When asked how long they spend reviewing job applications, 55% of hiring managers (n=2654, ±2% MoE) said less than two minutes:

Respondents who self-identified as HR managers (n=218, ±6.5% MoE) were even more speedy. Almost half less spend less than minute, and a quarter between one and two, meaning 72% of HR managers take less than two minutes for initial screening:

So job applications (résumés + other documents) are likely to get more than 30 seconds of attention–but not much more. (Thanks to Ryan Hunt at CareerBuilder for sharing these data.)

Since I’m teaching technical communication this semester and next, reading job applications is on my mind in other ways. Like quite a few textbooks, our program’s book starts out by using job application materials to model core concepts (Anderson, Tech Comm 7/e, centered around usability and persuasiveness). The syllabus framework my colleagues and I share begins with this assignment. So I read quite a few job applications this semester, though I certainly spent more than two minutes on each one. (Sometimes a lot more.) As in previous semesters, I had a pretty high drop rate the first four weeks, and some palpable dissatisfaction among students who didn’t drop the course. Quite a few students submitted draft job materials which would fail the two-minute test. There were three classes of problems:

1. Some students simply underestimated the amount of work needed to do work which meets my standards for quality, or tried to get by with generic materials not really tailored to a job description. (Of course, this can happen in any class, on any assignment.)
2. For many students, education is what happens the classroom, and work experience is limited to service work. This leaves them very little to insert into customary résumé categories other than “Education,” and very little to say about experience and abilities in cover letters.
3. They struggled to understand the job ads. Becoming fluent in disciplinary genres requires extensive knowledge of content, and too many students are simply unable to productively read job descriptions in their fields. Both lack of experience and lack of content knowledge play a part.

I’ve talked about the connections of genre and disciplinary knowledge in class. To see struggling students learning this lesson on the fly isn’t pretty: for example, having no way to write cover letters besides copying examples from the textbook nearly word for word, changing a few nouns here and there to keywords drawn from their field. For seniors, this is a bitter pill to swallow. And it should be for us: in these too-blank pages, we can see that students have realized that substituting academic faux-languages like “research paper” or “English essay” won’t replace the languages of magazine design, or sustainable energy, or broadcasting, to name a few of the majors I’m working with. On the one hand, this is good news: students know they need to learn more. But on the other hand, it points out our classroom practice is still problematic. When will we make the same realizations our students have? It’s downright unpleasant to see seniors struggle to connect what they have learned in their four (or five) years at the university with the languages and forms of their fields. It’s painful for them, and it should be painful for us.

With this in mind, I am eager to continue moving away from these mutt genres and finding ways to help students connect the work we can do with real genres to their classroom experiences. That’s no sure fix, but it’s a step forward. For sophomores and juniors, at least, there are possibilities. Reading collections of job advertisements can be used to map futures: the language of job advertisements we read together, now nearly foreign to students, suggests their do-lists for the next few years. I’ve asked students to speak with their advisors and professors to identify activities, internships, and other things outside the classroom which will help them learn the way their disciplines work. I’ve explained the connections between learning content, genres, and the languages of professions. This has been confusing and challenging for students, and often works better one-on-one than in class. Regardless, I want to continue thinking about ways to seeing fewer blank pages from students about to leave the university, and I hope my work with transfer and writing in the major will help.

Right away, I’m wondering about notology: how much time we’ll devote to what not to do. There are lovely visualizations out there, but a lot of noise competing with the signal. Too many “infographics” would be better rendered as simple text with an occasional chart or graphic, rather than a gigantic graphic. Here’s an example, “Securing yourself from a world of hackers,” 1000 pixels wide and 3172 pixels tall. Another, “Profile of Mac vs PC,” is 947 × 3693. Both graphics approach interesting subject matter: password security is particularly welcome, and the Mac vs PC comparisons are funny. But execution is poor. Form seems the starting point, not content. (“Infographics are hot hot hot. Go get me one.”) Worse, I see plenty of of questionable how-tos high in Google search results. Again, I welcome suggestions for high quality sites.

