The Composition E-Newsletter
Welcome to the latest issue of the Composition Newsletter! This issue includes two enlightening
articles. The first, by Muffy
Walter, discusses her recent experience at a conference on learning disabilities. The second is an excerpt from an
article co-written by Dr. John Barton, with an introduction by Kelly
Mathews. Thank you and kudos to
our contributors!
For the upcoming issue, we are looking for contributions
dealing with teaching exercises, pedagogy, student interactions, current
research, upcoming conference presentations, and any other issues relevant to
the composition program. We are especially interested in giving a voice
to adjunct faculty, as well as faculty who teach literature or creative writing
classes that would like to talk about their composition classroom
experiences. Please contact Kristin Huston at KristinHuston@umkc.edu for more
information.
Important Composition Program Announcements
Some Dark (Am)Musings from the Director
Hello all! As you may know, the tanking economy has wrought havoc
with our Sosland budget, which normally supports and recognizes excellent
teaching in the Composition Program. What this means is that, while we are
soliciting Sosland Teaching Award portfolios this semester and will offer
awards to teachers, we will not be able to offer our traditional cash awards to
the winners. However, the awards will be recognized in an awards ceremony in
the fall, and winners will receive a certificate of their accomplishment. These
are quite valuable even if, sadly, their exchange value on E-Bay is likely to
be less than the cost of postage.
If you would
like to submit a teaching portfolio for consideration, please send a hard copy
to Dan Mahala (106CH) by Friday, May 1, 2009.
We are still planning to offer Sosland Award money to
undergraduate student writers selected by the judges evaluating submissions to
the Sosland Journal. We can do so
because the rules for payouts from the Sosland fund are somewhat complex and
inscrutable, like the market derivatives and credit default swaps that got us
into this economic mess!
Lastly, we will be offering a CCCCÕs proposal preparation workshop
sometime in late April, and a date will be announced soon. The deadline for
electronic proposals is 11:59 CST on May 8. The theme of the conference this
year is ÒThe Remix: Revisit, Rethink, Revise, Renew,Ó and it will be held in
Louisville, KY. Hopefully, by this time, we will be able to muster financial
support for those teachers in our program who will have had proposals accepted.
You can read about the conference at: http://www.ncte.org/cccc/conv
Best of luck with your teaching for the remainder of the
semeseter, and I hope you can join us for some of these events!
Best,
Dan Mahala,
Director of Composition
Do My Students Know What Good Writing Is?
By Muffy Walter
Do my students know what good writing is? This is the question I asked myself
during the 30th Conference on Learning Disabilities sponsored by the
Council on Learning Disabilities.
I attended an all-day workshop, ÒÕWell of course I can write now. Somebody taught me how!Õ Effective
Writing Instruction,Ó where I learned to question some of my assumptions about
how my students perceive writing.
The biggest one was an assumption that my students know what good
writing looks and sounds like.
For struggling writers good writing is often wrapped up in rules. These rules can bar the doors to any
writing at all. There is a
psychological aspect of writing of which I need to be aware more often. Psychology of writing was made evident
to us in an activity we were asked to do.
We were given a writing prompt and 3.5 minutes to plan and write in
response to the prompt. Easy
enough. Next we were given a
second prompt with the same amount of time to plan and write. This time there were some rules:
Rule #1:
Every four letter word must be written backwards.
Rule #2:
Put a period after every fourth word.
Rule #3:
Capitalize every five letter word.
Rule #4:
Write with your non-dominant hand.
One could
hear the sighs and groans in the room when the list of rules went up on the
screen. It had been years since
writing was physically difficult for me to do, but I broke a sweat trying to
keep my left hand steady while I scratched out with and wrote htiw. As arbitrary as these rules were to us
in the workshop is as random as they can be for students who do not have a
grasp on grammar rules. Writing is
tedious when one must constantly look at seemingly meaningless rules in order
to put pen to paper. Struggling
writers may need more time to write without worry of grammar and spelling.
And what about handwriting, if students have access
to computers why should they worry about this? Typing does not come easily to all, for some it is a real
struggle. Voice recognition
software is available on our campus for student use. When a writer is simply unable to get anything coherent on a
page, this may be the tool s/he needs to get started. Another way to overcome the handwriting and typing
difficulties is to have students work in pairs with one serving as the
transcriber and the other dictating.
This allows for some interesting discussion about what it means to write
and whose story is actually being told.
Access to good writing sometimes means more than
just having a classroom where we accept people of creeds, class, and
color. It means making writing
accessible physically and psychologically to all of our students, both those
who know what good writing is and those who are still searching for their own
voices.
Reading and Writing Instruction
By John Barton with an Introduction by Kelly
Mathews
What goals should take precedence in first-year
writing instruction? ÒAnalysis,
argument, and thesis,Ó suggests Dr. John Barton, are the foundational blocks of
academic writing (ÒReading DetectivesÓ 174). Designing a curriculum that merges socio-political concerns
with formal logic and analytical reasoning allows students to develop academic
writing skills while gaining an understanding of how politics and critical
thinking Òare interrelated and mutually dependentÓ (175).
