Developmental Writing

Jana Anderson, Director of Writing Center
Ronna Privett, Chair of the English Department
Both are from Lubbock Christian University.
“What do The Chronicles of Narnia and a Magician Have in Common? A First-Year Writing Carnival Experience”

This is a live blogging of the session.

Several studies have noted the writing center experience starting at Purdue through Muriel Harris.

At LCU we have an ever-increasing number of first-generation college students and adult commuters.

Writing Center is 1.5 years old at LCU. Began at 2008 when these ladies attended CCTE at UTAustin. Decided to open a Writing Center, using borrowed funds.

UTAustin’s Director of Writing Center stressed importance of making it visible on campus.
“Must be significant centers of student learning.”
Needs events.
“Light up” writing centers and put them on administration’s map (and in the budget).

How do Writing Centers avoid being editing labs? How do they offer a model for public writing?

Kick off event:
The Chronicles of Narnia 24-Hour Reading Marathon
throughout the day and night the audience changed
56 faculty, staff, students read and tweeted, facebooked, and
generated a delightful level of energy- students camped out on the lawn to be there all night
Professors read. Student Government president read. Registrar read and she knows every student’s name. Young children of faculty read.
Professors brought classes.

The Food
Dining service provided fair-type food.
They had a campus picnic.
The students did have to pay for the food, but it was out there and available.

Lots of folks who aren’t usually out there were out talking to students.

Fun & Games
Boggle, Pictionary, Scrabble, etc.
Out on campus for folks to play.

First Annual Writing Contest
Create a Caption Contest
Graffiti Wall on Butcher Paper
Open Mic for poetries or short stories- Students read off their iPhones.

Volunteers got T-shirts.
T-shirts were big hit.
300 submissions for the contests.

Handout with details.

On the back of handout are things we learned that we would do differently.

Next year we are doing The Lord of the Rings.

Scope of involvement:
100s of students who read and walked around and ate turkey legs.
Don’t count those who played board games.
Don’t count those who listened to all the readings and open mic experience.

Showcased the Winners on the National Day of Writing.

Letter writing table on that day.
Free stationery, paper, envelopes, and stamps.
Wall to mark on (paper).

NCTE Blog for the National Day of Writing.

High profile event.
Academic resource entered student life.
Events that build student life help academic programs succeed.

Got more financial support.
Got our own budget beginning in 2011.

Writing Center and Writing Carnival focused on first-year students.

Turning point events:
1. provide a more cohesive learning experience
2. sense of community with shared experiences
3. faculty/staff interaction
4. involve students in university life

We believe this made significant support for retention.

$0 budget.

This event was successful because everyone across the campus worked together.
Tend to isolate on our projects, communal event really helped.
Allowed us to model academic curiousity we want to foster.

As a graduate of Purdue, I am rightfully proud of their Online Writing Lab (OWL). Their introduction to paraphrasing is good and they have a set of paraphrase exercises that are very helpful. I usually have the students work in groups.

Purdue OWL’s Avoiding Plagiarism introduction is reasonable. Their Safe Practices for avoiding plagiarism is a good set of recognition exercises.

In the computer lab:
This set of plagiarism exercises lets the students work at their own pace.
This set has a quote and the submitted text in four examples, letting the students talk about these in pairs might be useful.

This is a whole set of links on avoiding plagiarism and academic dishonesty. One of them might be better for you than others.

Wendy Galgan, Saint Francis College, NY, “Can the Fundamentals Be ‘Fun’? Assignment Design in the Developmental Composition Classroom”

This is a live blogging of the session.

Much of current literature focuses on the how to. Yet little discusses whether students should have fun.

Can you bring fun into the developmental classroom?

Professors who teach basic writing have multiple levels of language use. ESL, goof offs, readers, non-readers…

Keep academic level high but fun. All too often our small in-class writing was viewed as make-work. Role of small exercises is to teach the student how to play a small part of the writing. (E.C. Smith?)

There are few if any virtuousos in developmental writing classes.

Homemade comp class as happening. Help students see what writing really is. Perhaps have fun along the way.

Wm. Kohl “teaching of writing as writing is the teaching of writing as art” Art is engaging, provocative, and very personal.

