Victoria Bryan, an online instructor for the Center for Writing and Rhetoric, submitted this video about student engagement and building community in the online college classroom.
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For this year’s Transitioning to College Writing Symposium, we interviewed writing teachers and writing students about what it means to move between high school, college, and university writing. We heard from a variety if perspectives, and it helped us understand the diversity and richness of teaching and learning writing here in Mississippi.
You can watch both videos below. To turn on closed captions, click the “CC” icon once the video starts playing. These videos are also available in HD/1080p if you want a higher quality picture.
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On behalf of all of us in the Center for Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Mississippi, welcome to everyone attending this year’s Transitioning to College Writing Symposium! As the coordinator of the Symposium, I am privileged to have been working for the past six months or more with fellow writing teachers here in Mississippi to develop a program that offers as many opportunities for conversation, discussion, and learning about writing instruction as possible in just a day and a half of roundtable and workshop sessions.
The need for an event like the Transitioning to College Writing Symposium is timely, given the full integration of the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) now taking place in our public schools. We are privileged to host writing teachers from across Mississippi who have or are willing to embrace the opportunity and potential embedded with the Common Core Standards to help their students learn more effective ways of analyzing non-fiction writing, how to examine and craft evidence-based arguments, and how to become more professional in the writing they do. At the same time, they are passionate about retaining the value of close reading, of textual analysis and interpretation, and of engaging with values and ideas that push beyond the sometimes narrow and prejudiced-based enculturation their students may have received in their home communities. They want to share their love of reading stimulating, challenging literature and talking about the ideas generated by such reading with their students, using both traditional and new texts to do so. They want to foster in their students the awareness that writing actually supports learning, so in learning to write well, students are also writing to learn. They want to share their own ideas, learn from others ideas, and engage in helping other writing teachers understand and learn about the landscape where writing instruction takes place. It is all of this – and more! – that our annual Symposium seeks to encourage and provide a safe space for all of us to talk about and share our work.
We are gearing up this year for more attendees than ever. We have been privileged to receive partial funding for this year’s Symposium from the Mississippi Humanities Council, and thus our registration is free and open to the public. We continue this year to include as much input from high school and 2 and 4 year writing teachers: our program was developed by more than 24 writing teachers from K-16 settings! Also as in past years, we also have the opportunity to learn from experienced writing teachers and writing studies scholars.
We will learn from one of our region’s own, Laura Hammons, an English teacher from Hinds Community College. For many years, Hammons has been exploring ways to engage students in writing; she also draws on the resources of the Two-Year College Association (TYCA), which she helped found, in helping community colleges provide a solid learning experience for their students to help them in their transition to the writing they will do as juniors and seniors in four-year colleges. We also have as visiting scholar Dr. Pamela Childers, Professor Emerita of The McCallie School in Chattanooga. In addition to her expertise in the area of Writing Across the Curriculum (and in designing assignments and assessment for such work), Professor Childers has for years been a guiding light in the field of secondary school writing centers. She will present workshops on planning and setting up writing centers, and she will also talk to us about writing across the curriculum on both Friday and Saturday.
We continue to support the development of high school writing centers. At our first Transitioning to Writing Symposium, Mississippi writing teachers put onto their “needs and wishes” list something that we here at Ole Miss esteem: peer-staffed Writing Centers! There are now writing centers active in both private and public schools settings – Jason Jones of Strayhorn High School in Tate County has opened the Strayhorn HS Writing Center along with 8 or more high school students as tutors, and Lisa Whitney of Jackson Prep has launched The Writer’s Block, along with 14 high school seniors! They are both bringing some of their tutors with them to this year’s symposium.
We in the CWR are thrilled to see that our colleagues in high schools and community colleges also recognize the value of their students having access to writing centers, and from our work in writing center studies, we realize that students working with fellow students improves not just the paper or writing project, but improves the writing abilities and confidence of the writer. Improved writing leads to better grades, which in turn leads to increased motivation and retention among our students. Each year since that first Symposium, we have featured a strand in the program specifically for encouraging the development and implementation of writing centers, and this year is no exception. Dr. Pamela Childers will be leading sessions on Friday that specifically address planning, and then implementing, high school writing centers. Additionally, her afternoon writing workshop will incorporate how to plan for effective partnerships between secondary and post-secondary schools so that growth and support for new writing centers is part of the implementation of such writerly spaces.
