A Brief yet Triumphant Rationale on Why I Teach How I Teach
My approaches to teaching are deeply rooted in the variety of experiences and influences I have accumulated over my years within the academy. And while my focus of study is in English, and the classes I teach are housed within the English Department, immersing myself within the wide variety of disciplines and genres it offers: Creative Writing Pedagogy, Literature, Rhetoric and Composition Studies, and Cultural Theory, I often find myself pulling from an even broader range of studies. Ultimately, I teach English. And more specifically, I teach College Writing. But even though the aforementioned “English” concepts form the heart and spine of my teaching, my approach continues to shift and change in ways to best suit the diverse student body I have the pleasure of working with in the classroom.
While I would love to be able to provide a comprehensive explanation on why I teach the way I do, I will be focusing primarily on the “day to day” practices of reading and writing I encourage in my classroom: creating an access point into the academic world; encouraging a sustainable, critical reading and writing practice through the use of low-risk exercises, genre awareness, and the promotion of writing as a process. I have chosen to highlight these practices because I believe that they are key concepts—threshold concepts—that are essential tools for my students to acquire.
Laying the Foundation for Academic Accessibility
For many incoming students, a First Year Composition course doesn’t simply serve as an introductory course to college writing and thinking, but as an entry point to the environment of the university, which, itself, serves as an entry point into that “real” world beyond the classroom. This makes the professor’s approach all the more integral to encourage practices and skills that will enable future success within the academy (and hopefully outside of it as well). As Gerald Graff proposed in his introduction to Clueless in Academe: “academia reinforces cluelessness by making its ideas, problems, and ways of thinking look more opaque, narrowly specialized, and beyond normal learning capacities than they are or need to be” (33). And while I won’t go so far as to say Graff is absolutely, 100% correct, there is a heavy amount of truth to his accusation. In student questionnaire’s I provide for my students at the beginning of each semester, many students openly admit to being intimidated or concerned in regards to their position within particular disciplines (“I’ve never been good at English”) or the academy in general. And if my own experience as a student, along with my observations of students as a Supplemental Instructor and Teaching Associate, have taught me anything, it’s that the transitional period of a first-year student is quite often the hardest to traverse, especially given the ideological, educational, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds of each individual student. And because of these qualities, the landscape of the classroom changes on a semester-to-semester basis.
It is because of this constantly shifting topography that I strive to provide my students with as optimal a learning environment I can provide to help them navigate the transition and leave them with a set of skills they can carry with them to continue forward into the unmapped spaces beyond my classroom. This isn’t to say that I view my job as a FYC professor to be relegated to the purpose of “service” to other, more relevant disciplines, (which is, of course, a controversial topic within the conversations taking place within the field of rhetoric and composition and English studies), but it would be irresponsible as a professor to complete eliminate any semblance of skills that could be seen as a service towards other disciplines. As Italo Calvino proposes in “Multiplicity,” one of the six topics discussed in Six Memos for the Next Millennium: “who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatorial of experiences” (Calvino 124). Therefore, it is essential for myself, as an instructor, to aspire towards facilitating the combinatorial formation of my students by using a variety of exercises, activities, and assignments that allow for both transference of prior knowledge and acquisition of the language of the academic discipline to allow for an engaged and active entrance into the conversations taking place around them.
This aspect of my teaching is best exhibited by the texts I choose to assign, along with the variety of rhetorical situations my assignments are crafted around. Each text and assignment is multi-faceted in nature so as to provide multiple access points for each student to not only engage in critical reading and writing but varying levels of engagement from personal to social. And while I am not wholly convinced of the notion that first-year students suffer from what John Bean refers to as “cognitive egocentrism,” which is characterized by the transformation of unfamiliar experiences and concepts “into something from [the student’s] own psychological neighborhood” (Bean 165), I do believe that this form of egocentrism is prevalent in every individual. But instead of viewing cognitive egocentrism as an absolute hindrance to aspects of critical engagement, finding similarity and personal stake are important steps towards cultivating a sustainable and critically engaged conversation with any given topic—start from the familiar and extend into the unknown. But it is also equally important to ensure that this pursuit towards familiarity does not produce close-mindedness or cognitive stagnancy.
