Study of Writing

From QED

Hi, everyone,

I've posted here a bunch of stream-of-consciousness observations. I'll add the sources I've reviewed here to Sandie's bibliography and then both send that out and post it on The Literature page of the regular BB site. I'll also email you all the Word document that I've pasted this in from. (I reccommend doing that, by the way, because it seems that the Wiki logs you out if you take too long, and doesn't save whatever you've done.)

As I've said, these are incredibly free-form. I'm being much more detailed and random than I would if I were trying to draft something or if I were trying to redact the literature for you, because it seemed to me that the most useful thing I can do for Kerry and Judy at this point is to give you a kind of too-much-too-fast scattershot set of observations and possibly relevant quotations. (Yes, yes, it's also *easier* than trying to digest things a whole bunch. But what if I turned this set of ingredients into some kind of soup when we really wanted to bake it? You see my point.)

Here's a bibliography from Sandie with my additions.

DOUG BRENT -- REVINVENTING WAC -- FYS & RESEARCH (and HARRIS -- THINKING LIKE A PROGRAM)

An overview: basically, I think that Brent’s “Reinventing WAC(Again): The First-Year Seminar and Academic Literacy” is a strong and interesting piece. We can build on it in lots of useful ways, in part because he never actually looks at student writing, but makes his case based on interviews with a relatively small number of students and faculty who participated in the program.

His goal, then, is to “show how the pedagogy of these seminars integrates writing into inquiry-based research and engages students in writing as a process” (254). He’s using this as a way to bring WAC to a large, research-intensive, WAC-resistant school (hmmm…) (University of Calgary has 29,000 undergrads), but he also “want[s] to use this case to illustrate more than a way to sneak WAC in the back door. It also illustrates the degree to which the shape of the container can liberate pedagogy. The faculty members teaching the University of Calgary’s first-year seminar understood their mission to be ‘teaching research’ as a complex process. It did not take them long to discover that in order to do so effectively, they needed to allow time for students to explore the unfamiliar alleys and back roads of the process, to mentor students individually, to send work back with revision-promoting rather than editorial comments, and above all to empower students to make mistakes. When we remove the anxiety of coverage and give faculty members the opportunity to work with students on subjects that they really care about – and most important, foreground the *activity* of research rather than just the transmission of results – we create an environment conducive to process pedagogy” (273-74).

Materials and methods: the FYS he’s studying were all offered in Fall, 2003 in the Faculty of Communcation and Culture (264). He interview four of the six faculty who offered FYS that semester, and nineteen of the 100 students those four taught (266). He also had survey data from student evaluations. The seminars were limited to 25 students – which is much smaller than most other introductory coruses, which don’t seem to have caps at all.

I think that Brent has some good points for us. He’s situating himself in relation to the lit. on first-year seminars (rather than writing seminars or comp classes), and while we don’t want to do that, there are ways that I think that we can draw on his article and Joe Harris’ “Thinking Like a Program” to situate who we are and what we do in useful ways. In part, reaching out to both of those conversations lets us make a case for why our findings (and curricular changes) and interesting and important. In both cases, we’re giving much more of an inside look at 1) what actually happens to student writing in these kinds of courses, and 2) how you can modify curriculum in order to build on what you learn happens when you look at student writing rather than relying on impressionistic data as Brent has. (Although calling it “impressionistic” makes me sound more dismissive than I mean to.)

If we want to be making a case for the FY writing seminar as the place to teach research skills, then there’s additional good stuff to draw on in Brent’s article: he was a section on research papers that synthesizes a good bit of the literature (Judy? What did you think of this section?) and he also makes the case for teaching research in the context of a topic-based seminar rather than a traditional comp class (also useful). Key point about institutional variation from the latter section: after going over a program at Linfield College (Runciman), he mentions research (Daniell, Flesher Moon) that suggests that FYS don’t work at non-small liberal arts colleges. Then, “I think that they are selling the model short. Although the first-year seminar doubtless works differently in a large research university, the Boyer Commission report underscores a strong connection between the content-oriented first-year seminar and the research agenda of such institutions. Indeed, the model was pioneered by large research-based universities in the United States” (263). That strikes me as a great entry point for us – the relation of WS to FYS in structural terms, a way to pick up on Joe’s “Program” points, and a connection to the goals of undergraduate research at larger institutions (for which Princeton is a somewhat extreme version, but not shockingly so).

Okay, that’s it from me for now. More this afternoon and tonight.

