Writing as Recursive Cultural Product

In John Trimbur's "Composition and the Circulation of Writing," he cites Richard Johnson's description the circulation of cultural texts as a recursive process of "production to textual forms to readings to lived culture" (196). The example used is the British Mini Metro Car, which originates as the "transformation of a 'designer's idea' [...] into a cultural product" (196). This process of production leads to the creation of a text, which is read in many different ways by various sectors of the public, and in this way ultimately becomes a part of lived culture. Essentially, in this imagination of the circulation of cultural texts, production and reading are processes that produces objects - texts and elements of culture. The process of creating texts in the classroom is similar in that students produce texts, which are then read by classmates and teachers, and the result of this reading becomes part of the classroom's 'culture,' the ongoing mood and relationship between students, their classmates, and their teacher. Like Johnson's process of circulation, this process of textual creation is also recursive, through revisions or through a repetition of the process on future papers. But, as I have discovered this semester, the danger is that just as flawed readings of texts can have negative impacts on lived culture, certain readings of texts can negatively impact the culture of the classroom.

The challenge inherent in the recursive process of textual production in the classroom is making sure that students do not become what Trimbur refers to as "cultural dupes" (198). Although he uses this term in reference to the cultural studies classroom, what he's actually referring to is the necessity to teach students how to read a cultural text, and the composition teacher faces a similar challenge. Composition teachers must instruct students on how to become good readers as well as good writers, for the two go hand in hand. In order for students to give productive readings to their peers' papers - in workshops, for example - they must be instructed on the process of how to properly read a text, how to understand the rhetorical situation that has produced a paper. They must be able to understand how context, audience, and purpose influence a text. They must have a grasp of appropriate elements of design for a particular assignment, and when a writer must execute a particular stance appropriate for a particular situation. In addition, the composition student must be trained in how to interpret the teacher's reading of their text, to understand why certain elements of the paper worked and why others did not and how to incorporate suggestions for improvement into revised texts. Like Johnson's description of the circulation of cultural texts, the process of creating texts in a composition classroom is also recursive.

How Much Grading is Too Much Grading?

In "Students, Authorship, and the Work of Composition," Bruce Horner quotes David Bartholomae, who states, "the most precious thing I can do is provide spaces where I don't also [in addition to the culture] do [students'] thinking for them" (qtd. in Horner 512). Peter Elbow takes this philosophy a step further by removing the pressure of grades from his students' composition papers. In my own grading, I take a position that is the polar opposite from this, copiously grading students' papers and making as many notes as I can regarding how students can improve their papers. On the one hand, the risk is that I am stifling students' creativity by telling them exactly how to revise their papers. on the other, students will be expected in their other classes to meet certain mandated standards of appropriate writing. While proponents of the former philosophy might argue that these standards are set in a manner that promotes an imbalanced social contract, I feel that purposefully overlooking potential weaknesses in student papers for the sake of their autonomy as authors as a way of hopefully balancing the scales is ultimately doing them a disservice.

With that being said, I do often wonder if I'm a little too enthusiastic in my rooting out of potential weaknesses in student papers. I find myself spending sometimes as much as fifteen to twenty minutes (or more) per student paper, carefully cataloging every way that a student could improve their organization, clarify their thoughts, provide more evidence, or analyze more deeply. By the time that I'm done grading student papers, almost every page is covered with margin notes and line edits, and I often suspect that there comes a point when it's too much, when students shut down and become unwilling to read all my scribblings in the margins, or worse yet, when my notes only confuse or discourage them. Not to mention the fact that the amount of time I spend grading papers becomes impractical. I wonder if maybe I am doing what Bartholomae warns against, failing to prove a space where my students can do their own thinking in their writing rather than having me do all the thinking for them. I wonder if I wouldn't be doing my students (and myself) more of a service to prioritize and focus in on the one or two most serious problems in each student's paper.

A blog post that's trying to do too many things at once

Ok, so this week we were urged to try to include some multimedia stuff in our blog posts and also to respond to one of our classmates' blog entries, and finally to respond to the "Building a Mystery" article. In order to accomplish all of these things, I'm going to step away from the usual formal response format that my blog entries usually take and just sort of wing it.

