Lunsford, Andrea A. From Theory to Practice: A Selection of Essays

Lunsford, Andrea A. From Theory to Practice: A Selection of Essays. 3rd ed. Boston: Bedford-St. Martin’s, 2009. Print.

This brief collection of essays by Lunsford (most coauthored with others) spans thirty years of her work in composition and rhetoric. Although all of the essays are engaging, they were originally targeted at very specific audiences, which may make them somewhat less accessible to readers not familiar with the composition field. However, the two essays that lead off the collection, both summations of major research studies into errors in student writing, are fairly accessible to all academic readers, and most useful for our purposes. In the essays, Lunsford and her coauthors examined thousands of student papers, first in the mid-1980s and 20 years later in the 2000s (a study that Ursuline participated in). Both studies led to useful lists of common errors in student writing. With the lists, instructors could more easily guide students past these pitfalls. Lunsford also advises instructors to focus on errors as opportunities for learning, writing, “Doing so means presenting the conventions of writing as deeply rhetorical choices a writer makes, rather than a series of static rules writers must learn and be regulated by” (5). Such an approach is quite different from the standard notion that students are writing worse than ever, which Lunsford notes is a recurrent refrain across the generations: “During the last decade, I’ve repeatedly read articles in which researchers bemoan the illiteracy of today’s students, who apparently don’t read anymore and cannot write without fractured grammar or the use of smiley faces and text-message abbreviations. Such uproars over student illiteracy have a long history in the United States and, in fact, seem to have erupted about every thirty years since the mid-1880s, so this latest round of angst left me wondering just how much had really changed” (21). Though Lunsford found that the hysteria over student writing remains constant, the student writing and errors have changed. For example, today’s students write papers twice as long as their predecessors in the 1980s (an average of 1082 words vs. an average of 422 words), and they typically write in response to more challenging assignments (i.e., writing argumentative essays rather than personal narratives) (31-32). Also, the types of errors have changed (24; 33-34), though the number of errors in a paper has remained fairly constant (38). In short, Lunsford suggests that students are writing more than ever before, and arguably they may even be writing better than ever before. What then might be causing the continuance of the concern over student writing? Could it be that our standards have risen? We often lament that college today has been dumbed down, but perhaps that belief is not supported by the evidence. I have a copy of the book, and one can also be found in the Ursuline Studies Program office.

Yancey, Kathleen Blake, ed. Delivering College Composition: The Fifth Canon

Yancey, Kathleen Blake, ed. Delivering College Composition: The Fifth Canon. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2006. Print.

This collection of essays examines the different ways composition is taught, from the traditional face to face classroom to online education. Most of the book focuses on teaching the traditional freshman composition class, which we don’t have at Ursuline. However, the book does offer a few tidbits that would be useful for any class at Ursuline that utilizes student writing as a pedagogical approach, which is to say nearly all of our classes. In “Distributed Teaching, Distributed Learning: Integrating Technology and Criteria-Driven Assessment into the Delivery of First-Year Composition,” Rebecca Rickly includes a handy, distilled list of writing instruction principles:
• Students should have frequent and varied opportunities to write
• Students should engage in frequent peer and self-critique
• Students should receive timely feedback
• Students should receive helpful feedback
• Students should engage in a drafting sequence for assignments
• Assessment should be public, understood, and defensible; students should know and understand what criteria are being used to evaluate their work
• Students should be taught to integrate technology into their researching, writing, editing, and revising processes
• Students should have access to models of good writing (190)
Though most of the material in the book isn’t directly applicable to Ursuline, Rickly’s list is good to keep in mind when designing a writing assignment. The book is available through OhioLINK.

Haswell, Richard H., and Min-Zhan Lu, eds. Comp Tales: An Introduction to College Composition through Its Stories

Haswell, Richard H., and Min-Zhan Lu, eds. Comp Tales: An Introduction to College Composition through Its Stories. New York: Pearson-Longman, 2008. Print.

Like many anthologies, Comp Tales, a collection of stories about teaching college writing accompanied by some theorizing in relation to the stories, makes for an uneven read. For our purposes, most valuable are the stories themselves, and any instructor who has utilized writing in a course will likely be able to relate to many of the experiences in the stories. Indeed, this collection of composition lore can provide valuable pedagogical advice. For example, consider the experience of Leon Coburn, who marked every cliché on a student’s paper with the word “cliché”, only to be rewarded with even more cliches on subsequent papers. Finally, he confronted the student to ask her to use less cliches in her writing, and she replied, “I thought you kept marking them because you liked them” (40). Clearly, even comments the meaning of which instructors would assume to be self-evident can be completely misunderstood by students, a lesson we should all remember when communicating with students. Not every selection in the book provides such a fable complete with an educational moral, but the “Classrooms,” “The Writing,” and “The Student” chapters offer many. As Lu notes, “The premise of this book project is that who we are, how we act, and what we think inform and are informed by the stories we tell” (195). What can we learn from the stories we tell about our teaching experiences at Ursuline? This book is available through OhioLINK.

Nathan, Rebekah. My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student

Nathan, Rebekah. My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print.

