Blog Highlights from this Semester

English 709 Blog Take-Aways

 

The most useful blogs that I wrote this semester were:

Week 2 on Van Woerkum’s “Active Reading,” because it helped me to flesh out concrete strategies for teaching the before, during, and after reading processes. For example, in the pre-reading stage instructors can assess how well students will identify with the chosen readings. In the during reading stage, students can make inferences and connect ideas with other texts through journal assignments, and in the after reading stages, the activation of new ideas is triggered by asking students to establish what they still would like to know, and having them conduct research to connect what they read with other texts.

Week 2 Summary of “A Historical Perspective on Reading Research and Practice” because the article provided a broad and comprehensive overview of specific eras of reading research, such as Behaviorist, Natural Learning, Information Processing, Sociocultural Learning, and Engaged Learning, and how these relate to the particular cultural moments that they emerged within.

Week 3 Summary and Response to two articles by Sugie Goen-Salter on integrated reading and writing were especially useful because they introduced me to the history and principles behind the IRW program at San Francisco State, and laid a foundation for our work on IRW strategies in English 709. My responses also helped me get a head start on the IRW Memo assignment due at the end of the semester.

Week 3 Course for developmental reading/writing students helped me to integrate my own ideas and assignments with the ideas we’d been reading about, including Van Woerkum’s active reading strategies and Goen-Salter’s IRW strategies. I found a way to create assignments using metacognitive strategies and activating schema, so I was glad to be able to connect my prior knowledge of teaching with the new concepts that we’d been discussing in class through this activity.

Week 4 Thoughts on the blogging process helped me to establish my own criteria for a good blog, to justify how I’d been writing blog posts, and it helped me become conscious of why I was finding certain blog posts more useful than others.

Week 4 Summarizing McCormick’s Three Reading Approaches: cognitive, expressivist, and sociocultural, helped to solidify my knowledge after reading McCormick’s book, and became a touchstone that I returned to throughout the semester. The three approaches provided a framework that was very useful for understanding what becomes emphasized (both consciously and unconsciously) in our curriculum. I found myself thinking of ways to integrate all three approaches in my own teaching.

Week 5 Ideas and Elements for my IRW unit plan helped me to integrate concepts and strategies we’d been discussing with my own ideas for an IRW course. I went a bit farther than necessary here and roughly mapped out an entire IRW course when the assignment called for focusing on a unit. However, I was glad that I laid a foundation for the end of semester work on the unit plan, and connected my own ideas with those of the texts and with prior class discussions. 

Week 8 Difficulties with a Challenging Text: This activity was useful because it gave me a sense of what students go through when writing a difficulty paper. I chose a text written by a right-wing ideologue who is known for dismissing the severity of U.S. poverty and viewing the poor as greedy “takers.” I found myself stuck before I could even consider the writer’s ideas because of what I saw as a dismissive and arrogant tone and a lack of concern for the suffering of others. Because I disagreed with the writer’s use of “facts,” I could not “make meaning” of the text. I did try to understand the reasoning behind his arguments and to address which assumptions were underlying the argument. Nonetheless, while the activity resulted in a stalemate, it was a fruitful one because it exposed me to how clashing ideologies can create roadblocks that inhibit true dialogue.

Week 9 Unit Planning Ideas helped me create an initial plan with my group on our American Dream unit. We mapped out particular texts, assignments, and activities that seemed to have potential for our unit, so this assignment helped us to get the ball rolling.

Week 9 Community Building article by Nicholas. I was intrigued by the author’s use of models from Native American tribes for community building. While this could potentially veer into the territory of “cultural appropriation,” I appreciated the author’s emphasis on building classroom communities based on mutual trust, respect, honesty, and consensus building.

Week 10 Bartholomae and Petrosky Chapters 1-3. I was very intrigued by B & P’s radical reconception of a basic reading and writing class. I liked the recursive nature of the writing assignments, and the course’s emphasis on viewing student writing as equivalent to that of published authors. I also think that having students develop their own theories of adolescent growth encourages students to develop a sense of agency and empowerment. While the “seminar-style” of this course would be difficult to execute in today’s community college classroom, I appreciate the values and objectives that this course promotes.

Week 11 The Discovery of Competence: From this book, I was inspired to include assignments in my own teaching that draw on students’ own competence, such as personal narratives, and I’ll ask students to connect their personal experiences to the texts they read. I will encourage students to participate in dialectical and metaphorical kinds of thinking by assigning a dialectical journal which asks them to directly respond to (and provide compelling interpretations of) key passages in the assigned texts. I will try to have students discuss topics that they care about and can become invested in, so that my instruction will “foster both engagement and responsibility” (81).

