Paula Mathieu proposes that a writing course must be focused on some open ended question that focuses discussions and exploration so that the experience of “searching” for answers can be broad enough to include many interests while also narrow enough to explore a small facet of the issue. I also agree that even with such focusing, her woes about “the reality of how insufficient it all seems” in a single semester is my reality too, even though I have a year to teach a curriculum (125). Never enough time seems to exist to cover everything, so great care must be taken as to what will be presented. Currently my focus in my Brit Lit survey class is the focus on the power of the word. The mid-term and final exams must answer the same question (only cover more material in the final): Trace through the literature we have studied from Anglo-Saxon to modern the changing conscious of humanity about one certain issue. I “preach” that the “word” always comes before the physical manifestation. Literature, I firmly believe, functions as a harbinger of what is coming as society grapples with current concerns. So my focus will be on the power of language, of the “word.”
I also concur that a college level writing class must make students comfortable with scholarly research, including primary sources, and so I like her idea of teaching interviewing for the sake of research. Primary research and library skills are imperative, but without the ability to ask good questions, no amount of research will develop good writing. So having a meta-cognitive understanding of research helps students to consider “research” beyond the internet. Lots of mental doors could open up in such conversations as interviews or through “created experiences” or primary sources, leading to lots of questions to research.
Yet, Teresa Redd insists that students must be able to do more than scholarly writing to feel comfortable with their own writing skills. I also agree. All writing in one form or another is research. Some is “lived experience,” some is “created experience” as Douglas Hesse suggests, and some is searching “textual and empirical research” on the same topic (53). Either way, writing is sharing what one has experienced, discovered, or understood. So a writing class must also allow for writing done for different audiences and purposes with different mediums. Ultimately, the one goal for me, as it is for Chris Anson, is for students to be able to think with a meta-consciousness about how to explore and discover knowledge, how to consider that knowledge from an overview (twisting and turning the facts to see new perspectives and be conscious that one is doing just that), and how to communicate that knowledge in such a way that it matches the audience.
Developing these skills covers all five of Redd’s goals in her writing classes: develop authority within one’s own voice that can adapt to any situation; understand the relationships in thinking between writing, reading and research; understand how to research effectively; understand relationships between purpose, audience, and medium; and learn how to use all technologies from pen and paper to digital (147-151). Redd also stresses, as does Asao Inoue, the need to include students as the assessors to help develop that sense of meta-cognition abut their own writing, but she mixes student assessments, portfolios, and summative statements with formative assessments using rubrics and personal conferences. I love the idea of having students read their own papers before a mark is on the paper to “hear” if their errors are from proofreading (because they self-check as they read) or from a lack of knowledge (errors go right past them). That student reading offers two opportunities to assess: what writing knowledge (grammar, syntax, vocabulary, etc) are they not understanding or what value lies in proofreading. Both are excellent indicators of need for improvement.
Redd’s formal assessments, like Mathieu’s, focus on “grading” the portfolios and self-assessments, which avoids hindering the “labor” of creation as Inoue fears if formal grades are placed on the writings that move towards a finished product.
My writing class will be focused on an interdisciplinary research focus, will use portfolios and student assessments, will cross mediums for different audiences and environments, and will focus on Redd’s five goals, for they are mine also.
An aside I would like to share is the sublime feeling of being part of this collegiate research world on the pedagogy of writing when seeing Joe Harris’ text Rewriting quoted and forwarded as an argument to further improve writing classes. So cool.
Coxwell-Teague, Deborah and Ronald F. Lunsford. First Year Composition: From Theory to Practice. Parlor Press, 2014. Print.
Harris, Joseph. Rewriting: How To Do Things With Texts. U of Colorado, 2006. Print.
E688: Seminar in Teaching Composition 
Mary Kay,
I’m impressed by how you draw on what seem to me very different approaches in a way that lets you fuse them into something your own. I particularly like the meta-cognitive twist you give to Inoue’s system of contract grading—in which what gets graded are students’ written reflections on what they’ve learned, as evidenced by their portfolios and self-assessments.
If I follow you correctly, you stress diversity not so much as a familiar nod toward multiculturalism as an insistence that students draw on different sorts of work and knowledge in their writing. It’s a diversity of ways of knowing you’re after—which makes all sorts of good sense. Too often “research” gets reduced to a routine finding and quoting of internet or library sources. You make nice use of Mathieu and Hesse to think about ways in which you can get students more actively involved in making knowledge about their subjects.
