composition

This week, I had the pleasure of volunteering as a facilitator of a creative writing workshop for a group of young men. They wanted to work on spoken word and rap (a post for another day). I haven't worked with that age group in a few years, and even when I had, it had mostly been kids from somewhat affluent families. Needless to say, I was anxious about my performance. When I got to the classroom, I learned that the program was actually an attempt to provide more constructive uses of detention time. In essence, these were the "bad kids." I was always a "good kid" in school. With the exception of my high school chemistry class, I never got in trouble for being disruptive. In all my years of school, I had only one lunch detention because I forgot to do my homework, and my teacher made me sit through my lunch break and do it. The funny thing is that some of my closest friends were the "bad kids." Several of my friends were familiar faces in the office, s...

Every year the university where I work as a writing consult has a school-wide book that all incoming first-year students must read. They've picked some good books-- The Geography of Bliss, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, The Devil's Highway, and most recently, Scarcity: Why Having So Little Means So Much. Every year, though, without doubt, we cringe at the department-wide first writing prompt that students are given based on these texts. The problem is that every year, without fail, the question is convoluted and overwritten. As a consultant, I have to sit there with a pen, highlighters, and paper to try to make sense of what I'm being asked and how to approach the question. There are too many words on the page. The important information is wedged into distracting excess language. Sometimes, there is even discord between the question and the book's message. Sometimes, I feel like I don't understand the question and therefore can't help students. This year,...

image from pixbay.com I have this awesome colleague who I admittedly disagree with often. This is one of the things I enjoy most about our conversations, though. I always leave feeling smarter. Either he has taught me something about the other perspective that I had not considered before, or I am able to better articulate my own stance on something for myself. Most recently, the latter happened in regards to First Year Writing (FYW or First-Year Composition/FYC). My colleague definitely falls into the First-Year Writing abolitionist group. He believes it's useless. After all, outside of the FYW classroom, where would students ever need to write essays like that again? At the university where we work, the FYW course also has a social reform focus, which can sometimes wind up confusing students-- they feel forced to choice a side that they might not buy into based on what they think their teacher feels about the issue. It seemed to me that my colleague had a singular vision of FYW an...

More from IWAC 2014 today! What a wonderful conference! This time I'm going spend some time considering the presentation by Anne Ellen Geller, Michele Eodice, and Neal Lerner about the Meaningful Writing Project , a massive grounded theory study that questions what makes writing assignments meaningful to students and how faculty that have composed these meaningful writing assignments think about writing and writing pedagogy. This particular presentation was focused on the latter. Disclaimer: I have a very positive bias towards the panel I'm going to write about in this post. I strongly believe in the importance of student-centered research when it comes to describing student learning experiences. I love to hear the voices of writers and educators; narratives are exciting. I also admire an approach that works from a strength-based concept of student learning experiences rather than a deficit one. And of course, Anne Ellen Geller is my dissertation chair, and one of the most kick...

As promised, I'm diving into some of the things that the 2014 IWAC (International Writing Across the Curriculum) Conference presentations prompted me to consider. Today, I'm going to talk more about the wonderful talk given by Melody Pugh , Naomi Silver, and Anne Ruggles Gere called "Interrogating Disciplinarity in WAC/WID: An Institutional Ethnography." The scholars framed the discussion around what began an institutional review of the Upper Level Writing Requirement (ULWR) at their university, which lead to interviews with faculties and students about their expectations and experiences with these ULWR. What they found was a real struggle with defining disciplines/disciplinarity and whether their concepts of "writing in the discipline" would actually serve students. Many students and professors expressed a desire to explore more genres, but felt that was outside the bounds of " writing in the discipline ," which largely seemed to boil down to wr...

I just returned from the 2014 IWAC (International Writing Across the Curriculum) Conference at the University of Minnesota, and I have to say it was one of my best conference experiences yet. The presentations were engaging, the people were open and friendly, and Minneapolis was a great city. During my brief two days there, I managed to sit in on 5 panels, one in which I presented, a keynote, and an incredible plenary session. In truth, it made me a little sad that I'm not a WAC WPA because I would have loved the opportunity to implement some of the ideas that were discussed at the universities where I am involved in writing pedagogy. The Panels Here is a brief overview of the titles of the panels that I attended: Role Reversal: When Students Teach Faculty in WAC Programs - Deanna Daniels & Brandy Grabow, Kate Ronald & Lucy Manley, and Greg Skutches Writing Beyond the Curriculum - Nicole Papaioannou, Dan Reis & Caroline Klidonas, and KaaVonia Hinton & Yonghee S...

