 for an entire semester) but giving fairly specific prompts that ask students to think about their past, present and future writing habits and experiences.

Journals are only the first step of the process. I then ask them to distill this longer journal entry into a Tweet which is sent to our class Twitter feed. I have two reasons for this. First, I want them to delve deep beneath the surface for the journal entry, but I also want them to pull out the one important message that can be found in that reflection. Perhaps more important, I want them to see how that important message fits into the larger world and the experiences of other writers. Using the class Twitter feed connects their thoughts with their classmates but using Twitter hashtags connect their thoughts with writers from around the globe. I am so proud of some of their observations that I retweet them in my personal stream.

We then take those ideas and conversational threads to our class discussion board where we can expand and comment more cohesively on what we started in Twitter. I have found staging the discussion after the journal entries and Tweets are posted provides more fodder for a good discussion. However, what I find most rewarding is that this conversation becomes about the students and their questions and observations. I am very excited that there are days when I can simply be a participant and not a leader because the students play an active role and have something to say so they do not need prodding and steering.

Finally, I use literacy narrative to channel this conversation back to the individual writer. I assign a literacy narrative in two parts – one part at the beginning of the semester and one at the end. Part one is focused more on the writer’s past and what has formed them as the literate person they are today as well as exploring their views on the definition of writer and whether or not they consider themselves one as well as the issue of the overall importance of communication skills in the modern world. Part two draws together the lessons learned and challenges faced over the course of the semester. Each major assignment includes a cycle of journal, Tweet, and discussion which in turn feeds the literacy narrative. I also ask students to look back at their early thoughts and opinions about writing to see what has changed for them.

I have found this recursive reflection has inspired my students to think more deeply about their writing and reach more thoughtful conclusions than before. Or perhaps I should say – more of my students are doing so. There have always been a number of students every semester who have responded to my call for reflection, but there are usually a large number of students who resist thinking deeply (at least on record). However, adding in the public reflection on Twitter has meant that students realize they are not alone with their struggles and challenges which frequently tends to open discussion about these challenges and thinking about these struggles in ways students refused to do before. Also, the class discussions mix in enough thoughtful discussion to inspire some students to delve deeper than they originally intended. Like Yancey, O’Neill, Leaker and Ostman, and others I believe that these types of metacognitive activities make students better writers and are part of the writing process of successful writers. My dissertation results further confirmed this belief for me. In my study of adult writers I found that the writers who set goals and were involved in purposeful introspection about their writing became more confident writers.

I define myself...

2011-09-21T11:12:00.000-07:00

I define myself as a rhetorician. Much like Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of Rhetoric, I consider myself a student of rhetoric. I agree with Booth that the quality of our lives – indeed our survival – depends on the quality of our rhetoric. Rhetoric has the power to change the world. However, decades of working with writers has also taught me that the lack of agency and efficacy too often impedes the power of their rhetoric. The lack of confidence in their ability to communicate effectively and the lack of power to enact rhetorical agency results in an inequitable distribution of power in communities both large and small. This is what drives me to study the interplay of agency and efficacy with community and collaboration on communication in general and digital rhetoric in specific. Today, many communities and much collaboration involves digital communication and social media. As a rhetorician, technical communicator, and teacher, I am interested in the ways that communication is helped and hindered by digital rhetoric in the classroom, in the workplace, and in the world.

Ch-Ch-Change Goals for #change11

2011-09-19T17:34:00.000-07:00

As the orientation for Change 2011 wraps up and we prepare to embark on our epic journey, it is probably a good time to reflect on my goals for this experience. I really only have two. First and foremost, I hope to build up a network of likeminded folks to tap for future collaboration and possibly projects. Even if we don’t ever do work together I expect I will find a number of people whose work will inspire and feed mine. I hope that friendships and professional relationships will blossom as a result.

Of slightly less importance is my need to continue to learn and grow. I defended my dissertation this summer and I do not want to stagnate. I don’t think I’m in any danger of that this year with all the collaborations I currently have on the table, but I also do not want to pass up opportunities to learn and explore.

And that’s it, short and sweet. I can’t wait to see where this journey takes me.

Metareflection

2011-09-19T09:02:00.000-07:00

My number one goal for the students in my writing classes is to help them grow into more reflective writers. While I recognize that I cannot teach them every lesson they will need in the coming years of writing in college and beyond, I hope that helping them become more reflective about their writing will in turn result in more self-regulation and greater self-confidence.

Achieving self-regulation and self-efficacy are my ultimate goals, but I have come to believe over 10-plus years of studying, theorizing and practicing the teaching of writing that reflection is the key to achieving the goals of self-regulation and self-efficacy in writers.

Albert Bandura defines self-efficacy beliefs as a person’s belief in their capability to produce the desired effect through deliberate action. Decades of research in diverse fields has shown that self-efficacy is a more consistent predictor of behavioral outcomes than other self-beliefs. In particular, research suggests that beliefs about writing processes and competence are instrumental to the writer’s ultimate success as a writer (Note: the work of Frank Pajares and his associates has greatly influenced mine). Self-efficacy beliefs are a self-fulfilling prophecy with positive self-efficacy beliefs leading to positive outcomes and negative self-efficacy beliefs leading to negative outcomes. This is not because of the power of positive (or negative) thinking, but simply that our thoughts and beliefs influence our behavior. Our self-efficacy beliefs influence our chosen course of action, perseverance and resiliency when experiencing difficulty, and reaction to stress and depression. If we possess low self-efficacy then we avoid the challenges that could help us develop new skills or hone existing skills and we give up much easier when facing difficulties. If we possess high self-efficacy then we accept (even seek out) new challenges and persevere through difficulty by seeking new skills and tools to solve problems.

Clearly (in my opinion) there is a link between self-efficacy and self-regulation, but how does reflection link to self-efficacy and self-regulation? First, regular written reflection provides two important sources of self-efficacy – mastery experience and vicarious experience. Experience writing is a key part of developing writing self-efficacy. Obviously reflection cannot be the only writing a student conducts but it is certainly valuable writing experience. However, the real value of reflection in terms of writing self-efficacy is reflection that involves vicarious experiences such as making observations about the practices and habits as well as successes and failures of other writers then learning to make similar observations about their own writing. If done well then reflection can serve not only as an important source of writing self-efficacy but also lead to greater self-regulation and better writing.

Another important way that reflection impacts self-efficacy and self-regulation is helping students begin to engage with their own writing on a deeper level and to take responsibility for their own growth and development as writers. Once you begin thinking about your writing not as a one-size-fits-all proposition but as influenced by the rhetorical context then you are truly on the path to become a writer. Reflective writers think about their own writing and the choices they have made and can make as well as the consequences of those choices. Once engaged in reflection then writers can continue their growth and development long after they leave my classroom.

Revising the Reading Assignment

2011-09-15T05:44:00.000-07:00

As my students complete the first half of our class reading assignment I am feeling a bit battered and bruised and I detect a note of frenzy from my students. I suspect that my carefully crafted assignment – the result of much deliberation – is too blame.
I am on the third or fourth iteration (I’m afraid to check my records, sometimes it is just better not to know) of this assignment and I think each iteration has improved. I’ve worked out many of the problems and I suspect it will always be a bit messy and challenging, but I also know it could be better. Sigh. As a teacher I am a work in progress and it appears that as generally happy I am with the current version of my writing class it is also a work in progress – especially when it comes to the reading assignment.

Due to course requirements (and I admit my own philosophy), reading is an important part of my writing class. I have thought for some time that beginning the semester with the collaborative construction of an annotated bibliography is a useful way to introduce working with sources. I believe the process and the product of this work creates a solid foundation to build our class discussions of this reading and the writing that results. But…it is so time consuming and messy and I find myself spending so much time overseeing the process that I lose sight of the forest for the trees. I need to find a better way.

One major change that I made this semester was helping students sort themselves into groups. I think this worked rather well and I think creating smaller communities within the larger classroom community can be helpful to foster the sense of classroom community I want. I also hope these reading groups will provide another level of support as my students begin writing. Right now I expect I will follow that same policy next semester, but I have to change how the reading is assigned, and even more important for my sanity, how the work is done. I will definitely have to think about how to accomplish my goals more effectively. Meanwhile, I try to take comfort in the fact that I’ve planned and executed much more disastrous assignments and probably will again.

Am I collaboration crazy?

2011-09-08T05:18:00.000-07:00

If you know/follow me then you also know that I am interested in collaboration, negotiation, and community. I just had an epiphany, as my collaborations appear to reach a sort of critical mass, that I might have gone a bit collaboration crazy. Of course, only time will tell if I am crazy like a fox or just plain crazy.

My work as a National Writing Project site director naturally includes collaboration within my site and my state network as well as the national network – and it is one of my favorite things about my job -- but I also need collaboration to feed my research and scholarly needs so I have entered into research collaborations studying community (is that meta-collaboration?) in the writing classroom as well as from the broader issue of a rhetoric/technical communication perspective. As a teacher in Appalachia, I’m also involved in two different groups studying education in Appalachia. I’m also embarking on a MOOC focused on education, learning and technology and am quite excited about the opportunity. In my role as a site director, I am also working on establishing some campus collaborations that I hope will serve the Morehead Writing Project as well as Morehead State University. Finally, I am involved in a professional learning community to help me put my best foot forward as I embark on the job market. Yes, that is a whole bunch of collaboration.

I worry that it might be too much, but I also know that I need to feed myself. I am at my best, my happiest and most productive self when I am collaborating with people I like on topics of mutual interest. That is the reason I have collected four college degrees (well in part anyway) and why I’m attracted to the work that I do. I like to learn and I like being around others who do as well. I know that I am happy to be engaged in all this collaboration this year, but of course have yet to determine how productive I am – with all this collaboration.

My State of the Semester Address

2011-09-02T11:24:00.000-07:00

That sounds much more grand as it is more of rumination or reflection than formal pronouncement but oh well it is Friday. I’m tired and I’m not operating at full brain capacity. It has been a busy busy week with lots of projects bubbling and percolating. But I vowed that I would blog today and this seemed like a topic I could handle at my current level of functioning.

Actually, I am very excited about the state of my semester and very happy with (most) of my students. I did not make any major changes to the overall plan for my Writing II class but I did change some procedures/methods/practices in hopes of improving usability and the overall user experience for me and my students. I thought this might be a good time (the end of the second week) to review some of those changes and what has happened so far for my own reference. I know from past experience that I don’t always remember these details when it comes time to plan for the next semester. By December I know that August will seem like only a hazy memory of sunshine and heat.

As I have blogged about before, I consider classroom community important and so was determined to work much harder on developing it this semester. There are a number of educational benefits but it also makes my experience so much better too. One of the disadvantages of teaching online (and there are many) is that you often don’t get to know your students well and, even worse, many of your interactions with individual students are negative (grading, nagging, reprimanding etc.). You also do not get to witness (many) light bulb moments (when students make a key discovery or significant revelation) which is one of the great rewards for all the negative aspects of teaching.

I decided to work on community in a couple of very deliberate ways this semester. First, I mandated a certain level of Twitter activity that was purely social in nature. It really helps me get to know my students and understand what they are all about. I think this type of interaction helps replace some of the chatter and banter that would take place before class begins or during breaks in a traditional classroom. I find that students are using Twitter to ask for help and clarification which I am happy to give but it is wonderful to see other students respond as well so the interaction doesn’t just become a version of online office hours.

Second, I created reading groups based on major and intended profession and interests (each student is in three reading groups). I hope that creating smaller groups within the larger community will make students feel less isolated and I hope that the bonds of the group will be greater due to their shared interests. This is a change in the way I handled the reading assignments last semester. Last semester that assignment was not a success and I’m hopeful that this semester will go better. Too soon to say with this but the assignment of readings was a bit smoother/easier although still time consuming. Still seeking a way to deal with the logistics.

Another frustration for me has been trying to get my students to become more reflective writers as I believe this is a crucial step to becoming self-regulating writers. In the past only a few writers reached any depth of introspection and so I knew I needed to do something different. This semester I tweaked my reflection/metawriting assignment so we begin with a literacy narrative which then becomes a work-in-progress to incorporate the reflections and metawriting that I previously required. However, in order to feed this reflection I have required journals posts (and now that Morehead State has upgraded BlackBoard we can do that right in our course shell), Twitter posts, and discussions about these issues. So far I have seen much more evidence of introspection and critical thinking and am pleased with this promising start to the semester. I have tried to provide more scaffolding for this than I have in the past and think those efforts are successful but then this is the beginning of the semester. Have to wait and see if it holds up. However, getting them to think about their writing is an important first step so I’m happy to see if happening.

A final change is more procedural than anything. I have always believed in full disclosure and thought it important to give students the complete assignment as we began work on it. I still think honesty and full disclosure are the best policy but I also know that students frequently feel overwhelmed and frightened by large, complex assignments (OK, they freak out about them, in my experience). So this semester I have delayed giving assignments and began with giving students simple tasks that can be done in very short amounts of time. After most of the tasks associated with an assignment have already been completed, then I will give students the actual assignment. I have only done this with one assignment so far (although I’m going to have to deliver a second assignment fairly soon) and students have told me (when I asked) that they much prefer the list of tasks that guide them through the assignment. Again, the upgraded version of BlackBoard has helped me out with this as I have been using the Task list function to keep us on track – even if it is a tad clunky.

And so I feel pretty good about the changes I’ve made for this semester. They have improved my experience and early reports seem to be that they have improved the student experience as well.

Community and Social Capital

2011-08-26T09:32:00.000-07:00

Spinuzzi (2003) argues that “community implies more than simply information swapping” but notes that some communities “lack the sort of infrastructure necessary to do more” (p. 217). He contends that successful communities require a wide range of civic mechanisms not just communication mechanisms and notes that these civic mechanisms share information but also investigate and evaluate past efforts and current actions as well as deliberate on future developments.

