Measuring growth and change in our Writing Studio

This semester our National Writing Project site, the Morehead Writing Project, embarked on a new adventure. We created a Writing Studio by drafting five English Education students to serve as Peer Writers, or writing tutors, and provided support in the form of a learning community. In our pilot semester we worked with three developmental writing classes. At our institution students who score between 14 and 17 on the ACT are placed in these classes. Morehead State University offered 14 sections of this class during the Fall semester so we worked with just over 20% of the developmental writing students enrolled in English 099.

While we will not be able to determine the impact of our pilot program on retention and success until the semester is over, I am giddy about the results we have already determined. I know for the powers-that-be the ultimate success will be judged by how many students stay in school to complete a degree, but we expect to see that our three sections will have higher retention for the semester as well as a higher degree of success (earning a C or better) than other sections both for this semester and historically. How much higher we cannot know until December, but the results of a recent survey administered to the developmental students working with the Writing Studio demonstrates to me that we have had an impact in important ways.

Change

Many developmental writing students come into the class with a negative attitude – toward writing in general, their writing in specific, and the very idea of taking this writing class. They do not want to take this class and resist the idea that they can learn to be a better writer based on their previous experience. They also come in lacking confidence in their ability to write. This trifecta of doom – a negative attitude toward writing, low confidence, and lack of ability – creates a cycle of failure that can prevent students from achieving success in college and their profession. Our goal for the Writing Studio is to break that cycle of failure.

We think we have succeeded with a number of our students as 63% of the students in our pilot study reported a change in one or more areas of attitude, confidence, or competence and another 16% reported a small change in one or more areas. We are so excited to see the students’ self-awareness increase and even more important to see that they have grown as a result of our work together. We think this is a very big deal because we know as experienced developmental writing teachers that attitude has to change before anything else can change. If students don’t believe in their own ability to change then they won’t change their behaviors or thinking. However, discovering how they have grown is even more exciting for us.

According to our survey results, 55% percent of the students reported that they now like or love writing and another 39% indicated they neither like nor dislike it. Overall, 94% do not dislike writing after working with the Writing Studio for 10 weeks. It is human nature to spend less time on an activity that you dislike and so this change in attitude will play an important role in the students’ future success. We doubt that we can make every student love writing, but believe this move away from the hate and dislike of writing is important.

Low confidence is widespread in developmental writing. Most students were apprehensive during their middle and high school careers and then placement into a developmental writing class only confirmed their existing belief. However, at the end of the Writing Studio, 37% of our students reported that they were confident about their writing ability and 44% reported that they were neither confident nor apprehensive with a total of 81% indicating that they were not apprehensive about writing. Over and over again, students noted on their surveys that they were “more confident” than at the beginning of the class. Studies have shown that students with high writing apprehension are less likely to spend much time writing and persevere through difficult writing assignments, so improving student writing confidence can also be important to their future success.

Previous experience has taught these students that they are not good writers, but they also reported that this changed as a result of their participation in the Writing Studio. When asked to rate their ability to “write a well-organized and sequenced paper with good introduction, body, and conclusion,” 37% believed they could write a good or great paper and another 53% indicated that they could do OK which indicates that 91% of the students could demonstrate competence. Our hope is that we have given these students tools that will help them continue to develop their competence as well as confidence.

Growth

We have seen evidence of many changes in behavior and thinking that indicate our students are becoming writers and developing an understanding of how writers think and act. Perhaps most telling is the simple fact that they named  extra feedback as the number one benefit of the Writing Studio. Students reported enjoying the small group work and peer feedback as well as feedback they received from the instructor and peer writers. Several students indicated that this feedback was key to their growth as writers and that writers need feedback to learn and improve.

Every studio participant who completed a survey said that we should continue the program. Many simply argued that it was helpful, but those who offered more specific explanations described the small groups and opportunity for one-on-one feedback and support as key benefits.

We need to wait until the end of the semester before we determine how many of our students succeeded this semester using the simple measuring stick of grades, but for now I am more than satisfied with the results of our work. The students who worked with our Writing Studio have described changes in their attitude toward writing, their writing confidence, and their writing ability. That is success in my book. Only time will tell if we have truly broken the cycle of defeat that has plagued so many of these students in the past, but I am full of hope.

What do I want to be when I grow up?