In a collaborative essay published by the Modern
Language Association, John and his coauthors argue for a pedagogy that embraces
these elements in first-year writing instruction. An excerpt from the opening section of that essay
is printed below; you can find the full essay in the MLA volume, Integrating
Literature and Writing in First-Year English (2007), edited by Judith H.
Anderson and Christine R. Farris.
For a recent review essay on Integrating Literature that
discusses JohnÕs collaborative work, see Laura BradyÕs ÒRetelling the
Composition-Literature StoryÓ in College English, Vol. 71:1 (2008).
Reading
Detectives:
Teaching
Analysis and Argument in First-Year Writing
John Cyril Barton, Douglas Higbee, Andre Hulet
While the
curriculum for many college writing courses foregrounds important questions
about race, class, and gender, students do not always come away with a strong
understanding of the primary elements of composition. In a 1992 issue of College
Composition and Communication, Maxine Hairston registered a controversial
objection to such politicized pedagogies in first-year writing courses, arguing
that instructors too often put Òdogma before diversity, politics before craft,
ideology before critical thinking, and the social goals of the teacher before
the educational needs of the studentÓ (ÒDiversityÓ 180). Despite its problems, HairstonÕs essay
raises a valid point. Above all
else, first-year writing courses in English and composition should provide
students with analytic tools for critical reading and writing, skills that help
prepare them for writing in a range of disciplines, including English. To strengthen studentsÕ understanding
of academic writing, we have designed an expository writing course around
detective fiction because the genre thematizes the essential elements of
first-year composition, such as analysis, argument, and thesis.
At the same
time, the diverse cultural milieus of detective fiction offer rich sites for
exploring the politics of difference insofar as they enable students to see
that arguments and analyses are always produced and received in social
contexts. Students come to see,
for example, that careful writing is never merely a matter of collecting Òjust
the facts,Ó just as the construction of an argument is never simply a matter of
appealing to an autonomous, self-evident ÒtruthÓ that transcends a
sociorhetorical situation. In this
respect, our pedagogy differs sharply from HairstonÕs apolitical approach in
that it draws heavily from the social constructionist theories that have influenced
the field of composition studies since the 1980s. Whereas Hairston assumes that writing can and should be
taught in lieu of politics, we believe that writing pedagogy—just like
any other pedagogy or practice—cannot be separated from the given
political standpoint that informs it.
Although we share her concern that in many first-year writing courses a
given set of political commitments may override the teaching of writing skills,
we do not believe that Òcritical thinkingÓ can be placed before ÒideologyÓ or
ÒcraftÓ before ÒpoliticsÓ (to use the terms Hairston opposes), since ideology
or politics necessarily shapes any act of critical thinking. As we see it, the solution is not to
privilege one set of categories over the other but to collapse them in order to
teach students how politics and critical thinking are interrelated and mutually
dependent.
Our position, then, holds that concrete uses of
abstract tools such as formal logic and analytic reasoning are always already
shot through with assumptions about race, class, and gender. As Hairston maintains, however,
attention to sociopolitical concerns has often come at the cost of effective
writing instruction. Instead,
first-year writing courses need to integrate an emphasis on cultural diversity
with the development of primary skills in rhetoric and composition, such as
thesis development, analysis of evidence, an awareness of rhetorical situation,
and organizational mechanics.
Patricia Bizzell emphasizes the importance of bringing together formal and
social concerns in her influential essay ÒCognition, Convention, and
Certainty.Ó According to her, Òwe
need to explain the cognitive and the social factors in writing development,
and even more important, the relationship between themÓ; she goes on to call
for a synthesis of these two models, one that is Òcapable of providing a
comprehensive new agenda for composition studiesÓ (217, 235). More recently, Granville Ganter has
identified a lack of instruction in interpretive analysis in the composition classroom. Echoing Bizzell, he calls for a pedagogical
approach that balances formal tools and sociocultural concerns (64).
The course we have developed responds to calls for
such a synthesis by examining interpretive activity in detective fiction while
scrutinizing the socially invested assumptions informing that activity. In other words, detective fiction
provides a means for addressing both tasks. It not only dramatizes the formal or cognitive processes of critical
thinking as they unfold in an investigation but also situates those activities
in particular social settings. By
connecting critical thinking to social environment, detective fiction promotes
the value of interpretive self-reflexivity, an awareness of the specific range
and power of the analytic tools that students, like detectives, need to employ
in their work. Our course, then,
uses the literary genre of detective fiction as a multifaceted model for the
kinds of critical thinking and social critique we encourage in class
discussions and formal writing assignments. If students begin the course, as our title suggests, by
Òreading detectivesÓ—that is, by analyzing the logic and interpretive
activities of literary detectives—they finish the course as Òreading detectivesÓ themselves, as
careful readers and writers who are capable of performing and accounting for
their own interpretations and analyses.