North, Steve. “The Idea of a Writing Center.” College English 46.5 (1984): 433-446.
At the time this article was written in the early 1980’s, North states that writing centers were used as a place for instructors to send students who were labeled as struggling writers. Either that, or such spaces were used as a stop-gap, as an opportunity for students to learn about writing skills that teachers felt they lacked the time and/or skills to teach. North begins by expressing his frustrations with such perspectives, and then goes on to challenge this perception and also offer suggestions about how writing centers should be viewed as legitimate spaces for all writers at all levels, and not solely as a “fill-in space.”
Thankfully, many writing center administrators and their institutions have heeded this call. North’s article reads as a fact sheet, highlighting many features of writing centers that are present today. It was a little frustrating and disappointing to see how much has remained the same, however. For instance, it seems as though many writing centers are still trying to prove themselves as valid spaces, suffering when budgets are cut, and headed by directors who are untenured staff. Rants aside, though, North’s article was helpful to read to gain a better sense of the context surrounding writing center literature.
In noticing how few changes there seem to have been, my first question is, “Why?” Beyond the reasons North cites of lack of familiarity and understanding, why are writing centers constantly trying to validate their existence? I also wonder how instructors who use writing colleagues view them. For example, do instructors in math and science disciplines, who may have minimal knowledge of writing pedagogy, see writing colleagues as individuals who can “carry the ball” as far as writing instruction goes? When the practice of writing gets compartmentalized instead of seen as something everyone does, it’s no wonder there are so many misconceptions about writing instructors and writing centers.
I found it interesting to read about writing centers’ means of publicity and how much that has remained consistent. Even with the surplus of technology available, we still rely on in-class visits, fliers, and other publicity strategies reminiscent of those North mentions. I was intrigued by his idea of having individuals from the writing center enter classrooms for sample tutorials. Offering such services might de-stigmatize writing help.
At the KSU writing commons, where I’m one of the assistant directors, we’ve been toying with the idea of replacing the term “tutor” with “consultant” or a similar word, to further de-stigmatize visiting the writing center. We’re interested in building on skills that the students already have, which is why the term “tutor” feels like it has a “remedial” quality to it that we want to distance ourselves from. We do indeed help students from a variety of contexts, some of which might require being corrective, but ultimately, we try to minimize directivity so that students are able to identify the changes that they want to make in their writing, with minimal interference from us. I’m curious if North would have a positive take on what we’re attempting at our writing center, where we see ourselves as guides and support rather than tutors.
Finally, I wonder how North would feel about programs that require students to meet with colleagues. He emphasizes the importance of students taking the initiative to seek out a writing tutor, as he writes, “nor should you require that all of your students drop by with an early draft of a research paper to get a reading from a fresh audience” (pp 440). I wonder what differences, if any, surface in students who self-select writing feedback versus those who are required. There are students who come to see us who are resentful of the requirement, and I’m not sure how much we help them. I agree with North that everyone, no matter their level, can benefit from a writing center visit, but I’m not sure that the required students agree.
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Brooke, Robert. “Underlife and Writing Instruction.” College Composition and Communication 38.2 (1987): 141-153.
The article “Underlife and Writing Instruction” by Robert Brooke discusses the concept of underlife and how it plays a part in education. Underlife is a sociological idea that can be understood as “the activities individuals engage in to show that their identities are different from or more complex than the identities assigned them by organizational roles” (pp 142). In other words, others give everyone an identity based on their social interactions or organizations. How people present themselves physically, what is known of their past, and their view on the organizations they are assumed to belong to are all factors of what identity will be “assigned” to them. Participating in an underlife is essentially rejecting the role that one has been given by outsiders to show that they are more complex.
According to Brooke, there are two forms of underlife: disruptive and contained. Disruptive can be compared with unions, as they wish to abandon or alter the structure of certain organizations. Contained underlife is an attempt to show individuality from the assigned role, without eliminating the structure of the institution.
The purpose of underlife in the classroom is that it allows for students to take views towards the roles they are expected to take part in, and show others their point of view. Underlife that takes place in the classroom is usually of the contained form. Brooke performed an observational study of a first-year college writing class to study underlife. He found there are four major types of underlife activities. These included students using material or knowledge from the classroom in a different way than the teacher intended, students recognizing the roles they each play in the classroom, students evaluating certain aspects of the classroom, and students dividing attention between classroom activities and something else unrelated. All of these activities allow students to explore different roles and identities while still – hopefully – remaining successful in the classroom. It also allows them to show that they are not completely conforming to the role of student.
On the other hand, writing teachers are considered to play a part in the disruptive role of underlife. Writing teachers actively try to change the classroom roles to benefit students. According to Brooke, the goals in a writing class are different from other subjects. Writing teachers often note this as a struggle because they are forced to test students on writing “skills” when in reality writing teachers would like students to see themselves as writers and not only as traditional students. Writing teachers like to see students find their voice and identity through writing, but it is a virtually impossible task when teachers are forced to assign projects and then evaluate the students’ performances. To truly help students see themselves as writers and not just students complying with teachers’ demands, instructors must help them view writing classes as different from classes of other subjects. Teachers are asking students to take a disruptive form of underlife in the writing classroom rather than the contained form. By doing this, students will part from the normal roles of the classroom by becoming conscious of what these roles are and their differences from them. Writing instructors want students to accept their own underlife and discover these new roles and identities.
Brooke states, “…writing instruction comes into greatest conflict with the existing educational system, and also has the most to offer to it” (pp 152). He is saying that the shift of roles in the writing classroom would benefit the classrooms of other subjects as well. He uses the example of a student in a chemistry class seeing herself as a chemist rather than a student. Teachers need to “focus on fostering the identities of students as thinkers in our disciplines rather than merely on transmitting the knowledge of our fields” so that students are able to see themselves as something other than only a student complying with the demands of the classroom (pp 152). The concept of underlife helps to dissect the roles of teachers and students in the classroom and brings to light some issues in the educational system that could be changed to better benefit the student.
Wednesday, August 6
Friday, August 1
Week 3
Hake, Rosemary and Joseph M. Williams. “Style and Its Consequences: Do as I Do Not as I Say.” College English 43.5 (1981): 433-451.
The article “Style and Its Consequences: Do as I Do, Not as I Say” is interesting because its thesis hinges upon our need as composition instructors to hold ourselves accountable for our students and their ability to learn. It sounds like a no-brainer, but often, studies in composition seem to focus on students “getting it wrong,” instead of focusing on what instructors need to do in order to better connect with students and their needs: “Is it possible that despite our public declarations about clear, direct writing, we might somehow discourage our students from writing good prose and encourage them, through our own tacit behavior, to write bad?” (pp 434).