Low Stakes Writing and Personal Voice
An effective method I have used to help develop the skills mentioned above, as well as to guide the student away from close-minded or stagnant approaches to a particular topic, is to assign regular exercises that encourage students to engage with the material in a variety of ways without being restricted by the burden of a grade; these exercises are, instead, “graded” on a credit/no-credit scale. I have decided to engage in this practice, as Peter Elbow argues in “Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking” in the hopes that “[b]y avoiding frequent ranking or grading, we make it somewhat less likely for students to become addicted to oversimple numerical rankings” (393). If the numerical grade is the only thing that matters in the classroom, a student is more likely to try to appease the professor by performing the role the way they think the professor would want them to as opposed to experimenting and exploring their own modes of conversation. And while performing an expectation may constitute as a survival skill in the academic world, it does not necessarily empower a student’s own understanding of the material.
By removing the expectation of performance, and operating within what Elbow calls an “evaluation-free zone,” these low-stakes writing exercises encourage students to understand that “reading is a process [that] enables students to approach a text purposefully” (Clark 10). By providing a space where a student is able to process and respond in their own voice, they are able to find their own understanding of “purpose.” And once the student can find this purpose, they are more likely to realize that both reading and writing are a form of conversation they are able to take part in.
As you can see from any of my syllabi, my courses include a number of exercises and assignments (reading journals, in-class writing, responses) that serve as open spaces for students to critically engage with the assigned material in their own words. This isn’t to say that the students are free to write about anything; I do include some general guidelines that help guide their responses, but, for the most part, the student is asked to accumulate and process the information and respond on their own terms. In order to encourage further engagement and awareness (you will also notice that I refer to the class as a community on a number of occasions), I will often require students to respond to each other’s posts, to continue the conversation. I will also provide general feedback and response in the form of rhetorical questions meant to further each student’s involvement with the material. The importance of this method of my teaching is to help the student with critical reading and response, invention strategies, and audience awareness in preparation for future assignments that will be more constrained by genre conventions.
Another effective use of these “evaluation-free zones,” is that I can provide students who do not speak “Standard American English” as their primary tongue (or have studied under a different cultural curriculum) a space to freely engage in writing processes that will encourage intersectionality and understanding. As Vai Ramathan and Dwight Atkinson argue, “what we know about cultures and their varying approaches to knowing, meaning, and being should not be feared or denied. And rather it should be seen as integral to personhood” (Ramathan 185). And it is through this community of individuals with their own personhood, through the practice of regularly engaging in open conversation, that the students will be given a space of encouragement, of understanding, of support.
Movements Toward Genre Awareness
Genre Awareness is an important skill for any college student to acquire, but it is also one of the most difficult concepts to teach. In some senses, it isn’t something that can necessarily be taught, but it can be learned through regular practice and guidance.
In my class, I will typically emphasize that all reading and writing should be tailored towards some rhetorical purpose (to inform, to convince, to argue, etc) along with social context. One of the first exercises I assigned my students in Fall 2014 was to critically read a trio of commencement speeches from three very different authors: Barbara Kingsolver, David Foster Wallace, and George Saunders. The exercise was meant to encourage critical reading practices (annotation) and ask the students to begin identifying the purpose, context, tone, situation, and audience a particular text is created for. I engage in this practice to help my students to understand, what Deborah Dean defines in “Why Study Genre Theory?” as, “the idea that reading and writing isn’t the same for every person or situation” (Dean 3). This is then continually encouraged through the use of the low-risk writing assignments described above. The two practices combined (reading for genre awareness and low-risk writing) both serve to engage the student in practice and application of situational and contextual awareness. In other words: genre awareness.
