John’s Comments (group member since May 10, 2012)

John’s comments from the Composition and Rhetoric group.

Let's talk about Everyday Genres. Pose questions. Post striking passages. Share criticism. Connect it to your classroom experiences. It's all fair game. Happy reading!

I don't think this really counts as part of the Q&A since it's more of a ramble on my part and less of an organized question of any sort.

I just read Rachel Lewis Ketai's "Race, Remediation, and Readiness: Reassessing the 'Self' in Directed Self-Placement" and I was impressed by her revisions of the DSP brochures (found on the bottom of page 153) and think they do a great job emphasizing local context and a student's personal history in their self-placement.

But one revision troubles me a bit: "My high school classes did not prepare me to conduct research and use reliable sources in my writing" (153).

I guess I have conflicting ideas about it. I understand the revision takes up Bonilla-Silva's ideas on color-blind racism--specifically abstract liberalism-- to critique and revise the emphasis on the abstract self in the original language of the goal (original language: "I need to improve my research skills and learn how to use outsides sources in my writing"). I dig Ketai's approach.

But...does that revision erase any sense of "self"? Does it rob students of choice or agency in reflecting on their personal history?

Too much emphasis on the individual can erase racial inequalities and make it appear to be the student's fault, so, again, I like the revision...

But does the goal now position students in the old familiar banking relationship where education is merely a one-way street and students sit passively while the high school factory "prepares" them?

This is a whole lot of blather for one small goal. But look at the difference in another revision where Ketai emphasizes a more dynamic relationship between the student and the school: "My school and/or home gave me plenty of access to computers and the Internet, so I'm confident I can research, write, and revise college essays using the computer" (153).

Maybe what I'm saying is that in directed-self placement we wouldn't want to reinforce the idea that education is something that happens to students.

On a side note, I just added Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's book Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States to my personal reading list.

I just finished Anne Herrington and Sarah Stanley's excellent "Criterion: Promoting the Standard," which answered many of my questions about the above-posted NYT article on automated essay assessment.

I especially liked this passage near the end of the essay: "...Criterion mirrors beliefs that some of us hold about a single appropriate standard of English, beliefs that are at odds with or own organization's position statements and scholarship on language, rhetoric, and composition. We should look at the mirror self-critically, then, for what it reflects about ourselves and our values" (60).

ETS often argues that scores from automated essay assessment programs closely align with human raters. That probably tells us more about our own practices than the reliability/validity of the assessment software. Herrington and Stanley are right to suggest that "we should look at the mirror self-critically."

It seems like local assessment standards would be easier to revise--more like it's a local work in progress--than standards imposed from the outside that seem prepackaged and solidified.

The first Endnote to the Introduction--wherein Inoue and Poe note Chris Gallagher's counterargument to "local assessment"--really got me thinking. The endnote: "local assessments might not serve local needs and interest well. They may even be poorly constructed, unaligned (or misaligned) with curriculum and instruction, and even blatantly unfair and discriminatory" (11).

Jessica, this made me think differently about that quotation of Condon's. If assessments ought to "be grounded in the various locations in which students learn" (ix) that is, grounded in various local conditions, what happens when local assessments are, as Gallagher suggests sometimes "poorly constructed" or "discriminatory"?

A Mother Jones article notes that Louisiana voucher schools developed a local teaching/assessment program apart from normed Louisiana Dept. of Education standards. The curriculum included dinosaurs and humans existing together and "God used the Trail of Tears to bring many Indians to Christ." (http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marbl...).

Assessing content is a different ballgame than assessing writing, so perhaps that example doesn't fit. But when Condon writes "No nationally normed, multiple-choice test has ever helped a student learn anything" (viii) my gut agrees with him, but then I think about dinosaurs and humans hanging out.

An article in today's (April 4th) New York Times about automated essay assessment:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/05/sci...

Is it possible for automated essay assessment to "be grounded in the various locations in which students learn" (Condon ix)? How does a computer program address difference in race, ethnicity, or culture when assessing writing?

After reading that NYT article, the specter of computers grading student essays is haunting me as I read the chapters in Race and Writing Assessment. It certainly makes me appreciate scholarship like R&WA even more.