Week 11 The Discovery of Competence Chapter 9: I agreed with the authors’ approach to teaching multicultural texts, and thought about having my students explore the connection between self and world with a graphic organizer called "Text/Self/World," which gets students to establish an "essential question" that they want to explore, and to find connections between the text, the self, and the larger world. Reading this chapter gave me the idea to assign this graphic organizer in my unit in order to emphasize these relationships. I liked the assignment that asks students to keep observational notebooks in which they record events that reflect the ways in which people are marginalized or left out of the American Dream, based on their personal observations (185).

Week 13 Unit Planning Grid got our group’s unit plan under way by getting us to map out the readings and assignments for our unit, day by day. This was incredibly useful because it set the stage for the rest of our planning and helped us to visualize each stage of the planning process.

Week 16 Memo arguing for an IRW course helped me to recall the major points in Sugie Goen-Salter’s articles, and to connect these points with the strategies and methods that we’ve been discussing all semester in our class. Writing the memo encouraged me to try IRW strategies in my own classes, and I am excited to do so when I teach again in about a month.

Other students’ blogs which were most useful to me include:

Blog posts by Katie Bliss, who uses visual images in innovative and powerful ways. In most of her posts, Katie included pertinent visuals that helped to emphasize the points she was making, and this showed me how I could incorporate iconic images in order to emphasize my points, and to sometimes make a point visually instead of in writing.

Blog posts by Barbara Bradbury, because they would draw on Barbara’s experience as an instructor and offered useful in-class strategies (especially questioning strategies). I was interested in her unit plan project on advertising in the media and liked the use of a variety of texts in this unit, including internet websites, videos, and published texts.

I appreciated Susan Partlan’s critiques of a variety of readings, and especially her useful comments on my own blog and the blogs of others in class, which helped to keep a conversation going among us.

I enjoyed reading Katie Bierbaum’s insights into the readings, as she always brought new and original ideas to each text and interrogated them in useful ways.

I got a lot out of reading the posts on unit planning. It was interesting to see a wide range of possibilities for planning a unit, and to identify how each person’s interests were manifested in their choices of texts and assignments.

Memo arguing for an Integrated Reading and Writing Approach

Dear English Department,

I am writing to you to advocate on behalf of introducing an integrated reading and writing (IRW) approach to teaching composition at our community college. Based on research conducted by Sugie Goen-Salter and Helen Gillotte-Tropp, who are notable pioneers of the integrated reading and writing approach, along with my own experiences from seven years of community college teaching, it is clear that an IRW approach can effectively meet the needs of developmental English students, boosting their abilities as both readers and writers. Above all, an IRW approach would utilize strategies for “students [to] come to read as writers and write as readers” (Goen-Salter and Gillotte-Tropp, “Integrating Reading and Writing” (99), in order to recognize the interconnected aspects of reading and writing. Research conducted during San Francisco State University’s launch of their IRW program has proven that “better writers tend to be better readers, better writers tend to read more than poorer writers, and better readers tend to produce more mature prose than poorer readers” (Goen-Salter, “Critiquing the Need to Eliminate Remediation” 84). By integrating reading and writing into our curriculum, we recognize these interconnections between the reading and writing processes and thereby improve our students’ reading and writing skills simultaneously. The following memo outlines the components of the IRW approach and explains why implementing this approach at our college would provide a more effective and stimulating curriculum for our students.

What is an IRW approach? From an IRW standpoint, reading is no longer secondary to writing, and students instead “see how the structures, practices, and language of each process can enhance understanding of the other” (Goen-Salter and Gillotte Tropp, “Integrating Reading and Writing” 94). There are six fundamental principles upon which an integrated reading and writing approach is based: integration, wherein writing contributes to the development of reading, and vice-versa; time, which takes into account that reading and writing skills develop gradually and within supportive communities; development, which sets a slower pace for the learning process that is more conducive to learning; academic membership, so that at-risk students are incorporated into the mainstream academic community more quickly, thereby ending the cycle of remedial failure and removing the punitive aspect of remedial education; sophistication, which recognizes that basic-level writing classes can be as sophisticated as college-level classes by asking students to work on the same projects, such as reading book-length works and conducting original research; and purposeful communication, which places the teaching of grammar and essay-writing into broader contexts, imbuing the learning process with meaning.

The objectives of the original IRW program at San Francisco State University include: having students read a range of materials and write from a variety of viewpoints and helping students apply these skills both within and beyond their work at the university; developing a metacognitive perspective of reading and writing, involving developing conscious strategies for self-awareness; understanding the rhetorical elements of reading and writing, including purpose, audience, and stance; using reading and writing to engage with the world; and developing enjoyment and confidence in reading and writing through self-assessment.

