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).