Prompt: What is/are the most significant thing/s that you learned which you plan to use in some way in the future?

Key Words

As someone who’s bad with names and dates (“Have I read so-and-so? I don’t know, maybe; what did they say?”), I really valued the way we emphasized the significance of composition scholars who have made major contributions to the field. I’d heard many of the names before in my classical rhetoric and professional writing courses as an undergraduate, but I felt disconnected from those individuals. I often remembered texts not on the value of the work or the prolificity of the scholar, but by playing memory games. I still think of Robin Williams’ Non-Designer’s Design Book as some secret life of the late Robin Williams, actor. Somehow I struggle to retain information about Carolyn Miller and Peter Elbow, but if they’re distantly tied to the genie in Aladdin, they stay.

This semester, however, I’m starting to feel a connection to the community that I didn’t feel before. Don’t get me wrong – I still don’t feel like I’m on the inside, but I’m at least on the same island, probably hanging out around the barbed wire fence until I show that I’m worthy to be granted admittance. Names like “James Berlin” and “Richard Fulkerson” and “Ken Macrorie” aren’t abstract ideas but scholars with significant and individual contributions to Rhet/Comp. I now see a direct connection between terms like “Open Admissions” and “authentic voice” to the ways Composition has been reconsidered and reimagined. I know that the names “Mina Shaughnessy” and “Peter Elbow” and “Jacklynn Royster” are related to these terms (and I could actually tell you how!). I finished up the key words final today and – along with my excitement to use hashtags on a final – I was excited to rattle off key terms in Composition without the crutch of mnemonic devices. I intend to use this foundational knowledge to inform my future essays and class discussions, not only as a student but as a teacher next year. I don’t ever expect to have all the answers, but now I’m confident that I have some.

Theories for Multimodal Composing

Our discussions of post-process pedagogy heavily influenced the work I did this semester. My extended analysis was informed by research of Iowa State University’s ISUComm, a rebranded, multimodal approach to the teaching of First Year Writing. I was excited to see that not only are these assignments possible, but that they’re being done already. There are students who are learning about composing THIS SEMESTER as something more nuanced and significant than the traditional text compositions we were often taught as the foundation of Composition. My research for the final paper compounded this, and I began to consider what I’d already understood as true to be a legitimate approach to teaching writing: the most effective way to compose for a given audience is not always in the form of a written (text-only) argument. While I know my hands are a bit tied for the assignments my students will have to complete next year, I fully intend on bringing Youtube videos, images, memes, and all manner of rhetorical artifacts into the classroom so that my students understand composing from several angles and in several media. I want them to see other semiotic elements – audio, visual, oral, gestural – not as secondary to text, but as wholly foundational to theories of composing and rhetorical analysis.

Prompt: Write to Write; or, Aubrey makes a lot of lists.

Sorry I'm late with this post, all. The stress of the first draft caught up with me, along with strep throat. After a full day of rest, some amoxicillin, and the first episode of Jessica Jones, I'm back in action!

Working through my ideas for my article led me to realize that I still don't have my writing process down. I can't really remember how I wrote papers in undergrad, but I've always made lists, and this paper was no exception.

It started with a smaller "list" - an outline of about 400 words. That list grew into about 1000 words; I split my imagined paper into sections with headers, asked research questions, typed in authors and articles and quotes that seemed to answer them, or at least get at an answer. Out of this list grew another: potential sources. This separate list includes sources by name, article title, and year, with quotes I intend to use in some way pasted underneath. This list has grown to 2500 words plus - a combination of quotes and ideas I want to clarify when discussing those articles. Several of the sources I'm using are from articles we read for class, so I consulted my reading notes I've compiled throughout the semester. You guessed it: more lists, organized in hierarchical side notes and important quotations. At the top of my sources list is another list - books I'd like to review as additional sources if I can get my hands on them in time. (I'll paste this list below in case any of you kind souls can send these my way.)

So as I sat to write up my paper, I consulted my lists. I reviewed lists of articles - bibliographies. My outline grew larger, as did my source list. I realized that I feel completely unprepared to adhere to the expressivist "just start writing" technique; I only feel comfortable writing once I already know exactly what I'll have to say. To just start writing means to potentially write things that are "wrong" - things that may be scrapped entirely later.

"But Aubrey," you may say, "You're writing about post-process pedagogy! 'Writing is an act of discovery' and all that."

And I don't disagree. How could I? Of course writing is discovery, and of course I would learn something more about my paper through the act of trying to write it - a bit of fake it til you make it. I'm writing about post-process pedagogy in relation to multimodality, but also identity and authentic voice and audience. To draft ideas by freewrite would be to reject the way that my brain processes information - to an extent, to deny my identity as a developing writer. I thought about ways that we legitimize (sometimes) hastily written text in essay form but struggle to find validity in other ways of expressing a move toward knowledge. What if I'd used sketches to fill in the current gaps in my paper? Ultimately, I included a narrative to make some sense out of my outline - and to an extent, to justify my thoughts as having a legitimate process.