In spite of this strength, with which I still agree, however, I find the article’s representations somewhat confusing. First, Hake and Williams purport to be testing whether teachers reward a style that is "direct," "simple," "concise," and "plain." How these terms are defined isn’t exactly clear, however. In practice, Hake and Williams equate these qualities with verbal style and the opposite, negative qualities with “nominal” style. If we compare the nominal and verbal versions of the two essays in the appendix, we find, first, that there is no overall variation in conciseness. Closer examination shows that, in fact, the verbal version is wordier and loftier on a number of occasions: In essay one, five of seven sentences in the first paragraph are longer in the verbal version. In essay two, seven of the twenty-four sentences are longer in the verbal version.
Of course, the two versions have been designed to be the same length, but this very design makes it clear that what is being tested is simply whether teachers prefer nominal or verbal style when all other factors are equal. In addition, there isn’t much variation in how Hake and Williams depict directness or simplicity. As an objective measure of these qualities, the verbal versions have far more passive verbs: in essay one, five passives in the verbal version, one in the nominal; in essay two, seven passives in the verbal version, three in the nominal. My point is not that the researchers were wrong to identify verbal style with conciseness, directness, and simplicity. In normal, uncontrolled usage that equation seems to hold true. My point is that (if these examples are representative of those used in all the experiments) the researchers did not test instructors' reactions to variations in wordiness or directness. They only tested their preference for nominal versus verbal style (and perhaps for passive versus active verbs). Their representation of the research is thus misleading in that they actually tested a far more narrow difference than they say that they tested.
Yet another thing I find confusing is the indictment of instructors implied by the title: "Do as I Do, Not as I Say." Hake and Williams do not present evidence that any of the instructors who marked papers for their study preach that verbal style is superior to nominal. Because we don't know the "stated values" of this small group, we cannot be sure that in their theme marking they are "behaving in ways that contradict" them. We can believe even less that the indictment holds true for our entire profession. The fault here is in the researchers' assumption that our profession shares a set of "stated values." In fact, there is wide diversity in how instructors teach writing and what styles of writing we prefer. The preference for extreme simplicity of style is of course pronounced in some “remedial” composition texts, but even so, I know of no text which sets out an absolute rule that verbal style is superior to nominal in all cases, regardless of conciseness, simplicity, or directness. It’s somewhat arbitrary to say that only simple, concise language should be privileged in our writing classrooms. In fact, there are instructors who would argue that some forms of simple writing are unacademic. Different genres of writing dictate different styles, and even within those genres, there is still a wide variety. Not all fiction reads like Hemingway, for instance.
The significant issue is not just that the title is too strident, but that there is a genuine and deeply-felt difference of opinion among members of our profession re: style and that the tests reported here ignore the possibility that some instructors might hold opinions radically different from the researchers' own. Finally, the reporting of the experiments deserves a comment. In the report of experiments one and two, there is no mention that the readings were at all controlled. Inter-rater reliability is not an issue here; the experimenters wanted each teacher to apply his or her own standards. But it seems to me that intra-rater reliability is. Unless I can be sure that each teacher consistently and consciously applied his or her standards to each paper, I must question the statistical report. Fatigue, boredom, awareness of other readers' standards – all of these factors can cause differences in one reader's marking of successive papers unless they are controlled for.
Ultimately, I appreciated where the researchers were coming from and agree that the onus of student success should fall on the instructors, but I wish that the methods were more transparent and less unilateral and simplistic, and I wish that the actual experiments were holistic and accounted for the large variety of “legitimate” styles of student writing. I’m still not completely sure what they mean when they say, “We may have to look to psychology or history to learn whether we can create better writers by better teaching or whether we shall have to accept this [nominal] style as a historical inevitability and an unavoidable consequence of mass education” (pp 447). Why so fatalist? I guess, as a reader and educator, I don’t understand this particular “crisis.” Better teaching involves compassion, transparency, and acknowledgment and celebration of diversity, both in terms of our students and also in terms of the skills they are bringing with them to our class.
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Smith, William L. and Warren E. Combs. “The Effects of Overt Clues and Covert Clues on Written Syntax.” Research in the Teaching of English, 14 (1980): 19-38.
Smith and Combs are interested in measuring students’ ability or lack thereof in using cues to produce longer sentences or combined sentences: When instructors or researchers indicate or “cue” students, what are the results? Do they internalize those cues? What happens when the cues are covert? Are they still effective? Smith and Combs conclude that there are indeed cues that direct the student to complete longer, more complex sentences. During the course of several experiments and tests, they find that students privilege initial cues over later cues, but matters of retention are a different story.
Early in the article, Smith and Combs are able to articulate why such research is important to the field. They also do a fine job of transparently outlining their methods, as with Experiment 1:
Once students are given specific writing tasks, the researchers are able to figure out which types of cues are the most influential. When teachers are directive, thorough, and explicit about their expectations for assignments, particularly from the beginning, students seem to respond well to the task and are able to see to its completion with few questions. Smith and Combs’ findings led them to conduct another experiment, to “determine whether the cues transferred to students' actual writing, not just their ability to combine simple sentences” (pp 24). The second experiment focused on the influence of covert cues in particular, although “the possible combinations among no cues, overt cues, and covert cues were built into the design to assess the differential influence of the three” (pp 24).
The researchers were able to determine that the effect of the overt cues was positive, even though such directions were only “retained … across a short duration” (pp 35). It’s interesting that early initial cues seem to override later cues, and Smith and Combs suggest that it’s difficult but not impossible to study “how ling [a] cue will last.” Further, they were able to conclude that both “overt and covert cues give the appearance of complexity without providing the actual substance of complexity,” meaning that students were able to combine sentences or create longer sentences regardless of the type of cues they were given, but those sentences were not necessarily more complex (pp 35-36).
I wonder how much guidance is needed for students to write meaningful, complex sentences. Do we as instructors provide too much guidance? No matter if our cues are overt or covert, we still have certain expectations. Do students perform better with fewer expectations? I’m not sure if Smith and Combs’ study is laying the foundation for such inquiry, although their final remarks are intriguing in that regard:
Therefore, how can we as instructors separate what we want from what our students need? If high school English instructors, for instance, are pressured to give overt cues and have students meet certain bureaucratic benchmarks, are their students producing work that only has the “appearance” of sophistication? (pp 35). And sure, it’s no surprise that the instructors’ use of cues greatly reduced teaching time; however, at what cost? When students are given cues and lots of direction, I worry that they may not retain information in the long term, and Smith and Combs already pointed out that students weren’t able to hold onto cues for very long, regardless of whether they were overt or covert. Perhaps this lack of retention threatens students’ ability for life-long learning and enthusiasm for writing.
The article “Style and Its Consequences: Do as I Do, Not as I Say” is interesting because its thesis hinges upon our need as composition instructors to hold ourselves accountable for our students and their ability to learn. It sounds like a no-brainer, but often, studies in composition seem to focus on students “getting it wrong,” instead of focusing on what instructors need to do in order to better connect with students and their needs: “Is it possible that despite our public declarations about clear, direct writing, we might somehow discourage our students from writing good prose and encourage them, through our own tacit behavior, to write bad?” (pp 434).
