Writing Maternity

first-generation college students and SLACs

Great news from IHE today about how not only all small privates doing a good job of supporting first-generation college students, but also how they're getting more money to do so.  I'm particularly pleased because it seems to me that many of the central aspects of the small college education -- smaller classes, more access to faculty, and the like -- seem designed to recruit, retain, and support kids whose families don't have previous experience with the demands of college life.  Having taught lots of first-generation students in my year with a 4/4 load, I know that at a larger, commuter school it can be difficult for them to break away from the demands of family and work to focus on their educations.  And that, in turn, can make it harder for them to complete the degree.

But I want to underscore the importance of recruitment as well as support and retention in this mix.  Small liberal arts colleges can be a hard sell to kids and families who legitimately see a higher degree instrumentally.  If it's going to take a lot of familial sacrifice to send the kid to college, they need to be able to have confidence that s/he will be able to get a job afterwards that is better than the kinds of jobs s/he would get without the degree.  But that doesn't mean that we should somehow craft a message that the liberal arts are professionalizing; we need to think about how to translate the mission and value of the liberal arts into terms that people with those concerns can understand and appreciate.

And, no, I don't have a clear sense of how to do this.

Major's response

Since I posted Jerry Nelms' comments on Bill Major's IHE piece, it seems only fair to post Major's response to Nelms here, as well, rather than burying it in the comments.  The ongoing discussion is here.

I appreciate everyone’s thoughtful comments. I had a fairly well-known professor in grad school who wrote a very well-received book in the popular press, save for the review in his hometown paper. He felt the need to respond, much to the department’s delight and consternation.

I’m not sure I feel the need. On the other hand, it’s still early.

Professor Nelms makes a number of important points, for which I am grateful. On the whole, however, I wonder whether he was reading a different essay. My main question was quite simple: why aren’t more professors of English teaching writing? I make very few claims in the article about rhetoric and comp, per se, or the nuts and bolts of teaching it. I don’t talk about the scholarship of rhet/comp since this is not the subject of my column. Thus:

“I do not think it an exaggeration to say that the teaching of writing appears secondary to the other, more lofty work of professing literature. Since when did writing become anathema? If writing is so important thatvirtually every student at nearly every college and university must take at least one composition course (and usually two), why aren’t more professors of English teaching it?”

I simply offer a number of theories as to why writing instruction often has second-class status in the university, especially within English departments.

Moreover, professor Nelms:

1. I make no assumptions that all English professors are the same. I wonder—perhaps naively—why English profs (rather than rhet/comp) avoid writing instruction like the plague;

2. Grunt work: Indeed, it is. Just ask your local adjunct or five and five English prof. Check out the teaching schedule for both full and part-time English instructors at your local community college.

3. Composition theory: Where did I suggest or imply that there is no past and present history of rhetoric/comp theory and criticism? Foucault/Bakhtin/Kristeva? Please. I worked my way through them and decided that getting my students to understand the art of the semicolon was more important.

4. English profs and interpretive reading: I think I made this very point in my article.

5. Grammar: Ah! the rub! I’m afraid that I can never be convinced that grammar is *not* one of the more important features of good writing. It’s not the only one. Duh. Since when does talk of grammar/mechanics, etc. turn one into an ogre? What are we afraid of? Success?

6. Transfer-based question: Here I am in complete agreement with professor Nelms. I’m not sure where I addressed this issue in my article, however.

7. Language is changing: Did I suggest or imply otherwise?

8. Undergrads and writing: I teach enough basic composition courses to know that, yes, there is a problem. To argue otherwise tells me that we are winning the war in Iraq, too.

I obviously value rhet/comp and its long history. I did not imply—or mean to imply—that depts. of writing are not doing their jobs. On the other hand, I haven’t seen enough evidence to suggest that a more catholic approach to writing instruction might not be a bad thing. After all, if we value writing across the curriculum (and most of us do), we might wish to get the English (lit) professors off the bench and into the game.

addenda

There's an unsurprising firestorm on the WPA list in response to Major's piece, much of it (also unsurprising) about claiming turf.  I both agree with the tenor -- Major suggests that just *anyone* can pick up and teach writing without any training! -- and disagree -- since I'm intellectually and administratively committed to a writing-across-the-curriculum-based program in which, with training, faculty from every discipline on campus teach the first-year seminar, which is our primary first-year writing course.

But here are some interesting and thought-provoking responses to Major, from Jerry Nelms at Southern Illinois, which I've pasted in here for good measure.  (They're in the comments at IHE's site, and Nelms also posted them to WPA-L.)

