First Year Composition FYC

I am sure we have evaluations, but I couldn’t find the email. So I had my students write down a couple of things about the class. I’m recording them here so I will remember.

Useful:
the RAs (rhetorical analyses where the students give a thesis they would use the text for and three quotes and how those fit with the thesis) 3
“useful in organizing my thoughts and getting me focused enough to write a paper”
write an annotated bibliography 5
“helped me in some other classes this year”
“because I had never done one before”
“could honestly be extremely useful in the future”
using APA format 2
“useful just for practice with the formatting I use for other classes”
write in stages “It was annoying yet helpful. When it was time to sit down and write the final paper, it just flowed.”
transition sentences “I know the value of ‘flow.’”
how to think through things “not just take my first idea but really consider its usefulness”
process of writing a paper “I used to just sit in front of a computer and write. Now I write my papers in steps and sections, which I find to be most helpful. I will use this process in the future and in other classes.”
writing skills 2
“practical writing skills”
“how to write better! I learned a lot more about proper grammar and formatting”
learning how to write a research paper
“learning how to write a really long research paper”
writing every day
“English classes I have taken in the past did not require homework every day. In this class, it helped me with a better outcome in my paper and also gave me more thought about what to write on.”

Fun/interesting:
Poems and stories we read, especially the fairy tales.
reading some stories in the textbook
fairy tales
the fairy tale paper (one-source essay)
the compare/contrast essay
digital presentation (over their research project) 7
“Digital presentations were fun and did help with writing the paper, although I am very tech challenged.”
“I thoroughly enjoyed working on my digital presentation.”
“digital presentation was a lot of fun!”
“It was a learning experience, but we also go to experiment and have fun with the project.”
“The digital presentation was fun because I was able to do it on something I was already familiar with. It was quite time consuming but after figuring it out, it was enjoyable to do.”
“I was really dreading the visual presentation; however once I learned how to use iMovie, it was actually fun to put together.”
how we did the research paper “I really liked how we did the research paper–beginning with the annotated bib and ending with the entire research paper. I found it very helpful that small parts were due periodically, allowing me to keep track of my writing.”
being able to choose my own topic to research

“Thank you for a great semester, Dr. Davis. My writing significantly improved this semester with all of your help.”

Thinking through some things…

Challenge:
I followed the departmental requirements (one source paper, two source paper, annotated bibliography, research paper with multiple sources).

Success:
Overall those worked out fairly well. I was able to scaffold assignments and really keep students moving along with the process.

Challenge:
For the two-source paper, I decided to give them practice reading a scholarly and a popular source. This way I could give them feedback on what those were and they could learn to read them with less pressure than during the research paper.

Success:
The students had to use two sources, a scholarly source and a popular one. I have seen those and helped them find a scholarly source if they needed one.

They could write on anything they wanted to. They had to have a thesis sentence which mapped out their topic. They needed topic sentences for all their non-concluding and non-introductory paragraphs.

Every one of the students (except one senior and a student dealing with depression) have turned in either (or both) a 500-word version of part of the paper and a 1500-word version of the full thing.

All of those, except one, had good compare/contrast information. The one had a good idea, but used no sources and didn’t explain how his points connected to his thesis.

Most of the students needed transitions, rather than just listing their ideas. I found out today from one student that he had no idea what that meant. I’ve explained it in class several times, but if he doesn’t know, perhaps I need to try to explain it another way. (I have used map and directions and machine gun analogies.)

A few students had a good thesis, but didn’t follow it at all. Their compare/contrast was good, but didn’t match their thesis. I suggested it would be easier to revise their thesis.

There were four or five students who had good ideas, but didn’t appear to me (in my second three-minute, in-class look) to completely develop them, so I wrote on their papers that I thought it might be a good idea to go to the Writing Center. They went, but did not receive the help I was hoping for.

Challenge:
I wanted students to be working on their compare/contrast papers as they went along.

Success:
I told the students that if they wrote the papers early I would look at them during my office hours and review the papers with the students. I came in for additional office hours for at least three students who have classes during all of my office hours. One student came in three times, all of which were outside my normal office hours. I saw eight in two days and others on a different two days.

Challenge:
Even though I walk them through the process of finding a scholarly paper, understanding what a scholarly resource is can be difficult. They will often look for an “easy way” out of the assignment.

Success:
Students brought in what they thought were scholarly resources and I gave feedback on them in class, while others were reading and taking notes. I think this was very helpful for the students, since they didn’t finish reading a source which did not qualify as scholarly for this project.