I’m considering opening week work which features a few graphics, discusses their high and low points, and makes clear that visualization is not just prettying up (poor quality) content. Tying these activities to course objectives would set a clear path for the semester. For example, content in this password security graphic is weak:

• The headline “Securing yourself from a world of hackers” is alarmist and misleading. Any security professional will say “securing yourself” is impossible. Reducing risk? That’s possible. Unfortunately, bad content carries through to “How to create the perfect password”–no. There can be no perfect password; no security mechanism is perfect. The copy promises something which can’t be delivered. From a security firm, this is disappointing.
• The method for password generation and memorization is questionable. Try the mnemonic recommended here: it’s cumbersome at best. They generate ?LACpAs56IKMs” with five steps. Who can remember this? How is it more secure than other common methods of creating pseudo-complex passwords? If, as they recommend, it’s okay to write down passwords, why not just use randomly generated character strings? And it’s incomplete: they recommend testing passwords, but don’t say how.
• The authors call on a few sources (Schneier) but cite irregularly, truncating citations to base URLs or not including them at all. The graphic mentions NASA guidelines but there’s no mention of NASA in the sources. Not a good example for academic writing!
• Writing style is wordy and inconsistent. Some bullets use second person; some use third person. (“It is okay to write passwords down so they can be remembered” not “You can write down your passwords” or “Writing down your passwords is okay.”). Copy needs revision to bring characters and actions forward.

Etc. This maps to an objective about enhancing high-quality content through careful representation of data. Similar critiques could be targeted at others: effective design, knowing common visualization approaches, and familiarity with common visualization tools. (I guess it’s time to build out those objectives, eh?)

What “good” graphics should I include? Tufte’s well-known favorite, Minard’s rendering of Napoleon’s march? Staying meta, David McCandless’s What Makes Good Information Design? would be a good pick. I like both, but I think I also need some tables. Sometimes, tables are just better. A course in visualization which taught students how to make accessible, effective, well-designed tables would provide a very useful and transferable skill.

In October 2010, not long after I committed to retooling, I approached Neil to see if he wanted to collaborate to study transfer, since I knew from our research group he had experience with qualitative research. Like me, he was interested in the transfer research of Elizabeth Wardle and other scholars, and agreed that our writing program needed to better understand transfer student needs and other changes reverberating from WIU’s adoption of the “2+2″ model. I outlined the work I imagined doing to Neil, shared the Dartmouth Seminar application, and suggested we apply for a University Research Council (URC) grant as well. This is WIU’s featured internal grant, up to $5,000 “intended to promote research or its scholarly equivalent in appropriate fields by providing ‘seed’ money for the initiation of new projects.” We began meeting regularly in November, sharing readings in writing transfer, methodology, and working on the grant application as a way to begin designing a study. As Neil and I talked, we realized our long term research interests shared a key commonality:

• I was refocusing on ease, the array of specific practices which favor simplicity and transparency over complexity and difficulty, and discovering strong correspondences between qualities discouraged by ease yet conducive to transfer.
• Neil had long studied the negotiation of writerly identity which occurs when writers learn the particular worldviews, genres, and tools associated with the communities in which they seek membership. Imagined as conflict, this negotiation could hinder transfer.

That is, we realized both ease and negotiation might operate as barriers to transfer, and we could shape our study around this concept and the institutional needs we agreed were most pressing. Thinking big, and with some previous studies we liked in mind, we begin imagining a multi-year project which sought to collect data from multiple sources, answering the oft-discussed difficulties of studying transfer: surveys, interviews with faculty and students, and case studies which included analysis of student writing. Piloting the research would begin in 2011-12, most of the work would take place in 2012-15. We named the project “Transfer @ Transfer,” since our target is writing transfer in the upper division, and it’s a given at Western that includes many transfer students. By December 15, we had our application to the Dartmouth Seminar ready to go, and we were thrilled to see our acceptance in early January. At the time, these were our research questions:

1. What successes and failures do students have as they move from writing in general education courses to writing in their majors?
2. What strategies do students use to transfer writing skills and knowledge from writing in general education to writing in the major? Baird: how do students negotiate rhetorical and ideological conflicts between two or more activity systems? Dilger: does ease (making easy as a strategy for mitigating complexity and difficulty) play a role?
3. What differences in transfer of writing skills and knowledge, if any, exist between students who satisfy writing requirements at two-year and for-profit colleges, and those who do so at WIU?

