4/29 - Theories of Assessment

"The essence of reliability findings from the last two decades of research is that no single essay test will yield highly reliable results, no matter how careful the testing and scoring apparatus. If the essay test is to be used for important or irreversible decisions about students, a minimum of two separate writing samples must be obtained- or some other kind of measurement must be combined with the single writing score." (White 41)

"Directed self-placement is no panacea. It does not address the problem of how to teach, how to bring students in from the margins, or how to deal with all of the politics of institutional change. Soliday, Grego and Thompson, Bartholomae and others address many of these concerns that would take us far beyond the limited scope of placement alternatives. But our placement alternative does lay the ground work for much that these authors recommend." (Royer and Gilles 70)

LINKS

• The Council of Writing Program Administrators: http://www.wpacouncil.org/
• Digital book, Writing Program Administration by Susan McLeod http://wac.colostate.edu/books/mcleod_wpa/

READINGS
Huot, Brian. “The Literature of Direct Writing Assessment: Major Concerns and Prevailing Trends.” (1990)

• Direct vs. indirect assessment of writing
• Three types of direct assessment: primary trait, analytic, holistic, (portfolio)
• Topic development and task selection
• Text and writing quality
• Influences on rater judgement of writing quality

Royer, Daniel J., and Roger Gilles. “Directed Self-Placement: An Attitude of Orientation.” (1998)

• What are traditional methods/measures for placing students in firstyear writing courses?
• What are some of the problems with traditional methods?
• What are the reasons given for directed self-placment?

White, Edward M. “An Apologia for the Timed Impromptu Essay Test.” (1995)

• Multiple-choice vs. essay vs. portfolio
• What the advantages of the timed essay assessment measure? What are its limitations?
• Validity, reliability, cost-effectiveness 

White, Edward M. “The Scoring of Writing Portfolios: Phase 2.” (2005)

• What are the advantages of portfolios?
• What is the main problem with portfolios?
• What are key components to "phase 2" scoring of writing portfolios?

4/22 - Critical and Cultural Studies Pedagogy

"All educational practice implies a theoretical stance on the educator's part. This stance in turn implies--sometimes more, sometimes less explicitly--an interpretation of man and the world. It could not be otherwise." (Freire 616)

"Overall, this problematic study of "work" offers one means to engage students in an extraordinary reperception of something very ordinary. It not only develops literacy skills and consciousness relevant to the problem theme, but it also validates students psychologically, because the exercise is based on their experience and their language resources." (Shor 120)

"...we are ethically bound by students' own aims, even if those aims seem uncomfortably close to elite values. Our distrust of such values does not permit us to tell students what they "really" want, or should want. We are very limited, I think, in how far we can set ourselves up as ends-experts. The only thing we are certainly justified in imposing on students is our judgment of means: Here, in my expert opinion, is the best way to learn this thing that you and I have agreed should be taught." (Smith 317)

Freire, Paulo. “The Adult Literacy Process as Cultural Action for Freedom and Education and ConscientizaÇão.”

• Literacy as disease metaphor
• Critical consciousness

Berlin, James. “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class.”

• Ideology: what is real, what is good, what is possible
• What is the goal of a critical pedagogy?

Shor, Ira. “Monday Morning Fever: Critical Literacy and the Generative Theme of “Work.”

• literacy instruction vs. writing instruction
• What classroom techniques does Shor discuss?

Hairston, Maxine. “Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing.”

• What are the causes of the "cultural left suddenly claiming writing courses as their territory"?
• What are the shortcomings of critical pedagogy?
• What alternatives does Hairston propose? 

Smith, Jeff. “Students' Goals, Gatekeeping, and Some Questions of Ethics.”

• Comp studies' "Standard Model": "means-ends equivalence," "ethic of direct enactment"
• Universities and professions as "intentional communities"
• Teachers' ethical obligations: to students, to society

4/15 - Theories of Pedagogy

"...in teaching writing we are tacitly teaching a version of reality and the student's place and mode of operation in it. Yet many teachers (and I suspect most) look upon their vocations as the imparting of a largely mechanical skill, important only because it serves students in getting them through school and in advancing them in their professions. This essay will argue that writing teachers are perforce given a responsibility that far exceeds this merely instrumental task." (Berlin 766) 

"...ours is a truth-telling course; it forefronts the field's current labor practices and requires that we ask how FYC students are currently being served by writing instructors who couldn't teach a writing studies pedagogy. Our field's current labor practices reinforce cultural misconceptions that anyone can teach writing because there is nothing special to know about it." (Downs and Wardle 575)

Hillocks, George. "What Works in Teaching Composition." (1985)

• Duration of treatment
• Mode of instruction: Presentational, Natural Process, Individualized, Environmental
• Focus of instruction: Grammar, Sentence Combining, Models, Using Criteria, Inquiry, Free Writing

Berlin, James. “Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories.” College English 44.8 (1982): 765-77.