I'm excited to read this.

yes yes yes

"When we remember our field's historic and ongoing commitment to advocating for democracy and social justice, we can come to realize that making a multimodal turn should not simply be a matter of teaching students to compose 'effective' and 'appropriate' digital products that serve the interests of dominant power structures. Rather, a truly critical multimodal pedagogy must entail a process of teaching students to analyze and contest the ideological implications of corporate media" (159).

Once again, I appreciate Palmeri's rereading of Freire and Shor's work:

"When we relisten to the voices of Smitherman, Freire, Shor, and others, we can be reminded that we have an ethical responsibility to resist the hegemony of print forms of knowledge in the academy--an ethic responsibility to value and support all the diverse auditory, visual, and alphabetic ways of knowing that students bring to our classes" (Palmeri 158)

and

"By enabling students to emily multiple forms of composing to critically rehear and resee the world, we might increase the likelihood that they will come to recognize and attempt to transform the unjust material hierarchies of race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability that prevent the realization of transformative democracy in our nation and our world" (159).

More quotes:

On graduate rhet/comp education:

"Rather than positioning multimodal composing as a supplemental topic only relevant to graduate students who profess a specialty in 'computers and writing,' we might instead seek to demonstrate ways that all scholars of composition and rhetoric can benefit by incorporating visual and audio elements into their research. For example, qualitative literacy studies researchers might create video documentaries based on interviews or historians of rhetoric might develop online, multimodal archives. In order to prepare all graduate students students to produce multimodal scholarship, our masters and doctoral curricula will likely need to feature at least one core course in which students gain hands-on experience composing multimodal arguments using a range of digital technologies" (Palmeri 157).

"I also think it important to remember that our ultimate goal in the first-year course should not be to teach students to become professional 'new media' producers but rather to engage them in reflectively considering how theories of rhetoric and process can travel across modalities" (Palmeri 153).

My name is John Raucci.
I started this group because I wanted to break out of my research bubble. I also wanted a space to chat with folks about compy-type-things. No other rhet/comp group existed on goodreads, so........here we are.

Hello Jeffery - I'm glad you joined us. And thanks for getting our Introductions thread started.

I'm intrigued by the 1970s textbooks Montage (Palmeri 100 - 103) and the Comp Box (103-108).

The Comp Box "offers students a box of unbound photocopied materials as well as an author's guide that explains ways that students might draw upon the materials (cutting, pasting, rearranging, adding, deleting) to make their own texts" (103).

Reading Chapter 2, I enjoyed Palmeri's reconsideration of Freire and Shor's critical pedagogy in terms of actual spoken dialogue . It's funny-- of course "dialogic forms of knowing" (67) are fundamental to Freirean critical pedagogy, but in adapting Freire we've privileged alphabetic/print literacy and, in a sense, lost sight of the more "multimodal" aspects of his pedagogy:

"Although Freire does seek to teach students how to read and write print texts, he is very careful not to set up a hierarchy that privileges print forms of knowledge over aural, dialogic forms of knowing--a hierarchy that would reinforce the notion that 'illiterate' peasants are mere empty vessels to be filled with knowledge from their print-literate teachers" (67).

Carrying this idea forward, I start to see Palmeri's work aligning with my own: "In engaging Shor's work, I ultimately hope to consider ways that multimodal composition pedagogies might be designed to help students come to both critically analyze and attempt to transform material hierarchies of class, gender, race, disability, and sexuality" (66).

What can I say? I'm really digging this book.

In the spirit of saying hello and stuff, feel free to post an introduction here.

"Resisting the rhetoric of 'progress' that is often used to market new educational technologies, numerous computers-and-writing scholars have argued persuasively that we must remain vigilant about the way new technologies can be employed to reinforce both problematic pedagogical practices and material inequalities of race, class, gender, and disability. Yet at the same time, computers-and-writing scholars have also powerfully critiqued the tendency of some humanists to simplistically dismiss all digital forms of composing as inherently harmful for students' development of writing and critical thinking skills" (10-11).

"Instructors who may not consider themselves experts on visual, auditory, olfactory, or tactile modes can still focus primarily on the role that written text plays. The important difference has to do with refusing to ignore the presence or impact of these modes, and asking students to consider how other semiotic systems alter, complicate, expand, enrich, and/or shape one's reception of the written text" (138).