Sirc says composition is an opportunity to concentrate on the risks and everyday life…

Days when peer review going well… I try to remain unobtrusive.

Other days.. Students have struggled through the assignment. “just couldn’t focus” Ask the students to upend their own view of academic writers. Stripping down the materials to a series of text events.

I borrow shamelessly from performance and other disciplines. Best raw material comes from the students themselves. Close observation, reflection, searching, helps.

One example:
“Happenings happen. They are not passed down from one to the other.”

About midsemester entire class had struggled through. We needed something to shake us up. I borrowed and asked each student to write ten sentences. Each started with “I remember.” Students began to read. They laughed, read, teased, and supported each other. Obviously I wanted to draw upon this exercise.

In the next class… I sent the peer groups out into the college. On each floor they were supposed to write down something. Then find 5 words that rhymed.

Homework: Write two poems. One on the observation. One on the remembering.

A number said how much they enjoyed the poems.

“Shock and surprise are frequent x of the happening.”

I want to model for you how our students might feel when our students are given

Fun:
When did I last have fun writing? I found the papers that I am working on pretty long… I liked writing the poetry about my parents’ illness because it made me feel less stressed. It made me remember concrete details that made me smile and remember.

I enjoy writing on my blog. I really liked writing about Elizabeth E coming to visit! That still makes me grin.

Writing that was fun… The CHE forums. I like writing on the CHE forums. Those are fun. Those are times when I can say where I am an expert.

I would love to write some memoir/biography/autobiography work. If I could go back and write about not using facebook in the job search… I want to do that. Give ideas again.

I like to write things that I feel really comfortable with.

I enjoyed writing about Dielli. I enjoyed the book more before I asked people to read them. Once they did, I think that I felt the work wasn’t good. But writing it, I loved it. I haven’t worked on the next two books because I hit a wall and stopped. But some of the reason I stopped was because I didn’t know where to go and I wasn’t working on the next section after all.

There are things we can tell our students about how to succeed in college that might encourage them.

[T]he biggest predictor of success is a student’s conscientiousness, as measured by such traits as dependability, perseverance through tasks, and work ethic.

We can definitely upsell these, telling the students that they don’t have to be “smart;” they just have to do the work. It’s true and it might be an ecouragement.

The next three are less encouraging, if you are an introvert.

Agreeableness, including teamwork, and emotional stability were the next-best predictors of college achievement, followed by variations on extroversion and openness to new experiences

All this was according to “Experts Begin to Idenitify Nonacademic Skills Key to Success” at Education Week.

My students are leaving my class this week. I am very proud of them. Many of them have overcome significant disadvantages, both personally and educationally, this semester. I’ve been meaning to write them letters, but haven’t yet.

A new blog says:

My advice to students who are moving on from their developmental writing class or even the more traditional Freshman Writing course is to allow yourselves the opportunity to succeed. Don’t hand in your “first draft” that you wrote the morning before class. Proofread. Adjust your tone. Make sure you’re following directions. Don’t write the same paper for every class. Practice writing any and every chance you get. And remember that a professor can’t evaluate your ideas if they can’t understand them through your writing.

I like that idea. I hope it will reinforce the notion that the transfer of knowledge is important, not just in writing but in knowing how to write.

I did something with my students that I was very happy about. I am hoping that it encourages them to hang onto their knowledge.

I wrote the types of essays we have written on the board:
narrative
descriptive
process
definition/illustration
research
argument

Then I asked them what classes they might write that same type of paper in. We talked about that. Then I asked them where they might use that same type of writing in real life. We talked about that. For each of the essays we came up with at least eight college classes and four real-life scenarios where knowing how to write that type of information was important.

But I will say that none of it will help if they don’t continue to improve their grammar and keep what they have learned this semester about writing in the forefront of their brain.

Community Colleges Must Focus on Quality of Learning, Report Says offers this:

Increasing college completion is meaningless unless certificates and degrees represent real learning, which community colleges must work harder to ensure, says a report released on Thursday by the Center for Community College Student Engagement.