I have always known what I wanted to do. I wanted to work with words. I wanted to write and work with writers and I wanted to use my words to teach others. I am one of the fortunate people who knew from an early age what I wanted and I am even more fortunate that most of my adult life has meant doing just that. I have been lucky enough to have a long and varied love affair with the written word which has also allowed me to earn a living. I have been a newspaper reporter and editor, magazine writer and editor, and I been a published novelist. I have been a freelance writer for both print and web publications and worked as a technical writer. I ran a successful web publication company with a number of ezines, blogs, and web sites. Then I moved into academia and have had the dual joy and burden of teaching writing to both undergraduate, and graduate writing classes. I have taught everything from developmental to professional writing and after more than a decade I still believe I have one of the most important jobs on campus – even if my status and paycheck do not reflect that belief.

While I consider myself very lucky to have a job that includes important work that I love, I also know how difficult it is to work somewhere that work is not valued. I owe it to myself as well as all those who have contributed to the professional I am today to find that dream job. Of course, the real challenge is sorting through my dreams to uncover the true specifications for that dream job. This is hard. Very hard. Academia wants to sort people into neat little boxes. And I am not a neat little box kind of person. I have a lot of skills and a lot of interests and I do not want to abandon one skill set in favor of another – and I don’t think I should have to do so when I believe there are academic programs out there that are looking for people just like me. Am I fooling myself?

The Modern Language Association Job Information List is coming out soon and I need to be ready. I need to think about what I really want and where my needs and wants fit in with the needs and wants of academic programs. My current institution hired me to teach general education writing. At the beginning my course schedule was filled with developmental writing and the two-course composition sequence, Writing I and Writing II. Then I developed and piloted online versions of the composition classes which have become a mainstay of our general education program. As time passed I was also offered the opportunity to teach introductory creative writing and technical composition (an alternative to Writing II). Then shortly after entering my Ph.D. program I became the Site Director for our National Writing Project site which led to teaching graduate classes that covered a spectrum of topics from teaching writing to research and theory to creative writing. After earning my Ph.D. in Technical Communication and Rhetoric I have added professional writing to my list of course offerings. I like teaching all these things. I like working with developing writers to help them find their voice and confidence. I like working with more experienced writers to help them grow and develop as professionals. I like sharing my experience as a working professional writer with others who want to pursue a career with words. I like working with educators to improve the teaching of writing. I want to do all those things. Am I fooling myself?

In addition, my position as a National Writing Project site leader has given me administrative experience. I manage a budget with a variety of funding streams as well as writing the grants and reports that support those streams, a staff of students and professionals serving in a variety of roles, and oversee a number of community and professional development programs. This is important work and tremendously rewarding work. I love this work and the people I work with as a result. I know that I may not end up working in a program with a National Writing Project site, but I hope to work in program that fosters this kind of work – this synergy between writing and teaching writing – and I want to work in a program that is large enough to share this work and vision with others.

 

And so, the question remains. Am I fooling myself? Does such a dream position exist? Will I be able to find just the right program (not too big and not too small) that needs a multitool like me? And how do I position myself for that job? I anticipate that this is the type of job that will value teaching and service over research, but I still want to research, write, publishing and present -- but where and which focus? However, now I need to stop dreaming and focus on the job I have.

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

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

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

The U.S. National Library of Medicine defines postpartum depression as the depression that occurs in women 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 worries about her ability as a mother. I can certainly sympathize with both of those factors at this point in the academic calendar and so feel justified in using the term to describe my current state. I am lacking sleep and worried about my ability as a teacher.

I’ve also read that postpartum depression is also caused by a period of grief and mourning. While the birth of a child is certainly cause for celebration, it is also the death of the dreams and possibilities that the expectant mother held. It is also the loss of a closeness that can never be recaptured. In time, those losses will fade in importance as new dreams and possibilities center around the child and a new relationship is forged. I think teachers experience similar losses whenever a class ends. Certainly this is the point when we must accept that all the dreams and possibilities that existed at the beginning of the semester have now either been fulfilled (or dare we hope exceeded) or fizzled into something we neither expected nor wanted. Fortunately, we can start anew in the next semester, but that doesn’t seem like much of a consolation prize when we are tired from the end-of-semester grading onslaught and worn out from dealing with the angst of our students. Maybe tomorrow I’ll be better equipped to look back objectively at the Fall 2011 Semester and begin looking ahead to Spring 2012. 

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

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.

Fall 2010 3X3

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.

Finding Rhetorical Agency

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 One)

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.

The Forgotten "R"

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

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!

My 3 X 3

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.

Writing About Writing

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.