Kathi R. Griffin, Instructor of English and Director of the Richard Wright Center for Writing, Rhetoric, and Research – Jackson State University

During our first discussion of a reading in Comp I this fall, a student asserted, “I’m entitled to my opinion!” and his classmates whipped their heads in my direction: “Yes, you are,” I said, and they relaxed, “but,” I added, “in the academic world, more is required.”

While the simple word more hides a complexity of skills, the word academic hides a complexity of definitions. For many students, the word academic itself may present a problem.

In the third week of class, a student asked, “When do we get a break?” I replied, “In November.” Another student asked, “You mean we have to read and write for every class?” “Yep.” After a short pause, I asked, “Why don’t you think you should read and write for every class? We only meet twice a week.”

The most engaged response this semester bursts forth from across the room: “I hate to read,” “I hate to write,” “I hate to read and write.” And I am thinking, “for school,” because many students are sneaking to read and write on their phones! When I asked, “Why are you in college then?” I got a few furrowed brows, but I also got an equally energetic response, “To get a good job.” It’s not necessarily that they hate to read and write; it seems more likely that they hate to read and write for school. They have trouble seeing the purpose for what they are being asked to read and write.

At this early stage in their academic careers, academic seems to mean “not practical; not directly useful; conforming to rules and standards” – rather than entering a “learned or scholarly” community. They know about the parts of an essay and the steps to produce one, but they remain focused on the text as product rather than as a means for engaging in a larger conversation. In addition, their reading for school has primarily been for information, so being asked to read for a different purpose also confuses them. Before they can write an “academic argument,” however, they must learn to read critically, to critique, to analyze. As I try to persuade them, to engage them, to inform them, to challenge them in a variety of ways, I cannot always be sure the struggle is worth it.

But it is. This past week I was asked to address a group of first-semester graduate students on “writing in graduate school,” and a former student asked, “How do I only write 5 pages when I have 10 already written?” How different that is from where he began just a few semesters ago. Laughing he said, “Yeah, I used to struggle to fill the page limit, and now I have too much to say.” All I could do was smile and remind him about focusing on the purpose for his argument – and, of course, invite him to make an appointment in the writing center.

In the session on “Academic Argument,” Amber and I will share strategies for engaging students as they learn to read and write academic arguments and discuss related issues, such as how we might use technology to help us in the process of engaging students.

See you Friday!

Amber Nichols-Buckley, Instructor of Writing 100/101, Department of Writing and Rhetoric, University of Mississippi

Academic writing is often described as a kind of conversation…This metaphor of writing as conversation has several strengths.  It highlights the social aspects of intellectual work, the ways in which academic writing responds to the texts and ideas of others.  It suggests that the goal of such writing is not to have the final word on a subject, to bring the discussion to a close, but to push it forward, to say something new, something that seems to call for further talk or writing…You don’t win a conversation, you add to it, push it ahead, keep it going, “put your oar in,” and maybe even sometimes redirect or divert the flow of talk.  But you rarely win over a person you are speaking with by first refuting what she or he has just said.  The arts of conversation are subtler than those of debate; they join our need to articulate the differences among us with our need to keep talking with one another.

-“Forwarding,” Rewriting:  How to do Things with Texts, Joseph Harris

I have a three year old daughter named Jane.  Jane loves to win.  Whether it’s a race to the potty or a flower drawing contest, she demands the top spot.  In fact, the only time my husband and I witness the infamous toddler tantrum is when our Jane loses a “battle.”  And, of course, as parents we have to teach her how to deal with loss.  How to take something from it—a lesson, a new way of thought, a wrinkle of experience to use the next time a “battle” occurs.

Becoming a parent has given me so much insight into why my students think the way they do.  We live in a society where winning is everything.  To quote the famous Ricky Bobby, in today’s world, “If you’re not first, you’re last.”  But what has this obsession with winning done to our ability to engage in meaningful discourse about the world?

