CCE

Words and pictures (no.3)

I never was much of a comic book fan and I've never done more than flip (quickly) through a graphic novel or two, but Billie's  graphic novel seminar sounds like a wonderful course! I particularly like the way she weaves together analysis and creativity and reflection. How have others used graphic novels in their courses?? (I think I'd better check them out. Any suggestions?)

End of the Semester

Today I'm posting grades for spring semester.

Summer projects
1. Prepare for the American Studies Association Conference in the fall (I'm presenting on John Dewey).
2. Revise an article and send it out.
3. Play more basketball.
4. Read without underlining.
5. Go camping.
6. Work on audio and video podcasting
7. And, of course, blog more on Community College English.

Right now I'm reading Plainsong by Kent Haruf, a beautiful novel. Today my wife Dr. Write and I will go on a hike in Millcreek Canyon with our crazy dog Gus.

I have a dream (and a few questions)

It started with my transition away from using textbooks in FYC (because of cost, convenience, and flexibility). I've found so many great articles and essays available electronically that I wished for a way to share those links and to find out what (non-textbook) readings other FYC teachers would recommend: what I had in mind was some sort of collaborative online space for posting and sharing links to FYC reading materials.

(For example, a stand-alone essay/book chapter I love to use as a sample personal narrative is Meredith Hall's "Killing Chickens," from her well-received recent memoir Without a Map.)

The blog format is certainly not suitable for this (it's fine for drawing attention to an article now and again, but because entires are constantly dropping off the bottom of the page, it doesn't work as a central repository). Other options I've tried or thought about?

• First, for the thematic courses I taught for several semesters, I compiled H2O playlists: one on food and another on technology, with several others in the works.
• Mike Arnzen's recent Pedablogue post Dipping into del.icio.us (highly recommended) made me wonder about the possibility of using such a social networking site. I'm still having a little trouble wrapping my mind around how such a system would work. It seems that an agreed-upon system of identifying tags would be required (certainly the tagging feature of del.icio.us is a great advantage of this "platform").
• Another option, of course, would be a wiki, organized and cross-referenced (by theme and whatever other categories were useful to people).

Esp. for you tech-minded folks, what format/platform do you think would work best? Any other options? What tags would be useful to you in terms of how you organize your classes? (And, I guess most importantly, would such a site/system be of interest to you?)

Multimodal composition: Ganley's digital collage

In a meeting the other day, one of my colleagues just back from New Orleans muttered that all he kept hearing about at the 4C's was multimodal composition. In yet another one of the universe's synchronicities, I today came across Barbara Ganley's collage-presentation of a talk she'll be giving this week (Balancing Acts: Transformations & Tensions in the 21st Century Writing Classroom)--for more information, read her discussion here, and for more on the vuvox collage tool, check out their home page. In Barbara's collage move the mouse horizontally to scroll through the collage; hot spots marked by dialogue bubbles provide a treasure-trove of interesting links and videos, including a sample of very exciting student work.

For a shorter demo of what a multimodal FYC class might look like, check out Jason Palmeri's video introduction.

Is there a place for this sort of innovative pedagogy in the community college?

 

Reading and writing, talking and listening

Earlier this week, in a reflective moment in my Writing about Literature class, I was talking to students about the importance of reading in their educations, about how they may have relied on lecture as the primary mode of getting info in high school but that, as they advanced further in college, reading would become crucial, as they became more independent learners who were not tied to the sound of their teachers' voices. For my reluctant readers, I tried to sell poetry-reading as training in paying attention to the details of texts and  novel-reading as developing a sustained attention necessary for longer texts. Then a presentation by our head of disabilities services one evening this week made me re-examine my assumptions.

At the presentation we watched Richard Lavoie's film How Difficult Can This Be? The F.A.T. City Workshop: Understanding Learning Disabilities, a workshop session that replicates for parents and teachers the processing and perceptual difficulties faced by LD students and demonstrates how the reactions of teachers and other students can exacerbate the situation, a powerful and thought-provoking film. My reaction after seeing the film was to wonder how many of my students who seem to have difficulty reading might have some of these processing/perceptual problems and, more importantly, what I could do as a writing teacher to help them, to bring them towards competency in their reading, which is obviously what we want, I asserted confidently. No, said the ODS specialist firmly, not necessarily.

