When I have the time and money...

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 keep 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.

New Book--Engaging Audience: Writing in an Age of New Literacies

NCTE just published Engaging Audience: Writing in an Age of New Literacies.

A Multigenre Response to The Collected Works of Billy the Kid

Don't know why
but in my 10 years
of multigenring
I've never read
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid
the book that sparked an idea
in Tom Romano

And the multigenre research paper was born.

***

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJb6RM1dwOU

***

March 19, 2010

I just finished reading The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970) by Michael Ondaatje. Although I really have no interest in Billy the Kid as a historical figure, and never would have read this book based on its title, Bill suggested I read it as a seminal work for my class project. I'm glad I did.

The book is a collection of poems, narratives, pictures, news reports, rememberings and an interview with Billy, who insists on being addressed as Mr. Bonney. By reading all of these genres together, one gets a multi-voiced perspective of the last two years of Billy's life. The book is raw and honest, the imagery striking.

Billy's accounts of murder, drunkness, and fornication are not appropriate for a K-12 audience, but a mature reader can appreciate the graphicness of this book. In one poem, Billy describes a chicken digging its beak in the throat of a dying man and pulling out a vein.

Meanwhile he [Gregory] fell
and the chicken walked away

still tugging at the vein
till is was 12 yards long
as if it held that body like a kite
Gregory's last words being

get away from me yer stupid chicken. (Ondaatje, 1970, p. 15)

This is what Tom Romano calls an "indelible moment."

***

T: So what did you think of The Collected Works of Billy the Kid?

K: I certainly can see how it sparked multigenre. The book is told from multiple genres from
the perspectives of Billy and those who knew him. I see a lot of similarities between this
book and the kind of multigenre papers I wrote in Romano's classes 9-10 years ago. I'm
surprised, though, that Romano didn't think of the Endnote concept until he'd been tinkering
with multigenre a few years. The Endnotes are very similar to what Ondaatje does at the
end of the book.

T: What do you mean?

K: Well, when I first learned multigenre, Romano required a Letter to the Reader as the first
genre in a long multigenre paper. Its purpose was to introduce the paper and tell the reader
any important information the reader may need to understand the paper. A few years later,
Romano started having his students provide Endnotes, or a few sentences of explantion for
each genre, at the end of the paper. The Endnotes are similar to the Acknowledgements and
Credits Ondaatje placed at the end of Billy the Kid. After the book, Ondaatje cited sources,
including books, photographs, written accounts, and comic books, that he used to characterize
Billy. "With these basic sources I have edited, rephrased, and slightly reworked the originals.
But the emotions belong to their authors" (Ondaatje, 1970).

T: Interesting. Did reading the book change the way you conceive of multigenre?

K: A little bit. I've always written multigenre papers where each piece of writing has been a
different kind of genre. I required my students to do the same, the only exception being the
repetend.

T: Repetend?

K: A repetend is a repeated genre, kind of like a chorus in a song. It acts as a transition between
major ideas in a multigenre paper.

T: OK.

K: So anyway, I only repeat a genre if it is part of the repetend. A multigenre paper may be
constructed like this:
Genre 1: Repetend 1--Word collage
Genre 2: poem
Genre 3: narrative
Genre 4: word collage
Genre 5: diary entry
Genre 6: Repetend 2--word collage
Genre 7: dream sequence
Genre 8: top ten list
Genre 9: letter


Ondaatjee's book begins as:
Genre 1: Note
Genre 2: Poem
Genre 3: Narrative
Genre 4: Poem
Genre 5: Narrative
Genre 6: Poem
Genre 7: Poem
Genre 8: Poem
Genre 9: Picture

For me, when I think of multigenre, I think of each piece as a different genre. I have never
written or assigned multigenre papers that only rely on a few genres repeated over and over
again.

T: Why is that?

K: I like forcing myself and my students to think of different ways of communicating the
same information. I love multigenre because it gets you away from the expected school
genres--narrative, essay, poem. I guess I shy away from Ondaatjean multigenre because it
seems too much like what we already do in school. Multigenre gives students a chance to
experiment with genres we don't always explicitly teach. It's more 'out of the box.'

T: Will you continue to write and and assign multigenre papers the way you always have, or are
you rethinking that structure based on your reading of Ondaatje?

K: I still want more variety of genres, but after reading Billy the Kid, I'm more open to the idea
of repeating more than the repetend genre or switching between a smaller number of
genres. Ondaatje does it well, but I'm afraid if I told most students they could do this, I'd
end of with multigenre papers that looked more like a book of poetry than multigenre as I
know it.

