composition

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...

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...

(just for the record, I really don't care for the new Blogger layout) Tomorrow is a big day for me. I will be presenting at the State University of New York Council on Writing ( SUNY COW ), which will be held at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in Manhattan. While I don't want to give away my entire presentation, I do want to take some time to reflect on the reading and thinking I've been doing lately about public writing and engaged Composition programs because I think this is the way that Composition is headed or should, in some ways, be headed. At the conference, I will presenting on a panel called "Radical Ideas for the Composition Classroom." My piece in particular is "Ethnography and Activist Writing: Sustainable Inquiries for First Year Writing," which I hadn't considered being very radical, but now I suppose it may be. My pedagogical philosophy really aims at giving writing meaning beyond a tool for academic assessment.  I have seen ...

About a week ago, I picked up Stanley Fish's Save the World on Your Own Time. A colleague mentioned it during a conversation at faculty orientation, and I was instantly intrigued. Fish argues that teachers who try to do anything but teach-- which he defines as providing new discipline-relevant material and demonstrating practical methods of analysis and evaluation-- are doing their students and academia in general a disservice. His argument also extends to administrators and universities in general. And he doesn't sugar coat it. He has a wry, sarcastic, and very direct style to his writing; some might even call it aggressive (he does). As a teacher, I was interested in his distinction between "academicizing" and indoctrinating, especially after hearing a fellow classmate's heated objections to a teacher who was offering extra credit to students who chose to join Occupy Wall Street. To me, that was simply unacceptable. I also remembered the 2008 election and my tea...

This is not the first semester that I taught Jonathan's Swift's "A Modest Proposal." It is a piece I thoroughly enjoy giving to students. They are horrified and shocked by the nonchalant way that Swift goes about calling for the killing and eating of babies. Sometimes, they are uncertain as to whether or not Swift is making a legitimate proposal. Not everyone realizes it is satire from the get-go. Students don't usually get a chance to interact with satire in academia. Everything here is so serious. The one piece of satire my students recalled having read is Animal Farm, which is far less humorous than Swift's piece. My students had a great discussion about the piece, though. They laid out what made the piece effective or ineffective, found passages, and used history to think about the piece. Without being prompted, discussion about activism emerged, as well as commentary on the rhetorical triangle. I was impressed.  And, as we figured out, satire is all aroun...

ABC's What Would You Do? is really difficult to watch. For one, you want to jump into the television and do something. You sit there judging people, saying "How could they say that?" or "Why didn't they tell off the store employee for being a jerk?" or "How could they possibly buy their goods there?" You want to scream at the by-standers who do nothing. You are disgusted by bigots, or maybe freak yourself out a bit when you realize that their arguments are logical or even compelling. Once the actionless by-standers are interviewed, however, you are forced to see yourself, which is, perhaps, the most difficult thing about watching this show. Many of those who remain bystanders (though perhaps not in this clip) weren't sure it was their place to "get involved." While we all would like to believe that we would step in and do something in the face of social injustice, possible child abuse, fraud, etc., in reality, many of us would just su...