Moskovitz, Cary. "The Duke Reader Project: Engaging the University Community in Undergraduate Writing Instruction." Liberal Education 97.3/4 (2011): 48-53. Academic Search Complete. Web. 17 May 2012.
Many instructors at Ursuline have experienced the following phenomenon: Students turn in their final essays at the end of the semester, but seldom ever return the following semester to pick up the essays and read instructor comments, from which, of course, they could learn and thus write better in the future. Perhaps students just forget and get too caught up in the following semester's classload and activities, but it's likely that many students honestly don't care for feedback other than the grade, which they've already received. Those students are not engaged in their writing. They see it as a hoop to jump through rather than a means for learning that can still be learned from even after the grade has been turned in.
If this has happened to you, don't feel bad and don't take it personally. It's a phenomenon that happens nationwide. To counteract this disengagement and make students more invested in their writing and more likely to grow from it, Duke University has developed a program called the Duke Reader Project. Because Duke, like most higher education institutions, considers writing to be of paramount importance for learning, the University wants students to view writing less as a schoolbound activity that one directs to an instructor and performs for a grade, and more as a "contextual act" that has real world consequences and varies from situation to situation, as well as from discipline to discipline, often driven by the needs of different audiences (48).
To teach students the importance of writing and how it functions outside of an individual course, Duke makes students write for an audience beyond the instructor by pairing a student up with a volunteer professional in the student's field. Often, these volunteers are graduates of Duke and eager to interact with students. After being paired up, the student corresponds with the volunteer and then shares drafts of an assignment for feedback. Thus far, the project appears to be very successful with both students and volunteers pleased with the results. Cary Moskovitz, Director of Writing in the Disciplines in the Thompson Writing Program at Duke, reports that "For our students, the project offers the opportunity to get detailed feedback on multiple drafts of their papers from engaged readers who are familiar with the kinds of writing they are attempting. For our alumni and our many non-instructor employees, it offers a valued and interesting way to be directly involved in our educational mission. For our institution, it builds meaningful connections between segments of our community that rarely intersect" (52). Duke's innovative program is one that other institutions such as Ursuline could emulate. In fact, Tiffany Mushrush Mentzer, Director of Alumnae Relations, has indicated that many Ursuline alums would be open to participation in a similar project here, so if you are an instructor wishing to have your students be more engaged in their writing and learn how to write for different audiences, please contact her. She can put you in touch with interested alums, and you can give a similar program a try here. If so, then you might find that students start stopping by to pick up those final papers and see what you think about their work beyond the grade as well.
The article is available through our library's databases.
Thursday, May 17, 2012
Monday, December 5, 2011
"Assessing and Teaching What We Value: The Relationship between College-level Writing and Critical Thinking Abilities" by Condon and Kelly-Riley
Condon, William, and Diane Kelly-Riley. "Assessing and Teaching What We Value: The Relationship between College-level Writing and Critical Thinking Abilities." Assessing Writing 9 (2004): 65-75. OhioLINK Electronic Journal Center. Web. 14 Nov. 2011.
Many scholars seem to just assume that writing promotes critical thinking, akin to a faithlike belief in a higher, supernatural power, but don't provide compelling evidence and explanations of how that can be done. Fortunately, in a study conducted at Washington State University (WSU), Condon and Kelly-Riley actually investigated the link between critical thinking and writing. Unfortunately, they found bad news for the "If they write it, then they will critically think" crowd. They looked at student writing using a critical thinking rubric called "The WSU Guide to Rating Critical Thinking." Some classes had incorporated the guide into instruction, and, probably not surprisingly, those classes showed better critical thinking than classes which did not use the guide. What was surprising, however, was that the classes that showed better critical thinking also showed worse writing and vice versa. The authors note, "The inverse correlation, [sic] and then the lack of relationship between our writing assessment scores and critical thinking scores point to what anecdotal evidence has long supported. Oftentimes, raters in our Writing Assessment Program comment that the exams seem to show sound writing abilities, but really contain no critical thought, or are vacuous or superficial. Haswell's research (1991) indicates that when writers take risks with new ways of thinking, often their writing breaks down in structure as the student grapples with a new way of thinking" (65-66). The authors thus suggest that writing alone will not promote critical thinking. What will promote critical thinking includes explicitly laying out expectations for students including values and features of the individual discipline being taught (65).
Ultimately, the authors argue that "Writing acts as a vehicle for critical thinking, but writing is not itself critical thinking" (66). They provide helpful advice for how to promote critical thinking in the classroom, most of which involves explicitly clarifying expectations for critical thinking (66). The authors also go on to discuss issues with using timed writing situations to assess anything beyond superficial writing traits (67-68). Though writing clearly has a place in using courses to promote critical thinking, writing by itself isn't a substitute for the critical thinking, and instructors should be careful to assess the thinking and not just the writing.