In spite of this strength, with which I still agree, however, I find the article’s representations somewhat confusing. First, Hake and Williams purport to be testing whether teachers reward a style that is "direct," "simple," "concise," and "plain." How these terms are defined isn’t exactly clear, however. In practice, Hake and Williams equate these qualities with verbal style and the opposite, negative qualities with “nominal” style. If we compare the nominal and verbal versions of the two essays in the appendix, we find, first, that there is no overall variation in conciseness. Closer examination shows that, in fact, the verbal version is wordier and loftier on a number of occasions: In essay one, five of seven sentences in the first paragraph are longer in the verbal version. In essay two, seven of the twenty-four sentences are longer in the verbal version.
Of course, the two versions have been designed to be the same length, but this very design makes it clear that what is being tested is simply whether teachers prefer nominal or verbal style when all other factors are equal. In addition, there isn’t much variation in how Hake and Williams depict directness or simplicity. As an objective measure of these qualities, the verbal versions have far more passive verbs: in essay one, five passives in the verbal version, one in the nominal; in essay two, seven passives in the verbal version, three in the nominal. My point is not that the researchers were wrong to identify verbal style with conciseness, directness, and simplicity. In normal, uncontrolled usage that equation seems to hold true. My point is that (if these examples are representative of those used in all the experiments) the researchers did not test instructors' reactions to variations in wordiness or directness. They only tested their preference for nominal versus verbal style (and perhaps for passive versus active verbs). Their representation of the research is thus misleading in that they actually tested a far more narrow difference than they say that they tested.
Yet another thing I find confusing is the indictment of instructors implied by the title: "Do as I Do, Not as I Say." Hake and Williams do not present evidence that any of the instructors who marked papers for their study preach that verbal style is superior to nominal. Because we don't know the "stated values" of this small group, we cannot be sure that in their theme marking they are "behaving in ways that contradict" them. We can believe even less that the indictment holds true for our entire profession. The fault here is in the researchers' assumption that our profession shares a set of "stated values." In fact, there is wide diversity in how instructors teach writing and what styles of writing we prefer. The preference for extreme simplicity of style is of course pronounced in some “remedial” composition texts, but even so, I know of no text which sets out an absolute rule that verbal style is superior to nominal in all cases, regardless of conciseness, simplicity, or directness. It’s somewhat arbitrary to say that only simple, concise language should be privileged in our writing classrooms. In fact, there are instructors who would argue that some forms of simple writing are unacademic. Different genres of writing dictate different styles, and even within those genres, there is still a wide variety. Not all fiction reads like Hemingway, for instance.
The significant issue is not just that the title is too strident, but that there is a genuine and deeply-felt difference of opinion among members of our profession re: style and that the tests reported here ignore the possibility that some instructors might hold opinions radically different from the researchers' own. Finally, the reporting of the experiments deserves a comment. In the report of experiments one and two, there is no mention that the readings were at all controlled. Inter-rater reliability is not an issue here; the experimenters wanted each teacher to apply his or her own standards. But it seems to me that intra-rater reliability is. Unless I can be sure that each teacher consistently and consciously applied his or her standards to each paper, I must question the statistical report. Fatigue, boredom, awareness of other readers' standards – all of these factors can cause differences in one reader's marking of successive papers unless they are controlled for.
Ultimately, I appreciated where the researchers were coming from and agree that the onus of student success should fall on the instructors, but I wish that the methods were more transparent and less unilateral and simplistic, and I wish that the actual experiments were holistic and accounted for the large variety of “legitimate” styles of student writing. I’m still not completely sure what they mean when they say, “We may have to look to psychology or history to learn whether we can create better writers by better teaching or whether we shall have to accept this [nominal] style as a historical inevitability and an unavoidable consequence of mass education” (pp 447). Why so fatalist? I guess, as a reader and educator, I don’t understand this particular “crisis.” Better teaching involves compassion, transparency, and acknowledgment and celebration of diversity, both in terms of our students and also in terms of the skills they are bringing with them to our class.
---
Smith, William L. and Warren E. Combs. “The Effects of Overt Clues and Covert Clues on Written Syntax.” Research in the Teaching of English, 14 (1980): 19-38.
Smith and Combs are interested in measuring students’ ability or lack thereof in using cues to produce longer sentences or combined sentences: When instructors or researchers indicate or “cue” students, what are the results? Do they internalize those cues? What happens when the cues are covert? Are they still effective? Smith and Combs conclude that there are indeed cues that direct the student to complete longer, more complex sentences. During the course of several experiments and tests, they find that students privilege initial cues over later cues, but matters of retention are a different story.
Early in the article, Smith and Combs are able to articulate why such research is important to the field. They also do a fine job of transparently outlining their methods, as with Experiment 1:
The purpose of this investigation, then, was to determine the influence of various kinds of cues on students' writing performance. Purpose 1. No cue. Students were simply told to "rewrite" or "write". While this is an overt cue of sorts, it tells the students nothing about the audience or how to write. 2. Overt cue. Students were told that the reader would be a highly intelligent person who is influenced by long, complex sentences. 3. Covert cue. Students were presented with a two-class-hour programmed text in SC [sentence-combining] exercises (one hour in each of two consecutive days). It is assumed that instructional activities contain implicit cues. SC practice "tells" students that syntactic complexity is desirable in a writing task. (pp 20)
Once students are given specific writing tasks, the researchers are able to figure out which types of cues are the most influential. When teachers are directive, thorough, and explicit about their expectations for assignments, particularly from the beginning, students seem to respond well to the task and are able to see to its completion with few questions. Smith and Combs’ findings led them to conduct another experiment, to “determine whether the cues transferred to students' actual writing, not just their ability to combine simple sentences” (pp 24). The second experiment focused on the influence of covert cues in particular, although “the possible combinations among no cues, overt cues, and covert cues were built into the design to assess the differential influence of the three” (pp 24).
The researchers were able to determine that the effect of the overt cues was positive, even though such directions were only “retained … across a short duration” (pp 35). It’s interesting that early initial cues seem to override later cues, and Smith and Combs suggest that it’s difficult but not impossible to study “how ling [a] cue will last.” Further, they were able to conclude that both “overt and covert cues give the appearance of complexity without providing the actual substance of complexity,” meaning that students were able to combine sentences or create longer sentences regardless of the type of cues they were given, but those sentences were not necessarily more complex (pp 35-36).
I wonder how much guidance is needed for students to write meaningful, complex sentences. Do we as instructors provide too much guidance? No matter if our cues are overt or covert, we still have certain expectations. Do students perform better with fewer expectations? I’m not sure if Smith and Combs’ study is laying the foundation for such inquiry, although their final remarks are intriguing in that regard:
Furthermore, the results of this study do not speak only to SC [sentence-combining] research. All types of instruction in writing provide cues concerning what the teacher values and therefore what is expected of the students. Consequently, all research should make an attempt to distinguish what the students learn as a direct result of instruction from what they perceive as "teacher desired." (pp 37).
