664 Blog 5: New Assessment Practices for New Texts

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “Looking for Sources of Coherence in a Fragmented World: Notes toward a New Assessment Design.” Computers and Composition 21 (2004): 89-102. Rpt. in Computers in the Composition Classroom: A Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Michelle Sidler, Richard Morris, and Elizabeth Overman Smith. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008. 293-307. Print.

Kathleen Blake Yancey speaks to a gap (though one that is shrinking now) between the common promotion of intertextuality in the digital age and our assessment of the resulting multimodal texts. We often still rely on print sensibilities to evaluate and assess digital texts and are, as she says, “held hostage to the values informing print, values worth preserving for that medium, to be sure, but values incongruent with those informing the digital” (293). Therefore, she calls for a new language of assessment for the new types of texts our students may be producing.

The key area she addresses here is the idea of coherence. She first emphasizes that coherence refers to relationships. In print texts, these relationships rely mostly on the relationship of words to each other and to the context in which they appear. Coherence in such texts often remains relatively stable, and this stability establishes certain values about what constitutes “good” writing. This leads her to a slight (but useful) tangent regarding word-processing software’s effects on assessment, including surface correctness promoted by grammar- and spell-checkers and instructor dominance of texts aided by the ease of commentary allowed by such software. Recognizing these matters is an important move toward stronger assessments of digitally-produced texts.

After developing this awareness, instructors must be aware that coherence in digital texts is more complex than what we discover in most print texts. Yancey’s solution to assessing these multiple and multimodal coherences is a heuristic model that establishes a fixed schema but one that remains flexible for the various types of multimodal texts in may need to respond to. Her heuristic consists of four questions:

1. What arrangements are possible?
2. Who arranges?
3. What is the intent?
4. What is the fit between the intent and the effect? (301)

She then applies this model heuristic to examine the coherence of emails and, more valuable to instructors, to a digital portfolio to demonstrate (convincingly, at least in her terms) how these questions emphasize digital values of coherence.

Yancey’s article is certainly valuable to instructors who are planning to assign writing projects that ask students to compose with various digital tools and produce multimodal texts. First, those instructors do need to consider how they are assessing digital texts and whether their values still come from print or if they are making the shift to more digital values. Second, her heuristic provides a starting template instructors can tweak to fit more local contexts as needed and one that reminds instructors to focus on the multiple coherences of digital texts. However, Yancey does not provide much detail regarding assessments of content or language. Should our assessment of these areas rely on print values, or should this change as well? And if so, what would those changes look like? While these questions are beyond the scope of her article, instructors still must remember to consider more than coherence as they reevaluate their assessment practices.

664 Blog 4: Two Steps Forward, (at least) One Step Back

Stout, Roland. “Good Writing Assignments = Good Thinking: A Proven WID Philosophy.” Language and Learning across the Disciplines 2.2 (1997): 9-17. The WAC Clearing House. Colorado State University. Web. 26 May 2011.

As I have been searching through different journals and collections, I have been looking for both theoretical and practical discussions of assignment development and evaluation. The title of this article initially attracted me, as I agree with the WAC/WID notions that writing is a means of thinking. And, since a chemistry professor wrote the article, I hoped to gain some insight into interdisciplinary perspectives on writing assignments. The article argues that instructors who develop a clear sense of what they want students to learn will be able to develop effective writing assignments that encourage more meaningful thinking in students. But the perspectives of writing offered here make this article problematic.

First, I want to address the benefits of this article, for what this professor attempts is exactly the kind of work writing instructors in English studies should be promoting, at least generally. Stout promotes helping students learn to think as members of a discipline, making the work they do more relevant to them and helping them retain and more meaningfully apply information. He also promotes a number of other elements writing instructors will likely applaud: writing as a process; deeper, more thoughtful revisions of texts; considerations of different rhetorical situations by having students write texts in different genres and for different audiences. Finally, he talks about developing assignments and exam questions that require different levels of thinking These all help students better understand various abstract chemistry concepts and are all notions many writing instructors endorse.

