What does it mean to you to be a compositionist?

A compositionist is a maker who studies and practices makings. Makings have to do with bringing about a something where a nothing was before that something, or a making can be a reinterpretation or extension of a something that differs from the original something by one’s own way of seeing.

A compositionist must be sure footed although standing upon unstable terrain. A compositionist must dress her feets in changeling shoes. Because language(s) are the terrain upon which the maker stands or is standing.

A compositionist should not be shy about the doing of her knowing or the showing of the doing of her knowing in word or creation.

A compositionist should certainly know something of mechanics, of the technology of a making and how to show a making’s inner workings.

A compositionist should know that a bad any something of a making is better than a good nothing of a making any day. As a making mechanic, a compositionist should be able to do and show how to fix up a rusted-out making so its engine roars like new or purrs when the situation suits. So get going with your making and showing and forget with the tarrying.

Precis: Douglas D. Hesse, “Portfolio Standards for English 101″

Douglas D. Hesse

Portfolio grading attempts to judge a student’s body of work as a collective whole, assessing how well the students performs in a variety of interconnected papers and rhetorical situations. Instructors use the portfolio grading standard to measure student work against various criteria, providing a few sentences while leaving individual papers unmarked.

The “A” portfolio presents instructors with a dynamic student reader and writer who is able to incorporate and link most everything that has occurred in the course, plus knowledge obtained previous to or externally from the course via reading or personal experiences. These students are risk-takers who can deliver, writing about ambitious topics with fluency across modes. These writers can revise globally and locally using a variety of strategies within an individual paper. The “A” writer shows awareness of and execution for all of the rhetorical situations.

The “B” portfolio adopts many of the characteristics of the “A” portfolio but is perhaps not as globally consistent, ambitious, or aware as the “A” writer. These writers do not connect readings and writings or incoporate sources as fluidly as the “A” portfolio writer.

The “C” portfolio accomplishes most everything, but these writers have deficiencies in their portfolios including sturggling to make connections between projects, lacking awareness of their own process. These students often rely on others for guidance during revision, often relying on teacher comments and student peer review to guide revision and lacking the initiative or ability to carry revision beyond this. The “C” portfolio writer still ought to be able to handle many of the writing situations in the university.

The “D” portfolio suggest the writer cannot write competently in several rhetorical situations and will generally struggle to write well across various college courses. These texts are predictable and do not read naturally and may include errors that compromise the writing’s effectiveness. The writer may not follow through on processes.

The “F” portfolio includes writing with obvious thinking and spotty ability to be aware of an audience or write in any rhetorical situation. The writer cannot or will not make connections across projects and the papers exist in isolation. In order to fill space, these writers rely on repetition or wordy paraphrase. These writers tend not to have the capacity to revise. Many pieces of the portfolio may be missing or disorganized.

Mapping: Douglas D. Hesse, “Portfolio Standards for English 101″

The most important word cloud of the semester.

Precis: Kurt Spellmeyer, “Can Teaching, of All Things, Prove to Be Our Salvation?”

Kurt Spellmeyer: oddly Bartholomaen?

The university system of education has essentially been the same for the past 100 years, based on traditional and canonical information, choosing either to preserve or subvert that information. Sticking with this system has caused a wide gap between the world-as-world and the world-as-taught-to-American-students, who face more national reliance on standardized test scores.

Students even graduate college without an adequate understanding of their society, world or times. Departmentalized universities encourage students’ bewilderment as they cannot agree on what is important enough to teach, or even about the definition of the phrase cultural literacy or the word culture itself. The university needs to equip itself to teach students to critically manage events as they unfold, using dialogues on issues of consequence as a base. Again, though, the university does not prize good teaching, and teachers have no real incentive except warm fuzzy feelings to invest time into developing interdisciplinary courses to teach issues. A disparity exists also between the speed at which socioeconomic paradigm shifts occur (f-f-fast) and the speed at which the academy moves (s-s-slow).

Writing programs, sufficiently seated on the margins of the academy, are inclined to handle innovation, as many writing classes are taught by GAs and adjuncts not as invested in the academy’s system of production. The writing classroom can be the environment where students bridge the gap between their home world and the university, instead of students pretending to learn and teachers pretending to teach because they do not envision their role as linked to the future. The real lesson, besides writing, ought to be how to use the academy’s body of knowledge as a tool for navigting unstable real-world situations.

