Compose Yourself: Writing in American Universities, from the Perspective of Writing Centers and New Media Writing

Transcription

1 Compose Yourself: Writing in American Universities, from the Perspective of Writing Centers and New Media Writing A workshop for the Institute for English and American Studies and the Klagenfurt Writing Center, University of Klagenfurt Presented by Professor Sandy Baldwin, Professor Nathalie Singh-Corcoran, and Benjamin Myers, Department of English, West Virginia University May 2, 2011 Day 1 1:00 pm - 4:00 pm Introduction A Brief History of Composition and an Overview of Composition Theory (Singh-Corcoran, Baldwin, Myers) Most American colleges and universities require a first-year writing course or sequence. The classes that fulfill the requirement vary from institution to institution. They could be topicsbased, discipline specific, or they could be more broadly conceived, emphasizing argument and research. Regardless of the differences across programs, the expository writing requirement can be traced to a single course offered at Harvard in late 19 th century. Beginning with the Harvard course, this seminar will provide a brief survey of expository writing in the United States. We will then trace the trends in the teaching of American composition, moving from the early 20 th century, freshman theme to the multifaceted 21 st century emphases on writing in the disciplines, social epistemic rhetoric, and critical pedagogy. To present this overview, we will draw from texts such as John Brereton s The Origins of Composition Studies in the American College, , James Berlin s Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, , and selected essays from The Norton Book of Composition Studies and Composition in Four Keys. In addition, we will share examples of contemporary writing programs at three different institutions the liberal arts college, the private research university, and the land-grant, public research university in order to give our audience a sense of how different institutional missions inform the writing requirement. Graduate Teacher Training: A Contextual Overview of Composition Theory (Singh-Corcoran, Myers) The previous session s example of composition requirements at public research universities will bridge the broader history with our overview of composition theory and graduate teacher training at West Virginia University. We will share the rationale behind the course design and the curriculum for our graduate course that prepares students to teach our composition sequence: English 609-Approaches to Teaching Composition. The course is praxis oriented, meaning that the students not only consider practical issues such as how to respond to student

2 writing, but they also explore how various composition schools of thought such as expressivism, post-process theory, behavioralism, and cultural studies inform their pedagogies. We will end our session with an overview of Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) training methods, again placing emphasis on training at West Virginia University. In addition to taking English 609, graduate students are also required to regularly participate in professional development activities that enhance their teaching. These activities begin with our GTA Introductory Workshop which takes place in the first two weeks of August each year. This workshop is designed to prepare graduate students to step into the writing classroom. Students are introduced to our English 101 curriculum and encouraged to design lessons, writing assignments, and activities that meet course goals. May 3, 2011 Day 2 9:00 am - 12:00 pm Workshop: Assignment Design and Writing Assessment Composition theorists believe that writing is a powerful tool, one that is intimately connected to learning. Writing allows people to explore new ideas, to test the limits of their knowledge, to reflect, to vent, and to play. Compositionists also believe that writing makes learning visible. In other words, student writing allows the instructor to see what and how much the student has learned and where the instructor may need to modify her curriculum in order to ensure or support student a student s access to course content. The workshop on Assignment Design and Writing Assessment will build on the previous presentations (see May 2) and will explore the ideas about writing and learning introduced above. This workshop will be very hands on, so our hope is that participants will come to the session with a particular course in mind and course materials in hand. We will begin the first half of our workshop Assignment Design with two questions: 1. What do you want students to learn in your course? 2. What are your concerns in assigning writing? These questions will then inform our discussion about how we can use both formal and informal writing assignments to meet our course goals. We will share ideas about heuristics for writing assignments, models and templates, and how to scaffold learning. In the second half of our workshop Writing Assessment we will discuss the challenges that exist when writing is integrated into courses, one such issue being the amount of time that it takes to evaluate student writing. We also acknowledge that teaching written English to speakers of other languages poses its own unique set of problems. We will discuss some strategies to address assessment concerns, including how to use course goals to design writing rubrics, how to develop peer review activities, and how to craft comments that lead students toward meaningful revision.