She talked about the technological possibilities now: student textbooks can be scanned in and converted from print-to-speech, web pages can be read aloud, and students can compose by talking into a microphone (a comprehensive, at least to my eyes, list of such technologies is given here). Within five years, she said, textbooks will be available as old-fashioned bound books, CD-ROMs, or downloadable mp3 files, format to be chosen by student.

So will my reluctant readers and writers now be eager listeners and talkers?

I've been thinking about whether there are important differences between text-based and oral/aural communication. (Listening and talking are not my preferred modes, I hereby disclose.) I wonder about differences in vocabulary, syntactical complexity, organizational control, revision strategies. (An interesting article that I think is related here: Peter Elbow's "The Music of Form: Rethinking Organization in Writing," from CCC June 2006; I discussed it briefly here, but need to reread.)

 

Why the annotated bib?

While we're on the subject of the research paper/process, (if you haven't seen it already) go read Derek's post on the purpose and function of annotated bib, or, as he puts it, "how to (also whether to) reconcile rigor with pleasure in the processes of collection and annotation." It's a thought-provoking few paragraphs.

To ease into this thinking-stuff, I started the same way my students do, with a google search; UNC-Chapel Hill's page was the most complete description of the standard assignment that I could find in a few minutes' search. I've been trying to tease apart the problematic issues Derek identifies:

How does the A. B. fit into the research paper assignment? Derek here, in a comment:

So I like the side of the annotated bib that is about urging students to be more fully cognizant of productive ways of handling sources, the wide range of possible materials they might bring aboard, and so on. Yet it seems like--all the same--the annotated bib can become this tame aside, something that domesticates the research rather than breathing life into it (which is, ideally, one of the things it might do.)

Can the A. B. assignment be used to stimulate rather than deaden student interest? How does topic choice figure in here? I'm not at all convinced that allowing the student free choice of topic will lead to the "passionate, geeky collector" Derek envisions nor that instructor-assigned topics will preclude the development of such enlivened curiosity. When allowed free (sort of) choice of topic, many of my students still gravitate towards the conventional issues that even they are not truly interested in, whereas I think I have (on occasion) managed to suggest research questions that do end up engaging students (in much the same way that a teacher might suggest a book that ends up appealing to a reluctant reader). Certainly, though, the fostering of such curiosity is a central part of what we should be doing, or trying to do. (Not always an easy task, like trying to foster a love of butterfly collecting in a student who doesn't much like the outdoors, as I was reminded the other day in an after-class conversation with a student who readily admitted that he didn't much like to read).

How should this A. B. be assessed? I'll give a few links to rubrics here (while I continue to incubate my reservations-about-rubics post-to-come): here's one from Rebecca Martin of Clark College and here an interesting article about the A. B. in an undergraduate biology course (rubric via supplementary material link).

So I have been thinking about  why I have used the A. B. assignment. I don't use it every semester, but I did last semester, as a group project in which 3 or 4 students  posted onto a wiki Internet or database sources (as links) along with several-sentence summaries and evaluations. (Students then wrote analytical papers, looking at the sources of disagreement over an issue, using the sources found by their own or another group.) I guess I would say that my purposes in using A. B.s are to foreground the locating and evaluating of sources and to give students much-needed practice in picking out the main position taken by an author.

This semester I'm trying a different sort of annotation in service of the research paper (details to come).

2008 4C's: the virtual edition

For the benefit of those of us who didn't get to New Orleans for the 4C's last week, I wanted to post a few of the blog-reflections that have showed up on my blogroll. (If you've written or read something I haven't caught, please feel free to post as a comment!):

Joanna and Billie blogged some Basic Writing sessions here for McGraw-Hill. (Be sure to check out Billie's New Orleans photo essay on her own blog.)

Though sidelined by illness, Collin posted a version of the talk he would have given on "Visualizing the Invisible Collage of Research"; his would-be-co-presenter cbd posted some reflections as well.

Dan has posted a "dress rehearsal" of his CCCC talk on "Musical Pieces: Readymade Audio Projects and Creativity."

Mike posted one of his, as always, well-done summaries here on A25: Virtual Realities (with more to come perhaps?)

Jeff has an enjoyable riff that weaves together New Orleans-critique, fast-food culture, and Mark Bauerlein's Chronicle column on the "purpose(s)" of Rhet/Comp.