Anyone thinking of writing this kind of commentary on writing instruction
really ought to take a little time and study the scholarship on writing and
writing instruction (that is, the discipline of Rhetoric and Composition)
before making these kinds of uninformed comments.

The following are wrong assumptions and misrepresentations that I find in
this article:

—That all English professors are educadted in the same disciplines when, in
fact, many (most?) are not educated in Rhetoric and Composition, which is a
discipline dedicated to, among other things, how to teach writing. What many
people outside of English don’t understand is that English consists of
multiple disciplines. Many English professors may have had assistantships
through which they gained a small amount of training and a few years
experience, and those might provide sufficient knowledge to teach
composition regularly under the guidance of a considerably more
knowledgeable Writing Program Administrator (WPA), but whether many tenured
English faculty are willing to submit to such guidance is the question.

—That teaching composition is “grunt work” that no real English scholar
would want to do, when, in fact, there is a whole discipline of Rhetoric and
Composition, whose history dates from ancient Greece and Rome, dedicated to
the study and teaching of rhetorical communication—and whose membership is
committed to teaching writing, not eager to teach literature courses.

—That Composition has no theoretical basis but is simply how-to knowledge,
when, in fact, Rhetoric and Composition has a long history of theoretical
discussion. In fact, this history goes back to debates over rhetoric’s
status in ancient Greek society and education between the Sophists, Plato,
and Aristotle. There is also much contemporary theoretical discussion, too.
A study of Rhetoric and Composition scholarship reveals applications of
theorists like Foucault, Bakhtin, Kristeva, and others; applications of
learning theories such social cognitive theory; applications of linguistic
theory; applications of theories of cultural studies; and so on.

—That all English professors, simply because they are interested in language
use and texts, have adequate knowledge and training to teach writing, when,
in fact, literature professors tend to be trained in interpretive reading,
which is not the same thing as rhetorical writing. Literary scholars who are
highly competent in their study of literature do not necessarily make good
teachers of writing.

—That the “noviate” (graduate student or part-time instructor, although some
of each group may well not be novice at writing instruction) is less trained
in teaching rhetorical writing than the tenured English professor, when, in
fact, many graduate students today go through more rigorous training than
many tenured English professors have gone through. Also, we have evidence
that faculty and graduate students alike, more interested in literature than
in teaching writing, sometimes turn writing courses into literary
interpretation and writing about literature courses. Graduate students are
easier, then, to guide in their pedagogies—-that is, to keep on track
teaching writing, not literature—-than tenured faculty members.

—That grammar is one of the most important features of good writing, when,
in fact, 50 years at least of scholarship tell us that what matters most in
all communication is its rhetorical effectiveness, of which absolutely
“correct” grammar is only a minor part—a part certainly (notably in
establishing one’s ethos) but not the most important part.

—That the problem with teaching writing in a way that is relevant to writing
across the curriculum is content-based (what is taught in the composition
course, say) when, in fact, recent research suggests that the problem is
actually transfer-based. Writing program assessments tell us that students
are learning what they are being taught in composition courses. Recent
research, however, suggests that students are not applying what they’ve
learning in composition courses to writing situations beyond the composition
course. Just because some students’ writing is not measuring up to some
professors’ standards does not mean that students are not learning what is
taught in composition courses. It could be that students simply are not able
to recognize transfer “cues” to apply what they know. Research on knowledge
transfer tells us that such transfer is NOT automatic, no matter how much we
think it should be and wish it were. It could also be that some faculty in
other disciplines are judging student writing based on criteria that is
dramatically different from that used in composition instruction. A typical
example is when a faculty member assumes that all it takes to produce good
writing is to produce absolutely correct grammar. Linguists have taught us
for decades now that Standard English is, in fact, fluid and unstable, that
language is constantly changing. And we have a century of research that
tells us that formal grammar instruction is inadequate in improving writing
quality. More important is the writer’s ability to clearly define her or his
purpose; to “read” her or his audience; to develop a certain level of
expertise in the subject matter of the text; and to develop an appropriate
ethos for the discourse community which the writer is addressing.

—That undergraduates actually are unable to adequately communicate in
writing, and that we need to blame someone for it, when in fact, we have
research strongly suggesting that students today are actually better writers
than they were in past decades.

Jerry

who should teach writing?