• Epistemology = what is knowable
• Major pedagogical theories: Neo-Aristotelian, Positivist or Current-Traditional, Neo-Platonic or Expressionist, Epistemic Rhetoric

Breuch, Lee-Ann M. Kastman. “Post-Process ‘Pedagogy’: A Philosophical Exercise.” Villanueva 97-126. (2002)

• Rejection of mastery
• Post-process assumptions: writing is public, writing is interpretive, writing is situated

Fulkerson, Richard. “Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century.” CCC 56 (2005): 654-87.

• Fulkerson's metatheory of pedagogy: axiology, process, pedagogy, epistemology 
• Three major approaches to teaching of composition: critical/cultural studies [CCS], expressivism, and procedural rhctoric

Downs, Douglas, and Elizabeth Wardle. “Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning ‘First-Year Composition’ as ‘Introduction to Writing Studies.’” (2007)

• Rationale, pedagogy, challenges, benefits
• How would Fulkerson classify this course?

4/8 - Computers and Writing

"The gap between the manuscript and the printed page is closing. Through the technology, first through the development of the desktop publishing software and now, increasingly, through the standard word-processing package, the writer is entering an era where the published page is more directly under her or his control. This innovation has profound implications for writers, for writing, and the teaching of writing with computers, and for theories of electronic writing. Thus, weighing the consequencesof "taking control of the page" needs to be placed on our agenda for the nineties." (Sullivan 44)

"Despite these limitations, our project indicates that combining synchronous and asynchronous computer-mediated communication did help our students improve as writers. Frequent contact with an actual audience, frequent practice in writing, and a more enjoyable writing environment helped students become more competent, comfortable writers....If one of the purposes of education is to help students become not only more complex thinkers and writers, but also more tolerant, accepting people, computer-mediated exchanges can be used to foster that humanistic goal." (Harris and Wambeam 370)

Sullivan, Patricia. “Taking Control of the Page: Electronic Writing and Word Publishing.” Evolving Perspectives on Computers and Composition Studies: Questions for the 1990s. Eds. Cindy Selfe and Gail Hawisher. NCTE, 1991. 43-64.

• What was the "problem" with computers and writing research circa 1980s, early 1990s? 
• What are ways that desktop publishing affects theories of the writing process? 
• What does Sullivan propose as possible explanatory theories for electronic writing?  

Harris, Leslie D., and Cynthia Wambeam. “The Internet-Based Composition Classroom: A Study in Pedagogy.” Computers and Composition 13 (1996): 353-371.

• What were the goals of their "Internet based [first year composition] discourse community"?
• What pedagogical methods were used to achieve this community?
• What research methods were used to assess the pilot?

Tim McGee and Patricia Ericsson. “The Politics of the Program: MS Word as the Invisible Grammarian.” Computers and Composition 19 (December 2002): 453-70.

• MSGC reinforces current-traditional practice, assumptions
• MSGC inhibits writing process (i.e., novice writers too focused on surface-level corrections)
• Writing teachers should be aware of role of grammar checkers, computer tools on writing process, development of writing process

Mueller, Derek N. “Digital Underlife in the Networked Writing Classroom.” Computers and Composition 26 (2009) 240–50.

• What is "digital underlife," which is based on Robert Brooke's (1988) "Underlife in the Writing Classroom"?
• What recomendations does Mueller offer for "enriching our understanding of digital underlife"?

OPTIONAL

• Sullivan, Laura L. “Wired Women Writing: Towards a Feminist Theorization of Hypertext.”
• Grabill, Jeffrey T. “On Divides and Interfaces: Access, Class, and Computers.”
• Slattery, Shaun. “Un-distributing Work through Writing: How Technical Writers Manage Texts in Complex Information Environments.”
• Howard, Rebecca Moore. “Understanding ‘Internet Plagiarism.’”
• Amy Diehl, Jeffrey T. Grabill, and William Hart-Davidson. “Grassroots: Supporting the Knowledge Work of Everyday Life.”
• Purdy, James P. “Anxiety and the Archive: Understanding Plagiarism Detection Services as Digital Archives.”

