Writing Maternity

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.

pfftt

Somehow, between last fall and now, certain chunks of knowledge seem to have dribbled out of my mind. Sources that we at my fingertips through January are gone, sitting on my shelves utterly impassive and unhelpful. I know that this is largely because I've been so immersed in various local crises -- not to mention the personal ones -- that I haven't been writing, or even keeping up with my scholarly reading, as much as I was in the fall, but still.

How does it dribble out so easily?

Originality, Imitation, and Plagiarism

That's the title of the book that arrived yesterday, and that I'm now devouring.  It's an anthology edited by Caroline Eisner and Martha Vicinus, and it's proving a smart, varied, thoughtful collection.  Here's a great series of questions from Eisner and Vicinus' introduction:

• How do we conserve and inculcate a tradition of ethical research and writing standards, while acknowledging and taking full advantage of the opportunities provided by new technologies?
• How can students be taught to evaluate sources and then credit the authors appropriately?
• Why have so many experienced researchers been found guilty of stealing from others?
• How can we encourage the free and ethical exchange of ideas?
• How can we encourage students, so accustomed to digital sharing, to understand citation practices, free use, and the legitimate ownership of ideas?

Not a question, but I can't leave you without this, too: "All too often these queries [that writing centers face about plagiarism] are framed in narrow, judgmental terms that leave little room for either the teacher or the student to understand the complexities of permission, atttribution, and copyright.  Teachers find themselves placed in an adversarial position in relation to students, as if all writing assignments involved the risk of plagiarism. . . . Across disciplines and fields, we find that plagiarism is not a simple wrong; a full understanding of its role in contemporary intellectual life depends on a broad approach that includes notions of what is original and what role imitation plays in the creation of new texts" (1).

I'd already been pretty sure that this anthology would give me material for the cornerstone of a unit on these issues for my fall course on theories of writing and pedagogy; now I'm certain.

google books, man

I just found editions of two fairly obscure nineteenth-century advice books on Google Books.  Otherwise, I've only had my piecemeal photocopies and notes from the British Library to work with, so this is great, seriously great.

two good (professional) things

It's a time of the semester when exhaustion seems to strike.  I can remember a moment at a department meeting, many years ago when I was teaching at Regional State U. with a 4/4 load, looking around the room and noticing that everyone looked as though they hadn't slept in a month.  The blogosphere -- as well as my real-life colleagues -- seems to be exuding that vibe now.  We're hunkering down and trying to make it to the end of classes.  I'm trying to figure out how to teach two essays in tomorrow's first-year seminar, and at the same time trying to figure out how I'll comment on all the student work that needs to be commented-upon by Friday's thesis seminar meeting.

But I have far more energy this week than I have any right to expect for two reasons:

1. My administrative assistant, who's been out since August 31 because of an injury, has been cleared to return to work on Monday.  This is especially great because a) I spent precisely 3 hours of this past Monday doing work that she ordinarily would have done, and b) proposed budgets for the next fiscal year are due next week, and she (not I) has the necessary clearances to look at our accounts.

2.  I got news that the grant proposal I wrote earlier this semester has been forwarded by my institution to the granting institution.  This is the first major grant I've applied for since graduate school, so it's a huge shot in the arm.  (In all due modesty, I'll say that I'm pretty sure not that many people at my institution put in proposals.)

stretching, cracking my knuckles . . .

and trying to get back to work: these have been this evening's projects.

The strange and lovely thing about weekends -- including long holiday weekends -- when you have kids (at least in my experience) is that they become times when, for the most part, work is verboten.  G and I work hard, often before dawn (me) and after midnight (him) in order to protect our weekend time for family as much as possible.  This has been our choice historically; I'm not always sure that it's the best one for us, and I'm not always sure that it's the choice that we'll continue with into the future, but it's where we are now.  I feel the combined sense of rest and panic that comes from a mid-semester vacation: I took Wednesday off 1) to make the Thanksgiving desserts*, 2) to go to Squiss's school's Thanksgiving lunch potluck **, and 3) because I'd been working so hard Sunday night through Tuesday that I didn't have a brain cell left.  As a result, I haven't done any work in almost a week, which hasn't happened since early August.

