October 2016 – Elise's PhD Journey

PAB Entry #8

In Caitlin Cornell Holmes’ article, “At the Commencement of an Archive: The National Census of Writing and the State of Writing Across the Curriculum,” she explains the background of the National Census of Writing (NCW) and how it can allow us to archive information, potentially solving the problem of definition for the field (in this case, writing across the curriculum, or WAC) as well as benefiting methodological concerns among scholars who seek to represent WAC work in their scholarship and at their institutions. She argues for archives as a methodology for gathering and sorting research, noting that “[a]rchives—and the databases that constitute them—have since remained a focal point within rhetoric and composition as an emerging and evolving field, often calling attention to what is included and what is excluded” (p. 76). The CWP is a type of survey that collects and compares data from participant responses to a variety of WAC program-related questions.

archive Holmes draws on Susan Wells to justify her support of the archive, and reminds us that we are no longer limited to traditional archival work due to recent technological advancements; searchable and generative databases should be considered archives. According to Wells, archival work “help[s] us to rethink our political and institutional situation,” thus allowing us to reconfigure “how we situate and represent our larger scholarly conversation and practices” (cited in Holmes, p. 77). Archival work, therefore, allows us to discover the definition of WAC and the methodologies we use to implement and assess WAC in spite of what our current situation is or is not.

Holmes also draws on several scholars who have highlighted the problems of definition and methodology in their work. In her discussion of the definition of WAC programs, Holmes highlights Condon and Rutz (2012) who wrote, “As WAC’s thirty-plus-year history argues, the pedagogy and associated philosophy have become widespread, yet WAC as a phenomenon does not possess a single identifiable structure; instead it varies in its development and manifestation from campus to campus” (p. 80). This is, of course, because WAC programs have a tendency to be absorbed into other institutional structures such as composition programs or assessment initiatives (p. 86). methods

To address methodological concerns in the field, Holmes points out the struggles of several scholars, including Thaiss and Porter in their 2008 survey that sought to determine how many WAC/WID programs exist in the US. Holmes posits that “all efforts to survey and report. . . have been limited by the fixity of data represented in publication, the labor-intensive nature of collecting this information from individual schools, and the continuing ambiguity around how these types of writing programs are constituted and positioned within local contexts” (p. 78).

The CWP is not fail proof, however, as some respondents from the same institution gave conflicting answers, some respondents did not feel capable of giving information about their programs or requirements, and some respondents were sure there was a WAC program but did not know who at their institution would be able to provide information on it. It
seems that problems of methodology cannot fully be addressed until the field has defined itself. If this is the question-mark case, then the field will continue to struggle to define itself as long as there are questions about methodology. So at what point do definition of a field and methodology depart from each other? Are the terms inseparable? Must our methodology be driven by the conventions of our field alone and vice versa? Given these questions after thirt-plus years of WAC research, we seem to still be at commencement.

Holmes, C. (2015). At the commencement of an archive: The national census of writing and the state of writing across the curriculum. The WAC Journal 26. Retrieved from http://wac.colostate.edu/journal/vol26/holmes.pdf

PAB Entry #7

In the introduction to their edited collection, Landmark Essays on Writing Across the Curriculum, Charles Bazerman and David Russell (1994) explain how specialized discourses are grounded in the rhetorical theory that dates back to the Ancient Greeks and the debates and discussions that were shaped by the Sophists, Plato, and Aristotle. Bazerman and Russell explain that “[a]s there are professional rivalries today, so there were battles among the technai in the fifth century b.c.e., as one group of practitioners challenged the knowledge or skill of another group to win social credit in some activity field” (xvii). This history interestingly parallels the evolution of the field of English over the last 60 to 70 years, as literature has sought to suppress technical communication, composition, creative writing, etc.

Yet specialized fields such as writing across the curriculum have evolved. Bazerman and Russell explain, “the Sophists were interested in the uses of discourse for training young men to speak persuasively in legal and political forums.” As such, “rhetoric became the art of civic discourse and what came to be known as liberal education” (xix), and the evolution of specialized discourses in general first became evident during the Middle Ages after the breakup of the Roman Empire: “by the twelfth century, social structures for organizing specialized knowledge had begun to evolve, and with them specialized discourses” (xxiv). The first universities began to take shape in which students could study law, theology (including religion), and medicine, and while rhetoric “was relegated to lower levels of teaching,” it greatly influenced the activity of law and religion.

