Week of 3/24

Shaughnessy: “Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing”

Summary:
Basic writing students are presumed to have something wrong with them. The idea that these students must “ ‘catch up’ ” with others reinforces the idea that students, not teachers or institutions, are flawed and hence should “move” or change (311). Shaughnessy suggests that there are “important connections between the changes teachers undergo and the progress of their students” (312).

Using a four-stage scale, with each stage’s name functioning as a metaphor for the “center of the teacher’s emotional energy” (312), Shaughnessy claims that often the first question a teacher asks is what the consequences for him or her will be if s/he flunks the entire class. “Guarding the Tower” teaching leads students to focus on imitating academic language, and teachers become regimented and rigid, unable to adapt their teaching style to the particular class with which they are interacting.

Gradually, teachers enter into a phase in which they are able to see intelligence in students’ writing, and, intending to reach those students s/he believes can move forward to where standards dictate the students should be, the teacher moves into the “Converting the Natives” stage. At this stage, the teacher approaches students with the same condescending benevolence with which the US approaches “Third-World” countries and neither considers students as individuals nor relates what’s being taught to what students already know.

If students and teacher are lucky, one day it occurs to the teacher that what seems “simple and compelling” to him or her is not so for the students (314). This realization (enables? causes?) moves the teacher into the third stage of development: “Sounding the Depths.” In this stage, the teacher observes both students him- or herself and is better able to “mark a pedagogical path for teacher and students to follow” (314). This involves considering the logics and specific difficulties students are operating through as well as the sorts of questions one asks students and the sorts of comments one provides on their papers.

Finally, the teacher reaches a point when s/he “must make a decision that demands professional courage—the decision to remediate himself [sic], to become a student of new disciplines and of his students themselves in order to perceive both their difficulties and their incipient excellence” (317). Teachers who have reached this stage are able to assume that there are students in their classes who are superior to them and to recognize teaching composition as worthwhile and challenging work.

Musings:
While I’m almost always a little leery of attempts to schematize processes, I have known teachers who embodied each one of these stages, even though I have never been a student in a basic writing class. Nonetheless, Shaughnessy’s fundamental claim—that instructors’ attitudes and beliefs about students are crucially important factors in the tenor of a class, and hence in student attitudes toward particular classes and professors—seems perfectly obvious to those of us who sit in classrooms as students.

I had one professor who couldn’t adapt her teaching style to the class. I may have mentioned her before. She graded for form, grammar, and mechanics only. She was completely rule-bound—and she didn’t even know the rules! This prof gave me a D on a paper because she said the works cited page wasn’t in MLA style because it was double-spaced! Needless to say to those of you who know me, the D didn’t stand.

I’ve also had profs whose comments indicated that they saw intelligence in my writing (stage 2), but who never took the time to find out what I already knew. Given my peculiar psychology, these might be the most problematic profs of all. They accuse students of plagiarism because they cannot believe that students enter the room with knowledge. While they don’t mean to be insulting, they question students about the sources of their ideas in a way that indicates that they do not believe the ideas are the students’ own. I’ve actually had professors say to me that they understand that my husband teaches philosophy and that must be the source of my ideas! I mean, really! I have, in the past, rather quickly disabused them of the notion that Joel teaches me at home—as if having over 200 students per semester would allow him the time! As if Joel has any interest in the Continental philosophers who interest me! As if the only possible source of “knowledge” is the superior teacher! These professors assume that students are unsophisticated thinkers who need their guidance in order to find their places in the world. They mean well, and I think they sometimes want to mentor students in whom they see the spark of intelligence, but often mentoring means something akin to theoretical brainwashing, and if you know me, you know I’m not having any of that—from my husband or from a teacher or from anyone else.

Bartholomae: “Inventing the University”

Summary:
According to Bartholomae, students experience each writing assignment as learning to speak or to translate into a foreign language, which involves new and “peculiar ways of knowing” and the “various discourses” of the academy. Moreover, students must move between and among discourses, using appropriate voices. Barholomae calls this process “inventing the university” (624). Since students are required to speak in and inhabit these discourses before they have “ ‘learned’ ” the skills such speaking and inhabiting require, problems arise.

One problem is that it is difficult for basic writers to assume the authority academic discourse requires, and so they take on a teacherly voice and give directions, often using the second person. These “slips” (625) in voice are common, especially in the conclusions of basic writers’ essays, where basic writers often give advice and use “commonplaces” to convey meaning.