RANDOM THOUGHTS ON LONGITUDINAL STUDIES

All right, on to Carroll’s *Rehearsing New Roles.* In this, Carroll is reporting on her longitudinal study. I’ll confess that I didn’t read the full details of the study itself – I think Sandie may have read this one more closely than I have, so it may make sense for her to fill us in on this. But I did read the first chapter of the book, in which she presents her over-arching argument about what she found. She found that “Our study students did not necessarily learn to write ‘better’ but they did learn to write differently – to produce new, more complicated texts, addressing challenging topics with greater depth and complexity. They showed development as writers in terms defined by Scardamalia (1981), when she writes, ‘much of the story of cognitive development may be construed as taking progressively more variables into account during a single act of judgment’ (p. 82; quoted in Walvoord & McCarthy, 1990, p. 13). They became better able to juggle multiple the literacy acts often required by the commonplace writing assignments of college courses” (xii).

Generally speaking, I like Carroll’s interest in cognitive development theories, although I don’t think that we have any interest in treading on that terrain (speaking of fields we don’t know …). I feel the same way about her interest in “literacy”: that’s another big, unwieldy nut to crack. In both cases, I think there’s enough out there that we can build on it without looking like imposters or idiots.

“Writing in college is sometimes presented benignly as an invitation to students to join an ongoing conversation, a discourse community of scholars passionately and dispassionately searching for truth. However, examinations of academic discourse by writers like Linda Brodkey (1987), Patricia Bizzell (1992), and Marilyn Cooper (1986, 1990) reveal the complex web of social practices that shape what can and cannot be said….” (7).

“A preliminary analysis of students’ portfolios of writing and their reflections on that writing indicate that our study group did learn to write differently in college and to write better in the sense of producing new, more complicated texts, addressing challenging opportunities with greater depth and complexity. How can we begin to describe, account for, and support this development? A cultural or environmental view of development explains the almost ‘magic-like’ power of new environments and new roles to ‘alter how a person is treated, how she acts, what she does, and thereby even what she thinks and feels’ (Bronfenbrenner, 1979, p. 6). . . .”

— basically in what follows she’s putting some of Bartholomae’s ideas in “Inventing” into dialogue with/new language from theories of cultural development (Bronfenbrenner, Vygotsky, etc.)

Interesting point about the non-linear nature of development: “Michael Cole (1996) . . . notes, ‘Long-term involvement with a single group of children forces the analyst to recognize the individuality of each child and the difficulty of determining an analytic origin, a ‘first’ from which it is possible to deduce conclusions logically’ (p.346). He explains how each child exhibits individual patterns of strengths and weaknesses and negotiates ways to minimize disadvantages in reading. There is not a single, unitary theory to predict how the child will handle tasks in the environment” (23).

“Bronfenbrenner (1979) emphasizes that development, instead of being a continuous process, takes place during periods of transition” (23). – This strikes me as crucial for us. Carroll’s discussion continues, “Transitions promote development because ‘they almost invariably involve a change in role, that is, in the expectations for behavior associated with particular positions in society’ (p. 6).” (23) . . . “However, students are far from helpless subjects of these transitional environments. As Cole (1996) points out, ‘individuals are active agents in their own development but do not act in setting entirely of their own choosing’ (p. 104)” (24).

— she’s essentially leading up to Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development here.

(BTW, Curtis and Herrington, in "Writing Development in the College Years: By Whose Definition?" 3Cs 55.1 (2003) think about much the same stuff. They, they’re revisiting some of the questions from their longitudinal study in light of theories of cognitive development, which they hadn’t considered before.)

Onwards.

There’s some useful stuff in the first chapter of Anne Beaufort’s *College Writing and Beyond: A New Framework for University Writing Instruction*, although I think that it’s mostly stuff we already know and probably our 3Cs readers would agree with. Some useful bits:

• “McCarthy’s landmark study documented how little a student may gain from a generic writing skills course. Others have repeatedly documented over and over the context-specific expectations about what counts as ‘good writing’ (Bazerman 1992, Berkenkotter et al. 1988, Brandt 1990, Canagarajah 1997, Fahnestock and Secor 1991, Faigley and Hansen 1985, Heath 1983). Writing standards are largely cultural and socially specific. And yet, novice writers usually get little instruction in how to study and acquire the writing practices of different discourse communities” (11).
• “As a starting place to take into account the domains of knowledge writers employ, I use the model of writing expertise theorized from the data in my ethnographic study of writers’ transitions from academic to professional writing (1999). Briefly, the model consists of five overlapping yet distinct domains of situated knowledge entailed in acts of writing: discourse community knowledge, subject matter knowledge, genre knowledge, rhetorical knowledge, and writing process knowledge. . . . [T]hese knowledge domains, all integral to writing expertise, overlap and interactive [sic] with each other” (18).
• “There are a number of studies of students’ progress from beginning to end of a single course (Carroll 2002, Herrington 1985, Walvoord and McCarthy 1990), and several longitudinal studies following university writers over several years that document general types of gains in critical thinking skills (Sternglass 1997), self-identity as writers (Herrington and Curtis 2000), and socialization (or not) into academic discourse communities (Herrington and Curtis 2000, McCarthy 1987). But these studies do not attempt a composite developmental model for writers at advanced levels of literacy development” (23).
• She then points out that 1) generally we don’t see them long enough to really assess development, and 2) you can’t assess development if you’re only looking at their writing because “written products do not tell the whole story of what has transpired for the writer” (24).