The article is available in the OhioLINK Electronic Journal Center.
Many scholars seem to just assume that writing promotes critical thinking, akin to a faithlike belief in a higher, supernatural power, but don't provide compelling evidence and explanations of how that can be done. Fortunately, in a study conducted at Washington State University (WSU), Condon and Kelly-Riley actually investigated the link between critical thinking and writing. Unfortunately, they found bad news for the "If they write it, then they will critically think" crowd. They looked at student writing using a critical thinking rubric called "The WSU Guide to Rating Critical Thinking." Some classes had incorporated the guide into instruction, and, probably not surprisingly, those classes showed better critical thinking than classes which did not use the guide. What was surprising, however, was that the classes that showed better critical thinking also showed worse writing and vice versa. The authors note, "The inverse correlation, [sic] and then the lack of relationship between our writing assessment scores and critical thinking scores point to what anecdotal evidence has long supported. Oftentimes, raters in our Writing Assessment Program comment that the exams seem to show sound writing abilities, but really contain no critical thought, or are vacuous or superficial. Haswell's research (1991) indicates that when writers take risks with new ways of thinking, often their writing breaks down in structure as the student grapples with a new way of thinking" (65-66). The authors thus suggest that writing alone will not promote critical thinking. What will promote critical thinking includes explicitly laying out expectations for students including values and features of the individual discipline being taught (65).
Ultimately, the authors argue that "Writing acts as a vehicle for critical thinking, but writing is not itself critical thinking" (66). They provide helpful advice for how to promote critical thinking in the classroom, most of which involves explicitly clarifying expectations for critical thinking (66). The authors also go on to discuss issues with using timed writing situations to assess anything beyond superficial writing traits (67-68). Though writing clearly has a place in using courses to promote critical thinking, writing by itself isn't a substitute for the critical thinking, and instructors should be careful to assess the thinking and not just the writing.
The article is available in the OhioLINK Electronic Journal Center.
Monday, October 24, 2011
Overall Writing Instruction Guidelines
If one were looking for some quick and general guidance on teaching writing, then the National Council of Teachers of English's (NCTE) beliefs would be a good place to find it.
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
National Day on Writing
The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) has named October 20th as this year's National Day on Writing, a day that celebrates the importance of the written word. This will mark the third year that NCTE has had this event. Ursuline participated in the first National Day on Writing by having our own gallery as part of NCTE's National Gallery of Writing. The galleries were initially supposed to be closed down after a few months, but the entire event was such a success that they remained open. So if anyone has anything they would like to contribute to showcase the many types of writing done at Ursuline on a daily basis, please contact me via the information on the sidebar.
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy by Anis S. Bawarshi and Mary Jo Reiff
Bawarshi, Anis S., and Mary Jo Reiff. Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press, 2010. WAC Clearinghouse. Web. 29 Aug. 2011.
At Ursuline, we write in genres every day, whether academic essays, emails, lab reports, or lesson plans. How people use genres has been a fascinating question for scholars to explore. In this book, the authors provide an overview of genre theory from several perspectives including linguistics, literary studies, rhetoric, and sociology. Though seemingly abstract at the surface level, the topic of genres is important for pedagogy and our day to day activities in the classroom. Many times, it is precisely genre that students are having difficulty with when writing in a new and unfamiliar discipline, and the authors communicate the insights of several decades of research into genres.
Though not all scholars are in agreement, most who have researched genres suggest that the explicit teaching of genres to students will best assist them in utilizing genres. An interesting approach to teaching genre comes from the Australian-based systemic-functional school, which involves what is called the "teaching-learning cycle" (34). In this cycle, students are first exposed to various examples of a particular genre and invited to analyze them. Next, students and teachers work together to construct an example of the genre. After this collaboration, students create an example of the genre on their own. For example, if I were to teach students how to write a research essay, we would read several examples of research essays first, then we would work together to write a research essay, and, finally, the students would write research essays of their own. This method, though not without its critics, has been implemented successfully at all grade levels including higher education.
Teaching genres seem to be particularly successful if the instructor can communicate to students that genres are not mere formulas but instead "dynamic, situated actions" (17) that "help organize and generate social practices and realities" (20). The authors are critical of the hackneyed teaching of universal modes of writing such as description and narration, feeling that form is typically overemphasized whereas a true understanding of genre always involves content and context as well. To replace such traditional but untheoretically-sound pedagogical approaches, after discussing the theory and research into genres earlier, the authors discuss some interesting pedagogical approaches to teaching writing in Part 3 of the book, which concludes with a handy glossary and annotated bibliography (a genre, incidentally that has been difficult for students at Ursuline).