William Major argues in today's IHE that (essentially) everyone in an English department should teach writing -- that we shouldn't*** farm it out to the academic proletariat, be that graduate students, adjuncts, or some other lower-tier, less-well-paid category.  He isn't alone in making this kind of argument, although within Writing Studies it tends to be tied to arguments for secession from English, departmental status for composition, and so on.

I have reservations about the departmentalization of my field on many counts, but I'm writing about them elsewhere, so I'm going to hold off on the ins and outs of my feelings about that issue for now.  I agree with Major that the marginalization of teaching writing is a problem, and that it's a problem not just from the perspective of labor issues but also from a pedagogical perspective.  There's plenty of evidence that shows that retention rates go up when students have smaller classes taught by tenure-line faculty in their first year.  And as long as we frontload writing instruction, that's going to make for a pretty compelling argument for having those on the tenure-line teach first-year students the expectations and genres of academic writing.

It's difficult to even begin to list the variety of reasons why writing instruction is marginalized.  It's more practical, and we've been convinced since at least the eighteenth century that the abstract is more "serious" and "difficult" and "interesting" and "worthwhile" than the practical.  (And, yes, that's both gendered and racialized, as we all know.)  But it's also marginalized because, frankly, it takes time.  There's no way to teach writing without assigning writing; and there's no point in assigning writing if you aren't going to respond to it, giving students feedback.  Which means that it's necessarily more difficult to do research and publish if you're teaching writing.  Which means that with the rise of "academic professionalism" in the 1960s, it became increasingly difficult for institutions to reward faculty who were dedicated and even visionary teachers but who didn't publish.

I'm thinking, as I write this, about the career of Theodore Baird, who taught at Amherst from the late '20s through the late '60s, and who was the architect and guiding spirit behind Amherst's famous freshman English course, English 1-2.  (I've been reading Robin Varnum's book about Baird and English 1-2.)  It's pretty safe to say that Baird and that course have influenced Writing Studies and the teaching of first-year composition in ways too subtle and varied to list,* but what I'm most struck by today, putting Varnum together with Major, is the extent to which Baird's career and contribution are essentially impossible today.  Baird was a teacher, first and foremost.  He was also what we would now call a writing program administrator, although he probably would have scorned the title, and not because he saw the work as beneath him.  And in that teaching and administrative work we can now see -- and could probably see from the various memos and the incredibly elaborate assignment sequences that he developed -- that he was engaged in intellectual work as substantive and wide-ranging as much of the scholarship happening at the time. 

When Baird got tenure in the 1940s he could do so for being a good teacher and, let's be honest, being the right sort: white, male, upper-middle-class, Ivy League-educated.  While I'd like more institutions to pay more attention to teaching,** and (on the flip side) I'd like fewer institutions to offer time off from teaching as the most desirable, valuable, honorable reward graduate students or faculty can aim for, we also need to think about how we go about seeing teaching in the review process -- that is, how we make it visible.  I'd bet that relatively few of the students who went through English 1-2 had deeply positive things to say about it; from Varnum's interviews, it seems that it was a bewildering, somewhat excruciating course to take.  "Boot camp" was the most common image.  And while I think that student course evaluations are important, I think that we also need to think about how else we read what happens in the classroom.

In other words, if we're going to take Major -- and all the others making similar claims, including notables like Graff and Fish -- seriously, a lot of things have to change.

* It's pretty clear that Baird was deeply influenced by Robert Frost, and also that the assumptions and pedagogy of English 1-2 bear the stamp of that influence.  And given the direction that Writing Studies has taken, it's kind of trippy to think about that.

** A professor I worked with as a graduate student once told a class (when they were clamoring for papers back on ridiculously short notice): "It takes me a long time to read your papers because I take a pretty long time for each one.  There are many things in this profession that I can't tell whether or  not I'm being paid to do; but reading your papers is one of the things that I know is an important part of my job."  It's perhaps telling that at that research-intensive institution he didn't get tenure.

Added on Wednesday, 7/23 @ 9:02 AM: *** As Major himself pointed out, I misrepresented him here, an inadvertant typo on my part.  I've corrected the text in bold above.

the five-paragraph essay, by another name

The Perfect Theme

I've just found a reference to it in 1931, which describes its introduction, three body paragraphs, and conclusion. 

That might be the earliest reference I've heard of yet.  So much for blaming standardized testing, much less the new SAT.

six degrees of . . . something

I'm reading a book on the history of my field, and one of the things it does is briefly sketch the careers of several people who cycled in and out of a particular English department/writing program in the middle of the twentieth century.  As I'd been reading the book's description of the course and the program, certain philosophical and pedagogical aspects felt eerily familiar -- and unexpectedly so.  And it turns out that while none of my teachers taught in that program at that time, many of the teachers and scholars and administrators whose work has influenced by understanding of writing and teaching writing did.