To do:
Next class I want to add a scholarly resource that we read as a class to prepare for the second paper. That will give the students both the experience of reading a scholarly source and the understanding of how such things work.

Challenge:
The final is always up in the air, since I don’t get to create it and have little say in it as a new faculty member. How do I help prepare my students for the final, when I don’t know what exactly it will cover?

Success:
For the last several years there has always been at least one compare/contrast question on the final. Having the students write the two-source paper as a compare/contrast was a good way to prepare students for this part of the exam.

Challenge:
To have the students read four scholarly and four popular sources, summarize the sources (without plagiarism), explain how they intended to use the individual sources in their papers, and include relevant quotes.

Success:
Every student still attending class created an annotated bibliography. All but one of those included all eight sources. Only six of those did not receive an A as a final grade.

To do:
When I teach the annotated bibliography again I want to do two things differently.

First, I want to spend more time grading/marking/editing their first scholarly annotation. I want to have them come in and do a conference regarding what they are doing well and what they are doing poorly. And I want to go over their other sources with them during those conferences to make sure that they are appropriate.

Second, I want to remind the students of the value of the annotated bibliography after they have started working on it. Perhaps I can do this after all the first two scholarly works are done. This is because, while I tell them beforehand, they don’t remember until they are actually involved in the project. So I need to tell them again after they are immersed.

To tell them:
1. The annotated bibliography is intended to make sure that their bibliography is perfectly correct for the research paper.
2. The annotated bibliography is intended to serve as a vehicle for making sure that they get their research done.
3. The annotated bibliography is intended to serve as a memory device for their research. They will have read all the articles and when they can’t remember which one said X, they will be able to look at their annotated bibliography in order to figure it out and thus not have to reread all the sources.
4. The annotated bibliography will help the students determine the direction of their research papers, since they have to articulate how the article they are annotating will be useful to the research paper. This means that when they have to turn in an RA on their research paper, they will already have done the hard part of the work (the thinking section).
5. The annotated bibliography, with its relevant quotes, will allow them to quote from sources without having to re-read to find all the good quotes. It encourages them to list relevant quotes as they are reading the source, when the ideas are fresh in their minds. This also means that when they are doing their RA, they will already a) have quotes and b) know how to cite them correctly.
6. The annotated bibliography is the research phase of the research paper. It is the time to figure out what you are doing with the research paper so that the writing of the paper is significantly easier, because you have already done so much of the thinking and organizing.

Challenge:
Getting the students to turn the annotated bibliographies back in with any additional source added. Since this was not a major grade, they were not highly motivated.

Success:
Something that worked very well was explaining why they had to turn in two copies of their papers and the annotated bibliographies (with bibs for any works they added included). Describing the SACS accreditation, and mentioning Tech’s probation status after not having sufficient proof that their students had met the learning objectives, motivated the students to get it done and also caused them to ask what our present accreditation status was. I was able to tell them that it is excellent, which it is, thanks to all the work by our committee and our professors.

Challenge:
Integrating technology into the classroom in a way that facilitates learning, especially writing, and does not detract from that aspect of the process.

Success:
The digital presentations have turned out amazingly well overall. The students’ presentations were better than my original one, since I made sure to focus on the quality of the images they chose, since mine had a mixed level and that really impacted the strength of the video. The presentations were engaging and interesting and I think that students were engaged by the experience.

I followed the suggestions I learned at CCTE this year and integrated the digital presentation into the middle of the research writing phase. Several students mentioned that they wanted to change the focus of their research, having created the digital presentation. This was exactly what the presenters had said would happen. I look forward to being able to grade better research papers as a result.

Challenge:
Students have figured out that the version due before the final is not getting a grade and so they are not doing the work. This means that some students come in with only the four pages they wrote as a rough draft the week before as their entire twelve-page paper (when it is due in two more days).

To do: Next semester I am going to give 5% of the research grade to the first version. There will only be 3 possible grades. They will be
looks pretty good,
looks tolerable, or
looks terrible.
Those grades will be recorded as 90, 70, or 50. I hope that doing this will help the students actually work on a rough draft that is worth something–even if it means that I have to grade them after class in order to give them any meaningful feedback at all. I will replace the 90% with a higher grade if one is earned on the actual paper. I will not replace either of the other grades.

If, as the last post suggested, willingness to work is the key to becoming a genius in a subject, what can I do to have that happen in my classes?

How might I bring into my composition classroom time for my students to think things through, to figure them out, which will make them learn better? How can I encourage the willingness to keep working on something which will help them succeed, even excel, at English?

