My love/hate with Bartholomae

This class has opened my eyes to teaching in a whole new way, which is slightly terrifying.  Before this course, I felt like I could walk into a writing class and kick ass as a writing professor.  Now, I am grappling with theory upon theory and study upon study as what is and will be successful in my class.  I've always had a secret fondness for Bartholmae even though I find him to be a bit too rigid, but I agree with him in his essay, "Inventing the University" that there definitely is an academic voice that the students must write in to be successful in academia.  However, I know that often times this voice stifles the students because they are trying to speak in a way that is foreign to them.  I may not know everything about teaching or how to kick ass as a writing professor like I thought I would, but I do know that when students try to conform their writing too much so it meets their professor's expectations, it comes out like they are trying to speak a foreign language.  The sentences are jumbled, their use of words is often incorrect, and their ideas are skewed and unclear.  I witness this everyday and it pains me to see.  Unfortunately, I was exactly the same as those students when I did my undergrad.  I was completely unconscious of the fact that I wrote like that, and I'm sure if I looked back on my own papers, i would grimace.  Now, I have learned to keep my voice, which is a little sarcastic, painfully organized, not full of extensive vocabulary, long winded sentences and maybe not considered academic, but it's  my voice and I won't change it.  (And if I were to try, it would come across as a jumbled mess).  This is something I want to pass onto my students.  There is a happy medium, no I don't write in slang in my essays but I share my thoughts as I have them.  I have invented my own university and I want to show my students that they can do the same.

Anyways guys, if anyone read that, thanks for this semester.  Probably the most applicable class I've taken here for my future career.  Have a great summer! And to those who are graduating, congratulations!  

Thank You!

I wanted to thank you all for making this class and blog a terrific experience.  I have learned a lot from all of you.

Response to Bartholomae

Bartholomae's article was though to grapple with. I agree with him that there is definitely a style that academics share, but cannot agree with him in terms of methodology or opinion. One of the few things I agree with him on is this: "There is a context beyond the reader that is not the world but a way of talking about the world, a way of talking that determines the use of examples, the possible conclusions, the acceptable commonplaces" (406). I appreciate this sentence in its connection to Bakhtin's theory of multiple discourse, but that's about it. I don't connect with Bartholomae's "us and them" vernacular when talking about students. He claims to want to integrate students into academia right away but insists that there is some level of being able to speak in a certain voice for a certain audience they need to achieve to be able to do so.  I believe in the role of teachers as guides more than changers. I lean more toward Lindemann's view of the writing process whereby students learn through writing often and in several stages. I believe in the individual voice and its ability to convey meaning within an academic structure. Bartholomae makes no mention of voice other than the academic voice, and portrays an elitist point of view of the academy. It seems that there is either a pass or fail in his mind when looking at student writing. I'd rather teach more in the style of Lindemann and Elbow regarding the writing process, but appreciate Bartholomae's concern with multiple discourse.

Response to Bizzell

The Bizzell article really touched on the boundaries of English and Composition. The restructuring of both academic subjects must be done across the board. As defined, the contact zone is a circumscribed in time and space, but with elastic boundaries.” It is my belief that both of these studies (literature and Composition) should go hand in hand. I cannot see how one could study English without either one of these. It would be similar to making a peanut butter sandwich with no jelly or vice versa. Bizzell makes a great argument on organizing genres historically. She gives a great detailed breakdown of her proposal:

For example, the New England region from about 1600 to about 1800 might

be defined as a contact zone in which different groups of Europeans and Native

Americans were struggling for the power to say what had happened in their

relations with each other. Thus canonical Puritan histories, autobiographies, and

captivity narratives would be studied in connection with historical commentaries

and memoirs by non-Puritan Europeans (traditionally treated as "minor"), European

transcriptions of Native American speeches (problematic but invaluable),

and letters, histories, and spiritual autobiographies written by Native Americans

in English (unknown in the academy until very recently). The object would not

be to represent what the lives of the diverse European immigrant and Native

American groups were really like. Rather, the attempt would be to show how each

group represented itself imaginatively in relation to the others. We would, in

effect, be reading all the texts as brought to the contact zone, for the purpose of

communicating across cultural boundaries.