One thing I’d like to hear more about is how you will use the idea of the “word” to focus the work of your class while still allowing students some freedom in choosing what to research and write about. Do you have a particular series of writing projects or readings in mind?
And I was pleased, too, to see Paula cite my work in her essay. It is always nice to be read and appreciated, but especially so by someone as smart as her.
Have a great weekend,
Joe
As described in my response to Mary’s R4 post, I offer the song research paper to start because I want my students to see how the songs they listen to right now are shaping our culture as they sing along. Most students seem to just “like” a song, its rhythms, beats, word play, melody, and harmony, all working together to share a personal experience. When songs go platinum, audiences are sharing that they too connect with the song in some way. The song research is to explore what audiences are buying and why. Fascinating stories and commentaries about our culture lie in our songs. Once students perceive that connection, I show how our literary canon reflects our growth as a culture by lecturing upon literature from Beowulf to Graham’s Tenth Man, almost like humanity’s literary scrapbook of changing consciouness. I never get to the contemporary era, so the song research helps to cover that section of time (a drop in an ocean). In a writing course, I would have to take out the lecture survey and focus on hands-on activities focusing on writing and researching only, so addressing issues of when the “word” changed the world (shared cultural words as in certain speeches, letters, novels, twitter feeds, commercials, movies, songs, and more and then at the personal level, one’s own writing). Words manifest physical realities. Beyond this project, I need to research some printed articles in linguistics or other fields that explore these relationships between nothing and then creation. I might be able to mold a class around this song paper and draw many assignments from the research and exploration of ideas. Sharing these songs and papers is also fun. We have seen everything in Brit Lit from John Newton’s “Amazing Grace” to Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” to Marina and the Diamonds “How to be a Heartbreaker.” And that is just the tip of the iceberg. I do want to find some articles that talk about grammatical and linguistic differences in cultures and how those features inform and support the cultural perspectives, but most importantly how to explore the relationships between the word and its audiences. The point of writing is to express, communicate, and promote a shift or preferred direction in something. We build our worlds on our words.
This response really got me thinking about the significance of “asking the right questions” when it comes to a primary source such as an interview. Several years ago my Speech and Debate class at Elkton High School partnered with the Cecil County Public Library for the Smithsonian’s Main Street USA project. The goal was to have groups of students interview significant people in the community with oral history to tell the story of Elkton, MD.
Overall, what set apart the decent interviews from the riveting ones was the quality of the questions. Now, prior to sending the groups out to conduct their research, the Media Specialist and I co-taught a lesson on writing interview questions; however, looking back, it really on scraped the surface of what we could have done. Based on this experience, I would have students read over interview transcripts from programs such as Dateline and 20/20, and ask them to look for patterns and trends that led to significant disclosure in answers to implement in their own questions. Also, I would have students to conduct mock interviews with each other and myself to assist in revising and enhancing the questions.
Similar to how I make my students start the research process with as many as ten research questions before arriving at the main one, the interview process should not be haphazardly embarked upon. Students need to begin with a wealth of questions similar to an unsharpened pencil, only to be whittled down to those which reach the “point” as that pencil will possess when ready to make its mark.
What a cool project. By combining Mary’s concern for service and connecting writing projects with real world community explorations, students can participate in “real” writing opportunities to contribute to their society rather than “practice” writings that go no further than the teacher’s bag. I have wanted to mesh my class requirements with written or digital or oral scholarship requirements so that the writing actually has a personal payout beyond a grade. So many writing or speech scholarships cross my desk, and my curriculum does not allow the time to stop and prepare such opportunities. What a waste. So that reminds me I need to go back and research local opportunities so that I may work them into the curriculum. I also will introduce students to the Writer’s Market text that shows how they can be paid for their writing. Actually, possibly many of my assignments could be directed by editorial requirements to be published.
Mary Kay,
We have discussed research in our English department meetings repeatedly. It’s interesting to see how it evolves from the time students are first introduced to it in depth to the time they take Brit Lit and are expected to do so much more. I was upset last year when I found the eleventh graders still merely scraping the surface of research. I felt they should have been digging much deeper and exploring things like contemporary reviews of literature (looking at newspaper archives from the 1860s, for example), but many simply wanted to finish writing their papers without having to spend more time; however, a few took my advice and traveled those extra steps. The beauty we will find in this E110 course is that we can take the time to show students how to research thoroughly. In addition, if you want to make that move to service learning and real writing opportunities, I have a few examples from the Human Ecology Foundation, and I would be glad to steer students through the process and help them find interview and visitation opportunities to augment their research.