Don't Ask, Don't Tell

So I woke up early last Saturday (like 5:30 AM early) thinking about some pre-writing that I had read the day before. My mind was trying to make sense of the process that seemed to be represented in that work. The writers had gotten an assignment from me that asked them to imagine a project and outline how they would proceed and how they would use the reading and writing they had completed already. Most of them completed the assignment. (No complaints there.) But I finished the batch of pre writes uninspired. In only a few of them did I hear a writer using writing to figure out her or his path. In most cases, I heard a student fulfilling an assignment.

Maybe I’m the cause (I gave the assignment). Maybe the writers I’m working with don’t use writing to figure out what they are doing. Whatever is going on, I woke up anxious about the drafts that will come in next week. If these writers aren’t planning their work, what am I going to get? What can I offer in response to writing that is unplanned? What are the chances that a writer who doesn’t plan drafting will plan rewriting and revising? If there’s little planning and reflecting, how will the writers begin to write differently?

And when will I start sleeping better?

I guess what I’m working toward here is a concern about how my students see their work as writers and how they might. Early this term, this bunch read a piece by writing teacher Nancy Sommers; they encountered her claim that writers have to be their own sources have to “bring to bear” judgment and interpretation. The pre writes I read largely avoided that sort of commitment. I didn’t see many “connections” (another word Sommers uses) made between what writers wanted to do and what they had read.

Is it unreasonable to expect first-year college writing students to play the role of writer (and especially the role of academic research writer) with some seriousness? What is the cost of their choosing not to play? It is as if a lot of students in a first-year writing courses are willing to pay tuition and even to do the work (and concede that first-year writing courses are important): they are prepared to be student writers. But do they want to be writers and researchers, individuals who take on the obligation of making connections and offering their interpretations and judgments to others? Why might someone even want to do that?

And when will I start sleeping better?

Some Thoughts about Collaboration and Reflection

I’ve been doing a good bit of collaborative writing as of late (have to for a couple projects). Can’t say that I am enjoying it entirely. The give and take is fun, but waiting for other folks to “give” is not. Maybe I need to chill out, but I think I am seeing one reason, at least, why the student writers I work with groan a bit when I announce a group project. I’m a pretty good collaborator (at least I like to think so), but I am seeing the limit of my ability to work and play well with others.

My thinking goes something like this. I seem to take a farmer’s approach: I stay engaged as long as I see that a group is building meaningful capacity of one sort or another. That capacity need not, of course, be related to completing a particular task. My grandfather and I used to bullshit about any number of topics that had little to do with getting cows milked or hay bailed. We were building a relationship, taking joy in being together. That’s meaningful human capacity and was meaningful for us. It was worth the time. My grandfather had no interest in, say, knowing which clothes were fashionable (and I follow him here) or writing complex essays (he and I differ here). Investing time in such do involve building capacity but not, for Norm, meaningful capacity. Likewise, my grandfather refused to buy an all-wheel drive tractor with a cab and air conditioner. Such a piece of machinery offered tremendous capacity, but such capacity seemed to him not worth the cost.

Hmmm, so I begin to check out of a group if it has interests that seem not worthwhile or seem too costly. That makes sense to me, but brings me to ask for details. What is worthwhile and how do I know. This seems to me a question my students and I wrestle with. Take, for example, a roundtable assignment some just completed (quite nicely, I might add) or a proposal some just wrote (not quite as smashing). I’m not sure that all of them felt that these activities were worthwhile. I think what they were unsure of was the effort involved in synthesizing ideas, speculating about possible outcomes, and reviewing past effort. What I noticed was folks speaking extemporaneously or free writing. It felt like few had worked up notes (there were some exceptions) or paged through what they had done and free wrote about it before setting to the published project they were submitting or performing. The result were quite nice individual performances and sentences, but roundtables and proposals that were incompletely integrated and that did not really reveal what the performers/writers knew. The roundtables rarely named a central theme and stuck to it; members acknowledged each other but didn’t often get involved with what others said.