By encouraging the students to write towards and respond to each other’s work, they will have to focus on both sides of the audience equation: the creator and receiver of text. This is an important step towards genre awareness since, as Dr. Irene Clark observes in Concepts in Composition: “[s]tudents think of 'audience' only in terms of the teacher who will grade their work and lack awareness of how audience affects other aspects of a text, such as purpose, form, style, and genre” (109). Of course the students will have to write towards audiences that are not limited to their own peers, but these exercises help promote a regular practice of audience awareness. And, contained within an exercise that promotes experimentation, I hope to be able to dispel the typical understanding of genre that Amy Devitt summarizes succinctly in her essay “Teaching Critical Genre Awareness” as: “formulaic and constraining” (337).
The “Product” of Process
In her essay “Both Sides of the Desk: Experiencing Creative Writing Lore as a Student and as a Professor,” Priscilla Uppal argues that “we should use the classroom to encourage the skills, knowledge, and experimentation within the discipline that might eventually lead to publication” (53). While Uppal’s argument is catered specifically towards the field of creative writing, it echoes a sentiment often found in most composition classrooms: writing as a process rather than product.
All of the concepts I have discussed already play a role in the writing process, but these are also only part of the entire equation. Each of the classes I have taught revolve around four major assignments: three essays and a portfolio. Including the low-risk exercises I have outlined above, I also employ the use of group work that will, as Wendy Bishop proposes in “Helping Peer Writing Succeed,” encourage students to “work together to discuss readings, to complete exercises, to explore writing invention strategies, and to help members with forming very early drafts” (348). This collaborative and peer-support system encourages students to understand that whatever class or project they pursue in the future, they will always be able to work with their peers to complete any given task. I also utilize drafting and peer-review to help facilitate the writing process and place an importance on the value of collaboration and communication between individuals. Each essay requires students to produce first drafts, which are then submitted for peer review and my assessment. This feedback is used to help guide the revision process towards a “final” draft. I always emphasize the presence of quotations around the word “final,” to de-emphasize the permanency of the word and remind my students that despite this “final” being the paper that receives a grade, they should always view it as another step in the process: one that precedes reflection and revision.
My earlier comments about collaboration and communication between individual students may give the impression that I place the onus of learning on the shoulders of the student. And while this interpretation has some validity (reminiscent of Elbow’s “teacher-less classroom”), and maybe rightfully so since self-confidence and self-motivation are essential academic skills to achieve, I make sure to provide my students with the essential tools necessary to ensure that this group work supplements their academic goals instead of resorting to a “blind leading the blind” situation. These tools are found in craft-centered approaches that utilize genre awareness and practice that will assist and prepare each student for a wide variety of reading, writing, and learning tasks. This is precisely how I want to prepare my students upon completion of my class.
Works Cited
Bean, John. “Helping Students Read Difficult Texts.” Engaging Ideas. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011. 161-182. Print.
Calvino, Italo. “Multiplicity.” Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. 101-124. Print
Clark, Irene L. Concepts in Composition: Theory and Practice in the Teaching of Writing. Second ed. New York: Routledge, 2012. Print.
Dean, Deborah. “Why Study Genre Theory?” Genre Theory: Teaching, Writing, and Being. Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English. Print.
Devitt, Amy. “Teaching Critical Genre Awareness.” Genre in a Changing World. Ed. Charles Bazerman, Adair Bonini, and Débora Figueiredo. Fort Collins, Colorado: The WAC Clearinghouse and Parlor Press, 2009. 337-351.
Elbow, Peter. "Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting Out Three Forms of Judgment." Teaching Composition: Background Readings. Ed. T.R. Johnson. Third ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008. 387-406. Print.
Graff, Gerald. "From Clueless in Academe." Teaching Composition: Background Readings. Ed. T.R. Johnson. Third ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008. 32-58. Print.
Ramanathan, Vai and Dwight Atkinson. “Individualism, Academic Writing, and ESL Writers.” Second-Language Writing in the Composition Classroom: A Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Paul Kei Matsuda, Michelle Cox, Jay Jordan, and Christina Ortimeier-Hooper. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010. 165-187. Print.