T: Is that wrong?

K: No, but like all new ideas, I'm going to have to take some time mulling it over. I'm not sold
on the idea of a multigenre paper using 2-3 genres back-and-forth, but I'm more open to
genre repetition than I was a day ago.

T: Fair enough.

Multigenre Writing 1

The first time I heard of Tom Romano's multigenre paper was my sophomore year of college. Students were discussing their favorite papers they had ever written, and many of my classmates cited their "multigenre paper from Dr. Romano's class" as their favorite. I didn't know what they were talking about at the time, but when I took my first class from Romano the following year, I was sure to pay attention.

I've been infected with the multigenre bug for 10 years now, and I can tell you, multigenre is not only rewarding to write, it's also rewarding to read. When I assigned multigenre research papers to my college students, I actually looked forward to the day I would take 100 papers home to read. Now who does that with a traditional research paper? Students enjoy the experience too. I knew the assignment was a winner when two of my community college students stopped by my office to find out when I would be finished with their papers. They weren't concerned about the grade--they wanted to share their final drafts with their peer group before everyone left campus for the summer!

A few years ago, I gave a presentation about multigenre at NCTE. One of my co-presenters was Nancy Mack from Wright State University. Nancy was interested in editing a book about multigenre writng at the college level, but when she contacted some publishers, she was told there wasn't a market in higher education for books about multigenre writing.

There are many ways to approach multigenre writing, but I suspect some in higher education resist it because they've seen papers that were too cute. Perhaps they see construction paper sticking out of the sides of a paper and decide it couldn't possibly hold the academic rigor of their research papers.

For my semester paper, I've decided to examine multigenre research papers. Surprisingly, a fair number of the articles I've run across are written by college professors, which negates the book publishers' arguments that there isn't an interest in multigenre at this level. Some of the language to describe multigenre, though, may be part of the problem. In "Learning About Self and Others Through Multigenre Research Projects," Dickson, DeGraff, and Foard (2002) state, "This is not a success story of the uses of multigenre as an alternative to the traditional research paper" (p. 82). When phrased this way, readers new to the multigenre concept may mistakenly believe that multigenre is a way to avoid the research paper rather than present research through multiple lenses.

It's been a few years, so perhaps there is a readiness for multigenre writing at the college/university level. I know education programs have embraced the concept, but what about English, science, history, and art classes? I'll let you know what I discover.

My Local Literacies

Ever since I finished Barton and Hamilton's (1998) Local Literacies, I can't stop thinking about all of the ways literacy impacts my daily life. I don't know how I would function if I couldn't read and write. It doesn't seem like I can go 10 minutes without reading or writing something!

As I read the case studies of people's literacy practices, I found many similarities to my own life. Like Shirley, I have a lousy memory and because of this [rely] on written records" (p. 98). I write shopping lists before going to the grocery store as June does, and I have "kept diaries at various points" (p. 136) like Cliff.

On Thursday, I thought it would be interesting to jot down my literacy activities in a single day. I started the morning with good intentions and detailed notes, but as the day wore on, I got so engrossed in my literacy activities that I wrote less. Here's what I captured:

• Reading began before I got out of bed. I read, replied to, and deleted the 53 e-mails which had accumulated on my BlackBerry since 10 p.m. Wednesday night.
• As I surfed through TV channels, I read the screen--prices on the home shopping network, the upcoming schedule on the TV guide channel, credits on TV shows.
• I spent 1/2 hour on the elliptical machine, first reading a magazine, then reading my MP3 player as I scrolled through the play list.
• I took a shower and read the shampoo and conditioner bottles to distinguish between the two.
• I spent about an hour reading a textbook for class, writing notes in the margins while I read.
• During lunch, I watched the noon news on TV, which required reading all of those scroll lines at the bottom of the screen. I also scanned the Giant Eagle ad and wrote a shopping list, coordinating my trip to coupons, which had to be read for expiration dates.
• I spent the early afternoon reading and matching ranking sheets for my graduate assistantship. This activity was followed by writing e-mails to inform students and employers they had "matched" with one another.
• I read my calendar to make sure I was doing everything that needed to be done.
• I wrote a To-Do list for Friday.
• By 4:00 p.m., I had read/written 30 more e-mails (in addition to the 53 which began my day).
• I pulled receipts out of my purse and wrote them in the check register, which was then reconciled against my bank statement, which I read online.
• My husband and I went to H&R block to do our taxes. More reading. I also had to sign my name multiple times.
• After the taxes, Mike and I went out to dinner, where we read a menu. Along the way, we read many road signs and bill boards.
• When we got home, I sorted and read the mail. I scanned the newspaper headlines and decided there wasn't anything I wanted to spend time reading. Perhaps, like Shirley, I felt the newspaper was "old" since I had watched the TV news earlier.
• I went back to e-mail and ranking forms. Wrote a spreadsheet of matches.