As we already know, Herrington and Curtis’ *Persons in Process* is – as you’d expect from the name – largely about the intersection of personal and writing development. That’s not us.

FURTHER FIRST-YEAR SEMINAR STUFF

CHAPMAN essentially argues that WAC for first-years isn’t a great option: he contends that “the qualifications to teach a writing-intensive course an those required to teach the introductory writing course are not necessarily the same. Furthermore, I would like to indicate some of the potential problems for both faculty and students when the freshman writing course is handed over to those with little background in writing instruction” (56). This is a VERY short piece, and he’s just drawing on his own (and admittedly anecdotal) experience. He’s explicitly arguing against the Cornell model, and sites some of its language explicitly. He goes on, “The success of such programs does hinge, however, on the willingness of the faculty to commit time and effort to understanding and applying these principles [of “composition theory and pedagogy]” (57). Makes a distinction between the time commitment of WAC vs. an intro course.

DANIELL is responding directly to Chapman. She makes the distinction between “a writing course and a course that uses writing to help students learn a discipline” (69). “The first-year seminar Lex Runciman describes in ‘Ending Composition as We Knew It’ answers my complaint about the Cornell model – that is, that it is taught by graduate students instead of regular faculty. Where it has been tried, the first-year seminar has proven successful in keeping first-year students enrolled. Small classes of 15-18 students with the best teachers on campus, who are also, not surprisingly, the best scholars, would surely involve first-year students in the best the university has to offer. Again, enthusiasm, expertise, small classes, lots of written and oral engagement – what’s not to like? In the words of the old hymn, I am almost persuaded. [para. Break] But this is not a viable, realistic alternative to the required first-year composition course, as Runciman implies when he says that Linfield’s Inquiry seminar is a ‘local’ solution” (71). Reasons? 1) expense, 2) the stars wouldn’t do it.

She concludes by making a case for having both FY comp and FYS – because in comp you learn about rhetoric, civics, and blah blah blah.

CUTRIGHT is asking “What are Research Universities doing for First-Year Students?” And reports on the findings from 75 universities. Findings are: that universities are expanding programs for first-year students and that they’re increasingly thinking about it; that many first-year programs are tied to specific colleges or disciplines; that the programs are frequently integrating multiple strategies so that they’re creating residential learning groups tied to the seminars (e.g.).; and this is connected to institutional re-examinations of the cultures of teaching and learning; that there’s a strong connection to academic affairs. Ends by calling for “Deep evaluation,” which seems to mean assessment. (shocking)

MOON’s essay looks specifically at FYS, making the argument that while FYS is a small-college jewel, it has something to offer larger institutions, as well. Her experience is at Willamette and Gustavus Adolphus (both small); she contends that “the replacement of first-year composition by a first-year seminar can advance the college mission, elevate the teaching of first-year writing, free writing faculty to create and staff courses beyond FYC, invite greater participation in writing across the curriculum, and enhance faculty development opportunities” (116).

As you can tell, the literature on FYS is pretty thin. Much of what focuses on the “first-year experience” more generally isn’t really about academic – or, more precisely, writing – issues.

So that’s all from me, at least for now.

June 22, 2007 conference

What do we find?

1) Are these courses possible? Do they engage with their topics? Are the assignments really research driven? KW: Programmatic view

2) what do these courses ask students to do? Outcomes statements; philosophy core activities, values

3) How well do they do? Quality of performance: top bottom middle SOW as overview

More detail: How do students get there? Pathways.

Why these pathways? Stalled flight, taking off.

What is our news: How hard research is to learn. Many students good at sentence level but stuck at research level How much more teaching is needed to set up the research project. Organization. Managing the writing process. Study skills. Engagement problem – now what you think – change in understanding of the student’s role in learning.

What’s exciting? First Year Academic Seminar with accountability.

Place where WAC might develop – these faculty in Academic seminars must come to Writing program, and they come out changed.

SF:

The "Real" Research Paper is one in which students do genuine "intellectual work." We are defining "intellectual work" as posing a scholarly question and making an argument in response. Both the question and the argument are grounded in sources.

"Real" is a continuum. There isn't a dichotomy between "Real" and merely "Staged" (eg. compare and contrast or pastiche-like report) research. The process of doing the research is real; they learn real scholarly practices.

If you do the process, you get the features of the scholarly paper. You get closer to the "Real" scholarly production.