“Podcasting and Performativity: Multimodal Invention in an Advanced Writing Class” by Leigh A. Jones

Jones, Leigh A. “Podcasting and Performativity: Multimodal Invention in an Advanced Writing Class.” Composition Studies 38.2 (2010): 75-91. Print.

This essay offers a look at an innovative strategy one instructor used in a writing course, but one that could easily be adapted to most courses. Jones had her students create a podcast as part of the writing process for a research paper. She argues that the technique can “help alleviate the counter-productive anxiety that many students feel” at the start of a major writing assignment (78). Basically, she asked her students to pair up to write and record “a short, five minute mp3 file that would educate the class about a current controversial news issue they planned to write about over the course of the semester” (83). These podcasts were then played in class and discussed. She hoped that students would be able to use the podcasts as a means of narrowing their research topics and she was pleased with the results. Her findings dovetail nicely with some recent research in composition studies that suggests that having students talk about their writing helps them produce better documents (some research has even suggested that students discussing their writing with one another informally actually has the greatest effect), though she thinks that having the students polish the talking in the form of a podcast helped the students develop a sense of authority in addition to further honing their composition skills. Her technique could easily be adapted to many courses here and, of course, podcasting can itself be a form of writing if scripts are involved, and might be a useful alternative in and of itself to a conventional writing assignment.

The essay can be found in our writing instruction library in the Ursuline Studies Program office (Mullen 318).

The Quill Is Up!

Ursuline's new online showcase of student academic writing, The Quill, has its first feature, an essay by Lauren Krozser about aborigines in Australia. If you come across any outstanding student writing, please nominate it for inclusion in The Quill, as I hope that Lauren's essay will be the first of many to be featured on the site.

The Elephant in the Classroom: Race and Writing edited by Jane Bowman Smith

Smith, Jane Bowman, ed. The Elephant in the Classroom: Race and Writing. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2010. Print.

This collection of essays focuses on the experiences of speakers of African American English (AAE) in the college composition classroom. Many times speakers of AAE and other dialects of English considered nonstandard have difficulty in college writing classes, where Standard American English (SAE) defines the norms of linguistic expression. Often, the speakers of other dialects of English are treated as deficient and enrolled in developmental classes. I once taught a developmental English class composed of students who as far as I could tell had only been placed in it because of their dialect. Many people might not consider this absurd, but I did and felt bad for the students who had to spend money and time taking an extra college class they probably didn’t really need to take (aside from dialectal differences, they wrote as well as any other first year college student and probably could have just taken a regular composition course--I didn't challenge their placement because it was my first time teaching the course and at the institution so I wasn't certain about the situation until much later in the course). Basically, it was the equivalent of having to take a developmental math class because one was used to using the traditional English system of measurement rather than the metric system.

Instead of taking an approach that views such students as deficient, the writers of the essays examine why the academy typically views the students in such a way. While reading the essays, I was reminded of the old linguistic saw, popularized by Max Weinreich, that the only difference between a language and a dialect is that a language has an army and a navy. Because SAE has social prestige and power behind it, it is often viewed as more than just one dialect of English among many. And, despite the efforts of many linguists over the years to dispel the myth of one correct English, most people, including college instructors, still believe in it with the results disastrous for speakers of nonstandard dialects when they enter college. As Arthur L. Palacas reminds us in “African American Voice and Standard English,” “Often, the treatment of this language conflict in class ends up demoralizing the student, with all the attendant harmful consequences.” Consequently, the language issue may have an effect on retention, and may help to explain, in addition to other factors, why minority students and first generation college students return less frequently for a second year of college compared to their counterparts, which occurs here at Ursuline as well as nationwide (thanks to Sr. Virginia DeVinne of URSA for the Ursuline data).

However, despite the linguistic reality that all dialects are equally grammatically complex and valid, the social reality is quite different, so in good conscience we have to find a way as instructors to give our students access to what Jennifer Liethen Kunka, one of the book’s contributors, calls “linguistic capital in the professional marketplace" (76). As Kunka notes, using the example of business process provider Office Tiger in India, other speakers/writers of English are quite willing to adopt SAE if such an adoption proves profitable, with the results that speakers/writers of English without access to SAE will be left behind economically (77). This situation provides a linguistic Gordian knot with no Alexander in sight to untie it in one bold stroke.

Instead, we will have to muddle through somehow. To that end, the book’s contributors offer some useful advice. Palacas recommends that writing instructors: "1. Give explicit teaching about differences between standard English and [African American English] (or other varieties of English). 2. Use linguistically and culturally affirming readings. 3. Allow the student to use comfortable language in the composing stages of writing and in discussion periods when the flow of ideas and thoughts is paramount." Given that Ursuline doesn’t have a composition class per se, Palacas’s recommendations might be difficult to implement. However, if you encounter a student who appears to be speaking and writing in a nonstandard way, consider the possibility that he or she is using a dialect of English that is different from your own and is not merely a bad speaker or writer. Focus on the student’s ideas. Most dialects of English are mutually understandable. Though it may not be comfortable, it’s a good bet that you can understand the student. If you only care that the student understands the content of the course in the content and form balance of speaking/writing, that may be all you need to do. If the form part is important though (say the student is writing a research paper that might be presented at a conference), then you will have to help the student bridge her or his home language into SAE. This must be done delicately and in such a way that adds to the student’s linguistic competence.