In Joseph Harris’ words, “A dialogue is not a debate.  You don’t win a conversation.”  How do we teach our students that to think academically, they must think conversationally?  To write an academic argument, they must understand all facets of that argument (even the dreadful “other side”).  They must question the authority of the opposing view, sure, but more importantly, they must question their own authority.  So much of engaging in academic discourse is putting our own vanity aside and realizing that we, in fact, could be wrong.  That we can lose.  And through this loss, we can push ourselves to find the better stance, to further our own beliefs, to engage in new and exciting ways, to find solutions even.  To realize that losing is really winning.  This is what I want to encourage, at home, at school, even within myself.

This is why I believe that the best kinds of learning can happen in composition courses.  When we teach students to argue, we teach them to become a part of the conversation.  Not dominating it.  Not sitting back and letting others control it.  But entering it, without fear of rejection or fear of being wrong.  I worry that we’ve conditioned students to win so much in their young lives that we’ve inhibited their ability to enter the conversation.  Hopefully through continued dialogue with peers, such as the opportunity to join this conversation at the Transitioning symposium, we will find more ways to help students explore the challenge and the benefits of losing.

Lisa Reid, English Dept. Chair/Senior English Teacher, St. Aloysius High School

Well, I thought I had it right.

Over the years, I have worked furiously to set up an effective peer response system for my senior English students. I failed miserably at my early attempts, but bolstered by ideas from Transitioning workshops, I persevered. In the last year I had come to consider my system refined enough that students at all levels could benefit from – and maybe even enjoy – the interaction with their peers.

So imagine my letdown a few weeks ago when I introduced all my high school classes – English IV, Honors English IV and AP Lit and Comp – to my peer resonse process. Although it went smoothly in AP, the outcome was not so good in either Honors or English IV. The six-student Honors class is simply too small for much meaningful interaction, and when the process seemed to bog down in English IV, our post mortem diagnosis revealed the main problem: the groups of four (perfect in years past) were simply too large. A few other issues also reared their ugly heads.

So I will continue to reassess and tweak, and at the Transitioning workshop, troll for some new ideas about how others adapt their peer response programs to different situations. I will not be so confident of myself in the future, but I am confident that my colleagues will have some words of wisdom for me.

Mike Schwartz, English Teacher, Independence High School

I think that the primary concern for high school English teachers is how to meet the new common core standards with the renewed emphasis on written expression.  For years, the primary focus of English instruction was to teach the specific skills that we knew would be assessed on the SAT multiple choice test, no more and no less.  This has left gaps in the skill set that high school writers need to be able to not only meet the common core standard evaluations, but also to be successful college writers.   This emphasis must begin at a much earlier stage in their writing instruction.

Teachers are now faced with “catching up” students who do not know how to used outside source material, let alone cite those sources.  Our students do not know how to integrate multiple sources to support a claim, and they need the confidence to establish a claim in the first place.  I see struggles for the next three to five years in getting our students to the point where the not only can express themselves coherently as they provide evidence to prove their claims, but also the ability to address complex issues clearly understanding that they have something to say.

Gretchen Bunde, Instructor, University of Mississippi Department of Writing and Rhetoric

I guess I’m supposed to avoid favoritism in the classroom.  But I can’t help it–I love analysis.  As a student, it was my favorite type of writing.  I enjoy analyzing an author’s choices, whether they occur in the form of precise diction, expertly developed ethos, or strong organizational choices.  Now, analysis is my favorite to teach.  In class, my students and I can analyze print advertisements, commercials, songs, videos . . . the possibilities are both endless and fun.  I find that students are engaged in class and contribute more readily when we analyze a visual text together.

My challenge, though, is helping students transfer that sense of fun to the more traditional texts they may analyze in a college setting.  How can I show them the subtle joy of noticing an author’s choices?  How can I help them experience the similar joy of deliberately making those choices as authors?

Dena Holley, Secondary English Teacher, Pontotoc High School

Often times, high school teachers face two challenges in the writing realm. Students cannot transition to college writing when they have not yet transitioned to the high school writing level. I was sorely disappointed when I saw the rough drafts of my students’ research papers. Unfortunately, I assumed they knew, as eleventh graders, how to collect sources, format outlines, and write. I thought I would be teaching them how to write annotated bibliographies, use parenthetical citations, and work on building more complex sentences and transitions.

