digital digs

community, experiment, and the future of composition

The SUNY Council of Writing's annual conference was held yesterday in Buffalo. There were a number of interesting panels. Richard Miller and Kelly Kinney gave excellent plenary talks. Here I want to think about some of these conversations in relation to what we are doing at UB and my own vision for composition's future. 

Kelly is the director of the Writing Initiative at SUNY Binghamton, which recently won an NCTE CCCC award as a program of excellence. What are some of the program's defining features?

• Autonomy from the English department: this means independent space, budget, and hiring decisions, including deciding which TAs to admit as teachers.
• Class capped at 16. Binghamton has other courses students can take to meet their writing requirement, so the FYC class is limited to 1st year students only. Still 70-80% of first-year students take the course.
• 7 full-time faculty: some are traditional ladder faculty housed in the English department (including Kelly) and some are "clinical" faculty (non-research). I think they are at the instructor rank.
• Adjuncts make $4500 per course, which in part seems doable as I believe she only has two adjuncts.
• Common syllabus, which includes a portfolio worth 70% of the grade that is evaluated by at least two instructors.
• Portfolio instructor groups that meet on a weekly (bi-weekly?) basis, which is a great opportunity for professional development.

If there is one area the program is lacking it might be in moving toward digital composing, which is something that Kelly mentioned.  Digital composing was a central issue in Richard Miller's talk yesterday. It was a wide-ranging and well-received talk, and I will only settle on a few salient points. Miller discussed the struggles that students have with the directive to "be interested" in something that leads them to write. He observed that the superabundance of information and media stimulation is a significant factor in our students' (and, let's face it, our own) capacity to sustain a focused interest on a subject. We are all familiar with this argument, I think. We are, I think, equally aware of the countervailing argument that our always connected context facilitates opportunities to do incredible things with our "cognitive surplus." Miller also discussed this. Most importantly, he outlined the ways in which our traditional practices, hinged on the precepts that information is scarce (you have to go to the library and there's only one copy of the book) and mastery means content expertise, no longer applies. Instead, in a condition of information superabundance, mastery comes in the form of "resourcefulness:" having the skills to find the information and put it together for a digital community. For readers here, this message is familiar, but it was very well pitched to the audience yesterday (and still a message that the bulk of my discipline, to say nothing of the rest of the humanities, has failed to hear or understand).

One notable quality of Richard's pedagogy is his emphasis on helping students discover their passions and facilitating their exploration of those passions in a wide range of media and genre. It's a pedagogy that requires flexibility and improvisation from the instructor, which in turn requires a high level of expertise in rhetoric and composition. It also demands a specific pedagogical focus which puts the emphasis on the student where the connection to rhetoric and compositional processes arrives organically. You can check out some of Richard's students' work here. True, these are not FYC students. My point is not to say "look how well the students write." This isn't a heroic pedagogy narrative. Instead, my point is that the kind of appraoch that Richard takes would be difficult to accomplish in Kelly's program.

Or at least so we might think: that there is a tension between a standardized program and a classroom that faciliates this kind of open experimentation and pursuit of student interests. 

I've been thinking about these issues in our own program as we move to adopt a common textbook for our 101 writing course. The convention in the humanities (and elsewhere in the academy) is that professors choose the topics and readings for their courses. This is based, first, on the principle that professors teach a subject rather than teach students, and second, that professors are masters of the subject content. As such, the depiction of FYC as an experimental zone focused on student interests, while not uncommon in the field (at least once upon a time), is quite atypical otherwise.  FYC has become more disciplinary as the field has become more professionalized over the last 20 years (e.g. with the expansion of PhD programs in rhetoric and composition).

However I don't see these different emphases as necessarily opposition; they do require some tuning though. Without expertise in rhet/comp and commitment to its principles, the open FYC class becomes a free-for-all zone where the "content-less" nature of the course links with the conventional humanities impetus of the professor teaching according to her own content mastery to produce a curriculum where students are asked to write on whatever subject interests the instructor. With less experienced instructors it is very hard to get around this situation on some level, even if we attempt to negotiate some middle point where the writing topics represent some hoped for overlap between instructor and student interest/expertise. This is what we typically see with the "readers" publishers produce for FYC. 

We have adopted a common 101 textbook, Mike Palmquist's Joining the Conversation, which is a "rhetoric" (i.e. it offers instruction on rhetorical/compositional practices). The text does little, in my view, to limit the capacity of students to pursue their own interests as writers. As a "purpose-driven" rhetoric, it does introduce students to different purposes student-writers might identify in relation to their interests: evaluating, reporting, proposing, etc.  As such, students in a class might be asked "to evaluate," which might take the form of different genres--all different kinds of reviews (movies, books, performances, restaurants, a product etc.), an op-ed evaluation of a politician or law, an evaluation of a piece of research, a progress evaluation, a self-assessment, and so on. We can then make these genres more varied by intersecting them with different media (a slidecast, a blog post, a letter or memo, an internal report, a classroom essay). In theory, beyond the dictate "to evaluate" a student in a class using this text might choose among many genres depending on what suited her interest, purpose, and audience. In practice, an instructor might require all students to write movie reviews (for example). And in a way this might be understandable, especially for the novice instructor, as handling a wide range of topics and genres is challenging. This is particularly the case when an instructor adds topical readings (to extend my example: sample movie reviews and maybe some more academic/intellectual essay on film). At least in this example, we can hope that most FYC students can stir up some personal interest and expertise in movies. I have made this same choice in desiging the common syllabus taught by our incoming TAs: identifying specific topics in which I hope students and TAs will have some interest/experience--education, creativity, social media, etc. I have also narrowed the genre of a given assignment to make the task more manageable. 

Now I am wondering though if this is really the best decision. I would like to see a curriculum that opened up more opportunities for student interest and experiment, especially across media, while still introducing students to basic rhetorical concepts like purpose, audience, and genre and helping students identify and develop their compositional practices. I am sure the fear would be that chaos would ensue, but my experience is that when FYC students open a word processor they have a hard time writing anything that isn't basically essayistic (i.e. like what they wrote in high school). That's why the digital assignments are so interesting, because they push students into a different compositional network where they can't just replicate what they once did. We would still want students to write essays and draw on academic sources as part of the course. However I think part of the task would be to demonstrate how students can explore their interests and achieve purposes with audiences they seek to address by writing academic essays.

And part of the way I see that happening is in my vision of the future of composition. While I remain skeptical of much of the MOOC bizniz, I am interested in the largely untapped potential of creating real audiences and communities for/of student writers. Skip the 50K random MOOC participants and think for a moment of the 2500 UB FYC students in a given semester. Can we create a digital community that would allow them to share their work with other intersted students (and perhaps a larger web public)? Would there be value (for example) in 1000 students writing reviews of current movies, books, products, local hangouts, bands, events, etc? I think there could be. What if the proposing assignment led 500 students to write proposals to improve some aspect of local university life? What if another 50 wrote proposals to improve a neighborhood? Could something actually emerge from that? Maybe one student in a class wants to analyze fracking and no one else in her class does, but there are 15 other students similarly interested across the program. Could they form a research group together? Give feedback on each other's work? Maybe they could end up producing a collaborative website with academic reports and a multimedia presentation. 

