FROM THE (INTERIM) DIRECTOR
|
The inseparable skills of critical reading, writing, listening, and thinking depend upon students’ ability to postpone judgment and tolerate ambiguity as they honor the dance between passionate assertion and patient inquiry. ("Academic Literacy: A Statement of Competencies Expected of Students Entering California's Public Colleges and Universities," 2002) Today we celebrate the results of that dance. |
OVERVIEW
Welcome to the first annual Celebration of Student Writing, an event held in honor of researchers completing English 102 this spring and celebrating their final ethnographic projects in literacy studies. Modeled after the celebration by the same name held at Eastern Michigan University (see http://www.emich.edu/english/fycomp/celebration/index.htm), our own "Celebration of Student Writing" at Texas A&M-Commerce serves as the culminating activity for many sections of English 102. Today you will get a chance to meet the researchers, view their research portfolios, and otherwise learn about their work as they’ve experienced it over these past few months.
Represented at these tables are the multiple literacies in our lives: workplace literacies, faith-based literacies, gaming literacies, and—a little more obviously--the various literacies associated with academic and student life. More specifically, the projects we celebrate today explore, among other things,
majors (see Davis’s "Farm Life Literacies," Whitman's study of the first-year psychology major ["Probing the Mind of a Psychology Student"] and Jones's "Education in a Classroom" [an ethnographic account of A&M-Commerce students training to become teachers])o
(including Harris's analysis of Gregg Animal Clinic, Decker's "In the Minds of Third Graders," Martinez's study of the People's Bank of Paris, Texas, and Handy's ethnographic analysis of Commerce Eye Center)o career choices
academic disciplines (like marketing [see Kennedy's ethnography about A&M-Commerce's Bistro and Hudson's "Spot Brewery--A Sports Bar"] , veterinary medicine [see Novak's study of "care levels and how they can change," according to her research at Sachse Veterinary Hospital], education [see Helleson's "The Literacy Growth of Children" and Fults's study of the "possible benefits of physical education to children who experience speech delays"], and psychology/sociology [see Bell’s study of "how people of different races view a neutral character in a story in an attempt to determine whether or not readers ascribe race, ethnicity, or class to otherwise ‘neutral’ characters"]o
(see Murphy's study of the A&M-Commerce filming crew ["Fly on the Set"]; studies of fraternities/sororities [including Kappa Alpha (Null), the international music fraternity Mu Phi Epsilon (Wilkerson), the everyday life of a fraternity (Jopson’s "To Greek or Not to Greek," Pierce’s "The Letter Society," and Sokel’s "Defining a Gentleman"), and a sorority (Di Marco’s "Sorority Stereotypes" and Thorton’s "A New Life")], and the literacies associated with activities and music beyond the school, including area rappers [see Knotts’s "Commerce’s Finest" and Nnaji’s "Something to Rap About"], 1980’s punk culture [Pleasant], Deep Ellum Recording Studies [White], the Houston Cattle Show [Colby], Norris’s "Horse Show World: Western Pleasure," and a number of studies of the Memorial Student Center, the Morris Recreation Center, the women’s soccer team, and the Band Hall)o the extracurricular life of A&M-Commerce students
A number of projects also examined the working life of students at A&M-Commerce, both on campus (see Ramos’s "The World of Resident Assistants," for example) and off (see Williams’s study of the nursing facility where she works and Smith’s exploration of the literacies associated with her work as a front desk clerk at LaQuinta in "LaQuinta . . . Spanish for Literacy"). Several others examined the various literacies associated with faith (see Leftrick’s "Sunday Morning at the M.L.K. Church of Christ, for example).
I’ve listed above only a very few of the interesting and robust research projects represented here today. Please take a moment to view the program, visit with researchers located in the Founders Lounge and the American Ballroom (upstairs), and otherwise celebrate the original and often insightful contributions of these first-year students!
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
| Ethnography is a method of studying and learning about a person or group of people. Typically, ethnography involves the study of a small group of subjects in their own environment. Rather than looking at a small set of variables and a large number of subjects (“the big picture”), the ethnographer attempts to get a detailed understanding of the circumstances of the few subjects being studied. Ethnographic accounts, then, are both descriptive and interpretive; descriptive, because detail is so crucial, and interpretive, because the ethnographer must determine the significance of what she observes without gathering broad, statistical information. (“What is Culture?” Learning Commons, <http://www.wsu.edu:8001/vcwsu/commons/topics/culture/glossary/ethnography.html>) |
As the projects we celebrate today emerged from a very specific curricular design, it seems important to share with you the context and justification for that design. I shall attempt to do so here by responding to two key questions: (1) Why ethnography? (2) Why literacy?
