Month: November 2012

Real Researchers in Class

bsfLeave a comment

This semester, I have been teaching ENGL 360: Editing and Publishing.  It’s a career-prep course intended to introduce English majors to a variety of job possibilities in the fields of editing and publishing.  Although I have some experience in this area, my profession is teaching.  So, I decided to seek out some professionals in editing and publishing and have them come to class to speak about their careers.  We heard excellent talks from Deb Klenotic, the web content and social media editor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania; Dr. Zack Stiegler, communications media professor and expert on media law at IUP; Jennifer Bails, freelance writer and editor; and Luis Fabregas, reporter for the Tribune Review, author and self-publisher of A Transplant for Katy.

My students in 360 have told me numerous times how useful they’ve found these talks from real writers and editors.  And in our last presentation, from Luis Fabregas, I was struck by something he said quite often that I thought would have been useful in my more general composition courses too – research.  He used the word research many many times.  Here was a real writer talking about the many ways in which he does research on a daily basis as a reporter, and also how he had to do research not only on the content of his new book, but on how to publish it.

So it occurred to me, if you’re teaching students to write any sort of researched document, whether in a writing class or across the disciplines, bring in problem-solvers to talk about how they do things in the real world (outside of school).  I’ve often shown students my own blog, the one I wrote while doing my dissertation, and talked about how I did research for that project.  But that’s way out of the scope of what a first-year writer is thinking about, and I definitely see a lot of eyes glaze over and worried faces when I bring it up on the screen.  My own experience as a researcher isn’t interesting to them – they see it as part of my agenda to get them to do things they don’t want to do (of course, that is not my agenda, but they too often probably see it that way).

Instead, I’m thinking of people who work on smaller projects on a daily basis that require multiple avenues of research.  We all know people in a variety of fields – we should use our friends and colleagues to help our students.  I’m thinking this semester of having my friend who works in marketing come to my Comp 2 course to talk about the various ways she uses research to keep her company’s Facebook page updated with cutting-edge news.  I have another friend who works for an adoption agency, and I know that on a daily basis she uses professional research in social sciences to keep current in her field and also to help her solve problems that come up in her job.  The administrator at my son’s daycare does research on every day – in early childhood pedagogy, school administration, she interviews and meets with administrators from other schools, she does surveys of parents – this is all research.  More advanced students are also great resources – have some seniors come in and talk about the ways in which they’ve researched post-graduation opportunities (jobs, grad school, etc).  I think we’d find that they use much more than Google for these types of research (they probably go to the library for reference books, brochures, talk to friends, parents, advisors and career counselors – these are all sources for research).  Ask these students to talk about how the research skills they learned in college are helping them outside of college.

So here’s the take-away: have real researchers come to class to talk about their processes.  It’s one way to combat the ‘assignment-for-school/teacher-as-audience’ syndrome that comes along with a lot of researched writing assignments.  And, like it did for me with Luis, you never know what ideas you might get from it too.

Barbara Walvoord on Assessment and WAC

bsfLeave a comment
Today, I attended the New Vistas: WAC/WID Conference at Quinnipiac University (the meeting of the Northeast Writing Across the Curriculum Consortium).

Barbara Walvoord, one of the founding mothers of the WAC movement, gave the keynote address, “How to Assess and Improve Student Writing in Classrooms, Departments, and Institutions.”  Walvoord stressed three main elements of WAC Assessment –  Goals, Information, and Action.
Below are my notes from the talk.  I apologize for the strange bulleting, which occured as I converted my notes from Evernote to WordPress.
  • Retired from Notre Dame
  • Working on a book, Josey-Bass, same title as the talk
  • WAC/WID are different now than they were in the 70s and 80s when some programs were started
  • Now we have Assessment (capital A); a strong national higher education reform movement; has captured the attention of accreditation institutions, which places it outside of the institution (and they can force us to do it)
  • WAC is a reform movement in a sociological sense
  • Assessment has possibilities, but also causes alarm
  • Most useful question to ask: What do we need to work on?  Look at students’ work as they walk out the door [graduate] and see what you need to work on – it doesn’t really matter what they knew when they walked in the door – it matters what they know (or don’t know) when they walk out the door
  • GOALS, INFORMATION, ACTION (many programs get to wrapped up in data and then don’t act on it)
  • Articulate goals for student writing (these options below are broad, yet helpful – cannot be used exactly but can be adapted at the classroom and disciplinary level)
    • WPAcouncil.org/positions/outcomes.html
    • AACU.org/value/rubrics/WrittenCommunication
    • individual faculty, programs, department
    • Combat myths (like, writing = grammar)
  • Gather information (data)
    • Direct Assessment
      • Standardized tests
      • Readers score papers or portfolios
    • Indirect Assessment
      • Student self-report
      • Document use of instructor and/or student actions, beliefs, etc, that research has linked to learning (done by Pew, for example)
    • Direct assessment will be valued over indirect
    • e-portfolios “That is the way to the swamp”
    • Assessing writing across the curriculum
      • Keep purpose clear – what do I need to know and why?
      • Is this work valid at measuring what we’re trying to capture
      • Is it reliable? (you cannot have interdisciplinary faculty reading/scoring interdisciplinary work – no inter-rater reliability [80% is standard for publication])
  • Cannot mount a new program that will affect the results of standardized tests – it will not work!
  • What will work (by using standardized tests results) — (cites Stuart Greene’s longitudinal study of 25 students through 4 years at Notre Dame by collecting all of their writing — they wrote a report indicating that students were not doing enough writing and the writing wasn’t demanding enough — check into this)  (question for IUP – what do our NSSE reports say about student perceptions of writing?)
    • identify a specific problem
    • get people’s attention
    • focus resources
  • Draw on faculty members (Which learning goals are most difficult for your students?  Which should the institution work on?) — phrase questions to focus on students, not on what the faculty are/aren’t doing, to ask in a non-threatening way
  • What does it mean to “work on writing”
    • define it more narrowly? (grammar, source use, etc)
    • consult the literature; it tell us:
      • students develop as writers when they
        • believe that writing is important
        • believe they can learn to write effectively
        • use effective writing processes
        • write often with effective guidance
        • develop meta-cognition and strategies that encourage transfer
      • how do students develop as writers?  what methods can help them? –> your best chance of improving student writing is to make these things happen in as many classes as possible
  • Acting on the data
    • intensive work with faculty
    • institutional action (rewards, incentives, workload, freedom from punishment by student evaluations)
    • intensive work with student cultures
    • a system of reporting, aggregating, and disseminating results of actions
    • Actions are unlikely to change results on a national standardized test, but they CAN change student written products, processes, and attitudes in individual classes, major programs, gen ed program, etc
    • You then also have to assess the effects of the actions
  • Document the data by aggregating the action taken in smaller arenas (individual courses, programs, etc)
  • Assessment IS the driving force behind resurgence of WAC programs
  • Must have funding – need to have stipends to pay faculty to help do any sort of surveying of their students, to implement anything they learn in a WAC workshop, etc  (faculty development grants) – Institution needs to make improving student writing a priority

