R-J article on texting

Did you see this R-J article on text-speak: "Dis maks my teacha cry." Our own Patrice Hollrah, Director of the Writing Center, was quoted. All in all, another balanced and informed treatment of the subject. Surprising for the conservative R-J...

A couple more articles:

1. An interesting NYTimes article that challenges assumptions on technology and gender: More girls than boys are generating Internet content, according to "Sorry, Boys, This is Our Domain."
2. A story about an experimental online persuasive writing course taught to 5th and 6th graders, in "Experimental Online Writing Course Is Elementary"

2-25 class

Today we'll discuss some early rhetorical theory, a form of discourse analysis. See 2-25 class notes added to Webcampus.

Your dissonance paper/blog is due next week as well. I'll discuss my expectations in class, but basically the goal is for you to write about your own process of selecting a topic for your research paper. The term "dissonance" refers to the idea that you should be pursuing a topic for which you have some desire to understand better, based on your personal experience, professional goals, or both. Your dissonance paper should therefore identify topics related to this course that you want to understand better and reflect on why you want to pursue them. You can pose questions, discuss in or out-of-class readings, relate your experience. You also need to narrow and select a topic and explain your selection, based on personal interest, fruitfulness of preliminary searches in CompPile, etc. In the end, your paper should raise some possible topics, discuss your interest in them, and then identify the topic you want to pursue for your outside research paper. You won't necessarily be bound to the topic (I will read your dissonance papers with an eye toward helping you choose an appropriate topic), but you should have a good start and get the opportunity to get feedback from me and your classmates (so I suppose it should be a sharable blog?)

Next week's readings are mostly in the Cross-Talk book, but there is one article (Hillocks) in the library's e-reserves (not Webcampus). You should be able to access e-reserves from home, but you'll need a library access code. Can everyone access e-reserves?

California's Standard English Learner program

Here's an interesting news story related to our discussion of Canagarajah's “The Place of World Englishes in Composition." Written by Naush Boghossian, "Students Struggle to Leave Dialects at Home" is about the "Standard English Learner" (SEL) program in California schools, which aims to help minority students code switch between their vernacular dialects spoken at home and Standard English used in schools.

Boghossian discusses many issues of language poltics in education related to Standard English and national dialects. Boghossian points out that a big part of the SEL program is professional development for teachers aimed at instilling cultural sensitivity to the home langauges and helping students recognize the differences between their dialect and Standard English.

Boghossian treats the subject pretty fairly, recognizing the political and social complexities of language learning in a diverse, multi-cultural environment. He points out that we still don't know much about why students from minority households struggle to learn Standard English and that dialects persist as a form of cultural identity. He also recalls the 1996 debate over Ebonics in Oakland schools. There's also a few comments to the article.

After reading Patti's week 2/11 response I started to post a comment to her blog site specifically, but then thought, in the spirit of turning the course blog into more of a blog, my comments might appropriately fit here. So here they are:

Patti: wow, very thoughtful reflections this week. As I was reading through your response I started thinking to myself, wow, I'm glad Patti stayed in this course and has goals to become a nurse educator. Part of that is because your views (about language and new media) are very open-minded, or "progressive." Unfortunately, not everyone is as open-minded. Language is another historical site of power struggle. Why is English the WE (world English) and not Spanish, you ask? Because the ME (metropolitan English) countries colonized the globe. And think of the recent Pahrump "English only" language battle: It is a fight over the expansion/acceptence of the Spanish language. Those same language conservatives would likey be aghast at talk of teaching "new media" writing vs. good, old-fashioned grammar. (We'll read in a few weeks why direct instruction in grammar can actually be detrimental to the developmet of writing ability.) I'm glad Patti's in the course because she shows a willingness to consider the complexity and variability of writing. She openly wonders about the place of "formal" writing (and there is a place for it), but I feel comforted knowing Patti might be helping future nurses learn how to communicate.