Therefore, how can we as instructors separate what we want from what our students need? If high school English instructors, for instance, are pressured to give overt cues and have students meet certain bureaucratic benchmarks, are their students producing work that only has the “appearance” of sophistication? (pp 35). And sure, it’s no surprise that the instructors’ use of cues greatly reduced teaching time; however, at what cost? When students are given cues and lots of direction, I worry that they may not retain information in the long term, and Smith and Combs already pointed out that students weren’t able to hold onto cues for very long, regardless of whether they were overt or covert. Perhaps this lack of retention threatens students’ ability for life-long learning and enthusiasm for writing.
Friday, July 25
Week 2
Carol Berkenkotter. “Understanding a Writer's Awareness of Audience.” College Composition and Communication, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Dec., 1981), pp. 388-399.
Using methods from Flower and Hayes, Berkenkotter examines how ten different teacher-writers consider audience while performing a specific writing task. Berkenkotter wonders if teacher-writers with formal training in academic writing think more about audience than writers who do not have such training. She thinks it is particularly beneficial that her study's participants come from a variety of different academic backgrounds: “five are professors of rhetoric and composition and have published in national professional journals; five teach and publish in other disciplines-urban history, computer science, metallurgy, science education, and anthropology” (pp 388). Further, Berkenkotter hypothesizes that while professors from rhetoric/composition constantly consider their audience while writing, professors from other content areas don't think as much about audience, because they are used to lecturing to a variety of listeners in the classroom and possibly think that their readership will be composed of a similar variety. Thus, she guesses, that an abstract audience is difficult to address; further, it may also be difficult to know what they want or need from a text if they're “all over the map.”
As a reader and newbie researcher, I immediately found Berkenkotter endearing when she expressed the inherent limitations to studying writers in a controlled experiment/setting: “the working conditions and environment are unnatural, the affective aspects of writing ignored, and only a small fraction of the writing process can be examined” (pp 389). I appreciate her transparency with regards to her study and its conditions. She also makes plain her intentions re: this controlled environment:
Think-aloud protocols as a method become really useful in this experiment because they allow the researcher to get a holistic and clear sense of the processes the teacher-writers go through and the decisions they make while writing. Even the self-editing choices become interesting when the teacher-writers reflect on why they made such choices. It's as close to getting the real, juicy “behind the scenes” details as one can get, even if it's controlled, as Berkenkotter wants her participants to engage as organically as possible. When Berkenkotter asks these groups “to think aloud as they composed, [she keeps] track of when and how frequently the questions about audience enter each writer's mind, and to what extent audience-related considerations guided their rhetorical, organizational, and stylistic decisions” (pp 389).
Upon compiling her data, Berkenkotter realized that the teacher-writers made interesting decisions about audience depending on how they saw themselves conducting the task at hand and what the purpose of the task was: “Writers who wrote to persuade thought aloud about their audience four times more often and in twice as many ways as those who narrated personal histories. Writers who opted to inform fell somewhere in the middle of the spectrum” (pp 393). In addition, issues of tone, discourse, and intentionality played a role in decisions about audience and anxieties about how the audience would receive the information. (And I should make a point to clarify something interesting here: Even though those who chose to narrate their personal histories considered their audience less often, Berkenkotter still acknowledges that according to their protocols, they still thought about how their audiences would interpret their text; they just did so closer to the start of their planning instead of throughout their writing activity.)
I find compelling Berkenkotter's conclusions about how different Discourses also play a role in the participants' decision-making: there were several participants who came from the rhetoric/composition field, but the rest came from a variety of academic fields, and, depending on which category they fell into, they interpreted Berkenkotter's directions differently, which is interesting. Going back to her hypothesis, the composition professors were not exactly thorough and did not feel compelled to produce a draft of their text; they, therefore, were not as “self-conscious about the composing process” (pp 395). How did confidence about writing or a lack thereof play a role in making decisions about audience? Berkenkotter does not say. However, she does decide, in her Summary section, that a re-working of her research question is in order, given the results she gathered:
This re-situating of the study is valuable because it allows us to see that all teacher-writers, regardless of discipline and training, consider their audience important, particularly when they feel free to share from their expertise in particular. When the teacher-writers are asked to connect with their audience in tangible ways, they are able to, as one of the participants said, “speak the language of [their] audience.” In summary, this becomes a matter not of failing to connect depending on training but instead a matter of how often and why. I think these are important lessons to consider regardless of who the writer may be (teacher, student, businessperson, etc), because all of us are always writing with the goal to connect.
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Stephen P. Witte. “Pre-Text and Composing.” College Composition and Communication, Vol. 38, No. 4 (Dec., 1987), pp. 397-425.
Before beginning this review, some definitions are in order: Witte uses the term “pre-text” to mean the thought process and planning that writers go through before they actually sit down to compose. He starts the article by expressing the need in the field for researchers to continue to study the relationship between “pre-text” and writing. Therefore, pre-texts, according to Witte (who is also drawing from Flower and Hayes), are not simplistic: they are deliberative and constructive, the invisible yet important scaffolding processes a writer experiences before even the pre-writing stage of composition:
Now that some of these distinctions have been made, Witte gets down to business: Because all of the writers he has informally spoken with all have pre-text processes in common, he feels that there should be no question that they are worth our attention and seriousness. Further, this phenomenon is worth researching because “the most readily accessible data on pre-text, personal experience and the testimony of writers, afford very little insight into its nature and function during composing” (pp 398). Because it exists as invisible thought processes, however, Witte notes that studying this phenomenon will always be difficult; though the effects end up being tangible, while a writer is in the “pre-text” stage, his or her processes are completely abstract to outside observers. Therefore, “at the present, the best available means of studying pre-text, its creation, and its functions during composing is through indirect observation afforded by thinking-aloud protocols” (pp 399).
Witte confesses that employing think-aloud protocols in order to study pre-texts can be potentially seen as problematic, however. Think-aloud protocols may assume that there isn't a distinction between thinking abstractly about a plan and articulating said plan. He also states that observers may not be able to tell whether something is pre-text or just explanation: he wonders, is the difference between the think-aloud and the pre-text simply an issue of semantics? “[Another] objection could be based on the belief that thinking-aloud protocols encourage writers to produce more complete or better-formed pre-texts than they would if they were not simultaneously thinking aloud as they wrote” (pp 399). However, Witte ultimately concludes that most of these objections are not “convincing,” although matters concerning the ability to create “better” pre-texts given the unnatural setting of the think-aloud does warrant some concern. He states that in the end, because pre-texts are innate writing processes, it's impossible to tell whether think-alouds as a method help or hinder their productivity and measurability.