When IRW courses were first launched at San Francisco State in Fall 2001, student outcomes in the pilot IRW courses were compared with that of a control group. The outcomes showed that “[a]cross all categories of data, students in the integrated reading/writing program outperformed their counterparts in SFSU’s conventional sequence of basic reading and writing courses” (103). It is therefore important for more graduate teaching programs to extensively prepare instructors to teach integrated reading and writing and for our college to consider implementing this innovative approach.

Does IRW work and why is it better than a traditional system where reading and writing are taught separately?

Based upon the experience of implementing the IRW approach at San Francisco State, it is clear that this approach is superior to the traditional approach to separating reading and writing instruction. Sugie Goen-Salter and Helen Gillotte-Tropp’s “Integrating Reading and Writing: A Response to the Basic Writing ‘Crisis,’” argues that the historical tendency to separate reading and writing as distinct processes is a primary contributor to the “basic writing crisis.” In searching for new ways to address administrative attempts to dismantle “remedial” courses, Goen-Salter and Gillotte-Tropp developed the innovative IRW program at San Francisco State, “in which instruction in reading and writing is fully integrated, and students’ movement from the margins of the university to its academic center can be appreciably hastened” (91). The authors cite empirical research showing the links between reading and writing, and the benefits of reading and writing integration. They point out that before the implementation of the IRW program, many basic writing students would remain at the basic writing level well into their second year of enrollment at San Francisco State University. In response, Goen-Salter and Gillotte Tropp developed an accelerated program through which students could join the mainstream academic community and take college-level English courses within one year.

The IRW system was piloted, found to be successful across the board, and eventually replaced the old (two-tier) system. In the old system, students who scored in the lowest quartile of the English Placement Test were required to complete a full year of developmental-level course work in reading and writing by taking separate courses with different instructors; this model was cumbersome and redundant, and failed to alleviate the risk of dis-enrollment from the university that would result if the remediation requirement was not completed in one year.

San Francisco State’s IRW program places at-risk students into a single course which explicitly connects reading and writing and moves these students swiftly from the developmental to college level within one year. Successful completion of the course meets both the CSU remediation requirement and SFSU’s first-year written composition requirement, enabling students to complete in one year what previously took three semesters.

The facts are clear: as Sugie Goen-Salter explains, student retention has improved each year since the IRW program was launched. For the three years of the pilot project, IRW students passed the integrated course at a higher rate than students enrolled in the traditional sequence. Goen-Salter provides detailed tables to demonstrate how these outcomes were measured between the IRW and control groups (see “Integrating Reading and Writing: A Response to the Basic Writing ‘Crisis’”). 

As an instructor, it is also very clear to me that an IRW approach has a more student-centered focus that will engage and meet the needs of the diverse student learners in our community college classes. One of the goals of an IRW approach is “to break down the barrier between text reception and text production, by inviting students to look at a text they read for clues to its production, and a text they produce for clues to how it might be received” (Goen-Salter 86), which occurs alongside the development of metacognitive awareness. Assignments like the “difficulty paper” and KWL+ (in which students establish what they already know about a topic, what they would like to know, and after reading, what they would still like to know/investigate) are designed to promote this kind of self-consciousness about reading and writing processes, and to demonstrate their reciprocal relationship. By situating the assigned readings within both sociocultural contexts and the contexts of our students’ lived experiences, an IRW curriculum can provide meaningful instruction that is relevant to the actual concerns and prior knowledge that our students bring into the classroom, and can thus be a catalyst for deeper insights and critical reflection.

Specific IRW assignments include KWL+, which elicits students’ prior knowledge and encourages further inquiry, along with the “Difficulty Paper,” which asks students to critically assess the roadblocks in their reading process and to make an Action Plan for addressing these issues. These assignments focus on generating knowledge from students’ own experiences and on raising awareness of the processes students go through as readers and writers (metacognitive awareness). As an instructor, I have found that assignments that call for metacognitive awareness lead to an increased interest in and enjoyment of the curriculum, which in turn leads to a greater “buy-in” of the reading and writing skills that we are teaching. In the IRW classroom, students are encouraged to work collaboratively in pairs, small groups, and with the whole class. The goal is to establish a comfortable, stimulating, and productive discourse community where students from all backgrounds can participate and where diverse learning styles can be addressed and validated. Students are supported both intellectually and emotionally through this type of instruction. Moreover, an IRW approach provides an invitation to students to join the academic community more swiftly and smoothly, in part because students are now able to realize their own potential as critical thinkers, readers, and writers.

For all of these reasons, I strongly urge you to consider adopting an integrated reading and writing approach at our community college. I promise that you will not regret this important decision.

Sincerely,

Jordana Finnegan, Ph.D.