This means that successful communities do more than share information – they are learning organisms. Information sharing is an important function of a community, and often a primary reason for its formation, but in order to be successful the community must also exert social control so the community’s resources (information) are utilized in the best way possible for the community as a whole. Even more important, the future success and health of the community requires that new resources must be cultivated and developed. That is why it is important to understand social capital as this theory offers important insights to further understanding of how a community functions.

Portes (2000) calls social capital one of the most successful “exports” from sociology in recent decades. Social capital is comprised of the collective features of a social organization that enables mutual cooperation for mutual benefit (Gargiulo & Benassi, 2000; Burt, 2001; Portes, 1998; Onyx & Bullen, 2000; Kawachi, Kennedy, & Glass, 1999; Hofman & Dijkstra, 2010; Fukuyama, 2001). Hofman & Dijkstra (2010) say social capital gives us access to different resources through our social connections. An individual’s willingness to act on behalf of the common good depends greatly on their sense of community (Lochner, Kawachi, & Kennedy, 1999) and the mutual advantage of belonging to that community (Onyx & Bullen, 2000). Lochner, Kawachi, & Kennedy (1999) argue that social cohesion plays an important role in individuals’ willingness to intervene on behalf of the common good. They suggest social capital is an ecological characteristic of the social structure.

Not every community, group, or organization develops social capital. Portes (1998) argues that social networks are not “a natural given” but instead “must be constructed through investment strategies.” The community must have a number of features in order to develop social capital. First, membership must be voluntary and offer equal opportunity. This is essential to fostering the trust that is necessary for social capital. Onyx & Bullen (2000) also stress the notion of reciprocity or the combination of short-term altruism and long-term self-interest. Community members must also trust in the community and that the social norms embraced by the community will provide sufficient social control. Onyx & Bullen (2000) stress it is the combined effect of trust, networks, norms, and reciprocity which creates a strong community that is mutually advantageous.

So why do community members engage in the difficult and challenging work necessary to build a community and establish social capital? As Spinuzzi notes, many communities form out of an initial need to share information but Portes (2000) argues they persist for the benefits that they will bring later. Burt (2001) points out that building social capital is a form of investment and those with higher social capital experience higher returns. Portes (1998) makes the case that social capital offers three basic benefits: social control, support, and connections. Hofman & Dijkstra (2010) says organizations use social capital to coordinate actions without relying on formal authority or traditional influences. Garguilo & Benassi (2000) argue that social networks facilitate access to information, resources, and opportunities. Portes (1998) also points out that social capital also comes with disadvantages such as exclusion of outsiders, excessive claims on members, restriction of individual freedom, and downward leveling norms.

2012 CCCC Acceptance

2011-08-17T07:36:00.000-07:00

Very excited to receive the news that I was accepted to present at the 63rd Annual Convention of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, which will be held in St. Louis, MO, March 21-24, 2012.

I am presenting as part of a panel "Tranfer: The Gateway to Writing in Multiple Contexts" which includes Heather Hill and Misty Winzenried of the University of Washington and Elizabeth Fogle of Penn State Erie. Our panel will present research results on the transferability of writing in several disciplinary and workplace contexts. It will discuss pedagogies that may possibly aid students in transferring what they know and suggest possible solutions to the problem of transfer.

My specific presentation will share the results of research exploring the impact of recent pedagogical theories focused on helping writers understand how writing works and the implications of these theories for assessment and transfer. The speaker will use results from three mixed-methods studies to address the impact of the pedagogy on writing self-efficacy, or the belief that the individual possesses the skill and knowledge to successfully perform a specific task. Research data will be shared concerning the short- and long-term effects of this pedagogy utilizing case studies generated from three mixed-methods studies including students in first- and second-semester undergraduate writing as well as graduate writing classes.

Creating a Classroom Community

2011-08-11T10:15:00.000-07:00

Lately I have spent a great deal of time thinking about the idea of community. In part because my current research focuses on that topic and I’m fortunate enough to have a great group of likeminded friends and colleagues with which to collaborate (my own little research community about community) but also because this is the time of year when I am building my fall courses. I have always included ice breakers and various “get to know your classmates” activities. I am not alone in this effort. Just last night I helped my 10-year-old son fill a paper bag with items to share with his fifth-grade class for precisely that purpose. I imagine all across my county (and beyond) there were school children engaged in similar activities.

Of course, simply placing people in the same room and sharing a few facts about each other does not a community make. It certainly relaxes the classroom atmosphere and helps the teacher learn names, which are of course worthwhile results, but what does make a classroom community and why should we care?

I care for two reasons. In the short term, I believe that creating a learning community supports writers and writing and fosters learning. Rovai (2002) reports that studies have shown that strong feelings of community increase persistence in courses, flow of information among learners, availability of support, and satisfaction. In addition, according to Rovai, students who are part of a classroom community are less likely to cut class or come to class unprepared. Finally, Rovai says community decreases student burn out and increases overall retention. Obviously, classroom community can’t replace teaching and learning but my own experience (as well as the research) tells me that it makes teaching and learning more fun and everyone benefits.

In the long term, I am also interested in helping my writing students understand how communities shape the communication that takes place within them. I am not interested in teaching my students context-less forms and rules. As NCTE’s position statement about the teaching of writing notes: “Literate practices are embedded in complicated social relationships.” I want to help my students learn about the ways that different communities use communication (written communication in particular) and how writers can learn the rules and expectations of those communities. This is our class project. I hope that by making the goals of my classroom activities and assignments explicit and discussing the formation of our own classroom community as well as their developing knowledge will help them negotiate future community memberships and communications.

However, before we begin with that challenging work we will need to work to become a community. This, of course, does begin with those ice breakers and introductory activities. As my class is online and asynchronous I have chosen to use Twitter and the six-word memoir as our initial activity. Then, during the first weeks of the semester, we will Tweet about our lives and activities and thoughts. In the past when I have used Twitter this has been one of the ways that I have developed a sense of my students as people. I hope encouraging (requiring) this activity will help us get to know each other and lay the foundation for our classroom community.

Of course, to truly become a community we need more than “mutual engagement” (which I suppose is pretty expected of any class), according to Zucchermaglio & Talamo (2003). We also need joint enterprise. I hope that my planned ongoing discussions of our class project and the continued sharing of the individual projects that contribute to our larger work will help us create and sustain a classroom community.

Analyzing my lesson of the day

2011-08-10T12:08:00.000-07:00

I learned something today and that always makes for a good day. Unfortunately (or typically might be more accurate) what I learned is that there are gaps in my knowledge. Today I didn’t really begin to fill in those gaps but I am locating their boundaries so I suppose that makes today productive. Even better it gives me a plan for future work.

I have learned that I don’t know a whole lot about rhetorical analysis and that I will need to do quite a bit of study before I’m ready to embark on my next research project. This shouldn’t be shocking. While I have a number of research methods courses under my belt (thank you TTU TCR program), my dissertation project didn’t employ the type (or depth) of rhetorical analysis that I expect my current project will require. In fact another thing I’ve learned is that there is a whole lot more I can do with my existing data but that will be another project and another day.

For today, I think it is enough that I have expanded my understanding of what I know (and don’t know) about content analysis, discourse analysis, and rhetorical analysis. According to Huckin, content analysis is analyzing semantic data in text(s) to uncover underlying rhetorical themes/patterns. Barton describes discourse analysis as the study of the ways in which language in different communicative events function to create and reflect aspects of culture. Selzer defines rhetorical analysis as the study of how people in specific social situations influence others through language. Understanding what separates these different types of analyses is helpful to me as I knew I wanted to analyze a specific set of texts but was unsure which method to employ. I now understand that while I used content analysis (in a most basic form) as part of my mixed methods dissertation research I will more likely utilize discourse analysis for my next project.

My next project will focus on four documents, a type of annual report, that provide yearly snapshots for a group’s transformation from organization in crisis to thriving community. I am interested in what these communicative events can teach us about the evolution of the culture and community of this organization. I’m pretty excited about this project and can’t wait to dive in.

My Research Agenda

2011-08-09T13:58:00.000-07:00

One of the most exciting things about life post-dissertation is the freedom to embark on new and interesting research. Of course this is also a little frightening (if I’m honest more than a little…). After all, so many things excite interest and I also need to think about what type of rhetorician I wish to be so that I can attract the interest of the types of institutions and academic programs I want to join. However, sifting and sorting the scraps of paper and digital notations that reflect my interests, questions, and random thoughts I do find that there is some method to my madness and definite trends and links. I am relieved to note that I do actually have a research agenda even if at this point in my career it is more agenda than action. I am interested in agency and efficacy, communities of practice and learning, and digital digital rhetoric.

While my dissertation research focused on agency and efficacy, I still have many research avenues and questions to pursue in that area. However, even as I continue to collect data related to this project, my immediate research focus is going to focus on other areas. I have always been fascinated by the ideas of collaboration and negotiation in communities of practice and learning communities. I want to study these issues in terms of technical communication and pedagogy. I think this is my number one priority right now and I’m pretty excited about it.

My interest in digital digital rhetoric continues. This interests me as a technical communicator as well as a teacher. The TC-geek part of me is always enamored by new tools and tricks. Also, as an administrator I am always seeking new ways to facilitate communication with my various constituencies. Of course, as an online teacher I also want to facilitate communication with my students as well as prepare them to negotiate those channels and prepare them to face the ever-changing digital communication frontier. Currently, my interest in this area overlaps with my interest in community. How does digital communication help and hinder the development and work of communities?

There. I feel so much better to have a research agenda and plan. Now I better go do something about it...

Foundational Knowledge/Beliefs

2011-07-28T15:06:00.000-07:00

A recent discussion on the WPA-L Listserv about the foundational beliefs of rhetoric has led me to mull over where I fall on that spectrum.

I strongly resist teaching writing as anything that resembles a mechanical formula that involves simply inputting a few words to receive some form of output. I have (and will probably do so again when the situation warrants it) taught some useful structures to guide novice writers. This includes the five-paragraph essay and formal argument structure as well as formal research article structure. I see these formulas as useful stepping stones or frameworks to negotiate specific writing challenges for specific kinds of writers. If they are taught as tools that have benefits and drawbacks then I do not believe I am betraying my rhetorical training. I do believe quite strongly that teaching such formulas as the beginning and end of writing training is wrong and that using such formulas does not make anyone a writer. Writers can, and do, use formulas but they have other tools on their belt to wield as necessary and have the knowledge to choose the correct tool for the job. Sometimes the job calls for a simple hammer so why choose a more precision tool?

In essence, I hold these truths to be self-evident – or at least agreed upon by those who have studied and researched rhetoric and writing:

Writing is a process not a formula. Each writer undergoes multiple processes depending on the context and goal. Writer’s processes change and develop as they grow as writers. Learning to be a writer is a process as well. My job as a writing teacher is to help people become writers. This means helping them develop the confidence and agency as well as the knowledge to select the right tool for the job at hand. My current pedagogical choices focus on those areas but my classes also include teaching certain tools such as contextual and genre awareness.

Writing is contextually situated. Writing is a social activity in that it is written to make something happen whether that something is a thought or an action. Yes, writing shares information but it is more than that. It changes hearts and minds and deeds. Yes, writing can be art, but I hold that art is also meant to invoke some thought or emotion or change. However, effective writing must conform or fit comfortably within the context and meet the expectations of those expected to read it. This is deeper and more complicated than “audience awareness” and must involve not only learning about a community but investigating its boundaries and history. Genres change dependent on the context as each community adapts its own unique genres to serve its own unique purposes. This is a foundational belief of our field and essential knowledge that must be understood before one can become a writer.

It is hard to disentangle composition and rhetoric . Cutting through the Gordian Knot is an even greater challenge when you add in my other field—technical communication. I see both composition and technical communication as falling under the umbrella of rhetoric—the study of human communication—with composition falling more toward the learning to write end of the spectrum (which often falls during education) and technical communication embracing writing that works (not to be confused with writing at work) in life as well as work. I see technical communication as knowledge work that is conducted by communicators. I believe that my work in the field of technical communication can feed my work as a compositionist and vice versa.

What is Community?

2011-07-23T13:13:00.000-07:00

I am interested in the idea of “community” from two related but different angles. Not a straight-forward social or geographical community, but a network, such as a community of practice or learning community. This idea of community as a place to grow and learn interests me as a technical communicator and as an educator.

As a technical communicator I am interested in the development of a professional learning community and organization. The project I am embarking on will involve the rhetorical analysis of a community’s documentation (annual reports in particular) to study the community’s transformation from an organization in crisis to a thriving community.

As a teacher, I am interested in the impact of a learning community on the transformation to writer (the focus of my dissertation and classroom research). I have found evidence in some populations that participation in a learning community decreases writing apprehension and increases evidence of self-regulating activity such as agency and self-efficacy. I intend to continue studying the impact of community on writing development and transformation.

The challenge is that the definition of “community” has evolved over time and it is necessary to re-evaluate what defines or makes a community. I am currently conducting a literature review to better understand how “community” is defined in the fields of technical communication and writing studies.

Zucchermaglio & Talamo (2003) argue that because writing is a social activity a writer is always a member of a community. They point out that each community develops specific communicative practices, both oral and written. These practices are affected by the development of the main dimensions that characterize a group as a community of practice: mutual engagement, joint enterprise, and shared repertoire.

Ornatowski and Bekins (2004) agree that “community underpins rhetorical action” but ask what is a “realistic” idea of community today. Communication and transportation innovations have challenged and changed previous notions of community sometimes beyond all recognition. The “diverse contexts” that have resulted from these changes make pinning down a definition of community difficult at best.

