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.

Prompt: Respond to a peer's extended analysis.

For this week’s blog, I’ve responded to Will’s extended analysis and podcast, Prolific. Will’s first series of podcasts was dedicated to Victor Villanueva, who I’m familiar with as the author of Bootstraps but is a well-known figure in the field of composition and rhetoric. I sat across from Will while he planned out this podcast (and redesigned the Prolific logo a dozen times) so I’m excited to hear it come to fruition!

Will’s research on podcasts is apparent: the music is appropriate and catchy while not distracting. He maintains a casual tone despite highly academic content, perfecting that “reading without sounding like you’re reading” voice we discussed in class last week.

I particularly liked the audio overlays in podcasts 2 and 3 – Will leads in with an audio clip from Villanueva that brings in the topic of the episode. I will say that the opening clip for Podcast 3 was distracting for me as an audience; it fades out mid-sentence, leaving me wondering: Wait, was that last thing important? What did I miss? A few minutes into Podcast 3, he does speak back on the context and relevance of that quote, which I find really helpful. I’m not sure that all clips from Villanueva accompanied an explanation of their context. On the whole, the intermittent audio clips from Villanueva provide a helpful mental check, perhaps breaking up the podcast in a way that is difficult to do when doing a podcast solo. Many of my favorite podcasts are dependent on conversations between one or more hosts or the host and guests. While it’s unfortunately unlikely that Will would be able to interview any of his “prolific” subjects, he does suggest at the end of Podcast 3 that he’s considering bringing in other graduate students for future podcasts. I find it difficult to focus on audio without accompanied video, particularly when it’s one voice speaking – at some point, my brain zones out and wants to block out the monotony. (Not that your podcast was monotonous, Will; I’m just trying to speak to my particular form of learning and understanding!) A conversation would echo radio shows and other podcasts in its manner of orally shaking up the message.

Much of Podcast 1 is devoted to Villanueva’s publications and other “prolific” moments in the field. While Will rightly acknowledges that people in Tech Comm “love lists,” I don’t think this information translates well to a strictly audio medium. Instead, I might recommend reexamining the assignment (“The first segment should be background”) to interpret this as Villanueva’s personal and academic background – his life leading up to academics – rather than his background up to now (including publications). While his most noteworthy or relevant publications could be noted, I think the audience would find a narrative to be more engaging. Although I haven’t finished Bootstraps yet, sharing some of Villanueva’s struggles of diversity and education might give listeners a reason to care about this character (primarily appeals to pathos) beyond the texts he’s authored and published (primarily appeals to logos and ethos). Since Will acknowledges his audience as graduate students and other novices in the field, they might connect more strongly to the character of Villanueva the underdog than Villanueva the scholar.

Overall, I loved the podcast, and I’m excited to see where Will takes it next. (I volunteer to be part of a podcast conversation! (Although I have the voice of a child and I don’t think anyone wants to hear me.) Do Peter Elbow next! Or Carolyn Miller!