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.