After writing and reading this list, I think I know why I'm so tired! The bulk of my day was consumed with reading and writing e-mails. It's the main way I do work for my assistantship. I also may (who am I kidding? I do) have an addiction to my BlackBerry.

Is Christianity Just a Mistranslation?

I grew up with almost no religious background. My mom was raised Catholic, and Dad was Methodist, which led to some pretty mixed messages about Christianity. Mom told me I should pray to Mary. Dad said to cut out the middle man and talk directly to God. My parents' childhood religions couldn't agree whether non-clergy were qualified to read the Bible or not, and the one time I tired to read it, I couldn't stop giggling about that line about not coveting thy neighbor's ass. My neighbor was an overweight woman who wore ugly polyester pants every day. Who would want her ass?

After failing to find a church they both could live with, my parents were satisfied if my brother and I claimed there was some higher power but didn't talk about or practice anything specific.

I knew very little about Christianity as a child. After I took an Asian art class as an undergraduate, I think I knew more about Buddhism than Christianity. Then I met my Jewish friends who tried to help me understand their religion.

I remember having a conversation one night with my friend, Jeff. He told me that Christians and Jews both followed the Old Testament and believed in the same God, but the split occured when Christians believed Jesus was the son of God. Jeff explained that Jesus, a remarkable man, was not God/his son because Mary was not a virgin, so it was not an immaculate conception, hence no miracle. Jeff said he was taught somewhere in his religious education that a mistranslation has occured. The word used to describe Mary essentially meant young woman, but in the language the text was translated to (sorry, I forgot what the two languages were--Hebrew to English?), there wasn't a perfect translation, so the concept "virgin" was used as the closest approximation for young woman. Some people read this as proof of an immaculate conception and two millenia of wars and bloodshed have resulted due to a poor translation between languages.

In The Handbook of Research of Writing (2008), Prior and Lunsford say, "the translation of a text often has high-stakes consequences" (p. 85). They continue, "Jewish translation histories are punctuated by frequent arguments over...which of the many Jewish langauges/dialects ought to be privileged as the target, especially because the most common tongue of the Jewish diaspora--the Hebrew used in sacred texts--may not be amenable to new work coinages" (p. 86). Is it possible that Christianity is the result of a mistranslation?

When I think about translations, scribes, and the fact that the Bible was written from stories passed through oral culture, my friend's explanation is plausible. Those of us who have studied a foreign language know there are not direct translations for all words in all languages. We also know that when copying for hours, it's possible to make a mistake, and those of us who have played the "Telephone Game" know how quickly words get distorted.

When I learned about Buddhism in my Asian art class, I remember God/Buddha decided to take an Earthly form and Queen Maya was the person he chose to be his birth mother. Kinda sounds like an immaculate conception to me. In Nepal, women pray to Queen Maya, which sounds very similar to the relationship many Catholics have with Mary. I wonder if Buddhism and Christianity can be traced back to a common story and if all religions ultimately derive from a single source which has been mistold, miscopied, and mistranslated to the point it has evolved into separate religions.

I'm not out to convert or proclaim any religion is wrong, but I believe it's very possible that many of the world's religions believe in variations of the same higher power. If Latin could be vulgarized into languages such as French, Italian, and Spanish, surely some Master Religion could have turned into Christianity, Judiasim, Buddhism, etc.

William Holmes McGuffey

I'm sitting in McGuffey Hall at Miami University while attending the 10th Annual Graduate Student Conference sponsored by the Educational Leadership department.

McGuffey Hall is named for William Holmes McGuffey, a former Miami faculty member, who has been mentioned in recent class readings for his contribution to literacy education, specifically though his famous Readers. I thought while I was here I would stop by the McGuffey Museum, but I was disappointed when the sign on the door said tours where by appointment only.

I did get a picture of McGuffey's house, located in the center of campus, though.

You can learn more about McGuffey and the museum (his house) by visiting the William Holmes McGuffey Museum website.