I believe this could work, but I wonder how many years would it take to implement such doctrine across the board?

Bartholomae versus Elbow: My Last Blog Post...Until Next Week

I hear you, David Bartholomae, loud and clear, and in many ways I agree.  But if both you and Peter Elbow were teaching a composition class in one of my son’s schools, I would steer them toward Peter. 

            I agree with you.  Students need to learn the language and the dynamics of writing for the academy – and, as you remind us, writing for teachers who know the subject better than they do.  But, if I thought about this too much, I don’t think that I could write at all.  Both you and Peter Elbow had to start somewhere.  Both of you had to write for professors who knew the subject better than you did, and who recognized all your structural flaws, botched word choice, awkward phrasing, bungled analogies, and mangled metaphors. 

            Both you and Peter see the problems of audience and relate it to “power” (You 407).  Peter says in “Reflections on Academic Discourse” that he loves what’s in academic discourse: learning, intelligence, sophistication, even mere facts and naked summaries of articles and books…but hate[s] academic discourse” The reason for this visceral reaction, he says, is that “discourse carries power” (Peter 55). 

            In the interests of time (I know my audience, and they are busy right now with final papers), I will say this about your essay “Inventing the University”:  Perhaps one of the major flaws of all the essays you analyze for us could be summed up as student-writers trying too hard to write for the academy – to give the English department at this school, professors judging their work, the definitions and examples of creativity that they are expecting.  I don’t know if I am right.  Perhaps not, but when I get papers from my students like these, I don’t ask students to learn and emulate the language of the academy and to “show an awareness of the codes” (You 413), but to reveal more of how they really feel.  Your writers are playing it too safe. 

            Locating oneself in a discourse sounds complicated – and painful.  I think with time we learn how to write for our audience and yet remain true to what we want to say – need to say – for ourselves.  I don’t think Flowers’ writer-based prose must be wrenched from the writer; it must be gently guided and transformed toward prose that meets the needs of both the writer and the reader.

            Like Peter Elbow, “I love to explore and communicate with others through writing” (72), and when exploration and communication are allowed in a classroom, I believe with all my heart, writing grows and writers emerge.  I don’t need anyone to remind me of all the people that write a personal narrative better than I do.  All I need to do is pick up Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings to know that I have a long way to go.  I read good authors and hope it makes a difference.  But when I am writing, I need to forget about everything but what I want to communicate.  And at that moment anything is possible.  My ideas take flight and I feel like an author.  Take that away from me, and I am lost. 

            Where I think we agree, David, is in sensing what is wrong with essays like the “white socks” piece.  For me, it is not that the writer did not acknowledge the others who have done similar acts of creation, but that he didn’t enjoy revealing more of himself, showing his journey, exposing his vulnerability.  The student who wrote about copying music does this – to some degree – making her piece more engaging.  This is what I ask my students to do.  Take down the guard just a little.  Allow yourself to look imperfect – even foolish.  Show how you learned something and are a work in process.  I know that I am.  Even as I am about to get a Master’s degree (I still don’t believe it can be possible), I realize how little I know.  It is in this admission that I have any chance of writing something – or teaching anything – of value. 

            Therefore, I agree with a lot of what you say, David, but I’d rather have Peter teach my sons – and guide me as I teach others.   

research prospectus

For the past few weeks I have immersed myself in articles regarding revision and ESL speakers. A few things have stuck out for me. Firstly, the research I have seen so far has focused mainly on how secondary actors such as writing center tutors, peers in class, and teachers affect the revision process. I have not seen anything so far on how the ESL writers themselves approach the revision process. Also interesting is that most of the research subjects that I have seen are Asian. Very little has been done on Spanish speakers. I am thinking maybe I need to look in the ERIC database, one I have not consulted thus far.

I must admit that the lack of studies about Spanish speakers does surprise me. I suspect that researchers are more interested in English language development in terms of speaking and reading. Perhaps writing is not a priority for them. I am almost tempted to follow through on this thesis project for my Master's, because I believe that helping the fastest growing segment of the U.S. population develop proficiency in writing is vitally important, and frankly I am disappointed that so far the research community has not devoted much attention to it.