Because of that, and as I've been scanning blogs these last few days, I've felt very intensely aware of the difference children make.  A friend of mine thanked her children in the acknowledgments of her book "for making the process of writing both much slower and infinitely more pleasurable," and this is resonating with me now.  Childless academic bloggers, whether single or coupled, have written about getting work of various kinds done this holiday weekend.  Instead, I spent time with my in-laws, read Squiss a million stories, cooked with a 25-pound toddler on my hip, and ran various kinds of errands.  I'm not saying that I'd trade my kids away, or that the childless are missing out on something -- or rather, I'm saying that we're both missing out on something.  I could use (and in some ways would love) the long days of reading and writing that I had before Squiss was born; I'm aware of that loss, although I'd never pay the price that would get me those long days back, and am more than happy with the choice I made to (essentially) give them up.

This brings me, a bit obliquely, to a couple of realizations born of my rapid transition from a binge of writing to total family time.  First, I've gotten a good deal more writing done this semester than I have in a couple of years.  Given the teaching and administrative overload, I'm feeling quite proud of that.  (It can't be over yet, though: I have an MLA talk to write!)  Second, I seem to be a binge writer in a way that I would have found hard to imagine becoming a decade ago, and this concerns me.  (Donna was writing about this, and also about setting goals, which is one catalyst for these thoughts.)  While there's some utility in the binge writing model -- utility that the image doesn't convey -- there's also danger.  Almost every time I've been writing something professionally important -- conference paper, article, proposal -- in the last three years, I've felt as though I had started it too late and was working more frantically in relation to the deadline than I was comfortable.  In working on my project last week, I was utterly blocked for one moment and then suddenly realized that it was because I had been essentially skipping the brainstorming step, which for me is typically some kind of freewriting.  I've re-acquired all the bad habits that I try to teach my students to overcome, and I don't quite know what to do about it.

Part of the problem is that my writing process relied on long stretches of time -- the kind of time one has in, say, graduate school.  The kind of time few (post-graduate school) academics have, but the kind of time that academics with adminstrative roles and academic parents of small children may find in particularly short supply.  I haven't yet figured out how to make small chunks of time work for me, which means that I'm not writing regularly.  That, in turn, means that I waste a good bit of time thinking myself back into my projects when I get a somewhat cleared desk, and that (I fear) the things I'm writing aren't as good as they should and could be.***

This is, I think, one my tasks for next semester.  It's a lighter teaching semester than usual, the payback for this semester's overload.  The challenge will therefore be to maintain intensity while losing some of the stress, and to learn how to keep a steadier pace.

I'll keep you posted.

* I'm the dessert chef in the family.  This Thanksgiving I made an apple pie and a pumpkin clafouti.  The clafouti recipe was straight out of Claudia Fleming's The Last Course, which is an outstanding dessert cookbook.  I sprinkled in pumpkin seeds that I'd first toasted in olive oil and then sprinkled with salt and demerara sugar rather than the hazelnuts she recommends because I'm not a big hazelnut fan.  G and decided this time that the clafouti, while good, doesn't really pack enough pumpkin punch for Thanksgiving.  I make an apple pie every year.  It along with my mother's stuffing, make the meal for me.  This year, I used the new piecrust recipe from Cooks' Illustrated (with vodka!) and am cautiously pleased.  I also sauteed raisins in butter, brandy, and spices before adding them to the filling.

** They'd set up all of the tables in a banquet style, and had the kids sit around them and say, one by one, what they were thankful for.  There was something utterly cliched, but no less moving and lovely for it, in hearing each of these pre-schoolers, with a vaguely embarrassed smile, say shyly some version of, "I'm thankful for my family."

*** The quality issue is mine, not one that I'd generalize.  I don't do my best work with the deadline in plain sight.  Many academics, of course, do.

changing tacks

A student who I like a great deal, in hearing about my shift from writing a grant proposal one week to grading first-year papers and responding to thesis drafts the next, asked if I sometimes felt as though the various pieces of my (professional) life were in dramatic tension.  I laughed, said yes, and then said no.

The good thing about being a compositionist, and hence getting to write about what I do in the classroom and as an administrator, is that many of my writing projects connect with and reinforce the thinking I do as a teacher and WPA.  The bad thing about being a compositionist as well as a Victorianist is that I'm often wanting to write multiple things, and the reading and thinking for those multiple things doesn't intersect all that much.  (And the thinking for the latter doesn't often intersect with the teaching and so forth, either.)