Written under a penname, My Freshman Year details the results of anthropologist Cathy Small going undercover and enrolling as a student at her university in 2002-2003. The impetus of the study came from her discovery that “After more than fifteen years of university teaching, I found that students had become increasingly confusing to me” (2). What she found isn’t particularly surprising: Students studied about an average of two hours per day (that includes reading, writing, researching—i.e., everything) (33), students worked jobs more often than in the past in order to pay for school and for other items (33), students rarely read for class unless the reading assignment had a direct bearing on their grades (43; 137-38), and most students rarely took advantage of co-curricular activities (much of which is a waste given the university resources that go into it) (47). Some of her discoveries were less predictable though. She learned that suite-style dorms are preferred by students for privacy reasons because, unlike previous generations, today’s students rarely shared rooms with siblings while growing up (52). Communal spaces in dorms and elsewhere on campus were underutilized because students preferred their own individual spaces, a trend bolstered by most of them having considerable material resources even in their dormrooms (53-54). In fact, Small found that in contrast to the rhetoric coming from her university about the importance of community and diversity, students tended to self-segregate themselves into individual networks of friends, most quite homogenous (57). As a result, international students were often baffled by the self-absorption and ignorance of American students (89). Alas, college didn’t seem to change such matters for the majority of students, as most class discussion was superficial (95), and academic matters were not the central focus of college life (100). Surprisingly, given these findings, Small suggests in the book that the best way a faculty member can deal with today’s students is compassion (135). Reflecting on how higher education took this path, with a special focus on the drop of taxpayer support for higher education and the consequent rise of tuition and other more corporate revenue streams, she writes: “It is easy to see how some aspects of contemporary student culture were formed. To reduce running debt even higher, most students must now work and go to school at the same time, which has the added corollary of compressing their academic activities into ever smaller time slots. To repay their debts, students are anticipating the need for immediate and lucrative employment after college, so they choose both ‘practical’ and ‘well-paying’ fields of study, resulting in the decline of majors such as philosophy, history, and English literature. The majors for which there have been the largest proportional increases in degrees conferred since 1980 include business, computer science, parks and recreation, protective services, and the health professions. These degree choices, in turn, funnel new budgetary allocations to these same departments and programs, one of many feedback processes that closes the loop between the paths of students and the direction of universities” (151). In short, an institution once devoted to the life of the mind now resembles a vocational high school. Overall, Small’s analysis of college student culture is thought-provoking, and seems to apply to students beyond large public universities. I can see much of the student behavior she describes at Ursuline. The question is what do we do about it? It’s clear that students are not getting as much out of college as they could, but much of that result is shaped by cultural and economic forces beyond the students. Do we dumb down the curriculum even further? Do we resist the forces that encourage students not to prepare for classes? Or do we attempt to hold the line of academic rigor? I suspect we’ll do all three a bit here and there and muddle through as best we can. As Small’s fellow students know, sometimes one can’t avoid a hard course. The book is available through OhioLINK.

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Eisner, Caroline, and Martha Vicinus, eds. Originality, Imitation, and Plagiarism: Teaching Writing in the Digital Age

Eisner, Caroline, and Martha Vicinus, eds. Originality, Imitation, and Plagiarism: Teaching Writing in the Digital Age. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2008. Print.