Hampton & Wellman (2003) note that the idea of “community” has both persevered and changed over time and is rarely based on local neighboring, densely-knit solidarities, organized groups, or public spaces. They observe that communities consist of far-flung kinship, workplace, friendship, interest groups, and neighborhood ties that concatenate to form networks providing sociability, aid, support, and social control. Communities are usually not groups, but social networks that are sparsely-knit, loosely-bounded and far-flung.

Network Weaving (2011) defines a “community” as a network of people who share things in common. Others are more specific about those “things” the members of a community share. For example, Grossman et al (2001) and Rovai (2002) define a community as a group of people who share social interdependence, participation in discussion and decision making, and practices that both define the community and are nurtured by it. Grossman and Rovai also agree that the most essential elements of community include a sense of connection and trust, task-driven interactivity, shared interests, meaningful relationships, and overlapping histories among members.

Ornatowski and Bekins (2004) point out that the concept of “community” is typically used as a “god-term” in the sense coined by Kenneth Burke: reified, ubiquitous, always positive, and ultimately unexamined. They question the idea of “shared beliefs and values” that is often noted as a characteristic of (or as the very foundation of) community when any conceptualization of community today must grapple with…the context of diversity and value pluralism. They call for research and theory concerning the complex relationships between rhetorical actions and their impact on communities.

Reflections on the dissertation process

2011-07-20T12:41:00.001-07:00

I just completed the final draft of my dissertation and as a teacher who promotes reflection, I should practice what I preach for my own benefit and hopefully others as well. While I will never write another dissertation, it is likely that long-term research projects and writing books based on those projects is in my academic future. I know that a dissertation is not a book and vice versa but enough parallels exist that I should record the lessons I learned from this experience.

Writing a dissertation is exciting and exhilarating and fun – at times. There are also times when it is hard physical and mental labor that leaves you drained and twitchy. Writing a dissertation is a mixture of discovery and drudgery. Even though I received a great deal of advice, I was still unprepared for the process. I don’t know that you can ever be truly prepared. You can receive training and preparation and advice, but in the end you need to get your head in a certain place and no one can control that except you. But enough of the zen and more of the practical.

If I had to sum up the most important lesson that I wish I understood going in one word that would be: recursive. I was told repeatedly that a dissertation is a recursive document but until I understood that writing the dissertation is also recursive I still struggled. It is not a linear experience but rather a tightening spiral with your final dissertation message as the epicenter. I am sure that if I had realized this sooner in my process then the writing and revision of my dissertation would have been much less painful. Think of preparing your reading list and preproposal and taking your qualifying exams as a large loop that then gradually loops inward as you plan your research and craft your proposal. The collection and analysis of your data creates another inward loop until finally you reach the central point, lesson, or finding of your work – your take-away message. After you have worked through your results and analysis and worked out that take-away it is much easier to go back and work through the other chapters. Maybe doing so would save you some of the wheel-spinning and revision that I had to do by thinking too linear.

A more practical (rather than conceptual) piece of advice that I cannot stress enough (and a primary reason I was able to get through this process in a timely fashion) is that timing is everything. Give yourself time. Dissertation writing, in my experience, requires large chunks of prime time, but of course, mileage may vary according to the driver. I needed large chunks of time to read-think-process-write. During course work I frequently had large projects/papers but nothing on this scale and I learned early on that the work habits and practices that moved me through course work would not work for dissertation work. Writing a dissertation is different from writing a paper or article. In my opinion it is better to carve out one or two large time blocks a week than five smaller time blocks a week because I found that in small time block it took me too long to get to the place I needed to get (by reading, thinking etc.) to be productive. Mileage may vary for those who have chunks of time during the day to productively think (runners, for example, or commuters) without distraction, but as family and work demands fill all my waking hours the only time I could really focus was during the dedicated blocks of dissertation time. I aimed for three or four large time blocks a week. Sometimes I got them and some weeks I couldn’t. Fortunately, my family was supportive of this endeavor and I was able to adjust my work schedule to accommodate dissertation time. Finally, as I mentioned early on you should strive for locating those chunks of time for your prime time. When are you most alert, focused, and at your best (mentally and physically)? For me this is morning. As I teach primarily online (at least that is what I requested during this process) I was able to perform most of my teaching functions in the afternoon and evening and could then dedicate my mornings to dissertation work.

I’d love to hear about others’ experiences to see if their recommendations and advice compare or differ.

Fostering Agency and Writing Self-Efficacy: The Making of a Writer

2011-05-27T12:01:00.000-07:00

Note: This is the most current version of my dissertation abstract. Dissertation successfully defended May 25.

Writing is an essential professional skill as well as important life skill. The goal of writing instruction is to develop the skills and knowledge necessary to successfully meet future writing challenges. However, despite years of writing instruction, many writers struggle to transfer skills and knowledge from one context to another. One reason for this struggle is that even after years of instruction most people are highly apprehensive about writing and do not consider themselves writers. In order to overcome the problem of transfer, we must improve our understanding about writing apprehension and the role it plays in the transformation to writer. Writing research and theory has brought us to the current understanding that writing is a set of complex skills that is contextually situated and socially influenced, and yet most writing instruction focuses on general, basic skills. As a result, instruction does little to lessen writing apprehension and foster the transformation to writer. This mixed methods study focused on the transformation into writers of 17 teachers attending a National Writing Project (NWP) Summer Institute and addressed the impact of immersion in this learning community on writing apprehension. This research spanned a year and studied the writing apprehension of the participants before, during, and after their transformation by focusing on the role that agency and self-efficacy played in the transformation to writer.

NWP’s mission is to improve the teaching of writing, and central to that goal is the belief that teachers who write are better writing teachers. This makes the transformation of teacher into writer the primary purpose of the NWP Summer Institute. The Summer Institute is organized as a learning community focused on professional development, research, and leadership as well as writing. Most of the 17 women involved in this learning community experienced a decrease in writing apprehension while undergoing the transformation to writer and maintained that confidence level during the following year. The writers’ reflection journals reveal that as apprehension decreases evidence of self-regulating activity, such as goal setting and metawriting, increases as does agency and self-efficacy. These findings contribute to our understanding of the transformation to writer and how this transformation connects with writing apprehension as well as how this transformation can be fostered in a learning community which attends to agency and writing self-efficacy.

Fostering Agency and Writing Self-Efficacy: The Making of a Writer

2011-05-23T12:52:00.000-07:00

Rhetoric, the practice and study of human communication, has existed for millennia and is one of the oldest academic subjects. The study of writing is one of the most universally required subjects from kindergarten through college. Writing research and theory has brought us to the current understanding that writing is a complex set of skills that is contextually situated and socially influenced. Extensive theory and research has focused on the acquisition and teaching of these skills and yet there is much we do not know about the transformation to writer. We do know that writing apprehension hinders this transformation and writing self-efficacy helps it. This mixed methods study focused on the transformation of 17 teachers attending a National Writing Project Summer Institute into writers and addressed the following questions. First, what is the impact of immersion on writing apprehension. Second, how does immersion influence the sources of writing self-efficacy which include mastery experience, vicarious experience, social persuasions, and physical/emotional state. Third, what other aspects of immersion influence writing apprehension and writing self-efficacy. This study spanned more than a year and includes recording the writing apprehension of the participants before, during, and after their transformation and studying writing reflection journals kept by the participants for the sources of writing self-efficacy and other aspects of writing apprehension and writing self-efficacy.

NWP’s mission is to improve the teaching of writing and central to that goal is the belief that teachers who write are better writing teachers. This makes the transformation of teacher into writer the primary purpose of the NWP Summer Institute. The majority of the teachers immersed in the Summer Institute this research addresses experienced a long-term decrease in writing apprehension. Most significantly, writing apprehension levels remained stable during the year following the Summer Institute. While study of the participants’ references to the sources of writing self-efficacy indicated that mastery experience and their physical/emotional state were the strongest influences, this information did not offer insight into the question of why some participants experienced a greater decrease in writing apprehension than others. Instead, it was participants’ references to goal-setting and discussion of plans to achieve those goals that differentiated between the two groups. My research contributes to our understanding of the process of becoming a writer and the roles of agency and writing self-efficacy in that transformation.

References Handout

PowerPoint Slides

An argument for FYC WAW

2011-03-21T16:39:00.000-07:00

We have an institutional imperative to teach for transfer and I believe a moral obligation as well. Most of our students want to become better writers because they know it will help them in future classes and in their career. However, we must pay attention to what our own experience and the research of our field tells us – teaching and requiring the “mutt genres” of academic writing do not transfer. What does transfer? Understanding of how writing works, what shapes genres, and how to understand what drives a particular discourse community. We can teach those things in our classrooms, but until our students really begin to think and reflect on how those elements affect their writing then they won’t transfer either.

That is why we must spend more time treating our students as writers and focus their attention on their own writing rather than reading and writing about topics separate from the focus of a writing class. Reading in other subject areas is a needless distraction and certainly writing about other subjects should not be the focus of a writing classroom. I do not mean that all the reading and writing that takes place in a writing classroom should be a close inspection of their own navels. There is so much worthwhile and compelling research in our field, and most of it is extremely accessible for college students, it begs the question why so many writing students are forced to look outside the field of writing studies for the subject of their reading, writing, and research. If we want them to learn how to be writers then why are they not studying writing?

In the June 2007 issue of College Composition and Communication, Douglas Downs and Elizabeth Wardle made a compelling argument for teaching first-year composition as an introduction to writing studies. They argue that there is no such thing as a “unified academic discourse” and that writing is not a set of basic, fundamental skills which can be learned once and then applied forever after. Writing is a complex activity dependent on context and until we teach our students this fact and introduce them to ways of making sense of these complexities in their infinite variety of contexts then we are not adequately preparing our students to write outside our classrooms.

Every community, both inside and outside academia, uses writing in specialized ways. Even if you restrict your focus to academic writing Downs and Wardle point out that using such an umbrella term as “academic writing” is “dangerously misleading.” Downs and Wardle argue that while transfer may happen (by good luck more often than not) far transfer is extremely difficult and not likely to be fostered by current incarnations of FYC. They then go on to argue for a very specific and new incarnation of FYC which focuses on writing as the subject of student reading, writing, and research in order to teach student writers how writing works and how it is used.

While many within the field have viewed the proposal of writing about writing as some radical form of pedagogy created from whole cloth by Downs and Wardle, in fact their proposal is the most recent in a line of other respected theorists and writing researchers and is well supported by commonly-accepted and research-supported theories of how people learn to write. David Russell’s (1995) “Activity Theory and Its Implications for Writing Instruction”; Anne Beaufort’s (2007) College Writing and Beyond; and David Smit’s (2004) The End of Composition Studies all make arguments for teaching FYC as a course for learning how to understand and think about writing. While details vary I believe the theory and spirit are the same.

I have joined the Writing-About-Writing movement instigated by Downs and Wardle because of the many benefits I see for my students. As Barbara Bird points out in her 2008 CCC Interchanges response. Reading academic articles rather than the typical FYC reader not only demands more of the FYC student but also provides ready examples of how research and theory are shared and debated among scholars. We are not only telling them that writing and research are a conversation in academia but we are showing them – and by fostering the type of writing and research suggested by Downs and Wardle we are helping them find a way to enter that conversation.

Reading Workshop Still A WIP

2011-02-24T07:01:00.000-08:00

For the past two semesters I have struggled with the implementation of a reading workshop for my online writing classes. My institution requires the use of a reader and my writing-about-writing approach also necessitates some reading, but I was resistant to using the old model of reading discussion that I once used. I simply didn't want to devote so much of our semester to reading and, while I consider reading important, I did want to use it primarily as fodder for our writing rather than a large focus of the class.

So I came up with a two-pronged approach to incorporate reading that is my own version of a Reading Workshop. The first part of the workshop is centered around building a class annotated bibliography of our reading lists with each student making three contributions to the annotated bibliography and then reviewing the contributions of other students. We build the class annotated bibliography on our class blog and I like the option of using labels on the individual AB entries so students are able to find readings that connect with their interests. The student contributions include one selection from the book we are required to use by our department and one selection from a list of online readings that I have generated and one peer-reviewed journal article that they locate and then submit for my approval. After we have completed the class AB, I then have students develop discussion questions that connect to their reading and then we hold class discussions using those questions.

I like many things about this assignment. I have always liked including some version of an annotated bibliography assignment in my classes as I think it is an useful skill for students to have and can scaffold their use of citations and summaries. I also like the fact that by cooperating in this way the students can cover a large number of readings in a relatively short amount of time and assemble the AB entries in an usable format that can serve as a resource for future assignments. I also like giving students some choice so they can pick readings to work with that either interest them or serve their writing in some way.

What I don't like is mostly about logistics. Giving students a choice means that there is a lot of back and forth with me and it is a time-consuming nightmare for a few weeks. I need to find a better way to do this for the fall semester. One solution is to push the assignment further into the semester by a week or two at the least. One of the drawbacks of teaching a general education class online is that there is a lot of fluidity to the rosters during the first week or two of classes. Maybe pushing the assignment past the worst of this will make it logistically easier to manage. I think I also need to break the assignment up into smaller bite-sized chunks. Apparently I overwhelmed students with too much information this semester. I also plan to stretch out the time that we work on this assignment. Last semester I had it stretch all the way to midterm but this semester I thought I could get it out of the way sooner. I think the midterm method is better. I think compressing the time was one of the contributors to my logistical nightmare. Honestly the assignment is not so burdensome that students shouldn't be able to finish it in the time I've allotted but clearly their perception is different.