Trouble With Narrowing Down my Thesis Prospectus Question

The center of focus for my paper has remained relatively the same, although the overarching question that I want to focus on keeps shifting. I am focusing of the concept of "white privilege", the unearned and often unwanted advantages that white people have over people of color, and how this ideology affects Black students who resist white teachers who teach in urban, low-performing colleges where the majority of the students are Black. The question that keeps popping up in my mind is: How do we prepare White teachers, who choose to teach in this type of educational environment, to be sensitive to the reservations and prejudices that Black students have for White authority figures? Also, how do we assure our Black students that we are learned in the African American literature that we teach since we have not experienced the same hardships that they may have? These are very controversial issues and I have learned so much through the literature that I have been reading. However, I am having trouble narrowing my thesis, and I am also having difficulties in finding gaps in the research that I have read thus far. Any suggestions?

Lindemann's Top Eleven

My Top Eleven Quotes from Erika Lindemann

I hereby apologize for the reductive nature of the assignment I have presented myself.  I really do love this book and find it both extremely useful and inspirational.  As my opportunities for posting to this blog are fast fading, I wanted to consider what will stick with me the most from Lindemann.  I have appreciated many of our other writers this term, but I haven’t written enough about Lindemann; her common sense approach mixed with high ideals is what I want to aim for as a teacher.

1.         “Writing as Knowing” (5)

            Lindemann opens her book by discussing ways in which writing benefits us.  She talks about writing as “economic power,” “social necessity,” and “writing as knowing.”  In this section, she says that “writing also helps us solve problems” (5).  I cannot tell you how many of my own problems I have solved through writing.  (You probably got a taste of that with my last post.)  I have written all kinds of things that have helped me to understand my feelings on various issues.  I don’t know what I would do if I couldn’t write.  I want my students to feel the same way. 

2.         “Clearly writing is a messy business, rarely in real life as tidy as textbooks describe it” (23). 

            I am delighted to find someone else that doesn’t see the writing process as perfectly discreet stages of development.  I have felt guilty for far too long.  I love how Lindemann says that we don’t begin at a neat step one, “find a topic” (23), and move to drafting.  When we draft, new ideas emerge.  We can’t and shouldn’t feel obliged to stick to the plan.  Additionally, she notes that “prewriting and writing can occur simultaneously” (23).  Everyone has a different style of development, and while it isn’t a good idea to censor the first draft needlessly by stopping for every issue of word choice or punctuation, if something is glaring at me, I am going to fix it.  And now I do so without shame.

3.         “Prior to about the ninth grade, writing courses should emphasize self-expressive writing, description, simple stories, fairly concrete subject matters” (97). 

            This quote comes from Lindemann’s discussion of Jean Piaget, and those of us who have studied child psychology and educational theory know that you can’t push the abstract concepts and assignments to those just beginning to enter operational thinking.  You can push them gently and lovingly in that direction.  My twelve- and thirteen-year-old students are concrete learners, with occasional inklings of abstract thinking emerging from some.  I have them write from experience all year – and that has made all the difference.  While I am obliged to teach formal essay writing, and do so, the results are bleak unless they also write from experience.  Too many of my colleagues give up experiential writing.  I admire much of what they do, but feel strongly that without personal buy-in from young people who are fairly consumed with themselves, I can achieve very little.

4.         “The teacher must in such lists as this (brainstorming), begin to encourage honesty, to have the student look into himself and into his subject with candor and vigor” (Donald Murray as quoted by Lindemann 112).

            Brainstorming can make a teacher feel good about his/her efforts.  It looks like what we should do; it’s interactive, visual, and altogether quite twenty-first centuryish, but Murray and Lindemann recognize that we need to push our students past clichés and generalizations.  I am keeping this quote close by.

5.         “Journals offer students a place to write without fear of making mistakes or facing criticism for what they have to say” (117). 

            We all know the value of journal writing – this opportunity to write without censor.  After all, we speak, for the most part, without censor.  Why can’t we have a place for writing without fear?  I do read my students’ journals; they love the acknowledgement that their writing is worth my time.  I have followed Dr. Cauthen’s suggestion and told my students to staple pages that they don’t want me to read.  They have, and I have done my best not to peek.