As I contemplate the arrival of this year’s Transitioning to College Writing Symposium, I think how fortunate Mississippi is to have such dedicated and innovative writing teachers! This past summer, I was part of the University’s Writing Project Summer Institute, and we worked with teachers from across the state who wanted to improve their delivery of writing instruction. Teachers from across and around our state are very interested in helping our students succeed in career and college. With the implementation of the Common Core Standards, we will see an increased (and increasing) emphasis on writing in all subjects. Thus, we are most fortunate this fall to have sessions and workshops that will help us work with students across the curriculum to improve their critical reading and writing skills. We hope you are among those we meet this weekend!
Alice Myatt, 2013 Transitioning to College Writing Program Director
One of the great benefits of making your way through the world with writing is the view it affords of a range of disciplines – I have often commented that writing, editing, and the teaching and mentoring of writing have provided me a rich life and no money!
However, one of the dirty secrets of the professional world is the fact that even the most quantitatively based fields, math and science, deliver funding for research through prose. Data is important across disciplines and domains – literature is a modeled human experience, after all, a qualitative exposure to a mapped understanding of contradictory experience – but it is insufficient to the task of its own interpretation. We live in a world in which the polymer chemist cannot understand what the atmospheric chemist is doing without what we would call narrative and description (and all the analyses that underlie them!).
A great portion of our work at this year’s Transitioning to College Writing will be on the topic of Writing Across the Curriculum. I was one of those 80’s era grad students in literature – re-entry even then from work with scientists and engineers – who travelled campuses and canvassed departments with the now obvious, “Please provide us with an excellent, an average, and a poor paper from one of your classes.” What amazed me was not that the historian did not agree with the linguist, but that the physicist did not agree with the physicist!
Some of us are generalists, some have specialized in an area of expertise, some of us are still finding our way as novice writers, teachers, and writing teachers. We bring to our work a command of prose, an understanding of grammar, analytical skills, and approaches that work today and not tomorrow, that work in the 8 o’clock class, but not the 9 o’clock one. We stare at some extraordinary phrase, couched amidst a clutter of almost unreadable magnitude. We read it, and go back to the phrase to see where to tease out the potential to transform. We don’t always find it, but it is always there, and if we work together, one of us can find it.
The words function and dynamic have become banal from overuse – but the concepts they signal are vital in composition. Does it work? Does it work with who we are as teachers? Does it generate engagement and collaboration? How do students model its impact? How do our peers model its impact? That is the test of every writing assignment .
We don’t measure by oscilloscope. We don’t need that sort of measurement for our work with peers. We read, analyze, write. That latterly artifact changes lives other than our own, and ours among them. Hold your head up high in those collaborative groups – when they start waving their hands, you’ll have the word on your side.
-Jo Anne Fordham
“This is boring.” “This is stupid.” “I shouldn’t have to take this class. It’s pointless. I’m a good writer!” “I hate to write.” “I hate to read AND write.”
Having been in first-year college composition classrooms for twenty years, I have heard students’ distancing comments in halls, coming into and leaving classrooms, and I have heard them in the classroom and in journals when I have invited student feedback on reading or writing assignments. During summer “College Writing” workshops, I also heard rising juniors and seniors share their fears about writing in college. Might “boring” and “stupid” be interpreted as “scary”? Of looking stupid?
In 2010, I found an article entitled “Bullshit in Academic Writing,” in which Peter Smagorinsky et al. (2010) share “one high school senior’s process of academic bullshitting” (p. 368), and I was immediately intrigued. After the authors define “bullshit,” they explain that “although it is known as a common phenomenon in academic speech and writing, it has rarely been the subject of empirical research” (p. 368), and they reference Macrorie’s 1970 term “Engfish: the spuriously elevated language seemingly endemic to school writing” (qtd. in Smagorinksy et al., 2010, p. 369). While students’ language may reveal a lack of engagement, it is, unfortunately, nothing new and may mean their expectations have achieved a level of carefully honed disengagement. But why?