I have tried, to greater and lesser success, several things.

Scaffolding:
One thing that is supported (nay, required) by the department here is scaffolding. Give the students a bit of the work to do. Have it due. Then have them do another bit. Having little bits at a time encourages them to work on it over time, which gives their brains time to think about it when they aren’t working on it.

That is not something they get if you only have the major projects due.

Most students will work on the major project in a single section of time, perhaps two.

This focused experience is true of strong students as well as the poorer ones. It is just that the strong students tend to spend that first section of time at the beginning of the project’s timeline and then the second section at the end, so that there is space in the middle for their brain to have thought through what they were working on, which enables them to see where they could have done something better and fix it.

Malcolm Gladwell, in Outliers, says that “the world could be so much richer than the world we have settled for” (268).

Public education works:
In this section Gladwell is talking about several important issues, among them the fact that public education in the United States WORKS (255-260).

The public education system is actually quite effective. In our education system, Johnny and Jill can learn to read, if they are in school.

Based on fairly rigorous research by Karl Alexander, Gladwell says the real problem is our summer vacations. Over summer vacation wealthy students learn a lot. Students in poverty learn almost nothing. Over five years of summer vacation, they don’t even learn enough to raise their reading level a percent. Rich students raise their by 52% over the same amount of time.

I do not believe the answer is to reapportion wealth. But if we are seriously interested in equal opportunity in the United States, then we need to have summer school, at least for the lower SES students–not as a punishment but as a way of enabling them to keep up with the wealthier children.

Of course, that is K-12 and I am not in K-12 education anymore. I will say, however, that I saw that my children retained more of what they had learned if they were in school year round. So while my children were in elementary, middle, and high school, we had year round classes.

Higher education implications:
Now, as my sons are in higher education full-time and I am in the TT in higher education, I wonder whether the difference in learning still matters.

I think it does. It certainly matters to my students from lower socioeconomic circumstances. They have more to catch up with and not being immersed means they aren’t catching up.

Based on Alexander’s research, it seems likely that not only do those students not continue to make progress but that they might actually fall behind more during their vacations–especially as summer vacations for college are even longer.

Once students are doing internships in their majors, they probably don’t need summer school sessions. But until they are, many of them would probably benefit from year round school.

It’s something to think about and something that I might want to talk with my students about–individually.

While I had intended to live blog the MLA sessions I attended, I did not do so. I saved this one to add pictures to, forgot about it, and left it in my drafts without much hope of ever coming out. Today, in searching for something else I had written, I stumbled upon it and felt that publishing it, while several months late, might be a useful choice–even if I didn’t get matching pictures.

In blogging this conference, I am following the conventions for conference blogging.

Presiding: Charles Hatfield, California State Univ., Northridge; Craig Svonkin, Metropolitan State Coll. of Denver

The room is full. It’s not one of the smaller rooms, either.

Picture books help children learn to enjoy reading. Comic books are seen as “fugitive literature” that people hide.

Share a history.

Long list of works that show that these two types of works are related and connected in unique ways.

“Picture Book Guy Looks at Comics: Structural Differences in Two Kinds of Visual Narrative,” Perry Nodelman, Univ. of Winnipeg
author of Words About Pictures

Find comics confusing.

Two texts both by Michael Nicoll Yahqualanaas: The Canoe He Named X X and Red: A Haida Manga

Comic book structure more complicated.

Picture books, picture are separate from words.
Comics, words appear outside of, in, and through pictures.

Red exaggerates taht by placing words in edges of the panels.

In most pages of comics, there are more bits of information.
Picture books offer more pictures.
Complicated combinations in comics, seem less centrally or purely illustrative.

Hyper-illustration? Comics

Comics both imply sequential panels and other non-sequential possibilities.

Red as it appears on a gallery wall, a network of possible relationships.
Reveals other structures and patterns within them.

Totality = network
strip, page, and album are increasingly complicated

We can and do re-read, even picture books.
But we do so in the context of the relative isolation of the pictures and text, each separated by page.

In reading comics, the potential and actual relations seem immediately important. A single frame, from a corner of a larger picture. That page is a two-page picture. And it can be seen in the network gallery presentation of Red.

Different ways in which they illustrate each other could undercut…

Invitation to join into and out of numerous possibilities.
Red is a particularly intense example of that proliferation.
Characters interact with the borders: lay down, lean against, grab hold…

Comics seem to be radically tangential and unstable. That is its strength.
Always full of unrealized possibilities.