This what I think about when I think about "cognitive surplus." Not untapped brain power necessarily but the way a network creates opportunities for thinking and creating that are not otherwise possible. A common textbook and curriculum would faciliate these kinds of activities, encouraging and empowering experimentation rather than operating in opposition to it. It's an approach that would recognize, as Richard Miller pointed out in his talk, that composing is no longer a cloistered activity.

"The" Writing Process begins with Google

I was an undergrad in the pre-Internet days (late 80s, early 90s). At Rutgers even the library catalog was still paper-based in those days (i.e. a card catalog)... if you haven't ever seen a card catalog, I suggest that you google it. I'm sure there were a lot of books in that library, and paper versions of journals: I imagine there was more paper in that library then than there is today.

I remember writing an essay in my composition course in response to having read Plato's allegory of the cave (so an excerpt from The Republic). As I recall, I spun a couple pages of BS about the reading in relation to John Lennon's Imagine, all written on an electronic typewriter (and yes, you can google that too). But let's say I didn't have a good grasp on Plato after half-sleeping through my 8am MWF class. I could go to the instructor/TA or a classmate, I guess. If I went to the library, I could look in the subject catalog for Plato and see what books there were. I could go to the reference area and look up Plato in the Encyclopedia Britannica. I could try finding some journal article on Plato by looking through all the paper bound annual bibliographies (the paper equivalent of searching JSTOR). Or my personal favorite, I could look in the paper Periodical Index, which might lead me to some microfiche copies of newspapers or magazines. If I was really desparate I could try to find a librarian.

Not surprisingly I spent very little time in the library. My English major was almost entirely "New Critical," so it was all about close readings of primary texts. I recall writing one researched paper as an undergrad for English. I believe I wrote two for my History major. But really most of my classes were far too large to permit much writing anyway; it was mostly in-class essay exams. However, setting my experience aside, the point I want to make is that in the 80s, when our contemporary disciplinary notions of "the" writing process were being developed, research was difficult and time-consuming. In the example above, I probably would have found my way to an encyclopedia or maybe some intro to philosophy text to help me understand what I had read, but I doubt I would have found much conversation about it. At the time I doubt I even knew that the allegory of the cave was part of a larger text, let alone what that text was about or its historical-cultural context. As a result, invention was a far more internal process, and this is what we classically see with the writing process: freewriting, brainstorming, and so on are all largely internalized heuristics where writers draw upon their own memories and perhaps the text that is immediately before them. 

Today, writing begins with Google or more broadly with a socially mediated search of the web. For example, I was working on a book chapter yesterday, and I got to a point where I wanted to write about research into working memory and writing. In the good-old, bad-old days, I would have driven to the library and probably spent at least one full day walking around the stacks, looking through books, photocopying journal articles, and, of course, filling out interlibrary loan forms. It would have taken days, if not weeks, to get my answer. And at this point, I wasn't even sure if this was a direction I wanted or needed to take in my chapter. I did a little Google searching to refine some of my search terms, to see how the conversation operated. I went to Comppile, because I knew that was a good database of research in writing, and I found some articles there that were available online. I also did some searching on cognitive science and its relation to activity theory, which eventually led me to some journal articles that were available through my library's online databases. So I found a dozen decent references, which I downloaded as PDFs and quickly scanned while searching for specific key terms. 

In short, I was able to write and research on a very tight recursive loop, where invention and research were tied to an already existing big picture of where the chapter was going. Writing in this way takes a fair amount of experience to do well. It's the thing I have most learned to do through writing this blog. However, inexperienced writers use a version of this process as well. As instructors we already know that students turn quickly to Google when given an assignment. I often hear this fact bemoaned. We bemoan it because we have a different, antiquated notion of how to teach invention in the writing process. We also worry that it leads to plagiarism. And there is no doubt that plagiarism is a concern, but it is partly a concern because we need to help students understand how to use Google for invention.

For me, this is part of a larger picture of recognizing writing as a networked activity of distributed cognition involving technologies, organizations, and other nonhuman objects (as well as other humans). The network in which college students write has obviously changed a great deal in 25 years, but we still teach them the same basic process. I've been reviewing a lot of textbooks recently, and some rhetorics are making a move toward changing their perspective. However I imagine that many are hamstrung by the expectations of writing instructors (or at least the way publishers imagine those instructors). It's hard to steer the giant aircraft carrier of compostion on a national scale. Indeed it requires a complex network of distributed cogntiion, as Edwin Hutchins famously explored. And if you don't get that reference you can google it (or spend a day at the library, where the reference librarian will probably look it up online for you if you get stuck).

MOOCs and the general education economy

Steve Krause writes that the recent EDC-MOOC (in which we both participated) was "meh." I agree. But you know what else was meh for me? School. K-12. Undergrad. Grad. meh. meh. meh. I was never very good at playing the role of the student. Obviously my grades were fine, so I could play the game well enough, but I never found coursework particulary interesting or relevant. I could offer you a litany of the mediocre experiences of my undergraduate education, but I doubt that would be of much interest. However, I will say that if a MOOC amounts to a curated list of readings, some lectures, a largely unsupervised discussion among students, and a testing mechanism, then this isn't really any different from what I had in most of my courses as an undergraduate. The only real difference would be that my unsupervised discussion happened FTF with friends I was taking the course with rather than 1000s of people online. I learned that I could get decent grades with a very minimal amount of investment. I didn't value school and hence it wasn't valuable to me. I can see that. But I can also see that I put my investment into other places, other kinds of environments. I learned a great deal working in a small business in the computer industry, composing music and building a recording studio, and writing independently of school.

So from my perspective, so what if MOOCs are meh? The whole enterprise is meh. There's no doubt that there are plenty of students who have been so heavily institutionalized that they can't succeed in a MOOC. They are like those lifers in prison who find themselves paroled and don't know how to live on the outside. And we know there's an economic element to this as kids from poor school districts get the most regimented, institutionalized education and are typically the most at-risk for success in college (and even moreso online or in a MOOC). The students who will be most successful in MOOCs are ones for whom school was only ever one learning site among many. They will be able to jump through the inane MOOC hoops and get on with their lives, confident that what one learns today in a MOOC doesn't really matter anyway. It's just a tiny part of a much vaster learning ecosystem. Of course that's hardly a ringing endorsement for MOOCs, but they don't have to be great. They're free. I have a daughter in high school now. Do I really want to pay for her to sit in general education courses for two or three semesters? Not really. I'll draw up a reading list and she can read it over the summer. If she has questions, she can find the answers online. And she'll learn much more on her own than she would sitting through some lectures and taking some bubble test. Maybe she can even take a MOOC. 