Bartholomae distinguishes between language that comes “through the writer” and that which comes “from the writer” (627). Language that comes through the writer is geared toward imitating or appropriating the language the writer believes the audience expects; language that comes through the writer reflects a writer “ ‘thinking and talking to himself [sic]’ ” (627). Students’ writing problems often arise out of their inability to negotiate the shift from “ ‘writer-based prose’ ” and “ ‘reader-based prose’ ”(627). Hence, teaching students to write with an audience in mind becomes particularly fraught.

Bartholomae also distinguishes between the person writing and the writing persona. The person writing must be located in a discourse before s/he can negotiate this transition by locating the writing persona in it. Since students have to be “equal to or more powerful than those” for whom they write in order to locate themselves in this way (628), teachers must be absolutely forthcoming about who they are, what their expectations are and where those expectations come from, and their interpretive practices. Moreover, Bartholomae says that the usual practice of providing students with imaginary audiences does nothing to address the problem of writing for someone who knows more that you do about writing. The central problem for writers is representing readers’ knowledge in their minds.

Bartholomae critiques analyses of the writing process that treat writing as though it is something “separate from the writer and his intentions” (630). He notes that writing is a product as well as a process and that it is in the product that the writer is located on the page. Citing Barthes, Bartholomae holds that the writer is “written by the languages available to him [sic]” (631). The “aha” moment is most likely when students figure out in which discourse they will locate themselves. One’s new ideas or discoveries authorize one to speak.

Knowledge-telling is a discourse in which students locate themselves to complete academic assignments as they learn the discourses in which professionals immerse themselves, according to Bartholomae. Teachers can make students aware of the conventions of the particular discourses of the discipline as a means of enabling them to more easily enter into them.

Next Bartholomae examines essays written by student writers to “see how, once entered, . . . language made or unmade the writer” (636). He supplies examples to illustrate a variety of entry points that different papers offer readers, and he shows how some confer more authority to their writers than others. He notes that the most successful writers made use of a tension between commonplaces that they defined as naïve and one that they defined as their own, more sophisticated view. The most important lesson for student writers, Bartholomae argues, is that what they actually put down on paper is more important than what they intended to write.

Difficulties with the conventions of the appropriate discourses have substantive as well as technical consequences, and progress will become apparent in revision. Bartholomae outlines levels of discursive development; students establish themselves as authorities within discourse in increasingly sophisticated ways. However, these levels “are not marked by corresponding levels in the type or frequency of error, at least not by the type or frequency of sentence-level error” (646). They are marked by an effort to work against conventional discourse.

Bartholomae says that we need to once again attend to the products of student writing, allowing those students who need to imitate the conventions of discourse before they can enter into it and do its work.

Musings:
Bartholomae’s concept of “inventing the university” seems a useful expansion of the ways we try to make students aware of the importance of considering the audience when they write. I’m particularly interested in different ideas about how writers (and readers) establish their own writing/reading practices as authoritative. However, like Jessica, I am skeptical of the idea that language makes anything other than language. The fact that identity construction (and persona construction) takes place within discourse doesn’t mean that the discourse is doing the work, and we need to be very careful about making this distinction, because not making it denies writers agency.

I am, however, quite sympathetic to the idea that writing is product as well as process. As I’ve said before, breaking down a process into little mini-processes doesn’t keep the focus on the process—it just creates a lot of little sub-products at the end of the process. For instance, in one of my classes, we just had a “progress report” due. Since it’s graded separately from the paper that it will eventually be a part of, I viewed it as a product that’s part of a process. In fact, students’ process is very rarely (if ever) what gets evaluated at the end of the class. A paper, a piece of writing is what gets graded. I’ve never had a professor say to me, “Gina, your process is flawless. The paper isn’t so great, but the process was wonderful. You invented; you explored; you revised; you did everything you should have done. This grade is for your process.” Not once. And, if a prof had told me that, I’d have thought they were full of it. The fact is, composition takes place in a context, and there are rules. One of those rules in the comp class is that papers are graded. I think it’s part of the definition of comp or something.

The other thing is that I think we have to be careful about giving students the idea that there is only one academic discourse. There are many, as the discussion among members of different disciplines in this class makes clear, and I thinnk we have a responsibility to let students know that. Of course, I don't think we have the responsibility to teach all of them--Once again, an insight from Jess guides me here: We have to model entering discourses for students so that they can approach different discourses and find their own points of entry in order to participate in them.

