Open Post

During the beginning of this class, I was concerned that I might feel rather constricted by the discourse that the syllabus indicated we would engage in. As the course progressed, I began to realize, in light of the 1301 curriculum at Texas Tech, that the assignments and strategies for teaching first-year composition actually have more flexibility in them than I expected.  I discovered the value that, after producing a first draft of my article-length essay, creative writing, a craft that I hold dear to myself, can have within the composition classroom.  I have discovered that rhetoric might be best taught by having students first engage in writing as they have been taught to do prior to first-year composition; by having students engage in writing of their own choosing and that has less restrictions or expectations for a final product, I have discovered that it might be easier to teach students composition by illustrating to them that they already possess the necessary skills to communicate and to argue certain viewpoints.  I believe that teaching students from their own strengths and weaknesses greatly enhances all that they glean from the class, and I feel as if this is the best approach to teaching students rhetoric and how to translate their voices into different genres.

After critically engaging with a number of texts that discuss the theories and pedagogical practices of composition, I feel as if there is much more room for creative writing within the composition classroom.  I believe that it is imperative to first empower students by allowing them to realize the authority that they can give their words in mediums that are less critically or discursively motivated and then to illustrate to them how these skills can be applied within a variety of media.  This class has allowed me to understand the practicality of being able to recognize rhetorical situations, and I feel as if I am much better equipped to enter into the classroom for the first time. 

Thesis and Sources for my Article

What is the thesis to your article for this course? What support will you cite to help you make your case?

My thesis to the article this course focuses upon examining how teaching composition through creative writing is more effective for teaching audience awareness than teaching composition through rhetorical analysis. My thesis is, in its roughest stages: “Despite the contradicting views over the best methodology for teaching audience awareness in the composition classroom, utilizing methods that have their roots in teaching creative writing is more effective than teaching audience through how to construct a rhetorical analysis.” I believe that students are more likely to best understand how to appeal to a certain audience by engaging in creative writing than they are through writing an analysis of what rhetorical devices a particular author uses.

To support my claim, I will draw upon Will Hochman’s analysis of Richard Hugo’s performance in the composition classroom. Hugo’s pedagogy revolves around his ideas focused around teaching creative writing as a means of teaching students composition. Hochman’s review of Hugo’s performance in the composition classroom gives an in-depth account of specific techniques and strategies used by Hugo to teach his students all that they are expected to learn from engaging in composition. 

I will also use, to represent the alternative side of the argument, Bedford’s article, titled “A Brief History of Rhetoric and Composition” to indicate the method through which audience is taught through rhetoric. I also think that examining Ede and Lunsford’s “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy” will be useful for indicating the importance that identifying audience in this classroom setting holds. In order to establish the importance of considering audience during the process of composition, I will use Ede and Lunsford’s article, and I will then make my argument by redirecting my focus around the best way to teach this to first-year students.  I think that this will be an excellent starting point for my essay, and that these article will give me solid ground upon which to begin my research and engagement with the topic that I’ve chosen.

Week 11: A Translated Learning Objective

Review the learning objectives for this course. What's one thing you've learned that connects to an objective and to your future job?

After taking into consideration the objectives for this course, I find that the objective titled “Audience Awareness” is most important to consider for my future job. I ultimately desire to write for a living, which is wonderfully idealistic and highly improbable; therefore, I wish to teach creative writing and literature courses to students while pursuing my own interests at a University somewhere (anywhere). With teaching college students as my professional goal, I think that maintaining an awareness of their age, learning methods, current skills, and knowledge of the world is of utmost importance when attempting to communicate with them. This means that I place a high value on the ability to understand the group of people to which I present information and on the ability to manipulate information in ways to appeal to different audiences. I find this consideration important within the classroom, and, even though I have written several posts regarding andragogy (which places a main emphasis upon the type of audience being taught), I think that it is one of the most important styles of teaching to consider when engaged in a college classroom. 

By being aware of the audience that we, as instructors, are given to teach, we allow ourselves to consider how to best present information and how to best go about teaching these students.  By being able to analyze the demographic composition of the audience, it is much easier to select contact zones through which this audience will learn.  Being aware of our audience within the classroom allows us to select topics that are most relevantly linked with the students, which will further allow us to best teach the topics required of us by the curriculum.  Without a thorough understanding of the audience and the issue that most closely relate to them, it is nearly impossible to engage in successfully teaching a class.

            The ideas supporting andragogy are grounded in the conception of the audience as group of adults. By taking this into careful consideration when approaching lesson plans and activities for my classes, I will try to make the purpose of the assignments clear and concise, and I will try to provide multiple options/prompts to which students can respond.  I believe that, without knowing the type of people within the audience to which texts are addressed or to which lesson plans are directed, neither teaching nor writing can be executed effectively. This is one of our learning objectives that I value and appreciate, allowing me to understand both the importance of applying it and the importance of teaching it as well.