Why ethnography? In first-year composition programs across the country, ethnography is becoming an increasingly common curricular focus. The students whose writing we celebrate today are involved in one such program, though our version of ethnographic inquiry differs from others, as I will explain in a moment. Like Suzanne Blum Malley and Amy Hawkins (2006), Seth Kahn (2003), and the contributors to the collection Ethnography Unbound
(2004), we are committed to assignment sequences that require research into and the telling of a people’s story, primarily because we believe the lived experiences of others have a lot to teach us about ourselves, our choices, and even our potential majors in college and career choices after college. More importantly, perhaps, we believe in placing students’ experiences at the center of the classroom[1] then expanding outward into the multiple, overlapping, interdisciplinary, extracurricular, and college-/ work-related spaces that will make up the majority of their future reading and writing experiences.For primarily these reasons, we have asked the English 102 students involved in this Celebration today to develop their own original versions of ethnography. To this end, the projects celebrated here required each of their researchers to read key scholarship in literacy studies, select a research site, gather requisite permissions, identify and interview informants, conduct several extensive field observations, collect relevant artifacts, analyze all fieldnotes/artifacts (extensively and regularly!) to locate recurring themes, and then write it all up in a sustained, 10-15 page academic essay that incorporates information from both primary and secondary sources.
[2]Why literacy?
The way our first-year writing program differs from others that place ethnography at the center is our emphasis on "literacy as it exists when put to use by real people for specific purposes and in specific places" (Carter 6).[3] In many cases, first-year writing programs training students to conduct ethnographic research ask them to investigate a particular community and somehow "represent" that community through fieldwriting. As Sustein and Chiseri-Strater explain in their popular textbook FieldWorking,Fieldwriting is a skill that requires close observation, careful documentation, and rendering of data into thick descriptions of informants within their cultural spaces. To be an accurate and sensitive fieldwriter, you’ll need to manipulate your multiple data sources, call on your informants’ voices, examine your reflective writing, and craft a text so that it will give your reader a sense of participating in the fieldwork you’ve experienced. (305)
We want students to develop the skills required to be "accurate and sensitive fieldwriters," but we also want them to shape this fieldwriting in ways that will develop in them the metacognitive awareness necessary to negotiate a variety of different writing tasks in a variety of different rhetorical contexts. Thus the reading and writing assignments included in the first half of the semester (in
Literacies in Context) were designed to (1) introduce students to the general conversation in literacy studies through key scholarship in the field while (2) generating the space these writers need (and deserve) to test/resist/expand those arguments as presented.In other words, the writers were required to investigate and then articulate the way literacy functions in a particular context. Our assumption here is that in doing so, students begin to understand literacy in more reality-based and people-oriented ways—ways that require them to examine the project at hand, each new rhetorical context, and their own goals as writers before making any decisions about which rules or strategies to apply to it. Why? As David Barton and Mary Hamilton explain,
Literacy is primarily something people do; it is an activity, located in the space between thought and text. Literacy does not just reside in people’s heads as a set of skills to be learned, and it does not just reside on paper, captured as texts to be analyzed. Like all human activity, literacy is essentially social, and it is located in the interaction between people. (qtd. in Carter 42)
This isn’t an easy concept to grasp. As Brian V. Street explains in the regularly-cited Social Literacies, "individuals, often against their own experience, come to conceptualize literacy as a separate, reified set of ‘neutral’ competencies, autonomous of social context" (114, emphasis mine). In an attempt to circumvent these problematic notions of reading and writing, our program works to redefine literacy as a social practice rather than an autonomous skill set.
By focusing on literacy as both an object of scholarly inquiry and the product reproduced through said scholarly activities, we treat first-year composition as "a course about how to understand and think about writing in school and society" (Downs and Wardle 9). By focusing on literacies as they exist in context, and asking students to contribute to this scholarly conversation, we are attempting to develop in these beginning college writers a better understanding of "the ways writing works in the world and how the 'tool' of writing is used to mediate various activities" (9). More importantly, we are doing everything we can to make that writing really matter—not as an empty exercise but as a chance to create real knowledge. Knowledge that changes how we think about literacy and literacy acquisition and that should, therefore, change how we go about teaching it. Knowledge that continues to change me and what it means to teach writing.