With all of the disclaimers and caveats out of the way, Witte explains and legitimizes his methods and describes his study and sample:
In order to prevent himself from making sweeping generalizations about his data, Witte does a fine job of refining his argument to just be about some, not all, writers and their process. That said, he observed that those who do demonstrate pre-text definitely use such a practice to influence/direct/shape their writing. The examples from the students' think-alouds show that the pre-texts allow for recursive and thoughtful writing practices: For instance, one student, Pat, revises her thesis several times during the pre-text stage before even writing it down, and during the process of writing it down, parts of her thesis that give her pause are reshaped a third and forth time. Thus, “Pat's protocol provides compelling evidence that a writer's mentally stored and unwritten pre-text can affect immediately and directly a writer's written text and a writer's subsequent revisions of the written text” (pp 402).
Witte makes other interesting observations of his students and their think-alouds, including that they seem to store their pre-texts in such a way as to make them easily-accessible throughout the entire writing activity. Often, they lend themselves to self-editing/revising practices, even before pen and paper are used. In addition, “when revision of pre-text and written text occurs simultaneously, the contribution of a writer's pre-text to his/her mental representation of intended meaning may be the probable cause of the revision of written text” (pp 404). Overall, the data that Witte collected, and his interpretations of the data, are rich and invite further study. Pre-text is a complex and interesting phenomenon that affects many writers and their practices. The variety of pre-texts shown by the students in this study alone forces us to recognize that although the line between pre-text and composing is blurry, a lot of fruitful activity occurs at that border. In fact, instead of seeing such a line as a border, it's helpful to think of it as an intersection that permits writers to compose freely. In Witte's words, “How one distinguishes between planning and translating is, of course, a theoretical question... Nevertheless, it is [...] a theoretical question of considerable importance, because at the level of theory, distinctions between planning and translating affect the range and kinds of questions one chooses to ask about the nature of composing” (pp 418).
Using methods from Flower and Hayes, Berkenkotter examines how ten different teacher-writers consider audience while performing a specific writing task. Berkenkotter wonders if teacher-writers with formal training in academic writing think more about audience than writers who do not have such training. She thinks it is particularly beneficial that her study's participants come from a variety of different academic backgrounds: “five are professors of rhetoric and composition and have published in national professional journals; five teach and publish in other disciplines-urban history, computer science, metallurgy, science education, and anthropology” (pp 388). Further, Berkenkotter hypothesizes that while professors from rhetoric/composition constantly consider their audience while writing, professors from other content areas don't think as much about audience, because they are used to lecturing to a variety of listeners in the classroom and possibly think that their readership will be composed of a similar variety. Thus, she guesses, that an abstract audience is difficult to address; further, it may also be difficult to know what they want or need from a text if they're “all over the map.”
As a reader and newbie researcher, I immediately found Berkenkotter endearing when she expressed the inherent limitations to studying writers in a controlled experiment/setting: “the working conditions and environment are unnatural, the affective aspects of writing ignored, and only a small fraction of the writing process can be examined” (pp 389). I appreciate her transparency with regards to her study and its conditions. She also makes plain her intentions re: this controlled environment:
controlled laboratory writing situations […] force skilled writers to use large parts of their knowledge under pressure, knowledge that would be most likely drawn on automatically under naturalistic conditions. A protocol is, therefore, a rich source for information about some of what the writer is thinking as she is writing. At this time, it is the best research tool for teasing out the cognitive processes that reveal themselves in what we call audience awareness. (pp 389)
Think-aloud protocols as a method become really useful in this experiment because they allow the researcher to get a holistic and clear sense of the processes the teacher-writers go through and the decisions they make while writing. Even the self-editing choices become interesting when the teacher-writers reflect on why they made such choices. It's as close to getting the real, juicy “behind the scenes” details as one can get, even if it's controlled, as Berkenkotter wants her participants to engage as organically as possible. When Berkenkotter asks these groups “to think aloud as they composed, [she keeps] track of when and how frequently the questions about audience enter each writer's mind, and to what extent audience-related considerations guided their rhetorical, organizational, and stylistic decisions” (pp 389).
Upon compiling her data, Berkenkotter realized that the teacher-writers made interesting decisions about audience depending on how they saw themselves conducting the task at hand and what the purpose of the task was: “Writers who wrote to persuade thought aloud about their audience four times more often and in twice as many ways as those who narrated personal histories. Writers who opted to inform fell somewhere in the middle of the spectrum” (pp 393). In addition, issues of tone, discourse, and intentionality played a role in decisions about audience and anxieties about how the audience would receive the information. (And I should make a point to clarify something interesting here: Even though those who chose to narrate their personal histories considered their audience less often, Berkenkotter still acknowledges that according to their protocols, they still thought about how their audiences would interpret their text; they just did so closer to the start of their planning instead of throughout their writing activity.)
I find compelling Berkenkotter's conclusions about how different Discourses also play a role in the participants' decision-making: there were several participants who came from the rhetoric/composition field, but the rest came from a variety of academic fields, and, depending on which category they fell into, they interpreted Berkenkotter's directions differently, which is interesting. Going back to her hypothesis, the composition professors were not exactly thorough and did not feel compelled to produce a draft of their text; they, therefore, were not as “self-conscious about the composing process” (pp 395). How did confidence about writing or a lack thereof play a role in making decisions about audience? Berkenkotter does not say. However, she does decide, in her Summary section, that a re-working of her research question is in order, given the results she gathered:
If I reframe the question as follows: what ways of thinking about audience do writers from different disciplines share, I see two significant patterns. First, although each of the ten subjects handled the question of audience differently, all formed a rich representation of the audience; this representation played a significant role in the development of the writer's goals. Second, most subjects created individual rhetorical contexts or scenarios. I suspect that the writers in my sample felt freer to invent context because, unlike the subjects in the Flower/Hayes group, they were not asked to write for a specific genre... The ability to create context has an important heuristic function... (pp 395)
This re-situating of the study is valuable because it allows us to see that all teacher-writers, regardless of discipline and training, consider their audience important, particularly when they feel free to share from their expertise in particular. When the teacher-writers are asked to connect with their audience in tangible ways, they are able to, as one of the participants said, “speak the language of [their] audience.” In summary, this becomes a matter not of failing to connect depending on training but instead a matter of how often and why. I think these are important lessons to consider regardless of who the writer may be (teacher, student, businessperson, etc), because all of us are always writing with the goal to connect.
---
Stephen P. Witte. “Pre-Text and Composing.” College Composition and Communication, Vol. 38, No. 4 (Dec., 1987), pp. 397-425.