I absolutely won't deny that I felt I should have more to give. If my outline is such a crucial prerequisite to my writing, I should have nailed that down and delivered at least half of my final article. I should have done better. I thought about Rich's encouragement to "finish strong" and wondered if at the end of the semester I'll feel validated as a writer or an imposter. Reenergized or exhausted. (Some of that may have been the strep talking.)

I hope that this semester forces me to develop my individual writing processes and become more confident in the legitimacy of my own writing. For now, I'll keep on keeping on. Two more weeks, guys! We can do this.

Prompt: What is the thesis to your article for this course?

The texts that interested me most throughout our course are those related to post-process pedagogy and the push for multimodality in the classroom. For my extended analysis, I research Iowa State University's first year composition program, ISUComm, and their WOVE (Written, Oral, Verbal, Electronic) pedagogy that guides their writing coursework. I was especially excited to see that there are first year writing programs embracing multimodal communication as a legitimate form of communication on its own, not necessarily accompanied by a reflective or expository text that justifies it. (Discussions of Yancey and Breuch might be relevant here, as well as a brief discussion of that paradigm shift - Kuhn and Selfe.)

Despite this seeming embrace of multimodal pedagogy, composition scholarship still often reflects the values of a more traditional, perhaps solely process pedagogy. The vast majority of composition scholarship remains purely written, with the occasional image or graph. Scholarship has made a move toward multimodality in the form of web texts and podcasts, for example, but that move has been slow in the face of more traditional work. How do we measure "successful" scholarship? Are multimodal forms of scholarship given a legitimate space in the field of rhetoric and composition? Are they treated with the same sense of legitimacy as written texts? This may lead to a discussion of how we might legitimize these texts and theorizing of the future of multimodal scholarship.

I'm still tossing around specifics, but for my final paper, I'd like to examine the significance (or lack) of multimodal composition scholarship, particularly in light of an increasingly multimodal approach to writing instruction. I'm thinking particularly of web texts, although I'll bring in other forms as necessary. (Some examples of web texts: The New Work of Composing, Digital Mirrors, Techne, ConJob. An examination of texts published in Kairos may also be helpful.)

Prompt: Review the learning objectives for this course. What's one thing you've learned that connects to an objective and to your future job?

This week’s prompt draws from the learning objectives in the syllabus: audience awareness, critical thinking, diversity and multiculturalism, grammatical information presentation, stylistic information presentation, and communication skills. Although I think – hope – that I could speak to each of these learning objectives in relation to my own knowledge and the assignments completed, I’m struggling with my response this week. One thing I’ve learned? But I’ve learned so much! (And yet still feel entirely self conscious speaking to that knowledge.) My future job? Uh…well I…I thought I knew. Perhaps the reason I’m struggling to connect an objective to my knowledge and a future job is that the things I’ve learned have left me questioning my next step.

Since undergrad – perhaps earlier – I’ve had my eyes set on The Job. The Job shifts with my understanding of work (who even knew technical writers existed as a freshman?) but a practical component has always remained. I always go by Aubrey – not Dr., not Ms., not Madam – and Aubrey sits in a cutesy office typing up communication documents or editing manuscripts and goes home to her one (maybe two) miniature dachshunds. This idea of The Job hasn’t completely dissipated; I’m only in school for my MA. I haven’t locked in to anything! Nothing has changed! Right?

But if that’s so: Why did I have an hour-long conversation about authentic voice(s) yesterday? (On a Saturday, no less!) Why do I stress over the feedback that students receive (from me and others), forever searching for that perfect balance that allows them to express their own authentic voices, while ensuring they know they haven’t yet “mastered” the grammar of Standard English, while providing enough commentary not to overwhelm them? Why do I initiate (or at least engage) potentially controversial and complex issues of cultural appropriation and academic expertise?

Perhaps the answer is: Aubrey, you’re in grad school. These conversations happen (and besides, you were never good at keeping your mouth shut).

Whatever the explanation, I find the things I’m learning in this course and others – the critical discussions I’m engaged in – to be contradicting my knowledge of self. I laugh off a PhD remark and go home to research Writing Centers. I spend a few hours on a brief report and an entire day on ten student papers. Is this what grad school does to you? (PhD students unanimously respond, “Yes” – or so I suspect.)