I took the article and my question to class and asked my students. I held up the journal, Research in the Teaching of English, a serious peer-reviewed journal in my field, I explained, and I read them the title of the article. Of course, they laughed as sideways glances shot around the room. I asked if they knew what the authors meant. They erupted, “Yes!” And they explained, and I asked, “Have you ever written bullshit?” (Remember, this is in a college classroom, not high school.) Again, but a bit sheepishly, they replied, “Yes.” When I asked, “Why?” I got an earful: boring, stupid, pointless assignments. Writing had become something, anything, just to get the task done, to please a teacher or get a passing grade because “I didn’t care about the topic.” Writing in school had become pointless, an act of bullshitting. Why? How might we build, design, revise “assignments” with a point, one that students can see, one they can relate to?
All of us convening on this website, considering or planning to attend the TCW Symposium this weekend (even if we don’t have the time or can’t get the funding) care about students. But are we engaged as teachers? What does “engaged” mean? We want to reach our students, to engage them, but how? And high school teachers have more restrictions in the classroom and in the curriculum than college teachers, yet we each must negotiate institutional expectations, meet our students where they are, and try to move them forward, to help them be more effective, more engaged readers, writers – people. Do we know what students expect when they walk into our classrooms? How might we acknowledge – and change – their expectations?
As a composition instructor and a writing center director, I have heard – like a student mantra – “I hate to write.” “Really,” I often respond, “that’s not unusual. But you text, tweet, Facebook, yes?” (Is “Facebook” a verb yet?) “Yes, but that’s different,” they explain. “How?” I ask.
Then we engage in a conversation – and I ask them to write. Later I ask, “What was your worst writing experience?” And they write. And I ask, “What was your best writing experience?” (Sadly, some explain that they have never had a good writing experience. And we talk.) Then we compare and contrast their bad and good writing experiences, looking for similarities and differences, for what elicits bullshit. It is enlightening – for them and for me.
This approach may seem limited in its usefulness, but it has helped me at the beginning of the last several semesters. After years of conditioning, feeling that their perspectives rarely matter, students will not engage with one simple “shot” of engagement. It has to become a habit of mind. It is exhausting for me, but when students do begin to “come around,” usually around midterm or after, sometimes not until after they leave my class and come back to tell me, the work was worth it. This is why we need to come together, to share ideas, to invigorate our teaching, to engage among ourselves.
See you in Oxford!
-Kathi R. Griffin, Jackson State University
Reference
Smagorinsky, P., Daigle, E. A., O’Donnell-Allen, C. & Bynum, S. (2010). “Bullshit in Academic Writing: A Protocol Analysis of a High School Senior’s Process of Interpreting Much Ado About Nothing.” Research in the Teaching of English 44(4) May: 368-405.
You know those teacher conversations? The ones that begin with “Gosh, I don’t know what’s gotten into so-and-so,” or maybe “His grades have really dropped.” I listen to teachers in the lounge commiserate about how to motivate our students. As high school teachers, we fight a battle, or maybe more accurately, wage a war, against hormones and extracurricular sports; against apathy and electronics; against short attention spans and sometimes less than thrilling subjects (Pronoun/ Antecedent agreement, anyone?).
But here’s the difference: I know why my students’ grades have dropped. I am not a psychic or a counselor. I teach them to write. I teach them to express themselves. As a result, they express themselves to me. And so I know.
I teach sophomore English at Lamar School, a private college prep school in Meridian. Through my ten years of teaching various grades, I have developed a curriculum that is writing intensive. We read literature and respond. I love reading my students’ opinions on Hector’s gripping death at the hands of Achilles in The Iliad. I love reading their responses to Beowulf’s bravery as he battles Grendel in the fiery depths of that gruesome creature’s lair. Seeing my students inspired to read and write about these works of literature that meant so much to me…well, the feeling defies description. It’s why I became a teacher. Or so I thought.