The weekend was long and grueling, but I finally cut my losses and decided to start over…completely over. Fortunately, a wise teacher once imparted her wisdom to me in my first year of teaching. “Never keep dragging the cart forward when the wheels are broken or missing altogether.” -Juanita Head (Veteran/Mentor Teacher Okolona, MS). Monday we began with finding appropriate sources as a class. I did one, they did one, I checked it, and put the ones who got it with the ones who still needed direction. We did this all the way through the week with every step of the researching process.

Upon reflection, I do not feel behind in my plans, as I thought I would feel. The students’ reactions to my starting over helped with that. They were actually very appreciative of the extra time I took to walk them through the basics, and never complained about the extra, tedious work we were doing. In fact, it became a learning experience for all of us. I learned that nothing is wrong in starting over…and to have patience, lots of patience. My struggling students are now caught up to where they need to be. My future educator students received hands on teaching experience working with the peers that were struggling. We all learned the value of taking the time to do things right and to work as a team.

Thanks to my mentor teacher, I took the time to mend the wheels. The cart is a little bumpy, but it is moving forward with much more ease.

“Without a struggle, there can be no progress.” – Frederick Douglass

Rachel Johnson, Writing Center Director and Writing Instructor, University of Mississippi Tupelo

I’ll go ahead and put this out there. I am a total nerd. That’s right: Star Trek, gadgetry, ironic vintage décor, a pencil sharpener collection… the whole shebang. But, not all of my geekery turns to frivolous pursuits; I do have some marketable hobbies. One of those has always been word history and origins. This started as games I played in the car with my dad on road trips (read: “Whoever gets the most words with the same root gets sour gummy worms at the next exit!”), led to my mild success with the GRE verbal section (read: VERY mild), and grew into a fascination with language and cultural studies in graduate school.

Recently, through a tangled web of Facebook and Twitter recommendations, I stumbled upon John Patrick Leary’s cool blog series called Keywords for the Age of Austerity in which he examines “vocabulary words” of inequality, and, you guessed it, I’ve been nerding out ever since. In his series, he chooses one word, generally a buzz word of some kind (e.g. innovation), and examines it closely for both its productive and sinister qualities in current and former usage. Leary focuses mostly on the language of politics and the economy, but, as I explored his blogs, I couldn’t help thinking about all of our composition/writing buzzwords.

When I started planning my involvement in the “Transitioning to College Writing Symposium,” I kept encountering “vocabulary words.” They are words we all know: assessment, evaluation, writing skills, literacy, numeracy…

*pauses to take a breath*

…teacher-student relationships, intervention(s), readiness, cognitive skills and habits, learning styles, and on and on.

Straying from the task at hand, I got a little curious about the longevity and usage of these words and used a cool little gadget that Leary recommends called the Google “Ngram Viewer” to learn more about them. The Ngram Viewer is a search engine that searches for a particular word or phrase in a database of millions of books from the year 1500 to the present. Basically, it helps you see when a particular word or phrase gained some traction in publication by plotting that information on a nifty little graph.

Here are just a few charts of our buzz words:

Writing Across the Curriculum

College Readiness

Assessment

Literacy

Educational Interventions

Writing Instruction

There are a number of notable observations one could make here, ahem… ASSESSMENT… *cough*, but the term I feel particularly connected to as an instructor and a presenter/attendee of the symposium is “college readiness.” According to the almighty Google, college readiness didn’t seem to get a whole lot of attention until the mid-1960s, saw a mild decline, and has since had a resurgence of popularity. Like all buzz words/phrases, the meaning of “college readiness” seems at once both easy to grasp (ready for college) and very difficult to quantify (insert list of a thousand different academic, emotional, physical, and cognitive skills/practices).