Tonight was a partial exception.  I'm teaching Jameson to the first-years tomorrow, and in re-reading the pieces of The Political Unconscious that I assigned, I've realized that I need to re-read a good bit for the entire book for my own book project.  The problem with realizing that at this particular moment is that all of my current deadlines (MLA in December, UCSB in February) are for the CBPT paper, not the genre book.  And Jameson fits the genre book.

This is always the challenge.  How do I make myself work on the project that is big and amorphous and never-really-due, rather than the projects that are small and finite and urgent?  Other than the summer and a week or so in January, I find it enormously difficult. 

Advice greatly welcome on this one.

update

The proposal I've been working on is nearly finished; G will look it over tonight, and I'll put final touches on it and add some citations tomorrow.  I feel a bit like a student: when your institution says that something is due on a certain day, does that mean by 5:00 PM?  Or some other time? 

I have no sense whether or not I'll get the award.  It's for summer funding to pursue one of my writing studies, rather than the book project.  Ah, well.  Even if I don't, writing this proposal at this point has made me do a lot of the work I'd have needed to do in December for my MLA paper anyway.  I didn't really have time now, but I won't really have time, then, either, so I guess it's all okay.

It feels, as always, deeply good to be writing anything.  It feels, perhaps also as always, deeply angering that I have so little time to do this.  I'm stealing time from other things, and nearly lost it this afternoon after feeling as though I was so constantly stressed this semester that I've lost my ability to be patient with my daughters. 

all right, perhaps I've found my hook

After class this afternoon (yes, pity me, I teach a Friday afternoon seminar), I read Margot Soven's "Curriculum-Based Peer Tutoring Programs," which appeared in WPA in 1993 and finally arrived through inter-library loan.  She reports the directors of such programs reporting that both faculty and students report (oy) that the quality of student writing, students' awareness of having a writing process, and their level of engagement with the course material increase in CBPT courses.  In other words, my data are right on target. 

This is good.  Soven's survey is still one of the most-often-cited pieces about CBPT programs.  (There's an issue of Across the Disciplines due out soon that will complicate this, since it's a special issue focusing on these kinds of programs.  I'm sort of just behind that curve, but the issue will give me more fodder for the conversation I want to enter.)

Soven's article is based on a survey of the directors of CBPT programs, so there's no analysis of student writing.  That means that there is important to room to genuinely ask my question.  I'm not able to answer the question at the level of draft to revision (although I could probably do a follow-up study on the basis of one of the CBPT courses).  So the hook in general is actually what it was for me: this programs seem great, but what can we claim that they actually do?

Interesting factoid from Soven's article: shockingly enough, my institution participated in the survey.  My predecessor-but-one apparently attended at least one of the conferences or workshops from which Soven drew her pool.  That's a much greater degree of participation in the national conversation than anyone -- including the WPA herself -- had led me to believe had been the case.  Also interesting is that this institution appears in the article as being in the process of implementing a CBPT program in the first-year seminar program.  And I'm hear to say that that never quite got off the ground, although it still exists in a kind of limping fashion.  Fixing that particular problem is on my to-do list, but it's looking increasingly as though it's going to have to wait until, oh, 2012.

more on revision and writing tutors

I'm pasting in here a couple of bits that I wrote last spring, doing a cursory assessment of the a pilot program of CBPT (curriculum-based peer tutors) that I'm now revisiting for a couple of different projects:

[The participating faculty] all reported that the student writing in their classes was significantly stronger than they normally see; . . . they reported that they could “see specific improvements” and felt that the writing improved “more substantially” over the course of the semester than was typical; interestingly enough, they also reported that they could see the most improvement in the writing of students who had worked with the same [peer tutor] on all three papers. . .

[S]tudents reported that the [peer tutors] "are incredibly helpful.”  In many cases, students commented specifically at how well the [peer tutors] addressed – and even anticipated – their concerns: “[tutor] usually brought up topics that I was most concerned about before I even asked them”; “I think I am an effective writer, but I often struggle to pick an appropriate scope for papers.  My [PT] did a fantastic job of helping me, through a two-way conversation, sort through my various observations and synthesize an exciting, focused thesis and approach.”