Precis: Todd Taylor, “Take 20,” “How do you design a lesson plan?” & “What’s next for writing teachers?”

“How do you design a lesson plan?”

Lesson plans might be compared with a movie script in which the teacher ought to dramatize in her head what she wants to happen in class. The script should be mindful of where students are at in their current project and activities that can move them forward. For a 50-minute class session, a 20-10-20 breakdown may be useful splitting time among group work (small- or large-group discussion, workshopping, planning, reflection), writing and more group work to accomplish the agenda.

Another way to devise lesson plans for a longer class session includes alerting students each class will feature writing and reflection on writing. Teachers should study theories of performance, for what teachers do in the classroom is performance, as is the creation of compositions. Lesson plans and teaching are a kind of dance in which writing, small-group activities and summative work must be choreographed and adjusted.

“What’s next for writing teachers?”

• deal with technology
• new media/visual rhetoric/technology
• visual literacy
• new media
• conceptualize a broad definition of writing
• codify the specific value of alphabetic/print text in the context of an explosion of new technology and visual media
• advocate our work to the public including parents, corporations and legislators
• be involved in institutional assessment
• deal adeptly with the trend toward mandated testing for K-12 students and its affects on writing
• realize how work extends beyond the classroom
• confront global issues/globalization
• be aware of linguistic diversity including both foreign languages and different Englishes

Precis: Dickie Selfe, “Techno-Pedagogical Explorations: Toward Sustainable Technology-Rich Instruction”

Dickie Selfe: I liked the article, so I'll forgive you the hat. This time...

Developing sustainable pedagogy in a technology-rich environment means one must distinguish between techno-fads or whatever ever’s techno-rad and what may well be the lasting aspects of the technological environs in which teachers teach and students learn. In order to accomplish this successfully, teachers need to be able to, like our students, accomplish reflection on the fly as classes are in action and semesterly.

Considerations:

• technology-based pedagogy is experimental
• consider locally-sustainable pedagogy
• technology should not be the only focus of the writing class
• assess students’ technological literacy on the fly
• assignment sequencing matters
• reflect, reflect
• know your place, and shut your face–your pedagogy isn’t bigger than the class
• PAR (preparation, activity, reflection)
• each lesson ought to have a critical component
• network with others
• learn from others incessantly
• recruit cheap help from within/nearby
• share what you know with colleagues
• create the culture you want to be part of [be the change you want to see in the classroom--this is my line--sh

The interfaces we use, like language, are constantly shifting landscapes and the material conditions affecting them and the students, curriculum and instructors change along with them making for ever-new technological dynamics.

We ought to fear the hip as hip when developing techno-pedagogy. Not that it's not ok to go there, but the instructor must go there with the students and a willingness to be disappointed [use this as a teachable moment].

Students can be a big resource for learning technology, but they can also have technological access and literacy issues. Know and assess the spectra of experience levels.

Use the PAR model to own what you’re doing in technological pedagogy.

Precis: WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition

This document concerns the types of outcomes for students writing program administrators and instructors might expect to achieve in first-year writing courses. The outcomes desired are are general results and not necessarily specific standards for judgment. The outcomes are created under the notion that writing and the teaching of writing are complicated processes, both individual and social, occur over time and require continued practice and guidance to sustain.

The first outcome expected is rhetorical knowledge including students’ ability to recognize and respond to a variety of rhetorical situations. Teachers ought to teach students the purposes, uses, characteristics of and expectations of writers and readers within their field of endeavor.

Secondly, student should be taught writing as a form of critical inquiry using primary and secondary research, and collaboration. Teachers should critically teach writing as a way of thinking and performing knowledge.

Next, students should learn that writing is a process over time including several discrete phases that lead to a final performance that need not necessarily be definitive or authoratative. Teachers should encourage processes that have a proven track record but also encourage students to refine the processes to suit their needs as emergent writers.

Fourth, students should learn a number of different genres and the conventions for performance within those genres. They should learn to document research work accurately and be accountable for controlling their composition’s surface features.

Finally, students should be able to take advantage of technological environs to which they have access for process-based compostion and research methods.

Mapping: WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition

Precis: WIDE, “Why Teach Digital Writing?”