Unit Planning Grid

Week 1: The American Dream (Jim)

Monday Introduction to the course Community building activity Informal discussion of visual images of the American Dream Pre-writing: KWL+

Wednesday Read “The American Dream: A Biography” Introduce annotation Discuss the text Free-write on your own experiences with/observations of the American Dream; discus

Friday Read “What Happens to the American Dream in a Recession?” Discuss the text Literacy Narrative due

Week 2: Inequality and the American Dream (Jordana)

Monday Read chapter from Noah’s The Great Divergence: “Going Up” (on the lack of social mobility in America and why incomes have remained stagnant in the last few decades) Discuss paragraph structure and topic sentences Pre-writing for Ehrenreich: KWL+ and questioning strategies

Wednesday Read Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed chapter 1, “Serving in Florida” (11-49); annotate Discuss annotations and practice writing paragraphs on Ehrenreich. Connect Ehrenreich’s experiences to your own experience.

Friday Read Ehrenreich chapter 3, “Selling in Minnesota” (121-191); annotate Discuss annotations and connect Ehrenreich’s experiences to your own experience. After reading: how did the questions you came up with in the pre-writing stage (on Monday) get answered through your reading?

Week 3: Inequality and Democracy  (Jim and Jordana)

Monday Pre-reading activity for Capitalism: A Love Story; write about your views of/experiences with corporate capitalism Watch a clip from Michael Moore’s film Capitalism: A Love Story. Connect points from Capitalism to Ehrenreich’s chapters.

Wednesday Read two contrasting perspectives on the relationship between inequality and democracy: “Inequality Undermines Democracy” (NY Times) and “Defending the Dream: Why Income Inequality Doesn’t Threaten Opportunity” (Heritage Foundation) In-class debate on the relationship between inequality and democracy: take a position and support it with evidence Learn about MLA Style for citing sources and practice using MLA Style

Friday Watch PBS film:Park Avenue: Money, Power, & the American Dream. Connect points from Park Avenue to Ehrenreich’s chapters.  Fill out Text/Self/World graphic organizer to find connections between personal experience, the texts, and the world.

Week 4 (Essay 1 due)          Unit Two: Twenty-somethings and Educational Opportunity (Katie and Susan)

Monday Bring an outline and thesis for workshops on Essay 1 Bring a rough draft of Essay 1 for peer review workshop Discuss transitions and one sentence-level strategy, such as noun phrase appositives or verbal phrases

Wednesday Essay 1 due Write a reflective memo on the reading and writing processes Final unit activity: assess how this unit changed your views of the American Dream and/or inequality in America

Friday

Unit Planning Brainstorming

1. I will be part of a group that is developing a freshman-level composition class that explores the theme of “The American Dream.” The class meets for 50 minutes, 3 times per week on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. This broad topic provides an opportunity for exploring a number of interesting sub-themes, such as “income inequality and democracy,” “educational opportunity,” “changing patterns in marriage,” “educational opportunity,” “twenty-somethings and the Dream,” “debates over welfare,” and “racial inequality.” The topic of the American Dream is relevant to students' lives today, especially given the increasingly difficult prospect that our students will realize this Dream, or will achieve upward social mobility, within their lifetimes.

Our group will be working on two units, both placed at the start of the semester in order to introduce students to the broader topic of The American Dream. We will then focus on several sub-topics that relate to this theme. Subsequent units will each explore one of these topics and will incorporate longer and more complex readings. Essay assignments will also become more complex, moving from personal narrative to a close reading of a text, to compare-and-contrast, to a research essay requiring synthesis of multiple texts. All units will be related to the course theme of the American Dream. A preliminary outline of the units is:

Unit 1: The American Dream and Inequality

Unit 2: Educational Opportunity and Twenty-somethings

Unit 3: The Changing Face of Marriage

Unit 4: The Welfare Debate

Unit 5: Racial Inequality and/or Immigration

2. Jim N. and I will be working on Unit 1: The American Dream and Inequality, which will be the first unit in the composition class. Katie Bliss and Susan Partlan will be working on Unit 2, on twenty-somethings and educational opportunity.

The skills/activities will include brainstorming, including free-writing on students’ own views of the American Dream and inequality, coming up with key questions on these topics, and learning how to cite personal experience as evidence in an essay. The unit would incorporate community-building activities and introduce important aspects of the reading and writing processes such as annotation, citing sources in MLA Style, writing thesis statements, and writing paragraphs in P.I.E. format.

Students would begin by reading “The American Dream: A Biography,” and “What Happens to the American Dream in a Recession?,” and analyzing iconic visual images of the American Dream in Week 1. In Week 2, they would read news articles and op-eds on poverty and inequality in America, examining theories of why inequality is growing worse and why social mobility has stagnated (Timothy Noah’s book The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It has useful chapters on this). They would also read two chapters from Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, and they would then discuss how each text relates to the realization of the American Dream.

The first essay assignment will ask students to analyze their personal experience with the American Dream and inequality, and to connect this experience to one of the texts from the unit. It will primarily be a personal narrative, with personal experience used as evidence, but it will ask students to identify how their own experience relates to a text assigned during the unit and to cite details from their experience and the text to support their thesis.