And so my Reading Workshop is still a work-in-progress but hopefully next semester I will have it down pat! Stay tuned...

The Evolution of My Writing Workshop

2011-02-22T07:34:00.000-08:00

I intended to blog about my philosophy of grading re Prof Hacker but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. Isn't grading painful enough without thinking about it when I don't have to do so? Then another Prof Hacker post about grading (grading contracts that is) made me think again about how I manage grading. My philosophy of teaching is focused on fostering the growth of the writer and so I really do not like to dwell on the product of writing as I see it as a means to an end (the growth and development of the writer) rather than the end in itself. However, the workshop process that has evolved in my classroom is something that I could write about – and in fact have been asked to write about – and so here it is.

I have always set up my writing classes around some version of a writing workshop. For me, a writing workshop classroom means focusing on the writer and the writing rather than the teacher and the lecture. I believe writers learn and grow when they are actively engaged in writing and participate in a feedback loop that supports revision and fosters self-regulation. I believe the timely administration of a mini-lesson is far more effective than a lecture. But this post is about grading or feedback – not teaching. And so, back to my writing workshop. What does it look like? My writing workshop incorporates drafting and revision as well as a feedback loop. It uses reflection and self-regulation as well as working toward a final portfolio or some other final project.

These elements have remained constant but not static as they have evolved over the course of a decade of teaching writing. Back when I taught modes my students wrote five rough drafts and then after receiving feedback revised four essays and then after more feedback completed three final drafts for a portfolio. Today my students collaborate on a number of small projects before drafting papers that go through workshop before submission for a final grade and more feedback then they use those pieces as part of a larger final project (a blog).

My feedback process has also evolved over time. During my first years of teaching I graded even rough drafts but as I was teaching as many as five sections of writing (with a total of 125 students) at a time that was an incredible burden. Plus, I found that it actually interfered with the revision process as some students would take the attitude that the paper was “good enough” and did not always realize that the grade assigned to a rough draft did not translate into the same grade for a final draft. Around the same time I began teaching writing online and so I moved my workshop into a discussion board. Students posted their drafts in the discussion board and received feedback from me as well as their peers. I really loved this model as it allowed me to focus on helping students improve their writing – and not on grading. I also discovered that the transparency of sharing writing and feedback in this way fostered conversations with and among students about writing that would not have occurred under my old workshop model. I also learned that making the entire workshop process visible in this way made these conversations a resource for all students. I became so enamored of the online writing workshop that I began to use it even with my face-to-face classes.

Then I initiated a collaborative grading research project with two of my colleagues that involved the use of rubrics and I soon found that my blissful workshop model could not seamlessly integrate the use of rubrics. It took a semester to work out how to use rubrics in a way that still offered substantive feedback that supported revision. After the research project was over I asked my students about continuing the use of rubrics (secretly hoping I could abandon them) but students overwhelming responded that they liked the rubrics and found them useful when drafting as well as revising. And so rubrics continue to play an important role in my writing workshop as well as of course my grading.

I have always believed that reflection plays an important part in the growth and development of a writer and that belief has been reinforced by my experience as a teacher, a writer, and a researcher. In fact, my most recent research project reinforced this to an extent that surprised me. At various points during my teaching career I have used writing journals as well as portfolio reflections. I have required that students write a “grade note” when submitted papers that explains how their work meets or exceeds the criteria for a particular grade. My current writing workshop asks students to reflect on their process for each writing assignment and then to metawrite at the end of the semester about their growth and development as a writer. In addition, my students are required to Tweet thoughts about writing which may or may not be further developed in their writing reflections and metawriting.

I hope my writing workshop helps my students grow and develop as writers but my research on that is still pending. You know that pesky dissertation has taken a lot of my time.

Spring 2011 3X3

2011-01-16T12:48:00.000-08:00

As a reflective practitioner (clear demonstration of my NWP affiliation) Natalie Houston's suggestion on ProfHacker to reflect on the past semester as I prepare for the new one fell on fertile ground. I agree it is important to look at what worked and didn't in the past to make sure that my experience informs my future practice.

What Worked Well

Focusing on Writing About Writing with my Writing II students. As I used the more traditional approach for my Writing I class I didn't want to simply mimic that for Writing II. What I chose to do was have my students focus on writing about writing in their intended profession. This made the work more interesting and more meaningful. While a few students did not enjoy it, the majority reported learning a lot about their future profession.

Using a variety of different types of reading including a book required by my department plus readings from the web that I suggested and peer-reviewed journal articles my students located in the journals of their intended profession. This allowed us to have both breadth and depth of coverage and have conversations about the different kinds of text available and how to determine which is appropriate for the task at hand.

Using Twitter and Blogger to develop audience awareness and increase communication channels. In general, I was pretty happy with my use of Blogger but our use of Twitter kind of petered out in the second half of the semester so I will need to work on that a bit.

What Didn't

The way I worked out assignments for our class annotated bibliography. It was messy and time consuming and dragged on far too long.

Not giving more specific Twitter assignments throughout the semester.

Allowing too much time and flexibility with early assignments. I was trying to allow for that early semester roster fluctuation but in the end it just caused confusion.

What I'm Changing

I have changed the way I'm assigning reading this semester. I'm still allowing students to make requests but I'm not going to worry so much about the back and forth haggling. They will get a shot to ask and then get what they get. Also, I have compressed the whole timeline for that early reading and annotated bibliography assignment so it doesn't drag on like it did last semester.

I am folding Twitter into the metawriting assignment and will give more prompts and require more posts beyond the reading assignment. Making it part of a grade will give it more importance and linking it to this particular assignment (I hope) will show how/why I value it. In general I was happy with the way I used reflection and metawriting but this could be tweaked a bit more as well to emphasize what specifically I want from my students.

I'm going to try to be more explicit about my goals for my students and teach toward those in a more explicit manner. Last semester I was focused on those goals but perhaps was more implicit than I should have been.

The 3 Lessons I Hope You Take Away

2010-12-03T08:28:00.000-08:00

As we near the end of our semester together, I wanted to share with you three lessons that I hope you take away from this class. Clearly my goal for this writing class was to help you become better writers, but if my own work as a writer and as a scholar of writing studies has taught me anything it is that you – and you alone – can make this happen. I cannot make you a better writer and I cannot teach you how to be a better writer, but I can give you experiences that will shape you into a writer. Hopefully I did so this semester.

First, and foremost, I hope that you have become a more reflective writer over the course of this semester. Research, my own and that of other experts, shows that reflecting at a meta level about your writing is the key to your growth and development as a writer. This is why I asked you to reflect after each writing assignment as well as at the end of the semester. Hopefully this reflection will help solidify the lessons you learned this semester and hopefully what I am telling you now will help you realize that continuing this reflection after you leave this class will be useful to you as a developing writer.

An important part of our work this semester has been your immersion into a new discourse community – that of the profession you intend to join after earning your degree. You read professional literature produced in and for this field as well as interviewed professionals in preparation for your own writing. I hope this has not only taught you about the ways your professional peers communicate, but also how they value that communication. In addition, I hope that this process has also taught you how you can develop an understanding of other discourse communities that you encounter throughout your life as a writer.

Finally, although we have not spent a great deal of time specifically talking about genre – the form and structure writing takes – our study of the various discourse communities that you are striving to join has exposed you to the way that the discourse community shapes the genre. While in the future you cannot count on someone giving you an assignment sheet and scoring guide, you should now understand how studying the work of others in this same discourse community attempting similar tasks can inform your writing and teach you the specifics of the genre. Hopefully this study will allow you to generate your own internal checklist for future projects.

While you may have had different goals for your success this semester, ultimately that is what I hope you gained from this class: an understanding of the importance of reflection, an understanding of how to learn about and join a discourse community, and an understanding of how discourse community shapes the genres of writing it produces.

Good luck with your continuing journey to become a better writer and I am so glad we had a chance to work together this semester.

Calling For A Revolution or It’s About The Writer, Stupid

2010-11-03T06:36:00.000-07:00

American education is in crisis and nowhere is this more evident than when we look at the teaching of writing. Despite decades of research in support of the teaching of writing and the fact that we know more than ever before about how people learn to write as well as how to effectively teach writing – we do not see this knowledge used to improve the teaching of writing in any consistent fashion. We need a revolution in the teaching of writing but there is not even a whisper of a battle cry in the trenches. As a writing teacher I ask myself every day what we should be doing to improve the teaching of writing and I have come to the conclusion that we are simply focusing on the wrong things.

Far too much focus in the teaching of writing is on the end product. This appears to be all that administrators and non-writing teachers (don’t get me started on how every teacher is a writing teacher as this isn’t the time or place for that rant) care about. It is also what the public appears to care about. These attitudes then drive what our students think is important and, more often than I care to think about, drive what my fellow teachers of writing think is important. This, of course, runs counter to everything we know about how people learn to write and how good writers become good writers, but in our numbers-focused world it is much easier to focus on a test score (as if any standardized test can give us any information of value when it comes to writing) or final grade or number of errors. That is the easy way out. That is the easy to way evaluate writing. Never mind that all these methods are completely useless when it comes to evaluating writing.

Of course, in the past, the focus on writing process has been equally problematic. While an important part of the process of becoming a writer, focusing on process alone is not the answer to making someone a good writer. In addition, process has been rather haphazardly taught in many writing classrooms and in many writing textbooks. Quite simply, a focus on process is not a solution to the problem of teaching writing.

So what is the solution? I believe the solution to the problem of teaching writing is not focusing on the writing but instead focusing on the writer. If we do not focus on the root of the problem then we are only treating the symptoms – we are not curing the patient. While asking for a definition of good writing is problematic – you will often get four definitions when you ask any two people because the value of writing can only be judged in context and context is variable – we do know, thanks to research, what makes a good writer. Good writers can consistently deliver suitable writing. Suitable writing is not of course judged solely on correctness, although it does play a role, but is determined by the effectiveness of the writing for its purpose. Does it do the job? Of course, not every writer creates terrific writing every day and not every writer can write effectively in every situation, but a good writer can study the particular context, and through practice and study, deliver the goods. Every good writer that I know did not become a good writer by fortuitous accident. They may have been blessed with a good ear, quick mind, or strong support system, but it takes diligent practice and study to capitalize on those blessings and become a good writer. It takes even more perseverance to overcome the lack of these blessings to become a good writer. We do not do enough in our education system to help would-be writers capitalize on their blessings, or overcome their lack, and we do very little to help would-be writers actually become writers. For centuries (forever?) we have depended on the individuals’ drive to become a writer to struggle and persevere to learn, grow, and develop as a writer, but our education system does not offer a consistent, effective plan to help people become writers.

Perhaps the battle cry for our revolution could be adapted from Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign – It’s about the writer, stupid. If we ask this basic question whenever we make a decision (big or small) that concerns the teaching of writing – will this help our students become writers – and judge the answer using real research – then and only then we will see an improvement in their writing in the long-term but even more important we will make them writers – and that after all is the goal.

Don't hate me because I love my job

2010-10-20T12:53:00.000-07:00

Today is the National Day on Writing and I believe this blog post honors that celebration.

I love my job because I spend my days writing and hanging out with other writers (in person or virtually or both). What could be cooler than that? When I was a working writer I loved that too although in a different way. Writing is fun, challenging, and tormenting -- sometimes all at the same time. Words have the power to make people think, feel, and do things -- sometimes against their will. Being able to wield words with that power is exhilarating. However, since I have become a teacher of writing I have found a different sort of exhilaration -- helping someone else recognize and learn to wield that power. I happen to think I have the most important job there is because without literacy then all the rest of education is meaningless. There are many reasons I love my job but I think a quick look at a selection of the past week's events can illustrate that point for me.

My midterm grading backlog was formidable but I managed to get through it thanks to the inspiration I found in my students' reflections on the class to this point. Despite taking a general education required class (note: I think this is an important class but we all know many students don't agree), they are aware that they have learned some important lessons about communication, literacy, and writing and that awareness gave me a buzz every time I encountered it. One student writes: "I will be using what I have learned in my daily life". I should have kept track of all the great comments but didn't think of it until later and this reflection just happened to be the last one that I read.

I took a break from midterm grading to attend the 2010 Watson Conference at the University of Louisville and had a marvelous experience. I enjoyed the fortuitous serendipity of the session where I presented with Heather Blain and Timothy Johnson and we had the opportunity to talk about writing workshop, genre, and agency with our audience after presenting our papers. I loved that opportunity to have a conversation about the convergences of our topics and enjoyed doing so in the other sessions I attended as well. I also loved listening in to the conversation about larger issues during the keynote sessions. Not only to hear the key points brought up by the speaker by the chair and presenter but also the questions, comments, and thoughts of so many notables that have only been names on books and articles but now have faces and personalities too. Taking the step back from my daily teaching routine in order to gain the perspective necessary to see the larger issues of the field is necessary but I was so pleased to be able to do so at the Watson this year as it was an entirely different experience than attending the CCCC's and I really enjoyed it.

Once I had a chance to recover I was able to dive back into my current project -- my dissertation. I am in the throes of wrapping up my analysis and working through my conclusions and that is heady stuff indeed. I am learning a great deal about how a person becomes a writer. Learning how we can foster rhetorical agency and increase writing self-efficacy is important to me personally but also very important to the field. Not only is this important work, but I find it incredibly interesting.

I don't love everything about my job but I do love the major aspects of my life as an academic. I love helping my students become writers. I love talking with peers who love teaching too. I love investigating ways to help us do both those things even better.