According to Bazerman and Russell, “the Renaissance further complicated the relationship between the formal study of rhetoric and communicative practices in specialized fields.” Because of the invention of the printing press, specialized discourses were now accessible to the university while other discourses in practical arts and technology such as martial arts, mining, herbal lore, and shipbuilding began to evolve. The fourteenth century humanist revival of classical learning and education reinstituted and encouraged the study of rhetoric in the university, but it in turn “militated against the acceptance of specialized discourses as objects of study” (xxv). Humanist education was highly literary and Ciceronian prose was the compositionist ideal.

what-rhetoric-has-endured

Other individuals such as Francis Bacon (16^th century), Joseph Priestly and Adam Smith (17^th century), and Hugh Blair, George Campbell, and Richard Whately (19th century) have influenced the ebbs and flows of rhetoric over the course of time. In spite of what rhetoric has endured over the last 16 centuries, it has proven, in one way or another, to be foundational in every discourse, even supporting specialized discourses such as writing across the curriculum. But if rhetoric is so foundational to the many disciplines, why do we, scholars of English, continue to struggle to locate ourselves? Bazerman and Russell’s essay is useful in identifying and understanding the theoretical underpinnings of not only the field of English but also WAC as a subdiscipline, and I expect this work will be useful to me as I continue to work to locate myself within our field.

Bazerman, C., & Russell, D. (Eds.). (1994). Landmark essays on writing across the curriculum. New York, NY: Hermagoras Press.

Paper #3

I struggle in admitting I am an English professor. My students call me
“professor” and my mail comes to me with “professor” in the greeting, yet I still have a hard time introducing myself as such though I’ve been teaching at the collegiate level for five years—I usually just tell people, “I teach English.” “Professor” suggests that I have earned respect from my field and academia as a whole. The title suggests that I have studied, reflected, and can articulate where I align myself in my field. My apprehensions about being called “professor” were affirmed when I was tasked with this blog post, and I began to realize the challenge—and value—in being able to articulate how I align myself theoretically and epistemologically. What theories frame my pursuit of knowledge? What are my beliefs about discovering knowledge about my field? Perhaps I have struggled to embrace my position as an educator because I had not before defined myself in these terms, and in doing so, I had not before claimed a position as a scholar in my field or in academia.

After much reflection, I found that I align myself theoretically with David Russell’s (1995) explanation of activity theory which “analyzes human behavior and consciousness in terms of activity systems.” Through the activity system, we see 1.) the subject, or the writer, who 2.) mediates the situation in order to 3.) achieve an objective or outcome (n. pag). In effect, the activity system takes on a triangular shape that depicts each aspect of the activity system as dependent on the other two. The subject chooses which tool he will use to mediate the situation (in this case, writing) and how he will use it, but whether or not he achieves the objective—or finishes his written assignment—depends on how well he uses his tool to manage the situation he is in. Ultimately, the writer is impacted by the tool and the objective, modifying his use of the tool and his understanding of the objective as he pushes forward to completion. Therefore, activity systems are social and negotiable, and as such, every activity system is unique. However, learners often struggle to apply the skills that were learned in one activity system to another activity system due to their inability to adapt those skills. While every activity system is unique, learners often fail to recognize the similarities between them.

It is activity theory that gives me a language with which I can study transfer, which Perkins and Salomon (1988) describe as “something learned in one context [that helps] in another” (p. 22). That something, often consisting of a single skill or a set of skills, is beneficial to learners, who are ultimately responsible for their own independent ability to successfully manage writing situations. Downs and Wardle hold that this management is best understood through Russell’s lens of activity theory. Hence, the Writing about Writing approach, first introduced to the field in 2007, was designed in part as a response to a long-standing discussion on how to promote transfer in first-year composition classrooms.

Epistemologically, I align myself with social constructivism, “wherein knowledge is understood to be dynamic, provisional, and developed and mediated socially as people operate within various ‘communities’ of knowledge.” Psychologist Lev Vygotsky, scientist Thomas Khun, and rhetorician Kenneth Bruffee have contributed to our current understanding of social constructivist epistemology (p. 33). In essence, our inner speech, or thoughts, are on a higher level than our verbal, or social speech (Vygotsky), and these inner thoughts are inspired by our interactions with the social world around us, which is complex, interdisciplinary, and shapes our knowledge (Kuhn). Therefore, collaborative learning strategies, or social opportunities, enable us to use our higher level thoughts in conjunction with our surrounding environments that are working to shape our knowledge and in turn shape our output (e.g. verbal and written speech) (Brufee) (Hewett and Ehmann, 2004, pp. 34-37). Social constructivism allows me to make the teaching and learning experience transparent, which is essential to successful transfer as students leave my English classroom and enter into classrooms of other disciplines.