In January, Neil and I began writing the URC grant. We began to articulate our research design more explicitly: we sought to collect data which would allow us to understand the activity systems involved in transfer. For this reason, we imagined a three-stage research design: surveys designed to generate preliminary data and help us recruit students and faculty for more in-depth interviews and case studies. We planned to interview faculty and students at WIU and area community colleges which send large numbers of transfer students to WIU, followed by case studies of students at WIU and perhaps community colleges as well. Given the many different student and faculty demographics in which we were interested, we thought a fairly large number of participants would be required to be able to effectively answer questions raised by our institutional exigences. Faculty interviews would allow us to understand how transfer was (or was not) discussed in the classroom, and would help us understand better understand students’ experiences. We assumed, based on the literature, that talking with faculty would be needed to help us understand what students could or could not transfer–to get access to students’ thought processes, and to help us learn more about things students might not even be conscious of. With methods on our minds, Neil and I proposed a roundtable on transfer research methodology for the Midwest Writing Centers Association conference, October in Madison.

In March, the online component of the Dartmouth seminar began–email, telephone consultations, and group video chats with Dartmouth facilitators and other participants. These conversations helped Neil and I begin to see the limits, or rather the over-extensions, of our research design: the amount of work we imagined was just too large. (After one email exchange with Charles Bazerman, I checked a spreadsheet I had built to project our workload, and discovered an error which underestimated some required time by a factor of 5. Doh!) So we began to scale back the size of our study while keeping our diverse data collection methods. That is, we still felt that our research required a rich set of data to work with in order for us to understand the activity systems in which our writers moved, and to gain access to the discursive processes involved in transfer. We believed workload could be addressed by reducing the number of participants in each leg of the study, and finding ways to be more efficient (including more than one student from the instructors in the study). By the time we submitted the URC grant in April, we had made changes which reflected this thinking, and we submitted a research design to our IRB as well.

Three items of good news came in May when we found out our proposal for MWCA was accepted, we were awarded the URC grant, and our IRB protocol was approved. At this time, we were still planning to use surveys for the first stage of the study, with the hopes of targeting summer courses, but it soon became clear that wouldn’t work, since there were so few writing in the disciplines courses being taught. We also had trouble scheduling interviews: there just weren’t that many people around WIU or our local community colleges. My travel schedule didn’t make things any easier. We did get to interview four WIU faculty, and those interviews gave us a lot to think about. But we didn’t get as much work done as we planned.

When I traveled to Hanover for the Dartmouth seminar, I had the opportunity to sit down with Chris Anson and Neal Lerner, describe our intentions in detail, and get feedback about our plans. Independently, both Anson and Lerner suggested further changes would be wise. They agreed that Neil and I needed to find ways to get at information which would not necessarily be articulated by students. But they suggested that we didn’t need to work both sides of the problem–community college and writing in the major–to fully understand it. And, again independently, they suggested a different approach: rather than multiple kinds of data collection, turning to stimulated recall or techniques like those used by Flower and Hayes. Over the next few days of the seminar, I realized we might drop everything but the case studies, reconceptualizing those around interviews, and reintroducing other types of data collection if needed. Rather than spending a lot of effort to develop and execute surveys, interviews, and other instruments, then building an analytical framework to bring their data together, we should focus on interviews with a small number of students, and broaden data gathering only if it became necessary. I wrote up my ideas and shared them with Neil, and we quickly came to consensus about a new design.

That brings us to the current time. Neil and I recruited participants by visiting writing in the disciplines classes in August and September, building a pool which satisfied us in terms of demographic and curricular diversity. We made contact with ten students and interviewed them all once, with very interesting preliminary results. We’ve continued refining our design and our goals, and submitted a proposal for the CCCC Research Initiative. Over the next year, we’ll interview our participants four or five more times, collect their writing, discuss it in depth, talk to their instructors, and learn how writing transfer happens for them. As we move forward, I hope to keep up with our study here. Reconstructing what we did from email, meeting notes, and other archives is possible, but it would be far better to have a more formal record.