Despite Stout’s beneficial approaches, some of the assumptions about writing are troubling. The vast majority of these assumptions arise quite early in the piece, and some may even serve to undermine the good work his assignments attempt. First, much of how he defines “good” writing seems to rely on grammar and style. He wants “clear, concise writing” and note that “poor writing” consists of “awkward phrasing, improper grammar, illogical word choices” (10). Second, he seems to avoid much responsibility for teaching his students how to write well in his terms. He claims that he will help the students learn but immediately notes that, because he lacks specific training in writing instruction, he requires his students to go to the writing center. Furthermore, most of the commentary on students’ drafts prior to final drafts comes from their peers and from tutors, not from the professor (10-11). In short, this article seems to promote (even if unintentionally) ideas that good writing is superficially correct and that responsibility for writing instruction is minimally or not at all on instructors in the discipline, even if they rely on writing assignments in their classrooms. In considering the work that we and our colleagues from different disciplines do regarding writing assignments, we must attempt to challenge those assumptions that undermine more sound pedagogical practices, while praising the positive work our colleagues do to promote writing.

664 Blog 3: Assignments and Assumptions

Clark, Irene. “A Genre Approach to Writing Assignments.” Composition Forum 14.2 (2005): n. pag. CompositionForum. Web. 27 May 2011.

In my previous blog posting, I pointed out Bartholomae’s claim that certain language in writing assignments can contain discipline-specific expectations that we, as instructors, may take for granted. Irene Clark’s article furthers this discussion by arguing that relying on a genre approach to writing can help students discover and address these assumptions more effectively, and she suggests that viewing assignments themselves as a genre will help us recognize the assumptions buried in them. Such assumptions are often disciplinary, but Clark notes the socio-historical influences on views of education at a given time. These perceptions of what education is or should do markedly influence the goals of assignments. Thus, the aims of assignments are social as well as pedagogical, adding another layer of complexity that students often fail to understand fully. Furthermore, instructors themselves may even miss the assumed goals they are including in their assignments and see the problem as resting wholly on the students.

One of the key problems she notes is that those constructing assignments understand their language as transparent but this language carries with it the need for the student to construct “an appropriate textual self suitable for the writing task” (par. 7). Clark claims that “uptake” can help to illuminate this problem. Uptake unites a primary text and its “interpretant,” or a text that results from a primary text—the uptake text. In this case, a writing assignment would be the primary text; the interpretant would be a student’s essay in response to that text. If a student fails to recognize certain goals or assumptions in the primary text, he or she is likely to produce a less successful interpretant. Such practices privilege certain knowledge and discourse, not always readily available to our students. Therefore, students who already understand these situtions continue to do well, while those students on the periphery struggle.

Not only does Clark provide instructors with problems to consider regarding assignment design; she also offers three strategies for alleviating these problems. First, she suggests adding an element of role-playing. As she noted early in the article, students need to assume a role in response to the writing prompt. Helping students recognize this need will better enable them to address the topic with more authority than if they were to focus on the topic as another writing assignment situated only in the context of the course. Second, she suggests encouraging students to write for a discipline-specific audience; thus students may be more able to understand certain expectations that the audience may have and what it means to write for an audience. Finally, she reminds instructors to be more aware of the genre of the writing assignment, with all of its subtlety. Doing so helps instructors make the implicit more explicit, to the benefit of the students and the texts they produce. And indeed, Clark’s warnings and strategies provide instructors with some valuable tools to use when crafting their own writing assignments.

664 Blog 2: Assignments "Inventing the University"

Bartholomae, David. “Writing Assignments: Where Writing Begins.” Fforum Fall (1982): 35-46. Rpt. in Writing on the Margins: Essays on Composition and Teaching. Ed. David Bartholomae. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005. 177-91. Print.

This article appears three years before David Bartholomae’s seminal “Inventing the University,” but here, too, he claims that students “invent the university”—they attempt to approximate academic and disciplinary language and knowledge—when they write (177). The job of instructors, then, is to provide students with meaningful and challenging ways into the discourse of the university through carefully crafted and scaffolded assignments.

Bartholomae emphasizes two assignment principles (though others work their way in through these discussions). The first principle is indoctrination. For an assignment to indoctrinate students in academic and/or disciplinary discourse, it must build on their abilities to enter into such discourses, to “lead students through successive approximations” of them (179). Attention to this principle helps instructors move beyond providing disciplinary content. He notes students receive ample content in the university, but too rarely do they learn how to think and communicate as a practitioner in a particular discourse. Through indoctrination, students learn to engage with a subject as an active participant instead of as an outsider briefly peeking in on a subject as a theme for a particular assignment.