I also thought you might like to see the McGuffey statue which sits outside the hall which bears his name. When I was a student completing my bachelor's and master's degrees at Miami University, I would walk past both McGuffey's house and his statue on the way to class.

Love and honor to Miami...

(The beginning of the college fight song).

Still Stuck in New Criticism?

I need to get something off my chest. I've been thinking a lot about the format of dissertations. I recently read five dissertations for a class assignment and was beyond bored with the experience. The writing is just so formulaic and seems to defy everything I was taught about effective, engaging writing.

Last year I read a dissertation for the first time, and I just shook my head. The structure seems contrived, simplistic, and not far from what Tom Romano refers to the "five paragraph you-know-what." To me, the dissertation looks like a five paragraph "you-know-what" on steroids.

Nystand, (1993) in "Where Did Composition Studies Come From: An Intellectural History," describes the "five-paragraph theme" (p. 275) as an innovation of the formalist period tied to the tenets of New Criticism. I can't tell you how many education professors, in both my undergraduate and graduate education, have criticized the five-paragraph essay as a contrived school genre which is ineffective because it is inauthentic to the real work of writers. Let face it, how many of us have written a five paragraph essay outside of school in our adult lives.

In Ohio, we coach students to write five paragraph essays in high school so they can pass the OGT and get their diplomas. Is what we do to graduate students, advising them to write five chapter dissertations, really that much different? Isn't the dissertation format also a contrived school genre? How many published books about educational research are exactly five chapters?

I'm frustrated that compositionists recognize the limitation of the five-paragraph essay for college freshmen, but at the doctoral level, the highest level of study, we are less innovative and forward-thinking.

I've been talking to students and professors about this. Some professors have encouraged me to NOT write a five chapter dissertation while warning me I might not get my dissertation approved if I divert too far off the beaten path. One professor argued that the dissertation format in many way parallels the structure of intro, lit. review, question/methods, findings, and analysis that we see in journal articles and is hence an appropriate way to require graduate students to write.

The statistics of graduate students being ABD is depressing. Is it possible that the dissertation genre is part of the problem? We recognize that many middle and high school writers struggle with five paragraph essays but shine when they write poetry and other creative genres. Do some PhD students give up because they find themselves writing in an academic voice which isn't their own? In an attempt to provide a model of perfection for struggling writers to emulate, has graduate education done a disservice to their students?

It wouldn't be fair to criticize without suggesting an alternative, so let me suggest an alternative assessment. If the dissertation prepares PhD students for academic research and writing, could a student prove this competency by conducting X research studies and writing them as authentic journal articles which are submitted to peer reviewed journals? Wouldn't that also build a student's CV, impact the larger research community, and validate the student's scholarship by unbiased reviewers?

Wordle

A member of my writing group showed me Wordle today. It's a website where you type in a bunch of words and the site makes a word collage for you. Although the site generates the pattern, you have some control to move words and change their color and size. It's a really cool way to introduce poetry and the effect of word placement on a page.

What's Old is New Again?

This weekend I was reading Chapter 4 of Myers' Changing Our Minds: Negotiating English and Literacy. Although I was reading about the history of recitation literacy from the Civil War until the middle of WWI, I could have sworn I was reading a description of something I observed in 2000 during my student teaching.

Myers describes how signature literacy (if you could sign your name, you could "write") was replaced by memorization and recitation and "extensive reading though 'reading aloud' activities which 'required the teacher to do little more than assign selections to be read and, if he chose, to correct the pronunciation of his students'" (Finkelstein qtd. in Myers, 1996, p. 69). This description of 1880s literacy could have been written about scripted, direct instruction which is still being marketed today. The only difference is 19th century teachers had some autonomy in choosing their text selections. Thanks to thoughtful curriculum designers and textbook companies, that's already been decided for teachers lucky enough to teach in the districts which adopt these programs (can you sense my seething resentment?). All teachers need to do is sit back, read the script, and call on _________ to read the next passage aloud!

The Assocciation for Direct Instruction offers 160 lessons in Reading Mastery I. There are six levels total. You can read about lesson activities here.

Or you can watch Language for Learning, Lesson 44, Exercise 4. If you look closely, you can see the tape lines on the floor keeping the chairs in perfectly even rows. See how far we've come? The kids of the 19th century had to stand for their lessons, but 21st century learners can sit while they "toe the line" (Myers, 1996, p. 64).