Week 10: Expected Area of Weakness in an Assignment

Identify where you think students may fail in an assignment in your syllabus, and how you will use that as a teachable moment by design. 

I think that students are most likely to struggle with the group composition project, specifically in reaching a consensus of the most relevant sections and the most important devices at work within these sections. Although I will be actively mediating online discussion, I think that students will struggle with accepting others’ ideas as potentially better than their own. I hope to illustrate to students that collaboration is not always an easy process, and I hope to illustrate to them the most appropriate methods for going about refuting another’s idea.

I will stress the importance of maintaining an open mind and of providing an ample amount of evidence to back one’s claims.  I hope to teach students that clear communication and concise presentation of their thoughts is vital for reaching an agreement of this nature, and I wish to illustrate to them that an argument is not entirely valid until backed with substantial claims.  I expect there to be some difficulty among students in reaching an agreement and in supporting the claims that they make with solid evidence and appropriate sources.  I wish to use this assignment not only as a project through which to introduce the benefits and difficulties of collaboration, but also to show students how they should go about arguing.  I want them to understand, in the end, that arguing is a healthy, necessary part of academic discussion, and I want them to able to engage in this type of discussion appropriately and with the proper end goals in mind.

5 Terms Undefined

List 5 terms you don't quite know yet how to define from our final keywords list. Next identify three in other students' blog you do know how to define, and comment on them there in those blogs. 

Five terms/people I cannot yet define:

àLester Faigley

àWriting Assessment

àStephen North

àSusan Miller

àMaking of Knowledge

Three term's I've helped my peers define:

Authority

Collaboration

Critical Thinking

Week 8: Collaborative Syllabus Assignment

What is one assignment you will include in your syllabus assignment that uses collaboration and/or technology and/or other things Yancey, Selfe, Breuch, Bruffee, or Shaughnessey have discussed?

In class, we have recently discussed the concept of post-process learning as explored by Kastman-Breuch in her article “Post-Process ‘Pedagogy’: A Philosophical Exercise.” Kastman-Breuch suggests that teaching composition has become “another foundational example of writing” due to the emphasis that educators place upon the process of writing, traditionally defined as the prewriting, writing, and rewriting stages (97). Kastman-Breuch endorses Thomas Kent’s (another post-process scholar) idea that “teaching writing as a system is impossible,” which necessitates the search for and implementation of multimodal or collaborative learning opportunities, many of which we have discussed in class (101).

I believe that collaboration is essential for students to learn effectively and accurately, as it “requires two-way rather than one-way communication, suggesting that teachers move away from a transmission model of education and toward a transformative model that includes active participation” (Kastman-Breuch 102). I believe that it is imperative that students are actively engaged in their composition courses, both inside and outside of the classroom, which requires an active and open thread of communication be available for students to share thoughts, pose questions, or engage in discussion at any time. Although I indicate that this is important in order for students to learn, I maintain that instructor engagement is equally important, otherwise the effort is not collaborative.

In my syllabus, I will include an assignment that is designed to uphold Kastman-Breuch’s idea of post-process learning and to ensure student engagement inside and outside of the classroom. This assignment will be completed over the course of two days and will require that students communicate online during the week.  Students will be divided into two separate groups, each containing half of the class. The class as a whole will be asked to select a text (whether it be film, literature, artwork, etc.).  Once agreed upon, students in group one will be tasked with, on the first day of online communication, to select five of the most significant scenes/sections/aspects of the selected text.  In order to come to a consensus as to which portions of the selected text is the most important, students will have to engage in an online discussion, providing support for or arguments against the scenes that they believe should be included. Naturally, this discussion will be mediated by the instructor, whose job it is to direct students toward thinking about technique, strategy, and other elements that are pertinent to the text from a critical standpoint. After these five sections are agreed upon, group two will then be asked to identify and define three strategies of composition (or techniques) that the authors employ which students find the most relevant. They will be asked to defend their answers, and to agree upon three for each text. Afterward, the instructor should provide commentary that challenges each of these techniques as relevant selections.  The second day will consist of both groups of students working to compile a list of sources that support either their own claims or the claims of the teacher.  The results will be recorded by the instructor and brought to the next class meeting for discussion.

The purpose of this assignment is to illustrate the process of composition as an active, engaged process that requires a series of revisions to thought, and an intensive process of adequately supporting the claims that they make.  The design of this assignment mimics the process of composing a critical analysis of a text; however, the students are given the opportunity to engage in this process together, building on the blocks laid down by their peers.  The purpose of this assignment is to illustrate to students that engaging with a text is a highly interactive process, which their time spent online will show.  In class, the instructor will present the final product, a collaborative research paper, to the class; the instructor will engage students in a discussion the difficulties that arose during the process of completing the assignment, and he/she will offer more individualized strategies that may help in conducting future research endeavors.

