If I had the money this summer, I'd be going to the New Hampshire Literacy Institutes. I first learned about the program last year when I e-mailed Tom Romano with a question and his reply said he was on his way to New Hampshire to teach in the institute. Dr. Romano also recommended some books written by his institute colleages: Thomas Newkirk's Holding on To Good Ideas in a Time of Bad Ones, and Penny Kittle's Write Beside Them. Both are excellent reading and learning.
New Hampshire is on my list of "someday" goals. The instructors who gravitate to the institute are amazing, and I'm sure the experience is life altering for those fortunate enough to attend. When I was an undergrad, I heard about the power of the National Writing Project and put it on my list of "someday" goals. Thanks to a nudge from my classmate, Petra, I made that goal a reality last summer.
If any of you see me at a conference in, say, five to ten years, be sure to ask me if I've made it to NH yet!
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Sunday, April 18, 2010
The Rules of Writing
You're a Ph.D. student who's one month away from the end of the semester. You have two extensive literature reviews and one journal article to write by the end of the term. You:
A.) decide to move to a new house the weekend before finals.
B.) spend your "free" time serving on a search committee for the university's undergraduate trustee.
C.) procrastinate by spending an hour talking about a new Associated Press writing guideline.
D.) all of the above.
Bet you can't guess which one I chose! Although the answer is D, I'd like to elaborate on C.
Yesterday, my husband was reading The Washington Post online and came across this brief piece by Rob Pegoraro: AP says write 'website' not 'Web site." Pegoraro was commenting on the Associated Press's decision to change 'Web site' to 'website.' Following the article were dozens of comments from readers about similar changes in language which my husband started reading to me.
Because hubby and I are both self-professed nerds, we spent close to an hour discussing inconsistencies in spelling for technological terms and the problem with citing online sources. I told him about the new DOI numbers being assigned to database sources. My husband hadn't seen these before, so I described them as being like a Social Security number for journal articles which now need to be cited according to the 6th edition of the APA Publication Manual.
Then we had a discussion about the proper spelling of email (or is it e-mail?). If one applies logic and previous rules for written English, I believe the spelling should be e'mail since you're essentially creating a contraction for electronic mail= e'mail. Where did that hyphen come from anyway? According to the Purdue Online Writing Lab, hyphens are used with compound words and prefixes. The letter e isn't a prefix or a word!
From there we drifted to a conversation about the United States as an abbreviation. Is it US or U.S.? I wasn't sure when I was editing a textbook last week, so I consulted the APA manual and discovered that U.S. is used for adjectives, such as U.S. Navy, but US is used when the abbreviation is a noun, as in "I live in the US."
What's confusing, and frustrating, though, is so-called rules for writing change depending on one's context. Until a few months ago, I was leaving two spaces after a period in MLA format and one in APA (now APA has changed to two periods). And how about all of those not-so-handy spelling rules where plurals are created by adding the letter s, unless the word ends in an o, in which case you add es, unless that word happends to be radio, which only needs the s.
Aggh! Now that I've successfully spent another hour of my life thinking about this article, it's time to get back to writing papers.
A.) decide to move to a new house the weekend before finals.
B.) spend your "free" time serving on a search committee for the university's undergraduate trustee.
C.) procrastinate by spending an hour talking about a new Associated Press writing guideline.
D.) all of the above.
Bet you can't guess which one I chose! Although the answer is D, I'd like to elaborate on C.
Yesterday, my husband was reading The Washington Post online and came across this brief piece by Rob Pegoraro: AP says write 'website' not 'Web site." Pegoraro was commenting on the Associated Press's decision to change 'Web site' to 'website.' Following the article were dozens of comments from readers about similar changes in language which my husband started reading to me.
Because hubby and I are both self-professed nerds, we spent close to an hour discussing inconsistencies in spelling for technological terms and the problem with citing online sources. I told him about the new DOI numbers being assigned to database sources. My husband hadn't seen these before, so I described them as being like a Social Security number for journal articles which now need to be cited according to the 6th edition of the APA Publication Manual.