For multisensory appeal, we have k8's food pix here and Dennis's jazz (more from Dennis here as well).

Finally, for some interesting commentary from one who chose not to attend, see Liz's post here.

CCC on CCE issues

Just wanted to draw your attention to a couple of articles in Feb. 2008 CCC that connect to FYC issues:

Jane Danielewicz's article "Personal Genres, Public Voices" led me to revisit an issue I wrote about a few years ago, prompted by a fairly active blogosphere conversation at the time on personal vs public vs political writing in comp classes. A number of bloggers, as I recall, seemed to devalue writing based (solely) on personal experience, depositing it like a nasty-smelling rag held pinched between thumb and forefinger into the expressivist bucket of dirty mop-water. (And, to tell you the truth, I'm not too fond of those car accident, dead grandmother essays either that the personal narrative assignment seems to evoke.) Anyway, Danielewicz makes an interesting case that goes beyond the simplistic dichotomy of personal vs political writing to argue that 

writing in personal genres, where the "I" is at the center, not only develops voice and cultivates identities but also enhances authority. Authority increases the chances that individuals are able to participate in public discourse, which is, ultimately, agency. (421)

It all raises interesting questions, I think, about where we're asking our students to draw their information and on what basis we're helping them to develop their "public voices."

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I'd also recommend Richard C. Raymond's article "When Writing Professors Teach Literature: Shaping Questions, Finding Answers, Effecting Change," or, as he puts the question later in the paper,

What happens when a literature course gets taught as a writing course, complete with reader-response journals, group work, peer response groups, conferences, revisions?

(I found this particularly interesting because my CC sets up 2nd semester comp as Writing About Literature, which is intended to be taught as a comp class but often, laden with a hefty anthology, seems to take on Lit Crit Lite tones.) Raymond writes about teaching American Lit (Dickinson and Whitman, mostly) in Albania to students "used to memorizing facts but not to thinking about those facts...Not used to writing to discover what they know, what they want to know, what they want to shape or change." Sound familiar??

Advice for CC job search

Through the magic of site referrral statistics, I recently, happily, discovered the blog of CCE teacher Dale Yerpe. For those of you not already comfortably esconced in your TT position, he offers a number of posts that give great info on the job search, from  tips on writing the Cover Letter to what to check out before the Visit  to The Interview itself (the logistics of what to expect as well as questions a search committee might ask and questions you might ask them).

Caught any sheep lately?

Over the past six months or so,  as the rhet/comp blogging community stakes its claim to a corner of Facebook, grown men and women, with several degrees to their name, have been gleefully heaving farm animals and seasonal paraphernlia at each other. (More intellectual pursuits are available as well: sharing names and reviews of the scholarly books you're reading, friendly games of Scramble and the asynchronous Scrabble-like game Scrabulous, mired in copyright squabbles.) A quick check today reveals Facebook groups, among others, for the 4C's (271 members: need a roommate anyone?), NCTE (293 members), and Kairos (a whopping 404 members), although most of these groups see very light activity. A few questions come to mind:

• the old-fogey factor: Does the over-25 crowd belong there? Is it an invasion of privacy for our students, or children (my own daughters were horrified when they found out I had set up a Facebook page)? Is it unseemly, like a 70-year-old in too-baggy jeans with a baseball cap perched sideways on his balding head? Is Facebook like some adolescent nightspot we're better off avoiding, for everyone's peace of mind?
• social networking 101: As English teachers should we understand how our students communicate? What can sites like Facebook teach us about the possibilities for social connection with our own peers? (These are really two separate questions, I guess.)
• the privacy issue: How do we as faculty handle the balance between personal and public that sites like Facebook tend (maybe) to blur? Do you want to be able to see your students' pages? Do you want them to see yours? Are there important "teachable issues" here (and can the teaching take place in both directions)?
• creating community: I read about one blogger (unfortunately I can't remember which one) who chose for practical reasons to use a Facebook group (closed to members of his/her class) as a sort of course management system to post notices and assignments. As I remember, the teacher found that students bonded more closely, forming both study groups and friendships. Could this help in creating community of writers in a composition class?
• the alternatives: Of blogs, list-servs, wikis, Facebook, Twitter (anything else?), which seem most useful to you professionally and why? Do any seem rich in untapped potential?
• Facebook etiquette: Is it rude to refuse to catch the sheep that's sailing your way?