The Canoe looks more like conventional borders. Effect is more illustrative than energetic. Only pictures with “wide-eyed boy” have the energy of Red.

Picture and comic books have different breathing/reading rhythms.
Picture books build laterally. Work to make sense of words and books. Undercut each other. Build meaning. New pages and new pictures and new words give us a new puzzle.

Comics less dual. “fracture both time and space” (McCloud)
Closure allows us to connect these moments.

Ideas in earlier panels add to the new idea.
“the stuttering art”
Both Red and the arrow he shoots “stutter.”

More information makes for more complicated understanding needed.

Easy to downplay generic characteristics, but it is important not to ignore them.
The most significant study: might reveal something about inherent idiosyncratic…

picture books= pedantic,
comics=

“Not Genres but Modes of Graphic Narrative: Comics and Picture Books,” Philip Nel, Kansas State Univ.

juxtapositions: between “pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence” (McCloud)

Picture book: juxtapositions between words and

Closure:
movement in time:

comics: movement in time on all pages
picture books: movement of page

Venn diagram of the two. Might be different forms.

Comics have panels. And picture books do not. But some picture books have panels.

Typical two pages are one panel or each page is a panel.

In a typical comic, the gutter appears on both between panels and around the edges.

Panels, both with and without borders, have been part of the visual grammar of picture book narrative. (Curious George)

Multiple panels in a given page in all comics, but not in all picture books.
Bow-Wow Bugs a Bug by Mark Newgarden and Megan Montague Cash = multiple panels = comics
Board books = single panels = picture books

exposing the flawed warrant behind my claim that picture books use comics-style story telling…

I’ve been using genre as synonymous with form. Genre is more than form.
“Genre is reflected in form and features, but is not those form and features.”

Difference: Scott McCloud, etc.
Comics represent time spatially.
Comics locate the reader in space and are able to spatialize memory.
Comics’ cartographic temporality makes it particularly suitable for memoirs.

Picture books also represent time spatiallly.
We know looking at Olivia (2000), we know we aren’t looking at 17 fashionable pigs, but one at 17 different times.
They do render time as space.
Even the absence of bordered pictures, picture books still use time.

shortcomings of using genre to talk about form
spatial temporality in both
but panels offer multiple views

aspect to aspect

Harold and the Purple Crayon (1955)’s gutters are not like a comic books.

comics integrate words and images INTERdependently… Mark Newgarden

Both use/have interdependent words and images

text and image together form X
the location of that tension determined by where the words appear…

Comic books harder to isolate words and images.

Though some in picture books.

Examples of mixed image and words:
Contract with God
Woof Meow Tweet-Tweet
Bembo’s Zoo
Harold’s ABC

Two key formal differences:
1. degree of specificity in temporal divisions
2. proximity of contiguity of words and images
Greater in comics for both.

“Genres are essentially literary institutions, or social contracts…” Jameson, The Political Unconscious (92).

Many continuities between comics and picture books.

Thinking of comic books and picture books as a mode: “a conventional power of action” (Frye Anatomy of Criticism 366)

Literary genres value originality and novelty.

Recommended: Amy J. Devitt Writing Genres

Genres are unstable and evolving…

“Graphic Novels’ Assault upon the Republic of Reading,” Michael Joseph, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick

reading very quickly…

I’m going to begin “In conclusion, the elaborated code of comics:
their allusions
their printing history
nonsequitirs
Loop attention back to the book as a work of art…”

Loop attention back to the process of reading and their experience of reading.

Comics resist traditional process. Spurn authority of typical codex books.
social identity or structure resisted by comics

In early modern Europe, spurning ritual meant being less than human….
The same values that subscribe bookmakers surely subscribe the rituals of bookmaking and reading.

Looking at reading as a physical performance… involving eyes, head, fingers, stomach, and awareness of one’s reading body as an X in space and time. Body acts on environment that depends on how people move in it.
Qualitative experiences in ritualized and schematized reading…

Some woman moving around and into a chair “Sofa” by The Seven Fingers of the Hand… There’s a space around a reading figure in the back. He is enclosed in a void. Reading happens in or creates around itself a kind of bubble or crystal ball.

Reading body not only possesses phenomenology but it is connected to a transformative comment.

Reading is opposite of fear and nightmares. “Wake up, oh reader, and read!”

Child reading comic book under blanket with a flashlight, avoidance of sleep and reason…

“I feel that learning with books is as important a rite of passage as learning to eat with utensils and being potty-trained.”
Romanticized concept of ritual. Allied with a belief that ritual allows people to become human. 1982… anthropologist
books = forks, potties
Book is a culturally coded argument to restraint.