Then we had a discussion about the proper spelling of email (or is it e-mail?). If one applies logic and previous rules for written English, I believe the spelling should be e'mail since you're essentially creating a contraction for electronic mail= e'mail. Where did that hyphen come from anyway? According to the Purdue Online Writing Lab, hyphens are used with compound words and prefixes. The letter e isn't a prefix or a word!
From there we drifted to a conversation about the United States as an abbreviation. Is it US or U.S.? I wasn't sure when I was editing a textbook last week, so I consulted the APA manual and discovered that U.S. is used for adjectives, such as U.S. Navy, but US is used when the abbreviation is a noun, as in "I live in the US."
What's confusing, and frustrating, though, is so-called rules for writing change depending on one's context. Until a few months ago, I was leaving two spaces after a period in MLA format and one in APA (now APA has changed to two periods). And how about all of those not-so-handy spelling rules where plurals are created by adding the letter s, unless the word ends in an o, in which case you add es, unless that word happends to be radio, which only needs the s.
Aggh! Now that I've successfully spent another hour of my life thinking about this article, it's time to get back to writing papers.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
TA Training
Reading "Teaching of Writing and Writing Teachers Through the Ages" by Duane Roen, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Jennifer Clary-Lemon in the Handbook of Research on Writing (2008) brought back memories of my own TA training as a master's student in Composition and Rhetoric. Over the course of the year I spent as a TA teaching freshman composition, I received a very comprehensive training program including many of the components the authors described--"theory seminars, in-service practica, teaching journals" (p. 358) and participation in a small-group cohort with other TAs. However, all of these things occured after I entered the classroom.
I felt well prepared for teaching because I had studied English education as an undergraduate, but the majority of my peers had never taught before. Many were in the MFA and literature programs and had no desire to teach freshman composition beyond funding their graduate degrees. I found it difficult to be in a group with so many reluctant teachers.
Designing TA training programs is a difficult task. Although some programs, like the one I attended, offer a brief crash course in teaching, two weeks of syllabus design hardly prepares one for the demands of the classroom. These teachers learn to teach through immersion and often rely on the strategies of their teachers to guide their pedagogical decisions. Is it any surprise we keep replicating the same teaching strategies over and over again?
As my TA training evolved, I saw my peers attempt to connect theory to practice. One photocopied an essay by Gloria Anzaldua that was a required reading in our 700-level theory class and gave it to her freshmen. When they refused to read the essay because half of it was written in Spanish, the new TA complained about her unmotivated students. I thought she needed to read some cognitive psychologists to inform her teaching. She thought I wasn't doing enough in my class to deconstruct hegemony.
Roen, Goggin, and Clary-Lemon note, "the writing center is a space in which many tutors and future writing teachers are finding valuable field experience" (2008, p. 356). Zelenak, Cockriel, Crump, and Hocks (1993) elaborate on the benefits of preparing TAs in the writing center. They found tutors are:
* less directive than non-tutors
* more confortable with conferencing
* able to see writing at all stages of the process
* able to quickly identify patterns or error in student writing
* more empathetic towards students
(Journal of Developmental Education, Fall 1993)
Perhaps new TAs should spend their first semester in the writing center working with individual writers while they learn composition and learning theories. Rather than placing TAs in a sink-or-swim situation, they can develop as scholars and future teachers before being given sole responsibility of a classroom. It's still not perfect, but I think it's an idea writing program administrators should consider.
I felt well prepared for teaching because I had studied English education as an undergraduate, but the majority of my peers had never taught before. Many were in the MFA and literature programs and had no desire to teach freshman composition beyond funding their graduate degrees. I found it difficult to be in a group with so many reluctant teachers.