The second principle Bartholomae discusses at length here is interference. This term has positive connotations here as it emphasizes disrupting students’ typical perceptions. He claims students tend to approach the writing process as a linear activity, as a sort of a formula. The language instructors use in constructing their assignments can exacerbate this problem since this language often carries different meanings in different disciplinary contexts. The directive to “argue” in a political science course assignment likely carries different implications than it does in an English course. As a result, students tend to retreat to closed and easily defended theses rather than wrestling with the uncertainties of a subject. Instead of closing off subjects, Bartholomae claims that academic writers recognize and engage with the open and situated nature of discourse and knowledge. To help students better understand this, instructors need to make sure that their assignments help students recognize and be comfortable with this as well. Ultimately, Bartholomae claims that only a sequence of assignments that focus on the same topic, allow the instructor to push against students’ conceptions, and otherwise “interfere” with students’ typical ways of writing and thinking will allow students to explore a subject as a subject, to situate themselves in the subject’s discourse, and to have the room to explore the subject.

I tend to agree with Bartholomae’s position that at least part of our duty as writing instructors is to help students find greater academic and professional—even civic and personal—success by providing them the tools needed to effectively and efficiently understand and navigate discourse communities. The scaffolded approach to assignment development he advocates here positions assignments as part of an ongoing investigation into academic discourses (though one could certainly imagine this applying to other types of discourses as well) that link course assignments with the work students will be doing elsewhere and encourage students to see themselves as participants in that discourse.

664 Blog 1: (Re)Interpreting Post-Process and Process

Breuch, Lee-Ann M. Kastman. “Post-Process ‘Pedagogy’: A Philosophical Exercise.” JAC 22.1 (2002): 119-50. Rpt. in Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader. 2nd ed. Ed. Victor Villanueva. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2003. 97-125. Print.

Lee-Ann Kastman Breuch’s article explores post-process criticisms and argues against the simplistic views of both process and post-process notions to create a more dialogic and effective pedagogy. She begins by exploring some of the key tenets of post-process theory. Much of this resides in challenging the notion that writing processes can be codified and taught as content. This is most apparent in the “rejection of mastery” that post-process theories exhibit by objecting to writing as a thing to study rather than an activity in which students can engage. When the focus is on process as content, an instructor may bring up prewriting in a lecture or discussion and leave it as something for students to engage in on their own rather than making this an explicit and consistent part of classroom practices. Breuch also discusses the views of writing’s public, interpretive, and situated nature that arise from post-process theory; but she rightly notes that these are not specific to post-process theory, that they have established roots in postmodern theories of thought and language.

In short, post-process theory is not anti-process, nor is it trying to alter radically the theoretical underpinnings of composition instruction. However, she recognizes that post-process too readily turns process into a villain. The arguments against mastery, specifically, often miss the intentions (and quite often, the realities) of process pedagogy: that the goal of process is to engage students in an activity and not to provide content to master. Breuch ends her discussion with a turn toward pedagogy, though she claims that the anti-foundational nature of post-process limits her ability to consider specific pedagogies. She does discuss, however, two considerations we can draw from post-process theory. First, we need to consider writing and its processes as actual activities, not just as fodder for a few lectures. Second, we should attempt to emphasize the dialogic nature of communication both in how we help students understand and engage in writing. Her hope, then, is that we consider fully and carefully what we do as teachers.

Breuch’s article offers two key benefits, one somewhat more universal and one more personal. The first comes in her attempts to dispel some myths about post-process theory and to counter some of the problematic views of process pedagogy that some post-process interpretations have. By complicating both notions, Breuch reminds us that seemingly competing theories need not negate each other. Thus, to engage in effective praxis, we need to be critical interpreters and practitioners of theory. The second matter concerns a problem I tend to have as an instructor. I, too, have fallen into the trap of process as content (not that I do not bring in process activities directly into the classroom). Breuch’s article will not only provide some ideas to underwrite the entire trajectory of my course, but this also will provide me with reminders to keep process and dialogue as more central and active parts of the assignments I construct.

Entries for "Teaching College Composition"

My project for this course is to redesign my Composition II course. This course is a general education course and typically consists of sophomores. I have recently acquired the text Writing about Writing—a text that uses issues in writing as the content for a composition course. The content of this text is different than the “social issues” readers I typically use. Because of this, I am rethinking my assignments and my approaches to them. Therefore, my focus in the blog will be on issues related to assignment development and assessment to help me rethink my approaches to assignments.

Pedagogy Article Slideshow

Below is the link to my slideshow. I tried to condense as much as I could, but, you know. . . . My thinking on this is still a little rough, so I would appreciate any feedback.

N serfling 820 eposter

View more presentations from nathanserfling