 

3/25 - Literacy Theories (and other business)

We have several things we can cover today:

• Website tutorial
• Workshop research paper proposals
• Review feminist rhetorics and other voices readings
• feminist rhetoric, contribution to comp studies
• rhetoric of racism
• distinct nature of L2 writing
• teaching ESL
• Review literacy theory readings
• oral vs. literate traditions
• sponsors of literacy
• workplace literacy
• writing across the curriculum
• public intellectualism, service learning, activist research

3/4 - Social Theories

"If the student knew what he was up against better than the teacher giving the assignment seemingly does, he might ask, "Who wants to know?" (Ong 59)

"The case of the diary, which at first blush woudl seem to fictionalize the reader least but in may ways probably fictionalizes him or her most, brings into full view the fundamental deep paradox of the activity we call writing." (Ong 73)

"Writing is an attempt to exercise the will, to identify the self within the constraints of some discourse community. We are constrained insofar as we must inevitably borrow the traces. codes, and signs which we inherit and which our discourse community imposes. We are free insofar as we do what we can to encounter and learn new codes, to intertwine codes in new ways, and to expand our semiotic potential--with our goal being to effect change and establish our identities within the discourse communities we choose to enter." (Porter 41)

"As representatives and delegates of a local, disciplinary community, and of the larger community as well, teachers are responsible for the continued vitality of both the knowledge communities we value. Responsible to both sets of values, therefore, we must perform as conservators aand agents of change, as custodians of prevailing community values and as agents of social transition and reacculturation." (Bruffee 432)

"We will need...to look at collaborative learning not merely as a process of consensus-making but more important as a process of identifying differences and locating these differences in reltation to each other. The consensus that we ask students to reach in a collaborative classroom will be based not so much on collective agreements as on collective explanations of how people differ, where their differences come from, and whether they canlive and work together with these differences." (Trimbur 470)

"But if we take away that hierarchy [between “original” text and “borrowed” text] we remove the impulse for students to lie about it. If a piece of the assemblage is valued primarily for its function rather than its place in a hierarchy, students are no longer pushed so hard to hide the citations for their sources. In fact, if skills at making assemblages are made the focal point, then teachers would want to put great value on the ability of students to find existing chunks of text they can reuse. Re-inventing the wheel becomes an inefficiency, a misplaced waste of effort.“You borrowed that chunk? Great! Where did you get it from? Maybe I can use it, too.”" (Johnson-Eilola and Selber 400)

Key concepts

• "Audience is a fiction"
• Admissible ignorance
• Audience addressed vs. audience invoked
• Intertextuality (iterability and presupposition)
• Discourse community
• Forum analysis
• Collaborative learning
• Conversation / Social construction
• Normal discourse vs. abnormal discourse vs. acratic discourse
• Consensus vs. dissensus
• Originality / Creativity
• Assemblage

2/25 - Cognitive Theories

"To achieve expression effectively, of course, the musician has to have interiorized the technology, made the tool or machine second nature, a psychological part of himself or herself." (Ong 24)

"The larger point to be made here, however, is that no scientific research, no matter how rigorously it is conducted, possesses the kind of authoritative certainty inner-directed theorists are seeking....The strongest appeal of certainty, however, is its offer of a solution to our new students' problems that will enable us to undertake their socialization into the academic discourse community without having to consider the ethical and political dimensions of this act." (Bizzell 406)

"To encourage students to take on the same stance--to share some of the same knowledge--as the instructor is not the same as having them contribute to the work of the institution in the way that employees at the various institutions do. To put it simply, the captain needs the information provided by his most subordinate navigator. The Governor of the BOC needs the lowliest analyst's report. The professor, however, does not need any specific student's essay in the same way. A student who does not hand in his work does not impede the operation of the university. (In fact, he eases the instructor's task of grading.'" (Dias et al. 148)

Flower and Hayes, "A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing" (1981)

• Stage process models vs. cognitive process model
• Protocol analysis
• Task environment, long term memory, writing processes
• Goal-setting patterns

Bizzell, "Cognition, Convention, and Certainty: What We Need to Know about Writing" (1982)