First, regarding the Robert Davis and Mark Shadle's article, I think the thing that interested me most was the idea of multimedia/multigenre research essay. One of the student examples listed, the biography of John Lennon that was tied together through poetry and written in the form of a play seemed like an interesting, unique, and original approach to a genre that students undoubtedly find stale and boring by now. I'm interested in doing more of these sorts of assignments with my students. Another example listed in the article is allowing students to write a sort of 'what-if' biography, particularly useful for those students with troubled backgrounds that they may not be comfortable sharing. I wonder if maybe the next time I teach a 101 class, it might be beneficial to modify the personal narrative photo-essay. Say, have the students bring in three photos and tell them that they're going to use it in a personal essay about an event from their past, and then after they've chosen their photos, turn the assignment on its head by telling the students that they're going to instead write about an imaginary event in their history. The benefits to this, I think, would be that it would eliminate many of the 'my grandfather died and it sucked' essays that seem to be the tried and true fallback for most freshman comp students. Also, it would allow students to use their imaginations in potentially wonderful ways, while also alleviating some of the boredom they might otherwise feel with this assignment. And finally, rather than having to find a way to relate what the learned - the moral of the story, if you will - to a general audience, the student is faced with the potentially more challenging rhetorical task of formulating a 'so what?' for an event that they haven't experienced. Rather than moralizing, they'd have to speculate.

Davis and Shadle also mention multimedia essays, which sort of makes me think back to last week's article on multimodality, one that particularly interested me because I'm interested in introducing multimodality more fully into my classes. For the second part of 102, the rhetorical analysis, I had my students read and analyze a Ray Bradbury short story entitled "There Will Come Soft Rains." One of the things that I had students do is watch a Youtube cartoon version of the story, which has some pretty obvious plot deviations from the original story, and I had them analyze how the different media affect the narrative, why they affect it in that way, and what the two forms allow their respective authors to do differently. Below is the video:



But I wonder if there's some way to have students do more than merely view and respond to video posts. I wonder if there's some way to actually have students get more involved in these sorts of multimodal assignments by recording their own audio media or integrating video into classroom presentations or even, somehow, their papers. Sure, maybe this would only complicate things, and I don't see how this could be accomplished without making the papers a primarily web-based assignment, but with so much of our culture going digital anyway, is that necessarily a bad thing? I also found this video of a student-produced live action version of "There Will Come Soft Rains":



Now, I'm sure that most college freshmen would turn their noses up at the thought of being involved in something this amateurish and silly, but there are a host of other avenues they could explore. Even merely finding one of these videos on Youtube and finding a way to integrate them into their papers requires an additional level of thought and consideration that can only benefit the students.

And finally, the last part of my blog post (yes, I know, bad transition. If I were grading my own response I'd write 'Work on transitions/organization!" in the margins) is to respond to a posting by another student. Emily, I read your recent post on your students not bringing rough drafts to class, and allow me to say that I feel your pain. I had the exact same thing happen this past Thursday. I told my students on Tuesday that we were going to be workshopping rough drafts on the next class meeting, and that they should not come if they were unprepared (basically the same scenario you described). In my 8:00 class, only 5 people showed up. Now, the good news is we had one hell of a good workshopping session for their papers, because we were able to all participate in one group, help each other brainstorm, and give each other hands-on guidance. Still, I have to admit that it's so annoying to think that the other 10 or 15 students in that class were simply too lazy, too unmotivated, or too whatever to even bother with an attempt. Or maybe they didn't know how to begin and were afraid to ask for help, which I guess is another problem altogether. Still, for whatever reason you and I experienced this situation, at least you can rest assured you're not alone.

Multimodality in the Composition Classroom

In "Thinking about Multimodality," Pamela Takayoshi and Cynthia L. Selfe suggest a new sort of composition that extends its focus beyond the written text to include audio, video, still images, and digital media. They address many fears that they anticipate teachers might experience, such as a concern that they will have to juggle the responsibilities of both a technology teacher and a composition teacher, and that this new focus on multiple forms of media in assignments will cause students' ability to mastery of the crucial written mode of communication to suffer. But Takayoshi and Selfe ultimately decide that the possible rewards outweigh the risks, as the growing importance of new technologically-based forms of communication necessitate new types of student fluency. In our own composition classes, we have already taken strides towards addressing multimodality in composition. In Composition 101, we require students to integrate still images into their personal narratives. And in Composition 102, Blackboard allows us to easily integrate audio and video texts into our required reading lists. What I hope to do in future courses I teach is to further integrate multiple modes of composition into student assignments.