6.         “An outline can force premature decisions and limit options” (138). 

            Outlining can work, but not always.  Sometimes, efforts at parallelism simply defy outlining.  This is why Lindemann recommends “informal written plans” and “chunking” and “blocking” (139).  I am looking forward to trying this approach with my students. 

7.         “Instead of focusing instruction on what paragraphs are, we need to teach students how to discover relationships and express them in units of discourse” (151). 

            At the moment, this chapter on paragraphing is my favorite.  I have done my best to teach students why and how a paragraph comes about and what it ought to signify, but in this chapter, Lindemann makes clear that paragraphing is not a cookie-cutter (to quote Alyssa) operation.  Topic sentences and support are too limiting, and, according to Lindemann, emanate from Aristotle’s ideas of topoi.  Again, Aristotle is misinterpreted and misused. 

8.         “As Donald Murray explains, ‘The writer toys with language, knowing that out of his most irresponsible word play may come his most responsible writing’” (175).

            I love this quote (again Donald Murray) and appreciate this sense of play.  I have felt guilty having my students play with words.  And yet on some primal level (theirs and mine) I know that they need it.  Playing with words is what made me fall in love with writing.  Why would I not give my students the same opportunity?

9.         “To be effective, writing workshops need careful planning” (205). 

            I like her ideas about heterogeneous groupings and guidance in how to give feedback.  Some writing workshops are disasters; when the one’s I have put together don’t work, I know that I didn’t plan them enough.  Learning outcomes and specific goals for given time periods were too nebulous.  Planning is key.

10.       “What do I want the students to do?  Is it worth doing?  Why?” (230).

            I hate busy work.  If work doesn’t fit in with my objectives for students, it has to be thrown out.  This seems simple enough, but I have to keep these questions central to my planning, which is why it made this list.

11.       “Growth in writing is a highly individualistic process that occurs slowly…” (233).

            These words come from Lindemann’s chapter on responding to student writing.  This chapter, of all chapters, changed my thinking this term.  I no longer want to use my comments to justify a grade; I don’t think I was conscious of doing this, but I probably was.  Instead, I want my comments to continue a conversation that began in the planning stages and that will move beyond, as we conference and consider how to revise.  I want students to see writing as a process.  Allowing students to conference with me and revise their work is very difficult; I have close to 200 students, but it is a sacred trust that I must endeavor to fulfill. 

Research Report: Jennifer Seibel Trainor

TITLE:        The Emotional Power of Racism: An Ethnographic Portrait of an All-White High School

AUTHOR:   Jennifer Seibel Trainor

SOURCE:   CCC 60:1, September 2008 (NCTE)

RESEARCH QUESTIONS:

Global questions: What are the causes and origins of racism? How does the emotional infrastructure of schooling and institutional practices work against anti-racist pedagogies?

More specifically, the study asks—

(1)   What emotional rules were taught and how were they taught?

(2)   How and when were emotional rules performed and enacted?

(3)   How were they applied and policed across contexts?

(4)   How did emotional learning participate in the development of racial identity, and in the construction of persuasive social beliefs?

ANSWER TO RESEARCH QUESTIONS:

The emotional infrastructure of schooling and institutional practices works against anti-racist pedagogies by encouraging students to respond in the following ways:

(1)   Denial or rationalization of racism (e.g., “They just want to complain.”)

(2)   White victimhood and reverse racism (e.g., Whites are victims of racism too; “only a small number of ‘ignorant’ or ‘redneck’ whites [are] racist.”)

(3)   Bootstrap Theory (“Anybody can make it if they try.”)

(4)   White superiority (Non-whites are biologically and genetically inferior to whites.)

RESEARCH DESIGN:

A one-year qualitative study based on—

(1)   discussions with a high school teacher during her daily planning period;

(2)   interviews of students and administrators;

(3)   observation of students in two classrooms; and

(4)   examination of curricular material and student writing.