I hope you will enjoy what you see here today. I certainly will!
Shannon Carter, PhD
Department of Literature and Languages
-------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Long before I arrived, Dr. Donna Dunbar-Odom, former Director of First-Year Composition here at A&M-Commerce and current Director of Graduate English Studies, began this tradition of placing student experiences at the center of the classroom (see especially her innovative textbooks like
Working with Ideas, 2001, and Transitions, 2005/2006; textbooks that introduce students to a sustained academic discussion on topics like gender in the classroom or faith and religion on campus, then ask them to contribute to the discussion through their own ethnographic inquiry). I am merely building on that tradition, this time with an emphasis on the multiple literacies of our students’ lives.2
Their many assignments, directions for fieldnotes, and information about how (and why) to obtain permissions from participants can be found online at http://faculty.tamuc.edu/scarter/archive/teaching.htm (click "English 102").3
Literacies in Context, the text from which this quote came, was one of the two primary textbooks for this course; the other was Sustein and Chiseri-Strater’s FieldWorking (2006).--------------------------------------------------------------------
|
[O]ur cornerstone course must resist conventional but inaccurate models of writing. A re-envisioned FYC shifts the central goal from teaching "academic writing" to teaching realistic and useful conceptions of writing—perhaps the most significant of which would be that writing is neither basic nor universal but content- and context-contingent and irreducibly complex. (Downs and Wardle, 2007) |
(Proposed) WORKSHOP AT THE 2008 CONFERENCE ON COLLEGE COMPOSITION AND COMMUNICATION (NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA)
|
Our work in English 102 this term builds from and contributes to a growing, movement in composition studies that treats First-Year Writing as an introduction to the field of writing studies—in much the same way that an introduction to biology course provides students with an introduction to the field of biology. Given that work and related conversations, I have been invited to join Kathleen Blake Yancey (current president of the National Council of Teachers of English and an extensively published and regularly-cited scholar in the field), and Doug Downs and Elizabeth Wardle (whose forthcoming College Composition and Communication article I cited several times above) in a facilitating a full-day workshop on the subject at next year’s Conference on College Composition and Communication, along with a handful of others piloting different versions of this pedagogy at campuses across the nation.As it relates so closely to the work we celebrate here, I will share with you a version of the proposal for this workshop. |
First-Year Composition as Writing Studies: Implementing a Writing-about-Writing Pedagogy
In the past five years, a new FYC curriculum has been theorized, piloted, and is beginning to take hold in a variety of sites of composition instruction. Known as a "writing studies" or "writing about writing" curriculum, its premise is that teaching about writing and how writing works--that is, teaching the research-based content knowledge of our field--leads students to new understandings of what they are doing when they write and how to achieve what they want from their writing. Several versions of this curriculum exist, from those focused on student-inquiry projects into academic discourse (Downs) to those that center on literacies outside of school (Carter).
Regardless of the particulars of this curriculum, implementing it requires a shift in thinking--from simply teaching students how to write to considering as well how to teach students about writing. It also presents challenges new to many instructors: how to help students connect scholarly articles to their own experiences in order to make meaning of them; how to design assignment sequences that help students work from new knowledge to new activities such as actual scholarly inquiry; how to modulate their expectations for students' writing to match the complexity and newness of the work. Program administrators also often need to consider how to ensure that instructors teaching the curriculum themselves have sufficient background and knowledge of Writing Studies to understand what their students need to know.
Assisting faculty and WPAs who want to make this curricular shift (as evidenced by attendance at both CCCC presentations and the related SIG) is a first goal of this workshop. A second goal is to help those desiring to implement a program-wide writing studies curriculum and who thus need assistance in designing faculty development activities and formulating rhetorical strategies for making this case to their home departments.
This full day workshop, delivered by faculty who themselves have pioneered the curriculum (Elizabeth Wardle, Doug Downs, Kathleen Blake Yancey, Debra Dew, Betsy Sargent, Barbara Bird, Shannon Carter, and Suellynn Duffy), will engage participants in brainstorming approaches, designing syllabi and assignments, and drafting strategies for persuading administrators and faculty to adopt this approach. In addition, support for continuing collaboration beyond the workshop will be provided.