Patti, and a few others, also commented on the difficulties they had reading the Juzwik et al. meta-analysis of writing trends circa 1999-2004, especially compared to reading Yancey's article. Part of that is because, remember, the field of composition studies is multi-modal: the Juzwik et al. article uses the straightforward scientific article format (problem-method-results-discussion), whereas Yancey uses an almost experimental theory/essay format. Perhaps the Jurzwik article is too abstract in terms of intentifying problems without really giving any examples and citations of specific research. Perhaps a review essay, that summarizes a corpus of research would be more useful. But I did want everyone to get a bird's eye view, if you will, of contemporary research concerns and, new to the disucssion, research methods. We also got to talk about the range of journals in the field, which was useful too.

Furthermore, most of you are generally being asked to read differently than you're used to. Most of you are used to reading literature and to a lesser extent literary criticsm. You're not used to reading the scientific article genre, with its heavy use of citation, emphasis on technical specificity, and explication of research method. One trick for reading scientific articles is that you can pay more attention to the results and discussion at the end, and gloss the method section. Generally speaking, if a scientific article is published, it's method is acceptable--at least for our purposes in this class.

Lastly, I thought last night's class was a great mix of discussing the articles, the field in general, and our course itself. I was satisfied with our blog-inspired discussion of the aims of weekly blog responses. As we discussed, the blog needs to be focused on the readings (this would be the "formal" aspect of the assignment) but it can/should be written informally (I'm not grading your blogs for mechanics, for example). The "style" of the blog, as we discussed, is perhaps the gray area. You can critique, but you need to back up your criticism. Your tone should be balanced.

If I had to name the sub-genre of blog we are modeling, I suppose I would call it the academic's research blog. The academic's research blog can reflect more informally than published scholarship, but I would say it still maintains a "public" dimension of respect that one should afford fellow academics. A good example would be Clay Spinuzzi's blog, which is a sort of "this is what I'm reading now" blog. His two most recent book reviews are somewhat critical, so you can compare the level of tact employed by Spinuzzi. Spinuzzi's blog also contains posts related to other aspects of his professional life and some personal posts, and so can yours. I'll likely read the other posts, and maybe comment on them, but your "grade" will be based on your reading posts. (If you want to argue the grade should be based on the whole blog, that's another discussion.) With that said, see if you can find me some "vitriolic" toned academic research blogs...

I also updated the 2-11 notes file in Webcampus based on the in class discussion.

Lastly, did anyone notice we got our first "outsider" comment to our course blog!

-Dr. J

2/11 class

I graded the first week’s blogs in Webcampus (out of 10 points). Remember, I am looking to see familiarity and engagement with the readings. You can reflect personally, but you must engage the readings (e.g., use specific examples, quotations, etc. from text). A main goal is to convince me you did the reading. I was lenient this first week since my expectations weren’t really known (you are being disciplined, in the Foucauldian sense, can you feel it?)

I thought I should try to turn the class blog into more of a blog…did you read my musings on the 2/4 class?

I compiled a partial list of blogs (see below)

Log into Webcampus for a list of questions on this week’s readings

I’ll be passing out handouts on research methods, too.

Rhet/Comp Blogs

• A question: What would you say is the typical profile of a rhet/comp blogger?
• An artifact: “Amy’s Rhetoric Blog” or this will be you… http://amysrhetoricblog.blogspot.com/2007/09/why-is-platos-gorgias-so-agreeable.html

Individual blogs

• Clay Spinuzzi, associate professor of rhetoric at University of Texas at Austin. http://spinuzzi.blogspot.com/
• Jeff Rice, English professor at University of Missouri-Columbia and Director of the Composition Program, http://www.ydog.net/
• Johndan Johnson-Eilola, professor of communication and media, Clarkson University http://people.clarkson.edu/~johndan/workspace/
• Steve Krause, professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Eastern Michigan University http://stevendkrause.com/
• Paul Kei Matsuda Professor of English at Arizona State University, http://www.public.asu.edu/~pmatsuda/blog.html
• Charlie Lowe, assistant professor, Department of Writing Grand Valley State University http://cyberdash.com/
• Krista Kennedy, a Rhetoric Ph.D. Candidate in the University of Minnesota Department of Writing Studies http://slimcoincidence.com/blog/
• Jill Walker Rettberg, associate professor at the University of Bergen, http://jilltxt.net/