KEY RELATED STUDIES:

Abu-Lughod, L., and C. Lutz [the politics of emotion]

Anderson, Virginia [“property rights”]

Boler, Megan [emotions and education in relationship to power]

Cintron, Ralph [an ethnographic study of how emotions affect institutional practices]

Crowley, Sharon [an analysis of the importance of emotions in persuasion, the relationship between whiteness and critical or anti-racist education, and persuasion]

Daniells, B.A. and Lindquist, Julie [some recent examples of nonacademic ethnographic literacy studies]

DeVoss, Daneille Nicole, Ellen Cushman, and Jeffrey T. Grabill [the embedded social arrangements, organization\, and conventions of practice that govern local practices of literacy, i.e., infrastructure]

Foucault, Michel [mentioned but not cited. Trainor states her research methods derive from Foucaultian theories focused on how norms and rules govern public behavior and private perceptions and emotions.]

Gorzelsky, Gwen [the importance of paying attention to emotional processes when changing ideological beliefs]

Jacobs, Dale, and Laura Micciche [rhetorics of emotion]

MacIntosh, Peggy [a representation of white privilege as property, which Trainor disagrees with]

Kates, Susan (quoting Gere) [the short time span between high school seniors and freshmen composition students]

. . . from a total of 29 citations

UNDERLYING ASSUMPTIONS:

(1)   The “prevailing view of student racism as arising from a need or desire to protect or gain white privilege, or as rooted in ignorance of systemic oppression or lack of exposure to difference” is wrong-headed.

(2)   Educators need to rethink “our curricular and pedagogical responses—multicultural exposure to difference, critical interrogations of whiteness and privilege.”

(3)   We need to do this by examining “the workings of emotion within institutional practice [the ‘infrastructure’], the embedded social arrangements, organization, and conventions of practice that govern local practices of literacy.”

(4)   We also need to pay “attention to the role of individual and collective emotions in the creation of persuasive belief systems.”

SUBJECTS (including how selected):

Students in an all-white high school enrolled in (a) an advanced writing course for college-bound students and (b) a graduation requirement called Introduction to Humanities. The central theme of both courses is “identity, difference, and social justice.”

METHOD OF RESEARCH (including key variables):

A one-year qualitative study based on—

(1)   interviews with a progressive teacher at an all-white high school;

(2)   interviews of administrators;

(3)   observations of classroom interaction;

(4)   interviews of students; and

(5)   examinations of student essays.

MEASUREMENT OR ANALYTIC METHODS:

Qualitative analysis

RESULTS:

(1)   Almost every student essay reflected at least some racist beliefs.

(2)   Many students simultaneously held racist and non-racist beliefs.

(3)   Many of the racist beliefs were based on emotional rules taught both intentionally and unintentionally.

CONCLUSIONS:

(1)   Racist assertions do not always or even often originate in racist attitudes or belief.

(2)   Racist discourses are best understood as psychosocial rhetorical phenomena—forms of persuasion that need to be understood not only for their political meanings and implications but also for their persuasive subjective and affective coherence.

(3)   Racist discourses structure feelings sometimes linked to, but rarely reducible to, the racial politics such discourses forward.

(4)   School scaffolds the emotional frameworks within which racist discourses cohere.

(5)   School itself—its infrastructure—exerts a powerful, but largely unacknowledged, pedagogical and persuasive force.

(6)   Institutional racism is fueled by curriculum and in-school social practices.

IMPLICATIONS:

Educators and researchers need to—

(1)   pay attention to persuasion in antiracist education;

(2)   examine the ways that schools structure the emotional logic that makes racism convincing;

(3)   consider ways to teach different emotional rules;

(4)   change current emotional positions to serve as alternative models for students;

(5)   reconsider the effectiveness of racism-as-property metaphors in anti-racist education when exploring racism with white students.

STRENGTHS OF THE STUDY:

The overarching question is limited to an examination of the emotional infrastructure of the school and its curriculum. The author is careful not to generalize about participants’ levels of racism and shows that some individual students hold more than one view. She cites a large number of references that develop and often support her study’s premises from a variety of perspectives.

CRITIQUE OR LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY:

(1)   Trainor mentions outside-of-school factors that create racist views and discourse but fails to give sufficient evidence of their possible effects on the racist school infrastructure.

(2)   Trainor admits many students exhibited both racist and nonracist beliefs but declines to include the latter.

QUESTIONS ABOUT THE STUDY:

Would there have been a way to analyze the effects of non-school racist beliefs?