Ultimately, the goal of this assignment is to teach students that actively participating with texts is crucial for their ability to adequately analyze a text and to draw conclusions from it.  I want students to understand that there is no simple way to go about composition, but that time and involvement are necessary for completing this task.  I also wish to provide students with a skeleton for how they might go about conducting an analysis, as the steps that are required of them are all necessary.

Week 7: A Return to Andragogy

 Engage in discussion about something that captured your attention over the past few weeks in the course. Relate it back to specific class discussions, readings, and your grading/teaching when possible.

Although there have been a number of aspects pertaining to the methodologies and focuses of teaching composition, all of which we have studied and addressed this semester, the idea of andragogy has struck me as one of the most valuable concepts.  In class, we continue to discuss the versatility of approaches for teaching first-year composition; in light of this wide variety of methodological practices in teaching this discipline, I think that it is of utmost important to acknowledge the adulthood that students enrolled in these classes are coming into.

Although many composition programs limit the agency of instructors through strict curricula and prefabricated syllabi, the concepts of andragogy can still be implemented within the classroom, allowing students to actively participate in the construction of the class itself.  Although I think that the entirety of andragogy, in terms of Knowles’ definition (which can be found further down on this blog page), is important in all of its ideas, I believe that there are two concepts which hold the most import in terms of a first-year composition class: students should be involved in the planning and should be given a certain degree of autonomy when it comes to assignments and scheduling, and learning should be problem-centered.

By giving students the ability to actively affect the syllabus and their assignments, I believe that they would engage with these assignments and readings with much more depth.  By allowing them to play a role in the development of the class, students feel as if their opinion in regards to what they learn truly matters; consequently, I believe that students would place a higher emphasis upon the quality of their work. As we have discussed in class, and I as I have observed within my own grading experience, students seem to be generally disinterested in the assignments they are given, resulting in work that is not inspired, to say the least, and that follows a formulaic pattern.  I find that students often repeat the same mistakes in different assignments, indicating the insignificance that these assignments seem to hold in their eyes.  I believe that we can overcome this disengaged writing by allowing students to select the readings (from a list of selected works) that they will engage in, as they will gather a sense of the true import that these assignments hold; students would see that, by being given the opportunity to aid in developing the course, their education is indeed important to those teaching them. This form of constructive and active engagement would allow for students to begin producing work that they find meaning in.  By engaging with the course materials in this way, students’ writing would indeed serve to teach them as they advance their skills in this discipline, leading to Nancy Sommers’s idea that good “writers recognize and resolve the dissonance they sense in their writing” (51).  I believe that this aspect of andragogy would set students in the direction of becoming experienced writers, as defined by Sommers, who “seek to discover (to create) meaning in the engagement with their writing” and  who “seek to emphasize and exploit the lack of clarity, the differences of meaning, [and] the dissonance…that writing…allows” (51-52).

Additionally, I believe that centering first-year composition courses around problem-based learning would greatly impact the amount that students actually learn and take away from assignments. In cadence with Bizzell’s idea of centering studies around contact zones, I believe that we should, indeed, arrange our courses “in terms of historically defined contact zones, [or] moments when different groups within the society contend for the power to interpret what is going on” (463).  I think that organizing first-year composition around these areas of conflict would result in a much higher participation rate within the classroom, and I believe that students’ writing would be much more engaged; as a result, it would make teaching them to express their ideas much easier, as they would have a desire to express with clarity their stances. Additionally, as Bizzell argues, this method would allow students to address the world in which they live in terms of power struggles and the inequities that effect their social lives (whether directly or indirectly), teaching them to argue for or against issues in appropriate manners.  I think Bizzell’s idea is powerful, in terms of andragogy, because, rather than having to engage with material from which students are generally detached, they would have to learn HOW to discuss these topics, how to consider a variety of perspectives, and how to recognize the ways in which these perspectives are presented (rhetoric). 

Personally, I believe that andragogy, more specifically the two aspects I have touched upon, is essential for successfully teaching students how to write and how to engage with the topics at hand.  Not only would these practices benefit students in terms of writing, but they would also teach students how to appropriate the incessant stream of information that our technologically-based society throws at them; this would provide them with the skills to determine the validity and importance of this information, and it would teach them HOW to actively engage with a society of which they are an integral part.

Bizzell, Patricia. “‘Contact Zones’ and English Studies.” Cross-Talk in Comp Theory. 3^rd ed. Eds. Victor Villanueva, Kristin L. Arola. Urbana: NCTE, 2011. 459-466. Print.

Sommers, Nancy. “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers.” Cross-Talk in Comp Theory. 3^rd ed. Eds. Victor Villanueva, Kristin L. Arola. Urbana: NCTE, 2011. 43-54. Print.