So I wonder why. Do I need to spell out even more clearly the value of synthesis, speculation, and reflection? Maybe. Is it unreasonable to ask U.S. students to value these intellectual disciplines? Maybe. If the later is the issue, I’m in trouble. I feel that these disciplines are central to being human (oddly, my farmer grandfather did too). I join groups to pursue these disciplines. I'm not sure that I work well with learners who are uninterested in making connections, imagining alternatives, and listening to others and themselves.

Do I need to?

Some Thoughts on Reading a Bunch of "Exploratory Essays"

So I just read a batch of “exploratory essays” that came in in my “Writing from Research” course. I’m popping quotation marks around some phrases here because I am interested in the exchange these students and I are having. I think that the exchange tells me something about school and something about the complexity of the ethics of rhetoric. I asked for “essays” within a genre that we defined in class at some length. The process is straightforward: develop a complex question, one for which you don’t have an answer. Then go and find sources and explore them in an attempt to see if you can find an answer. Here’s the way the “exploratory essay” we all talked about develops: you summarize (in a generous way that respects the context of the source) what is new in a new source of information; you do some analysis of what you summarized to try to understand what the source offers; you reflect on how the source has expanded your thinking and brought forward your exploration of that initial question.

My students are smart; they read well and write with clarity. All in all, this was a pretty successful batch of drafts. What interested me in this batch of papers (notice the shift in terms here) was a kind of resistance to a new genre. I don’t want to rant here but I might a little. Just trying to figure this college composition thing out.

About half of the papers did what came naturally to the writer: they argued a thesis with now apparent intent to open the writer up the information from sources. Others offered a report, sort of repeating what Wikipedia or some other (sometimes more focused) sources offered. A few tried out the exploratory form but made pretty uneven use of paragraphs. Rather than using blocks of text to make the moves of summary, analysis, and reflection cohere, they sort of just wrote (I read several two-page paragraphs). It was as though the tool on offer (the “exploratory essay”) was either too foreign or too much labor or not adequately understood or something. Maybe it is that in an academic world dominated by the five-paragraph essays, it’s hard for a school writer to imagine paragraphs serving other purposes, hard for them to see the paragraph as a tool for thinking rather than a teacher’s metric.

This resistance showed in two other ways as well. First, writers struggled to link the sources they were working with. I kept scribbling the same idea in the margins: “maybe in a revision use a content-based transition.” As I read, I could see, “oh, this source got you thinking about this and the logic you are not naming is that knowing this, you next need to know that.” What I wondered is why that was visible to me and not to the writer. Hmmm, the answer to that is kind of obvious to me now. I had the opportunity of reading a complete draft; many of the writers may not have taken up that opportunity.

The second resistance is more interesting to me. As a writing teacher, I have begun to use over and over the phrase “frame this source reference.” My meaning is not especially novel at one level. I mean use what Diana Hacker calls a signal phrase that announces the source; I mean integrate some thoughtful paraphrase or summary and quote selectively; I mean “connect” (a verb Nancy Sommers plays with) the ideas you draw from a source to the purpose you are achieving within your paragraph and bring your judgment and interpretation to bear on what you’ve borrowed. Nothing new here. Writers’ resistance to “framing” is, I think, also not especially novel. To “frame” naturally, I have to be comfortable in open conversations, conversations where my assumption is that others have as much (or more likely more) to say than I do. I have to be ready to be generous as a listener/reader and also as a speaker/writer. U.S. citizens, on my observation, are not comfortable in such conversations. So many of us are puzzled by the humility that “framing” requires. It’s not natural; we don’t do it.

One final resistance that leaps to mind. Wikipedia. I’m inclined to include the acronym WTF here. I know about Wikipedia; I use it when I don’t have enough time to find a better treatment of a topic or when I just need some dates. It’s a beautiful tool, but it’s an ENCYCLOPEDIA. Actually, it’s likely closer to either a dictionary or a blog. It’s not, finally, a researchers conversation partner. The papers I read had some intense conversations with Wikipedia entries. Cool. Not enough. I want conversations with the sources that Wikipedia authors read. This resistance is driven, I think, by time. If a writer hasn’t given herself enough time to read, reflect on, make notes on, and then work with a 15-page essay or article, she goes to Wikipedia. It makes sense. Sadly, it probably also terminates serious exploration, at the least it leads her to write in generalities that make exploration less likely.