To wrap it up: I’m struggling to identify one thing I’ve learned because everything I’ve learned is tied into knots. (Have you ever traveled with necklaces and tried to untangle the knots that result? It’s a struggle. Trust me.) I’m struggling to connect my learning to a future job because my idea of The Job has changed more in the last two months than the last four years. This is where I haphazardly connect these ideas to a learning objective: critical thinking. According to the syllabus, “Students will become more conscious of their processes for planning, drafting, revising, and editing of writing.” I’m not entirely sure that I’ve become more conscious of my own processes – but I’m certainly considering them in new ways.

Prompt: Identify where you think students may fail in an assignment in your syllabus, and how you will use that at a teachable moment by design.

One of my syllabus assignments is adapted from Chen’s Editorial assignment he posted in his blog (LINK). My adapted assignment has three parts: a written Op-Ed adapted to two different papers, a reflective blog post, and a brief presentation. Part 1 of this assignment reads as follows in my syllabus (although I’ll expand on this in class):

You will identify a community issue or topic and write an Op-Ed piece to submit to two different publications: the school newspaper and a local newspaper. (I am flexible on this; if there is another paper you’d like to write to, discuss it with me.) Your written Op-ed should follow the guidelines established by each paper and consider the audience and gatekeepers associated with each. Your two Op-Eds should NOT be identical.

I anticipate that students may struggle to adapt their Op-Ed to two different sources. Some pieces of this are obvious – different word count, perhaps different rules for grammar and syntax – but I think writing to two separate audiences will be tricky. Most likely, these students are used to writing for one audience: their teacher. This assignment requires a level of rhetorical awareness within their own writing and an awareness of the audience of each institution. When designing my syllabus, I considered what I want my students to learn about through the struggles of their Op-Eds:

·       Audience awareness - based on significant research of each institution (community and school newspaper), students must choose a topic that can be adapted to either audience

·       Gatekeepers – different from the primary audience but necessary to appease in order to reach that audience

·       Rhetorical choices within their own writing – applying audience awareness in both choosing a topic and expressing an opinion on that topic in a way that appeals to that audience

·       Journalistic writing – as opposed to academic writing

In a sense, I’m setting my students up to “fail” in this assignment when they submit to each publication and are not all accepted. It’s cliché, but it’s a teaching moment – it will give us an opportunity to review why those submissions weren’t accepted and to revise their submissions accordingly for a chance at publication. Add “Revision” to the above list!

What do y’all think? Is it a good idea to include an assignment that encourages failure? Perhaps I would revise this assignment to include online publications (which I’m only now considering) – more students will have a chance to be published if they’re submitting to different papers. I really like that this assignment allows us to have conversations as a class about audience, gatekeepers, and the “medium is the message” (print versus digital pubs). As-is, this assignment comes before their rhetorical analysis, so I’m hoping that this assignment naturally leads into analyzing audience and purpose in others’ writing. (Perhaps an informal peer critique of the Op-Eds?) So many ideas for a class I don’t even have!

Prompt: List 5 terms you don't quite know yet how to define from our final keywords list.

All semester we've been engaging with unfamiliar terms in the world of comp/rhet. Here's a few I still don't know how to define. And I think it's worth noting - I'm just as interested in what you recall that we've discussed SURROUNDING these terms in class as I am a definition of them:

1. Intertextuality
Google tells me this is the relationship between texts.

2. Knowledge

3. Social construction

4. Style
How do y'all define style? Is it related to voice?

5. Self/Subject


Leah (H.) was kind enough to make a Google Doc that we've been contributing to throughout the semester. Rich has also linked it in the top of his syllabus. For those of you who haven't yet, please contribute to the Google Doc! We need all of your brilliance to fill in these terms.

Google Doc Link

Prompt: What is one assignment you will include in your syllabus assignment that uses collaboration and/or technology and/or other things Yancey, Selfe, Breuch, Bruffee, or Shaughnessey have discussed?

In light of the Kastman Breuch article on post-process pedagogy we read this week and my presentation on Iowa State University’s ISUComm on Wednesday, I want to take this week’s blog to reflect on how we might engage with post-process theories of writing in our first year composition courses.

For those of you who weren’t in class Wednesday, the first year composition program at Iowa State University (ISU) is called ISUComm. Their curriculum revolves around WOVE – Written, Oral, Verbal, Electronic – forms of communication and contains appropriately multimodal assignments. The curriculum is broken up into English 150, taken sometime the first year, and English 250, taken sometime the second year. In addition, students take writing intensive courses throughout their undergraduate coursework, including those courses within their major. English 150 and 250 assignments include: describing an ISU campus place, investigating a campus organization and writing a profile, a visual analysis of a campus building or piece of art, repurposing one of these assignments into a brochure or poster, and tying everything together into a portfolio for a final reflection and assessment.