In an effort to solve the riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma that is the term “college readiness,” I thought I would do a brief vocabulary study of my own. So, I went to the mother of all dictionaries, the Oxford English Dictionary. This didn’t immediately help because the OED has four different definitions for “readiness,” two of which have sub-definitions. But, after examining these definitions a bit closer, I decided there is something to learn (or more appropriately, questions to be asked) from the evolution of the word’s meaning.

The first and most current set of meanings is what I and, I suspect, most of you associate with readiness: “the condition or fact of being ready or fully prepared” and “the condition of being able or prepared to learn.” The second of these really caught my attention. Readiness is a state of being? A condition? A frame of mind? Not just a set of skills? This certainly matches up with my classroom experience. The students that I see succeeding with college writing tend to be motivated and driven even if they aren’t necessarily prepared skill-wise for my class. Sometimes the students coming from the best schools with the best background lack the frame of mind to stay on top of their work. Then again, it is just as likely that those who are prepared with the right set of skills are less likely to struggle with issues of motivation in the face of failure.

Readiness hasn’t always been synonymous with preparedness. Nope. In fact, its older and more rare meanings interestingly relate to speed: “the quality of being prompt or quick in action, performance, expression” and “the quickness or ease with which something occurs or is done.” Has our version of readiness retained any echo of this emphasis on speed and quickness? Do we want students to not only be prepared, but also quick to adapt? Quick to learn or grow? If so, how do we teach this? Adaptability seems more like a personality trait or perhaps something that is perfected over a long period of time. Does this mean that college readiness training starts in elementary education? Is it more of a social or intellectual matter?

Quickness aside, a third meaning takes the form of “prompt compliance, willingness.” I can certainly find positivity and relevance in this definition in that students who are willing to try new things and take a few leaps seem to do well at the college level. Those that spend a lot of time focused on the rules, formatting, or safe formulaic answers for writing that they’ve relied on in the past are at a disadvantage in the college classroom. I’ll say though, that the word “compliance” troubled me. Doesn’t compliance suggest bending to the will of another? Performing something as a function of the rules or norms of a system? Is college readiness just about doing what we as instructors say? I’ll be the first to admit that I structure my class around my own training and ideas related to teaching and writing. These ideas and training surely dictate my evaluation criteria. Are we sending students conflicting messages about thinking outside of the box and simultaneously following the rules?

*Sigh* To be honest, I’m not sure that my vocabulary study has left me with any answers about what college readiness actually means or should mean. But, I, like many of you, teach my students that the best place to start with research, writing, and ideas that matter is with a question. So… since I’ve asked, I don’t know, eighteen… maybe we are in a good place. I hope the symposium gives us the space to consider these questions, nerd out together, and find what “Transitioning to College Writing” and all its many buzzwords mean for our students and ourselves.

Deborah Kehoe, English Instructor & Writing Center Director, Northeast Community College

Still Transitioning

I am looking forward once again to attending this fine event where Mississippi writing teachers gather to commune and confer about the responsibilities and challenges we all face, challenges that change, and those that never seem to go away. I am especially happy to be on the program as a facilitator with Wendy Goldberg and Mike Schwartz of the Conversation Corner on academic writing. I have been teaching writing since I was a wet-behind-the-ears graduate student over 30 years ago. I know what can happen to a person who does something so all-consuming (if done full-heartedly, the only way I know how to do anything I care about) for that long: acedia, close-mindedness, the enemies of a fruitful late career.

I also know the narrow-mindedness of youth and the unfortunate conviction that only the new has value. I wish I had not been that sort of person years ago and that I had had a more discerning, more gracious, attitude in my work. I wish it had taken less time for me to become a teacher who listens genuinely to others and reflects honestly upon herself. I cannot re-paint what then I was all those years ago, but now, I resolve almost daily to acknowledge both the spirit of the times and the wisdom of the ages.

While I trust and treasure the experience that sustain me in the classroom and which I bring to this symposium, I am more pleased with my enduring curiosity about what I will learn this time around, perhaps from those who represent the next 30 years of writing instruction in Mississippi.