I’ve been a note-taker since I started undergraduate work. I have used a variety of approaches: longhand; longhand, recopied (suggested by a chemistry professor); longhand, typed into the computer afterward; direct entry on a Palm PDA with portable keyboard; and now direct entry on a laptop. For a while I used Markdown, and then a simplified version of LaTeX, to format my notes, and I used to be very careful about noting subheads, chapters, and the like. But these days I don’t worry about formatting. One exception: I use braces {} to distinguish comments I’m making from the text. Other than that, I just type, having realized that having notes is much more important than having pretty notes.

Since I’m on sabbatical leave, I’m reading a lot and taking a lot of notes of my own, and I’m going back to some old notes as I work on some articles. That was one of Ulmer’s favorite things to say… ten years later, you can go back to notes and the text comes right back to you. Certainly, I feel the same way. And that’s one of the reasons I was disturbed to see reading notes so far down the lists in WIDE’s “Revisualizing Composition” study. Apparently, my engagement with notes is by no means shared with contemporary students; they don’t take notes often, and don’t value them, at least not enough to make the top 10.

Add this to some of the implications about reading from last week’s visit from Sandra Jamieson, and I’m ready to engage notes more directly in courses. For the past few years, I haven’t assigned it, recalling fierce resistance to compulsory note-taking in some of Ulmer’s seminars. I’ve encouraged it by allowing students to substitute notes for reading quizzes, and by modeling–keeping my notes handy in graduate seminars, for example. But it’s been a while since notes were a core requirement in my courses. Time to change that–though I’ll need to think hard about assessment. Fortunately, I’ve got plenty of time to work out the specifics.

1. Common definitions of plagiarism always include intention. That’s true for professional organizations like CWPA, and for Western, like most universities. But intent is very hard to prove, making enforcement processes cumbersome and time-consuming.
2. Definitions of plagiarism also focus on acknowledgment and citation. Western’s policy repeats “without acknowledgment” four times in its definition. Does this mean any use with a citation is okay? Certainly, policies give that impression. We focus too much on “Is it cited?” without asking about the quality of the citation itself.
3. Though policies often differentiate between plagiarism and resubmission, most weigh both as academic integrity offenses. Students, on the other hand, are far less likely to see resubmission as wrong. In a class Jamieson visited, one student said something like, “It’s my paper. I can do what I want with it.” Little wonder students have this attitude, given much of the “it’s mine” orientation of intellectual property discourse in and out of the academy.
4. Rebecca Moore Howard’s concept of “patchwriting” drives much of the Project’s work. Jamieson shared student writing which fit the definition (quantified given their approach), comparing it to sources to show that while patchwriting might not fit the definition of plagiarism, it isn’t good writing. The most obvious implication: writing courses need to spend far more time working with the nuts and bolts of quotation, paraphrase, and summary. Since students work across disciplines, their exposure to norms is wildly inconsistent: what’s okay for the humanities is too much quotation for the social sciences, etc. This makes using others’ texts even more difficult to learn.
5. We don’t talk enough about reading in writing courses, and we don’t read enough different kinds of texts. The (overstated) literature/composition divide serves us quite poorly in this regard.
6. Faculty present reacted audibly when she showed that 91% of student citations come from the first four pages of their sources–and 78% from the first two pages. Jamieson suggested many students rarely go past the abstract or introduction of an article, which would certainly cause problems if they tried to summarize or paraphrase: it’s hard to write summaries, but even harder to write summaries of summaries.
7. Jamieson noted the Citation Project exists, at least in part, to address the dearth of empirical work being done in English studies. At a time data is driving education more and more, we continue to ignore data-centered research or even look down upon those who perform it.

One implication, besides the need to address reading and use of texts more forwardly in courses. Because I am thinking a lot about standards, I have spent a lot of time recently looking at the CWPA Outcomes Statement for FYC. The Citation Project’s work provides another reminder that standards and policies always have impacts which are not intended and poorly understood. Should making citation the focus of policies mean we obsess over documentation styles but neglect other areas, and suggest, even implicitly, that students should follow? Standards, then, have a didactic role whether or not we’d like them to. That doesn’t mean everything we’d like to be taught will be; recall the gap on resubmission Jamieson’s surveys pointed out. Nor does it mean standards and policies must be engaged directly to have tremendous impact. All students must deal with the impact of policies on course design. File all of these reminders under “obvious,” sure, but do file them lest standards be developed ineffectively.