3. See the next blog posting for the grid for the unit.

Week 11: The Discovery of Competence, Chapter 9 comments

The Discovery of Competence:

Chapter 9: Enriching Competence: Constructing Multicultural Frameworks of Knowledge and Understanding

What is important:

The authors discuss recent debates about the value of a multicultural curriculum that expands the Western canon, and the question of whether students who are educated in multicultural classrooms lack the kinds of knowledge that earlier generations (ostensibly) possessed. 

The authors call into question the view that multiculturalism has weakened curriculum because this argument focuses narrowly on which texts are included and excluded. It also maintains a view that the teacher is the sole purveyor of knowledge to passive students, and texts always remain apart from students' lives and personal concerns. 

The authors present their view of "curriculum as an environment ... that enables students to construct knowledge and in doing so to discover their own competence ... [so that] students and teachers can place themselves inside not outside what is being studied" (166).

Creating a multicultural curriculum means more than simply adding texts by diverse writers to the canon, but getting students to engage with their own traditions and cultures by including stories that speak powerfully to them. It also means getting students to see both particular differences as well as the common humanity between and among diverse cultures.

Students should become co-researchers along with their teachers about multicultural knowledge (169). 

Multicultural curriculum is not fixed, but is continually renegotiated with each set of new participants in a classroom community (170). 

Students "need to be able to see the self and the world -- and to find ways of placing that self in relation to the world" (170). The authors discuss classes they have taught on South Africa and on the American Dream: Myth and Reality, and how multicultural frameworks were established in both contexts. They note that in the South Africa course, not enough explicit connection was made between exploring the self and the world, so that students did not explore their role as writers in relation to the content (174). These components of the self and family and the larger world ideally need to be integrated, so that students learn to tell their own stories and explain where they stand in relation to the texts and cultures they are studying (180).

The authors discuss how classes with students from mainstream cultural backgrounds, who have not experienced cultural difference, can benefit from a multicultural course. Students can still discover diversity even within a common culture, often by exploring their own cultural roots (176).

For one of the instructors, it is important for a multicultural course to have a multicultural population of students; a personally compelling theme that touches on values across cultures; and the use of materials that immerse the class in a diversity of cultural visions (179).

Like Bartholomae and Petrosky, this approach asks students to become authors alongside the authors they read, and to use sources to support their own original claims (190).

What I agree and disagree with:

I agree with all of the points listed above; I was trained to study literature from a multicultural perspective, so this chapter reiterated many of my own beliefs and approaches.

I wonder how students come to "trust the voice of the self in the very moment of describing the world" (171)? What can instructors do to encourage this, specifically?

How these ideas might inform my own teaching unit:

The connection between self and world can be explored with a graphic organizer I've used in the past called "Text/Self/World," which gets students to establish an "essential question" that they want to explore, and to find connections between the text, the self, and the larger world. I might assign this graphic organizer in my unit in order to emphasize these relationships. 

I like the assignment that asks students to keep observational notebooks in which they record events that reflect the ways in which people are marginalized or left out of the American Dream, based on their personal observations (185). I think this would be a useful assignment for my group's "American Dream" unit.

Week 11: The Discovery of Competence, Chapters 1-5 Comments

What I like:

I like the authors’ goal of drawing students “into the academic community and helping them to discover their existing competence as thinkers and writers and the relationship between what they know and what and how they will come to know” (3). This focus on the competence and literacy that students already bring to the classroom is an important part of creating curriculum that helps students become authentic members of the academic community.

I like the advice that “as teachers, we have to be willing to set aside, for a time, the ‘stuff’ we are carrying and take these students up where they are, as individuals … without becoming shattered by multiple failures” (5). Too often, instructors let their own agendas and expectations dictate what occurs in the classroom, when in fact just letting go of an agenda, and relating to students based on who they are as people, and how they are feeling at a particular moment, can lead to improved student progress and a more dynamic and enjoyable classroom atmosphere.

I like the suggestion that teachers must overcome their view of students as “outsiders” whose worldview threatens the world we know (5), but I wonder how exactly this new perspective might be achieved?

I like the recognition that acquiring academic language is intricately tied to the cultural perspective represented in academic discourses (8). To provide a more welcoming environment, instructors must “alter” the academic context by providing more responsive (multicultural) curriculum (12). 

I like the emphasis on both teachers and students developing “dynamic, reciprocal processes of teaching and learning” (14), which shifts power away from the teacher and toward a more student-centered classroom. 

I like the metacognitive focus on having “both students and teachers … discover their competence as learners who know what they know, know that they know, and know how they know,” and the link between academic knowledge and prior knowledge: “these new kinds of knowledge have a direct relationship to the knowledge they already possess” (15).