3 1:00 pm - 4:00 pm The Roles of Writing Centers: Theories and Practices that Support Writing (Singh-Corcoran, Myers) There are approximately 1,400 college and university writing centers in the US; all exist to support student writers be they highly proficient writers or underprepared for college level writing. However, just as writing programs differ across institutions (see May 2), so do writing centers. Some are staffed only by faculty or graduate students, some only by undergraduates, and others are a mix of all three. The Writing Center at West Virginia University is primarily staffed by undergraduates who assist other graduate and undergraduate writers both native and non-native English speakers on a variety of writing projects across a variety of disciplines. Before the undergraduates begin tutoring, they attend a tutoring practicum. In this seminar, we will discuss the rationale behind our tutor training course and our curriculum. In addition, we will look at other methods for training tutors and how to implement an ongoing staff development program. We will also discuss how to support student writers beyond the one-onone tutoring session. Writing at the University Level This seminar deals with a university-level view of writing at West Virginia University and uses this strategic view as a lens to understand the place of writing in American universities. Along with first year composition instruction, WVU requires all students to take an additional course with a substantial writing component and where writing is a significant part of the grade. Such a requirement is typical of American universities. In principle, the requirement is that students learn discipline-specific writing practices: engineers or psychologists should learn the terminology, genres, settings, audiences, and other aspects of writing in their discipline. In short, the requirement treats writing as a shared responsibility across the university. In practice, this is not always the case - for a combination of reasons, ranging from resource limitations to departmental resistance to integrate writing into the curriculum. This seminar will examine the specific structure and history of the WVU W requirement. We will use survey data to compare WVU s approach to related writing across the curriculum models at a number of other American universities. Finally, we will examine alternative models of university-wide writing, notably the writing portfolios model now under consideration at WVU. The goal is to understand the successes and failures of initiatives to make writing a strategic strength of American universities. To do this, we will draw from texts such as Carol Hartzog s Composition and the Academy: A Study of Writing Program Administration and the recent Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. May 4, 2011 Day 3 9:00 am - 12:00 pm Writing and Technology: Historical and Aesthetic perspectives

4 (Baldwin) This seminar offer hands-on engagement with new media writing tools and electronic literature. The background of the seminar is the co-development of the digital computer and later the networked digital computer with writing practices, especially aesthetic or literary practices. While I reference precursor practices of generative and calculable language (e.g. cryptography, the gematria of the Kabblah, or Boole s laws of thought), I will focus the historical rupture occurring with Alan Turing s digital computer, conceptualized in 1939 as a machine for computational operations on symbols written on a long piece of paper. The complexity of these operations deepens first as interlinkings of marks with the invention of hypertext by Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson, and latter with the extension of such interlinking to the web of Tim Berners-Lee, where writing comes to mean the meta-codes for interlinkings, and the computational marks mean any sort of (multimedia) object. Writing today co-evolves with the networked digital computer and writing. Digital informatics is necessarily conceived of as writing because of writing s unique and complex imbrication of inscriptive marking and (re)action (or, in system theoretical terms: information and utterance). The broader context of my argument is the professionalization of writing s political economy beyond the bellestristic approaches to university composition in the nineteenth century. Formalist/New Critical approaches shaped American composition studies in tandem with the Cold War emphasis on skill-training in post-industrial information society. If the military C 3 I network is defined by command, control, communications, and intelligence, it is easy enough to add a fourth C: composition. The descriptive power of my argument is its limitation: it captures the habitual and institutional space of writing today, but not the poetic practice of artists artists for whom writing remains analogue, libidinal, and corporeal, even if it takes place in digital networks. Such a digital poetics focuses on innovative practice with the networked digital computer beyond the apparent formal constraints of protocols and codes. I characterize these practices as hactivist in that they create an other place and temporal order a temporary autonomous zone (TAZ) within the space/time of the networked digital computer. I will sketch a trajectory for digital poetics from the first acts of digital literature the love letters generated in 1952 on the Manchester MK1 computer by the homosocial circle around Alan Turing and pioneering work by Max Bense and Emmett Williams, to current practitioners such as Alan Sondheim, Young-Hae Chang, and Mary-Anne Breeze. These writings work through, intensify, and use up the medium of the networked digital computer. They invent what remains beyond computation and linking. 1:00 pm - 4:00 pm Writing and Technology: Pedagogical Perspectives (Baldwin) The web is everywhere. It is all around us, saturating our experiences and those of our students. This seminar is about harnessing and leveraging the ubiquity of the web to construct significant and engaging classroom writing environments. It is also organized around two case studies: first, teaching composition in computer instruction classrooms during the 1990 s; second, the evolution of WVU s Multimedia Writing course over the last decade. I use a

5 personal-experiential approach to claim that my history is, broadly speaking, exemplary for the evolving role of technology in the writing classroom over the last 20 years. Two decades ago, the computer provided discrete and stand-alone application that mapped different rhetorical functions. Typically, these applications involved specialized knowledge. Today, the (ideological) promise and selling point of multimedia is that the barrier of specialized knowledge is dissolved. For example, anyone can make a blog in moments, with no technical knowledge. For the writing classroom, this means that Web 2.0 technologies are fully available to composition and to rhetorical analysis. In telling this history, I focus on the current configuration of the Multimedia Writing course, arguing that it recognizes and is suited to students writing and learning practices, and that it also demonstrates the failures of the university to recognize the role played by information and the web in students experience. My students are web natives, and I understand the task of the multimedia writing class as discovering and enabling their experience with the web, valuing and leveraging what they already know and do, and harnessing their intelligence to create a collaborative, group learning environment. I will discuss the course framework and the pragmatics of using Web 2.0 technologies such as YouTube, blogs, Twitter, Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, cloud computing, and social bookmarking as writing environments for the classroom. Synthesis and Conclusions