Sandra Jamieson and Maurine Magliocco

That’s just content. From a delivery perspective, Jamieson was also quite good, structuring her talk around a central question, using local examples to make her argument, explaining her assumptions, pacing nicely, and pausing only a moment when her PowerPoint didn’t cooperate. She spoke equally well to both students and faculty, judging by the number of students who stayed for the whole talk then asked questions afterward. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so pleased about good delivery, but given the number of poor talks I’ve seen at conferences and otherwise, I’m always happy when speakers perform well and I can tell students, “Do what she did!”

As I believe she has done every year, Maurine Magliocco attended the lecture and participated in the discussion afterward. I’m thankful for her engagement and generosity. Her gift targets a need the university is increasingly pressured to address. Even (or especially!) at a teaching-oriented institution like Western, conversations about research are necessary, particularly when they articulate deeply with all levels of English studies. Certainly, this is true for The Citation Project’s research, and for everything Jamieson shared with us.

Western is fairly open to open source. I say “fairly” because while I can think of several cases where open source software is readily available and used on campus, I can also think of several examples of software procurement where open source was basically eliminated from day one. Overall, I’d say the climate could be better. Folks like me who want to install and support their own software on WIU servers aren’t prevented from doing so by policy. But we do have to contend with a very outdated web server. That’s what drives me to wrecking.org for my WordPress installs; it’s much easier to keep the software up to date there.

Having said that, Clancy Ratliff reminded that many people aren’t so lucky, when she wrote to ask about my use of open source. It’s not unusual for IT staff to object to open source software because of security, privacy, problems obtaining support, a lack of standardization, or all of the above–whether or not such problems exist. So, as Clancy asked:

How should faculty respond when university IT staff members express suspicions about open source software, and refuse to install it and/or support it?

What exactly are they afraid of?

I think Clancy’s second question points to the answer for the first. First and foremost, faculty need to fully understand the grounds for any reluctance to install software. Many (most!) IT staff work with limited resources and have epic demands on their time. They’re not really afraid of anything; rather, they simply don’t need more to deal with. For example, I used to get a single course release (from a standard 3/3 load) in exchange for service as department technology coordinator. That was about half what it should have been. Hell, maybe a third. So I made decisions based on the amount of time involved, refusing most time-intensive projects out of hand. It didn’t really matter what the project was; if it was labor intensive, the answer had to be “No.”

So let’s back up a step: faculty should think carefully about the way they make requests. Obviously, emailing the helpdesk, “Plz install OpenOffice in r computer labs kthxbai” isn’t going to cut it. But it’s often equally ineffective to drop a two- or three-page request email into a system administrator’s inbox with cc: to the department chair. Rather than ask that something be installed, ask to meet to discuss possibilities–and don’t invite the chair. A little dogfooding really helps: when students ask for deadline extensions, alternative assignments, or things which make unexpected demands on our time, how do we react? More favorably, I think, when students make open-ended requests which invite us to help shape them.

I suggest this framework:

1. An initial meeting to discuss the project in general terms;
2. Research which answers questions about the scope of the installation;
3. A proposal which shapes the request as a project with desired outcomes, a schedule, and a primary contact.

Imagining the installation and use as a project shouldn’t unnecessarily complicate things. Rather, a project framework can clarify what’s expected of all parties, for how long, and for what purposes. Above all, that documentation makes it clear faculty will communicate with IT staff about the project, and not expect them to go it alone. And if it turns out that internal or external funding will be needed, turning an initial request into a grant proposal won’t be difficult.

Research should address the following:

• What, specifically, are the software and hardware demands of the installation?
• What support needs will be generated? Who will need help? When? With what expected turnaround time? Who can provide help? When? At what cost?
• Consider support alternatives: should help requests be diverted to faculty, TAs, or others? If so, will additional funding be necessary?
• Clarify the time frame: is the product to be installed and maintained for a single semester? For an academic year? Forever?
• Why is the software needed? For a single class? Multiple classes? An entire program?
• Is similar software is already on campus–maybe not in the building, or even close by, or even on this campus? Is that alternative acceptable? Why or why not?
• Will the software create unnecessary risks to computer security or stability?