So I had a fun read, wrote lots of comments. But I’m talking with my friends about why U.S. citizens are so resistant to intellectual exploration. Is it in the water? I suppose Mark Edmundson’s grouchy 1997 critique of consumer students offers some limited insight. Makes me sad, makes me think many of my students will miss out on the joy of a college education, makes me really really worried about my fellow voters.

Midterm Reflections

So I'm rereading this stuff and noticing that I'm not writing very concretely about class. Look for that in the coming posts. I'm also going to try to get visual and hypertextual. These are big aims for me. I have several degrees in English and all of them were done before 1995. I get into books, books without pictures largely. Not saying this taste of mine is somehow superior, but it is mine:)

Teaching and Learning

I was recently at a retreat with a bunch of community college faculty from around the state of Washington. I find these sorts of meetings both exhilarating and exhausting. We stay up too late but have conversations about what learning might involve. As I listened to others, spoke my own mind, made a presentation, I saw something about learning that I don’t attend to often enough. Tom Drummond over at North Seattle Community College has been riffing on this theme for a while (maybe 20 years); I’ve been scribbling it in the margins of student papers for at least 10 years: SLOW DOWN!

I think that we all hope that teachers will come up with some magic strategy that makes learners see what they will need to know and do and how to comprehend and act. Anyone who has taught a while knows that the magic happens from time to time but rarely because a teacher “knows,” at least consciously. It happens because the teacher has slowed down a setting at a moment when a learner is ready to look again at what she or he is up to and to say, “Oh!” The knowledge is always already out there (the teacher learned it somewhere, and the Net makes what the teacher knows as close as a Tully’s). The skills are a matter of practicing substeps even if they are boring and hard. What is magic is the opportunity to look at what’s been said or tried and to own that look. Such an act requires the normal time-space flow to SLOW DOWN so that a learner can still see what’s happening but doesn’t have to do or learn the next thing just yet.

Why is such an act so rare, I wonder? As a writer, I can dig a poem out of my journal almost every time if I take time. Why don’t I do this very often? Other things to do? Not sure that this sort of reflection earns me much money (indeed, it may be costly)? Lack of confidence? Perhaps if we stop and look at what we have done in an effort to understand and complete that action or thought, we will discover that more effort is needed, that we will have to stop watching TV if we hope to achieve what we value. Were we to slow down, we might wonder whether we need an iPod or a mobile phone or whether we can really afford them.

Seem to be sounding a bit Wendell Berryish here. Not sure that’s a bad thing.

Reflection on Some Stray Rhetoric

Last month, I heard a story on the radio this morning about a raid on the Iranian consulate in the mainly Kurdish city of Erbil in northern Iraq. As I followed up this piece in the New York Times, I found this:

Today, Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, said in a news conference in Washington that the United States would act to defend American troops from attackers in Iraq, regardless of the nationality of the attackers.

He said that “with regard to those who are physically present trying to do harm to our troops, regardless of nationality, we will go after them and defend ourselves.”

What fascinates and saddens me is a violation of citizenship that will likely spawn more violence. The “we” Pace refers to are U.S. nationals (mostly) in Iraq (another nation) after an invasion prompted by the defense of U.S. national interests. The U.S. forces have become taken on a role that is interestingly nationless. The raid was done without informing local leaders and with U.S. hardware. The U.S. forces are acting in their own interest of survival, but their interest, in this instance, seems not to support the interests of the groups who have to live long-term in the space (at least the physical space) in which they are acting. The men and women serving the U.S. in this space cannot act as citizens, cannot come into conversation, cannot win (unless winning is defined as enslavement or genocide). Condoleezza Rice and General Pace may decide that this is the only way to respond to the situation; they may be accurate in this judgment. But they are surely promoting a sort of agency that can guarantee no one’s security, particularly not that of the world’s vulnerable. Moments like this make talk about a U.S. “victory” in Iraq more and more out of alignment with any notion of the success of a democratic people.

What does this have to do with writing students? Guess the sort of writer that I want to be and to work with makes note of these sorts of contradictions and tries to make them productive.