Books immunize the sexuality. Book as kind of chastity belt.

Books were allied with slaves and women… Associated with less intellectual… Greek…

We assume books absorb meaning.
The immateriality of the codex book is an overwhelmingly strong ideal.
Reading as immaculate conception.

Spiritualization of the book…

Porn superstar Sasha Gray reading to children. She’s naked.

Turning and examining and reading a book that requires turning to read keeps the reader involved. It also de-ritualizes reading.

Reading qualifies as ritual.
By romanticizing ritual, we lose understanding that ritual is part of modern world not the answer to the modern world.

“Ritual can be situational. A matter of what … done… rather than ..universality…”

St. Jerome reading… reading as prayer.

Sanctuary? (Syfy) woman in a library, with hands cupped in front of faith, like prayer

Codex… book’s anatomy…

The Ideal Book 1893 “sleeves should be peaceful”

“As to the height of a page, this is governed by the hand and eye.” –Gill

Books anatomy bears the imprint of the reader.

Stephen Lukes “ritual draws people’s attention to certain forms… since every way of looking is a way of not looking”

foregrounding arbitrary …

communal rituals… make pointed, though symbolic and indirect, traditions
make inconsistent demands on the reader, ask to be loved…

“The Panel as Page and the Page as Panel: Uncle Shelby and the Case of the Twin ABZ Books,” Joseph Terry Thomas, San Diego State Univ.

Grew up reading comics.
Didn’t read children’s literature until I hit college.
I was the kind of kid who read comics, comic books, comic strips… My ambrosia was word balloons and colors.
Around the same time I took a children’s lit class, I began reading the so-called language books.
genre-bending books led me back to… historical avant garde… New York School unafraid to cajole the comics I so loved.

Kind of texts I met as a young man resist the genre of Aristotelian…
“Stopping by Woods as a Snowy Evening”
“Visual Text XIV” poem
or “Concrete Cat”
yet they are all poems.
If I had added sound poems, there would be even less.

Theoretical defense: radial category
“typical case” poem
less likely a work is to meet a kind of marker, the closer you are to a typical case prototype

Eventually the case becomes harder and harder to make. We reach, have moved so far from the center, that we have something that is “intermedial” or “experimental” or “X avant garde.”

Historical defense: where published, who wrote

Samuel “Chip” Delaney best articulates this defense in his review of Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics.

“What I mean when I use the term genre: … largely through an unspecified combination of social forces (they are sold from the same bookshelves in bookstores, they are published by the same publishers, they are liked by the same readers, written by the same writers, share in a range of subject matters, etc.), most people will not require historical evidence to verify that a writer producing one of those texts, has read others of that group written up to that date.” (257)

to justify this: Shel Silverstein
“The” US children’s poet
got his start as a comic for Playboy
poems called “seemingly dashed off and endlessly recycled”
Poetry seems so simple and straightforward. Hard to pin down as one form of art.
Poetry interesting because it isn’t always just poetry.
He insists that his poetry must be connected to the illustrations.
Some of his poems are their illustrations.

mixed genres, travelogues, etc.

Consider this: visit to a nude beach “Nudist Camp” essay, photojournal, one panel gag comic, etc.

“New St. Nick” collides the motion of the panel. Here he’s blending the comic strip with light verse.

Savage Sword of Conan #95, December 1983, full page panels
“infamous” sideways issue of Spiderman.

Slipperiness of genre… page of Playboy
Uncle Shelby’s ABZ Book…
picture book parody of children’s alphabet book
two double-paged spreads, comic book version
content suggests alphabet book, look suggests comic book
a minor point… Narrative isn’t a crucial element to either comics or picture books.
In the comic version, one reads across the page.
In Playboy, clearly a parody.

Once the panels are broken up into pages and a cover added. Our reception of the work is unsettled. His picture at the back is Shel Silverstein reading with three children moving, but being read to.

In the form of a picture book, we are no longer thinking about a hole, but we are looking at something you might bury in a hole. When you read the page, the drawn hole is a phallus.

Concluding gesture: Delaney’s definition of genre good.
But rather than drawing up lists of which are comics and which are picture books,
See how the text is read by its community of readers.
Asking what happens to a comic when it is read like a picture book and what happens to a picture book when it is read as a comic.

Question: Why have picture books evolved as child media? What does it have to do with our conception of the child as reader?
Spatialization of time…

Resist the idea of picture book and comics being these way because …
Talked back and forth.