I am proud to announce that I am beginning my dissertation research! I am looking for undergraduates/recent grads to participate in a qualitative study on writing through the classroom and beyond. Do you know a student who used class writing-- no matter how formal or informal-- to springboard to a larger project beyond the class without being required to do so? I would love to talk to them! Seeking nominations and/or interested parties.  Please feel free to forward or share this call for participants. Thank you!  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1K0xbY8lSemh9WothJ59sb40WRje59q18jHfwHmqWVs0/edit?usp=sharing

For the past few months, I've been trying to learn Portuguese. It is definitely one of the hardest things I have done in a long time. I use interactive websites. I write in elementary grammar books. I listen to podcasts. I even try reading the news and books in Portuguese. Acquiring even the most basic conversational skill has been a painfully slow process. Despite keeping at it everyday, I can make only a few full sentences-- nothing in past tense or conditional or the million other tenses Portuguese has. As someone who is almost a doctor in the English language, it feels so odd to me not to be able to craft complex sentences or find the right vocabulary for the ideas I want to express. I haven't given up yet, though. The reason I continue to fight it out is partially because I want to be able to converse with my boyfriend's friends and family, but even more so because I've had positive encouragement. My significant other will let me ask him one million questions about...

For last week's writing center professional development, my colleagues and I read George Hillocks' literature review on Middle and High School Composition from Smagorinsky's Research on Composition: Multiple Perspectives on Two Decades of Change. The chapter heavily concentrates on state-wide and national assessment, mostly via standardized tests, giving you an idea of what middle and high school writing education has become- an endless series of exams and rankings. Bleh! In this chapter, Hillocks cites Langer's (2001) discussion of six strategies used by high-performing teachers . They are: applying a variety of teaching methods and approaches that "integrate the skills taught with ongoing larger curricular goals" integrating testing-based skills into the curriculum pointing out connections teaching students strategies for organizing thoughts and making tasks more manageable, focusing on the "development of meta-cognitive strategies" taking a ...

Today, my Facebook newsfeed was covered with stories about government-mandated oppression and silencing across the world. At least 94 protestors were killed in Egypt by state security forces. A US woman was deported from Bahrain  after writing articles and comments on social media that the Bahraini government decided  "incited hatred against the government."  As I read these headlines, I was also moved by an email I received: a student could not participate in my course because the government of the nation where this student resided blocked access to many sites. The student could not perform unbiased research-- or perform research at all, in some cases-- so the student was forced to withdraw, hoping to take the course again when back in the U.S. This made me think hard about the globalization that many universities aim to promote. In my online summer course, for example, I have several international students, and they are taking the course from their home country. While ...

High School and Higher Ed. Writing Instructors Come Together This Monday, I attended a great event, Across the Divide, a writing forum that connected high school writing instructors from multiple disciplines with college writing instructors (mostly FYW). The forum took place in the form of a 2-hour roundtable talk that was based around organic discussion. It was held in a beautiful conference room at Biotechnology High School in Freehold, NJ, where several of the high school teachers were currently teaching.  The conversations were insightful, constructive, and fun. You can watch the conversation and check out the  live-tweet feed  to see for yourself! Just a quick aside: I found out about this event from my twitter pal, @ ReadyWriting . I was immediately interested because I don't think there are nearly enough opportunities for high school and college educators to collaborate. Plus, I am an alumna of the school district that was hosting the event and still live...

image from techwhirl.com For the past few weeks, I've been working part-time at an IT consulting & network integration firm in downtown Manhattan as part of the technical writing team (which is really just me & the existing technical writer). The thing is, even though I’m (somewhat) proficient at writing for academic purposes, technical writing is a whole new ball game. While my writing is clean and easy to read, I don’t always have the knowledge to write what needs to be written. It’s a bit confidence-shaking. I’m feeling like an intern rather than someone whose specialty is writing. Feeling like a beginner isn't easy, especially when you've devoted your entire adult life thus far to studying English and Communications, and even more so when as a writing instructor and writing consultant, I’m supposed to be an expert writer. It’s true that I can write for many contexts. Heck, I can even teach writing in the disciplines! But writing in the professional domain about ...