Computers and internetworked writing have revolutionized process, product and context for first-year composition, affecting rhetorical theory, composition practice and writing instruction to the point where:

• a new theory of digital writing is necessary
• composition can no longer be effectively taught in traditional classroom because multimodal composition is quickly supplanting traditional rhet/comp instruction
• approaches need to change and as they change, they should be brought to the attention of critically aware students

Internetworked computers changed the way writing is made and distributed by students, not only as a stand-alone composing machine but also as a means of publication for various audiences. Students need to be taught writing in these new environs. A variety of arguments against digital writing are made in categories like purpose/mission, humanistic, cost/access and passivity/silence.

The modes of composition, speed of writer/reader/writer interaction and engagement with existing textual materials changes notion of composition from the traditional views of print-only publication. Space issues often govern digital writing and mitigate its theoretical possibilities.

The definition of writing also changes from words on paper to using materiality for rhetorical purposes. Multimodal composition better represents the meta-semiotic way people experience the world as opposed to print writing.

Composition instructors should teach writing with the following pedagogical dicta in mind:

• compose in any place at any time; context
• cultural, technological and social rhetoric
• critically aware of technology
• learning how to learn: meta-learning
• multimodal

Faculty development must also take place to best implement the aforementioned pedagogies in order that they are not mentioned without appropriate contexts for implementation in the classroom.

Precis: NCTE Guideline on Multimodal Literacies

At about 1450 words, I’m deeming this pithy enough not to precis. Read it yourself, buggers.

Precis: Lovett et al “Writing with Video”

Maria Lovett: is she composing me right now? I hope her simulacrum is, in the immortal words of Bono "even better than the real thing."

Given how people compose in the workplace and the wider world, composition studies needs to make moves to blend traditional pedagogy with the ability to change and adapt in a world where communication is hybrid and electronic.  Too often, media in composition studies are viewed as adversaries (either/or instead of both/and), when in fact, media like video and writing have a symbiotic relationsip, with video as a rhetorical narrative medium emphasizing process.

Video process has four main stages:

• pre-production
• production
• post-production
• distribution

with writing integrated into all phases of video production, including drirected freewriting and jounaling, visual notes, reflections on process and responses to videos. A course in video writing could include the following project:

• motif or adjective project using video images for metaphorical expression
• writing about a lived experience via video (a translation)
• a portrait of place through the eyes of another
• a visual argument (embracing reserached subjectivity)

All four projects have the intention of creating critically aware student-citizens who have an awareness of video composition as a kind of rhetorical work. Textual creation in new media requires symbolic-analytic research work including rearranging, abstracting, connecting and transforming information for new rhetorical purposes–a bricolage or assemblage of discrete items.

The work of a video composition is collaborative and interdisciplinary from two persepctives. First of all, students must work through a number of different content areas including rhetorical, technological, and visual literacy in addition to the content work for the projects they choose in video composition, often relying on others through primary and secondary research to learn the necessary information and skills to bring a project about. This process, however, may allow for curricular recursiveness and interconnection as students revisit old information from class in other disciplines.  Teachers must also rely on each other as a resource (see WAC pedagogy) through co-teaching and pedagogical sharing in order to appropriate the necessary information to teach across disciplines.

Potential difficulty in video composition is mainly a question of access and sustainablity, and in light of the benefits, competition between departments and schools for technological funding will always be fierce and privelege one department over another. Will teachers and students have the necessary access to the wide range of technological devices needed to visually compose, and will that access be sustainable with the ever-changing technologies impacting video composition?  If a video composition class relies on corporate intervention to remain technologically current, will it be selling out as a pedagogical entity to privelege the corporate directives? Open source technologies offer one solution, but as of yet, it’s not 100% viable.

Precis: Gunther Kress, “Multimodality”

Over the past few decades a movement has been made to dislodge written language from its central role in communication and level the playing field between the written and the visual. Visual and musical modes are outside of the theorized realms of communication, and both have become specialized or extrinsic to basic school curricula. Nevertheless, social and economic turns have made multimodality difficult to ignore, and this socioeconomic fact calls for a full theorization of all semiotic modes to replace the monomodal theories currently competing with one another.

Language and especially written language have heretofore been priveleged over other modes, but language is itself multimodal, with its materiality meaning across sensorial boundaries. Western society has priveleged communication modes interacting with hearing and sight, but multimodal communication involves as many senses as possible, making it richer. It is unclear in language exactly what falls inside and outside of its material boundaries.