Designing TA training programs is a difficult task. Although some programs, like the one I attended, offer a brief crash course in teaching, two weeks of syllabus design hardly prepares one for the demands of the classroom. These teachers learn to teach through immersion and often rely on the strategies of their teachers to guide their pedagogical decisions. Is it any surprise we keep replicating the same teaching strategies over and over again?
As my TA training evolved, I saw my peers attempt to connect theory to practice. One photocopied an essay by Gloria Anzaldua that was a required reading in our 700-level theory class and gave it to her freshmen. When they refused to read the essay because half of it was written in Spanish, the new TA complained about her unmotivated students. I thought she needed to read some cognitive psychologists to inform her teaching. She thought I wasn't doing enough in my class to deconstruct hegemony.
Roen, Goggin, and Clary-Lemon note, "the writing center is a space in which many tutors and future writing teachers are finding valuable field experience" (2008, p. 356). Zelenak, Cockriel, Crump, and Hocks (1993) elaborate on the benefits of preparing TAs in the writing center. They found tutors are:
* less directive than non-tutors
* more confortable with conferencing
* able to see writing at all stages of the process
* able to quickly identify patterns or error in student writing
* more empathetic towards students
(Journal of Developmental Education, Fall 1993)
Perhaps new TAs should spend their first semester in the writing center working with individual writers while they learn composition and learning theories. Rather than placing TAs in a sink-or-swim situation, they can develop as scholars and future teachers before being given sole responsibility of a classroom. It's still not perfect, but I think it's an idea writing program administrators should consider.
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Research Papers:Then and Now
When we ask students to write a research paper, what exactly are we asking for? During a conversation with Dr. Kist last week, it struck me there are three common ways of conceiving of a student research paper:
1. Written findings of original research (such as a middle school science fair project)
2. Book research as literature review (most high school and college papers)
3. A blending of ideas 1 and 2 above (journal articles, thesis, dissertation)
As a graduate student, when I write a research paper, I am reporting the results of an original inquiry. This contrasts from the type of research papers I wrote in high school and undergrad which were basically mediocre attempts at a literature review. Rather than being exhaustive, my high school and early college research papers typically were written using a particular number of sources quantified by the teacher.
While I was reading "Re-envisioning Research," by Gregory Shafer, in the September 1999 issue of English Journal, it struck me that my middle school teachers and graduate professors both defined research as an original inquiry/experiment. However, somewhere in the middle of the educational continuum, the idea got fixed in my head that research was reading a bunch of books and spitting them back out in proper MLA or APA format. It's the kind of kind of research Shafer describes as "a very disciplined procedure of following directions, of stoically learning form" (p. 45).
Building on the concept of Macrorie's I-Search paper, Shafer required his college undergraduates to use "the research paper as a way to solve problems that directly affected their lives" (p. 46). Once students chose a topic they were passionate about, they collected data through interviews and observations and supported their findings with statistics and books they had read for the project.
When I think back to my P-16 education, I acquired the skills I would need to conduct research as a professional. However, these skills were taught in isolation from one another. In middle school, I was an inquiry researcher. I won second place in the 6th grade science fair for my project on bread mold. I didn't consult outside sources. I just left pieces or bread all around the house for two months to see what would happen and concluded mold thrives in warm, moist environments. Mold didn't need light; it grew just as well on the windowsill as it did in the back of the bread drawer.
In middle school science, research was cool. It was based on my interests. That all changed in high school and college, though. I remember writing a paper on Edgar Lee Master's Spoon River Anthology. This involved reading the book of poetry and the works of some critics, all of which were reported in a research paper. There were rules, note cards, a few more rules, in-text citations, a bibliography page, and--you guessed it--more rules. I really didn't care about Master, and there certainly wasn't a burning question/interest that kept me up at night and made me want to read about Spoon River. In fact, conducting this "research" put me to sleep!
Research for the rest of high school, undergraduate studies, and even my master's degree was book-based, so of course, this is how I taught research to my own high school and college freshmen. Like so many teachers before me, I created another generation of students who probably hate research because it didn't address a genuine problem or interest in their lives. I could have done better than assigning research papers on the 1920s during a unit on The Great Gatsby, and all of the research papers on social issues could have been so much better if I'd asked students to conduct an interview or observations to supplement their book findings.
