Summer Reading 2008

I’ve finished working through all of your drafts (though I am waiting for Katie to do a little more before providing extensive commentary), and I’m very pleased with the work I’m seeing. Some thoughts, given the criteria I posted earlier:

The “filling in” work you are doing is very strong. I see echoes of my doctoral exams in your writing: showing that you understand a position, its antecedents, and its problematics. Good.

Writing quality is excellent across the board. I saw a few typos and other glitches, and for the most part I let these go, since I didn’t know if you folks were planning to revise in Google Docs or take things back to Word.

We are doing pretty well on time, too, I think: with a little less than a month before the start of Fall classes, and two weeks before my soft deadline of August 10, none of you have an insurmountable amount of work left to do. August 15 is probably the latest you should let things go: that would give me ten days to get comments on your work.

Katie asked if we might get together one more time: you tell me. I’m happy coming to the QC sometime next week; Erin’s mom is gonna be in town Aug 1-9, so it shouldn’t be too hard to get a QC trip together then.

Finally, from a nuts and bolts perspective, I hope the use of the weblog and Google Docs is going as well for you as it is for me. I expect to use more of both in ENG 500. Working on that syllabus is next for me…

Now that the power is back on for all of us, can we discuss where we are at this point in project development? Are we planning any more pow-wows? What is our anticipated end date for project? Bradley, I am posting my rough draft (2/3 of it) on G-docs and sending it your way. I anticipate having a completed draft by Monday 7/28. Planning to revise as often as time allows–are you willing to read?

Question: After I incorporate all of my research, am I permitted to speak first person, interjecting my own thoughts along the way? I plan on using my own voice in the final section where I am discussing implementing strategies in my writing class. I actually hope to use this as a springboard in collecting data toward my thesis.

Hey folks, I didn’t get stuff read this weekend as I anticipated; my counter/kitchen work dragged on longer than I had planned. But now Erin and Madelyn are out of town, so I have plenty of time to spend on your stuff. I’m commenting on Katherine’s blogged work right now; Katie’s email is next.

Suddenly my house seems very big and very quiet.

I am going to create separate documents for each of the following headings:

Why Collaboration?

Instructors’ Hesitations

Collaboration vs. Cooperation

Planning

• Teacher
• Student

Process

Grading

Under each of these headings I will write rationale/explanation, and I will then link to specific documents I intend to use in my class.  Please let me know what you think!!

Some teachers are hesitant to pursue collaborative writing for several reasons.  Because our culture is truly one that validates individualism, collaboration goes against our culture of individual authorship.  Rebecca Moore Howard points out that our conception of writing is that it is done in isolation—with between on person and his/her pen and paper (or fingers and keyboard) (62).  Most books and articles are written by one person.  However, as I stated earlier, this conception is for the most part misguided in our current society.  Few people in the professional world write on their own, especially once we consider the degree to which all writers talk about their work.  Once we realize that all writing is essentially collaborative, and that people in the professional world are required to write collaboratively, we really do our students a disservice by limiting these opportunities.

Teachers are also leery of collaborative writing due to the time it requires on both the teachers’ and students’ behalf (Speck 14).  Certainly, collaborative writing takes more time than individual writing, but the point is that students will be more apt to revise.  They will be less likely to write the essay at the last minute before its due because others are counting on them.  Teachers will also need to invest significant time into planning a collaborative writing task, but if the teacher takes seriously her role as providing the best opportunities for learning, this effort is worthwhile.  The National Council for Teachers of English (NCTE) has determined that students learn more from revising the same essay four times than by writing forty different essays (CITE).  Best practice, it seems, is to do more with less; revise more with fewer essays.  I would argue the meta-cognitive components to collaborative writing are highly meaningful for students’ learning about the writing process.  When they think about why they are making specific decisions and then justify or explain these decisions to others, their own ability to understand and participate in the writing process is bound to improve.

Noel & Robert argue some teachers find fault with the disjointed style of a piece written by several authors (65), and while I can see this as a legitimate concern, I would argue the problem itself opens the door for discussion about style and what determines style, a discussion which so rarely occurs at the high school level.

Understandably so, teachers and students alike worry about a lack of equitable task division and responsibility (Noel & Robert 65).  No student wants to be in a “group” in which he does all the work, and no teacher wants to make an assignment in which a student is able to slack off and get the same grade as the worker-bees. Likewise, instructors do not know how to grade a project in which this inequity occurs.  Grading and group responsibility are worrisome subjects, but if the teacher follows the planning and process steps I will outline, theses concerns should be alleviated.

While there are some realistic concerns on behalf of students and teachers with collaborative writing, the benefits I discussed earlier substantially outweigh the drawbacks.  We owe it to our students to provide them with opportunities to work with, struggle with, and learn from other students to prepare them for life in a global economy.

This looks interesting not only for Katie’s work, but in general: The Center for the Study of Ethics: Ethics Across the Curriculum.

…these folks used some grants to establish ethics-intensive courses which both explicitly include and generally support the idea of ethical issues as sparks for critical thinking. There’s even a sample student essay on this page; the analysis isn’t the students’ own ethical issue, and I think it’s a little too heavy on “reading proof,” citing the sources and criteria rather than explaining the specifics of the ethical problem. No matter, it’s still interesting.