Rose: “The Language of Exclusion: Writing Instruction at the University”

Summary:
Rose begins by listing five beliefs about writing that he holds are erroneous because they are based on a “reductive, fundamentally behaviorist model of the development and use of written language, a problematic definition of writing, and an inaccurate assessment of student ability and need” (548). Rose then addresses the five mistaken assumptions one by one, before moving to speculating about better ways to think about academic writing.

Rose begins by surveying the historical development of behaviorist models of writing. Through this approach, he hopes to understand the reasons this approach continues to exert such influence in the academy. This paradigm arose out of early-twentieth-century concerns with efficiency, a desire to establish writing as a utilitarian skill, the medicalization of writing difficulty, and positivism in general.

The stigma attached to Basic Writing is a function of the idea that writing is a skill. On this view, specific skill sets ought to be acquired at specific points in the educational process, and basic writers have not achieved this goal. Thus, they must be remediated, which allows schools to keep their enrollments high while students are brought up to speed. Moreover, the medical paradigm’s transformation of “difficulty” into “disability” intensified the focus on errors, which came to be viewed as a diagnostic tool.

Next, Rose turns to a consideration of the meaning of “literacy.” He notes that the way that literacy “translates into behavior varies a good deal” (559). He says that while basic writing students are literate according to the “common definition,” they lack familiarity with the conventions of academic discourse and academic discursive communities (560). We should be careful in applying the label “illiterate” to those who lack this familiarity for a number of reasons, Rose notes. First, it’s inaccurate. Second, the term carries negative connotations that come from earlier usages. While students may be uninterested in reading and writing, they read and write all the time—it’s just that they read and write things other than those valued in the academy.

Rose attends to “transience.” He says that the idea that student writing difficulty is often viewed as a transient problem that can be solved is an illusion because the changing demographics of American society ensure that students arrive at post-secondary institutions differently prepared dependent on a variety of conditions, over many of which students (and teacher) have little or no control. The myth of transience, moreover, “brings with it a powerful liability” (564). It falsely implies that the past was better than the present and that we can return to that mythical past if only we can figure out the right things to do.

Finally, Rose proposes “a model of written language development and production” that “honor[s] the cognitive and emotional and situational dimensions of language” (564). This model also accounts for the psycholinguistic, literary, and rhetorical aspects of language. It demands that teachers critically examine their teaching practices in order to better understand the theoretical underpinnings of the ways they teach. He suggests that we consider other terminology for discussing writing, terminology that doesn’t involve classifying writing as a skill or a tool.

Musings:
Rose’s article resonates with me because it echoes something (actually, I guess it predates it) I’ve just read in this month’s CCC. See my annotated bibliography for the Ortmeier-Hooper entry. It also reflects the historical reality we’ve been reading about all semester—comp instructors have always complained about how ill-prepared their students are, remedial or not.

I’m less certain about the idea that writing ought not to be characterized as a skill or a tool. I think it can be both, although it’s not necessarily either. While I’m not sure Rose would disagree with this assessment, I suspect he might. My problem is that I want to allow students to have a voice in defining the role writing will play in their lives, and if they choose to approach it as a means to some other end they deem more important, so be it. I often do this myself. I sometimes write because I want a job when I leave here, so I write for publication, even though I don’t much care about it (although I must admit, if I’m honest, that I do like to see my name in print). I sometimes write to sort things out—personal things, ideas, tasks, etc.

I’m very sympathetic to the idea of discourse communities, but it’s important to keep in mind the fact that the academy is not a single, monolithic discourse community. And, it’s just as important to make use of those things that students read and write all the time. We need, in other words, to know who they are and what interests them, rather than constructing them in our heads as we so often do.

Rose: “Narrowing the Mind and Page: Remedial Writers and Cognitive Reductionism”

Summary:
Rose begins by identifying the trend to seek a single explanation for “broad ranges of poor school performance” as “cognitive reductionism” (345). Rose notes that despite repeated challenges from various sources, cognitive reductionism returns, in a variety of guises and from a variety of sources, to discussions about writing and writing ability. Because these claims have significant consequences for teaching writing, Rose proposes to reexamine them.