Writing Self-Efficacy is not the same thing as confidence

2010-09-29T12:53:00.000-07:00

Self-efficacy is not the same thing as confidence. Confidence is often equated with arrogance or hubris and may have little relation to actual ability. Self-efficacy on the other hand is based on real factors. The primary sources of self-efficacy are actual performance experience, comparisons with and observations of the performances of others, what others say about your performance, and your general physical well-being at the moment. So, for example, say that you are a runner. Your running self-efficacy will be determined by how well you have run in similar situations in the past, how your running compares with other runners, the feedback you have received about your running, and your general sense of well-being and preparedness for the challenge at the time. Self-efficacy is a much more informed self-evaluation than confidence and that is why self-efficacy is important to performance.

This sense of informed self-evaluation is also why I believe writing self-efficacy plays an important role in transfer. It is a key part of self-knowledge that will help continue growth and development long after students have left the classroom. Writing self-efficacy is not the same thing as the first-semester student who tells me she got all A's in high school English or that his mom thinks he is a good writer. I can't tell my students they are great and see their writing self-efficacy increase. In order for my students to gain writing self-efficacy they need the opportunity to perform -- they need to write -- hopefully giving both deep and broad experiences, but they also need the opportunity to compare their performance, their writing, to that of others which then helps them judge the quality of the feedback they receive from others about their writing.

I don't want to simply go through the motion of preparing my students for their future writing challenges -- I want to increase their own sense of preparedness and their sense of writing self-efficacy.

Why am I studying writing self-efficacy?

2010-09-25T08:31:00.000-07:00

I don't believe the ability to write is a gift from the Muse. I believe becoming a competent writer can be learned, but I do not believe it can be taught. This is especially true of the way that we so often teach writing -- with a sort of inoculation instruction focused on "mutt genres" intended to prevent future bad writing that may help student writers in the short term, but not in the long term. I am not all that confident of the "may help" either, because all too often, I believe it does more harm than good by reinforcing students' belief that they will never, can never, be writers. This is very harmful indeed because writing is such an essential part of communicating today. I think we can better serve our students by shifting our focus away from teaching context-less writing lessons and focus more on helping them become writers.

Writing is a complex skill that requires that the writer be able to evaluate the context, understand the needs of the discourse community, and work within the appropriate genre as defined by that community to appropriately meet the requirements of the situation. Preparing students to handle the infinite variety of situations such complexity creates seems a hopeless task to me. Worse, teaching students that writing is simpler and easier to master than it actually is undermines their confidence and competence. So how do we prepare them? How do we help them become writers?

My goal is for my students to become self-directed and self-regulated writers. I use a two-pronged approach to achieve this goal. First, my writing classes are focused on "writing about writing" to help my students understand how to study a context and discourse community so they can choose the appropriate genre and work with it as determined by that context. I tailor this approach to the level of students and expectations for the class so it is different for my first-year students than it is for my graduate students and so on. Equally important to this effort is my focus on agency and self-efficacy. In order for my students to be ready, willing, and able to take this much control upon themselves they need to have confidence in their ability to address the task at hand and belief in their ability to to control their own destiny. In order to become writers, they need both self-efficacy and agency.

Albert Bandura defines self-efficacy beliefs as a person’s belief in their capability to produce the desired effect through deliberate action. This is similar to a self-fulfilling prophecy in that positive self-efficacy beliefs lead to positive outcomes and negative self-efficacy beliefs lead to negative outcomes. Decades of research in diverse fields has shown that self-efficacy is a more consistent predictor of behavioral outcomes than other self beliefs. In particular, research suggests that beliefs about writing processes and competence are instrumental to the writer’s ultimate success as a writer. This is because self-efficacy beliefs influence an individual’s chosen course of action, perseverance, resiliency, sense of optimism or pessimism, and reaction to stress and depression. Sources of self-efficacy are performance or mastery experience; vicarious experience, such as observations and social comparisons; social persuasions; and physiological state. However, Bandura emphasizes the fact that agency and self-efficacy are interdependent. In order to make the decision to act, people must believe they have the power as well as the capability to act.

That is why I am studying writing self-efficacy. I want to better understand how people become writers so I can help my students become the self-directed and self-regulated confident writers they need to become to succeed.

Tweet, Tweet: This is My Class on Twitter

2010-09-16T08:44:00.000-07:00

I admit it. I'm an avid reader of ProfHacker and often find myself inspired by ideas I find there -- ideas such as teaching with Twitter (Framework and Practical Advice). I also have several colleagues who tried Tweeting with their students and so it has been something I've thought about for a while. This semester I was inspired to use Twitter with my students for these reasons as well as the fact that my basic focus for the class was to explore the idea of writing for different audiences and for different purposes. Also, as I frequently teach online (as I am this semester) I was looking for a way to improve communication and increase the connections we make in class.

In the past I have worked to channel class communication to take place within BlackBoard and restrict the use of other channels of communication, such as email, to specific discussion of private issues, such as grades. I did use online chat programs, such as Instant Messenger, to confer with students about papers but this was hardly a daily occurrence. While the restriction of class interaction to BlackBoard did make teaching dozens of students more manageable and make all information available to everyone -- and not just the student who asked the right question -- it doesn't really promote a lot of give-and-take (in general). I have had (and am participating in some right now) great discussions in BlackBoard but there is also a lot of one-way communication rather than an actual conversation. Plus, the simple truth is that you have to log into BlackBoard to join the conversation. For busy students (and teachers) this doesn't happen as frequently as is possible using a communication channel such as Twitter. I have Twitter on the home page of my computer and mobile devices. I never just glance at BlackBoard like I do Twitter.

One of the reasons that I like Twitter for myself (the person, not the teacher) is that it allows me to communicate with friends and colleagues immediately. I can glance at my Twitter feed (as I do several times a day) to see what they are doing and/or thinking. Sometimes it is something interesting to me professionally and sometimes it is funny and sometimes it is poignant. I love these glimpses into the lives of my friends but I also love the ability to stay in touch with what is going on in the world as well as my profession.

I have found that pushing my students on to Twitter offers me similar glimpses into their lives. Whenever I check my class Twitter feed I gain new insight into who my students are and what interests them. Granted sometimes there is Too-Much-Information because some students don't filter but in general I know when someone is feeling under the weather or overwhelmed by life. I would not have known either of those things in a traditional online class although probably would have in a face-to-face one. While I might not really care what my students ate for dinner last night, I do like knowing more about their lives outside of class as it makes them more real and more accessible. I think for that reason Twitter has made me a better teacher.

However, more than simple personal benefits, Twitter has had a direct impact on my teaching and the class in other ways that are beneficial. I can push out messages via Twitter that I would have previously had to send via announcements or email. Those methods work but also require more effort on the part of the students to access (they have to log into BlackBoard or their email server to see if there is anything new). They also seem so formal and heavy handed that I try to use them sparingly. I do post a new "Announcement" in BlackBoard every week (more if something comes up) but hate to overuse it. I can Tweet once or twice a day and it feels much more informal and more accessible. Of course that is my perception. We'll see how the students feel about it.

I have not required a certain number of Tweets from my students but instead required that they Tweet about certain things at certain times -- for example, Tweet about the reading selection you just posted to the class annotated bibliography on the class blog. This seems to have worked fairly well. Students are posting regularly about class business as well as personal lives. What I have found is that these posts help me keep track of the various subjects that students are working on (they were tasked to choose a theme for the class that included their intended profession) because I am getting regular reminders of these subjects. I hope the students are also seeing these trends and intersections among their work.

A month into the semester and I feel that Twitter has helped me get to know my online students better and to stay connected with them, so I feel my experiment has been worthwhile. In the end, the proof will be in the pudding -- did it improve my students' experience in the class? Some students have already commented that they feel more connected and like knowing there are real people "out there" reading their messages and classwork, but other students have complained that there are too many places where information must be posted and tracked. This is a valid complaint as I am using a class blog in addition to BlackBoard and Twitter. I wanted to open multiple channels of communication this semester and we'll just have to wait until the end of the semester to determine if that was a good choice, but, right now, from where I'm sitting, I'm pretty happy with my choice.

My Credo as a Writing Teacher

2010-08-30T10:26:00.000-07:00

I seemed to have reached the point in that early semester chaos when it is helpful to ground myself once more and review what I believe is important to remember as a writing teacher. Sometimes my goals get lost in the administrivia.

Most important, as countless research studies have established, writing is not one skill, and certainly not a basic skill, but rather a complex set of skills that vary according to task. As a complex set of skills, rather than one simple skill, writing cannot be taught. That's right, I don't believe in transfer -- at least not when writing instruction is based on skill acquisition. I do believe transfer can, and does, happen when writing instruction moves beyond basic skill acquisition. If I'm not teaching basic writing skills then what am I teaching?

I strive to teach my students that writing is context-specific. The specific audience and the specific task create the boundaries and goals for each piece of writing. This is why writing cannot be taught and why transfer fails. I cannot simply work my way down a checklist every semester and churn out competent writers. As soon as they leave my classroom they will write in such a wide variety of contexts that I cannot hope to prepare them for all possibilities. What I can do is help them develop an understanding of how genre and audience drive writers in their work so they can adapt and learn to work within those new contexts as they are encountered. Learning how to sift out the needs and conventions of each new discourse community they join will help my students become successful writers.

However, there is one more essential task that faces me as a writing instructor -- I have to make my students agents of their own change. I have to help my students not only believe that they can write but that they can guide their own destiny as writers. I can create and deliver the most amazing writing class ever, but if my students are not ready to accept the challenge and do not believe they can meet it then no change -- or very little change -- will take place. My experience working with writers outside and inside academia as well as my own research has reinforced this belief time and time again. This is the driving force behind my focus on writing self-efficacy in my research.

Fall 2010 3X3

2010-08-25T09:34:00.000-07:00

As a reflective practitioner (clear demonstration of my NWP affiliation) Natalie Houston's suggestion on ProfHacker to reflect on the past semester as I prepare for the new one fell on fertile ground. I agree it is important to look at what worked and didn't in the past to make sure that my experience informs my future practice.

What Worked Well

Focusing on Writing About Writing with my first-year writing students. My concept for the class is not yet fully refined but students still learned important lessons. Not all of them were big fans but their arguments against were more eloquent and informed as a result of their reading (a fact none of them noted of course). I think I can work on this concept more to bring more students on board.

Switching from a multitude of summary assignments to building annotated bibliography as a class. This not only provides a saner (for me and my students) way to build the same skill set but it provides more support and scaffolding for the process. Also, when we are done we have a pretty helpful document to guide future research and writing which the summary assignments didn't really do for us.

Creating video tutorials were also a good choice. Admittedly they were initially created because I was dying to use my new Flip and as a new user they were not very polished, but students did find them helpful. I have a tendency to be too text reliant for the information I share with my online students so this was a nice break.

What Didn't

I assigned too much reading right up front. I was excited about making the switch to writing about writing and also knew students needed to front-load their reading to inform the writing they would do the rest of the semester. All true but still too much too soon for first-year students.

Starting out with a group project was a mistake. Enrollment has too many fluctuations at the beginning of a semester (especially in an online class) and it is really hard to make students work together when they haven't formed a community yet.

In part because I needed to allow more time for the group project than originally planned and in part because of my own misinterpretation of departmental guidelines I assigned too many pages of writing for my students. These factors meant I didn't allow as much time as I should have for drafting and revision.

What I'm Changing

One of the complaints about the writing about writing focus was simply that students didn't know what they were getting into. So this semester I created a video challenge to let students know what our focus would be for the semester. I sent it out weeks before classes started and also put it in my introductory materials (for those late additions as well as folks who might have missed those early emails). They still might hate the emphasis but at least now they've been warned!

I am making more video tutorials although perhaps for some at least mini-lesson might be more descriptive. Short explanations for major assignments etc. Hopefully students will find these useful and also help them understand my goals for the class and assignments.

I'm using social media to build a sense of community and audience and then took the elements I really wanted to keep from the class annotated bibliography assignment and melded it with the social media. This semester we are building a class annotated bibliography together but it is not a group project.

Am I Media Mad or Simply Mad?

2010-08-12T09:00:00.000-07:00

That's mad as in crazy as I am committed. The syllabus is made. I notified my students. We are using Blogger and Twitter this semester in addition to BlackBoard -- and I'm making YouTube videos like crazy to support my instruction. What is up with that?

That is exactly what one of my students just asked me. She had me for Writing I in the spring and signed up for my Writing II class this fall -- assuming she knew what she was getting into. And then came my Challenge video and she is pretty confused.

I can't blame her.

Of course, change has become my habit ever since I started this whole Ph.D. thing. The more I study, contemplate, and conduct my own research about the teaching of writing (or the learning of writing, after all which came first, the chicken or the egg) then the more I want to do for my students.

So why Twitter? A couple reasons.

First, I believe it can be an easily monitored channel of communication that will allow any of us (teacher and students) to send a message to the group. If information is being generated in two different areas (Blogger and BlackBoard) then announcing changes and additions via Twitter means we can all still check just one place. This is actually an improvement on BlackBoard as there is not just one place information is posted in BB.

So simple communication is one reason, but perhaps more important, I think using Twitter with its limited character count combined with its open access will help my students get away from the traditional English essay mindset and perhaps (hopefully?) think a bit differently about audience and genre -- focusing on the message and not the medium or perhaps more accurately how the medium impacts the message. We'll find out!

So why Blogger?

This is perhaps the least radical change. For several semesters now I have required students to present some final web presentation of some sort and for many students that meant a blog. So requiring all students to blog (instead of create web pages, slide presentations, or Squidoo lenses for example) might actually be a step back. I am experimenting with the use of a class blog as a way to help two sections of the same class interact with our subject matter. That is a radical change. We'll see how that works. I'm requiring all students to make their web presentations of their project via blog in hopes that if we all use the same program we will be able to explore in greater depth the many ways this simple format can be adapted and changed. My reasons for sharing their presentations on the web as opposed to a final paper turned in via BlackBoard's gradebook are the same. I want my students to develop an understanding and appreciation for writing for a real audience -- not me -- and how the needs and knowledge of the real audience drive real communication. I've been striving for that goal for some time and still haven't reached it. I'm not sure you truly can in any writing class (after all, students know they are writing for the teacher) but every semester I hope I can do better.