Clearly though, universities depend on general education courses to make their economic model go. Either they cram 100s of students into a room or they pay adjuncts minimal pay to teach the course. Or, like in English, they float their grad programs with TA-ships. None of those strategies are ringing endorsements from my perspective as the one paying the tuition dollars. And that's not to say that those adjuncts might not be better teachers than some of the professors. Few of these folks have ever received any pedagogical training. It's just to point out that universities seem to look the low costs of general education courses to balance out the high costs of other kinds of courses that are smaller in size, more technology intensive perhaps, and are taught by faculty earning more money, especially in the professional schools.  It's even more crucial from the perspective of the humanities. Without general education, humanities departments are tiny and lose the means to offer graduate students TAships, which means tiny grad programs as well. 

So it's not that MOOCs are great. Better-designed MOOCs might be on the horizon, but the ones we have already shine an uncomfortable light on general education. The basic premises of general education are that 1) every college student should have some baseline introductory knowledge that stretches from science and math to social science and humanities, and 2) a gen ed curriculum is the best way to deliver that knowledge. I don't know if either of those premises still works. Certainly #2 does not. Today it seems more relevant to teach the students how to fish rather than to give them the fish in a 50 minute lecture, especially since the 50-minute lecture is free online anyway.

The upshot of this is that the humanities need to start developing a new economic model, one that will not depend on 1000s of undergraduates taking composition or western civ or whatever. Could we create a better version of general education? Sure. I've talked about that before. But I'm not sure that even that will make a difference. The crucial thing we need to do is reinvent ourselves to connect with the values and concerns of our students and our culture. The MOOC, meh or not, means we can't imagine that we can just plod along as we always have.

what is the topic of composition?

Here is the familiar double-bind of composition pedagogy. A composition course is, of course, intended to teach students about the writing process, which includes learning rhetorical principles and reading rhetorically (i.e with an eye toward the rhetorical/compositional strategies at work in a text). At the same time, the students' compositions must be about something. As such, composition courses often imagine themselves as having secondary subject matter (topics). As writing is rarely a favored topic of students or composition instructors (who generally are not rhetoricians either), that purportedly secondary material can come to dominant the time and focus of a composition class. Traditionally that material has been literature. You can still google composition syllabi and find many with schedules that indicate weekly readings of literary texts interspersed with a few writing assignments. Perhaps more common today are courses that make use of the many composition readers produced by textbook companies (or that have some DIY version of the same). Such courses may focus on a single theme (e.g. media images) or cover a variety of such themes. I have taught many such courses, typically around science and technology themes. My early teaching career parallelled the rise of cultural studies in composition, a shift that clearly subordinated the teaching of process to the teaching of critical-rhetorical methods. However, in more recent years I know that I have (and I believe the discipline has) come out of that view to focus once again on writing and composition practices rather than critical reading (though such matters will always need to be balanced). There are disciplinary-historical reasons for these shifts that I won't go into here except to say that I see these shifts as matching the maturation of rhet/comp doctoral programs.

So what do we do today?

For example, the second course in our sequence is focused primarily on writing a research paper. Obviously the research paper must have a topic. One option would be to allow students to research and write on a topic of their own choosing and thus focus the course entirely on the subject of rhetoric and library research practices. The other option is to offer some topic area for research, which requires introducing the topic with readings and discussion to some extent. But then one must ask "how does one define that topic?" and "to what extent should it become a focus of the course?" It is obvious and commonsensical that, as an instructor, one would begin answering the first question with identifying topics in which one has interest and expertise. (It doesn't make sense to try to teach something you know nothing about.) Given the way universities judge expertise, the obvious choice would be related to one's own research. In our program this would mean almost exclusively literary topics. But then, one also has to consider the interests and expertise of the students who will be writing the papers. Very few of them will have literary interests or experience. To ask students to write about literature would require teaching them some literary interpretive methods. Suddenly the topic also becomes the methodology and the possibility for addressing the actual goals of the course greatly diminish, which is what we see in the traditional, literature-oriented composition courses. However, what we should realize from our foray into considering literature as a topic is that it is not unique in causing these problems. All subjects/topics can introduce their own disciplinary methods and genres. In introducing literature into a course, you are introducing primary research material. Any such primary material whether it is an archeological artifact, a historical document, a group of students in a classroom, or a chemical substance points to a disciplinary method of analysis that is beyond the scope of the composition classroom. And as Warlde and Downs have argued, since disciplinary writing practices are really part of systems that include those primary materials, research methods, and the various object-networks that support that work, one can't really do that kind of writing either.

As such, the answer becomes fairly obvious. The topics in a composition course are its primary source material. They are akin to the dissected frog, or perhaps more closely, the dissected poem. One learns rhetorical-interpretive methods, and one learns about the rhetorical practices of a particular profession, genre, or issue, not unlike the way one learns literary interpretive methods and about the literary-cultural practices of a particular author, genre, or historical period in a literary studies class. The important difference is that literary analysis does not have as an objective identifying practices for the purpose of adopting them. For the most part, literary scholars do not aspire to write literature. On the other hand, rhetoricians are clearly practicing rhetorical arts. For this reason, in addition to this "rhetorical analysis," a composition course also teaches "compositional analysis." This is the analysis of compositional practices: the study of how texts are composed.  It's very difficult to do this with published material (short of doing extensive archival research beyond the scope of a composition course), but it is certainly possible to do this with one's own writing practices and those of one's classmates. One can learn about compositional practices in general (e.g. what successful writers say they do; what our research suggests is often effective), but one can also learn methods for analyzing one's own practices, which then opens opportuntities for intervening in that practice. In this way a composition class more closely resembles a class in the arts than the humanities: creative writing, painting, photography, etc.  

Now let me return to my original question. The topic of a course might therefore be like the poem in a literature course or the frog in a biology course. There is a reason to pick a poem rather than a novel or a frog rather than a fish. You study poems to learn about the anatomy of poetry and frogs to study the anatomy of amphibians; either way one learns some introductory principles of dissection. For the purposes of rhetorical analysis, one could identify important public-civic discourses to become acquainted with: scientific, political, economic, media/entertainment, news, educational, legal, technological, etc. So you pick an area and conduct rhetorical analysis within it. The rhetorical analysis of scientific discourse (e.g. climate change) no more aspires to teach one to be a climatologist than a poetry course aspires to teach people to be poets (or a biology class aspires to teach people to be frogs for that matter): it aspires to teach how one conducts rhetorical analysis and to teach something about what the rhetorical analysis of scientific analysis shows us (just as a poetry course aspires to teach us to study poems and to teach us what the literary study of poetry shows us).