Next person: Found the panel very refreshing… Last decade comics’ theory has focused on authority and formal definition. Glad to see this absent here. In doing that, you liberate comics and picture books into a more sophisticated sense of re-reading.

Taking a book apart and hanging it in a museum stops it being a book and makes it a piece of visual art.

Artist’s book … responding to elitism of the art world.
Graphic novels make gestures to sophisticated art work, but they ask to be seen as literature.
mass production of picture books… means they occupy different genres(?)

My first experience with Red was with the museum visual artistic representation. Quite different response to seeing it on the wall. Then intrigued to see the book.

Artists’ books have become overwhelmed by desire to sell well. So they become beautiful but aren’t really art any more.

Not clear to me that the generic boundaries are shared by all readers.
Picture books are mapped out on storyboard… Harry Potter is all those things.

I really want to define a difference between picture books and comics and then in other ways, there’s not.

last issue is a comic book that you are supposed to take apart. Designed to be destroyed. Good if you buy two copies.

Comics “don’t have to be worked at as artwork.” Comics abstract comics. Don’t need to have narrative.

Comics and curation… art…

Historicize the genre as it shifts.

Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers says that motivation comes from doing work that is complex, autonomous, and which has a clear relationship between effort and reward (150).

I am thinking about ways that I can develop this in my English fyc (particularly) classrooms.

Does anyone have some great ideas for implementation?

M. Elizabeth Sargent –“Betsy,” University of Alberta
UofA trying to integrate WAC and Writing Center
Arc btw 1st day of 1st year, 50-?
Writing Strategies Inventory and then at the end re-complete the Inventory
Based on Writing About Writing approach, structured around Beaufort’s conceptual model of the 5 knowledge domains (discourse community knowledge, writing process, subject matter, rhetorical, and genre knowledge) -> some include metacognitive knowledge as another circle, but her position is that this IS a metacognitive model

Fall term, 1000 students on waiting list
20 per class, other option is 40 per class (U limits #s of courses allows b/c of that)
email bsargent@ualberta.ca -> will send an electronic copy of Writing Strategies Inventory

39 sections over 5 years
about 750 students (at the end of this term)

reflective writing about their conscious understandings, which increases transfer
goal = help students see themselves as writers who can transfer
“If you are confronted by a prickly writing situation in a dark alley someday…”

Beaufort’s model as heuristic

“The trick, with this as with any genre, is to satisfy its requirements while escaping its confines” (Nancy Mairs)—disaster writing

Writing Strategies Inventory
Graphs by Question
Getting Started, Drafting, and Research
3. Can you start writing without first having to know exactly what you want to say?
Yes is much more prominent in end.

Many people did not understand question at the beginning of the course.
Huge change because they have never before written for someone besides the teacher.
Huge change in giving feedback

Reflecting on the writing process
Yes significantly different

Class Graphs
All think they are pretty good at proofreading at end of term.

Random students in database
Student ID 533 wrote ecstatic responses about changes in his writing.

Gives them three graphs after they turn in the last one.
One shows the positive/negative change per question.
This is used to write the overview for the portfolio

Student M compared 5 pairs of questions
10. Beg=question End=Sometimes/somewhat
Then wrote a really long paragraph answer.
22. beg= no/never tried end=yes/often
Even longer paragraph. “constantly overuse phrases” that hedge, “commitment issues much?”
34. beg=sometimes end=rarely, not very well
“A so-called deterioration in my writing. I sort of think I may have just not understood exactly what it meant. … I might have lied a little bit… I didn’t know what I didn’t know before. I didn’t understand enough to know that I didn’t understand.”

It is the act of filling it out and writing about it that makes the difference.

E. Shelley Reid, George Mason University
“Teaching it Forward”
Using myself as a guinea pig.
Questions:
What do we want to transfer?
Solving writing problems orientation/ability
How should we teach for transfer?
Decoder assignment example
How can we assess thransfer of learning and what do we do then?
Indirect interviewing with students (n=5)

Rebalancing a writing class is challenging
Students already intuitively solve writing problems outside the classroom
Interviews suggest low transfer… BUT…

Solving Writing Problems: Rhetorically
Be able
Not to Write a Document
Not Follow a Production Process
To Solve advanced problems better (interpretive knowledge)
To Evaluate a Writing Problem
To Choose and Apply Appropriate Strategies
To Self-Assess Solutions

How much about Problems
Official class materials
Amt of class per week
Grade weights

Asked us to answer:
One thing to transfer: ability to write as a process
Then think about how much of your textbook supports this: 1 essay
How much time in the last few weeks have you spent: 10%
How much time students spent doing the thing in the last few weeks: ?