And so, dear students, never fear. There is a method to my madness. Of course, that is exactly what I would say if I was indeed mad...

Technology: How much is too much?

2010-07-15T03:50:00.000-07:00

I was suddenly sucked into a vortex of class concocting, pedagogical pondering, and technology taste-testing last night. I don't know what hit me. There I was living my life as usual (cooking, cleaning, caring for child and dog, performing administrative duties) when suddenly I was struck with the urge to build my fall course. This compulsion was so fierce that I never did go to sleep last night. Wow. I've suffered such creative compulsions before but never for writing a syllabus or assignment sheet.

I have a lot of ideas for making this class exciting, challenging, fulfilling, and fun (too tall an order for a general education class? well we'll see).

One of the primary things I want to focus is on genre awareness and all that entails (that is a whole 'nother blog post though so I won't get into it now) and part of my brainstorm is to utilize various web publication tools to emphasize that. But that does lead me to the all important question of how much technology is too much? I am not much of a subscriber to the belief that digital natives are super techno-savvy. Perhaps that is simply because I've had to explain to too many people how to use BlackBoard and even email. I think just like anything else -- they know what they use but there is a whole world of technology out there they don't use -- so they don't know it. But again that is another blog post.

I'm teaching a general education (as in required for everyone and taught in many different incarnations although with the same basic goals by many different instructors) writing class. The class is online and our university utilizes BlackBoard to support all classes. So that is one form of technology we will need to use -- albeit sparingly.

I'm also fairly definite about the use of student blogs to display finished products and allow peer comments -- perhaps more but still deciding the parameters there.

I've got a couple of short introductory assignments (very short!) which made me start to think about using a twitter feed as well. Is that too much? Still thinking about what I would do with that...but I do like the idea of using these different technological tools as well as other assignments to make my students think about the importance of communication and words in general as well as the role genre and audience etc. play in communication. But oh dear...how much technology to require and how much to simply encourage. How much is too much?

Community and muscle building

2010-07-12T12:07:00.000-07:00

It's not that I haven't thought about these things before and it certainly isn't that I thought they were unimportant, but, recently, as I analyze my dissertation data (a study of the writing self-efficacy of adult writers) I have come to appreciate anew how important creating a sense of community is for a newly-formed group of writers and how essential it is to help those writers (who typically don't think of themselves as writers) develop their writing muscles.

I am not claiming either of these issues is new information to experienced writing teachers -- they certainly aren't for me (and I have the t-shirt to prove it) but reading through the comments of the writers I'm studying has made me more aware of their importance and will force me to emphasize them more in future incarnations of my writing classes.

Too often I have succumbed to pressure (from students as well as administration) to emphasize the business of a course up front (or at least place too much emphasis) but instead I vow to focus those initial days to activities that will build community and trust (among the group in general as well as between coach and writer) but even more importantly begin exercising those (often) flabby and underdeveloped writing muscles. The writing growth and development that I am studying has taken place as a result of these two elements and as the growth and development of writers is my primary goal as an instructor it seems a no-brainer to me that I need to focus even more on those elements in future classes.

A supportive community is an essential part of a successful writing workshop. This means a leader who provides lots of writing opportunities that not only give writers the chance to develop their writing muscles but also a safe place to push and challenge the writers to stretch beyond their safety zone. Of course the leader is also responsible for mentoring, teaching, and otherwise supporting the writer's progress through the development of individual pieces and growth as a writer. It also means a true community of writers that shares common goals to support each individual member's growth and success. In this community every writer contributes toward these goals by participating in workshops and offering feedback -- providing a real audience with a real response to the work. The support of both instructor and community are of equal importance to the growth process. I've always believed this but my recent research has given me even more reason to do so.

I've also long believed that writing practice and experience are essential. Just as you need to build your tolerance for physical activities so must you build your tolerance for mental activities. But I think we need to build (force or enforce?) more writing time on our developing writers. Time and practice are essential to writing improvement and I've always thought if there was no instruction but lots of time and practice we would see more improvement than if the reverse was true. While I don't believe no instruction is the answer -- I think we have a tendency to do too much pushing (direct instruction) and not enough pulling (giving the writer opportunity and getting out of their way until they need us). It is probably a response to our need to feel like we are doing our job but I can tell you that running a workshop is work.

I am pretty excited about the implications of my research for my teaching but now I better get back to it!

June news

2010-06-30T16:03:00.000-07:00

Why no blog posts in June? Well mostly the Summer Institute is to blame as that took the most of my time and energy but I did manage some progress on data analysis for dissertation -- and an article revision for Academic Exchange Quarterly. The good news is that my article "A Study of Writing Self-Efficacy in Adults" will be published in Fall 2010.

May news

2010-05-31T15:58:00.000-07:00

Why no blog posts in May? Perhaps it was the usual end of the semester chaos combined with Summer Institute orientation chaos immediately followed by a trip to Lubbock for hopefully the very last May Seminar! Good news is that my dissertation proposal was accepted and have a good start on first three chapters -- recognizing there is more work to come there as I begin working on data analysis. Also received word that my proposal "What is the Impact of (re)Working & (re)Negotiating Language on Writing Self-Efficacy?” was accepted for the 2010 Thomas R. Watson Conference.

April news

2010-04-30T15:56:00.000-07:00

Why no blog posts in April? Perhaps it was those pesky qualifying exams (which I passed, yeah!) immediately followed by plunging into a dissertation proposal.

Finding Rhetorical Agency

2010-03-23T06:44:00.000-07:00

A funny thing happened while I was struggling to define and understand rhetorical agency and how my work connects with it...I not only learned about rhetorical agency but found it as well.

I have been struggling for months with situating my research within the bounds of technical communication and rhetoric (see The Forgotten "R") while simultaneously reading the research I needed to inform that work. What truly complicated the boundaries for me (I only just realized) is that so much of that research fell within the disciplines of psychology and education with just a smattering of composition work. I needed this work to define and ground my research -- to feed it -- but I also needed to locate my work (which is not in psychology, education, or composition) within the discipline of rhetoric.

In "How Ought We to Understand the Concept of Rhetorical Agency?", Cheryl Geisler defines rhetoric as a productive art and says that rhetorical inquiry should "make a difference in the world". She asks how we can create a better society through the pursuit of rhetoric.

This makes me happy as I feel that I have at last found a home for my work that satisfies my needs and interests. I see composition and writing studies to be focused more on academic writing or "schooled literacy" (to borrow from Rick Evans). This is an interest of mine but not the focus of my dissertation work. I also do not want to be pigeonholed as a compositionist as my research and teaching interests are much broader. I am also interested in the work of technical communication (which Grabill defines as communicative labor situated in the social institutions of public life (I really like that definition). Reading Geisler helped me understand (better) that rhetoric encompasses both this societal and educational mission governing communication as Andrea Lunsford defines rhetoric as "the art, practice, and study of [all] human communication." I believe my research has implications for composition but is more situated in the communicative labor of a social institution. Either way I'm covered if I focus on rhetorical inquiry.

Now that I have announced my intent to create a rhetorical inquiry that makes a difference in the world I must describe it more fully. I return again to the work of Albert Bandura in social cognitive theory to set the stage. I feel more comfortable with this revisit as I now understand (better) the path I must travel to return to rhetoric. Bandura posits that people can effect change in themselves and their situations. This is clearly something rhetoricians need to believe (accept, embrace) or our work would be an exercise in futility. But where does that belief take us?

One of the ways people effect change, according to Bandura, is through self-efficacy. He defines self-efficacy as a person's confidence in their ability to utilize specific skills. Bandura maintains that self-efficacy and agency are interdependent. People do not pursue activities if they doubt they can do what it takes [self-efficacy] to succeed. Why bother, right? Similarly, people do not pursue activities if they doubt they have the power [agency] to act/enact change.

Bandura says the exercise of personal agency is achieved through reflective and regulative thought, the skills at one's command, and self influence (that combination of self efficacy and agency). He points out that skill is not a fixed property (a battle we continually fight as teachers of writing) but has generative capability that must be organized and effectively orchestrated. He says there is a marked difference between possession of knowledge and skills -- and being able to use them under difficult (and different) circumstances. In essence this is the problem of transfer that has dominated so much rhetorical conversation in recent years.

I am interested in the ways that social cognitive theory (self-efficacy and personal agency) interacts (or is it intersects?) with rhetorical agency to effect transfer. I am looking at the short- and long-term impact of negotiated writing (such as that found in collaborative and libratory writing pedagogies) on rhetorical agency and writing self-efficacy.

Carmen Werder makes a call for rhetoric in general to move from individual efficacy to collective agency in "Rhetorical Agency: Seeing the Ethics of it All". For Werder rhetorical agency is about persuasion rather than exerting control over others through the use of power; negotiating with others through dialectic interplay rather than simply communicating to others.

In "Tradition and Agency in Humanistic Rhetoric", Michael Leff points out that individual agency in traditional humanistic rhetoric was held entirely by the rhetor. The humanistic rhetor was active and in control, although admittedly constrained by the demands of the audience, while the audience was passive. Like Werder, Geisler describes agency in postmodern rhetoric as socially constructed.

While Geisler defines rhetorical agency as the capacity of the rhetor to act, she also points out that only a select few have enjoyed traditional rhetorical agency while linking rhetorical action and social change. She says it is important to consider in what sense can the actions of the rhetor be linked to consequences in the world. She argues that it is rhetoric's mission to educate rhetors to have agency and to intervene (as in support and encourage) in the skills of the rhetorical agents with whom we come in contact.

Geisler says rhetorical agency manifests itself in the ability to identify and manage, orchestrate, resources for communication. I believe this brings us back, full circle, to writing self efficacy as a tool to achieve that educational mission as Geisler outlines it. It is my job as a rhetorician and educator to facilitate the acquisition of these skills, and their orchestration, in other rhetorical agents. I can do this both in the classroom and through my research.

Geisler's goal for rhetoric is for rhetoric to contribute to the development of a society that grants agency more broadly which ties in well with the goals of my research -- just as Grabill argues research should encourage emancipation, empowerment, and social change.

My 2010 CCCC Experience -- Remixing and Rethinking in Progress (Part Two)

2010-03-22T04:43:00.000-07:00

I started the day with G.14 "Theorizing Agency in Writing Studies" and was interested by Clayton Walker's "The Embodied Act of Writing: Toward a Theory of Affects and Agency" and its connection of agency and classroom discourse.

Then on to H.21 "Research on Learning Transfer, and How We Use That Research to Improve Classroom and Institutional Success". Was particularly interested in Anne Balay's study of transfer at her institution and her call for more longitudinal research on transfer.

That brought me to preparing for my own presentation as part of J.26 "Daring to Remix, Renegotiate, and Reassess Writing Assessment" with Rebecca Rickly, Fred Kemp, and Ronda Wery. I talked about "Negotiated Assignments and Rubrics" and am more than happy to provide notes etc. for any interested in my experience with collaboration and negotiation.

After rehashing our talk and chatting with others following our talk it was too late to attend the last session of the day. Had intended to see K.08 "Revising Genre Theory: Reporting on the Emergence of Online Health Communication Genres" to be a supportive friend.

Enjoyed a leisurely dinner with Ronda Wery and Liz Pohland and then on to celebrate Rebecca Rickly's 50th birthday party at a party hosted by Joyce Locke Carter. Very exciting combination of folks and lots of fun.

Saturday morning meant dealing with business of checking out and finding car in huge underground garage beneath Galt House then having a very productive meeting regarding Morehead Writing Project with Tom Fox.

Managed to squeeze in one last session -- O.12 "Web 2.0: Problems and Possibilities". Was interested in John Alberti's discussion of power and pedagogy as well as Annie Mendenhall and Elizabeth Brewer's discussion of interactivity and power.

Then was called away by family emergency so I couldn't attend P.10 "Creating Narratives for Technical to Professional Communication" which promised to include very interesting work by Christina Low, http://www.faculty.english.ttu.edu/dragga/, and Alissa Barber Torres.

My 2010 CCCC Experience -- Remixing and Rethinking in Progress (Part One)

2010-03-21T11:25:00.000-07:00

I returned home from "CCCC 2010: The Remix" last night. An easy trip home with the conference so close but the recovery time will last much longer. I am still exhausted: physically, emotionally, and most definitely cognitively.

I've been following the discussion of the conference on the WPA-L and thought I'd share my reasoning for session choice. I was not a good friend. I didn't go to any sessions to support my friends and colleagues. I was strictly selfish about my session choice -- I selected sessions to attend based solely on my interests as a researcher, scholar, and teacher. I didn't really pay attention to the level of the scholar (master or initiate or somewhere in between) and simply chose sessions based on my hope that I would learn something from the presenter. Sometimes I reaped more than I expected and other times I was disappointed (although never by a whole panel). I would love a more centralized way to access papers and handouts etc. It would be even more awesome if such a mechanism included a way to share our own notes and reactions to continue the conversation long after the conference. I could see a tremendous benefit to such an experience. I definitely plan to follow up with many of these folks as the hectic (frantic?) pace of the conference just didn't leave me time for such contact.

I have pages of notes and handouts that I'm afraid will get lost in the shuffle so I want to post a quick review of what I did with notes about things that particularly interested me.

I was disappointed right out of the gate that I could not get in the door to attend session A.09 "Rethinking Transfer, Renewing Pedagogy" but I will follow up with those folks.