"...overly prescriptive assignments afforded students potentials for bypassing the inquiry phase as they searched for the 'implicit clues that reveal what really counts and what can be ignored in completing a particular assignment. By refusing to hand students a list of nonnegotiable steps that must be accomplished in order to satisfy a specific course objective, the framework described here asks students to to consider how communicative objectives might be accomplished in any number of ways, depending on how they decide to contextualize, frame, or situate their response to those objectives" (101).

I couldn't agree more.

However, I'm scared of student evaluations--which weigh much, much more heavily on my yearly department evaluations as a new faculty member than they did for me in grad school. At a university that values teaching over research, evals play a monumental role in determining tenure and promotion.

As a TA, my students often interpreted my non-prescriptive assignments and my "refusal to list nonnegotiable steps" for writing the assignment as a game I was playing. They thought I was hiding my criteria for assessment, and that I was trying to confuse them. My student evaluations repeatedly listed being frustrated by the nondirective nature of the assignments and the course in general.

Some semesters students bought into the pedagogy after some initial struggle. Other semesters, my student evals were caustic. What I saw (and still see) as a valuable pedagogical strategy, they saw as an instructional weakness. Right now, I can't afford to have a pile of evals saying my assignments weren't clear.

While I don't believe being nondirective means being unclear (and I always worked to improve assignment clarity based on those evals), the students that say: "just tell me what to do" and who are unwilling to accept any assignment that's not prescriptive are going to let me have it on those evals.

Currently I'm working on balance (never a bad thing).

Let me start off by saying that about a year or so ago I was very critical of the digital humanities and the focus on new media, digital technology...etc. in comp. I was (and still am) worried about access, among other things.

Teaching for a year at Michigan State introduced me to the concept of remix as a way of helping students see revision differently. Remix was a part of their standard FYC curriculum. Let's just say I remained skeptical but intrigued. My students were telling me they stayed up all night editing their video projects. In 6 years of teaching at UW-Milwaukee I never had a student breathlessly tell me they stayed up all night writing one of my assignments for portfolio (well, unless it was the night before it was due...but that's different).

I brought the remix assignment with me to Frostburg State. I continue to experiment with it, remaining interested but also worried about what I've seen as a lack of "criticality" (for lack of a better word) in student projects. In these digital projects, students were less likely to challenge dominant discourses. I was worried my approach to the assignment concentrated too much on the form and technology and not enough on how the technology allowed them to engage in different kinds of critique. What I am now appreciating about Shipka's book is how she is bridging the gap (real or imagined by me) between the work of digital technology and the work I want to accomplish teaching writing.

.......But now she's throwing me for a real loop. In Chapter 4 "Making Things Fit," she critiques the idea of having one "alternative" assignment (like the remix) with the rest being traditional essays. Instead she asks students to choose the form of *every* assignment.

Asking students to determine the genre or medium of the final product for an assignment "is not something this approach requires (or allows) them to do once or twice during the semester. Unlike, for instance, Wendy Bishop's (2002) "radical revision" assignment, or Davis and Shadle's (2000, 2007) multi genre research writing projects, this approach to composing is not intended as an alternative to, or a break from 'essay writing as usual' (Bishop 2002, 206). Rather, throughout the whole of the semester, the tasks students are given require that they play a role in determining the most fitting way of conveying, communicating, or re-presenting the work they mean to do in response to those tasks" (89).

So, I'm reading this book as I'm revising my assignments and syllabi in preparation for the spring semester (starts Wednesday!). In my advanced comp (both general and social science writing) courses, I've framed "remix" as a "radical revision" and an "alternative" to "essay writing as usual."

I appreciate the way Shipka is challenging me (well, not me personally, that might be weird, but us) to open up all our assignments in this way...to, um, *cough* "allow" *cough* students to choose how they would present every assignment instead of having one "alternative" multimedia project.

I've flipped the format for this semester. Where previously 1 out of 4 projects asked students to compose an “alternative” text, now I'm walking into class Wednesday with only 1 out of 4 major assignments that asks them to compose a more traditional written academic essay. The rest, well, it's up to them.

One of my new assignments is actually an adaptation of one of Shipka's assignments: History of this Space. (Document A in the Appendix).