• Inner-directed vs. outer-directed language theory
• Discourse community/interpretive community
• Discourse analysis
• Sociolinguistics
• Situated
• Certainty
• Hidden curriculum

Kellogg, "Training Writing Skills: A Cognitive Developmental Perspective"

• Stages of cognitive development of writing ability: knowledge-telling, knowledge-transforming, knowledge-crafting
• Executive attentional control
• Training methods: relative automaticity, deliberate practice, cognitive apprenticeship

Dias, Freedman, Medway, and Pare, "Distributed Cognition at Work"

• Distributed cognition

Russell's "Rethinking Genre in School and Society"

• Dialogism
• Activity theory
• Activity system(s)
• North American genre theory/genre
• Cultural-historical theory
• Contradictions/double-binds

2/18 - Product Theories

"Little wonder that in such a sea of confusion [the new teacher] clings to his handbook as a shipwrecked sailor clings to his raft, and by an interesting human weakness, soon comes to believe that these rules, which only yesterday were unknown to him, are the sole criteria of good writing." (McCrimmon, qtd. in Connors 69)

“More than any other enterprise in the teaching of writing, responding to and commenting on student writing consumes the largest proportion of our time. Most teachers estimate that it takes them at least 20 to 40 minutes to comment on an individual student paper, and those 20 to 40 minutes times 20students per class, times 8 papers, more or less, during the course of a semester add up to an enormous amount of time. With so much time and energy directed to a single activity, it is important for us to understand the nature of the enterprise.” (Sommers 148)

"It would not be so bad if students were only commanded to correct errors, but, more often than not, students are given contradictory messages; they are commanded to edit a sentence to avoid an error or to condense a sentence to achieve greater brevity of style, and then told in the margins that the particular paragraph needs to be more specific or to be developed more." (Sommers 150)

A bit more on responding to student papers:

• “Average Time on Course for a Writing Teacher,” Richard Haswell http://www.comppile.org/profresources/compworkload.htm

• “The Complexities of Responding to Student Writing; or, Looking for Shortcuts via the Road of Excess” by Richard Haswell http://wac.colostate.edu/atd/articles/haswell2006.cfm

• What are the reasons Connors gives for teachers' (and society's) emphasis on grammar and correctness?
• Why is direct instruction in grammar ineffective means to improve students' writing ability?
• What are the main findings of Sommers'  and Connor and Lunsford's study of teacher comments on student writing? 
• What (again) is the aim of the freshman college writing course?
• Why teach non-academic discourse?
• Teach academic discourse, yes, but what is academic discourse?
• What are the stylistic features of academic discourse?
• But how much should one focus on style? Or how should style be taught?

2/11 - Process Theories

"Year after year the student shudders under a barrage of criticism, much of brilliant, some of it stupid, and all of it irrelevant. No matter how careful our criticisms, they do not help the student since when we teach composition we are not teaching a product, we are teaching a process." (Murray 3)

• Do you agree with Murray’s estimate: 85% prewriting, 1% drafting, 14% Rewriting?
• How does one teach writing as a process?
• What is the role of the teacher when teaching writing as a process?
• What are the criteria for judging "good writing," according to Elbow?
• What is the role of the teacher when using Elbow's "method for teaching writing"?
• How is Elbow's approach a "process" approach? (How does it fit with Murray's guidelines/implications?)
• What are the four language processes discussed by Emig?
• What are the biggest differences between talking and writing, according to Emig?
• What are the “unique correspondences” between writing and learning, according to Emig?
• What are the implications for teaching writing when it is understood as a mode of learning?
• Describe the methodology used by Perl
• In the case study of Tony which mode (extensive or reflective) did did Tony perform better in and what
• What are some significant findings from Perl’s study regarding the phases of prewriting, writing, and editing?
• What is the methodology of Sommers' study?
• Why does Sommers study revision, or what fault does she find with composing process models?
• What are inexperienced writers concerned with during revision?
• What are experienced writers most concerned with?
• What do inexperienced writers need more practice in based on the studies by Perl and Sommers?
• How are student (print) journals and weblogs related to process pedagogy?
• What are the pros and cons of journals vs. blogs?
• What are some other possible electronic tools discussed by Lowe and Williams?
  