In my need to quickly choose a new session I simply picked the one that interested me the most that also happened to be nearby and selected A.06 "Protocol, Power, and Possibility: What the Literacies and Rhetorics of Organization Can Teach Us About Teaching Writing".

I was interested in Annette Vee's discusion of "Counter-Coding: Procedural Writing as Resistance among 'Hacker' Communities" in particular some of the things she had to say about writing resistance and power.

Richard Parent's "Hacking the Classroom: Teaching and Learning (as) Playfulness" was also really interesting to me in regard to pedagogy and teaching.

I next planned to attend B.33 "The Remix in the Classroom: Innovations and Implications of Multimodal Composing" but instead got side-tracked by meeting up with some of my fellow TTU TCR Ph.D. students (Sue Henson and Janie Santoy) and then my fellow panelists (Fred Kemp and Ronda Wery).

Then I was off to C.33 "Rethinking and Renewing Academic Literacy: Issues of Transfer" which was a great session just full of information that I can use for my scholarly work and teaching. Just love when that happens. Kathleen Rowlands presented some interesting work to aid in transfer from high school to college that should be interesting in my writing project work. Irene Clark's talk about genre awareness was very noteworthy. Chris Thaiss discussed transfer and presented many intriguing ideas.

With my mind whirling from all the information I'd received so far and knowing I had two more events to go I decided to take a break with friend, colleague and fellow TTU TCR Ph.D. student Lora Arduser.

Refreshed and renewed I was off to E.25 "Using Quantitative Analysis to Extend the Gains from Authentic Assessment of Writing" and was very impressed with the presenters and the audience (got some great tips for stats support). Keith Rhodes told us we must learn to do our own numbers because numbers have power and Carol Rutz gave great insight into the impact of faculty development on student writing that I found particularly interesting for my writing project work.

Then my final event of the day was the Special Interest Group TSIG.10 "The Subject is Writing: First-Year Composition as an Introduction to Writing Studies" which was chaired by David Slomp and Kathleen Blake Yancey and of course brought us Elizabeth Wardle. Great contacts and ideas. Still fascinated by this project.

There were more events that night but by this point my brain was past capacity and my body was exhausted so I enjoyed a quiet dinner with Lora Arduser and Lisa Meloncon before collapsing.

Personal Agency

2010-03-16T18:07:00.000-07:00

I have spent much time of late thinking about personal agency. It appears to be one of the common threads intersecting different projects for different areas of my professional life.

According to social cognitive theory, we are driven not just by inner forces nor controlled by the environment and social forces but also have the power, the personal agency, to choose our actions. This power to originate actions for specific purposes is the key feature of personal agency, according to Albert Bandura. Bandura is one of the most eminent psychologists of our time and the most cited one living -- and he is the father of social cognitive theory.

Bandura tells us personal agency is when we deliberately choose an action, monitor the results and adjust accordingly. This agentic capability means we influence events around us and contribute to the shape of our lives. There is variation in our individual levels of personal agency and this has a direct impact on our ability to exert influence on our lives. Low level agents think about their actions in terms of details and the methods necessary -- essentially focusing at a low level on the actions to be performed. In contrast, high level agents are able to look at the big picture and determine what the actions mean beyond the immediate result and what effect it will have. No surprise then that high level agency is more impactful.

We develop personal agency across many action domains by experimentation, observation, and adaption of these experiences. This development process begins in infancy and continues throughout our lives but clearly for some people it does not progress beyond low level agency. Personal agency can be promoted if others provide scaffolding for the agent, essentially offering a series of experiences that gradually increase in challenge, and/or provide support. These types of experiences are natural progressions for many life experiences in school, sports, and life skills, for example.

So what differentiates those high level agents from the low level agents? Was there a failure in their early support system? Did they need more or different support than they received? Either or both may be a cause, but Bandura tells us that there is a great deal of research that supports the fact that experiences where we have a lack of control can undermine our level of personal agency.

Fascinating stuff, eh? But it is more than theory. This theory is well supported by decades of research and personal agency impacts real-life issues such as our academic success, professional achievement, and social engagement. As a writing teacher I am especially interested in social cognitive theory and the issue of personal agency. Certainly both have implications for the teaching of writing. I think increasing our (my?) understanding of how personal agency is developed and fostered could be key to helping my students move from struggling to skilled writers. Certainly the implications go beyond first-year writing classes when we study the differences between low and high level agents.

Extensive research has been done on the writing processes of struggling writers and I can quickly see the parallels between those processes and Bandura's description of low level agents. Understanding why those struggling writers have remained low level agents is just as important as understanding the actions we can initiate to help them make the move to high level agency.

The pedagogical choices we make have strong implications for effective changes in our students from low to high level agency. We know the lack of control undermines personal agency. We know giving the opportunity to choose actions, monitor results, and make adjustments accordingly contributes to personal agency. Furthermore, we know the progression from low to high level agent requires scaffolding and support as well as guidance and feedback.

I'm already thinking about how this will change my own practice as a teacher. It certainly makes clearer to me some of the problems with transfer. Once you have reached high level agency then it is easy to transfer skills from one writing context to another. You are skilled at reaching into your bag of tricks, selecting the most appropriate tools for the task at hand, monitoring the success of those tools, and then making adjustments as necessary. The problem, I think, is that low level agents (the majority of my students I suspect) not only have a more limited set of tricks and tools but are much less successful at monitoring and adjusting as necessary and do not put all the available tricks and tools to appropriate use.

I definitely see a connection here between helping increase personal agency and effecting transfer -- and Bandura has helped me understand more clearly how agency can be fostered. The question is to what extent.

The Forgotten "R"

2010-03-15T08:02:00.000-07:00

Preparing for your doctoral qualifying exam is more than a bit like scrapbooking. I think this might be true anyway since my scrapbooks are all hideously in need of updating. Doctoral studies have a way of doing that to you. I have spent a great deal of time lately sifting and sorting through books, articles, and notes -- and taken many walks down memory lane in the process. This "scrapbooking" process has also allowed me to take a step back and look at all this academic clutter to see it as a whole and to see patterns I had either missed the first time around or forgotten about while in the midst of gathering new information. Some of those discoveries will provide fodder (hopefully) for my qualifying exam and my dissertation, but one discovery is much more foundational -- my identity as a rhetorician.

I once embraced and celebrated this identity but somewhere during the process of my coursework I was seduced by the idea of technical communication. Further complicating matters was my marriage to composition as a general education writing teacher. My professional identity has always been connected to writing (as a professional writer and editor as well as published novelist before becoming a teacher of writing). This identity became even more intertwined when I took on the role of a National Writing Project site director. The National Writing Project focuses on improving the teaching of writing and one of the main methods for achieving this goal is to help teachers become writers themselves. I love this work but do not want to be defined by it either.

All these titles and roles became perplexing to me. Just what was my primary identity? What was my primary role? While the siren song of technical communication was alluring and interesting and full of wonderful challenges I knew that was not the right fit for me -- too much of my work was tied up in the teaching of writing. Maybe someday I would be able to devote myself entirely to that work, and I certainly had many projects I wanted to explore, but not in my current professional position. Certainly composition fit much of work but that description was too confining, too restricting, it chaffed and had to be discarded. I contemplated the term writing studies long and hard as that seemed to encompass all that I was while also offering the ability to embrace all I wanted to be as well. And yet...some nagging notion remained that something still was not right.

Fortunately for me, my weekend reading included Wayne C. Booth's The Rhetoric of Rhetoric: The Quest for Effective Communication. This was fortunate because it reminded me that I was a rhetorician -- and that the study of rhetoric covers quite comfortably all the areas of communication that interest me so much as a professional, as a teacher, and as a researcher. Rhetoric includes technical communication, composition, and writing. I didn't need to shop for a new identity -- I just needed to be reminded of one I had tucked into the back of my closet and forgotten. Amazingly, while I have grown and changed since I packed that identity away it still fits well and looks marvelous on me, if I do say so myself.

Booth defines rhetoric as all forms of communication. He shares a number of other popular definitions of rhetoric. A few of my favorites include:

Lloyd Bitzer, 1968 -- "Rhetoric is a mode of altering reality, not by the direct application of energy to objects, but by the creation of discourse which changes reality through the mediation of thought and action."

Jacques Derrida, 1990 -- "We should not neglect rhetoric's importance, as if it were simply a formal superstructure or technique exterior to the essential activity. Rhetoric is something decisive in society...[T]here are no politics, there is no society, without rhetoric, without the force of rhetoric."

Andrea Lunsford, 1995 -- "Rhetoric is the art, practice, and study of [all] human communication."

Marc Fumaroli, 1999 -- "Rhetoric appears as the connective tissue peculiar to civil society and to its proper finalities, happiness and politic peace hic et nunc."

If a rhetorician is a student of communication, as Booth tells us, then I am indeed a rhetorician. I am not just a communicator or teacher of communication -- but a student of communication. I believe those studies will help me become a better communicator and teacher of communication, but those are not the only reasons I study. I study because I find communication fascinating in all its awe-inspiring power.

Booth reminds us that for millenia the study of rhetoric was considered essential. He is concerned, frightened even, by the way we have bastardized rhetorical education today. I agree that the neglect of rhetorical education "threatens our lives" and in fact our whole world. Yes, rhetrickery has given rhetoric a bad name to most of the world -- and perhaps that may have been one of the reasons I avoided defining myself as a rhetorician -- but I believe that rhetoric has the power to change the world.

Certainly as a teacher I believe rhetoric has the power to change lives. Reading and writing well are key to our personal success in both education and professional life. No one disputes that fact but what has gone so horribly wrong with our education system today -- and hence society -- is that we divorce those "skills" from what makes them so meaningful. In order to read and write well we must learn to read and listen critically so we can then communicate effectively in response.

Booth says that the quality of our lives -- our very survival -- depends on the quality of rhetoric and I think that is certainly a field worthy of dedicating my life to studying and teaching. Now if you will excuse me...I need to go update my web site to make it clear that: Deanna Mascle is a rhetorician.

Coming Full Circle

2010-03-04T08:18:00.000-08:00

As a writing teacher I have continually struggled with the content of my writing classes. I am a skilled and experienced writer, but what do I need to teach my students so they can become skilled writers? What experiences do I need to give my students so they can learn the skills necessary to skilled writers? I read and re-read the theory and research of my field and no where could I find a clear answer to this key question: Just what should I (we?) teach in first-year composition classes?

This issue became even more complicated when I began to think beyond the boundaries of my classroom. I could definitely create a class where students could master the assignments I set for them and experience success, but could I create a class where students could take those skills into new writing situations and experience success. Could I really fulfill the essential mission of FYC to prepare students to enter academic writing? Could I foster transfer?

I created carefully scaffolded assignment sequences based on the research and theory of my field and built in more reflection and more collaboration. I introduced my students to the concepts of discourse community and genre. I strove to make them aware of the writing that would be expected of them in other classes as well as the professional world and how they would need these ideas (discourse community, genre, collaboration, reflection) to find their way.

All these changes also marked important changes in my teaching style. I became more of a hands-off teacher and more coach or facilitator. The more I read of social cognitive theory and understood of human adaptation and change the more I realized that I could not teach transfer. I could not teach specific skills that students could immediately apply to the work in other classes. Sure sometimes we both might get lucky and it might happen but those occurrences seemed to be more by serendipity than design.

But all was not lost and there was no need to choose between the two evils of quitting my job or living a lie. I found my answer in personal agency and self efficacy.

People are agentic operators who regulate their own motivation and the activities they pursue. We make causal contributions to our own success through mechanisms of personal agency – acts we intentionally perform to achieve a desired outcome or prevent an undesired one. One of the most influential mechanisms is that of personal efficacy. If we do not believe we can produce the desired result then there is no incentive to act.

We guide our lives by our belief of personal efficacy. We analyze a situation, consider alternative courses of action, judge our ability to carry those actions out successfully and estimate the results of our actions.

I have now come to believe that the only way to effect transfer is through personal agency, personal efficacy, which makes fostering writing self-efficacy the central mission of my writing classes.

How do we foster writing self-efficacy? Well there is a lot we don’t know yet about the sources of writing self-efficacy (and that is the focus of my dissertation) but we do know that human adaptation and change are rooted in social systems. As a result it is not surprising that social forces play an important part in writing self-efficacy and are a key source of writing self-efficacy. This has meant I spend even more time in class on collaboration and building a writing community as well as making writing workshop an integral part of coursework.

Successful outcomes also play an important part in fostering writing self-efficacy. Again collaboration and writing workshop support this, but it is also important to not just build writing self-efficacy for the short-term (this class) but also the long-term, to which end I’ve focused on developing my students knowledge of writing studies (read my post about FYC as Writing Studies) so they do not simply acquire a set of tools they do not know how to adapt – transfer – to a new writing situation but hopefully learn how a discourse community works and the key role it plays in genre so they can better make the necessary moves to enter a new discourse community and understand its genres.

So now my graduate work as well as my teaching has come full circle – a fact I hadn’t realized until just this week. I’m still struggling to answer that question – what should we teach in FYC – and while I think I may have found an answer I’m not confident it is the answer. Stay tuned!

What Is Best Practice (and how do I know when I have it)?

2010-02-11T20:28:00.000-08:00

As a National Writing Project site director best practice is key to what I do (what we do as a site). We base our professional development on best practice. We direct our Fellows to prepare their demonstration lessons the best practice way. Recently I embarked on a research project with Dr. Brian Still (my dissertation adviser) focusing on measuring the impact of teaching and he asked me if I was using best practices. I said yes but the question certainly prompted me to think -- what is best practice and how do I know when I have it?