Before beginning this review, some definitions are in order: Witte uses the term “pre-text” to mean the thought process and planning that writers go through before they actually sit down to compose. He starts the article by expressing the need in the field for researchers to continue to study the relationship between “pre-text” and writing. Therefore, pre-texts, according to Witte (who is also drawing from Flower and Hayes), are not simplistic: they are deliberative and constructive, the invisible yet important scaffolding processes a writer experiences before even the pre-writing stage of composition:
Thus distinguished from abstract plans and goals, pre-texts represent critical points along a continuum of composing activities between planning and transcribing written text. In terms of the Flower and Hayes cognitive process model, pre-text may be asso-ciated with planning, and it may be associated with translating, "the process of putting ideas into visible language" (Flower & Hayes, 1981, 373), even though a pre-text is not yet visible on paper (pp 397)
Now that some of these distinctions have been made, Witte gets down to business: Because all of the writers he has informally spoken with all have pre-text processes in common, he feels that there should be no question that they are worth our attention and seriousness. Further, this phenomenon is worth researching because “the most readily accessible data on pre-text, personal experience and the testimony of writers, afford very little insight into its nature and function during composing” (pp 398). Because it exists as invisible thought processes, however, Witte notes that studying this phenomenon will always be difficult; though the effects end up being tangible, while a writer is in the “pre-text” stage, his or her processes are completely abstract to outside observers. Therefore, “at the present, the best available means of studying pre-text, its creation, and its functions during composing is through indirect observation afforded by thinking-aloud protocols” (pp 399).
Witte confesses that employing think-aloud protocols in order to study pre-texts can be potentially seen as problematic, however. Think-aloud protocols may assume that there isn't a distinction between thinking abstractly about a plan and articulating said plan. He also states that observers may not be able to tell whether something is pre-text or just explanation: he wonders, is the difference between the think-aloud and the pre-text simply an issue of semantics? “[Another] objection could be based on the belief that thinking-aloud protocols encourage writers to produce more complete or better-formed pre-texts than they would if they were not simultaneously thinking aloud as they wrote” (pp 399). However, Witte ultimately concludes that most of these objections are not “convincing,” although matters concerning the ability to create “better” pre-texts given the unnatural setting of the think-aloud does warrant some concern. He states that in the end, because pre-texts are innate writing processes, it's impossible to tell whether think-alouds as a method help or hinder their productivity and measurability.
With all of the disclaimers and caveats out of the way, Witte explains and legitimizes his methods and describes his study and sample:
The thinking-aloud protocols used as data are drawn from a group of over fifty collected from college-level writers, mostly freshmen.4 As preparation for doing thinking-aloud protocols as they wrote essays, each student was given a "matchstick" problem or a similar problem to solve as he/she produced a "practice" thinking-aloud protocol. Subsequently, students were given a writing assignment. After reading a particular assignment, each student was to write an essay and to "say aloud everything that comes into your mind as you write." (pp 400)
In order to prevent himself from making sweeping generalizations about his data, Witte does a fine job of refining his argument to just be about some, not all, writers and their process. That said, he observed that those who do demonstrate pre-text definitely use such a practice to influence/direct/shape their writing. The examples from the students' think-alouds show that the pre-texts allow for recursive and thoughtful writing practices: For instance, one student, Pat, revises her thesis several times during the pre-text stage before even writing it down, and during the process of writing it down, parts of her thesis that give her pause are reshaped a third and forth time. Thus, “Pat's protocol provides compelling evidence that a writer's mentally stored and unwritten pre-text can affect immediately and directly a writer's written text and a writer's subsequent revisions of the written text” (pp 402).
Witte makes other interesting observations of his students and their think-alouds, including that they seem to store their pre-texts in such a way as to make them easily-accessible throughout the entire writing activity. Often, they lend themselves to self-editing/revising practices, even before pen and paper are used. In addition, “when revision of pre-text and written text occurs simultaneously, the contribution of a writer's pre-text to his/her mental representation of intended meaning may be the probable cause of the revision of written text” (pp 404). Overall, the data that Witte collected, and his interpretations of the data, are rich and invite further study. Pre-text is a complex and interesting phenomenon that affects many writers and their practices. The variety of pre-texts shown by the students in this study alone forces us to recognize that although the line between pre-text and composing is blurry, a lot of fruitful activity occurs at that border. In fact, instead of seeing such a line as a border, it's helpful to think of it as an intersection that permits writers to compose freely. In Witte's words, “How one distinguishes between planning and translating is, of course, a theoretical question... Nevertheless, it is [...] a theoretical question of considerable importance, because at the level of theory, distinctions between planning and translating affect the range and kinds of questions one chooses to ask about the nature of composing” (pp 418).
Wednesday, July 16
Week 1
Berthoff, Ann E. "Is Teaching Still Possible? Writing, Meaning, and Higher Order Reasoning." Cross-Talk in Comp Theory. 2nd ed. Ed. Victor Villanueva. Urbana: NCTE, (2003): 329-343. Accessed via http://www.wou.edu/~waitej/crosstalk.pdf
In her piece “Is Teaching Still Possible,” Berthoff examines the thinking process involved in expression via writing. Berthoff's essay, in a major way, is a call to action for teachers of English in particular: We need to "invent a pedagogy that views reading and writing as interpretation and the making of meaning" (pp 329). This new pedagogy will, as a result, allow us to better navigate – and possibly avoid – the pitfalls of traditional developmental models. The crux of this re-framing is that unless “a learning is engaged [with the teaching model], no meaning will be made, no knowledge can be won” (pp 330). To solidify her claim, she states that the Piagetian model of education, which “represents the stages of development of the language and thought of the child” (pp 329), doesn't do enough to address the needs of older students.
By breaking down the essence of learning via language, Berthoff further shows why it is necessary for modern teachers to move beyond these traditional understandings of language and education: “If you start with a working concept of language as a means of making meaning, you are recognizing that language can only be studied by means of language” (pp 331). This presentation seems to imply a limited effectiveness for teachers who rely too heavily on archaic lecturing tactics to shape student understanding (instead of including various multimodal discussions and activities that would expand the "language" used and studied in class). Because of this limited focus, Berthoff explains that students are not given the guidance needed to adequately interpret and apply writing concepts. The author cites I.A. Richards in showing that this inadequacy prevents students from recognizing the role of language and expression as tools for defining one’s “becoming.” Instead, language is viewed as a hard-to-crack code, an obstacle that must be overcome in order to convey information.
Further emphasizing the importance of engaging the student’s mind in active learning, Berthoff explains that “[teachers], by means of a careful sequence of lessons or assignments, can assure that the students are conscious of their minds in action [and] can develop their language by means of exercising deliberate choice” (333). According to Piaget, these lesson plans should test students’ cognitive understanding by removing themselves as far as possible from “language-dependent settings” (335). However, as we hark back to Berthoff’s earlier stipulation that Piaget applied his youth-teaching techniques to the role of post-secondary teachers, we may be inclined to notice her disagreement with this assessment. Instead, one might note that while this method could be effective for teaching children, young adults may need a more advanced focus.