Security is last here. It’s first for many. As Clancy continued:

Are they afraid that, say, OpenOffice contains spyware that could compromise the privacy of student records? That hackers can, via the open source application, send worms and such into the university network? Other stuff too?

What’s your advice for faculty who want to get open source software installed in university computer labs but have to deal with this obstacle? Are there sources in particular that you recommend, sources that offer evidence that open source software is generally secure?

I’ve had proposals for installing software shot down because of security risks, real and otherwise. I’ve refused them myself. The risks are real. However, for me, arguments which compare the relative security of open source and proprietary software miss the point completely. All computing is risky. Rather, I suggest that faculty research the security and securability of specific software involved. Have project developers, and third parties, audited the codebase in the past? What mechanisms for reporting bugs exist? How do developers typically respond to bug reports? How often is the software updated? How are updates installed? Can the software be installed on a “sandbox” server, or access-controlled in some way?

Again, asking IT staff what questions they have is a good idea–not in a predatory manner, but with forward thinking in mind. With answers to these questions, staff can better understand the risks involved with a particular software package, and the measures necessary to minimize the chances that risk will develop into actual problems. On the other hand, faculty can point out refusals to install “insecure” software which are unfounded.

Finally, faculty should help establish a means for evaluation of the use of the software over time. Two related parts:

1. Is the software actually being used by the expected population? If not, it should be discontinued, and the reasons for non-adoption investigated. On the other hand, if adoption is enthusiastic, will additional resources be needed? Might others be interested in helping scale up the installation? In that case, evaluation shows good reason for continuing maintenance and upgrade cycles.
2. I wish we (big we: higher education, and little we: geeks who teach writing) had more data on the comparative quality of the software we use to do our jobs. I’ve used WordPress for discussions for a long time, and had varying reactions to it from students. But I’ve never heard a student praise WebCT. As higher education gets more and more data-centric, we need ways to make the arguments I outline here in terms which administrators will be willing to engage.

I’m interested to hear what others think: how would you answer Clancy’s questions? Why? What problems do my answers raise, or ignore? What have you done to get the software you would like to have in your classrooms, on your campuses?

My calendar from last week. Student conferences in the house!

A lot better. Substantially better! The colors are much nicer, and reducing the number of links on the front page is smart. I like making the feature story bigger; I hope it will have persistent links. Getting rid of the funny font is long overdue. Same with the overlapped text, which is a problem in many ways. Search is much easier to see. The wider page is welcome (though it may be too wide: let’s not forget mobiles, and let’s not separate them either). Glad to see the college portrait go away. Adding the contact info is a plus (but see below).

Negatives: the reduced number of news and events. That’s a big problem: a nice clean design is great, but we need to dish information, too. I think there’s too much ALL CAPS, which forces type sizes down and reduces legibility. Many links are hard to differentiate: what’s the difference between giving and support? admissions and apply now? “Current students” link is too small.

Questions:

• Why two Quad Cities links?
• Is “Spotlight” for events only?
• Why “Macomb campus?” The impression is that we are two universities. Not good.
• Why is Distance Learning one of the biggest links on the page?
• Instead of “Academic majors”, why not just “Academics”—we have lots of non-major programs (certificates, minors, non-credit, graduate, etc).
• Can we just say “Jobs” instead of “Employment opportunities?”
• Why the vertical imbalance in “parents and families” and “alumni and friends”?
• Is it necessary to repeat “Western Illinois…” in the contact information? Can that text go with the copyright?
• I trust the omission of people of color is just a mockup oversight?

Finally, the home page is just one piece of the pie. Current WIU web pages have excessive navigation on most pages, making design of pages very difficult. Given that I can’t see what child pages look like, I would give this design an “Incomplete” if I had the option. I hope that a horizontal navigation scheme will be used on child pages.

With others on the graduate committee, I established five goals for the course:

1. awareness of the major theoretical movements and disciplinary structures in English studies;
2. understanding the position of English studies in culture and society;
3. articulation of theory and practice, a problem faced by all practitioners of English and taken up in scholarly discussions in all areas of English studies;
4. building a professional identity as an English studies scholar and practitioner;
5. developing research, presentation, writing, and self-promotion skills.