So students should be practicing rhetorical analysis in their writing, but that doesn't predetermine the genre in which they might write. Yes, one option would be some introductory version of the academic articles written by rhetoricians: an analog of the way undergrad literary essays correspond to the articles written by literary critics. But rhetorical analysis happens in many genres: blog posts, newspaper editorials, policy memos, political speeches, legal briefs, etc. Really anywhere that one makes an argument and must address the arguments of others one is engaged in some rhetorical analysis. Now one can argue that without the entire object-network that supports such genres that one cannot really write in them. This is certainly as true for undergraduate attempts to write in the genre of an academic journal article as it is for them to write a newspaper editorial. As I see it, the exercise of writing in a different genre is about putting compositional analysis to work. It asks students to think about the rhetorical and compositional features and practices of a given genre and how they intersect with their own writing situation. 

I'm not teaching one of our research-driven composition courses next semester, but if I were, I would probably take up social media as a topic. It's obviously an area in which I have expertise, but it is also an area with which my students have familiarity. Furthermore it is a subject that is addressed widely in our culture by journalists, academic researchers, businesses, educators, politicians, etc. We could study and practice the rhetorics of social media themselves. We could study the rhetoric of some of these discourses by looking at social media scholarship, business reports on social media, and current media issues. Students might write in one or more of these genres. They would also write an analysis of their own compositional practices as they intersect with social media. Their culminating assignment would require them to do independent research into a particular area of social media that cited both academic and nonacademic sources and demonstrated a rhetorical analysis of these. The piece would either take the form of a kind of policy proposal or remain, more neutrally I suppose, in the realm of rhetorical analysis, making some interpretive claim about the rhetorical practices at work. The latter would be more akin to literary analysis. 

In the end, I would have to say that part of my course's success would depend on whether or not the students learned about social media in the way that biology students learn about frogs. That is, they would need to learn the rhetorical-disciplinary features of social media as they need to learn the biological-disciplinary features of frogs. So the topic is not irrelevant. As such, not any topic will do. Here are a couple questions I would ask about any topic I might select for study in such a course:

• Do I as the instructor have some previous knowledge/expertise with it?
• Do I believe the typical student at my institution would have some previous experience with it?
• Can I identify at least one, but preferably multiple, academic disciplines that study it? (n.b. if your discipline is the only one, then your topic might be too narrow)
• Does the topic have kairos? I.e., Is it a matter of current concern in the news media? (i.e. can you find feature articles and/or editorials from the last couple years on it?)
• Is it addressed by businesses, politicians, educators, lawyers or some other professional sector? (i.e. how do people write about this in non-academic professions?)
• Is the issue addressed in non-professional public-civic discourses? (i.e. Do people discuss this in social media? Are there political interest groups or movements?)

You should be able to answer yes to all of these questions. It's possible to have a workable topic without all positive responses, but it probably means that there are better topics out there. The intersection of the first two answers will almost certainly give you something viable and then answering the rest of the questions will help you figure out an appropriately generic way of describing the topic (as opposed to being caught only in one's own disciplinary rhetoric).

My final piece of advice to instructors (in what has turned out to be a very long post) is that I would resist topics where I strongly believed there was only one correct position to hold. Almost tautologically a course on rhetorical analysis will address a subject on which there is disagreement and thus persuasion is called for. Obviously many strongly political issues operate this way. For example, I have certain views on social media (as this blog indicates), but it would not be a problem for me if students adopted opposing views. I would not teach the course for the purpose of persuading students to adopt my view. This is the most salient way this approach differs from the cultural studies pedagogies of the 90s, which clearly viewed themselves as a political project. Some might suggest that to make one's class a political platform is unethical. Those who might undetake such pedagogies would not view it that way; they would suggest all classes are already political whether supporting the status quo or working against it. Maybe so. My view, 20 years into the cultural studies thing, is that such pedagogies are just ineffective at their own goals but also ineffective for the purposes of teaching rhetorical and compositional analysis. If you can't study the rhetorical and compositional practices of a corporate think tank white paper without immediately judging such a thing to be inherently evil, if you can't read scientific reports without immediately jumping into some knee-jerk humanistic critique of naive realism, then you can't really do the work of the course. Pick a topic where you can be more measured. After all, most composition students will end up in business or science or engineering, and many of our own colleagues are in such fields. It's a little pathetic how we will denounce large swathes of the campus and then expect them to come to our defense now in our hour of need, but that's a different matter. I guess my final piece of advice comes down to teaching a topic that won't distract you from the primary task of teaching the disciplianry practices of rhetorical and compositional analysis.

the composition intercession

Many universities and colleges have "winter sessions:" 3-4 week courses between the fall and spring semesters. UB doesn't have this, but there is a push now to create one, and suprisingly it isn't a top-down push, though I think our administrators are in favor of it. Instead it seems to be about faculty addressing the logistical problems of getting students through the curriculum. Faced with this proposal, I started thinking about the idea of a composition course taught in such a session. A quick survey of the WPA list showed that such courses are offered, but they aren't common. That said, there are four community colleges in the SUNY system offering online composition courses this winter and we would be required to accept those courses as our own. Fortunately the number of sections is minimal so that won't impact us in practical terms, but perhaps the writing is on the wall, or at least in the winter. 

We already teach a 6-week summer online course as a compressed version of our conventional 15-week semester course, but as the post title suggests, to me a composition intersession course seems more like an intercession to me. In a three-week, M-F class, every day is like a week of the regular semester. 

1. Monday (week 1): introduce topic and assignment
2. Tuesday (week 2): rough drafts, workshops
3. Wednesday (week 3): give students feedback, discuss revision strategies
4. Thursday (week 4): assignment due; start next assignment
5. Friday (week 5): rough drafts, workshops
6. Weekend: return rough drafts
7. Monday: assignment due; start assignment 3

You get the idea. The first two weeks are two assignments per week. Week three gets a fifth assignment and then perhaps some opportunity to revise one or two earlier assignments more substantively. As an instructor, you're reading 3-4 sets of student papers per week. That's probably 30 hours of work, plus 12 hours in the classroom (if it were FTF), plus prep and other matters. So it's probably a 50-hour week job at minimum, which makes sense since a full semester course is easily 150 hours of work. We could mitigate that by lowering class size to 15, for example, which would bring the responding to writing load down below 20 hours per week I think. Still it strikes me as a tough load. I know people teach roughly this load on a regular basis when they teach 4-4 or 5-5, but such folks probably need a break in-between semesters. And none of this even begins to mention whether or not such an apporach is effective for students.