In conclusion, the book is a valuable primer on genre theory and well worth reading. Even more valuable though is to stop and consider what genres you utilize in your courses and how you expect students to master them. Are you depending too much on tacit knowledge that you hold but the students do not? Or are you explicitly guiding the students through what is for them new rhetorical territory? Getting students to think about genre explicitly can help them to transfer their skills and enable them to recognize and negotiate new genres and situations in the future (190). As the authors vividly demonstrate, genre is worth thinking about for instructors and students alike.
The book is available for free online at http://wac.colostate.edu/books/bawarshi_reiff/.
At Ursuline, we write in genres every day, whether academic essays, emails, lab reports, or lesson plans. How people use genres has been a fascinating question for scholars to explore. In this book, the authors provide an overview of genre theory from several perspectives including linguistics, literary studies, rhetoric, and sociology. Though seemingly abstract at the surface level, the topic of genres is important for pedagogy and our day to day activities in the classroom. Many times, it is precisely genre that students are having difficulty with when writing in a new and unfamiliar discipline, and the authors communicate the insights of several decades of research into genres.
Though not all scholars are in agreement, most who have researched genres suggest that the explicit teaching of genres to students will best assist them in utilizing genres. An interesting approach to teaching genre comes from the Australian-based systemic-functional school, which involves what is called the "teaching-learning cycle" (34). In this cycle, students are first exposed to various examples of a particular genre and invited to analyze them. Next, students and teachers work together to construct an example of the genre. After this collaboration, students create an example of the genre on their own. For example, if I were to teach students how to write a research essay, we would read several examples of research essays first, then we would work together to write a research essay, and, finally, the students would write research essays of their own. This method, though not without its critics, has been implemented successfully at all grade levels including higher education.
Teaching genres seem to be particularly successful if the instructor can communicate to students that genres are not mere formulas but instead "dynamic, situated actions" (17) that "help organize and generate social practices and realities" (20). The authors are critical of the hackneyed teaching of universal modes of writing such as description and narration, feeling that form is typically overemphasized whereas a true understanding of genre always involves content and context as well. To replace such traditional but untheoretically-sound pedagogical approaches, after discussing the theory and research into genres earlier, the authors discuss some interesting pedagogical approaches to teaching writing in Part 3 of the book, which concludes with a handy glossary and annotated bibliography (a genre, incidentally that has been difficult for students at Ursuline).
In conclusion, the book is a valuable primer on genre theory and well worth reading. Even more valuable though is to stop and consider what genres you utilize in your courses and how you expect students to master them. Are you depending too much on tacit knowledge that you hold but the students do not? Or are you explicitly guiding the students through what is for them new rhetorical territory? Getting students to think about genre explicitly can help them to transfer their skills and enable them to recognize and negotiate new genres and situations in the future (190). As the authors vividly demonstrate, genre is worth thinking about for instructors and students alike.
The book is available for free online at http://wac.colostate.edu/books/bawarshi_reiff/.
Monday, June 6, 2011
Summer Break
Another academic year has ended so the blog will be taking a summer break. Please look for new posts in Fall 2011.
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Lowering Higher Education: The Rise of Corporate Universities and the Fall of Liberal Education by James E. Cote and Anton L. Allahar
Cote, James E., and Anton L. Allahar. Lowering Higher Education: The Rise of Corporate Universities and the Fall of Liberal Education. Buffalo, NY: U of Toronto P, 2011. Print.
This book is the sequel to Ivory Tower Blues, which I have also written about on the blog, and the authors continue to explore the themes and concerns of the earlier book. In fact, you could probably read either book and get the gist of the other. However, since this book is more recent, I’d suggest reading it instead of the previous book. In both books, the authors are concerned that higher education has lost its way, abandoning the traditions of the liberal arts for the economic appeal of “pseudo-vocational training,” an approach that threatens to capsize the whole university enterprise: "These programs have been rebranded to promise that they will give students an edge in the competition for jobs. As this has happened, the pedagogical value of the liberal education in stimulating critical thinking abilities, and honing the skills associated with effectively communicating those abilities in writing and speech, is diminishing; thus, as universities adopt teaching practices associated with training people to remember formulae, systems of facts, and procedures, rather than educating them to develop a critical awareness of the world at large that they can defend epistemologically, we witness a fundamental alteration in the structure and function of the traditional university and its curriculum" (4). For writing instruction, this approach manifests itself in a lack of significant writing assignments, and, consequently, a lack of transformative opportunities for intellectual growth (86-87). The authors make a number of recommendations (177-78) to remedy matters, but only a societywide initiative is likely to succeed, for, as the authors note, the crisis in higher education stems from misguided government policies that promote higher education as the one-size-fits-all answer to questions of economic development (91). Furthermore, the authors suggest that student disengagement doesn’t stem from universities not embracing multiple ways of learning (127) or utilizing new technology (the entirety of chapter 6), nor from students working more hours to pay for college (139), but from a basic academic permissiveness in which the majority of students achieve above-average grades for what logically and statistically must include some below-average work (69). They ask, “why would someone try harder in their courses when high grades are so easily obtained, especially someone who prefers socializing or making some money on the side?” (144). But, without an effort on the part of the individual student, he or she will not achieve the benefit of a college education, an assertion of the authors that will likely find support in any reader of this blog (65). Therefore, in order to guarantee that students must exert themselves in their studies, colleges and universities should fight grade inflation and the accompanying relaxation of academic standards.