I really like the emphasis on drawing upon students’ prior personal experiences, and treating these experiences as a foundation for academic discourse (17). Along with this, the authors recognize that students come to learning as members of other communities, and that these communities have already imparted significant kinds of knowledge that they can utilize in the classroom. This calls for creating a classroom that contextualizes their prior knowledge.

I like that the authors advocate transferring the knowledge attained in the classroom to real-world contexts. 

I like the authors’ rejection of the “drill and kill” approach to language instruction, and their recognition that becoming overly conscious of errors can harm the process of language acquisition (25). By contrast, the authors suggest creating an “acquisition-oriented classroom” in which students become active learners by formulating hypotheses about written discourse (31), which reminds me of IRW’s KWL+ approach. 

I like the suggestion that teachers need to see their students’ writing differently, as not possessing deficits or gaps, but as already competent (and with the potential to improve). This is something I need to cultivate as an instructor with my own classes.

I like the authors’ view that writing is a means, not an end in itself, since the “end” lies in the questions and interpretations that writing can produce (so less emphasis in placed on writing itself as the final product) (83). 

I like the focus on developing interdisciplinary courses that draw upon a variety of media and activities, including lectures, debates, films, books, etc. (85)

What is problematic:

I was uncertain about the analogy used in Chapter Four, which compares the instructor’s position with that of an anthropological field worker (57). This seems to presuppose that the instructor is from an entirely separate culture than that of the students, standing alone outside of this culture. This analogy seems flawed because the teacher-student relationship is more blurry and complex than this, and often less distant. 

The authors very clearly state which teaching approaches they reject, but are less clear about how the approach they are advocating could be implemented through specific assignments and activities. They do note that they assign portfolios, process journals, and other exploratory modes of writing, but the book lacks descriptions of these assignments (82). I found myself longing for something like Bartholomae and Petrosky’s specific and clearly scaffolded discussion of their BRW course.

What I have questions about:

I like the discussion of “interlanguage,” features that do not occur either in the students’ spoken language or in the target language of academic discourse (32), and wish more explanation would have been provided on how instructors can work with examples of interlanguage when discussing the writing process. 

How can the dichotomy between the abstract thinking that is traditionally privileged in the academic world and the embedded, situated thinking often valued in other contexts and cultures (50), be overturned in the classroom? Which specific activities and assignments would overcome this dichotomy?

How, precisely, can we move students toward “dialectical” and “metaphorical” levels of thinking, while at the same time integrating “analytical and logical approaches” (51)? Which particular assignments and lessons would facilitate this new kind of thinking?

How can we “create writing courses that would provide opportunities for inquiry and discovery … and take into account both the contexts our students came from and the new contexts they were entering” (73)? How can we make the writing classroom a more “natural” and less “artificial” space? It would be great to see specific assignments that focus on this.

I’m not sure what the authors mean by “systematicity in the acquisition of new discourse structures appropriate to written academic discourse” (63) and would like more explanation of “systematicity”.

What I will include in my own unit design: 

I will include assignments that draw on students’ own competence, by assigning personal narratives and asking students to connect their personal experiences to the texts we read.

I will encourage students to participate in dialectical and metaphorical kinds of thinking by assigning a dialectical journal which asks them to directly respond to (and provide compelling interpretations of) key passages in the assigned texts.

I will encourage multiple perspectives and validate multicultural experiences by assigning multicultural readings and asking students to explore how their diverse individual experiences relate to the topic being discussed. 

I will try to have students discuss topics that they care about and can become invested in, so that my instruction will “foster both engagement and responsibility” (81).

How this approach fits in with the principles and strategies we’ve been discussing this semester:

Like Bartholomae and Petrosky, the authors advocate “an authentic immersion [of developmental writers] in the [academic] community” (7), rather than remedial courses that would “quarantine,” or isolate them from it. They offer much less specific information on how this might be accomplished, though. 

Like McCormick, the authors draw upon prior knowledge/schema, to establish what students already know, and which particular ideologies inform students’ thinking (15).

The focus on what the writer brings to the task from their individual background is very “expressivist.”

The discussion of how speakers of Black English are often viewed as not understanding proper English (and therefore as weak thinkers) reminds me of our discussions of AAVE and Chicano English in English 704 class (78).

Week 10: Summary of Nicholas Coles, "Empowering Revision" (Chapter 6)

Nicholas Coles, “Empowering Revision” (Bartholomae and Petrosky, Chapter 6):

Summary:

Coles begins by addressing the fact that inexperienced writers often do not understand the need for revision, and can see revision as “a form of punishment – especially when it has been assigned as extra work” (167).