A search for origins is always impossible, particularly if you're convinced that there's going to be a single origin.  (The author of the book rightly invokes Wittgenstein's notion of family resemblances.)  But part of the strangeness that I'm registering right now is that ideas and notions that I'd thought or assumed or believed had only recently converged have turned out to have another, more originary point of convergance . . . some 60 years ago.  The idea of family resemblances is also useful because I'm feeling a bit as though I've uncovered my intellectual family tree -- or rather, I've discovered that in addition to all the officially documented marriages and births and so on, there are a host of clandestine relationships and secret cousins that no one had acknowledged as part of the family.

There are lots of things about the program and the pedagogy that strike me as completely insane, in the way that elite education in the 1950s was insane, which somehow makes it all the stranger to find these traces.

In other news, I've completed a draft of the review that will not die, and I think that it's a draft that I'll be able to tweak tonight and send out tomorrow.  That means that I get to move on, only ten days later than I'd planned.  Please don't remind me what day classes start; I'm keepin' my head in the sand as long as I can.

assessment round-up

Oddly enough, on a day with 1 CHE and 2 IHE stories about assessment and higher ed, a confidential letter came through my inbox that also got me up in arms on the issue.  I'm going to satisfy the outrage I'm not allowed to spew to the world by chortling mightily at the fact that although Margaret Spellings has just made "another high-profile attempt to convince colleges that they risk painful government interventions if they don't improve the quality of their programs and help more students identify and afford them" "colleges seem increasingly willing to keep taking that risk" since she only has six months left in office.

I also have to say that of the regional accrediting agencies one might have to deal with, Middle States is looking pretty good.  Here's what a member of their executive committee says about some of the DOE's current take on higher education's responsibilities: "What the public wants is to get a good education at a reasonable cost," said Mr. Chambliss, a member of the executive committee of the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, one of the six regional accrediting agencies. "Rather than focusing our efforts on trying to somehow convince the public through various data strategies," he said, colleges should "just do a good job and let them figure it out."

My sense is that many major colleges and universities have been playing an admittedly passive-aggressive waiting game with Spellings and questions of accreditation.  While going through the motions -- although what's required to appear to go through the motions has been pretty sustained and developed, I have to say -- most if not many institutions have done their best to adopt a mode of passive resistance, as described here in a slightly different arena:

"As a group of state leaders at last week’s Education Department summit on higher education began a discussion aimed at identifying the biggest problems facing higher education and potential achievable solutions to them, the session’s moderator asked for a volunteer willing to report back to the larger summit about the fruits of the group’s brainstorming. The previous day, the moderator explained, a department staff member had done the reporting out for each of the breakout groups, but the summit’s leaders thought it would be better if the reports came instead from participants.

So, any volunteers? she asked again. Despite repeated entreaties, no takers emerged." (from IHE)

One of the big names in my field, Ed White, has a mantra that was repeatedly invoked at the WPA Conference a couple of weeks ago: "Assess thyself, lest thee be assessed!"  He's right.  And, frankly, between my own position in rhet/comp and as the daughter of someone who started her career in the field of educational policy, school change, and educational evaluation, I'm a lot more receptive to many of the ideas of what's now called assessment than most.  But the Spellings Commission's fixation on quantifiable results that document the "value" that's been "added" to students* as result of 4 or 5 years in a higher educational institution, not to mention the apparent goal of some kind of national standardization between higher ed institutions across the country, gives me the willies.

Which is just to say that I'm firmly in agreement with Diane Auer Jones and others in the debate over what this model of assessment could do to the liberal arts.

* If you can't tell what's wrong with that sentence, read Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  Now.  Please.

limbo

I've been waiting for news from my institution since late May on a major proposal.  It's not the first step in the process, but it's nevertheless a major proposal that my department put together on my behalf (and with lots of my input) and asked the administration to consider.  We thought that we were going to get an answer fairly quickly, but in fact we've heard nothing since several of the senior faculty met with the President at the beginning of the summer.

At first I was glad not to hear, in part because I was on vacation and getting bad news while on vacation would have sucked, to put it mildly.  And then once I was back it seemed kind of moot, because, really, it's summer.