My theoretical and epistemological alignment are connected to my professional objectives as an educator and a faculty member at my current institution. I want students to understand the interconnectivity of the disciplines they are studying and the value of a liberal arts education. At the beginning of every semester I ask them, “What is a liberal arts education?” Their responses are limited to the idea that they need to be “well-rounded”—a reminder for me every semester that students need to see the social nature of learning and the activity systems in which they engage. A reminder that, as a professor, I am a window through which my students will view the university and the English discipline for 15 weeks, and I better know where I align myself in order to help align them.

References

Downs, D. & Wardle, E. (2007). Teaching about writing, righting misconceptions: (Re)envisioning “First-Year Composition” as “Introduction to Writing Studies.” CCC, 58(4), 552-584.

Hewett, B. and Ehmann, C. (2004). Preparing educators for online writing instruction. Urbana, IL: NCTE.

Perkins, D.N, & Salomon, G. (1988). Teaching for transfer. Educational Leadership, 46(1), 22-32.

Russell, D. (1995). Activity theory and its implications for writing instruction. In J. Petraglia (Ed.), In Reconceiving writing, rethinking writing instruction (51-78). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

PAB Entry #6

college-writing-and-beyond In Appendix A to her second book, College Writing and Beyond (2007), Anne Beaufort worked to improve learning outcomes, “including positive transfer of learning for an academic writing class.” But five years later, after further reading, reflection, and observation of her students’ difficulties, she recognizes the need to give students “a stronger skill base in academic writing and to foster more positive transfer of learning from writing courses to other contexts for writing” as she articulates in her article, “College Writing and Beyond: Five Years Later” (2012). Here, she revisits her sample course outline and previous suggestions, acknowledges the problems she sees with the pedagogy and curriculum she previously set forth, and explains what she is now experimenting with as she continues to teach college writing.

Beaufort highlights four considerations for improvement to her previously proposed curriculum:

Clarifying assumptions about learning goals in writing courses
The issue of guideline for course theme(s) and the relationship to teaching for transfer
Applying principles of transfer of learning explicitly to the pedagogy associated with associated with any writing tasks in any instructional setting
The ideal types and number of genres in academic writing classes with pragmatic aims

When discussing her first consideration, Beaufort acknowledges that “the major writing projects proposed in Appendix A are not the best for helping students gain analytic skills and rhetorical skills in typical academic genres. Students are asked to write in too many genres in a single writing course and in genres that are not widely used in a lot of other academic disciplines.”

When discussing the second consideration, she identifies her proposal in Appendix A to utilize a course theme, “Writing as Social Practice.” Beaufort’s concern here is not with the proposed theme, however—it is the limitation she implicitly set on potential themes: What I did not say as clearly as I would like to now is that this is only one possible course theme that would encourage in-depth intellectual exploration into subjects from any number of discourse communities.” Further, Beaufort notes that “Writing as Social Practice” as a theme “would enable writers to become more self-aware [but she] conflated that goal with the goal of teaching for transfer. Teaching for transfer can be accomplished, if appropriate strategies are used, no matter what the course’s subject matter.”

what-is-genre

For the third consideration, Beaufort expresses her concern for the little explicit instruction given to writing teachers that is needed to teach students to understand and apply key concepts to writing tasks (discourse community, genre, rhetorical context, etc.). She notes that “[t]asks must be framed appropriately and repeatedly in order for writers to carry forward those big concepts to help them analyze and successfully accomplish writing tasks in other situations.” Also, helping students to understand and apply genre theory should become a standard practice in composition pedagogy, which was not previously made clear in Appendix A.

For the fourth consideration, Beaufort submits, “I did not think through carefully enough whether the particular genres I suggested for writing assignments in Appendix A would be most efficacious for teaching core academic writing skills.” She explains that she has removed her previous assignments from the syllabus (literacy autobiography, genre analysis, and ethnography assignment) and replaced them with two major assignments: a rhetorical analysis of a nonfiction text and a literature review of a body of research that seeks to address an important question.