Make Words Count, Instead of Counting Words

bsfLeave a comment

Yesterday was the first day of what has been dubbed #AcWriMo (Academic Writing Month) on Twitter, and it’s gotten me thinking about word counts.  I’m an avid reader of PhD2Published‘s Dr. Charlotte Frost, and I think that there are many good reasons to participate in #AcWriMo.   To participate, an academic writer makes a goal to write a certain number of words per day or for the month of November, similar to #NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) where writers pledge to write an entire novel in one month.  Some #AcWriMo writers are pledging to write by project instead of by word (so, for instance, they pledge to write a conference paper [my personal goal] or a thesis chapter by the end of the month), but many other participants have word count goals.

This probably works very well for advanced writers (many of the participants appear to be graduate students or teachers in higher ed), who may have trouble getting motivated to write, but once they get going they can really produce.  These same advanced writers most likely have fine-tuned revision processes, where they take the hundreds or thousands of words they’ve produced and edit them into polished and publishable prose.  These participants, if yesterday is any evidence of what’s to come, also have an ally in Frost who has been cheering on the academic writers through the Twitter stream.

Still, I wonder if using word counts as goals even for advanced writers is beneficial.  So I tweeted,

“Love the idea of #acwrimo but so many are measuring progress with word counts. Is there a way to make quality a goal instead of quantity?”

Frost responded,

“Sure, or measure the time you put in. We’re not anti-quality, we’re pro process! :-)”

And I think that’s the key  when approaching teaching writing to students.  #AcWriMo isn’t trying to be a model for students, and it really has nothing to do with teaching.  But it’s gotten me to think about the ways in which we approach assigning writing to our students. Often I see assignments asking students to write a certain number of words, and it always makes me cringe a bit.  The implication is that the quantity is more important than the process or the quality of the work.

Many teachers indicate length requirements for student assignments by providing word counts; my sense is that because our own writing in academia is often defined by word counts (most journals will set a word count for submissions), some teachers use that same approach with their students.  But our students, in most cases, aren’t striving to be professional academic writers.  I’ve always believed that providing a word count, or any length requirement for that matter, can send a dangerous message to students: you value quantity over quality.

I did early in my career provide page restrictions for student writing assignments; I did this because I was too inexperienced to trust my students that they would write “enough.”  But as I became more interested in Rhetorical Genre Studies, I came to realize that what matters more is that students make certain moves in their writing – that they meet the criteria of the genre and the rhetorical situation – not that they write a certain amount.

This can be a troubling concept for student writers.  When I present an assignment, the first question often is, “How long should it be?”  That is a perfect teachable moment – a great time to talk about genre and what the situation of the writing task calls for.  Depending on the assignment and the audience for the project, I ask a question back, “Well, if you were the President of the University receiving this report, how many examples would it take to persuade you?”  Or, “When you were a high school student, how much writing would you have wanted to read on a brochure?”

Since I’ve stopped providing length requirements for students, I’ve found that their work is more thorough and less redundant.  I don’t get a lot of questions like, “How do I get to the required length without repeating myself a hundred times?” or comments like, “I feel like I’m saying the same thing over and over.”  And even though some students find it unsettling, what’s more important is that the message is clear — what I value in their writing is not that they’ve reached a certain count of words.  I’m interested in how they’ve made those words count.