Uppal, Priscilla. “Both Sides of the Desk: Experiencing Creative Writing Lore as a Student and as a Professor.” Can It Really Be Taught: Resisting Lore in Creative Writing Pedagogy Ed. Kelly Ritter and Stephanie Vanderslice. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook Heinemann, 2007. 46-54. Print.
While I would love to be able to provide a comprehensive explanation on why I teach the way I do, I will be focusing primarily on the “day to day” practices of reading and writing I encourage in my classroom: creating an access point into the academic world; encouraging a sustainable, critical reading and writing practice through the use of low-risk exercises, genre awareness, and the promotion of writing as a process. I have chosen to highlight these practices because I believe that they are key concepts—threshold concepts—that are essential tools for my students to acquire.
Laying the Foundation for Academic Accessibility
For many incoming students, a First Year Composition course doesn’t simply serve as an introductory course to college writing and thinking, but as an entry point to the environment of the university, which, itself, serves as an entry point into that “real” world beyond the classroom. This makes the professor’s approach all the more integral to encourage practices and skills that will enable future success within the academy (and hopefully outside of it as well). As Gerald Graff proposed in his introduction to Clueless in Academe: “academia reinforces cluelessness by making its ideas, problems, and ways of thinking look more opaque, narrowly specialized, and beyond normal learning capacities than they are or need to be” (33). And while I won’t go so far as to say Graff is absolutely, 100% correct, there is a heavy amount of truth to his accusation. In student questionnaire’s I provide for my students at the beginning of each semester, many students openly admit to being intimidated or concerned in regards to their position within particular disciplines (“I’ve never been good at English”) or the academy in general. And if my own experience as a student, along with my observations of students as a Supplemental Instructor and Teaching Associate, have taught me anything, it’s that the transitional period of a first-year student is quite often the hardest to traverse, especially given the ideological, educational, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds of each individual student. And because of these qualities, the landscape of the classroom changes on a semester-to-semester basis.
It is because of this constantly shifting topography that I strive to provide my students with as optimal a learning environment I can provide to help them navigate the transition and leave them with a set of skills they can carry with them to continue forward into the unmapped spaces beyond my classroom. This isn’t to say that I view my job as a FYC professor to be relegated to the purpose of “service” to other, more relevant disciplines, (which is, of course, a controversial topic within the conversations taking place within the field of rhetoric and composition and English studies), but it would be irresponsible as a professor to complete eliminate any semblance of skills that could be seen as a service towards other disciplines. As Italo Calvino proposes in “Multiplicity,” one of the six topics discussed in Six Memos for the Next Millennium: “who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatorial of experiences” (Calvino 124). Therefore, it is essential for myself, as an instructor, to aspire towards facilitating the combinatorial formation of my students by using a variety of exercises, activities, and assignments that allow for both transference of prior knowledge and acquisition of the language of the academic discipline to allow for an engaged and active entrance into the conversations taking place around them.
This aspect of my teaching is best exhibited by the texts I choose to assign, along with the variety of rhetorical situations my assignments are crafted around. Each text and assignment is multi-faceted in nature so as to provide multiple access points for each student to not only engage in critical reading and writing but varying levels of engagement from personal to social. And while I am not wholly convinced of the notion that first-year students suffer from what John Bean refers to as “cognitive egocentrism,” which is characterized by the transformation of unfamiliar experiences and concepts “into something from [the student’s] own psychological neighborhood” (Bean 165), I do believe that this form of egocentrism is prevalent in every individual. But instead of viewing cognitive egocentrism as an absolute hindrance to aspects of critical engagement, finding similarity and personal stake are important steps towards cultivating a sustainable and critically engaged conversation with any given topic—start from the familiar and extend into the unknown. But it is also equally important to ensure that this pursuit towards familiarity does not produce close-mindedness or cognitive stagnancy.