Beaufort’s revisions cause me to reflect on my own pedagogy and curriculum design for first-year composition. I appreciate her honesty and candidness, and question to what extent I am encouraging students to compose in genres that will be meaningless to them once they have completed FYC. Or, is the integration of genre awareness as a threshold concept in my curriculum useful regardless of the genres students actually compose?

Beaufort, A. (2012). College writing and beyond: Five years later. Composition Forum 26. Retrieved from http://compositionforum.com/issue/26/college-writing-beyond.php.

PAB Entry #5

In their article, “Articulating Claims and Presenting Evidence: A Study of Twelve Student Writers, From First-Year Composition to Writing Across the Curriculum,” J. Paul Johnson and Ethan Krase share their longitudinal study in which they examined transfer as a key component of argumentation from first-year composition (FYC) to writing across the curriculum (WAC) in the junior and senior years of college. After highlighting several studies that have also analyzed transfer of argument skills (Rose, 1989; Dias et al., 1999Smit, 2004; Thaiss and Zawacki, 2006; Wardle, 2007; Greene & Orr, 2007; Fukuzawa & Boyd, 2008), Johnson and Krase align themselves with Toulmin’s method of argument, noting that “Toulmin’s taxonomy of argument allows for accommodation of the generic features of argument, primarily its use of claims and evidence, across multiple disciplinary areas” (p. 33). They define claim as “the main point a writer hopes to assert,” which is supported by evidence, or what Toulmin called data (p. 32).

toulmin

Using these definitions, the authors conducted their study seeking to answer the following questions: “Did students employ claims in their writing in FYC and WAC? Were students’ claims clear, concise and qualified? Did students support claims with authoritative, varied, and documented evidence? As students progressed through and beyond FYC to WAC in their various undergraduate majors, did their abilities to employ claims and evidence improve?” (Johnson & Krase, 2013, p. 33).

Twelve students participated in the study, and in order to examine more closely “individual students’ transition from FYC to their later WAC coursework, [the authors] collected and triangulated data from multiple sources and at various stages of development” (p. 33). Data from each student portfolio allowed the authors to examine students writing at three specific points: 1.) the start of first-year composition, 2.) the end of first-year composition, and 3.) during writing across the curriculum.

The authors note that the evidence from their study suggests that the majority of the twelve students improved their ability to articulate claims and support them with evidence in FYC. In the WAC courses, the authors found that “[w]hile the students in this study encountered in WAC a diverse variety of genres, most of those genres required them to support claims with evidence. In this regard, students appeared to benefit from related instruction in FYC. That is to say, students’ development of ability to articulate and support claims in FYC appeared directly related to their ability to do so in their later WAC courses” (p. 46). But after reading this article, I have several questions for the authors about their methodology in this study. Were FYC instructors teaching with transfer—or WAC at the very least—in mind? While enrolled in WAC, were students prompted to recall the skills learned in FYC? To what extent were the students responsible for their own transfer?

These methodology questions beg some larger questions for me regarding WAC and transfer: How is transfer taught for in a WAC curriculum? To what extent is the onus left on the students to transfer writing skills across contexts? Do FYC instructors encourage students to think beyond FYC? Or do WAC instructors prompt students to recall what they learned in FYC?

Johnson, J.P. and Krase, E. (2012). Articulating Claims and Presenting Evidence: A Study of twelve student writers, from first-year composition to writing across the curriculum. The WAC Journal 23, 31-48.

Paper #2

To this point, I have attempted to lay some groundwork that justifies Teaching for Transfer (TFT) as a subdiscipline of English, as it is an emerging disciplinary question in the field. It is possible, however, that I have been thinking too narrowly and need to reflect first on the greater ongoing discussion in an already established subdiscipline in order more fully shape a discussion and justification for TFT as its own subdiscipline. no-tft

Because the discussion of transfer is supported by the field’s desire to encourage students to utilize learned writing skills across disciplinary contexts, a more appropriate scope of research in ENGL 810 would be Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC). According to Gallegos (2013), “[WAC] recognizes that writing is an integral part of knowledge production within every discipline or because it involves instructors in other disciplines in the teaching of writing, but also because it is a model in which students’ use of writing to learn, as well as to demonstrate learning in courses across the disciplines, helps them to realize the necessity of writing throughout their academic careers.” Transfer and WAC are related in that both privilege contextualized writing, yet WAC is an established movement that transcends disciplinarity while still being quarterbacked by the English department.