I finally realized last night -- as part of a longer conversation with M. l'O -- that the waiting is really wearing me down.  The proposal has wide-reaching ramifications for my work life and trajectory, and certain setbacks in the process last spring had me deeply angry at the institution in a kind of blanket way, as well as my non-departmental colleagues.  As we've passed the apex of summer and are starting that inexorable downward slope into fall, I'm finding it incredibly difficult to feel energized because I still don't know what the outcome to this proposal will be. 

Wikipedia, SAQ, and J. Hillis Miller

From Miller's "Performativity as Performance/Perfomativity as Speech Act: Derrida's Special Theory of Performativity" (SAQ 106:2 [Spring 2007]: 219-235):

"These pages are an extended version of what the admirable online encyclopedia Wikipedia calls a 'Disambiguation Page,' that is, a page that discriminates among the various more or less incompatible meanings of a given term.  Wikipedia, for example, distinguishes nine different referents for 'catastrophe.'  I hold that it would be a catastrophe to blur different meanings of 'performativity'" (220).

"(I am using Wikipedia here, and in what I say about Judith Butler later, as the best source I know for highly informed received opinion about a given topic or writer)" (220).

Wikipedia gets a lot of flack, and it's by no means a perfect instrument.  But what instruments are?  In an "information age" -- that is, an age in which information seems more readily available than it had been previously -- we have to teach students ever more carefully how to use/read/engage with sources.  In other words, we have to teach them to think critically.  It's nice to see Wikipedia get some props from a major figure of twentieth-century literary studies, and it's also nice to have a model to show students of one way to think about Wikipedia -- what it can be a source for, and how it's valuable.  (This is only one way, mind you.)

But I have to say that I think that Theodore Baird (and his disciples) would disagree with me on "new" urgency of teaching students to think critically.  I'm currently reading Robin Varnum's book about Baird and English 1-2 at Amherst College -- English 1-2 was a central feature of Amherst's curriculum from 1947 through 1969, although Baird began developing the course in the early 1930s.  It seems to me that Baird's curriculum and pedagogy were aimed very much at getting students to disambiguate.

Interpretation

I read Squiss the "Atlanta" story from Free to Be for the first time two nights ago.  She was coming to it from a fairly solid knowledge of the original -- at least, the original as re-told in D'Aulaires, her Greek myth Bible.  In that story, Melanion wins the race and the right to marry Atalanta because he lures her off-track by tossing three golden "apples of love" along the race course.  Aphrodite gives him the apples because she "wants to see all pretty girls married."

In the FTB re-telling, Atalanta still doesn't want to marry, but "Young John" and she *tie* in the race, and he doesn't use any god-given trickery.  He's actually running because he's noticed her about town (as she buys wood and nails to build things, or equipment for her telescope, or is laughing with her friends) and wants a chance to talk to her.  Her father interprets the tie as Young John's win, but YJ and Atalanta agree to spend the afternoon talking.  "By the end of the day, they [are] friends."  Then she goes off to visit "the great cities" and he goes off "to discover new lands." 

This version met with cautious approval from Squiss, but required some processing.  At first, she insisted that it was "nothing like" the original.  Then she agreed that it had similar elements.  Then (I don't know how) we got into an interpretive tussle.

You're thinking that I should have known better, and I mostly agree.  But I can't really let the idea that "all pretty girls should be married" pass me by.  But I made the rhetorical mistake of calling Aphrodite "silly" and this was unforgivable.  After some back and forth -- and Squiss at one point coming close to tears -- we got to such an impasse that she had to claim ownership: "Well, Mommy, the Greek myths book is MY book, and so *I* get to decide how it is."

I didn't explain the thousands and thousands of years of bloodshed such a relationship to interpreting texts about gods has produced.  Instead, I tried to suggest that we could have different opinions and still love each other.  Eventually, she just called it quits.  "Mama, I think we should stop talking about this."

Indeed.

This intersects interestingly with another thing I've noticed lately, which is that Squiss is in the process of sorting out the difference between opinion and fact: her perceptions, even when they're opinions, are simply *true* to her.  And so countless times I'll disagree mildly, or correct her gently, even saying something along the lines of "I can see why you think/thought that" and her response is consistently, "I didn't *think* it."

It's hard to imagine that an almost five-year-old could process a fine-grained difference that (let's be honest) most of us have enormous difficulty with.  But it's interesting to see it happening in real time.  My calling Aphrodite "silly" wasn't simply a difference of opinion; it was a threat to Squiss's essential world-view, and not just because I'm her mother.