All texts are multimodal as well, but one mode may dominate a text. Texts can exist in modes other than language. Certain systems of communication and representation are multimodal, but all systems are multimodal.

It has been generally though language is a complete communication and representational system fully prepared to express whatever needs to be expressed by humans, whether thought, felt or sensed. Following this logic, if something cannot be thought, felt, sensed and then communicated in language, it need not be said. The multimodal approach to communication and representation observes the viewpoint that humans use many ways to mean because of the varying potentials of each means. For example, language and the visual are entrenched in similar ways of expressing cognitive function but get at those functions from different beginning points. Language and visual communication have distinct temporal differences that affect their expressive potential–language tends to be successive and sequential, lending itself nicely to narrativity in expression while visual communication occurs simultaneously, allowing for a day’s narrative to be included in a summative encapsulation.

All texts are multimodal, and this must be considered when attempting to achieve multiliteracy. Grammar regardless of mode, serves three demands: communicate about events/states of the world, communicate about participants’ social relations in a communicative setting and to form coherent messages.

Watch out Dr. Kress! That slobbery-tongued dog of an E is out to give you a wet one to spite your serious expression.

Precis: Palmeri’s “Prologue” and “Openings” [from his 2007 OSU dissertation, Multimodality and Composition Studies, 1960 - Present]

In the new digital environment, a multimodal turn in composition pedagogy was a necessity. Given the diverse new modes in which composition students might compose, it is important not only to elucidate that the multimodal turn in composition pedagogy is rooted in compsosition studies’ theoretical history but also that multimodal pedagogy need not be viewed as the adversary of alphabetic writing. Multimodal composition instructors, however, do need a foundation of argument by which they might defend their pedagogy against a number of recurring questions: how can I defend myself as a multimodal instructor? how can I defend multimodal composition versus institutional mandates? how can I defend multimodal pedagogy as enhancing and not detracting from students alphabetic compositions?

To answer these questions, a new narrative for the history of multimodal pedagogy must be threaded through three important preceeding pedagogies: expressivism, cognitivism and social epistemic. This narrative would show how core values of these pedagogies (multiple drafts, peer response, invention, contextual grammar, collaboration, rhetorical analysis) are involved in multimodal pedagogy.

Multimodal pedagogy does have to face several valid critical questions: why should compositionists teach other modes, isn’t alphabetic writing the best and most important? shouldn’t other departments teach other modalities, like visual and sound (art and music depts.)? how does multimodal composing interact with abc composing? Full, critical literacy and rhetorical analysis instruction account for the answer to questions one and two, as students will be asked to be analytically and interpratively literate across different forums and genres that are unstable and incessantly changing. Multimodal composition’s enhancement of metacognitive interaction with composition proces work via multisensory pathways in addition to the relationship between image and word contribute to student composition in a holistic way.

Post 101: Reflections on Blogging from a Mad Post-er

Post 101: Torture? Not exactly...

This is post #101 according to my Orwellian reading of the stats from my login. I’m celebrating 100 posts since August because it feels like a major achievement since the other two blogs I write, Fluid / Exchange (a poetry-culture culture blog) and Seven Corners (a blog-journal publishing Chicago and Midwestern poets) have only 194 posts between them since I started blogging in December 2005. It just goes to show what kind of output can be generated by a type-A nerd like me when running with a given project.

The other blogs of mine rely on several factors. Fluid / Exchange requires me to have enough eunoia and free time to create a post I’d be satisfied with others reading. Seven Corners, since it’s solicitation based, requires me to seek out and solicit the writers I’m interested in publishing, appraise my ability to “pull off” their work editorially speaking given the limitations of Blogger, and then publish their work so both the poet and the perfectionist editor are equally satisfied.

In the age of blog readers, I’m less worried about posting frequently as I was when I first started blogging. Blogs I follow pseudo-religiously, like Stoning the Devil, Silliman’s Blog, and Samizdat Blog, have a track record of consistent posting, sometimes daily. Before blog readers and rss, daily posting, in conjunction with topics of not, were the only ways to build a reliable readership. Since I check Google Reader as often as my Gmail account, I’m confident my posting can be more infrequent and still get read. Maintaining this blog, though, has made me reconsider how posting works. I think the posts on this blog are good, but they are not essay-quality.