In teaching research skills, I think a lot of us miss the mark in a few key ways. First, real research conducted by professionals is driven by passion. When we force research topics on students (such as everyone research the biography of Shakespeare), we are creating an artifical research situation. Second, in much of P-16 schooling, research is taught as
inquiry/experimentation or literature review. When we begin to require students to consult texts and learn documentation style, we should not omit other sources of data such as observation, interview, and experimentation. Finally, students need authentic models of real-world research. Journal articles may be too high of a reading level for certain ages, but a visit from a real researcher, perhaps a professor from a local university, could provide insight about the utility of a literature review and how it informs, not replaces, original research.
1. Written findings of original research (such as a middle school science fair project)
2. Book research as literature review (most high school and college papers)
3. A blending of ideas 1 and 2 above (journal articles, thesis, dissertation)
As a graduate student, when I write a research paper, I am reporting the results of an original inquiry. This contrasts from the type of research papers I wrote in high school and undergrad which were basically mediocre attempts at a literature review. Rather than being exhaustive, my high school and early college research papers typically were written using a particular number of sources quantified by the teacher.
While I was reading "Re-envisioning Research," by Gregory Shafer, in the September 1999 issue of English Journal, it struck me that my middle school teachers and graduate professors both defined research as an original inquiry/experiment. However, somewhere in the middle of the educational continuum, the idea got fixed in my head that research was reading a bunch of books and spitting them back out in proper MLA or APA format. It's the kind of kind of research Shafer describes as "a very disciplined procedure of following directions, of stoically learning form" (p. 45).
Building on the concept of Macrorie's I-Search paper, Shafer required his college undergraduates to use "the research paper as a way to solve problems that directly affected their lives" (p. 46). Once students chose a topic they were passionate about, they collected data through interviews and observations and supported their findings with statistics and books they had read for the project.
When I think back to my P-16 education, I acquired the skills I would need to conduct research as a professional. However, these skills were taught in isolation from one another. In middle school, I was an inquiry researcher. I won second place in the 6th grade science fair for my project on bread mold. I didn't consult outside sources. I just left pieces or bread all around the house for two months to see what would happen and concluded mold thrives in warm, moist environments. Mold didn't need light; it grew just as well on the windowsill as it did in the back of the bread drawer.
In middle school science, research was cool. It was based on my interests. That all changed in high school and college, though. I remember writing a paper on Edgar Lee Master's Spoon River Anthology. This involved reading the book of poetry and the works of some critics, all of which were reported in a research paper. There were rules, note cards, a few more rules, in-text citations, a bibliography page, and--you guessed it--more rules. I really didn't care about Master, and there certainly wasn't a burning question/interest that kept me up at night and made me want to read about Spoon River. In fact, conducting this "research" put me to sleep!
Research for the rest of high school, undergraduate studies, and even my master's degree was book-based, so of course, this is how I taught research to my own high school and college freshmen. Like so many teachers before me, I created another generation of students who probably hate research because it didn't address a genuine problem or interest in their lives. I could have done better than assigning research papers on the 1920s during a unit on The Great Gatsby, and all of the research papers on social issues could have been so much better if I'd asked students to conduct an interview or observations to supplement their book findings.
In teaching research skills, I think a lot of us miss the mark in a few key ways. First, real research conducted by professionals is driven by passion. When we force research topics on students (such as everyone research the biography of Shakespeare), we are creating an artifical research situation. Second, in much of P-16 schooling, research is taught as
inquiry/experimentation or literature review. When we begin to require students to consult texts and learn documentation style, we should not omit other sources of data such as observation, interview, and experimentation. Finally, students need authentic models of real-world research. Journal articles may be too high of a reading level for certain ages, but a visit from a real researcher, perhaps a professor from a local university, could provide insight about the utility of a literature review and how it informs, not replaces, original research.