This anthology of essays addresses the growing concern about plagiarism in our computer-networked age. I have read it, as with the other books on plagiarism that I have read lately, in hopes of gleaning some practical advice on how to prevent and eliminate plagiarism in college courses, and the text does offer some useful advice, which I will discuss later. However, the authors often go beyond the walls of the classroom to consider issues of originality in academic publishing, courts of law, and, even, public sculpture, among other topics, all of which are very interesting, but not tremendously useful given my purpose in reading the text. Nevertheless, the editors suggest in the introduction that all these factors are connected, as they write, “It is no accident that public debates about plagiarism have coincided with efforts to limit access to copyrighted material” (1). In other words, the ease at which material can be duplicated today via computers has exposed holes in our previous conceptions of the ownership of ideas and their expressions, and we are attempting to deal with such issues. For college instructors specifically, these issues often boil down to the question of, as the editors ask, “How do we conserve and inculcate a tradition of ethical research and writing standards, while acknowledging and taking full advantage of the opportunities provided by new technologies?” Indeed. Alas, the volume is very good at raising such good questions, but not terribly good at answering them, perhaps because the issues are quite complex, as the authors of the essays often point out. Despite all that, the book holds a tremendous amount of value for the college instructor. Anna Berggren’s essay, “Do Thesis Statements Short-Circuit Originality in Students’ Writing?” is extremely thought-provoking. She traces the history of the thesis statement in writing instruction, and argues that it only became prominent after World War II when college enrollment increased and neophyte writing instructors hired to handle the influx of students needed an easier and faster way to evaluate writing (58-59). She suggests that rather than organizing thinking, the thesis statement may limit the creativity and originality of students. I don’t know that I agree, but the essay will certainly make one reflect over the pedagogical value of demanding thesis statements in student writing. Perhaps some students do turn to plagiarism because they don’t value the writing assignment or the purported learning that it is supposed to generate if everything has to be distilled down to a sentence or two; a more fluid structure might incur more enthusiasm in students. Another interesting idea is supplied by Kim Walden and Alan Peacock in “Economies of Plagiarism: The i-Map and Issues of Ownership in Information Gathering.” They suggest that students document the stages of their thinking in a research project, and share the document with the instructor along the research journey. This method would certainly cut down on the cases of plagiarism where a student, due to procrastination usually, turns to an online essay site or whatnot the night before an assignment is due. Though Walden and Peacock have a specific type of document in mind with their i-Map, the same result could likely be achieved with a journal, blog, or other means. Similarly, in “Plagiarism, a Turnitin Trial, and an Experience of Cultural Disorientation,” Lisa Emerson notes that holding individual conferences with students lowered instances of plagiarism (186-87). Stefan Sanders even explains in his essay “Academic Plagiarism and the Limits of Theft” how he was able to develop a student’s writing after she was caught plagiarizing. When the student was under threat of expulsion, she suddenly took writing seriously. The description of the experience makes for an interesting case study. Finally, Lynn Z. Bloom suggests that if teachers were more original with their assignments, then students would be more original as well. In “Insider Writing: Plagiarism-Proof Assignments,” she states, “In the final analysis, avoiding plagiarism is fundamentally a secondary concern for teachers, whose efforts are better spent inventing writing assignments that are original, intellectually demanding, participatory—the essence of insider writing” (216). She defines insider writing as writing where students are invested as “engaged participants rather than as alien outsiders whose understanding comes through what others—sometimes centuries of others—have had to say on the subject” (210). While you probably won’t be able to copy the specific assignments she describes since they likely won’t fit your courses--and anyway that would be plagiarism if you didn’t credit her, right?—she asks us to emulate the spirit of her approach and come up with creative assignments of our own. The book is available through OhioLINK.

Blum, Susan D. My Word!: Plagiarism and College Culture

Blum, Susan D. My Word!: Plagiarism and College Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. Print.

Blum, an anthropologist, bases her examination of plagiarism on today’s campuses upon interviews with and observations of students. As with most examiners of plagiarism, she argues that the issue is more complex than commonly understood, and spends a portion of the book exploring the history of citation practices, intellectual property, and plagiarism. Through this review, she suggests that, despite the current hysteria over plagiarism, it may not be a larger problem today than it has always been. However, given increasing collaboration in education (think of the many group projects students do at Ursuline) and the ready availability of texts of all sorts through the Internet, students’ attitudes towards citation and individual ownership of ideas may have undergone a profound shift from that of the previous generations who make up the faculty. In fact, Blum finds that “Today’s college students have been groomed to be successful, clever, and above all calculating: ‘Will this look good on my resume?’” (102). In short, they may have mastered the art of rhetoric so well in their ability to provide audiences with what they desire that what Blum terms “the performance self” has erased any authentic notion of self underneath it. Blum argues that as a result such students may not view writing as “the expression of a singular personal essence” (89), and so plagiarism would just be viewed as a means to an end. As long as it brings results about, then any moral component is irrelevant. As such, Blum suggests that honor codes as a means of preventing plagiarism will be unlikely to be effective. However she doesn’t suggest that a generation of sociopaths has been created; instead, she examines other factors of today’s culture that may also encourage plagiarism. One factor she finds is that the academic component of college is not central to students, who instead focus their college experience on co-curricular activities, internships/work, and partying. She writes, “For students who don’t care about the content of courses, or who only go through the motions of learning, plagiarism and cheating are strategies like any others, aimed at producing the best outcome (high grades) without impinging on what they really want to do with their time—socializing and relaxing” (124). Faculty who read the book will likely be shocked at how little students study, and even more shocked at how little this lack of studying seems to affect their grade point averages. Blum suggests that while we may want to blame plagiarism on the faults of individual students, the culture in which they were raised is also at fault, whether it be the higher cost of college (which Blum traces to the growth of administration) leading to greater pressure to succeed at any cost, the practice of student evaluation affecting faculty grading (i.e., faculty succeed by pleasing students, and not necessarily educating them), or parents loading students up with habits of taking on too many extracurricular activities in order to impress others and not because students are actually interested in them. And, though Blum, on pages 177-78, provides a variety of recommendations to lessen acts of plagiarism by students, she really can only suggest that the individual instructor teach “the genre requirements of academic writing” so students understand the importance of citation in academic culture (169), and that the larger culture needs to “lower the water table and return the youth of our society to drier, calmer ground, where they can hop, skip, and jump rather than cut, paste, and graduate” (180). Ultimately, Blum seems to trace the plagiarism plague not to a lack of education on the part of the students, but to the fact that they have learned all too well a larger lesson from a society that in the past decade has praised with money and other “honors” those who faked evidence to start a war, stole votes to win an election, made up accounting figures to pump up a company’s stock price, and cheated to win a Super Bowl: Any means is acceptable as long as you succeed. The book is available through OhioLINK.