One good approach is as Peter Elbow advises in his essay, “Why Deny a Choice to Speakers of African American Language that Most of Us Offer Other Students.” Allow the student to compose the paper initially in her or his own dialect and then once the ideas and structure are worked out, then help the student to translate the nearly-completed document into SAE. To that end, many resources are available to you. The book In Other Words is available in the Writing Instruction Mini-Library in the Ursuline Studies Program office (Mullen 318). I am available for consultation. And this book is available through OhioLINK.

What Is “College-Level” Writing? edited by Patrick Sullivan and Howard Tinberg

Sullivan, Patrick, and Howard Tinberg, eds. What Is “College-Level” Writing? Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2006. Print.

This anthology presents a variety of answers to the titular question, which turns out to be more difficult a query than it may appear to be on first consideration. Writing varies across the college curriculum. Writing is not a monolithic one size fits all skill, but a complex network of activities, which can vary from discipline to discipline based on specific needs and socially constructed knowledge. However, even if what “college-level” writing exactly is can never be definitively answered by the contributors, they still offer useful advice for college instructors who assign writing.

For example, Patrick Sullivan notes that instructors with high standards seem to spur better writing from students and that students who perceive low expectations from an instructor will produce worse work (12). Lynn Z. Bloom argues that students write better as “insiders” than they do as “outsiders” (84). She uses as an example her experiments in a course on autobiography which had students read autobiographies and then write in a similar mode, the results of which she found “varied, imaginative, on target, and—a bonus for me—virtually unplagiarizable” (86).

Contrast Bloom’s approach with an approach typical in higher education. An instructor assigns writing of one genre for students to read and then asks the students to write a document in another genre. Often this results in the instructor wondering why the students wrote so badly, but without models to go by, students basically have to create a genre on their own, and not surprisingly they don’t do very well. For illustration, if I gave you a bunch of recipes to read and then asked you to write a lab report, how well do you think you’d write? Bloom’s approach makes much more sense. If I want students to write in a particular genre well, then, as an instructor, I should have them read examples of that genre first to get an understanding of the form.

Another useful bit of pedagogical advice comes from Michael Dubson, who suggests that writing instructors should present good writing as the result of hard work rather than of innate talent (98). Otherwise, some students will assume they just aren’t good writers and will give up trying to improve. His essay, “Whose Paper Is This Anyway?: Why Most Students Don’t Embrace the Writing They Do for Their Writing Classes,” makes for an interesting read, as does “What Does the Instructor Want?: The View from the Writing Center,” by Muriel Harris. Harris focuses on the importance of audience awareness for good writing, using Linda Flower’s notions of “writer-based and reader-based prose” (125). Often, a student writer produces writer-based prose, which does a fine job of expressing the writer’s ideas from the writer’s perspective, but can be quite incomprehensible to readers. Teaching students to write with an audience in mind and to transform writer-based prose, often a necessary stage of composition, into reader-based prose can be of tremendous benefit to novice writers.

Finally, for those of us who like to complain about student writing, Sheridan Blau asks, “If students could [write well] at the time they entered your class, why would we need you to teach them?” And, in our moments of despair when responding to student writing, that’s a good point to keep in mind, one of many good points to be found in this collection of essays (even including an “anti-essay”). The book is available through OhioLINK.

Ursuline National Gallery Of Writing Is Still Open!

Apparently, last year's National Day on Writing event was so successful that the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) are holding it again. Unfortunately, this year's date (October 20th) falls over Ursuline's fall break, but we'll still be participating in it by keeping our Ursuline College Gallery of Writing open as part of NCTE's Gallery of Writing tie-in to the Day on Writing. The gallery was supposed to have been deleted over the summer, but apparently NCTE has decided to keep the galleries (all 2500 of them or so) open as part of this year's National Day on Writing. To celebrate, Ursuline colleague Joe LaGuardia has added a new contribution to the gallery. His contribution is a touching poem in honor of the memory of Ginny Marion, an Ursuline colleague who passed away recently. Joe's poem is our gallery's featured piece. If you are associated with Ursuline and would like to contribute a piece of your own writing to the gallery (it needn't be a poem; it could be any piece of writing associated with Ursuline, even a memo or course assignment), then please consider doing so. You can find the gallery at
http://galleryofwriting.org/galleries/gallery_pieces.php?galleryid=156018. Please just send me an email at fwright AT ursuline.edu when you do so as that will let me know as the curator to go and review your submission. Happy National Day on Writing!