The Future of "Good" Writing

In last week's class, I wrote that too many students believe "good" writing is correct grammar and mechanics. Monaghan and Saul (1987) explain in the 19th century, "'good' writing was taken to mean a mastery of capitalization, punctuation and syntax as well as correct spelling and pleasing handwriting" (p. 89). Growing up in the 1980s and 90s, I found most of my classmates viewed their writing in these terms, but why wouldn't they when the kind of feedback they received about their writing was red scrawls of "sp" for spellling errors and corrected punctuation?

As an elementary school student, I remember spending countless school hours writing upper- and lowercase cursive letters on specially lined paper. These lessons in penmanship were often the first comments students received about their "writing' ability. Matt was a "good" writer because he dotted his i's directly above their bases. On, I the other hand, was "unsatisfactory" because I couldn't make my s's behave.

I don't know how, but some time during my adolescence I got the idea in my head that "good" writers were ones who were engaging and creative. I remember being shocked when one of my most creative classmates told me I was lucky because I was a good writer. I didn't consider myself good. Sure, I could write grammatically correct sentences, but at the end of the day, I didn't write anything I felt was worth reading, and I certainly couldn't write engaging poems and short stories like this classmate wrote.

When I went to college, I had the opportunity to be a professor's assistant. I got to evaluate sets of preservice English teachers' papers and was shocked by how many simple errors existed in their writing. It was then that I realized a strong command of grammar and punctuation set one apart in classroom writing. Correct was "good."

Today, though, computers can check our spelling and suggest probable words. As we type, Microsoft Word creates colored squiggles alerting us to possible errors in subject-verb agreement and punctuation. These programs are far from perfect, but they are helping us come closer to "good," correct writing.

Schmandt-Besserat and Erard (2008) tell us in "Origins and Forms of Writing" in the Handbook of Research on Writing (Ed. Charles Bazerman), "The future of writing will also be determined by communication technologies" (p. 20). Already, word processors have obviated the need for good penmanship on most school papers, and text messaging and phone memo applications are quickly replacing the lists and notes we used to jot and leave on the kitchen counter. Will printed and typed text replace handwriting at some point? Will there come a time when handwriting notes and essays will seem as archaic as scribes copying books? If computers and other technology intuitively use the correct punctuation, capitalization and spelling in legible text, what will "good" writing look like a century from now?

War, Archetypes, Mayan Writing

This morning I read about structuralist criticism in Tyson's (2006) Critical Theory Today: A User Friendly Guide, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge). Basically, structuralists believe there are "underlying principles" (p. 209) which govern writing. For example, we can differentiate poetry from prose because all poetry shares some structural commonality which enables us to recongize it as poetry. By the same token, we know prose when we see it because it utilizes a structure we associate with prose.

Structuralist criticism also looks at the way a piece of writing may be structured internally. For example, The Great Gatsby is a "seek-find-lose story" (p. 236) because all of the characters' experiences follow this pattern. Gatsby seeks out Daisy after many years, finds her at Nick's house, and loses her again to Tom. Tom seeks a mistress, finds Myrtle Wilson, and loses her during the car accident. Daisy seeks a lover, finds one in Gatsby twice, and loses him both times--once to the war, the second time through death (Tyson, 2006, pp, 236-237).

Does anyone else have an overwhelming urge to reread The Great Gatsby? I love that novel! I've probably read it more times than any other book I own. I may have a borderline obsession with it, though, evidenced by the facts that my computer wallpaper is a picture of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and I named my car "Gatsby."

But I digress. Returning to structuralism, Tyson explains the scholarship of Northrop Frye. Frye believes "the word archetype refers to any recurring image, character type, plot formula, or pattern of action" (Tyson, 2006, p. 223). Archetypes provide a narrative model from which other genres derive in the Western literacy tradition.

This evening I was reading "Writing and Secular Knowledge Outside Modern European Institutions by Charles Bazerman and Paul Rogers (2008) in the Handbook of Research on Writing. The chapter described how the Mayans "used writing to reinforce a ruler's military power and to legitimize his descent from noble ancestors and the gods" (p. 146). Later writing from the Mayans focused on themes of war and conquest. As I read this passage, I scrawled in the margin, "Archetype?"

If you think about most historical writing, especially that sanctioned by a ruler or government, isn't it structured in a way that paints the ruler as a hero? If we read a German school text from the late 1930s or early 1940s, would Hitler be painted as a hero or a villian? Would Hitler still be considered "evil" if he had been the winner in history? What about Saddam Hussein? Americans painted him as the villian, and by defeating and putting Hussein to death, America declared itself the hero-winner.