My students also work tirelessly (or so they claim) writing personal narratives on a broadly defined topic. This is the best way I have found for them to apply their grammar skills (that pesky pronoun/ antecedent stuff) and to develop their vocabulary (I have forbidden them to use linking verbs. Many tears are shed over that one, I assure you). Our students at Lamar are all college bound, and I want to prepare them for the inevitable onslaught of college entrance essays. So I lecture tirelessly (or so I claim) about the pedagogical theory behind writing these essays. And then came the essay that changed it all.
The broad topic was forgiveness: I threw Diogenes’s famous quotation about “forgiveness is better than revenge” as a stepping off point. I read through class after class, marking comma splices and misplaced modifiers. One boy, 15 years old nonetheless, wrote about his the complicated experiences he faced following his father’s death. Prior to reading this essay, I really enjoyed teaching this child; he is very bright and studious. He seems happy and popular with his peers, but this glimpse behind his sophomore façade almost broke my heart. But what saved my heart is…that he chose to share this with me, knowing I would read the content as well as the grammar. Of course, I can’t openly acknowledge what he told me; after all, he does have his teenage image to protect. But tacitly, we both know. I think we were both changed: his ability to write this story was obviously cathartic. I experienced a renewed compassion not only for him, but also for all my students who struggle behind their carefully crafted exteriors.
It is all because of writing.
And so I know.
– Mary Wilson, Lamar School
In answer to Bob’s initial questions (In our current models of writing assessment, both high school and postsecondary, do we measure achievement, or learning? Is there a way to measure both?), I’d say we primarily measure achievement in the form of a finished document. We break these down and assess them categorically, and assign a grade based on how well each student has executed each aspect of an assignment. But I don’t think it’s really possible to engage in the complex task that is writing, which requires so many steps to complete, without learning a great deal in the process, including, perhaps, how to do it better next time.
That said, I think reflection is a great way to measure learning. I have found both e-portfolios and student evaluations useful in gauging what aspects of a course were the most effective and instructive. Yes, it’s self-reporting, which is always problematic because it is inexact and subject to bias, but even so, I think it can provide some valuable data regarding what students feel they have learned to do in a given writing course. Specifically, students will often express gratitude and pride at having mastered a task they initially dreaded, such as the correct rendering of APA-style documentation, the structure of a literature review, or the formulation of primary research.
I have taught sophomore level courses for some time, and so my students experience a different sort of transition. They often come to advanced writing courses after a long and deliberate hiatus from first-year writing, and are incredibly insecure about their writing abilities despite having completed much of the required curriculum. My task as a writing teacher has always been to coax students out of this thinking by showing them how to write in stages. I am always amazed to hear many students say that their previous writing experiences focused entirely on the finished product, but gave them very little instruction regarding how to generate and assemble content that would lead to a completed assignment. This is always something I enjoy showing them, as it dispels so many fears and shows students that they are, in fact, quite capable writers.
Also, I think what students learn in our courses are often taken with them into a wide variety of situations, from their major courses and even into their eventual chosen professions. One of the chief characteristics of what we teach—and what can sometimes make it difficult to assess our successes as teachers—is that the skills first learned in our writing classrooms have a tendency to develop, to self-perpetuate and grow as they are repeatedly used by our former students long after they have left us.
I want to comment on something that used to obsess me when I was a younger teacher. I wanted to be a great teacher. Yep, nothing less.
Now that I have almost 20 years behind me, I see that great teachers cannot exist in our time.
My great teachers smoked in front of the class and talked in oblique riddles. The greatest of them all, Dr. Bill Durrett, used to say, “Now what is the word I have in my mind right now?” OMG, we all worked to match that word. One time I did just that. He said, “I am thinking about what being Victorian would mean to most people and have one word in mind.” I said “prude” out loud. I was right. I was 19 and right. Oh, how glorious. We all know that doing this is a huge pedagogical no-no.
My great teachers took us to their houses for dinners. We can’t do that safely now. What would happen if one of them had an accident? We would never escape the lawsuits. So all the staring I did at their artwork and books—my students can do this only if I post pictures.