This semester, I've included multiple modes of texts for my students to read, requiring them to watch a film version of "There Will Come Soft Rains" and comparing how the medium of film presents the content of the short story in a completely different manner, how it allows the author to do things that the original author, Ray Bradbury, was not able to do in a purely textual medium. I've also included audio texts in my syllabus. When focusing on musicians as a discourse community and how they write about technology, I played for my students some examples of mash-ups, a form that Philip Gunderson describes as "the New Age of Composition." Allowing students to experience additional media beyond text gives them the chance to better comprehend what Gunderson means when he coins this term.

What I've yet to do is actually integrate multimodality into my students' assignments. One of the things I'm considering for next time I teach Composition 102 is the inclusion of a wiki page and possibly a Facebook page into class instruction. In addition to musicians, another discourse community that we focused on this semester is educators. We read an article about the uses of Myspace and Facebook, as well as another article about the use of technology in the classroom. I think it might be beneficial to help students understand these articles by experiencing firsthand how webpages such as Facebook or wiki pages can be useful in the classroom for allowing students and teachers to keep in touch and share multimedia resources.

Introducing multimodality into the Composition classroom is a gradual process. Many of the concerns Takayoshi and Selfe discuss in their article are apprehensions that I share. Preparing classroom syllabi and lessons is already a time consuming process, and attempting to integrate additional resources and technologies into the classroom will only add to the amount of time spent in preparation. Furthermore, merely deciding how to integrate these additional resources in a truly profitable manner is another challenge. Nevertheless, the instances in which I've introduced multimedia resources into the classroom have proven to be among the most rewarding for both the students and myself, and I would love to continue to do so in the future, and in particular I would like to devise ways to have the students participate in the creation of multimodal forms of composition rather than merely experiencing them.

Technology and the Accumulation of Literacy

In "Accumulating Literacy," Deborah Brandt discusses, among other things, "the enduring power of dominant classes to define language standards" and "[...] the emerging power of a highly educated, technocratic elite [...]" (659). In the story of Sam May, she describes how his literacy advanced through the years, and how it was affected, in particular, by new technologies such as radio and television. This narrative is relevant to our classrooms, because new technologies, particularly the internet, are having a profound impact on our students' abilities to acquire literacy. And while Brandt's claim that the dominant classes can use these new technologies to control literacy is interesting, it's also true that technology, particularly access or lack of access to it, can be used to limit literacy. This ability to control access to literacy promotes and protects an already established class structure by limiting upward mobility through education.

This aspect of Brandt's essay struck me as most interesting because this semester one of my students is an alumnus from the K-12 school at which I taught for several years in the early 00's. I taught this student in both seventh and eighth grade, and while he excelled among his peers, he's now struggling within my classroom. He told me that he's one of only three students from his graduating class that managed to make it into college. But one of the concerns he has expressed to me is an unfamiliarity with the technologies that play a role in college academics. This concern is especially relevant, since the theme of my course is technology. In particular, this student has struggled with Blackboard because he's relatively unfamiliar with internet usage and web browsers.

My student's lack of familiarity with web browsers and the internet represents how the limiting of the proliferation of technology can be used to maintain a regimented class system. In Tchula, Mississippi, where this student attended school, there was no widespread broadband access as recently as five years ago, when I taught there. While the school where I taught had internet access, it only worked sporadically, and very slowly when it did work. Almost none of my students had internet access at home; some of them didn't always have electricity. The fact that the internet has become such a crucial piece of educational technology in the classroom ensures that people and places with limited broadband access - primarily people from lower economic classes - will remain firmly placed in the social tier they currently inhabitant.