Friday, April 2, 2010
Writing as a Process is Misguided. Really?
I'm in the process of reading all of the articles published in the Journal of Developmental Education about college writing instruction for the last 25 years. Inbetween articles about innovative ways to teach writing with new "microcomputers" (suggestion--look for a green phosphorus screen for best readability!) and articles about sentence combining, which was all the rage in the mid to late 1980s, I found this gem.
According to Thomas Devine, the writing process is misguided. In "Caveat Emptor: The Writing Process Approach to College Writing," in the September 1990 issue of the Journal of Developmental Education, Devine writes,"Today college teachers concerned with student writing can find a super-abundance of information--almost all, unfortunately, from the writing process point of view" (p. 2). He means you, Lucy Calkins, Donald Graves, and Donald Murray.
Devine makes five assertions:
1. Not all writers follow The Process--brainstorm, draft, revise, peer review, edit, publish.
2. Beliefs about the writing process, such as writing as discovery, meaning-making, and form following function, are questionable.
3. The process approach produces non-academic writing.
4. It's good for writers to emulate the models of other great writers.
5. There is no evidence (as of 1990) that the process approach produces better writing.
As a process teacher, I took issue with many of Devine's claims. True, not all writers, including the professional writers Devine cites, follow the same writing process. However, as Rita Pollard points out in "Another Look: The Process Approach to Composition Instruction" in the same issue of the journal, most teachers view the writing process as an iterative process, and those who present it as a rigid, lock-step structure are misguided in their application.
I think Devine is out of touch with the readers of the Journal of Developmental Education when he writes, "To deliberately encourage young writers to produce casual journalistic prose in their college courses may be doing them a disservice" (p. 3). He elaborates by saying students who pursue careers in law, medicine, and business "will not thank us for teaching them the print equivalent of social conversation (p. 3). Here Devine is referring to the use of contractions and the first-person perspective.
The primary audience for the Journal of Developmental Education is community college instructors. Given this audience and the mission of community colleges to advance technical education, I don't think Devine, a university professor, knows who community college students are. When I taught at a community college, my developmental English courses were filled with future Blackjack dealers, chefs, and mechanics. I'm not implying that students in developmental English are incapable of achieving professional careers, but for a developmental student, preparation for graduate study should not be a concern in the first semester or course work. Plus, Poland tells us research on nonacademic writing shows there are "few 'real world' corollaries for the kinds of 'academic' writing we require of college students" (p. 32), so we're still doing our students, gradaute school bound or not, a disservice.
Returning to the issue of audience, Devine advocates modeling of professional writers such as the way Benjamin Franklin emulated the style of Joseph Addison. Sure, students could sit around modeling Thoreau if they were going to become philosophers, or write like D. H. Lawrence if they wanted to be authors, but these are not the goals of most developmental English students. Devine suggests students should use the best writing in their respective fields as models, but he is forgetting that many developmental writers are also developmental readers. Reading text at this level would be confusing and intimidating to developmental students who struggle to write at the sentence level.
According to Thomas Devine, the writing process is misguided. In "Caveat Emptor: The Writing Process Approach to College Writing," in the September 1990 issue of the Journal of Developmental Education, Devine writes,"Today college teachers concerned with student writing can find a super-abundance of information--almost all, unfortunately, from the writing process point of view" (p. 2). He means you, Lucy Calkins, Donald Graves, and Donald Murray.
Devine makes five assertions:
1. Not all writers follow The Process--brainstorm, draft, revise, peer review, edit, publish.
2. Beliefs about the writing process, such as writing as discovery, meaning-making, and form following function, are questionable.
3. The process approach produces non-academic writing.
4. It's good for writers to emulate the models of other great writers.
5. There is no evidence (as of 1990) that the process approach produces better writing.
As a process teacher, I took issue with many of Devine's claims. True, not all writers, including the professional writers Devine cites, follow the same writing process. However, as Rita Pollard points out in "Another Look: The Process Approach to Composition Instruction" in the same issue of the journal, most teachers view the writing process as an iterative process, and those who present it as a rigid, lock-step structure are misguided in their application.