The most page views I’ve gotten concern my most contentious post, the theory-shark post from a month and half ago, but I’ve gotten comments on posts firmly rooted within composition studies by interested, out-of-class individuals who are engaging with the same aspects of the field as we are in this class. Anyhow, since I’m practiced at precis writing, I’m thinking of incorporating something similar to Fluid / Exchange, perhaps as a compliment to my list of books read and films watched that I compile yearly. Other blogs I read, Culture Industry and Bemsha Swing both are plowing through 1000-books reading lists, sometimes reading four or five books in a day. Also, Silliman’s Blog’s linking provides an interesting option for making quicker and more consistent posts, although his link lists often get into the hundreds. I’ve also had a lot of fun writing captions for this blog, which provides a further way to make more regular posts that don’t take up much time. I’ll still be jealous of those brilliant five-page papers turned post that Robert Archambeau turns out at Samizdat Blog. He might only post once or twice a month, but shoot, most of the posts are so good, I’d pay to read them.

Scott’s Prompt on Writing Center Readings

Even though writing center pedagogy and the notion of tutorials presents a grade-free space in which the writer-as-developing-writer comes first, in this meeting, Gretchen was interested in whether or not her paper was cogent and related to class material enough to get the grade she wanted.

In the role of the tutor, I still face the pressure of accommodating Gretchen’s desires in relation to her project in conjunction with her teacher’s wishes for the project and paper, as filtered through Gretchen, the tutee (OK so I’m in the same class and know what the teacher wants, this time). The tutor often has to balance these competing pressures along with the culture and pedagogy operating within the writing center itself.

The tutee, furthermore, often sees the tutor as a car wash: a one-time stop to thoroughly clean the writing up, while at the same time, the professor may perceive the tutor’s work as counterproductive or even working against the teacher-as-audience’s expectations for the text.

The writing center experience works best if the tutors are good to exceptional at approximating discourses and quickly surmising how a tutorial may best be handled. It also helps if tutors have a grasp on writing for a variety of teacherly audiences.

All these competing forces can sour the seeming purity of writing center pedagogy, which appears to be (in the readings, in “Take 20″ (Sanchez)) one of the purer pedagogies based on its intentions to help emergent writers without the pressure of the grade. The writing center appears to have no overt content or agenda, a trap into which content-based pedagogies often fall, but it still involves its instructors (tutors) in a variety of contentious social and political situations.

The working logo for my theoretical writing center. A spade is a spade is a spade.

Mapping: Lovett et al “Writing with Video”

Mapping: WIDE, “Why Teach Digital Writing?”

Mapping: Palmieri, ““Prologue” and “Openings” [from his 2007 OSU dissertation, Multimodality and Composition Studies, 1960 - Present]

Mapping: NCTE Guideline on Multimodal Literacies

Capsule responses to recent pedagogies pt. 1

I’ve been woefully poor at incorporating my own responses to these recent pedagogies, so I’ll throw some thoughts down like gauntlets.

Basic Writing Pedagogy

I’m not sold on Basic Writing Pedagogy as an autonomous pedagogy. It needs to be contextualized within an institution’s ideals and values in dealing with lower-ability or learning-challenged students. I’ll probably sound jerky for saying so, but my mind is not made up that higher education should be democratized because I think it will tend toward lowest-common-denomiator education rather than representing a pinnacle or capstone of the education system. I am suspicious of basic writing pedagogy as an autonomous fix for writers at a perceived intellectual borderline, and basic writers need to be viewed more holistically as learners rather than merely as writers. Basic writing operates under the notion that the pedagogy itself is a fix or accomodation for acclimation into the academic world. Really, basic writing needs to be a college or university-wide pedagogy, providing explicit or implicit support for at-risk learners with cross-disciplinary vision.

Community Service Pedagogy

The name alone seems to doom this pedagogy. I am a believer that first-year writing courses layer coercion onto students (students must take the course to graduate and must write whether or not they want to because writing is perceived as having value in academia), and service learning may be another layer of coercion, depending on its handling by instructors. I’m certainly not comfortable with layering coercion by making students serve the community in a capacity where power relations and educational value are arguable, or, at least, more arguable than other facets of institutionalized education itself.