Workshop Schedule and Activities
9:00 I. Primer on theoretical foundations and rationales of the curriculum.
9:30 II. Roundtable of sample syllabi and course designs.
10:30 III. Breakout groups for drafting and workshopping reading lists and assignment sequences keyed to participants’ institutional, programmatic, and course outcomes.
12:00 Lunch break (1 hour): optional one-on-one consultation between participants and facilitators
1:00 IV. Feedback session: Participant reports to the workshop as a whole on potential readings and assignment sequences.
2:30 V. Strategies for programmatic implementation: Considering one program-wide implementation
3:00 VI. Strategies for programmatic implementation: Considering administrative priorities and designing effective rhetorical appeals
3:30 (break)
3:45 VII. Strategies for TA and faculty development.
4:15 VIII. Rotating breakout sessions—facilitators work with participants on some administrative aspect of curriculum implementation: TA preparation, instructor preparation, program building, and rhetorical strategies for communicating with administrators. Participants will work at up to two stations they are most interested in, drafting their own plans for that aspect. Other facilitators will offer additional one-on-one consultation for participants not interested in matters of program-wide implementation.
4:45 IX. (15 minutes) Wrapup, including offering listserv and SIG information, signup sheets for further info and contact, instructions for uploading syllabus designs to group site.
|
The curriculum serves students who seek rationales, rather than assertions, for the guidance and rules they encounter in writing; it is in fact an attempt to show students the rich knowledge that underlies their own instructors’ approaches to and experiences with writing. It is, in short, a form of radical transparency and a logical move: in the same way "introduction to biology" overviews the state of knowledge in the field of biology with the promise of giving students a sense of how to "do" biology, "introduction to writing" uses the content knowledge of the field of Writing Studies to help students better understand how to "do" writing. (Downs, Wardle, and Yancey on "First-year Composition as Writing Studies: Implementing a Writing-about-Writing Pedagogy" [from previous draft of workshop proposal]) |
Potential Publications by our FYC Students—
The nationally-recognized journal Young Scholars in Writing: Undergraduate Research in Writing and Rhetoric is part of a growing movement in composition studies to introduce students to what scholars are saying about them as writers and ask them to speak to (and perhaps against) these key arguments. By "publish[ing]," as the co-editors explain in the introductory issue (2003), "undergraduates’ interpretations of research in the field" (5), they have inspired others to begin treating undergraduate researchers as real scholars with something meaningful to contribute to the scholarly conversations in composition and rhetoric.
And as more and more undergraduate programs are developing writing majors (see "From Service Function to Discipline, Inside Higher Ed, March 23, 2007), the conversation in the writing community has begun to take a much closer look at this publication, even devoting a recent article in College English (Robillard, January 2006) and a CCCC panel (Salvatori et. al, March 2007) to the issues it raises and the reasons its very existence should cause us to rethink citation practices, Institutional Review Board policies, and publication norms (especially multimodal texts and intellectual property rights).
A number of our students are considering submitting their final projects for publication in this journal. While I am a current member of the Young Scholars Editorial Board and co-editor of this new feature devoted to the scholarship of first-year writing students, I will, of course, recuse myself from any decisions regarding student submissions from A&M-Commerce; Dr. Downs (Utah Valley State University) will do the same for any submissions form his students. See the Call for Papers (CFP) below.
| Young Scholars in Writing Announces New Feature in First-Year
Composition Young Scholars in Writing is seeking submissions for a new feature in First-Year Composition research. We seek excellent scholarship by first-year writers on topics tightly related to composition, rhetoric, and/or literacy studies. Research papers on topics unrelated to composition, rhetoric, and/or literacy studies will not be considered.
Submissions should be 5-15
pages in MLA format. Students should submit an electronic copy of their
manuscript in Microsoft Word to First-Year Composition Editors Dr.
Shannon Carter (Shannon_Carter at tamuc.edu) or Dr. Doug Downs (downsdo
at uvsc.edu ). Decisions will be made by the
editors.Students should include name, address, institutional
affiliation, course name and number, email |
Questions? Comments?
For Bibliography, please see the CSW Program
at http://faculty.tamuc.edu/scarter/archive/csw_program.pdf