Low Stakes Writing and Personal Voice
An effective method I have used to help develop the skills mentioned above, as well as to guide the student away from close-minded or stagnant approaches to a particular topic, is to assign regular exercises that encourage students to engage with the material in a variety of ways without being restricted by the burden of a grade; these exercises are, instead, “graded” on a credit/no-credit scale. I have decided to engage in this practice, as Peter Elbow argues in “Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking” in the hopes that “[b]y avoiding frequent ranking or grading, we make it somewhat less likely for students to become addicted to oversimple numerical rankings” (393). If the numerical grade is the only thing that matters in the classroom, a student is more likely to try to appease the professor by performing the role the way they think the professor would want them to as opposed to experimenting and exploring their own modes of conversation. And while performing an expectation may constitute as a survival skill in the academic world, it does not necessarily empower a student’s own understanding of the material.
By removing the expectation of performance, and operating within what Elbow calls an “evaluation-free zone,” these low-stakes writing exercises encourage students to understand that “reading is a process [that] enables students to approach a text purposefully” (Clark 10). By providing a space where a student is able to process and respond in their own voice, they are able to find their own understanding of “purpose.” And once the student can find this purpose, they are more likely to realize that both reading and writing are a form of conversation they are able to take part in.
As you can see from any of my syllabi, my courses include a number of exercises and assignments (reading journals, in-class writing, responses) that serve as open spaces for students to critically engage with the assigned material in their own words. This isn’t to say that the students are free to write about anything; I do include some general guidelines that help guide their responses, but, for the most part, the student is asked to accumulate and process the information and respond on their own terms. In order to encourage further engagement and awareness (you will also notice that I refer to the class as a community on a number of occasions), I will often require students to respond to each other’s posts, to continue the conversation. I will also provide general feedback and response in the form of rhetorical questions meant to further each student’s involvement with the material. The importance of this method of my teaching is to help the student with critical reading and response, invention strategies, and audience awareness in preparation for future assignments that will be more constrained by genre conventions.
Another effective use of these “evaluation-free zones,” is that I can provide students who do not speak “Standard American English” as their primary tongue (or have studied under a different cultural curriculum) a space to freely engage in writing processes that will encourage intersectionality and understanding. As Vai Ramathan and Dwight Atkinson argue, “what we know about cultures and their varying approaches to knowing, meaning, and being should not be feared or denied. And rather it should be seen as integral to personhood” (Ramathan 185). And it is through this community of individuals with their own personhood, through the practice of regularly engaging in open conversation, that the students will be given a space of encouragement, of understanding, of support.
Movements Toward Genre Awareness
Genre Awareness is an important skill for any college student to acquire, but it is also one of the most difficult concepts to teach. In some senses, it isn’t something that can necessarily be taught, but it can be learned through regular practice and guidance.
In my class, I will typically emphasize that all reading and writing should be tailored towards some rhetorical purpose (to inform, to convince, to argue, etc) along with social context. One of the first exercises I assigned my students in Fall 2014 was to critically read a trio of commencement speeches from three very different authors: Barbara Kingsolver, David Foster Wallace, and George Saunders. The exercise was meant to encourage critical reading practices (annotation) and ask the students to begin identifying the purpose, context, tone, situation, and audience a particular text is created for. I engage in this practice to help my students to understand, what Deborah Dean defines in “Why Study Genre Theory?” as, “the idea that reading and writing isn’t the same for every person or situation” (Dean 3). This is then continually encouraged through the use of the low-risk writing assignments described above. The two practices combined (reading for genre awareness and low-risk writing) both serve to engage the student in practice and application of situational and contextual awareness. In other words: genre awareness.
By encouraging the students to write towards and respond to each other’s work, they will have to focus on both sides of the audience equation: the creator and receiver of text. This is an important step towards genre awareness since, as Dr. Irene Clark observes in Concepts in Composition: “[s]tudents think of 'audience' only in terms of the teacher who will grade their work and lack awareness of how audience affects other aspects of a text, such as purpose, form, style, and genre” (109). Of course the students will have to write towards audiences that are not limited to their own peers, but these exercises help promote a regular practice of audience awareness. And, contained within an exercise that promotes experimentation, I hope to be able to dispel the typical understanding of genre that Amy Devitt summarizes succinctly in her essay “Teaching Critical Genre Awareness” as: “formulaic and constraining” (337).