The good news is that at Ursuline we already employ many of the approaches that the authors recommend, such as a focus on developing the critical thinking skills of students (the epistemic positions discussed on 95-97 resemble those from Women’s Ways of Knowing), which is ironic since much of our curriculum might be viewed by the authors as pseudo-vocational. Apparently the core curriculum’s base in liberal education may be moderating the effects of the issues negatively affecting higher education. In any case, I hope that we don’t offer a “BA-lite” here, a trend that the authors see growing, with the more rigorous, traditional liberal arts education being discarded (6). But, like other institutions, we may do well to remember and resist the current fashionable metaphor of the college as corporation: students aren’t customers; instead, they are better understood as raw commodities “to be transformed in some way by the experience, not a consumer of knowledge or a credential” (78). The authors conclude that if things do not change, most colleges and universities “will pretend to teach students at a level of higher education, and students will pretend to learn at that level, but the truth will be that universities are simply providing empty degrees that are little more than expensive ‘fishing licenses’ for lower-level white-collar jobs” (191), resulting in a terrifying situation for both higher education and the rest of society.
The book is available through OhioLINK.
This book is the sequel to Ivory Tower Blues, which I have also written about on the blog, and the authors continue to explore the themes and concerns of the earlier book. In fact, you could probably read either book and get the gist of the other. However, since this book is more recent, I’d suggest reading it instead of the previous book. In both books, the authors are concerned that higher education has lost its way, abandoning the traditions of the liberal arts for the economic appeal of “pseudo-vocational training,” an approach that threatens to capsize the whole university enterprise: "These programs have been rebranded to promise that they will give students an edge in the competition for jobs. As this has happened, the pedagogical value of the liberal education in stimulating critical thinking abilities, and honing the skills associated with effectively communicating those abilities in writing and speech, is diminishing; thus, as universities adopt teaching practices associated with training people to remember formulae, systems of facts, and procedures, rather than educating them to develop a critical awareness of the world at large that they can defend epistemologically, we witness a fundamental alteration in the structure and function of the traditional university and its curriculum" (4). For writing instruction, this approach manifests itself in a lack of significant writing assignments, and, consequently, a lack of transformative opportunities for intellectual growth (86-87). The authors make a number of recommendations (177-78) to remedy matters, but only a societywide initiative is likely to succeed, for, as the authors note, the crisis in higher education stems from misguided government policies that promote higher education as the one-size-fits-all answer to questions of economic development (91). Furthermore, the authors suggest that student disengagement doesn’t stem from universities not embracing multiple ways of learning (127) or utilizing new technology (the entirety of chapter 6), nor from students working more hours to pay for college (139), but from a basic academic permissiveness in which the majority of students achieve above-average grades for what logically and statistically must include some below-average work (69). They ask, “why would someone try harder in their courses when high grades are so easily obtained, especially someone who prefers socializing or making some money on the side?” (144). But, without an effort on the part of the individual student, he or she will not achieve the benefit of a college education, an assertion of the authors that will likely find support in any reader of this blog (65). Therefore, in order to guarantee that students must exert themselves in their studies, colleges and universities should fight grade inflation and the accompanying relaxation of academic standards.
The good news is that at Ursuline we already employ many of the approaches that the authors recommend, such as a focus on developing the critical thinking skills of students (the epistemic positions discussed on 95-97 resemble those from Women’s Ways of Knowing), which is ironic since much of our curriculum might be viewed by the authors as pseudo-vocational. Apparently the core curriculum’s base in liberal education may be moderating the effects of the issues negatively affecting higher education. In any case, I hope that we don’t offer a “BA-lite” here, a trend that the authors see growing, with the more rigorous, traditional liberal arts education being discarded (6). But, like other institutions, we may do well to remember and resist the current fashionable metaphor of the college as corporation: students aren’t customers; instead, they are better understood as raw commodities “to be transformed in some way by the experience, not a consumer of knowledge or a credential” (78). The authors conclude that if things do not change, most colleges and universities “will pretend to teach students at a level of higher education, and students will pretend to learn at that level, but the truth will be that universities are simply providing empty degrees that are little more than expensive ‘fishing licenses’ for lower-level white-collar jobs” (191), resulting in a terrifying situation for both higher education and the rest of society.
The book is available through OhioLINK.
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