The fact that the student in question was able to escape Tchula and attend college at all suggests that the possibility to achieve literacy despite the limitation of technology still exists. However, now that the educational environment has become a technocracy, individuals who are not proficient with modern technology in general and the internet in particular will find themselves at a disadvantage when it comes to acquiring literacy in today's educational climate.

Someone Tell Me, Please, How Do I Make My Students Care?

In "Performing Writing, Performing Literacy," the authors discuss how performance can play a role in the writing process. In particular, they draw a distinction between writing done for the classroom and writing done for oneself. To elaborate on this distinction, they summarize I. A. Richards's notion of "inter-animation of words," which states that the meanings of words and text can shift depending not only on "their context within a sentence, but also [...] given their embodied context and their physical location in the world" (228). Context is all important in the creation of a text, as illustrated by the performative writings of Beth McGregor and Mark Otuteye, cited at the end of the essay. When students write texts outside of class - journal entries, notes for a debate, song lyrics, or what have you - they generally have more invested in the writing, and are less likely to see it as busy work. The challenge, then, for us as teachers is to make our assignments seem less like busy work and more like texts in which students should take a vested interest.

Merely turning classroom writing into an opportunity for performance art is not enough to achieve this task. We have given students opportunities both this semester and last to turn text into performance: group workshopping of assignments has an element of performance, as do the facilitation groups that students were required to take part in in English 101. In many instances, however, the performative element of these assignments did not make students any more interested than they normally would've been. As with any other assignment, they saw these things as hurdles they had to leap over in order to get the grade they wanted in class. In the worst instances, students became self-conscious, fumbled the ball in front of their peers, and ended up feeling embarrassed and humiliated.

The trick, then, is not merely to turn all writing assignments into performances, but to find some method of tying the assignments to the sort of writing (performative or personal) in which students are interested. This challenge is one that I'm currently facing in my classroom. In response to one of my decompression questions for paper 2, "What do you wish I as the instructor had more adequately explained in class," two students replied that they didn't see the point of the assignment, that it seemed to them like busy work and they weren't sure what I was expecting. My knee-jerk reaction was to place the onus on them: if they had such a relevant question, why did they not bother to ask it in class, after class, during office hours, or in an email? And while part of the responsibility for getting an answer to such a question is theirs, I'm also interested in figuring out how to convey to students the idea that the papers we have them write aren't just busy work. I've related to them in class the idea that learning how various discourse communities approach writing will help them understand how discourse communities they're a member of approach writing. I've related to them that critically analyzing the rhetorical choices that other writers make will help them make similar rhetorical choices in their own writing. But these things, of course, sound abstract at best to a freshman college student and ridiculous at worst.

While this essay raises some interesting ideas, I am still left with the question of how (and whether it would even be helpful) to integrate performance into the classroom in a way that is meaningful to students. And, perhaps more importantly, I'm always interested in finding ways to develop in my students a vested interest in completing their assignments beyond the authoritarian "You'll do it if you want to pass this class" or the abstract "In the future it'll help you analyze the texts you're actually interested in." If anyone has an answer, I'm all ears.

It's Past My Bedtime and I Still have to Read Two More Essays after this Response

The question I often find myself facing when grading papers is how much to say. in "Teachers' Rhetorical Comments on Student Papers," one of the things Robert Connors and Andrea Lunsford discuss is the amount of margin notes and end comments that teachers' make on their students' papers. In general, it seems they found that most margin notes are just one or a couple of words. And short comments of 10 words or less are far more prevalent than lengthy comments of 100 words or more. I've never actually gone through the trouble of counting the number of words in my comments, but I'm certain they consist of considerably more than 10 words. In fact, I think Connors and Lunsford would probably be impressed by the amount of (hopefully useful) commentary that I give students. But I've found that this sort of heightened scrutiny can be time consuming for the teacher and overwhelming for the student, and I wonder if I might be better served by limiting the amount of commentary I make.