  

2/4 - Basic Writing Theory

"But as we come to know these students better, we begin to see that the greatest barrier to our work with them is our ignorance of them and of the very subject we have contracted to teach." (Shaughnessy 317)

“…[W]e need to look closely at these claims and at the theories used to support them, for both the theories and the claims lead to social distinctions that have important consequences, political as well as educational…Social and political hierarchies end up encoded in sweeping cognitive dichotomies.” (Rose 346)

"The rising tide of discourse on plagiarism does not necessarily indicate a rising tide of plagiarism." (Zwagerman 678)

• What is “Basic Writing”?
• What is wrong with current models/scales of student writing development, according to Shaughnessy?
• Define each of the four stages of her “developmental scale” for basic writing teachers? What question does the teacher ask at each stage?
• What are the problems with applying the following theories to writing development:
• Cognitive style: field dependence-independence
• Hemisphericity
• Piaget’s stages of cognitive development
• Theories of orality-literacy
• 
  What is a “behaviorist approach to writing”?
• What is the problem with defining writing as a “skill”? 
• What is the problem with associating the term “remedial” with writing ability?
• What’s problematic about saying college students are “illiterate”?
• What is the “myth of transience”?
• What steps does Rose recommend to change discourse on writing instruction in higher education?
• How does Bartholomae define “basic writers”?
• What are the stages of development of the academic writer, according to B.?
• What research method did B. use in this paper?
• How might B’s notion of “commonplaces” be applied to the teaching of academic writing/style?
• What are some "reductions" and problematic assumptions in the "war on plagiarism"?
• What are some problems with electronic plagiarism detection services?
• What motiviates cheating?
• What are some alternate/successful models for basic writing instruction (Goen Salter, Glau)?
• What are some ways to measure writing success/effectiveness in college?
  
  

1/28 - Modern Theories of Rhetoric

"Our discipline has been long in knuckling from its eyes the sleep of the ninetheenth and early twentieth centuries, and the real lesson of the modes is that we need always to be on guard against systems that seem convenient to teachers but ignore the way writing is actually done."

- Connors, "Fall and Rise of the Modes"

• What are some definitions for "rhetoric"?
• What are the features of a rhetoric?
• What were the influences on early modern American rhetorics and writing instruction?
• What was the role of textbooks in the development of early modern rhetorical theories?
• What is the difference between the modes of discourse and Kinneavy's aims of discourse?  
• How are theories of discourse "built," what method do they use?
• How do these readings fill in the "gap" in composition scholarship from week 1, i.e., the early 20th century? 
• How would a "timeline" of composition scholarship look, as we know it today?
• What are the major contributions of modern theories of invention to comtemporary rhetorical theory and pedagogy?
• What is the issue between rational and non-rational forms of invention?
• What are some of the emphasese of more contemporary forms of invention (social, critical, etc.)

1/21 - Comp Studies Origins

Part I: Open Discussion

• Read the blog of the person following your name on the ENG 701 blog roll.
• Post a thoughtful response
• Read and respond to someone eles’s if you have time.
• Class discussion

Part II: Histories, Problems, and Methodologies

• Do a binary comparison the “old” American college to the “new” research university, including how writing instruction faired in both systems.
• Identify the main elements of the Harvard model of composition? (curriculum, philosophy, leaders…)
• What are some alternative models?
• What is the rationale for English A given by Hill?
• What is the significance of Hill’s piece to the history of composition studies?
• What is the "domain" of composition studies?
• What are the areas of research in the field of rhetoric and composition?
• What are the research methodologies used in composition studies?
• What larger intellectual movements influenced composition research?
• What is unique about composition studies?
• What is the relationship of composition to literature and English departments?

Welcome

If you are reading this you are probably sitting in CBC C309 on the UNLV campus. I'm sitting in front of you. You may be wondering why you are taking this course in a computer classroom. You might be wondering why you are taking this class at all. Hopefully, I'll answer any questions you have, and you might decide to stay.

After discussing the course and syllabus, we'll spend some time reading some recent news and articles related to the course. The readings can be found on the course reading list.

According to the reading list, the texts for the course on any given week can be found in one of two places:

1. Required textbook, Cross-Talk in Comp Theory by Victor Villanueva (2nd ed.)
2. Webcampus course

For next week's class, you'll need to do the following:

1. Pick up or order a copy of Cross-Talk
2. Read the articles for 1/21
3. Write your blog entry for the articles before the start of class next week
4. E-mail me the link to your blog and post your URL of your blog to Webcampus

-Dr. J