One possible downside: no site updates since 2005…

Given some of our conversations yesterday, I thought I’d say more about expectations for your projects. I’m pretty sure you all understand this already, but let’s make sure. The guidelines I wrote in 481 hold, for the most part:

Publishable essays have the following qualities:

• Strong analysis: demonstrate a line of reasoning about a topic; write an argument, not just a list of facts or a summary of the thought of others;
• Copious evidence: use multiple well-considered quotations, examples, and other source material to make your argument;
• Adequate development: extend your analysis beyond the obvious or well-known, offering new insights about the stylistic concepts you engage;
• Articulation: connect your work to others in English studies and/or other discourses;
• Relevance: select a topic and focus relevant for English studies, or explain why a particular approach to style is valuable;
• Originality: avoid rehashing other work—find a new perspective, approach, synthesis, or application of existing ideas;
• Conventional style: Use your MLA Style Manual to ensure your format is conventional.

A few tweaks:

1. The least important of these criteria is originality. As Nan said yesterday, “filling in” your knowledge of writing studies is a core goal of this independent study. So if you find yourself working through a wide range of material on your topic, don’t be worried; that work is important not only for the short term (building your knowledge base) but proves useful in situations where showing broad support is required. For example, a writing program administrator might need to explain decisions to a chair or dean; no need for originality there, but rather showing good antecedents for your thinking.
2. Make the form meet your needs and your audience, especially if you are working with content presented online. You need not write the proverbial 20 page paper; annotated lessons, pedagogical guides designed for practical use, or other forms are fine as long as the criteria above are met. I am happy to discuss alternative formats with anyone.
3. Finally, let’s continue to use this space to share. We can use the weblog to share documents, web addresses, excerpts, or all of the above. And I will happily support use of my wiki or other spaces. Just let me know.

Questions &c. below.

More how-to… last night I also mentioned the CCC Online Archive, a hugely valuable resource for searching College Composition and Communication, arguably the most important journal in college-level writing studies. Have a look at the site; I think you’ll find it very responsive to searching (look for the box in the lower left). Other features are very cool; for example, Kathi Yancey’s chair’s address/article has links to other CCC articles which cite it, and then in the Works Cited links to those it cites. That enables a reader to quickly click backward and forward in an articles “citation heritage,” so to speak.

I talked to the WIU librarians this morning, and unfortunately they didn’t have much to offer in terms of citation indices in the WIU databases; they gave me a couple leads I’ll follow up and share if they are worth it.

However, Google Scholar does a pretty good job. Try this search for “the idea of a writing center.” It’s the first result in the list, and you’ll note “Cited by 107″ is a link, too. That will give you a list of articles which cite North’s piece. To address the recent articles problem we talked about last nigth, you can use the Advanced Search to limit by date. For example, when I limited the search to articles from 2006-, 31 hits remain.

Again, I’d love to hear your feedback about using CCCOA or citation indices.

Last night I mentioned the writing studies database CompPile. Have a look.

The default search interface is a little overwhelming; here’s their simpler one. I searched for “writing center” and got 65 hits, with the first two pages from 2007 or 2008, including quite a few links to full text. Pretty cool. If you use it, please let me know what you think; the more specifics, the better.

For our Sunday meeting, I propose we have a conversation about these five chapters in the Guide:

• Collaborative pedagogy
• Critical pedagogy: dreaming of democracy
• Community-service pedagogy
• The pedagogy of writing across the curriculum
• Writing center pedagogy

That pretty much covers the interests you’ve mapped out in your three prospectuses, and would set each of us up to discuss the texts which supplement our big three.

Sound good?

I forgot to comment on this question by Katherine, and it’s a good one, so I wanted to raise it to a big post:

On a side note, Bradley, I’ve not been successful at actually accessing articles from CiteULike (many are linked to library databases for which I don’t have an ID), so I’m sticking with WIU databases for now. Am I missing something? There were some really good articles I wished I could have accessed.

First off, I’d love to see some samples–it’s important to keep track, so we can hassle the libraries to get databases we don’t have access to. Let me know what you want to read.

WIU has more access than is sometimes obvious. And because the databases are often hard to search (which one to use?) CiteULike remains worth a shot. I’ve had success logging into the WIU proxy server and then accessing the article by hacking the URL. For example, here’s “Teaching for Creativity” in Rebecca Moore Howard’s CiteULike. In the “Fulltext” box, if you click DOI (that stands for “Document Object Identifier, a unique ID for scholarship), it will direct you to this database page:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/g518p92082×3l221/

Without access, you get the abstract but not the article–unless you hand over $32–feh! But if you’ve logged in to the WIU proxy server, you can hack that URL by adding “.ezproxy.wiu.edu” just before the third slash:

http://www.springerlink.com.ezproxy.wiu.edu/content/g518p92082×3l221/

That routes the connection through WIU’s server. From there, you can click the PDF link, and there it is.

Now, if that doesn’t work, put in an interlibrary loan request for the article at WIU, and in a few days you get an email with directions for downloading a PDF copy. I do that via Illiad, but I’m not sure if that’s the best way for you. I asked, and I’ll update this post accordingly when I hear from the librarians.

Update 07/02: The WIU librarians say you folks should sign up for and use Illiad (link above); they just haven’t updated their web site yet.