This chapter discusses the ways in which revision has been used in Bartholomae and Petrosky’s BRW class, and how instructors have tried to move beyond making revisions at the level of the sentence or vocabulary, and toward broader, conceptual kinds of changes. This takes place more easily within the context provided by the semester-long sequence of assignments on a single topic in the BRW class; this singular focus approximates “the experience of sustained immersion in inquiry which gives our rewriting its meaning and its context” (168).

• Because the BRW’s sequence of assignments is “persistently recursive” (169), it provides a useful context for reengaging with previous readings and writings and is thus conducive to the revision process.

Revision should be seen “as part of the ongoing process of invention – that is, as a technique for producing meaning” (167), from a perspective informed by “disciplined self-awareness” (169).

Coles distinguishes between “sequential revision,” which involves occasionally citing quotes from previous assignments, and “textual revision,” which involves actively confronting problems with the “luxury of knowing that [the writer] can make changes later” (170).

“Re-seeing” must be taught through two methods: in-class reading and discussion of first drafts, and teacher commentary (170).

Coles describes a class’s discussion of multiple versions of one student’s draft on paid versus unpaid work, which shows how the students function as a kind of scholarly community that promotes the writer to consider other possible interpretations of the topic.

Through class discussion, the instructor aims to show students that writing is a process of representing an event or idea, and that it is thereby not simply a literal reconstruction of history. It is important to maintain this self-awareness throughout the revision process (177-178). Through the choices the writer makes, a narrative can be reshaped to highlight particular ideas and to de-emphasize others.

Coles notes that “at the moment of revision . . . it is the writer who must become [the] reader” and this requires attaining a sense of estrangement and distance from one’s own writing (185).

Coles discusses how teacher commentary can promote deeper kinds of revisions than those promoted by class discussion: teacher commentary can “encourage changes of mind or radical reformulations” (190), as opposed to thinking about “matters of intelligibility, proportion and emphasis” (189).

Coles argues that revision can be an empowering process if it encourages students to better understand the subject that they are engaging with.

How these ideas might inform my own teaching unit:

• I really like Coles’ point that revision can be used to transform and deepen students’ understanding of the subject matter, and I’d like to incorporate revision activities into my unit that promote this new understanding. However, I’m not sure that I could conduct the in-depth dissection of a student’s essay in the meticulous way that Coles describes, as I’ve found it to be difficult to critically deconstruct one student’s writing in front of an entire class.

• I like that time has been provided in this course for the revision process, in order to move it beyond focusing on sentence-level changes and toward a deeper re-evaluation of the writer’s argument and of the topic itself. I think I will have students produce multiple drafts of their essays both in my unit and in the classes I teach in order to realize this goal.

• Coles’ discussion of how teacher commentary can promote a reassessment of the subject being engaged with has encouraged me to find ways to ask probing and guided questions in my own feedback, to point students’ toward a new awareness of how they are constructing their ideas.

Week 10: Comments on Bartholomae and Petrosky Chapters 1-3

Facts, Artifacts, and Counterfacts: 

Theory and Method for a Reading and Writing Course

What I like:

I am very intrigued by the concept of teaching a basic reading and writing course in the style of a rigorous graduate seminar. At first I resisted this seemingly radical approach because I wondered if it neglects to teach students the important reading and writing strategies that most composition classes focus on. I was also skeptical about the plan to have students read primarily the writing of other students instead of published texts. But as I read Chapter Two, I warmed to this course plan (and it became clear that both published texts and student writing are integrated into the lesson plans). 

I like the notion of designing a course around the need to address the problem that occurs when students are “unable to speak, and the text is silent” (5), and the need to recognize that these problems “are those of status and authority” (6). The course seems intent upon shifting the traditional emphasis on the instructors’ authority (the “banking concept of education”) by assigning and discussing students’ own writing, by encouraging students to connect their own experiences with the concepts they read about, and to ultimately “publish” their own writing for the class. I especially like this final assignment, and have often thought about incorporating a publishing assignment similar to this, where students create their own magazine or another publication that showcases their work. This seems like the ultimate form of empowerment and validation for students who are struggling to find their own voices within an academic setting; as the authors state, this course “is designed to give students access to the language and methods of the academy” (9). It is inspiring to read that the course aims to get students themselves to “be the source of knowledge, an original” (40); this seems, to me, like the essential goal that instructors strive for, but rarely achieve.

I like the course theme of exploring adolescence, since this is a fruitful topic for students’ own writing about their life experiences, as well as a chance to assign some powerful autobiographical writing; it seems to work well in a course such as this. I also like how the ”case studies” of students’ own experiences are used to build toward developing a theory of adolescent development. This enables students to synthesize their own experiences with theoretical concepts, an important part of academic writing.

I like how class time is set aside for students to choose and read books on their own, which also empowers them. I just wonder if asking students to read four books on their own, in addition to the assigned readings in class, is a bit too much (49).