In the rear-view, three conclusions. First, I’m seeing the third, fourth, and fifth of these goals as the most critical for the students in our program. I don’t want to take away from #1, the usual framework for these kinds of courses–coverage of the -isms of literary theory via anthologies, histories, and/or introductory texts. And certainly our students could benefit from a better knowledge of the field (broadly speaking: literary, writing, and media studies). Similarly re #2, not to overstate our students’ grasp of the role English studies plays (or fails to play) in culture. However, for me their problems performing #3, #4, and #5 trump #1 and #2, in part because redesigning the course to focus on this work would allow the first and second goals to be achieved indirectly–perhaps not in the framework of a single semester, but over time. That is, I think students have some idea where they want to go, even if they don’t know how to get there. I think we should ask students to assess themselves professionally and make connections between the literature of English studies and their everyday work as high school teachers, writing center tutors, librarians, etc. Theory/practice work needs exigence, and has to be individualized. Articulating these goals would explicitly situate theory/practice readings as support for a concrete activity, hopefully leading to understanding of the shape and scope of English studies via investigation of one’s own particular positions, theoretical and professional.

Second, I am glad I relied more on single-subject, single-author books than anthologies and collections. That is, I prefer sampling to the coverage methodology: better to profoundly engage a few texts and a few issues than hop about. For this semester, the focus was anti-intellectualism and the tensions between writing and other media such as television. (A few texts moved radically outside that realm, just for a change of pace.) Those back-and-forths proved nice ways to talk about the other pairs which we have to balance: theory and practice, research and teaching, literature and the popular press. I do see value in coverage work, but I’m not sure it needs to occur in courses. I read Cross Talk in Composition Theory and Central Works in Technical Communication long after my coursework was over. For me it was easier to backfill that knowledge, fitting the texts I had already read into the narratives those coverage-model anthologies and their apparatus provided (and given the filter my own particular focus provided). I think the same movement transfers to our students.

Finally, my biggest mistake this semester was backloading development of the big project. That was okay for the students who know how to play the game–who are comfortable writing in English studies and know the moves scholars make: working closely with texts, drawing on multiple external sources, understanding the appropriate level of support, situating one’s work in relation to others, etc. My wide-open assignment–isolate one of the issues raised by the course texts and write about it–was ideal for these students, offering them a chance to develop an essay, web site, or other text germane to their (already delimited) long-term interests. Though I spelled out my criteria for “graduate-level work,” many of the students who were new to graduate study and/or who hadn’t been pushed as undergraduates struggled to find and delimit a subject, manage readings, and write at length about it. As a result I issued many rude awakenings during Thanksgiving break, when I emailed multiple students to say their drafts didn’t measure up to graduate-level standards. (I’m glad to say most folks got things straightened out before the end of the semester.) Obviously, I should have asked students to submit written work to me earlier, in order to determine whose reading, research and writing skills need the most help. For some of those folks, the path forward is a well-rehearsed form, such as a literary analysis or a review essay, which solves the “What do I write about?” question and provides ready examples of structure as well.

In the future, I think the semester should begin by asking students to submit a writing sample. That won’t be difficult, since we require it for admission, and it clicks nicely with the professional development content of the course, with the added benefit of providing more structure. While the course weblog provided an excellent space for students to work through the course materials in writing, some students didn’t take advantage of it (despite my repeated exhortations), and course weblogs are not the appropriate space for detailed criticisms of work in progress. (At least not to the level I consider necessary for effective critique.) Chris Morrow, who will teach the class next fall, has suggested making the course more oriented around academic conversations. For example, he thought it would be productive to get all the students to attend an academic conference, with an eye to understanding the discussions that go on there, and giving them more acclimation before our annual graduate organization conference. Good idea; in my zeal to get students to learn by doing, I think I sometimes overlooked the value of modeling that would provide. Given that my department is about to revive its faculty colloquium series, on hold last year because of our multiple job searches, there’s a second strong possibility for conversation about conversations. We can also encourage students to participate in the talks, presentations, and other events which occur throughout the year. While we don’t have a bazillion of those at Western, interesting people do come through Macomb, and we should encourage our students to hear these talks, and think about how it might become a part of what they want to read, write, and talk about.