Berthoff explains that students do not experience difficulty in forming abstractions as much as they do in forming generalizations. Abstract thinking, she claims, is “the way we make sense of the world in perception, in dreaming, in all expressive acts, in works of art, in all imagining” (pp 338). This imagination is something naturally inherent to us all through birth, she asserts. The difficulty that we all face as composition instructors, then, is in moving “from abstraction in non-discursive mode to discursive abstraction, to generalization” (pp 338) – in other words, applying a method to the madness of abstract thinking. Berthoff's emphasis of the importance of the imagination reminds me of Lacan: Indeed, is it more “natural” for us to think abstractly than concretely or generally? (The seams show when we transition from the Imaginary Order to the Symbolic Order, right?) Or is Berthoff making a lot of cultural assumptions with that statement (i.e. are all student-writers, regardless of socio-economics, race, location, etc, “born” to think in abstracts)? Even thinking about my own students as all being the same in this regard feels somewhat problematic: Sure, I'm inclined to sympathize with those who privilege imagination, but isn't the free exploration of imagination in itself a privilege?
But I digress. Berthoff's suggestions, although originally made in the 1980's, are still relevant and useful to us. To give us direction in our quest to develop our students’ generalizing techniques, the author cites Kenneth Burke and his studies concerning multiple perceptions: “Looking again and again [at a subject] helps students learn to transform things into questions; they learn to see names as ‘titles for situations’” (pp 339). Expanding on this idea, she adds, “In looking and naming, looking again and re-naming, [students] develop perspectives and contexts, discovering how each controls the other. They are composing; they are forming; they are abstracting” (pp 341). This consideration of multiple perspectives drives the students’ learning as they begin to learn less in terms of facts and more in terms of concepts. “Concept formation as it is often called,” explains Berthoff, “must be deliberately learned and should therefore be deliberately taught.”
As an instructor, I really like this philosophy, valuing interpretation and meaning-making over the sterility of facts and regurgitating information. Especially in light of the ill effects of No Child Left Behind, it would be helpful to re-engage with these concepts again: We lose a lot when we fail to emphasize the authority of thoughtfulness and imagination. “If we let our practice be guided by whatever we are told has been validated by empirical research, we will get what we have got: a conception of learning as contingent on development in as straight-forward, linear fashion; of development as pre-self program which is autonomous and does not require instruction; of language as words used as labels, of meanings as a one-directional, one-dimensional attribute; of the human mind as an adaptive mechanism” (pp 336).
---
Bruffee, Kenneth A. “Collaborative Learning and 'The Conversation of Mankind.'” College English, 46.7 (1984): 635-652. Accessed via https://www.uni-bielefeld.de/exzellenz/lehre/docs/Bruffee_Collaborative_Learning.pdf
Through the process of explaining the rationale behind collaborative learning, Bruffee posits in his article that instructors, many of whom may be unsure about the implementation, will come to see the intrinsic value of collaborative learning. He starts by providing some background and context for the “nature” of thought and knowledge by citing Michael Oakeshott and Clifford Geertz, who believe that human thought is connected to social conversation: that is, our private thoughts spring from our public interactions with others, which isn't dissimilar from Berthoff's beliefs expressed in the previous article. According to Bruffee, scientist Thomas Kuhn says that knowledge is not "merely relative," or "what any one of us says it is. Knowledge is maintained and established by communities of knowledgeable peers" (pp 640). Similarly, Richard Rorty believes that to understand any kind of knowledge, "we must understand how knowledge is established and maintained in the 'normal discourse' of communities of knowledgeable peers" (pp 640).
Bruffee aligns himself with these thinkers. He reasons, "To think well as individuals we must learn to think well collectively--that is, we must learn to converse well" and adds, "Not to have mastered the normal discourse of a discipline, no matter how many 'facts' or data one may know, is not to be knowledgeable in that discipline" (pp 642). Our task as teachers, therefore, according to Bruffee, must be to engage students in conversations with each other and to encourage their conversations to sound like what Rorty calls "normal discourse." This means a conversation which everyone in the discourse community would define as "rational."
He sees the collaborative learning classroom as the perfect environment which will provide the kind of social context where “normal” discourse can occur. Bruffee argues that, for instance, in a peer writing group, the editing that students are doing isn't what's important, it's the conversation they have while they work, a conversation about the assignment, about writing in general, that matters.
With this point, I'm reminded of Berthoff's call-to-arms, above: In a way, when we ask students to “act naturally,” we're allowing them to perform the act of writing within the comforts of abstraction. Often, when we ask students to engage with texts (often with their own texts as well), we expect them to follow a set of rules or meet X-number of requirements in order to do a “good job.” When imagination takes over, however, perhaps more productivity can result?
In addition to providing a place for “normal” discourse, Bruffee also admits that it's where the equally important "abnormal" discourse can occur. Abnormal discourse can be seen, according to Rorty, as "kooky" or "revolutionary" depending on whether the speaker can persuade others of his or her ideas. Abnormal discourse is important because it helps us challenge the authority of knowledge that may be unproductive; it helps us change when we need to. As instructors, Bruffee claims, we need to teach the tools of normal discourse while at the same time leave room and permission for abnormal discourse to occur. As Bruffee puts it, we must be both "conservators and agents of change." (pp 650)
Using collaborative learning may be an uncomfortable pedagogical shift for some teachers who are used to being the expert because of their content mastery. Bruffee claims that in a collaborative learning environment, instructors, instead, have to view themselves as experts in how to think, speak, and write in a discourse community. Our ultimate charge is to help our students access our discourse community, and to guide them through the "reculturation" process – where they figure out how to place this new community in the context of the rest of their identities – as they do so.
I would argue that it's necessary to continue to move away from the autonomous model of teaching/thinking about writing; in fact, "pure" collaborative learning is difficult to maintain, I confess, but in order for students to enjoy all of the benefits of growing through writing, as a teacher, I have to give up a lot of my power so that they can have power over their growth.
In her piece “Is Teaching Still Possible,” Berthoff examines the thinking process involved in expression via writing. Berthoff's essay, in a major way, is a call to action for teachers of English in particular: We need to "invent a pedagogy that views reading and writing as interpretation and the making of meaning" (pp 329). This new pedagogy will, as a result, allow us to better navigate – and possibly avoid – the pitfalls of traditional developmental models. The crux of this re-framing is that unless “a learning is engaged [with the teaching model], no meaning will be made, no knowledge can be won” (pp 330). To solidify her claim, she states that the Piagetian model of education, which “represents the stages of development of the language and thought of the child” (pp 329), doesn't do enough to address the needs of older students.
By breaking down the essence of learning via language, Berthoff further shows why it is necessary for modern teachers to move beyond these traditional understandings of language and education: “If you start with a working concept of language as a means of making meaning, you are recognizing that language can only be studied by means of language” (pp 331). This presentation seems to imply a limited effectiveness for teachers who rely too heavily on archaic lecturing tactics to shape student understanding (instead of including various multimodal discussions and activities that would expand the "language" used and studied in class). Because of this limited focus, Berthoff explains that students are not given the guidance needed to adequately interpret and apply writing concepts. The author cites I.A. Richards in showing that this inadequacy prevents students from recognizing the role of language and expression as tools for defining one’s “becoming.” Instead, language is viewed as a hard-to-crack code, an obstacle that must be overcome in order to convey information.