Rose’s first target is field dependence-independence theories of cognitive style. He notes that attempts to translate perceptions of the relative embeddedness of objects in a field to diagnose how well individuals will perform tasks are misguided because these tests measure how people perform tasks, not how well they perform the tasks. In fact, he says, research doesn’t find what the theory predicts when it is applied to writing. Noting seven problems with applying field dependence-independence theories to writing, Rose concludes that it is inappropriate for analyzing, predicting, or diagnosing student writing because there is no rhetorical-linguistic test of cognitive style. Furthermore, the theory deals only with a “general disembedding skill,” and new data indicate that such general skills may not in fact exist (354).

Moving to “hemisphericity,” Rose notes that empirical and experimental studies have yielded “remarkable insight into the fine neuropsychological processes involved in understanding language and . . . in making spatial-orientational discriminations” (355). He notes that while this field is still relatively “primitive” (355), there are “convergences” and “areas of agreement” (355). He says, however, that oversimplification has caused distortions in how some people characterize the functioning of the cerebral hemispheres. Because much of the data has been gathered from studying people whose corpus callosums have been severed, the data might not be pertinent to those with healthy brains. Additionally, Rose voices some concerns about the techniques used to gather data and the ways the data are synthesized. Little definitive correlation between hemsiphericity and occupation or talent exists.

Next Rose addresses Piaget and cognitive developmental stage psychology. Noting that Piaget’s point of view is “fundamentally logical and mathematical” (361). The problem with this is that this POV presupposes that people actually think objectively and syllogistically. Rose discusses its “appropriation” by those who theorize about college-age remedial writers (362). First, he notes, the model is meant to explain the developmental stages children go through, and thus it is at least questionable how aptly it may be applied to adult learners. He notes other problems with testing, pointing out that failure at a specific task may result in a learner’s being branded as lacking a some fundamental cognitive principles.

Rose next shifts his attention to orality-literacy theory. He distinguishes between the strong version that holds that literacy “necessarily results in a wide variety of changes in thinking” and that literacy is a necessary (and sufficient?) precondition for abstraction and a host of ther crucial reasoning skills (367), and a weaker version that posits that literacy plays a non-determining role in extending the possibilities of human cognition. While Rose admits that “literacy must bring with it tremendous repercussions for the intellect” (367), problems arise when this theory is applied to composition studies, notably the labeling of some people as incapable of abstract thinking. This problem is methodological in origin: It involves generalizing from one group to a relevantly different group. And, it is not at all clear that literacy provides the essential ingredient in socio-cultural change. In fact, sometimes literacy is used to reinforce the status quo.

Rose says we should beware of “neat, bipolar characterizations” of oral and written language because although there are differences, the “continuum does not adequately characterize these differences” (373). Rose holds that the theories he examines “end up leveling rather than elaborating individual differences in cognition” (376). They distract us from the contextual influences on composition for basic writers; they reflect stereotypes. Rose closes with some cautionary words about the responsibilities and limitations one takes on when one theorizes and a warning about the special concerns regarding comparative studies.

Musings:
While I agree with Rose’s criticisms of those who want to apply Piaget’s developmental psychology to adults, I also wonder how cognitive development theory would look if someone, anyone, would attend to the fact that females’ and males’ brains develop differently. Infusions of sex-specific hormones around adolescence result in different brain chemistry and there is more and more evidence that male and female brains develop differently. Who knows what, if anything, that means about the ways males and females learn.

In fact, some of the newest research shows that if women’s reactions are attended to, one of our most fundamental beliefs about human behavioral development—the fight or flight response—is only partially correct. It applies pretty definitively to males. There is increasing evidence that females’ responses in situations that arouse fight-or-flight in males may more properly be described as “tend or defend.” In other words, females try to defuse and deescalate rather than fleeing (running away from one’s offspring doesn’t seem evolutionarily sound, does it?), and, if that doesn’t work, to defend a space without necessarily defending one’s self. This may explain why female mammals are so much more territorial in general than males.

Please, don’t get me wrong. I am not of the “biology is destiny” school. I think one of the really cool things about being human rather than some other animal is the fact that we don’t seem to be determined by our biology. We have the capacity to transcend what seems to me best understood as parameters instead of determinants. That seems clear. Moreover, it also seems to me that much of what we might currently define as biological may in fact be social (yes, it’s a return to the old nature/nurture debate). In fact, perhaps it’s the case that very little about human psychology and consciousness is either strictly nature or strictly nurture. That seems most correct to me…

Peace to all.