Often I wonder if I'm doing my students a disservice by spending too much time analyzing every rhetorical (and often mechanical) aspect of their papers. First, from a practical standpoint I find myself spending far too long on each individual paper, to the point that it always takes me no less than ten days to grade the entire stack of my student papers, and that's devoting at least two or three hours a day to grading. I wonder if my end notes are too long. Last semester we were advised to limit the amount of writing we did at the end of the paper, but I always find that I want to address every aspect of the paper that I think students could focus on in their improvements. Partly this is a defense mechanism, what Connors and Lunsford would describe as justifying my grade, but also it's because I find it difficult to simply focus a student's attention on the one or two aspects of their paper that need the most work, which I think might be a more beneficial way of addressing what needs work in a paper.

In addition, I find myself concerned that in giving students the amount of feedback that I do I may be overwhelming them. Generally I address several recurring rhetorical issues in any given paper, sometimes as many as half a dozen, and I often wonder if it might be better to focus in on one or two aspects of the paper that could be improved. After all, a student can't be expected to reach perfection even necessarily over the course of one semester, and when presented with several issues all of which the student will feel compelled to focus on in the next paper, it may create a sense of paralysis, in which the student is focusing so hard on the issues I addressed in their previous paper that they can't even get any thoughts down on paper. This concern of mine does not arise arbitrarily; I mention it because it's a concern that I've experienced in my own academic courses.

So while Connors and Lunsford seem slightly complimentary of those teachers who make numerous lengthy margin notes and end comments, I wonder if we might be better served to err on the side of specificity when picking and choosing which aspects of any given paper are most problematic and should be focus on with greatest detail.

The Trouble with Textbooks. Or, Why Kathleen E. Welch is My New Favorite Person

As both a student and a teacher, I've had a love hate relationship with textbooks. In the past, as a student, I encountered teachers who relied to heavily on textbooks that had little to say or said it poorly (or both). As a teacher, I find that I have a difficult time balancing just how much or how little to use the textbook in my classroom. Kathleen Welch's assertion that the textbook often serves more as a tool for the teacher than for the student seems to fit my experiences in the composition classroom.

As a beginning composition teacher, I found myself relying too heavily on the textbooks, trying to go through every section of every chapter, even reading lengthy passages, essentially spending class time doing what students were supposed to do for homework. When this method predictably failed - students (and teacher) becoming bored and listless - I course corrected too far in the other direction, relying so little on the textbook that the students began to wonder what the purpose of even reading it was if we weren't going to go over anything in it. Through trial and error, I've learned that the information in the textbook is useless to the students unless they see it in practice alongside the discussion. And I think I've reached a comfortable balance regarding how much time to spend on the text, with the focus of each class being on student writing informed by what they've read.

One part of Welch's text that I found interesting was the discussion of excerpts. It seems to me - and maybe I'm just misinterpreting Welch's meaning here - that the Norton Field Guide is very much guilty of decontextualizing many of the excerpts it uses. I understand that there are the introductory and conclusion blurbs before and after the texts pointing out where they came from and what their purpose was. But often they seem to do a poor job of illustrating the actual "how" of how a text is written. For instance, in the "Analyzing a Text" chapter, Bullock excerpts a portion of William Safire's study of the Gettysburg Address to illustrate context and pattern analysis. It's a great example, and I was able to make use of it. But what might have been more useful, and based on her article I think Welsh would agree, is a step by step illustration of how a student writer creates a similar study. This is where I think Ballenger's book is, in many ways, a preferable text for the composition classroom. My students and I were able to examine the student texts included in The Curious Writer and find examples of what they did wrong and what they did right.

In any case, it's not the job of the textbook to teach, and if we rely on it as such, then we are doing ourselves and our students a disservice. The textbook is a tool, but the actual act of teaching has to be a hands on collaboration between student and teacher. And as Welsh asserts, a classroom in which student writing becomes the primary text is often more effective than a classroom that centers on a set of guidelines taught out of a textbook.

Static vs. Dynamic: A Response to Amy J. Devitt's "Generalizing About Genre"

In "Generalizing About Genre," Amy J. Devitt presents a traditional and a "new" conception of genre. She characterizes the conventional form of genre as "trivial," as "a classification system deriving from literary criticism that names types of texts according to their forms" (573-574). Her new conception of genre argues that genres arise in response to "situations that writers encounter repeatedly" (576). In other words, rather than a writer being forced to shoehorn his or her text into the form of a specific genre, the form is defined by the needs of the authors who choose (or find it necessary) to write in that genre. In effect, "writers [...] construct situation by constructing genre" (578). Devitt further points out that, this being the case, genres are subject to change as context changes, context including everything from surrounding environments, potential readers, previous texts, and societal pressures, among other things.