Collaborative Pedagogy

The argument in our class on collaborative pedagogy was interesting because, for me, it gets framed by the dichotomous questions: “How can you do collaborative pedagogy? / How can you avoid collaborative pedagogy?” Like several of the past pedagogies, I would find it hard to make collaborative pedagogy a content-area for a first-year writing course by its lonesome, but many of the tenets and variations of collaborative pedagogy are taken for granted in many writing programs (peer review, small- and large-group discussion, etc.). The choice for instructors seems to be how far to take collaborative pedagogy; do we want to incorporate attempts at collaboratively-authored texts, in either the hierarchical or dialogic incarnations? From my own practice, students’ experience with collaboratively-authored texts can provide fruitful interactions with notion of knowledge-creation and social consensus among other things, but it keeps problematic aspects (the shirker, etc.).
Listening to: Mötley Crüe Greatest Hits

Are any of these "Feelgood" pedagogies?

Precis: Yergeau, Wozniak, & Vandenberg, “Expanding the f2f: Writing Centers and Audio-Visual-Textual Conferencing”

Audio-visual-textual (AVT) conferencing can influence writing center pedagogy and environments by offering an online space that can more faithfully approixmate the phatic elements of face-to-face tutorials lost in older technological innovations applied to tutoring like chats and e-mails.

AVT, however, should not be seen as a technology that competes with the older, aforementioned technological innovations in tutorials or even f2f tutorials, if those are viewed as new technologies-as-pedagogies. It is counterproductive to promote one technology at another’s expense because each technology may serve a discrete purpose when considering the overall scope of a writing center as fostering better writers not necessarily better writing.

AVT does have distinct differences when compared with f2f tutorials, mostly regarding the trasnsparency, or lack thereof, of the interface. When a tutorial is engaging, the interface has a tendency to disappear and the engagement of writer and tutor emulates a f2f tutorial as the behavior of those engaged approximates real behaviour of two interacting individuals. Sometimes, though, the interface is highly noticeable, especially when the users do not have a fully fluid grasp of using the interface as a technology.

When technologies like e-mail and chat, when applied to writing centers, seem to encourage tutors to have unbiased conception of the tutee, AVT tutoring, and its space, can allow preconceived notions and perceptions of the tutee’s environment or personage to influence the tutorial. Also, AVT technology is still haunted by the tutor’s institutional roles.

In the end, writing center agents must become bricoleurs, wisely and calculatedly layering technologies and pedagogical tactics in combination with new and useful innovations to best serve the functions of theory and practice they inhabit.

Precis: Duffelmeyer and Ellertson, “Critical Visual Literacy: Multimodal Communication Across the Curriculum”

An Ideological Veil for Barb Blakely Duffelmeyer

Multimodal coomunication across the curriculum can enable students to develop critical literacy, visual literacy and critical technological literacy by reflecting how students compose. It can also help students to learn that texts are constructed things, not transparent windows of real reality. Students can build rhetorical awareness in by both reading and composing multimodal texts. Multimodal CAC composing can give students agency as composers and readers rather than the built-in passivity prevalent with many of their interactions with texts.

Multimodal CAC pedagogy is an inclusive, both/and pedagogy allowing for composition across different modes including text, sound and visual. This pedagogy can demonstrate the web of relationship between humans and the media with which they interact in literacy, language and composition. This interaction reflects the speculation that today’s students, raised in a technological world evince new patterns of thought and the ability to balance multiple fast messages from a variety of sources.

Students can learn to differentiate between what appears to be automatic, natural, transparent systems that are actually an “ideological veil” that interposes coding to separate the viewer from the really real world. Students can begin to see the text as from a particular viewpoint and analyze the codes that comprise it.

In the early days of multimodal pedagogy, hypertext writing was prized, but now its stock is sinking because it provides a seemingly endless view of building knowledge into an infinite space, which contrast with traditional views of rhetoric and composition as directed arguments comprised of specific and specialized information.

Flash and other programs provide easily accessible programs from which new methods of multimodal composition can be attempted.

Anthony Ellertson: Many modes, one hand. How to decode that?

Precis: Anderson et al, “Cross-Curricular Underlife: A Collaborative Report on Ways with Academic Words”

Why do students take the courses they take? How does first-year composition prepare them to take these courses and in what ways? How do students and teachers imagine their roles including goals and outcomes?