Students also reported that the experience changed their attitudes toward the writing process: “Made me take revising more seriously,” noted one.  Another observed, “I felt my papers improved as did my ability to formulate rigorous critical arguments.”  A third student claimed that the benefit of working with the [PT] wasn’t simply to her writing: “I feel like I understand the material that I wrote on better for having talked to the [PT]s because they made me really think through my claims.”  Perhaps most movingly, several students felt that their performance in the course was directly indebted to the support of the [tutors]: “I would not have done as well in this class without the writing [tutor]”; “I felt much more confident handing papers in.” 

My current writing task(s) is to essentially write the frame of a paper in which I'll present and analyze data from the actual student papers.  I'm in the process of analyzing "time-sequenced" portfolios of student writing, so that we can see whether or not (and, to my mind most interestingly, how) the students' writing changes over the course of the semester.  This is why I've been reading the stuff I alluded to yesterday about revision, and also why I'm rapidly becoming an expert on the advent of CBPT (also called "writing fellow") programs in the US.  As I noted yesterday, it seems that there's little evidence that simply requiring revision as a step makes a big difference.  (There's a great article by Muriel Harris about "one-draft" versus "multi-draft" writers, in which she points out that many non-revisers do enormous intellectual work before really starting to draft the paper.  She then ends up sort of insisting that it's better to find a mean between the two extremes -- the one-draft writers she observes tend to cut some promising avenues off too early, and the multi-draft writers can spend so much time generating generative mess that they find themselves smack up against the deadline without a finished product.)

Today, I was reading parts of Joe Harris' A Teaching Subject, a kind of history of composition studies that's also Joe's chance to respond to a series of the central texts in the field.  In a chapter on "Process" he essentially argues that the 1970s/80s process movement got sort of stuck in valuing (and hence teaching) process as its own good.  He convincingly shows how, in several of the key texts, that these teacher-scholars seem relatively uninterested in the ideas the students are developing in their drafts.  That investment and interest in students' ideas -- and the notion that an emphasis on process and revision has to be about them developing those ideas if it's going to work -- is at the heart of the work Nancy Sommers has done on "Responding to Student Writing."  In her (again, early 1980s) work on that and on revision, Sommers essentially develops the argument -- now largely taken as self-evident truth -- that the task of professors in giving feedback is to genuinely engage with the student's ideas, so that s/he can develop them further, and thereby learn what revision really is and can do.  In other words -- although Sommers doesn't really say this, I think that Joe Harris would -- the point is helping students engage with and develop the ideas they have in the context of the course.

This is great and exciting, but it also presents all kinds of problems, when you think about it.  If requiring students to revise doesn't necessarily produce better papers (or get them to engage more deeply and thoroughly with the ideas of the course), and if you, as a busy teacher, can't realistically respond thoughtfully to complete drafts of everything the students write, what do you do?  Particularly given the connection -- that the student in my study, quoted above, proclaims, but that other people have also observed -- between writing and critical thinking?  It's pretty clear from all kinds of studies -- including Harvard's longitudinal study -- that students feel more engaged by classes that assign more writing.  And I suppose that CBPT programs developed in response to this need, as well as (frankly) the sense that non-writing teachers needed extra support if they were going to not simply assign more writing but take it more seriously.  (CBPT programs are largely WAC programs, after all.)

So, in this scenario, the peer tutor takes on the role that Sommers advocates for the responding professor: seriously engaging with the student writer's ideas in order to help him or her develop them and giving the student writer realistic feedback about more formal problems.  The CBPT model assumes that the peer tutor can do this without course-specific knowledge: without necessarily having had the course, done the readings, or sat in on class discussions.  And many -- Muriel Harris among them -- would argue that peer tutors can do this in some ways more effectively than professors, precisely because of the "peer" aspect of things.  That's an ultimately unanswerable question, to my mind.

In my study, we're looking at what happens over the course of a full semester when students have to revise on the basis of peer tutor feedback three times.  If the professors' and students' impressions are borne out, we'll have some interesting fodder for conversation, both at the institution and in the field.  (Well, I feel pretty tentative about the latter, but I'm hoping so.)  This could make a case for a kind of radical expansion of CBPT programs.  It could also make an interesting basis for training the peer tutors, although I can't quite wrap my mind yet around how that might change.