The Norton Pocket Book of Writing by Students edited by Melissa A. Goldthwaite

Goldthwaite, Melissa A., ed. The Norton Pocket Book of Writing by Students. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010. Print.

This anthology collects writing by college students, and demonstrates the truly amazing writing in a variety of genres that students are capable of doing. It even includes a poem by Barack Obama, written when he was a college student, and, whatever you think of his politics, most people would agree that he developed into a fine writer, building upon the foundation of his student writing. Even if none of the other student writers in the book eventually write bestsellers as Obama did, most instructors at Ursuline would be thrilled to read papers of this quality. In fact, the book is aimed at inspiring students to develop their writing, even including a submission sheet in the back of the book for those who would like to have their work considered for use by W.W. Norton as examples of fine student writing. Though instructors often bemoan the quality of student writing, Goldthwaite, who once visited to Ursuline to host a writing workshop, suggests that a better use of our time might be to focus on the excellent student writing we do find, writing, “For most students there is little opportunity to celebrate such work and little chance for other students and teachers to enjoy, appreciate, and learn from such writing” (xii). Is her statement true of Ursuline? We do have Inscape, our fine arts annual, after all, which publishes the work of many of our students, but it tends to focus more on creative writing rather than more traditional academic writing. Perhaps we should celebrate student writing more when we come across an exemplary piece by having a contest or showcase each year. Some might worry about the opportunity for plagiarism this might create, particularly for papers written in response to assignments that are used year after year, but displaying exemplary student writing on our Web site or elsewhere might also help students understand more clearly what we want in terms of student work by providing accessible models of it. What do you think? The book is not available through OhioLINK, but we hope to have a copy in the college library soon.

The Elements of Teaching Writing: A Resource for Instructors in All Disciplines by Katherine Gottschalk and Keith Hjortshoj

Gottschalk, Katherine, and Keith Hjortshoj. The Elements of Teaching Writing: A Resource for Instructors in All Disciplines. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004. Print.

Written by two writing program administrators from Cornell University, The Elements of Teaching Writing makes a nice counterpart to The St. Martin’s Guide to Teaching Writing. While the authors of the latter book focus more on the needs of instructors teaching a course centered around writing such as the traditional composition course, Gottschalk and Hjortshoj focus more on the needs of instructors teaching courses where writing is not the center, but ones in which instructors might find it useful to incorporate writing in order to reach the learning goals of the course, which, in their opinion, appears to be almost any course offered at the college level. The authors then address the classic question of how to incorporate writing assignments and instruction in a course without sacrificing the content of a course and turning it into a composition course. They begin by noting that grousing about the quality of student writing is a tradition of higher education, noting that half the students failed “the first writing assessments of entering students at Harvard in 1874” (3), and seek to explain why student writing has consistently disappointed instructors in the decades since then as well. Their explanation is that instructors often forget that students are typically newcomers to the disciplines they are studying and accordingly the written genres those disciplines favor. How would you like it if I asked you to write a grant request and then didn’t give you any examples of the genre? Or if I asked you to write a newspaper article on an Ursuline swim meet without giving you any guidance on how to do so, and just assumed that you understood the rules of competitive swimming? Unfortunately, such absurdities are often analogous to the types of writing situations students encounter in college. Thus, it’s no wonder that the writing students produce is often substandard in the judgment of instructors.

Gottschalk and Hjortshoj suggest that explaining discipline and genre expectations for writing in advance will increase the odds that students will produce better writing (6). They also argue that writing instruction will take time away from content in a course, but the sacrifice will be worth it since the writing will strengthen the learning of students, whereas the content sacrificed would have likely gone in one ear of a student, rattled around in the auditory cortex, and then slipped back out the other ear. The authors argue that, by contrast, using writing as a means of learning will ensure that the content takes root and doesn’t slip away. They write: "One of the best reasons for integrating writing with learning, therefore, is to give students time, reasons, and opportunities for understanding complex subjects: making connections among ideas and readings, grasping concepts they can use for further understanding and thinking critically about the course material. Most teachers hope for these types of learning, but they will not occur if students are passively listening, reading, and taking notes primarily to absorb large amounts of information and to keep up with the rapid pace of your course" (19). After offering their rationale for why to incorporate writing in courses across the curriculum, the authors devote the remainder of the book to offering many helpful suggestions for how to do so, including sample writing assignments from a range of disciplines. Though the book isn’t perfect (for example, the authors seem to have an irrational aversion to grading based on points, as seen on page 57), it likely is the single best resource for an instructor trying to figure out how to incorporate writing assignments into a course, and I highly recommend it. The book is currently available through OhioLINK, but we hope to have a copy in the writing instruction mini-library in the USP office (Mullen 318) soon.