We drank with our teachers. What can I even say about that? Goodbye to a job, that’s for sure.
One great teacher even taught me to play poker. Even mentioning this 30+-year-old memory to an administrator at my school brought a rebuke.
My great teachers asked me great questions in the hall. Dr. Randy Patterson said, “So, Miss Hammons, are you a Democrat?” My affirmative answer got me a job in his office in later years, which led to another job in Washington, which led to traveling all over the country—heady stuff for a naïve idealist. But what would I have become without Randy? I now tell my students that admitting to being a Democrat is akin to admitting to being a Communist when I was in school. They laugh but take notice.
Ok, now you’re saying that teachers still talk to students in the hall, still invite them to dinner, still drink a beer with them at local bars when all is legal. Sure you do.
I don’t. Can’t. Wouldn’t. I am not brave, but I have reason. I have been eye to eye with a petty, abusive system. I know the consequences.
Besides, most of us don’t have time to talk in the hall. We have at least 30 students to hustle out of the classroom, papers to retrieve, laptops to put in the cart, and another bunch of students on their way inside the room.
My great teachers were rushing 15-20 students into and out of their comp classes. I just heard of a teacher in South Mississippi who has seven classes and 350 students. She can’t worry about being a great teacher; she’s busy surviving.
Now I know that I can settle for being a good teacher and that being a good teacher is, indeed, not settling. Some days I am even a very good teacher. Today was a very good day. In American Lit I, I tied in a family story about my alcoholic relatives with a paragraph about a profane young man in Bradford’s history to illustrate how cheap human life was, even later into the 20th Century. In Comp II, we went over some essays again and edited the smack out of some so-so paragraphs. They kept nodding to the others in their groups and saying, “I told you that needed changing.” Good, good day.
I am still not ok for letting go of the great dream. It’s just that since I relinquished it, I have become a better teacher. I concentrate more on what they can do, instead of what I want them to do. Consequently, I am nicer, calmer. Don’t ask me why. Maybe it’s aging. Maybe I am finally listening.
“A mouse sat under a tree. He was reading a book.”
– Arnold Lobel
As teachers of writing, we read lots of papers. Lots, and lots, and lots of papers. Usually I start off very enthusiastic about the whole thing, excited to see how far they have progressed since I last saw a draft or spoke with them about their work. About a quarter of the way into the stack of files, I start to lose steam, thinking about all the papers I have left to grade and realizing that I have gotten bogged down in reading and commenting. Somehow I find the umph to keep going – I need to get these students’ papers back to them, with comments that will help them learn more about writing, all in a reasonable amount of time.
Nothing stymies this process more than discovering, on paper three or four, that many students have written basically the same paper. Sometimes prompts that seem promising just don’t produce the kind of variety and compelling thinking and writing I imagine that they will inspire. And sometimes prompts lead to really heartbreaking personal narratives that are very difficult to read with a critical eye – how can I give a paper a C when it discusses a student’s experience with a parent’s terminal cancer or a similarly devastating event? How can I grade, at the same time and according to the same standards, these papers about personal tragedies and those where students discuss playing in (or cheering at) a high school football game as the biggest event in their lives? I close my laptop in frustration and put off grading for another day.
Because of the problems posed by just such personal narratives, I decided to try the literacy narrative and I have grown to love the assignment. Do I sometimes get a bunch of papers about how students’ parents used to read to them at bedtime? Yes, I do, and sometimes they are repetitive. But I also get incredible narratives about overcoming learning disabilities, about being the strongest (or weakest) reader in a class, about teachers who helped them to have the confidence to read out loud, about the first book they read all by themselves, about the cultural difference an international student noticed when he did not have this seemingly ubiquitous experience of bedtime stories with his parents, about learning to write so a young man could communicate directly with his deployed father.
These literacy narratives give me a window into my students’ experiences leading up to what can be a scary class for them: their first college-level writing course. I can see the baggage they carry, often pronouncing themselves “bad writers” here (if not on the first day of class). I can see the strengths they may or may not realize they have as writers. The literacy narrative helps me to figure out who my students are and the route they have taken into my writing course – it also helps them to see what attitudes and experiences they bring with them. And though the experiences are different and sometimes painful to the students, I feel much better equipped to grade their writing in these essays than in more general personal narratives.