Devitt's new conception of genre seems to be more of a reversal than a complete reimagining of what genre means. In effect, she's flipped the traditional understanding of how genre and writer interact - writer must conform to genre's formal standards - by suggesting that the community of writers create a genre's formal standards based on the purposes they need that genre to serve. I don't know that such a reversal is as radical as Devitt seems to think it is. In fact, I think it's sort of understood by most experienced writers that the standards of any given genre were developed for pragmatic purposes at some point in the past. What is interesting about Devitt's reimagining of genre is the concept that these standards can be modified due to societal changes or the needs of readers or writers. In general, we (and our students) think of genres as a collection of static rather than dynamic standards, a set of rules that we must follow regardless of context.

In class, I stress to my students that while each genre has its own set of standards, these are always open to modification should the need arise to do so. For instance, while it is commonly taught that academic research papers should be strictly objective - even our Norton Field Guide stresses this belief - I would argue that complete objectivity is not only impossible, but also undesired. A student's biases will creep into the paper anyway, so if the opportunity arises, why should we not encourage them to put those biases to constructive uses that will support the thesis of their paper? Along similar lines, while first person is often discouraged in academic writing, I encourage my students to use it when it is appropriate. I would much rather see a student write "I would argue..." than "some would argue..." The "some" in the second clause is an abstract and unidentifiable term. Who are these "some" and why should I care what they argue? The student, on the other hand, I can assume to be somewhat knowledgeable on the subject about which they're writing, and so their argument will carry more weight than that of an abstract "some."

I've always thought of genres as a set of guidelines that are designed to be broken in creative ways rather than as a rigid set of rules that must be followed. That being the case, I found Devitt's new conception of genre not to be a radical reimagining, but nonetheless an informative reversal of traditional thinking on the subject.

Douglas Hesse begins his article, "Teachers as Students, Reflecting Resistance" with a pair of anecdotes. So in response, allow me to share my own anecdote regarding my personal experience with resistance in the post-graduate classroom.

My first semester as a grad student, I had to read an article by Mary Poovey concerning accounting practices in eighteenth century England. In class, I commented that I found the writing unnecessarily overwrought and actually counterproductive to the writer's ability to make any sort of salient argument. This was the first and last time that I railed against the discursive style used by modern academicians.

My resistance stemmed from my own frustration at how difficult a time I had making heads or tails of the article. As someone who prides themselves on their intelligence (as I'm sure we all do, or we wouldn't be pursuing post-graduate degrees), I was embarrassed at my inability to translate egghead to English. In retrospect, however, I understand that my failure to comprehend this article is something that every first-time reader of dense academic literature encounters. Over time, the category of articles that I consider dense and overwritten has shrunk. While I still don't always feel that the language used by academicians is as straightforward as it should be, I've come to accept the fact that this is the way things are and no amount of outcry on my part will change it. Therefore, if I can't change the system, then at least on this particular issue, I'll have to grudgingly conform. Overcoming this resistance is a natural process, and one our students must undergo as well.

One interesting suggestion that Dr. Walcher made regarding my proposed readings for English 102 is that I should pick an article on technology written by physicists or engineers, something full of jargon and terminology impossible for the layperson to understand. While this is a potentially risky move, I decided that I will give it a shot. My students already complain that the class text book is boring and often doesn't make any sense, so I'm a hundred percent certain that not a single one will finish the physics/engineering article I assign them, but having them attempt it will provide an interesting opportunity for discussion in class regarding who the article's audience is and whether it might be successful in conveying its intended meaning to that audience. In other words, I want to provide my students with the same opportunity I had as a newbie grad student: to understand that not all types of texts are intended to be understood by all people, and even the discourse that takes place within our own communities can incite a resistance in the reader that can only be overcome with practice.

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I've never blogged before, though I'm not entirely resistant to the idea. I haven't read the article yet, so I'll say something more when I have something more to say.