The “Product” of Process
In her essay “Both Sides of the Desk: Experiencing Creative Writing Lore as a Student and as a Professor,” Priscilla Uppal argues that “we should use the classroom to encourage the skills, knowledge, and experimentation within the discipline that might eventually lead to publication” (53). While Uppal’s argument is catered specifically towards the field of creative writing, it echoes a sentiment often found in most composition classrooms: writing as a process rather than product.
All of the concepts I have discussed already play a role in the writing process, but these are also only part of the entire equation. Each of the classes I have taught revolve around four major assignments: three essays and a portfolio. Including the low-risk exercises I have outlined above, I also employ the use of group work that will, as Wendy Bishop proposes in “Helping Peer Writing Succeed,” encourage students to “work together to discuss readings, to complete exercises, to explore writing invention strategies, and to help members with forming very early drafts” (348). This collaborative and peer-support system encourages students to understand that whatever class or project they pursue in the future, they will always be able to work with their peers to complete any given task. I also utilize drafting and peer-review to help facilitate the writing process and place an importance on the value of collaboration and communication between individuals. Each essay requires students to produce first drafts, which are then submitted for peer review and my assessment. This feedback is used to help guide the revision process towards a “final” draft. I always emphasize the presence of quotations around the word “final,” to de-emphasize the permanency of the word and remind my students that despite this “final” being the paper that receives a grade, they should always view it as another step in the process: one that precedes reflection and revision.
My earlier comments about collaboration and communication between individual students may give the impression that I place the onus of learning on the shoulders of the student. And while this interpretation has some validity (reminiscent of Elbow’s “teacher-less classroom”), and maybe rightfully so since self-confidence and self-motivation are essential academic skills to achieve, I make sure to provide my students with the essential tools necessary to ensure that this group work supplements their academic goals instead of resorting to a “blind leading the blind” situation. These tools are found in craft-centered approaches that utilize genre awareness and practice that will assist and prepare each student for a wide variety of reading, writing, and learning tasks. This is precisely how I want to prepare my students upon completion of my class.
Works Cited
Bean, John. “Helping Students Read Difficult Texts.” Engaging Ideas. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011. 161-182. Print.
Calvino, Italo. “Multiplicity.” Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. 101-124. Print
Clark, Irene L. Concepts in Composition: Theory and Practice in the Teaching of Writing. Second ed. New York: Routledge, 2012. Print.
Dean, Deborah. “Why Study Genre Theory?” Genre Theory: Teaching, Writing, and Being. Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English. Print.
Devitt, Amy. “Teaching Critical Genre Awareness.” Genre in a Changing World. Ed. Charles Bazerman, Adair Bonini, and Débora Figueiredo. Fort Collins, Colorado: The WAC Clearinghouse and Parlor Press, 2009. 337-351.
Elbow, Peter. "Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting Out Three Forms of Judgment." Teaching Composition: Background Readings. Ed. T.R. Johnson. Third ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008. 387-406. Print.
Graff, Gerald. "From Clueless in Academe." Teaching Composition: Background Readings. Ed. T.R. Johnson. Third ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008. 32-58. Print.
Ramanathan, Vai and Dwight Atkinson. “Individualism, Academic Writing, and ESL Writers.” Second-Language Writing in the Composition Classroom: A Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Paul Kei Matsuda, Michelle Cox, Jay Jordan, and Christina Ortimeier-Hooper. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010. 165-187. Print.
Uppal, Priscilla. “Both Sides of the Desk: Experiencing Creative Writing Lore as a Student and as a Professor.” Can It Really Be Taught: Resisting Lore in Creative Writing Pedagogy Ed. Kelly Ritter and Stephanie Vanderslice. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook Heinemann, 2007. 46-54. Print.