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:

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.

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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:

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).

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).

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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.

Watch This Space

This is just a place holder, until I start writing regularly for class. Happy reading and discussing!