Best practice is one of those terms that is often thrown around in education circles and as a result it has lost its focus and for some its meaning. Yet the term best practice is used in many professions and often it is specifically defined or outlined by professional organizations. Harvey Daniels and Marilyn Bizar in Teaching the Best Practice Way compared the standards documents published by the national professional associations of educators including those for science, reading, English, math, geography, and history as well as the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards and found they all endorsed a very similar model of teaching and learning -- a student-centered or progressive paradigm of teaching that Daniels and Bizar call best practice. In other words, best practice is another word for good teaching.

While some may think of best practice as nothing more than an educational buzz word, I agree with Daniels and Bizar that best practice is not something nebulous and fuzzy but something very specific when it comes to the activities and ideas that take place in the classroom. Best practice teaching is based on research, the study of development and learning, and the history and philosophy of American education.

Steven Zemelman, Harvey Daniels, and Arthur Hyde give us the main ideas that represent best practice in Best Practice, Today's Standards for Teaching and Learning in America's Schools:

Student-centered: Active and hands-on, holistic, and challenging.

Cognitive: Higher-order thinking, constructivist, expressive, and reflective.

Social: Collaborative, cooperative learning in a Democratic community.

Best practice is research-based. Zemelman, Daniels, and Hyde say: "We have decades of research and thousands of studies showing that progressive teaching practices do 'work'." They further point out that the standards of educational associations are backed up with still more research to support the effectiveness of best practice in specific content areas.

Best practice not a new invention and it is not a fad. It is built on a firm foundation of what we know about development and learning and you can find these ideas embedded in important philosophers and educators including: Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, Johann Pestalozzi, Friedrich Wilhelm Froebel, Maria Montessori, Jean Piaget, John Dewey, Eric Ericson, Carl Rogers, and Elizabeth Harrison, as well as more recent figures such as Jonathan Kozolo, James Beane, Paolo Friere, Deborah Meier, Maxine Greene, and Howard Gardner.

But how does a teacher know best practice when she uses it?

Daniels and Bizar say best practice offers less whole-class-directed instruction and less student passivity.

Check: I rarely lecture and prize engaged student activity.

Daniels and Bizar say best practice offers less stress on competition and grades.

Check: I try to shift the focus away from grades and focus on drafts and workshop to help students grow and improve.

Daniels and Bizar say best practice emphasizes higher-order thinking and learning a field's key concepts and principles.

Check: My writing classes are about writing studies with students (yes, even freshmen) reading research and theory about the current thinking in the field of writing studies.

Daniels and Bizar say best practice encourages cooperation and collaboration in a classroom community.

Check: I strive to create a sense of community and through workshop and group projects stress both cooperation and collaboration.

My 3 X 3

2010-02-09T19:06:00.000-08:00

This post was supposed to be written weeks ago but oh well...better late than never.

It is inspired by a friend's blog post which was in turn inspired by ProfHacker.

I thought this was a good idea for the reasons that ProfHacker writes about but also the fact that I really should reflect in a purposeful way about the various experiments I conduct in my classroom.

Three things that worked well last semester

Combining two sections in one BlackBoard course shell -- I was worried it would get too chaotic but once we got past those first few weeks of acclimation it worked well for me and I think for the students.

Giving my students' IM access -- I was worried that it would be disruptive to me and there was one incident with a student who couldn't understand I was already doing something else and couldn't talk at that moment but for the most part it inspired some truly great teaching moments because I was available when the student needed help. IM also meant we had a record of our conversation so if we were brainstorming the student could just go with the flow of the conversation and not worry about taking notes or remembering. IM also allowed us to clear up confusion that email (or discussion board) can't always provide clarity for -- or at least the process of clearing up confusion in email is more time-consuming and cumbersome.

Shifting focus to writing about writing -- as the main focus of a writing class should be writing I decided to eschew writing about other topics. My choice of focusing on writing for school and professions had mixed results but still a better choice than giving students free rein or focusing on some other unrelated topic.

Three things that didn't work well

Focusing on writing for school was not a good choice -- or at least the way I framed it for students and most of the readings that I provided. It just didn't lead students in the direction I wanted them to go.

Excessive summary writing. I don't know what I was thinking. I was sick of grading them. Students were sick of writing them. Blick. Way too much work for everyone and why?

Excessive assignments. Again. Don't know what I was thinking. I do believe you need to write to improve as a writer but there is also a balance in a workshop situation and this semester didn't find that balance. Shudder just remembering...

Three things I changed for this semester

First-year writing as introduction to writing studies -- I already blogged about this idea

Eliminate summary -- I lied above when I said I didn't know what I was thinking assigning so much summary. I know what I was thinking. I was thinking about how many students the previous semester struggled to learn how to write a summary. But I've sense decided that while this is an important skill perhaps that was not the right approach. I once focused more on the annotated bibliography assignment and I moved back to that approach this semester.

Cut down the number of writing assignments -- bring back sanity for myself and my students and focus on quality rather than quantity. My new approach will focus on smaller, more reflective assignments that then build to a longer, focused research paper inspired by that earlier work. We'll see how it turns out.

My Teaching Philosophy

2010-01-20T13:48:00.000-08:00

My teaching philosophy and my course plan seem to be in a constant state of flux. I used to worry about all this change but recently Prof Hacker wrote that constant innovation is actually a sign of great teaching so I will stop worrying about that anyway.

I see myself primarily as a teacher of writing and so focus is on composition pedagogy. Of course there are many composition pedagogies and I find mine influenced by five schools of thought (at least) in my current incarnation. Is that something new to worry about?

I was first introduced to process pedagogy when I was a student in Lee Brooks' sophomore high school English class. The idea literally changed my life. I believe I would never have gone on to become a professional writer and writing teacher without that experience. As a result, process pedagogy continues to play an important role in the way I teach writing and my teaching is strongly influenced by the work of Peter Elbow and Donald Murray. As Elbow teaches, I encourage true invention such as freewriting, playing with words, etc. As Murray teaches, I encourage writing for discovery and exploration and a willingness to take risks. I teach writing to writers and believe everyone is a writer. While I believe strongly in the power of process, I loath the forced structure taught in so many textbooks and classrooms. I believe every writer should develop an individual writing process that is flexible enough to adapt to many writing tasks. I long resisted the idea of post-process but admit that while I continue to think process is key to developing as a writer my classroom is more post-process. While it includes some element of choice and follows a workshop model that includes iterations of drafting, feedback, and revision, I do limit the range of topics and utilize mini lessons.

I firmly believe in placing the writer and writing at the center of the classroom and every activity and assignment is focused on one simple goal – writing development – which is definitely influenced by expressive pedagogy. My classes have long included freewriting, journals, reflective writing, and small group work. I am strongly influenced by bell hooks' “engaged pedagogy” and Paulo Freire's “liberatory pedagogy” as well as the work of James Britton and the National Writing Project. I understand I am teaching the whole student and I strive to build a critical consciousness about thinking and writing (and thinking about writing).

Collaboration has long been an important part of my life as a writer. As a published novelist I worked with writing groups and as a newspaper reporter and editor writing groups were also key. I learned the power of peer response for myself and as a result have always made it a part of my writing classroom and then as I learned more about the work of Kenneth Bruffee, Anne Ruggles Gere, and Richard Rorty collaborative pedagogy became a central part of my teaching. I believe, as Charlotte Thralls and Patricia A. Sullivan write, that collaborative pedagogy mirrors the true nature of writing and this is another reason it strongly influences my teaching.

Like Ira Shor I often ask myself, and my writing students, what is good writing and how do you become a good writer. My recent move to a writing studies pedagogy for my composition classes is a good demonstration of my own commitment to critical pedagogy. As Freire, Henry Giroux, and Shor have taught, my classes are student-centered and focused more on questions that students ask and answer than questions and answers provided by the instructor alone. I believe greatly in the power of thinking and communication and hope to improve the skills of my students in these essential areas but realize they must be able to take the lead to do so.

Of course these concerns also lend themselves to feminist pedagogy. I strive to decenter authority in my classes as much as possible and place more emphasis on process than product. I hope my students will gain a better understanding of social justice and issues of power as we read, write, and think together to explore these important issues.

Writing About Writing

2010-01-13T05:11:00.000-08:00

I'm not talking about Metawriting now but rather the strategy Doug Downs and Elizabeth Wardle propose for first-year composition (FYC) which focuses on improving students' understanding of writing, rhetoric, language, and literacy (see Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning "First-Year Composition" as "Introduction to Writing Studies"). The focus of this post is to explain what led me to experiment with this approach for my own FYC classes in the Spring 2010 semester.

The issue of transfer has increasingly bothered me as I planned my writing classes in recent years. This nagging concern has caused me to rebuild my classes based on the inquiry and genre work of David Jolliffe as well as the research of Anne Beaufort and work of David Smit. There are many others who influenced my recent efforts to refocus and restructure my FYC classes.

As a result of these influences I have been heading in the direction of writing studies pedagogy with each new semester's evolution of FYC and the Downs-Wardle model seemed to be the next logical step. This was confirmed as I began to study the syllabi, reading lists, and assignment sheets of others working on this approach.

The longer I teach writing and the more I study the research of this field, then the more I think that traditional goals and methods are not working. Downs and Wardle make this very point as they argue that more than 20 years of "research and theory" have "repeatedly demonstrated" that not only does "a unified academic discourse" not exist but that research and theory have also "seriously questioned what students can and do transfer from one context to another" (p. 552). In essence, FYC is making a promise it cannot deliver.

However, I remain committed to teaching writing and communication skills because I believe they are so important, essential in fact, to success in life. So how do we help our students improve if we cannot teach them how to write? Perhaps the answer, as Downs and Wardle posit, is to teach them about writing.

The Council of Writing Program Administrators (WPA) has adopted an Outcomes Statement for FYC that focuses on four major goals for writing instruction: rhetorical knowledge; critical thinking, reading, and writing; processes; and knowledge of conventions. Downs and Wardle argue that students write for so many different communities in college and beyond it is an impossible task to prepare students, in one or two classes, for all the specialized rhetorical and convention knowledge necessary for each community -- especially when the student and instructor cannot know which communities the student will join in the future. The main crux of the Downs and Wardle argument is that "far transfer" is difficult and most FYC courses are not up to the task. My own teaching experience certainly seems to bear this out.

They instead argue we can make students "better writers by teaching about writing. "Instead of teaching situational skills often incorrectly imagined to be generalizable, FYC could teach about the ways writing works in the world and how the 'tool' of writing is used to mediate various activities" (p. 558). Downs and Wardle reimagine FYC as "Introduction to Writing Studies--a course about how to understand and think about writing in school and society".

While consisting of the same activities as the more traditional FYC classes -- reading, writing, research, and argument -- the focus is on understanding writing rather than other topics which typically vary widely and offer students no context. "In this course, students are taught that writing is conventional and context-specific rather than governed by universal rules--thus they learn that within each new disciplinary course they will need to pay close attention to what counts as appropriate for that discourse community" (p. 559). Through the reading, writing, and research students conduct in this course, both Downs and Wardle discovered in their pilot offerings of the class that students developed increased self-awareness about writing. I agree with Downs and Wardle that increased self-awareness about writing may be the best path to improving student writing.

Clearly there are challenges for this new pedagogy including the facts that it is intellectually demanding of students; as a new pedagogy there is not a solid infrastructure in place, such as a corpus of textbooks and assignments; students are more likely to generate imperfect work; and instructors must be knowledgeable about writing studies.

Critics have also argued that teaching about writing may not improve writing. Downs and Wardle respond that "writing studies pedagogy is also consonant with current understanding of transfer. Proven means of facilitating transfer include self-reflection, explicit abstraction of principles, and alertness to one's context" (p. 576).

I have used self-reflection et al in my FYC courses in the past and feel that strategy has been somewhat effective, but I have still felt something was lacking and that my students did not fully grasp how the abstract principles we discussed could be applied to future writing contexts. That is why I found the writing studies pedagogy to be such an interesting and challenging idea and why I was so eager to implement it this semester -- even if redesigning a course over Christmas break is not an ideal situation.

Why Metawriting?

2010-01-12T08:22:00.000-08:00

Quite simply that is what I plan to do in the blog -- write about writing.

Really, writing is probably only going to be a part of it as I will certainly be reflecting a great deal of the time about communication in general (as a technical communicator) as well as particular aspects of communication such as writing. In the interests of true accuracy I should have named the blog Metacommunication but I'm not sure I like that as much as I like Metawriting. Have to ponder I suppose...maybe see how things shake out? But enough blather about that.

The question is why metawriting -- why writing about writing? I used to think the main method to become a better writer was simply to write more. As I saw my students write more but not really progress and repeat mistakes, I began to question the old adage that practice makes perfect. This is because writing is more than a skill set or muscle memory -- writing is thinking. Yes, you need to write to become a better writer but that writing must be accompanied by thinking or you will not see the improvement you want. This is quite simply why metawriting is now a requirement in all my writing classes. I think the key to reflectively writing about your writing -- challenges, problems, successes, processes, etc. -- can help any writer at any level.

This blog is intended to focus on writing about writing (or communicating about communicating) in order to better understand writing as a writer, teacher, and researcher. I have worked as a professional writer for decades but I still sometimes struggle with certain writing tasks. I do not think you are ever DONE learning about writing or growing as a writer. Certainly I continued to need metawriting to help me learn and grow as a writer. Now my primary job is teaching writing to other writers as well as working with other teachers of writing to improve the teaching of writing. As a teacher of writing it is even more important that I understand how people learn to write and the problems and challenges involved in that process. Of course, while there is a growing body of research about how people learn to write, there are many questions remaining and that is why I am interested in conducting my own research on the subject as well.