All of this thinking brought me to the realization of how means have become the ends in composition instruction (and to a lesser extent the rest of the university). Instead of asking "These are my goals in composition: how can I achieve them in 3 weeks?" I asked, "How can I cram the activities of a 15-week class into a 3-week span?" Maybe the answer to the former question still is that it is not possible to do so, but that doesn't mean asking that question won't at least get different results. The question is further complicated by the fact that this hypothetical course would be online. As I've written in the past, the primary error in moving courses online is that faculty begin by asking "how can I do what I do FTF in an online space?" It's the online variation of the intersession-cramming question. Typically what happens with the online transformation approach is that one gets lecture video plus slides (i.e. the basic experience of the lecture hall). Then you have the textbook, some quizzes or similar online worksheets, and maybe a discussion forum for helping students with questions. All that's left is arranging for some secure testing facility. So lecture-hall style courses easily translate (in fact, so easily that they are the low-hanging fruit for MOOCs). However this easy tranlsation masks the ends/means question. We are still asking how do we replicate the activities in one place into another; the fact that it is relatively easy to do so just means that we fail to see this as a problem. This online lecture course could, in theory, operate at almost any speed, at the discretion of the student. If the typical semester course is 150 minutes in class and 3.5 hours out of class for six hours a week or 90 hours per semester, then that's doable in 3 weeks, maybe even 1.5 weeks if you're really diligent and you find the material easy. What doesn't translate is the Socratic, class discussion model that describes smaller classes, including composition.... that is unless one had a real-time component to the online course, but even then a chatroom-like function would still be a very different rhetorical space from that of a classroom.

All of this led me to realization that I wasn't thinking about a composition winter intersession, but rather winter's intercession of composition. How would this shift in time and (virtual) space intercede in the affairs of composition pedagogy? We have these commonplace rules in composition: that students need to write 20 or more pages, that instructors need to give feedback on drafts, and that students need to revise. Composition without these activities would be like Catholic mass without transubstantiation. Argubaly these pedagogical methods are more than articles of faith; there is some evidence to their effectiveness. However, even if we believed that composition pedagogy worked to achieve its goals, such evidence would not rule out the possibility of alternative methods. And in my view that's what an online, 3-week composition course would require: substantively different methods. Specifcially the tutorial method that underlies composition instruction doesn't scale very well, not only in terms of instructor workload but also in the way that students would write and revise. I think it is unrealistic to imagine students spending more than 15 hours a week writing and have the activity be productive, including informal writing. So you're probably not going to get the same amount of writing in as you would in a normal semester, but I'm not sure if that's necessary. What you are getting instead is an intensification of the writing experience, because in the normal semester you wouldn't get students averaging more than 5 hours of writing per week. 

So I guess the question you'd have to answer is how would you leverage the intensification of the writing experience to meet the goals of the course? The more I write about it, the more it seems like there could be an answer. Obviously one could learn something about writing by spending 3 weeks doing it intensely. The question is how would such an experience relate to our conventional understanding of this course.

 

composition's big gamble

As you may know, rhet/comp's big conference is in Vegas this year. Generally speaking, the conference theme is tied to the location in some way. (Last year's St. Louis conference had "gateways" as a theme.) This year's theme is "the public work of composition" and gestures half-heartedly to the Hoover Dam. Of course it begs the question, why not a theme about risk-taking or gambling? Too obvious? Or just too tawdry. On the WPA-list there has been some recent complaining about holding the conference in Vegas, which in and of itself is not unusual since complaining about the conference site is an annual practice. However these complaints are of a slightly different tenor as they have a moral tone. Whether it's the gambling, the smoke-filled rooms, or the whole tourist-trappiness of it, the complaints focus on a sadness to the whole enterprise. I've never been to Vegas, so I don't have an opinion. I also have no interest in going there, for the conference or any other reason. 

However, Vegas (and my colleague's complaints) are only an occassion for writing this post. What really struck me is how very similar Vegas and composition might be. This might seem a counter-intuitive claim in the way that composition instruction is associated either with grammarian schoolmarms or earnest untenured radicals. The transformation to gambler might seem as unlikely as that of the librarian turned pole dancer in an 80s hair band music video. But really a certain desparation might be shared between the gambler and the composition instructor. There are many other similarities:

• both are really phenomena of post-War America
• both operate on the backs of a large, exploited labor force
• both attract employees who have dreams of something greater
• both serve similar types of customers/students: those who play the system; cheaters; those who sit and pull mechanically at the arm and hope it will payoff.
• both places inspire a willful amnesia. 

Most importantly though, both Vegas and composition are profit centers for large corporations. And from that view, the way online gambling has transformed that industry offers some shady insight into the future of online composition. I don't want to push the metaphor too far, but I don't think I need to in order to see composition as being cheap, tawdry, and sad in the way the Vegas can be, but also glitzy, high-tech, and performative. Vegas and composition classrooms: two great middle-American sites of naked rhetoricity in an agora of the surface fueled by the magic of appearance. Neither the grammarian nor the untenured radical wishes to see composition this way. No one who has made a career of rhetoric and composition would, including me. And yet I think we need to recognize that rhetoric plays this role. Rhetoric is a gamble; it is often a calculated risk, a matter of style and bluffing. Like gambling, rhetoric might offer a lens into the circulation of signs, psychology, and social behaviors.

But the real gamble for composition ultimately comes in shifting from a horizontal mass curriculum to a more vertical and varied one. The mass curriculum reflects that legacy industrial notion of mass production and a homogenized, monocultural literacy of an era long gone (if it ever existed). It also supports the paradigms and interests of a similarly industrialized university system; writing as a homogeneous, unspecialized activity that requires little qualification to teach, unlike virtually every other course on the campus. It can be taught cheaply with adjunct labor; it can fuel graduate programs with TAships. I understand why many constituents at the university would have an interest in preserving composition, but I do not understand why those in rhetoric would share that interest. Perhaps it is the fantasy that rhetoric might (and should) become some master university discourse that is necessary for righting all our social wrongs. This is the lottery ticket the untenured radical buys every semester (and I say untenured because so few tenured faculty ever teach FYC). Perhaps it is the opposite belief, the grammarians' belief, that writing really is low stakes. Or perhaps it is a continuing fear that universites will never allow writing to be anything else, a fear born of decades in the basement. However, these days it is the entire humanities that is in the basement. The finishing school of cultural appreciation that drove the humanities in the last century is no longer of interest. Instead, what is of interest are the so-called "soft skills" that rhetoric develops: creativity, collaboration, and of course communication. It is the facility with digital media, which rhetoric has more broadly embraced than any other humanistic discipline. And finally it is an ability to write in a diverse, global workplace and culture, which rhetoricians have studied for decades. 

Of course such matters cannot be covered in a single, homogenous course. I am not suggesting that universities should abandon their expectation that students develop as communicators; nor am I suggesting that rhetoricians shouldn't lead universities in meeting that expectation. I am only suggesting that we replace the mechanism that we use to try to get there. That's hardly a new suggestion. However, it strikes me, as so many of my colleagues head off to Vegas, that a greater gamble is required here. If, as it appears, higher education is in a state of transistion, if the humanities are under fire, then now is the time for us to insist, organizationally, that composition as a mass educational tool is not viable, that it needs to be replaced by a different model of instruction. One that is perhaps not so susceptible to the mass delivery of online courses. One that does not fall prey so easily to exploitative labor practices.