I think Devine is out of touch with the readers of the Journal of Developmental Education when he writes, "To deliberately encourage young writers to produce casual journalistic prose in their college courses may be doing them a disservice" (p. 3). He elaborates by saying students who pursue careers in law, medicine, and business "will not thank us for teaching them the print equivalent of social conversation (p. 3). Here Devine is referring to the use of contractions and the first-person perspective.
The primary audience for the Journal of Developmental Education is community college instructors. Given this audience and the mission of community colleges to advance technical education, I don't think Devine, a university professor, knows who community college students are. When I taught at a community college, my developmental English courses were filled with future Blackjack dealers, chefs, and mechanics. I'm not implying that students in developmental English are incapable of achieving professional careers, but for a developmental student, preparation for graduate study should not be a concern in the first semester or course work. Plus, Poland tells us research on nonacademic writing shows there are "few 'real world' corollaries for the kinds of 'academic' writing we require of college students" (p. 32), so we're still doing our students, gradaute school bound or not, a disservice.
Returning to the issue of audience, Devine advocates modeling of professional writers such as the way Benjamin Franklin emulated the style of Joseph Addison. Sure, students could sit around modeling Thoreau if they were going to become philosophers, or write like D. H. Lawrence if they wanted to be authors, but these are not the goals of most developmental English students. Devine suggests students should use the best writing in their respective fields as models, but he is forgetting that many developmental writers are also developmental readers. Reading text at this level would be confusing and intimidating to developmental students who struggle to write at the sentence level.
I think the Journal of Developmental Education made a wise decision in balancing Devine's claims with Pollard's response. As Pollard points out at the end of her article, it's important to challenge widely held assumptions, but this must be done in an academically rigorous way.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Wimpy Kid--Wimpy Reading?
I was surprised to read in "Seeing the Screen: Research Into Visual and Digital Writing Practices," by Anne Wysocki in the Handbook of Research on Writing, that visual literacies are historically associated with the working class and are hence looked down upon. Wysocki states, "Writing studies research into the visual aspects of texts is shaped by a continuing belief that the interpretation of words, unadorned and unaccompanied by illustrations, is what produces the steadily rational being we often believe we ought to be" (p. 600). These ideas stem from the fact that 19th century publications for the working class contained more illustrations than those produced for a more educated audience.
This got me to thinking about the reading practices in my own home. It's not unusual to see my husband stretched out on the couch reading a 1000+ page Stephen King novel, like Under the Dome, while I read Diary of a Wimpy Kid, a journal-comic-narrative, on the other side of the room. I kee
p telling my husband he should give Wimpy Kid a chance, but he's turned off by the simple illustrations which accompany every page.
p telling my husband he should give Wimpy Kid a chance, but he's turned off by the simple illustrations which accompany every page. I personally love the Wimpy Kid series. If you've ever read it, you know the illustrations reinforce the "journal"content, provide additional details not included in the written portion of the book, and also foreshadow predictions of the main character, Greg Heffley. The visuals and text work together--one does not replace the other. A full understanding of the book is not possible without engaging with both the written and visual elements.
So is the Wimpy Kid series wimpy reading? I think that depends on your purpose. As a full-time doctoral student studying education, I find Wimpy Kid augments the theoretical readings I do in The Handbook of Research on Writing and the seven pound (yes, I did weigh it!) Handbook of Research on Teaching. While the handbooks help me think about the decisions I make as a teacher, at the end of the day, I'm looking for texts I can share with adolescent readers, and Wimpy Kid fits that category.
Maybe my husband thinks I'm procrastinating when I spend two hours reading a pseudo-comic book instead of something more scholarly, but I see it as an opportunity to apply theory about teaching while working on some preliminary lesson plans.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
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