I have another, more personal reason for embracing the literacy narrative: I am a mom. I have two beautiful daughters – Debbie, who is five and just started kindergarten, and Clara, who is two. Both girls love story time; Debbie knows her letters and sounds and is working on sight words and starting to blend sounds. She is learning to write more and more words every day. As the mother of two girls who are learning to love books, to love reading, to write (or pretend to write), I am in the thick of my girls’ own literacy development. It is such an exciting time; as someone who has spent much of my life with a book in hand, I am anxious to pass my love of reading and writing on to my girls.
One of our favorite stories to read together is Mouse Soup by Arnold Lobel. As a writing teacher with a background in literature, I always think about the frame (a mouse fools a weasel into releasing him by telling him he needs stories to make his mouse soup taste really good) and the thematic similarities among the stories the mouse tells; as a yoga practitioner, I think about the influence of perspective on one’s happiness in the “Two Large Stones” story, and on and on. Meanwhile, Debbie giggles because the weasel is fooled by the mouse and because “Ewww – yuck! The old lady mouse is going to kiss the police mouse!” and Clara snuggles up to me and comments that the little mouse in the picture is a baby mouse. The story ends with the mouse escaping: “The mouse hurried to his safe home. He lit the fire, he ate his supper, and he finished reading his book” (62-64). Is there a better way to end a day?
My students are somewhere between the girls and me in terms of literacy development. When I read their literacy narratives, my personal and professional lives come together in interesting and inspiring ways and I am compelled to keep reading and responding to their writing.
Briana McCoy
How many pages does this have to be????
I teach three sections of ninth grade English at Lamar School in Meridian. I love teaching freshmen; they are so unsure of this whole high school thing and are, for the most part, pretty eager to please. Translation: the perfect guinea pigs for me! Our school, like most, stresses writing. The students begin writing in kindergarten and literally journal their way through lower elementary, report their way through upper elementary, narrate through middle school, and analyze through their senior year. So the kids in ninth grade are in transition, to say the least. I try to ease them into the analytical world of high school by leaving the objective tests behind and moving into more and more discussion questions to challenge them. At the beginning of the year, I invariably get the same questions during tests; you know the ones, “Is this enough?” “How much will it count off if this is all I write?” “Will you look at this and tell me if I answered the question?” We are a college preparatory school, and I know these children have been pushed academically for at least ten years by the time they get to me….but many of them still want to do the least amount required, and be done with it. Or do they? Maybe it is this same academic pressure that urges them to make sure the answer is “just right,” or at the very least, “long enough.” Maybe, just maybe, being overachievers is keeping them from excelling!
I have taught all ages…from Pre-K to college sophomores, and I believe the ones who are most pressured to do well are the ones who heap that pressure on themselves. Often this trait of self-sufficiency is looked upon as a blessing; as the mother of one such child and the teacher of many, I tend to look upon it as a curse. What in the world does this have to do with writing? The same thing I attribute to the fact that my once-avid reader of all things readable now equates reading with school work. Translation: a tiresome chore. Gone are the days when my daughter would curl up with Harry Potter books 1-7 all hours of the night; now she spends her late-night, early-morning hours with AP Everything. I don’t make her do these things; she is the guilty one. I asked her last week why she felt she had to tackle this tremendous work load at school. Her answer: what else could I do? SO…reading becomes a chore, or at the very least, a forbidden luxury of days gone by. And writing is the same way…you want me to journal for self-reflection??? Who has time? Jot down some ideas for an amazing short story? You’ve got to be kidding. So this week I am giving a paper topic to my little guinea pigs…write a fictional story about whatever you want….of course there will be guidelines and a rubric (this is school, after all!), but hopefully, they might enjoy writing the papers…and sharing them. And maybe, just maybe, at some point during this year, they might learn to truly express themselves through their writing. Realistically, though, I am bracing myself for the first one who asks me how long it has to be….