r5: An affinity space for career pursuits

In The Activity of Writing, Alexander Reid offered a point not yet mentioned in any other essays which really helped me finalize my brainstorming for one of the final writing projects in my course draft. I really admire his move to assist students in finding their “affinity space.” Although I really crave the first type he describes Sirc’s account of how “students sat in the dark, burned incense and listened to Steppenwolf,” (199) the reality is that I also want to keep my job. Thus, his point about how “passionate affinity spaces update such practices by engaging the contemporary digital network to facilitate student learning and communication,” (199) really reminds me that students should not be made to write for the sake of writing but to engage them in writing that can “shift students away from their typical habits of seeking to be finished with writing” (201). Luckily, the course will be afforded the technology and online availability to make all of this occur.

As I was planning out the last marking period of my syllabus draft, I sought to have students write a unique piece applicable to their planned career path. All I had so far were two assignments named “Writing in My Discipline” and “Career Writing,” and to be honest, all I had was a vision that at this point in the course, students would be ready write meaningful pieces to bridge their writing affinity to their career affinity. For example I imagined a Biochemical Engineering major writing an email to an employee of Gore (or a similar company) to gain partnership, followed by a correspondence of the type of writing involved in their daily work. The student would then go on to compose this lab report or whatever it came to be followed by a metacognitive reflection on the process and systems used to write the piece.

However, this all seemed to need the affinity space mentioned by Reid so when I arrived at his Article and Magazine Project, all of the loose ends came together. Students could write one more piece only with the audience of their peers as the main focus. Reid notes this difference as he states, “However, magazine article writers, editors, and publishers realize they have to compete for their readers’ attention” (204). In relation to that point, these articles, written about the technical types of writing in a variety of majors would then be used to “produce an online magazine with images and related media” (204). Instead of using volunteers as the magazine editors, it would be a collective effort to form committees in the class with input and ownership for individual aspects of the project. If the final product lived up to my expectation, it would be worthy of a link on our school’s website.

Reid’s anecdote about fiction writing workshops really sums up what I don’t want students to come away from the course with as “all too often stories end with characters suddenly dying or realizing that ‘it was all a dream’” (201). This, too, is analogous to what I want students to leave the class with: not a means to an end, but a means where they understand that “when writing is successful, writers respond with writing; when it is a failure, they respond with writing” (202).

Coxwell-Teague, Deborah, and Ronald F. Lunsford. First-year Composition: From Theory to Practice. , 2014. Print.

Goals and Purposes

The E110 goals mesh quite fluidly with my own philosophy. Having employed writing workshops, I fully understand the importance of peer interaction in the writing process. When students genuinely engage with others’ work, valuable and purposeful results occur. Ideally, peer reviewers successfully identify the intended audience and respond to works meaningfully. If all involved have the experience of writing for a variety of audiences and purposes, the process eventuates intrinsically. While my students have served as writing communities for years, their experience largely lies in analytical essays and research papers. It may be a challenge for some of them to break out of their reinforced formulaic, analytical habits. They certainly know the research process, even though many struggle to establish their own sentiments to support. Clarifying the proper use of research presents as a challenge, but once it’s overcome, reading as a writer and vice-versa takes on greater significance.

The one goal that initially stumped me is that of creating print and digital texts. This seemed too simplistic, for I took it to mean merely printed and electronic. Upon reading the Brown Bag Multimedia Resources page, I found clarification. The method of remediation is particularly interesting to me for two key reasons. First, I strive to bring fundamental twenty-first century skills into the classroom. Debates have raged over usefulness of technology in education, ranging from the opinion that iMovie and YouTube projects waste time, to the position that students must learn how to present themselves and their positions across a host of software and social media platforms. Of the two opinions, I favor the latter. It’s been a challenge to convince others in the educational arena that this is more than just a fad that will fade in a few years. Second, I realize that I haven’t been keeping up with the jargon as I should be, especially since I have immersed myself in the world of technology in education. The term remediation was unfamiliar, and I’m disappointed in myself because I understand the concept so well and have used it with my students, but I had no idea it is so critical in collegiate success today. My limited experience in publishing and advertising enlightened me to the importance of mastering rhetoric and aesthetics from the business perspective, especially since the globalization of the marketplace has morphed so drastically since my undergrad years. It’s a completely different world, and today’s students must be digitally savvy in such a way that they can communicate in technological universals. Re-mediating texts truly overlaps and exemplifies the understanding of audience. So many factors, such as background and context, play into the visual or audio remix of a text. Few students grasp this concept inherently. The art of presentation relies heavily on voice and diction tailored to the intended audience, a crucial, controlling factor. Remediation, if guided correctly, builds confidence and success in composition. Through this, students manipulate presentations to suit the audience, consequently mastering the ability to win over any crowd. Shouldn’t this be every writer’s goal?