As I have often said on this blog, my decision, now nearly 20 years go, to specialize in what we now call digital rhetoric was a gamble. It was a bet, at the dawn of the WWW, that digital technology would be a transformational force, perhaps the most significant one of my generation. Now that seems like a no brainer, but not everyone made that bet then. Not everyone in the humanities sees that today. But really, is it even still a gamble today to wager that higher education will be transformed, both in form and content, by digital media networks? Or that future academics will not only require the proficiency to work in such contexts but the expertise to lead in shaping such transformations? This is where composition's gamble must go, toward a diversified and vertical curriculum that looks toward the digital and global future. And Vegas, well as the cliché goes, no one needs to speak of what happens there.

What a first-year writing MOOC would teach

The other day in our Teaching Practicum we were discussing Kathy Yancey's 2004 CCCC address, republished in CCC, "Made Not Only in Words." In it Yancey observes

it seems to me that in all our efforts to improve the teaching of composition- to reduce class size, for instance, to conference with students, to respond vociferously to each student paper, and to understand that in our students' eyes we are the respondent who matters-we seek to approximate the one-to-one tutorial model. Quite apart from the fact that such an effort is doomed-about a hundred years ago, Edwin Hopkins asked if we could teach composition under the current conditions, which conditions then are the same conditions we work in today, and immediately answered, "NO"-I have to wonder why we want to work this way, wonder why this is the neo-Platonic mode to which we continuously aspire.

The general, negative reaction to the idea of MOOCs for writing instruction is based on this premise: that writing instruction must occur through some approximation of the tutorial model. (And of course fears about what a MOOC would do to the economics of composition instruction, but that's a different matter.) This post isn't an argument for or against MOOC-based writing instruction, but rather a consideration of how the MOOC challenges this value.

As such I want to begin with two points. First, as I have argued here before, it is an error to approach online instruction of any kind with the question "how to can I import my traditional classroom activities into an online environment?" Asking this question generally ends up with the worst of both worlds: only those things that can be done in both contexts. Second, following on that, the appropriate question is not to ask how (or if) MOOCs can teach us what physical classrooms teach us, but rather, more neutrally, what kinds of learning happens via a MOOC? If the traditional classroom was/is modelled on the industrial model and prepared students for work on an assembly line, then it is fair to wonder if the MOOC is/will be modelled on a postindustrial model and prepare students for work in a distributed network.

What kinds of literacies, rhetorics, and cognitive processes (the art formerly known as critical thinking) will be appropriate in the emerging model? Perhaps the answer, somewhat tautologically, is those that are taught via networks (i.e. some future version of the MOOC). Industrial-print literacies are clearly linear in nature. And even though we assert the recursive nature of writing processes, they still smack of the assembly line in a way that is very different from the experience of thousands of particpants composing media in a collective, real time fashion (which is what massive, open online composing would be... a different MOOC). Change the process of composing and change what is meant by communicating. Change what is meant by communicating and change what is meant by learning. Change learning and change pedagogy and evaluation. Or in thise case, try to make that system go backward by changing pedagogy and evaluation first. 

The most obvious model for a composition MOOC would be freemium. At the free level there is a textbook. lectures, online discussion, and perhaps some kind of automated activity. There would be crowdsourced evaluation of writing and maybe some collective writing project along the lines of a wiki. In other words much like you have now. Then one could purchase tutorial sessions where one would get professional feedback on one's writing. Finally one could submit a portfolio and pay for some evaluation. Undoubtedly cheating would be possible, but in my view cheating is always possible. Since I call this the "obvious" model, I'm not offering it up with much endorsement. It is a model that still tries to reassert the tutorial approach to writing instruction. Another technocratic model might imagine some kind of artificial intelligence that would serve as tutor (and evalutor). These models still presume that we want to create individual writers in a traditional humanistic sense. However my argument would be that those writers never existed (at least no in the way we described them) and so we clearly never taught students to become them.

Instead, in sci-fi speak, in a MOOCC (the two Cs are "composition course"), students are the wetware nodes in a writing network, participating in a larger, emergent, rhetorical-decision-making structure. On a "massive" enough scale, those decision become statistical. Indeed even in the traditional writing seminar (and certainly on the level of program assesssment) the statiscial nature of student writing choices become apparent. The same rhetorical variables are recognized by the students, a predictable set of student responses can be identified, common errors (rhetorical and grammatical if you like) are visible, writing behaviors are largely consistent across the population. This is not unlike the way the Kindle identifies commonly highlighted passages. In other words, when one starts to think about 2000 or more individuals composing essays in response to a curriculum, one inevitably starts to see trends: common quotations, common theses, common organizational structures, etc. Arguably, the purpose of FYC is to normalize student writing in a particular way, to produce predictable outcomes with certain generic features. One could almost see this happening in real time with the right technical affordances as a kind of cybernetic feedback loop. This would be the post-industrial equivalent of assembly line composing.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that as desirable, as something I would want my kids to experience. However, I do think that there is likely some future MOOCC in store for us, and it will require us to recognize a few things:

1. That symbolic behavior involves nonhumans (e.g. technologies) in a networked environment that is increasingly digital in character.
2. That rhetoric and composing, which have always been collective activities, will be more palpably collective due to the speed of networks and the accessiblity of data. This intensification is reaching a point where some becoming is emerging (i.e. we're not just hot water anymore, we are coming to a boil).
3. That the tutorial model of writing instruction is not necessarily the best model (let alone the only one).

As I always tell my practicum students, teaching writing implicitly assumes an ontology. It begins with some assumption about how thinking and composing arise. It assumes something about the agency of students, about the choices that are available to them and the practices that they are free to adopt. Millions of people can collaborate to compose Wikipedia or the archive of YouTube or the Web for that matter. Generally all composition classes do is say that that stuff shouldn't be trusted. To be honest, what FYC (and academic writing in general) really must say is that the web isn't possible, because it violates many of its assumptions about how writing takes place. 

We ask scholars to produce scholarly writing because that writing is supposedly evidence of their capacity to think and to know their subject. We ask students to write academically for the same reason. But what if thinking and knowing didn't work that way? What if thinking and knowing were more distributed activities and what we were measuring with composing was not some inhered characteristic of individuals but rather their capacity to participate in certain networks? Networks that shift over time. In that case, rhetoric and composition would be about learning to participate, to relate, to particular networks in ways that are productive of thinking and knowing in certain paradigmatic ways. That's what a MOOCC would have to teach,, I think.

from rhetorical theory to composition classroom

It should go without saying that the pedagogy and curriculum of our composition classrooms should bear some relationship to the theories, methods, and research that drive the discipline. It "should go" but probably doesn't. And this is particularly a problem for first-year composition where the instructors on the ground are often disconnected from the discipline. Largely they aren't rhetoricians and have had little contact with the field beyond maybe some introductory course that they took at some point in their academic careers. This problem is exacerbated by the lack of support for professional development for writing instructors. The closest one gets to professional development in most instances are composition textbooks, which hypothetically could do the job of translating contemporary research to the classroom. Unfortunately, textbook production and sales is not an effective system for accomplishing this task in part because the economic imperative of publishers is to meet their consumer demand (i.e. the demand of the instructors who order the books) rather than the intellectual demands of the discipline (which are a consideration but are clearly secondary). Even a cursory examination of textbook content will reveal that many are fairly outdated in the disciplinary paradigms they promote (e.g. modes). 