Community Blogs

• Kairos News “A Weblog for Discussing Rhetoric, Technology and Pedagogy” http://kairosnews.org/
• KairosNews Blogroll: http://kairosnews.org/weblogs-by-teachers-and-scholars-in-composition-rhetoric-and-literature
• Council of Writing Program Administrators http://www.wpacouncil.org/
• Rhet/comp.com blogroll http://rhetcomp.com/ (click on “blogs”)

Musings on 2/4 class

Thinking how the class went, I felt we didn't "review" the readings as much as I had hoped. Maybe we spent a bit too much time reading each other's blogs, or working out the technology of posting to each other's blogs? Perhaps this is a simple classroom management issue on my part, but it also raises the question of the use of blogs in the classroom. It is artificial to be sitting in a face-to-face classroom reading each other's posts? Should blogs be an out-of-class-type activity? How useful did the class find reading each other's posts? Did the in-class blog activity help with understanding of the readings?

Another issue of using blogs in the classroom I need to resolve is that by making the student blogs public, I now have to think about how I'll provide feedback on the blogs. I can't very well be evaluating individual blogs in public.

We started some good discussion of the first week's readings. The impact of the Harvard program on the formation of English departments and the development of writing instruction in North America is not questioned by most scholars, though as even Brereton notes, there were "other" versions of freshman English taught elsewhere and some scholars look to these alternatives to re-examine the prevailing narrative of Harvard's influence. And this is not to say that Harvard's program was all bad: Harvard pushed the reform of the Latin-based recitation method that was used from, oh, say, Classical times to the middle- to late-19th C. (though, as we discussed, some elements of the recitation system emphasized language use more than the new lecture model of the research university.)

We also started to discuss some common assumptions about teaching writing, in light of the histories we read, namely about the role of reading, in general, and literature, specifically, in teaching writing. This is good. Most teachers (and writers) don't have a theoretical foundation for what they do, which could lead to ineffective or inconsistent teaching (or writing). One of the goals of this class is to help devlep a more theoretical stance toward writing or teaching writing. Histories help show where common practices and assumptions come from. Theory and research is necessary to test whether these practices and assumptions are useful and effective. If you're interested in the history of composition and rhetoric, there is a section in the Bedford Bibliography of Writing worth looking at.

Lastly, I'm starting to look for some blogs by scholars in our field...

Dr. J

2/4 Class

Last week we discussed the syllabus. Apart from reading and weekly "blog" responses, the major project for the course is a conference length paper. Keep thinking about topics that interest you (a "dissonance blog" that narrows your topic is due on March 3.

I mentioned the 2008 Western States Rhetoric and Literacy Conference call for papers (CFP) coincides with the proposal due date for this class. I will pass out the CFP in class, as I can't yet find an online link to the announcement.

I uploaded our notes from last week's class discussion to a folder in Webcampus. We discussed "First-Year Writing Gets a New Look," which highlighted the English Alive program at Drexel University and its efforts to incorporate new media technologies in composition classes. We discussed some key themes in composition studies, including

• What is the aim of post-secondary writing instruction?
• What is the most appropriate way to achive those aims, or what are the best teching methods? ("pedagogy" is the study of teaching)
• What role does new media in post-secondary writing instruction?

It loooks like everyone managed to activiate a blog (see our blog roll). We'll start this week's class with some reponse to the responses:

Part I: Open Discussion

• Read the blog of the person following your name on the ENG 701 blog roll.
• Post a thoughtful response (how easily will the person's blog site allow this?)
• Read and respond to someone eles’s if you have time.
• Class discussion

Part II: Taxonomies

With a partner, answer the following questions:

1. Do a binary comparison the “old” American college to the “new” research university, including how writing instruction faired in both systems.
2. Identify the main elements of the Harvard model of composition? (curriculum, philosophy, leaders…)
3. What are some alternative models?
4. What is the rationale for English A given by Hill?
5. What is the significance of Hill’s piece to the history of composition studies?
6. Outline the “story” of rhetoric, from classical to contemporary times.
7. List as many areas of research in the field of rhetoric and composition as you can.
8. What larger intellectual movements influenced composition research?
9. What is the relationship of composition to literature and English departments?

For next week, 2/11, read and "blog" about "comp studies today." Three of the readings are on Webcampus, and one is a link to an online collection called "Into the Blogosphere."

Dr. J