 

 

R3: Considering Context

As we quickly approach the due date for the initial work on our plan for next year, I find myself searching for common threads throughout all of the approaches we’ve been assigned so far.  One in particular has jumped out at me – the need to consider context.

As we tackled the first 4 readings, I found myself feeling (in certain cases) as though some of the material, though intriguing, may not be applicable in my classroom.  But as Paula Mathieu explicitly points out in her piece, understanding our “place” is critical in determining our approach to a first-year comp course.  As is evident in the numerous academic readings about FYC (Shipka lists 12+ in her suggested reading list, none of which include any of the professors asked to contribute to the text we are studying), approaches to this course inevitably change with time, audience, place, instructor, among other factors like required grading policy guidelines, number of students enrolled in the course, etc.

Crafting our courses will require us to consider all of the factors I mention and the contributing authors allude to, as well as, of course, others, as we adjust to schedule changes (snow days!, last minute assemblies, testing windows, prom, field trips, . . .) and other demands we encounter through implementation.  I do not suggest we not plan – in fact, the plan is CRITICAL – but rather that we heed the advice provided to us to consider our context.

In reflecting for this post, I flipped back through my annotations to look for obvious connections or ideas throughout the texts.  I discovered that many of the ideas I marked were ideas that I thought sounded fun and engaging to teach (like Mathieu’s researched interview – I found this assignment terribly interesting) – I was thinking of myself in the context of the course – what might I enjoy teaching.  I also noticed many question marks with notes like “how might this work at Conrad?” or “would this work in the HS setting?” (like Reid’s publicly posted forums and grading policy). With these notes, I was considering the students sitting in my classroom – my audience.  I even discovered a note in which I mentioned a particular student and how the strategy might be particularly successful for him (I taught him as a 10th grader and know he is registered for this course next year).  Designing a course with particular students in mind has obvious implications (not all positive, of course), but the context in which I will be teaching this course next year (which includes teaching 15 out of the 20 students whom I taught as 10th graders) facilitates some ability for me to consider the context of the particular learners in my classroom to customize the activities to meet some of their specific needs.  This context will be available to me as long as I continue to teach 10th graders and E110 students at Conrad.

To be clear, my plan is not to design this course year after year with my particular students in mind, but I mention my unique context as a consideration, one that is impossible for me to remove from my thinking as I begin to piece together the approach and syllabus for E110 at Conrad.  We must be sure that the context of our individual styles, students, school requirements, and beyond work their way into our course plans, in the same way that each contributor designed courses that met the context of their unique situations.

R1: So What?

When I began reading Rewriting: How to Do Things With Texts, I was quickly reminded of a book from which I have borrowed many ideas for teaching writing.  In They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing, Graff, Birkenstein, and Durst offer suggestions and even templates that encourage and assist writers to “enter the conversation” of academic writing.  As in Rewriting, They Say/I Say explores several ways that writers work with texts to advance their own ideas.

One “move” that Graff, Birkenstein, and Durst suggest, which I find myself reminding students over and over again in my own classroom, is one which asks the writer to explain WHY what they are saying matters.  The authors assert that “rather than assume that audiences will know why their claims matter, all writers need to answer the “so what?” and “who cares?” questions up front. ”  This assertion not only gives a writer the directive to respond to these questions, but also implicitly requires the writer to consider her audience.  Considering audience (whether academic specialization, political slant, gender, or something else) can help the writer determine WHY what he or she has to say will matter to whomever she is writing for, completing the rhetorical triangle connecting writer, subject, and audience.

I have suggested that students in my classroom address this move at the end of their essays (rather than “up front” as suggested in They Say/I Say).  In the formulaic final “element of an argument” (after the hook, claim, support, and concessions/refutation), the call to action seems a natural location for writers to directly address their audience by calling on readers to DO SOMETHING as a result of reading the text, providing them with a reason why the text matters – answer the “so what?”  However, this move is offered in They Say/I Say as a way to hook the audience from the outset, giving them a purpose for reading the text.  I propose that either approach can be effective, as long as a writer remembers to address her audience by telling them why what she has to say matters and why they, too, should care.

In an editorial assignment completed by 10th graders at Conrad Schools of Science, one student (Madison) hooks her audience with the following opening: “Thin hair, baggy eyes, yellow teeth and wrinkles before you’re old: all effects of smoking. Most people agree that the smoke is not worth it; in fact, approximately 3 out of 4 adults in the United States reported that they do not smoke,” and concludes with “If people want to save the next generation, they need to first acknowledge the problem.”  She tells us who cares – “3 out of 4 adults,” people who do not want to look old before their time, and people who “want to save the next generation.”  She addresses this additional move which calls for academic writers to say why it matters.