I don't believe it is necessary to be an active scholar/researcher in a field in order to teach an introductory course, but I do think it is necessary to be aware of contemporary research as it might inform the course. And in the case of composition the link between research and introductory course is more significant than in other fields. That is, from history to chemistry, I doubt that research very often has a large impact upon the content of an introductory course. In composition this is not the case for two reasons. First, and most obviously to those in the field, composition studies takes that introductory course as a primary object of study. As a result, much of the research produced is specifically about that course. Second, composition studies is a relatively new field. Sure, rhetoric goes back millennia, but the active, disciplinary study of college composition is only a few decades old. I am among the first or second generation of rhet/comp scholars that were trained in rhet/comp graduate programs on a national scale. As a result many of the legacy notions of teaching writing in K-12 and universities, which remain heavily in effect, are reflective of non-disciplinary values. So, for example, when one is preparing a new group of graduate students to teach composition, they will have had little or no contact with the disciplinary paradigms of teaching composition but they will have extensive experiences and ideas about writing and even the teaching of writing. In fact, one could say that if a first-year composition class works to undo many of the received ideas and attitudes students have about writing practice, then a teaching practicum has an analogous task in relation to new instructors. Indeed one might argue that consistently failing at the latter task means having little opportunity of succeeding at the former on a programmatic level. 

Of course it's not that simple (what is?). Research isn't prescriptive of practice nor intended to be. Scholars disagree (surprise, surprise). One cannot simply read the research and act on it; one requires a larger paradigmatic/discourse-community understanding of the field to evaluate and situate research properly. To put it simply, while one doesn't need to be an active rhet/comp scholar to design and teach an introductory composition course, it's very difficult to do so if one is not trained in the field. Can anyone name any other discipline where it would be controversial to state that one needed to be a professional in the field in order to teach in it, even at the introductory level? The short answer is that this has always been acceptable for composition because of historical and institutional reasons rather than scholarly ones. The composition class was invented before composition studies and emerged from English departments at a time before those departments split with rhetoric and became so specialized in the modern version of literary studies.

For decades, expertise to teach composition was evidenced by demonstrating that one had the practical knowledge to succeed as an academic writer (i.e. by demonstrating one had an English degree). This remains the de facto criteria. This criteria makes a degree of sense, and it is also the basis for a WAC/WID curriculum (e.g. if you are a biologist then you are qualified to teach students to write as biologists). There is no doubt that literary scholars are best positioned to teach students about the discursive features of literary scholarship. So following that logic, composition, as the teaching of a general writing practice, should be eliminated and replaced with discipline-specific writing courses, which would at least eliminate the problem of instructors teaching outside their field. However, just because students can benefit from learning about the discursive practices of their chosen major/profession from faculty in those fields does not that composition is a course devoid of valuable content, content that is valuable enough to remain a requirement of general education. Rhetoric offers methods for investigating a wide range of communication (personal, civic, professional, etc.) as well as understanding compositional practices (as they emerge differently in different contexts) that can support writing practices in a general way (just as having a general education, introductory understanding of science, art, or history can be beneficial). 

So this brings one back to the original problem. To teach an introductory composition course, one needs an expert-level understanding of how rhetoric and composition operate. This understanding informs both the content of the course (i.e. what one would define as introductory and foundational that students should learn) and the pedagogy of the course (i.e. one's understanding of how rhetoric/writing operate would inform how one would go about teaching these things). Again, the relationship is not prescriptive: theory and disciplinary understanding do not provide a roadmap to pedagogy. Furthermore, pedagogy demands flexibility to the singular conditions of each group of students. Such flexibility only further exacerbates the need for expertise. 

Given the situation at many universities, including my own, where composition is largely taught by TAs with limited experience who will go on to become experts in literary studies and likely never develop expertise in rhetoric and composition, how does one create intelligent expert systems that can provide the support that would benefit instructors without muting the strengths the instructors do have? In my view simply providing a universal set curriculum is a blunt instrument answer to this question. On the other hand abdicating the responsibility for curriculum design to individuals who have not been provided adequate resources or training to make those decisions (the opposite end of the spectrum) is not a better option.

As a WPA with 65 literary studies TAs, figuring out how to strike this balance is continually on my mind. When I took this job, the practice at UB was very near the total freedom approach. Seeing that, I tried to take on the task of providing the general expertise that would be necessary to support that. I don't really see that working, which I don't believe is anyone's fault. It is unreasonable to imagine such a thing would be possible in a single semester of a teaching practicum. Anyway, this blog post has gone on far too long. Ultimately the point becomes identifying where strength and expertise exists and/or can be reasonably developed (which then become the spaces where instructors focus their activity) and then providing a network of expert systems and support to undertake the rest of the work. In some respects all teaching operates this way. No one is out there teaching naked without a network or context. My concern is becoming more strategic about the composition of that network as it addresses the need to support disciplinary expertise in the classroom.

 

Noise, (ir)rationality, and debate

By now, no one really imagines that presidential debates are really, well, debates. Instead, we want a line going up and down measuring "undecided" voters. Are we measuring galvanic skin response? The raw, exposed nerve of collective unconscious? In our fantasies about debating, rational arguments are provided, suppositions are considered, evidence is evaluated, and conclusions are reached through the commonplaces of argument (deduction, induction, etc.). In a purely rational argument it should be possible to reach a conclusion that both sides would be forced to agree was correct. Or at least, the sides could pinpoint their disagreement over a particular piece of evidence or supposition that could, in time, be resolved. We realize that many disagreements stem from beliefs: suppositions that cannot be dis/proven. I think that most supporters of one political party over another act out of such beliefs, including myself. That is, there is absolutely no argument the opponent could offer that would change my vote. In rhetorical terms, we might view this as a matter of ethos, but even ethos is supposed to be rationally adjudicated. 

But what about the undecided voters? Are they meant to make a rational choice from the fodder of debates, campaign ads, and partisan analysis? No, not really. Rational debate can be composed, under sterile laboratory conditions. As with a scientific experiment, a rational debate requires the near elimination of external variables, and more importantly it requires the willing participation of everyone involved. In other words, debate requires that noise and irrationality be eliminated and the debaters must play a role in that. Of course a presidential debate isn't a lab experiment. It's an opportunity to incite people to vote. Maybe after the fact, we can retrospectively rationalize our choices and we can discover rational points and tropes in a debate. 