Further emphasizing the importance of engaging the student’s mind in active learning, Berthoff explains that “[teachers], by means of a careful sequence of lessons or assignments, can assure that the students are conscious of their minds in action [and] can develop their language by means of exercising deliberate choice” (333). According to Piaget, these lesson plans should test students’ cognitive understanding by removing themselves as far as possible from “language-dependent settings” (335). However, as we hark back to Berthoff’s earlier stipulation that Piaget applied his youth-teaching techniques to the role of post-secondary teachers, we may be inclined to notice her disagreement with this assessment. Instead, one might note that while this method could be effective for teaching children, young adults may need a more advanced focus.
Berthoff explains that students do not experience difficulty in forming abstractions as much as they do in forming generalizations. Abstract thinking, she claims, is “the way we make sense of the world in perception, in dreaming, in all expressive acts, in works of art, in all imagining” (pp 338). This imagination is something naturally inherent to us all through birth, she asserts. The difficulty that we all face as composition instructors, then, is in moving “from abstraction in non-discursive mode to discursive abstraction, to generalization” (pp 338) – in other words, applying a method to the madness of abstract thinking. Berthoff's emphasis of the importance of the imagination reminds me of Lacan: Indeed, is it more “natural” for us to think abstractly than concretely or generally? (The seams show when we transition from the Imaginary Order to the Symbolic Order, right?) Or is Berthoff making a lot of cultural assumptions with that statement (i.e. are all student-writers, regardless of socio-economics, race, location, etc, “born” to think in abstracts)? Even thinking about my own students as all being the same in this regard feels somewhat problematic: Sure, I'm inclined to sympathize with those who privilege imagination, but isn't the free exploration of imagination in itself a privilege?
But I digress. Berthoff's suggestions, although originally made in the 1980's, are still relevant and useful to us. To give us direction in our quest to develop our students’ generalizing techniques, the author cites Kenneth Burke and his studies concerning multiple perceptions: “Looking again and again [at a subject] helps students learn to transform things into questions; they learn to see names as ‘titles for situations’” (pp 339). Expanding on this idea, she adds, “In looking and naming, looking again and re-naming, [students] develop perspectives and contexts, discovering how each controls the other. They are composing; they are forming; they are abstracting” (pp 341). This consideration of multiple perspectives drives the students’ learning as they begin to learn less in terms of facts and more in terms of concepts. “Concept formation as it is often called,” explains Berthoff, “must be deliberately learned and should therefore be deliberately taught.”
As an instructor, I really like this philosophy, valuing interpretation and meaning-making over the sterility of facts and regurgitating information. Especially in light of the ill effects of No Child Left Behind, it would be helpful to re-engage with these concepts again: We lose a lot when we fail to emphasize the authority of thoughtfulness and imagination. “If we let our practice be guided by whatever we are told has been validated by empirical research, we will get what we have got: a conception of learning as contingent on development in as straight-forward, linear fashion; of development as pre-self program which is autonomous and does not require instruction; of language as words used as labels, of meanings as a one-directional, one-dimensional attribute; of the human mind as an adaptive mechanism” (pp 336).
---
Bruffee, Kenneth A. “Collaborative Learning and 'The Conversation of Mankind.'” College English, 46.7 (1984): 635-652. Accessed via https://www.uni-bielefeld.de/exzellenz/lehre/docs/Bruffee_Collaborative_Learning.pdf
Through the process of explaining the rationale behind collaborative learning, Bruffee posits in his article that instructors, many of whom may be unsure about the implementation, will come to see the intrinsic value of collaborative learning. He starts by providing some background and context for the “nature” of thought and knowledge by citing Michael Oakeshott and Clifford Geertz, who believe that human thought is connected to social conversation: that is, our private thoughts spring from our public interactions with others, which isn't dissimilar from Berthoff's beliefs expressed in the previous article. According to Bruffee, scientist Thomas Kuhn says that knowledge is not "merely relative," or "what any one of us says it is. Knowledge is maintained and established by communities of knowledgeable peers" (pp 640). Similarly, Richard Rorty believes that to understand any kind of knowledge, "we must understand how knowledge is established and maintained in the 'normal discourse' of communities of knowledgeable peers" (pp 640).
Bruffee aligns himself with these thinkers. He reasons, "To think well as individuals we must learn to think well collectively--that is, we must learn to converse well" and adds, "Not to have mastered the normal discourse of a discipline, no matter how many 'facts' or data one may know, is not to be knowledgeable in that discipline" (pp 642). Our task as teachers, therefore, according to Bruffee, must be to engage students in conversations with each other and to encourage their conversations to sound like what Rorty calls "normal discourse." This means a conversation which everyone in the discourse community would define as "rational."
He sees the collaborative learning classroom as the perfect environment which will provide the kind of social context where “normal” discourse can occur. Bruffee argues that, for instance, in a peer writing group, the editing that students are doing isn't what's important, it's the conversation they have while they work, a conversation about the assignment, about writing in general, that matters.
With this point, I'm reminded of Berthoff's call-to-arms, above: In a way, when we ask students to “act naturally,” we're allowing them to perform the act of writing within the comforts of abstraction. Often, when we ask students to engage with texts (often with their own texts as well), we expect them to follow a set of rules or meet X-number of requirements in order to do a “good job.” When imagination takes over, however, perhaps more productivity can result?
In addition to providing a place for “normal” discourse, Bruffee also admits that it's where the equally important "abnormal" discourse can occur. Abnormal discourse can be seen, according to Rorty, as "kooky" or "revolutionary" depending on whether the speaker can persuade others of his or her ideas. Abnormal discourse is important because it helps us challenge the authority of knowledge that may be unproductive; it helps us change when we need to. As instructors, Bruffee claims, we need to teach the tools of normal discourse while at the same time leave room and permission for abnormal discourse to occur. As Bruffee puts it, we must be both "conservators and agents of change." (pp 650)
Using collaborative learning may be an uncomfortable pedagogical shift for some teachers who are used to being the expert because of their content mastery. Bruffee claims that in a collaborative learning environment, instructors, instead, have to view themselves as experts in how to think, speak, and write in a discourse community. Our ultimate charge is to help our students access our discourse community, and to guide them through the "reculturation" process – where they figure out how to place this new community in the context of the rest of their identities – as they do so.
I would argue that it's necessary to continue to move away from the autonomous model of teaching/thinking about writing; in fact, "pure" collaborative learning is difficult to maintain, I confess, but in order for students to enjoy all of the benefits of growing through writing, as a teacher, I have to give up a lot of my power so that they can have power over their growth.
Monday, July 14
Watch This Space
This is just a place holder, until I start writing regularly for class. Happy reading and discussing!
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