While national education goals prioritize attainment, community colleges must focus on quality, says the annual report, which is based on focus groups and data from three surveys: the 2010 Community College Survey of Student Engagement, the 2010 Community College Faculty Survey of Student Engagement, and the 2009 Survey of Entering Student Engagement, which polled students in their first few weeks of enrollment last fall.

This year’s report, “The Heart of Student Success: Teaching, Learning, and College Completion,” centers on “deep learning,” or “broadly applicable thinking, reasoning, and judgment skills—abilities that allow individuals to apply information, develop a coherent world view, and interact in more meaningful ways.” By some measures, students are doing well.

Would it surprise you to know that I was frustrated by this study? The reason I was is in the article, by Sara Lipka, itself.

the national push for attainment could drive those expectations down further, she says, citing a remark she worries about hearing on campuses: “Well, sure, we know how to retain students and help them complete. We just lower our standards.”

I’ve heard it on my campus. Haven’t you heard it on yours?

My classes in developmental writing have a 40% attrition rate. I have seven essays, three revisions, and one hundred homework/classwork assignments.

Someone else at my college has 95% retention rate. She has two essays and no homework.

But if you are looking at attrition rates, her classroom is the more attractive.

The Shadow Scholar is a Chronicle of Higher Ed article purportedly written by a ghostwriter for hire who has created theses and dissertations, as well as hundreds of run-of-the-mill term papers.

I may write about that in some other post, or not, but comment 195 caught my attention and I thought it was worth writing about here. (Perhaps a later commenter mentions it. I don’t know. I stopped at 195 to write this post.)

Here is the pertinent section of comment 195:

On another matter: the unedited student emails in “Dante’s” article, with their egregious problems with idiom and verb management, strongly suggest that a lot of these ghostwriting requests come from ESL/ESOL students, for whom writing fluent, near-native English is a problem, and for whom plagiarism and other forms of cheating are less of an issue in their home countries than here. This possibiliity suggests a need to administer on-grounds language proficiency examinations for all international and domestic students for whom English is not the first language and get those who need it into English remediation courses as a first order of business.

I am struggling with how to address this comment, though I have a lot of points.

Purdue University, where I received my PhD, had just this kind of writing exam. They only administered it to foreign students.

Local SLAC used to have an English entrance requirement for all their students who did not take freshman composition there. However, there was no mechanism to force the students to take it immediately and so sometimes graduating seniors were taking–and failing–it. This forced/encouraged the administration to drop it, even though it showed that the likelihood of those students having graduated without someone like Dante’s (see article mentioned above) creative connivance. Now there is no requirement for English ability.

FinalCC, the college I teach at now, could really benefit from a writing component or writing test like this one. However, I would suggest/petition that it be a placement exam for all entrants rather than just ESL. I think many of our students, coming in from area high schools, are singularly unprepared for writing.

I am teaching Developmental Writing, which I love. Despite my desire to teach the course, and my preparation for it, I still struggle with parts of the course. How do I make the course relevant to my students and make it sufficiently challenging?

One idea I found at the CHE fora seems to offer some significant possiblities:

I’ve been structuring my comp courses around a “welcome to college” theme for years, and it doesn’t get old nearly as fast as you’d think. Most of the students seem to have no problem with an entire course about university education. (I try to keep the assignments varied and cover a lot of territory — everything from analyzing representations of college life in the movies to researching a contemporary issue of the student’s choice, as long as it affects the college community in some way.)

A few readings that I use:

Jack Meiland, The Difference Between High School and College

William Cronon, Only Connect: The Goals of a Liberal Education

Caroline Bird, College is a Waste of Time and Money (for a contrarian view — I might try something a little more contemporary next time around, since an updated version of her argument seems to be in fashion now)

And there are a ton of short pieces from the Chronicle or Inside Higher Ed that work well with this sort of theme.

I like this idea. It reminds me of work I did many years ago with my students to try and get them to understand the culture of the college they were attending. I can certainly see where it would be useful for my students, who come from a low socio-economic stratum, to learn about the culture of college itself.

Basic Writing eJournal

List of essays for Basic Writing instructors

Blogging and basic writing

Developmental Writing Classes: Wide-Not Rich-Diversity

The Impact of Remedial English Courses on Student College-Level Coursework Performance and Persistence