Decoder Assignment: 7 angles
Context, community/discipline, genre, approach, evidence, development, presentation
Everything after context is framed as context dependent.

Student decodings:
5-minute presentation decoding a writing task
decoding our composition assignments, before and after drafting
final quiz: decode someone else’s task
Students can do this readily

Approach/stance:
Challenges:
Explain how this problem applies to all their other writing:

Invited 80+ to interview, got 5
How do you solve writing writing problems? How do you start a writing task?
Tell me about one writing task for in and out of class
Students had a category for structure

Problem-evaluation: minimal evidence
Stepwise problem solving: minimal evidence (7 won’t transfer)

School
2 of 5 aud as starting
4 of 5 begin with content
5 of 5 discuss content at length

Extracurricular writing
5 of 5 focus on the audience

School = content
Extracurricular = rhetoric

Low transfer of solving writing strategies.
Students have the capabilities, but they are not crossing to school writing.

What do we want?
How to spend enough time?
What will transfer look like?

Unexpected questions:
Do a majority of students already know and use rhetorical strategies outside class?
If so, how do we leverage that knowledge?
If we leverage that knowledge, will rhetorical awareness for curricular writing be a disservice, since their other professors are only focusing on content?

Will leave you with questions.

Kara Taczak, U of Denver, “Transfer of a Transfer Curriculum”
Continuation of studies conducted as part of dissertation

Research on transfer shows that writing can transfer.
FYC knowledge about writing may be responsible for transfer.
Building on previous research…
What happens when a teaching-for-transfer curriculum is itself transferred, taught in a new FYC context at a different institution?

2 years:
designed and tested a syllabus of Teaching for Transfer (tft)
Key terms, reflection, theory of writing
11 key terms: genre, audience, etc.
reflection used at different deliberate points
Students created a theory of writing using key concepts they learned in the course and from other writing experiences. !!!
A reflective framework informed by theoretical writing content, including key rhetorical terms for writing that guides students to develop a theory of writing

FSU study:
*reflection offers students a chance to look backwards so that they may go forward, and reflections becomes part of their writing process (all said)
*reflection has a direct link to transfer (4 of 6 said)
*can intentionally teach for transfer (4 of 6 said theory of writing is important, 5 of 6 said they had enacted or would enact their theory in the semester or next)

FSU v. DU study:
FSU Research 1 institution with 40,000 students
DU private university dedicated to the public good with over 11,000 students
FSU traditional college age, live on campus
DU upper-middle to upper class, few on scholarship or do work study, traditional college age, deep dedication to receiving As
FSU participants from Liane’s course
DU from my own course
FSU 6 for 2.5 semesters (35 semesters)
DU 12 for 25 weeks
FSU: 11 key terms- genre, aud, rhet sit, reflection, composing, critical analysis, context, discourse community, circulation and knowledge
DU: 7 key terms—rhetorical situation, audience, genre, reflection, argument, the rhetorical appeals, and knowledge
(Won’t use rhetorical appeals in the research course)
Order of them changed. I started with rhetorical situation at DU.
I think I have noticed that this played a part in how they responded.

DU: tft 12 participants, 10 females and 2 males—whole class, all participating
1 discourse-based interview so far, 2 more interviews, and an exit survey
analysis of the sources, final iteration of theory of writing, and writing from other courses

DU Preliminary Findings:
Students are able to develop a theory of writing, based on prior knowledge and new knowledge, that they use to frame and reframe writing situations both inside and outside the comp course

Students’ Theory of Writing:
Different from FSU, each student defined their theories using key terms
“theory of writing is that good writing stems from a rhetorical situation and takes into account audience, genre, and connecting to the reader” (one example)

Why is this different?
Hypothesis: TFT has been reimagined to focus on fewer key terms. I’ve now taught the course 6 or 7 times over 3 years, so I’ve gotten better.

Theory of writing requirement does not discourage previous knowledge. It allows them to already have knowledge and integrate it.