I like how smaller writing assignments are given and then built upon as students work on a longer writing assignment. For example, Writing Assignment #11 (70) asks students to discuss a turning point in their lives, which will be further developed in their longer autobiographies.

I like the use of students’ actual essays as the basis for discussion of the writing process (93).

What is problematic:

(I like the course philosophy and most of my “problematic” issues have to do with logistical or technical matters.)

The authors state that the writing assignments are not graded, except for the occasional in-class essay exam (50). It seems that a more concrete breakdown of grading criteria is necessary to clearly convey the expectations and requirements of the class.

I’m not sure if asking students to read each book cover-to-cover by the due date is asking too much (50); I realize this is modeled after a graduate seminar, but at this level if a student is reading and is having difficulty with comprehension or anything else, they cannot get help in class until they have completely finished the book. I’m not sure that this provides enough help for struggling readers. 

This is minor, but I did not like the way in which the essay prompts featured questions instead of direct descriptions of the assignments: “would you then write about…?” or “would you be sure to explain…?” (52). I think simply stating the task at hand is preferable to asking a question here, which could make the prompt seem optional and not required.

While I like the focus on incorporating personal experience, it seems more could be done to place the texts within a sociocultural context; this approach seems to be missing from the assignments.

The layout of the assignments was a bit overwhelming and the separation of writing and reading assignments seems to be antithetical to an IRW approach (at least as they appear in Chapter 2).

Will waiting until the sixth or seventh week to discuss sentence-level errors be too late in a basic composition class (97)?

Questions: 

If this course “is designed to give students access to the language and methods of the academy” (9), is this radical “seminar” style the only way to achieve this objective in a basic reading and writing class? Are there ways to integrate some of these assignments/strategies while teaching the course in a more traditional format? 

If student writing is primarily what is discussed and analyzed, are students provided with enough models of strong, published writing as well, to demonstrate what excellent writing looks like? It seems there should be a balance between empowering students through discussion of their own writing, and providing models of the kinds of rhetorical and stylistic aspects of published writing they are being asked to produce.

Is it necessary to arrange for a typist to produce the final copies of students’ autobiographies? I realize this makes it seem more “professional,” but it could also distance students from the final version of their own work. 

Since autobiographical writing can often be very intimate, painful, and personal, do the instructors provide guidelines for how students might handle writing about painful topics? Do they advise that very painful subjects be omitted from their writing? Why or why not? (See question #9 on page 75.)

The student-teacher ratio of 15 students to 2 instructors seems highly unusual and I wonder if the course’s format would work for an average, 30-person composition class? (87)

What I will include in my own unit design:

I like how the course focuses on what students find to be significant without providing too much “cognitive” instruction on finding a “right” answer.” 

I like some of the prompts in Chapter Two, such as the metacognitive reflection/”difficulty” assignment (52-53) and the prereading assignments (81 and 92).

I like how the class discussion worksheets are scaffolded, to begin with identifying main characters and events, to then discussing their significance, to finally incorporating textual evidence to support major claims (63).

I like the vision of the journal assignment as an ongoing “conversation” between instructor and students. 

I like the option to rewrite essays multiple times, and hope to incorporate this into my unit design and teaching.

How this course fits with the principles and strategies we’ve been discussing:

The course seems to provide a foundation for the IRW approach, as the authors point out that they had to struggle to bring a reading and writing focus together within one course and to convince their department that reading could be taught in an English course (13). Sugie Goen-Salter echoes this point in one of her articles on the IRW program at SF State, and I wonder if these authors initiated this debate? 

·      The authors also view “difficulty as a condition of adult reading, as a gift that makes reading possible” (18), and one of the assignments asks students to reflect upon any hardships they encountered while reading; this seems like a precursor to IRW’s “difficulty paper.”

The introductory discussion of “misreading” seems to draw on cognitive notions that there is a “right” and “wrong” way to read a text, and that there is a single right answer to be gleaned from the reading process. The authors note that “the question is not, then, whether some students’ readings miss the mark. All readings are misses. The key question, as Culler says, is ‘whose misses matter’” (6). To define all readings as “misses” implies that there is a correct reading that is somehow never achieved, and I’m not sure that I share this assumption.

The authors later contradict this “cognitive” approach when they criticize teaching the concept of a single, main idea within a text because “it denies readers their own transaction with a text” (12), a point that seems to concur with expressivist approaches. This expressivist angle is reinforced in Chapter Two through the journal assignments that ask students to identify the most significant aspect of each text, without guiding them toward a desired answer. Like McCormick, Bartholomae and Petrosky criticize a cognitive approach that would “directly or indirectly tell students where to ‘find’ meanings”; the authors believe such an approach hinders students from creating their own meanings and finding relevance between the texts and their own lives (14).