I’m fond of these assignments as a jumping point (or perhaps “diving” point?) because they encourage students to see communication beyond writing: there is a purpose and an audience in the writing of a paper and in the design of a building and in the creation of a sculpture. It also allows them to apply this knowledge: create a visual document that demonstrates an understanding of this artifact and your own audience and purpose. To me, the most significant of these documents is the portfolio.

Perhaps I’m biased. I created/revised a portfolio for at least three courses as an undergraduate, a portfolio for each job application after graduation, and a portfolio for each graduate program application. One potential graduate program specifically requested my application materials as separate Word documents, so I submitted them as such…in addition to my electronic portfolio. I didn’t just want to hand over my documents to be read in any order with any assumptions of intention; instead, I wanted my application to be read as a narrative, leading reviewers through my materials with brief reflections to situate these documents.

As Breuch says, writing is 1) public, 2) interpretive, and 3) situated. I think that the kind of reflection, intention, and audience awareness that goes into the creation of a portfolio emphasizes all of these post-process features of writing. Weaving together a portfolio not only encourages students to see how they’ve improved as writers, but it allows them to apply newfound knowledge of audience and purpose. Portfolios remind us that writing is public, as these once-private documents go on display; interpretive, as you must guide your reader through an understanding of them in your reflections; and situated, as not each document is appropriate for every portfolio and every purpose. Contemporary portfolios are almost always electronic and therefore necessarily technological. Critically engaged students will design a portfolio with an understanding of at least written, visual, and electronic communication.

Sidenote

I haven’t chosen to discuss it for this blog post, but when I was president of a technical writing student organization and we were holding a call for a social media blogger, we gave only one guideline: It must be one page. From there, you decide what kind of document will best represent your skills. Most submitted one page resumes – good resumes, but not the most creative approach to the task. The person we selected created a one page document that mimicked a social media profile and integrated her qualifications onto the page. I’d love to see what students would do with an open-ended assignment like that.

Approaching Student Error

Last week we read Peter Elbow’s “Inviting the Mother Tongue” and Joseph Williams’ “Phenomenology of Error.” Since my primary interaction with students this year is through grading assignments, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to produce effective and influential feedback in response to student “error,” especially as an inspiration for revision and “re-envision.” How do I naturally approach student error, and how should I be approaching it? What kind of feedback is most useful for the types of assignments I’m grading? Should I be prompting the student to think more deeply about a subject, or giving them the “right answer” so they’ll be correct the next time?

How do I define student error?

I took David Ryan’s survey measuring “comfort level” in relation to error that Dr. Rice forwarded. I found that out of roughly 20 questions on common grammatical errors, over half “bothered [me] a lot” and the remaining “bothered [me] a little.” I’m a stickler for punctuation in formal settings. Misused apostrophes don’t go unnoticed, comma splices I can be flexible on. (See what I did there?) In this week’s grading, however, I marked few of these errors – despite being “at least a little” or “a lot” bothered – and focused on revising content.

How do I approach student error?

Over the course of the semester, I’ve had a few students leave writing concerns specifically requesting “good feedback” so they can “fix all the problems.” I often respond to these concerns within their assignment feedback, letting them know that while I’ll point out frequent grammatical errors, my intent is to guide the content of their writing rather than the form. For example, I’ll only correct an author’s last name once by providing the proper name, but I’ll leave multiple questions throughout the text that encourage the student to identify the proper audience. (“Where was this essay originally published? Does the author use any inclusive language that clues you in to a group that he’s speaking to? Who might this argument be trying to persuade? Who would it effectively persuade?”)

How should I be approaching student error?

Last week Peter Elbow invited us to accept the “mother tongue.” On this note I feel [mostly] unconflicted: dialect can be appropriate in specific rhetorical contexts, and we should alert our students to those contexts, especially as it relates to authorial credibility. In the case of the student assignments that I’m grading, they are all aiming at an academic level of writing (with some suffering from what Ken Macrorie called “Engfish,” the loss of authentic voice in the attempt to mimic academic discourse). So how do I respond to deviations from Standard English (the academic staple) or wholly incorrect student assumptions of key points like audience and purpose?

I don’t have the space (or the experience) to respond to each of my questions here, but as a last note I can outline my current approach to grading composition papers. As I’ve said, I focus on content rather than form. But perhaps more important is the mindset I invoke: behind each of these papers is a student with their own set of ambitions and struggles. I can only grade them on my perceived value of their work. And even that work that is fraught with error – the perceived less valuable work – doesn’t necessarily reflect a lack of effort or a negative mindset. In this arena, we are the experts and the authorities, and grading feedback is a powerful tool to wield – with all the responsibility that that implies.