Last week, I had to read Mina Shaughnessy's 1976 essay "Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing" for our professional development session at the writing center where I work. I've read her book Errors and Expectations (1977), but this was the first time that I had a chance to read any of her shorter works. Though the article is nearly 40 years old, the problems and solutions described by Shaughnessy are still applicable today. Shaughnessy's main argument in the piece is that educators need to stop considering basic writing "a writing course for young men and women who have many things wrong with them" (291). Instead, she argues that writing instructors need to begin to examine their own teaching and learning processes and the complex and contextual needs of their students. To show how these issues manifest themselves in the university, Shaughnessy outlines a "developmental scale for teachers," complete with four stages. They are: Guarding ...

Today, as I attempted to prep students for one-on-one conferences, I had them answer a list of questions to bring to our meeting. My last questions was "Do you have any questions for me about writing?" I expected a bunch of requests for specific instruction, such as "how do I write the perfect conclusion?" or "what are some ways I can come up with topics?", but what I got instead were several questions about my own experiences with writing. They asked me about my feelings about writing, whether I deal with constraints, the kinds of vocabulary I use when I write, why I teach writing the way I do, who my favorite authors are, and what I consider "good" writing. I guess what this suggests to me is that I need to be more transparent about my own struggles and successes with writing. Students want to know who their teacher is as a writer. They don't seem to want to me to establish credibility and claim myself as a writer. Instead, it seems like th...

Today, I went back through my folders of research, trying to get back in the swing of the semester. I picked up the article "Composing for Delivery" by Kate Kessler. The article was initially published in the November 2005 edition of The English Journal.  In this article, Kessler makes a fairly convincing argument for doing what she calls "composing for delivery" or creating "a call to write" for students in a Composition course. Building off the fifth canon of classical rhetoric, delivery, she implements a curriculum that forces students to write for purposes beyond the classroom (which, may I add, she never denotes as "real world"). She finds that as a result of this method students learn to compose with their own purposes in mind while also considering audience and effective rhetoric. In this particular article, Kessler observes how students develop rhetorical sensitivity through letter writing (actually mailed to the intended audience) and pr...

The semester is now officially wrapped up, and I've sent in all my grades. Grades, as many of you probably know by now, are the bane of my existence. I hate giving them. Sometimes, I'm not even sure I know how to do  it. Evaluating writing is so subjective, even when you try to be consistent and objective. So this post is kind of a -- in the words of one of my fabulous students -- "am I doing this right?" sort of thing. I've traded out the standard system of grading each paper for a 50/50 contract/portfolio grading method. The contract grade is based on participation, completion of blogs and small writing assignments, and turning in drafts of major assignments. Everything must be done on-time and according to assignment criteria in order to be given full credit. Anything turned in after the cut-off date gets no credit. The portfolio is grading according to the department standards for A, B, C, D, or F. The thing is when you give students a chance to revise their d...

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of attending my very first National Council of Teachers of English Annual Convention (#NCTE12) at the MGM Grand Conference Center in beautiful Las Vegas, NV. There were many interesting and exciting panels to choose from. My program is about an inch and half thick. My favorite panel, however, was "Connecting Lived Experiences and Literacies with Urban High Schools: Lessons for Pedagogy." Here is the program entry: B.41 CONNECTING LIVED EXPERIENCES  AND LITERACIES WITH URBAN HIGH  SCHOOLS: LESSONS FOR PEDAGOGY (S) Room 107, Level One Teachers experience pedagogical struggles while students interact in academic spaces that challenge their multiple lived experiences through the narrowing of curricula. In this session, presenters will critically analyze their educational research contexts, which often miss rich opportunities to consider students’ multiple identities, positionings, and languages. Chair: Timothy San Pedro, Arizona State Universi...