A composition course based in process and rhetorical pedagogy prepares students for other lower-level college courses, but perhaps it prepares them in unforeseen ways. For example, a writing course often prizes collaboration, sharing and self-competitive activities, but in many higher education courses, product is prized over process through independent work and study, which, though exposed in composition, may only be visible to other instructors in private meetings.

Instead of collaborative interdependence, much of student work is independent as students need to best find their way into the specialized language of a discourse community and figure out how best to interact with the requirements of a course. Students learn to adopt rhetorical notions of audience-centered communication to interactions with teachers, quickly discerning the needs and wants of an audience to achieve classroom success.

Students advocated learning other compositional processes, like note-taking, which would benefit them by learning how to take advantage of the teacher-student communication, how to translate the important information offered by the teacher into their own language. Writing courses often develop a content of their own comparable to other content-area courses often at the expense of teaching navigation among multiple discourses.

If students are to be members of the academic community in any capacity, they need to learn how interactions happen in that space and the particular ethoi of the participants. As students can attest, much of this learning is private, but composition courses can help demystify academic discourses.

Precis: Nancy Sommers, “Responding to Student Writing”

Nancy Sommers: Why is this woman smiling? Because she responds to student texts more fruitfully than you.

Responding to student writing is the most time-intensive endeavor a writing instructor will undertake, often spending 20 to 60 minutes per essay for each assignment over the course of a semester. Still, writing instructors often do not understand the rhetorical effects of the comments and responses they provide on student texts. Teachers often represent the larger community of potential readers for a students text, possibly dramatizing a number of roles as readers, and we comment on students’ texts in order to have them consider possibilities for revision.

Several problems exist with responding to student writing. First, teachers comments can transfer students’ attention from their texts to the teachers’ purpose in commenting. In this difficulty, teachers appropriate students’ texts and students begin to write or revise in order to please the teacher or satisfy his comments rather than better the text. In this difficulty, teachers often provide contradictory information in their comments as they ask students to correct stylistic and usage errors while also providing commentary on possible global revisions needed in a text. Students often receive the mixed message to edit a text, perhaps by making it more concise and less wordy, but expanding certain points that are vague or underdeveloped. The contradiction between addition and deletion here is obvious and highly confusing for students.

Another problem for teachers is their comments are often not text-specific and could, in fact, be applied to more or less every text in a class. Teachers often draw on a specific lexicon of appropriate words to comment on students’ texts: vague, specific, awkward, etc. This kind of commentary often makes students believe if they follow a set of rules, it will be an instant fix for their writing dilemmas. Often, these canonical comments result from teachers commenting on initial drafts as if they were finished. Teachers may be undertrained in responding to students’ texts as texts, finding perhaps always what they set out to look for as evaluators rather than seeing each text as discrete. In the initial phases of writing, it is useful to sabotage students’ sense of doneness by making comments that encourage fruitful chaos in which they are reshaping texts and ideas leading to new discoveries.

Comments on students’ texts should not satisfy the teachers’ need to feel like they have done their job–it should instead be a means for students to find reinforcement of ideas learned in the classroom and offer incentive to revise.

Precis: Eric H. Hobson, “Writing Center Pedagogy”

Writing Center Pedagogy adopts an atypical stance among composition pedagogies as it provides one-on-one and small-group instruction as its primary fucntion. The primary goal of WC pedagogy is to improve writers but not necessarily writing. Writinc Center tutors, as a community, engage with all aspects of the writing process and are able to custom tailor instruction based on writers’ need while being simultaneously engaged with and critical of students texts without the burden of providing a grade.

The tutoring process, often ongoing and collaborative, attempts to assess students writing’s current status and make a plan of action going forward regarding the text. This plan can focus on either higher-order global content and structure-based commentary or lower order surface matters important to a draft’s readability. The writing center format often lends itself to reciprocity between tutor and tutee as each can often learn from the other’s suggestions or interactions with a particular text.

In addition, writing center tutors often find themselves at the forefront of technology, especially in the arenas it intersects with composing texts, and tutors may often know more than instructors in different fields because they may be encountering work from a variety of disciplines.

Writing center staffs often extend outside of English studies in order to accommodate writers from the multitude of discourse communities, and the writing center can be a proving ground for potential future educators from the various discourse communities. Additionally, writing centers can shape classroom theory in arenas like peer review, often providing a more practical peer review situation, as well as extending writing instruction over time as students often develop regular relationships with tutors lasting much longer than a typical classroom semester.