Patriotism is based on an archetype that one's government and country are good and those who challenge its way of life are evil, which is why citizenships texts are highly critical of other countries while praising their own (whether that praise is deserved or not). Structuralsim helps us understand that there are very few variations of human stories. Whether its 650 BCE or 2010 AD, the only way rulers can stay in power is to give their people the hero myth they expect. There's only one alternative--loser.

Writing one sentence saved me three hours! Wanna know how?

Today I used writing in a way I never have before. I thought my day would be spent in Kent attending the EHHS Doctoral Forum and having lunch with a friend, but a foot of snow changed those plans.

Did you know you can save yourself hours of shoveling a long driveway by sending a text message, such as "Please plow 555 Street Address," to my neighbor? It's amazing how much I accomplished with one sentence and $25 cash (worth every penny, BTW). He replied with "Sure" and stopped by the house a few hours later. He then texted back letting me know I could leave the cash in his mailbox down the street. Thanks to the convenience of technology, and writing, one can clear a foot of snow from the driveway with 30 seconds' effort.

Response to Monaghan and Saul

Response to Monaghan, J. E., & Saul, E. W. (1987). The reader, the scribe, the thinker: A critical look at the history of American reading and writing instruction. In T. W. Popkewitz (Ed.), The formatting of school subjects: The struggle for creating an American institution (pp. 85-122). New York: Falmer Press.

As I develop professionally, I can't seem to find my home. I know the study and teaching of writing and its applications across the disciplines is in my heart, but I haven't found a place in the university where I can pursue that interest whole-heartedly. As an undergraduate, I became a generalist through a liberal education core and courses in education, communciation, literature, reading, theater, and writing. Wanting to focus on writing, I tried a master's degree in Composition and Rhetoric but left because there wasn't enough application to teaching. Now in my PhD program, I just learned that the emphasis I've been claiming (literacy) isn't really my emphasis. Literacy students in Curriculum and Instruction at Kent State University take a core of reading, not writing, classes.

Luckily, Monaghan and Saul's chapter shed light on the history of reading and writing. Due to factors like the profitability of basal readers over pens and pencils and "theories of learning and language" (p. 109), reading has been privileged over writing for many years. Reading got an additional boost through government Title I funding which placed reading specialists in schools (there were no comparable writing specialists) (pp. 109-110).

Compositionists have made progress, though. A few decades ago, freshman composition was viewed as a service course to be passed off to graduate students and adjuncts as described in Ray Kytle's 1971 CCC article, "Serfs, Slaves, or Colleagues--Who Shall Teach Freshman Composition?" Today, the proliferation of graduate programs in Composition and Rhetoric is writing scholars' attempt to gain the upper hand. When I entered the college job market in 2003, a MEd got me a full-time position teaching English at a community college, but last year a local community college told me I wasn't qualified for a comparable job because my degrees are in education. My colleague was told her MA in English (literature) and MFA (fiction) did not qualify her either. University English departments are taking similar stances in requiring a Composition and Rhetoric degree for those exclusively teaching freshman composition.

While English departments are stepping up to finally privilege writing over reading, schools of education still have some catching up to do with their reading endorsements (I'm not aware of any writing endorsements) and reading-focused "literacy" programs.

Response to Menand

Like many of my classmates, I began the semester by reading "Show or Tell: Should Creative Writing by Taught" by Louis Menand (2009). The article's first appeal was it's title, a play on the writing advice I've given numerous students to "show, don't tell." But honestly, I have to admit the second appeal was the article's economical seven-page length. I already feel hopelessly behind this semester due to an out-of-town funeral for my grandfather in early January followed by a trip to San Diego last weekend for my sister-in-law's wedding at Park Manor Suites . This article gave me the opportunity to actually check something off my very long and growing To Do list.

Do I agree with Kay Boyle "all creative writing programs ought to be abolished by law" (p. 106)? No. I don't think so. I side with Menand that putting students "in the ivory tower puts them in touch with real life" (p. 109). When I reflect on my own experience of leaving a small town to attend college, I am amazed by the growth I experienced in four years. If nothing else, being a college student gave me something to write about!

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to teach a creative writing course at a community college. Unfortunately, I could only teach the course as an online hybrid which prevented students from developing the kind of relationships I wanted for productive peer review. I don't believe my class "made" anyone a great author, but it did offer students new perspectives on their writing and show them criticism can be productive once you get over the blow to your ego.

If I had to characterize my role as the teacher of that class, I wouldn't say I taught anyone to be a creative writer, but I certainly provided support by giving students the space to write and an audience to provide feedback.