wac

David Russell dealt with the history of WAC in his work “American Origins of the Writing-across-the-Curriculum Movement.” In this article, Russell indicated that the origins of WAC date back to the late nineteenth century and are a response to “the American tradition of progressive education” (1992, p. 3). Progressive education is the result of conflict that emerged from an industrial society—a building pressure between increased specialization of knowledge, professional work, and the need “to integrate more fully an ever-widening number of citizens into intellectually meaningful activity” (p. 3). Guerra noted that visions of WAC solidified as a movement in the late 1970s when WAC became “institutionally acceptable” (p. 297). But in spite of disciplinary support, according to Condon and Rutz (2013), WAC lacked consistency: “[WAC] pedagogy and associated philosophy have become widespread, yet WAC as a phenomenon does not possess a single, identifiable structure; instead, it varies in its development and its manifestation from campus to campus” (p. 358). Institutions who utilize a WAC model each designate their own outcomes to work toward, but for Condon and Rutz, successful WAC programs are supported by a complex infrastructure that supports general education and first-year seminar goals (p. 359). First-year programs across institutions, therefore, need to be in conversation with each other. This is unrealistic, of course, due to local affordances and constraints, so Condon and Rutz challenge outcomes as a structure.

question-mark Condon’s and Rutz’s assertion begs a major question in the field: Does goal-oriented progress, or the use of outcomes, increase the tension that exists between the disciplines? Gallagher’s work (2012) is critical of outcome assessment (OA), positing that though OA is “common sense” because of the goals they provide for student learning and the results that can be measured for curricular improvement (p. 42), “[f]ocusing on outcomes tends to limit and compromise the educational experiences of teachers and students” (p. 43). In an effort to resolve, or provide a structure for, the inconsistencies in WAC programs, Condon and Rutz propose their own structure, noting, “To honor the resilience and variety of WAC programs, we offer a taxonomy, an organized classification system based on key characteristics” (2013, p. 358). Interestingly, Yancey (2005) supports the WPA Outcomes Statement in her work “Standards, Outcomes and All that Jazz,” citing specific reasons as to how and why outcomes are useful tools.

Much research within the discussion of WAC has been produced over the last several decades, including work on genre, literacy, and transfer (Bawarshi, 2010; Devitt, 2009; Goldblatt, 2007). But perhaps the most interesting research has been on WAC in practice, thus responding to the question of goal-oriented instruction. Kinney and Murray Costello (2015), for example, note that one of WAC’s greatest strengths is also one of its greatest weaknesses: while it does not compel students to enroll in a required sequence of courses, students are enabled to delay enrollment indefinitely. WAC has been a useful pedagogical model at Binghamton University, but students were not required to take a first-year writing course early in their curriculum, “leaving them ill-equipped to take on higher-order literacy tasks” (p.143). Here, it seems that outcomes within a WAC course do little to help students apply writing skills across the curriculum when the most basic outcomes are left unmet. This causes us to question Yancey’s point that outcomes are useful tools—the adjective “useful” does not describe the extent to which outcomes support successful vertical progression through a curriculum. More research and discussion is needed in this question, however, as we cannot limit ourselves or our students to a standard measure of usefulness in determining their success or our own.

References

Condon, W. & Rutz, C. (2013). A taxonomy of writing across the curriculum programs: Evolving to serve broader agendas. Conference on College Composition 64(2), 357-382.

Gallagher, C.W. (2012). The trouble with outcomes: Pragmatic inquiry and educational aims. College English 75(1), 42-60.

Gallegos, E.P. (2013). Mapping student literacies: Reimagining college writing instruction within the literacy landscape. Composition Forum 27. http://compositionforum.com/issue/27/literacies.php.

Guerra, J. (2008). Cultivating transcultural citizenship: A writing across communities model. Language Arts 85(4), 296-304.

Kinney, K. & Murray Costello, K. (2015). Back to the future: First-year writing in the Binghamton University writing initiative, State University of New York. In M.J. Reiff, et al. (Eds.), Ecologies of writing programs: Program profiles in context, Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 142-162.

Russell, D. R. (1992). American origins of the writing across the curriculum movement. In C. Bazerman and D. Russell (Eds.), Landmark essays on writing across the curriculum, Hermagoras Press.

Yancey, K. B. (2005). Standards, outcomes, and all that jazz. In S. Harrington, et al. (Eds.), The Outcomes Book. Logan, UT: Utah State UP.