This is not just about political debate though. As an academic, I don't think I've ever seen a colleague change his/her position on a matter of importance. Perhaps, over time, from one book to the next, positions are modified. But, for example, when one engages in a disagreement on or between blogs (or at a conference panel), no one imagines that minds will be changed. One might learn about a new method or hear an interesting interpretation. These things might change our views over time. One could read over the posts on this blog on object-oriented rhetoric to see how my views have shifted through the consideration of new theories. But that is a span of years, and just as importantly, it is not a shift that I would describe as rational so much as intuitive. That is, my decision to pursue OOO is/was primarily a result of a feeling that something interesting/productive would result. And over the years I have come to trust those intuitions. I have also come to realize that the best decisions I have made, the ones that have made me successful (to the extent that I am), have been intuitive ones AND that they are decisions I do not think I could have made by rational, deliberative means. Starting this blog a decade ago is a prime example: a totally irrational decision.

I have these thoughts in mind when I watch (or don't watch) presidential debates or follow the arguments surrounding OOO: none of this is about changing people's minds by rational means. However, what pushed me to write this post was teaching Victor Vitanza's "Three Countertheses" essay in my teaching practicum. I imagine that Vitanza doesn't show up on many practicum syllabi because his work is theoretical and challenging and doesn't offer the kinds of nuts and bolts advice that are the typical staple of such courses. I suppose the focus of my practicum is different. To me, the key goal of a practicum is for TAs to understand that a writing pedagogy rests upon theories of writing, communication, and cognition. To teach writing well, one has to be reflective of the ways in which theory and practice relate here. Part of Vitanza's argument is about the resistance of theory to application. Another is the critique of our faith in rationality to explain how writing works. Before reading Vitanza, we have read Bartholomae and Berlin, who I think still represent the mainstream thinking about academic discourse, empowerment, and critical thinking (though they also differ from one another). We've also read Russell and Wardle as I think that CHAT and the issues of transfer and writing-about-writing represent significant (and relatively new) views in the field. However, all of those positions ultimately rely upon rationality as the foundation of writing, communication, and cognition. They are all asymmetrical in their identification of the human (and the rational mind) as the controlling force in a writing system.

So what happens when one takes up a flat ontological, symmetrical view of writing? Vitanza writes about the third sophistic position, the role of the other and noise, that both the speaker and listener (in a more conventional rhetoric) conspire to erase, even when they are supposed opponents in a rational debate. What about the nonhuman objects, including language, at work in any network of writing activity? Returning to the presidential debate, this is how I see Latour's object-oriented democracy functioning. The extended network of objects participating in the debate from flag pins, cameras, and teeth whiteners to Twitter, drinking games and real-time polling: there is no ontological boundary between rationality and otherness, between noise and message. 

 

in which The Atlantic demonstrates its understanding of writing

The Writing Program Administrator's list has been discussing the recent Atlantic series on writing education. The series begins with Peg Tyre's "Writing Revolution" and then a series of pro/con responses follow. However, the entire series seems to create a bewildering dichotomy. Actually, that's not true. "Bewildering" would suggest that it's genesis is hard to follow, and I don't think that's true at all, as I will try to explain.

Briefly described, here are the two sides. Tyre is advocating what she sees as a kind of revisionist back-to-basics approach where students are given formulae for constructing more complex sentences that will lead to more complex thinking. If you are familiar with They Say, I Say then you get the picture; otherwise, read her article. This instruction is connected with argumentative, expository essay writing, which Tyre opposes to the expressive, creative writing she claims dominates public education, especially at early ages. She offers the story of one school (how many times have we seen this trope) where the test scores changed radically. And in a way, it makes sense. The state test (in this case the NYS Regents) will give you a good score for a formulaic, expository essay. So if you focus on teaching students to write that, then they should probably pass the test at a better rate. 

The other side of the "debate" is represented by the Freedom Writes and National Writing Project approach, which is characterized (in Atlantic) by journal writing and self-expression. Here the counter-argument is that students will tune out formulaic approaches that devalue their own perspectives and do not connect with their lived experience.

This debate would be a head-scratcher for me, except that is history is recognizable. I will only briefly rehearse that history that begins with rhetorical invention dividing into scientific method and romantic inspiration, turns arrangement into form, and forgets about memory and delivery, leaving only "style" as rhetoric. It's the history that also separates literary practice and study from rhetorical practice and study more than a century ago. The basic problem is that very few people are at all interested in understanding what writing is and how it actually operates: an understanding that you would think would be crucial to teaching. Instead, whether we focus on process or product or the demonstration of some critical-thinking ability, writing instruction has always emphasized the more pragmatic concern of getting students to produce texts that we judge as "good."

The difference between the understanding I am talking about and the more pragmatic concern is analogous to the difference between a heliocentric and geocentric model of the solar system. The latter may offer very accurate predictions of the movement of heavenly bodies (it produces good results). It's just totally wrong. In fact a more accurate analogy might be sacrificing goats to ensure a good crop. There's no doubt that the cultures involved in ritual animal sacrifice believe it produces good results. I'm fairly certainly they are wrong about the casual relation there, but there is very little common ground on which either party could go about trying to change the other's mind. 

I think that we can all agree that students tend to struggle to produce the kind of academic writing expected by these Regents exams, as well as the kinds of writing asked of them in college composition courses. I would also suggest that students struggle to produce the more self-expressive writing that represents the other side of this debate, particularly if we held that kind of writing to any quality standard. So we can agree on the problem, but we probably can't agree on what causes the problem. Texting? Bored students? Angry gods? Burned-out teachers? Economics? Rigid institutions and policies? All of the above? None of the above?

I suppose the first question we should ask is why we want students to produce this particular kind of writing and why we establish the particular standards that we have? The answer to the first question is more crucial, and I believe we teach a kind of writing that we imagine as a general, foundational kind of argumentation. This imagined foundation spawns from our observation (reading) of many different kinds of texts and our discovery of these common attributes in our reading. But to me this is like the geocentric model. The ability to describe and even predict textual features bears no necessarily relation to the ontology of those texts or the process by which they were composed. The standards then follow upon this intellectual error and constitute what we describe as these general features of argumentative writing. But our descriptions of argument rest upon ontological assumptions that arise from Enlightenment thinking about humans and language. Personally I would suggest that one is better of sacrificing a goat before writing an essay then going with those assumptions, especially if you can bring yourself to really believe that the dead goat will cause you to write well. 

What is writing then? Well, it's not human. Let's start with that. Then let's add that it is many things that withdraw from one another and that cannot be overmined by some generic account. I think that activity theory and actor-network theory approaches to examining specific sites of writing are a good start, but are probably not enough. And it might be a long journey from there to teaching. Or not.

If we recognize that the idea of a generalized writing is no more real than say "nature" then how do we change our writing instruction? What becomes the objective of K-12 rhetorical education? There's the writing revolution that we might need.