Prelim findings:
*by teaching explicitly for transfer, students begin to make the connections themselves about the importance of transfer
“a working theory of writing that will continue to grow and help me grow as a writer” –one of students
All students said one of most important things was their theory of writing.
“Don’t be turned off by the amount of writing… yeah, it’s scary… but you can apply it to your future writing” –another student

Students do respond to a transfer curriculum.
“Don’t just write the class away because it’s not just a writing class … different kind of writing class, you learn how to put together a good piece of writing and how to really construct that with … [with] key terms… will help me in the future … key terms in writing when writing my own assignments”

Liane Robertson, William Paterson U, New Jersey
“Comparing Transfer Across Contexts: Two Studies of Transfer”

Study 1: does transfer occur between fyc and other academic writing contexts? If so, does the content matter?

Study 2: this and another question.

Transfer is related to content.
7 study participants across 3 fyc sections
syllabi, student writing material, multiple interviews
first interview: could they identify content taught and apply to writing assignments
second interview:

tft: content
Prior knowledge creates resistance—false sense of expertise is a barrier to new learning
The practice of writing does not suffice as content—conceptual framework needed
Perception as novice releases prior knowledge and allows for new learning (as Summer and Saltz suggest)
Content with clear purpose retained better; opportunity to seek transfer = transfer
(Michael Carter)

Total of 3 participants. Both of the two successful transfer students were scientists. One understood genre of lab report, he did a much better job of writing the lab report, as evidenced in his better grades. “I started to think about the discourse community…” Understanding discourse community allowed him to better communicate with his professors. Demonstrated he had a framework to apply information.
Hypothesis: Science may encourage the idea of failure possible. Helps students feel like they don’t know everything.

New study’s context:
Northeast, “edgy”
Commuter students, age diverse, first generation students
Comprehensive, lit-based or themed fyc
Expectation of passing
Work and family primary focus
Imposter syndrome

Preliminary findings:
Similar prior knowledge developed from HS experience of lit-based course
Share a common belief that they learned to write in their HS classes
Expectations, priorities, perceptions as novices, the barriers were more easily overcome, students identified themselves less as writers
Clearly articulated intention of course content = successful application of content in new context—helps students see application of new information to transferred
“In my psych class, we had to analyze a case study, and I realized it was a genre. And we had to write an analysis. And that was a type of genre, I think.”

Lit-themed class students were different.

Potential implications
*Content not tied to instructor or department interests, but to student interests and application may increase successful transfer
*Understanding of connections between contexts of writing can help students to learn to transfer between those contexts
*Ability to release prior knowledge that creates barriers to learning is critical for transfer

Final question: Threshold concepts—collapse of barriers created by prior knowledge (X and Lamb)
Research in the area of threshold concepts (Linda Ava Casner?)—emerging area

Question:
Does it matter that we are doing the same thing and the acronyms are different?
–Writing about writing is part of transfer, but not everything.
–Transfer is muddy. Has lots of parts. Difficult to wrangle.

Perhaps all of you might reference might use Susan Jerrett, pedagogical memory.

Struck, Shelley, by your findings that the academic writing kept talking about content. Take the student results as an insight.
Transfer is so tied to the content. (Beaufort book shows that.)
We can design a course to move them forward, but we don’t know the content that they are going to be working in. Mentioned Linda Adler, one thing for history student to learn, but if I don’t know much about history competing narratives, I can’t really write it.
A: Teaching them how to do the transfer and transfer to the next course.

What do you have your students read?
We don’t read a reader. We want them to be reading writing theory and practical pieces. They start with Bitzer. Talk about rhetorical theory.
“Is Google Making Us Stupid?” next.
Then we have them read in the genre.
Then we have them create a genre fr

Getting students to write is often hard. It is easier if they have a real audience and purpose. Here is an opportunity for them to write concisely, for real people, with a real-world purpose.

Calling all budding reviewers!

They say the best movie pitches are made in twenty-one words or less.

www.21words.net is the place to put those pitches to the test.

At this new site, you can review not only your favourite – and worst – films, but also albums, TV shows, books and games – all within 21 words or less!

So, do you fancy nailing the nastiest film of the year? Or do you reckon you can blog a blockbuster? Even take on Rent-a-Quote for a pithy put-down?

If so, sign up now and start sharing your creative insights with the world.

We look forward to seeing you on the site!

Welcome to the review-lution!

This announcement was the forwarded email I received with the following text:
We are three English Literature research students at the University of Sheffield who have recently established a new user-generated review site for the creative arts.

The site, www.21words.net, encourages budding writers to post their creative insights into a chosen genre within a strict word limit.

We are interested in building a solid base of concise reviews of films, books, music, television and games. Undergraduate and postgraduate arts students are best placed to provide consistent content as they are at the rockface of emerging and existing creative output.

Here’s a great post on book covers in the US vs. in the UK.

For example: