Bringing it Together Podcast

I'm sure the title explains it all, but just in case it doesn't, I hope the images help. The following podcast serves as a conclusion to the ideas presented in this blog. Enjoy!

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Mind the Gap, Please

At some point early in my first semester as a graduate student I was sitting in a class (ENGL 530, in fact) where we were discussing the purpose of writing and the purpose of first-year composition courses. As this discussion progressed, numerous classmates made comments and claims about needing to teach students what they were not taught in high-school. Or, un-teaching what they were taught because it was wrong. The blame-game continued until I finally lost my temper and said that not all high-school teachers were bad. I am not the first or the last high school English teacher to cross the bridge and enter teaching in the collegiate environment. Starting my program and beginning teaching WRIT 101, I was afraid I would be too much of a “high school” teacher and not enough of a college one. I wasn’t sure I knew how to teach at a college level, despite always trying to prepare my high school students for college writing. What I’ve discovered is I’m not alone in wondering about the gap between high school English curriculums and college writing courses. The literature currently available seems to agree that one of the reasons this gap exists is because there is very little communication about writing expectations K-16. Even worse, “Most states implicitly discourage K-16 policy making,” making collaboration difficult (Kirst and Venezia 97). High school teachers think they are preparing students to write at the college level and college instructors think high school teachers are not preparing students well enough. In his book The Transition to College Writing, Keith Hjortshoj explains this discrepancy clearly and succinctly. He cites, “High school teachers were much more likely to emphasize the interpretation of literature…while college teachers assigned papers on a much wider range of topics and readings” and “Half of the high school teachers stressed specific formulas for structuring essays…while 93 percent of the college teachers discouraged the use of these formulas” and lastly, “While half of the high school teachers believed that the use of the first-person I would be inappropriate in college writing, 95 percent of college writing teachers disagreed” (28-29). Each example here demonstrates a number of differences in the structure and role of the classroom, the presence of external, standardized measurements of success, and the assumptions on the part of each side as to what is “college writing.”

Example High School Classroom
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One thing that is inherently different about teaching writing in high school and teaching writing in college is that college writing courses are focused mainly on writing. High school English courses, however, are focused on teaching writing and literature, language, and speaking and listening skills. There are a number of focus areas crammed under the umbrella of English Language Arts. As Hjortshoj explains, “While high school teachers are generalists, college teachers are specialists” (15). Even if a first-year composition instructor is not a composition or rhetoric specialist, it is still his or her job to teach students how to become better writers, which may include reading better as well, but that is not where the focus is. In opposition to the high school structure, nobody is expecting or testing college writing instructors to see if their students can read as well as they can write. Patricia J. Sehulster’s “Forums: Bridging the Gap Between High School and College Writing,” includes exit survey comments from high school and college teachers who hint at this difference. One high school respondent writes, “I see now that I don’t have my students reading enough nonfiction. We’re all about poetry and short stories and drama and analyzing characters and figuring out plots” (Sehulster 347). Due to time constraints and the need to address a wide variety of state or mandated standards, it makes sense that high school English teachers would focus on writing about literature. However, like Hjortshoj shows, very few college writing programs ask students to write a literary analysis of a novel. Likewise, college instructors who participated in Sehulster’s forum realized what types of writing students were being asked to do. One college participate explains, “Knowing that most [high school students] are familiar with journal-writing has inspired me to use journal writing as the source of choices for their topics and theses in a given assignment” (348). By just opening the doors of communication, instructors on both sides of the gap were better able to understand the constraints and opportunities of each classroom, and then they were able to adjust their own teaching practices to better take into account actual expectations and accurate past-experiences.

Example College Classroom
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Still, just realizing that high school English teachers have more to teach than writing does not take into account the difference in accountability. While it is true that college writing teachers are really, even if not rightly, accountable to all of their students’ future teachers, high school English teachers have to worry about standardized tests that measure how well they have taught a specific mandated standard. Fanetti, Bushrow and DeWeese explain that “High school education is designed to be standardized and quantifiable. College education is designed to be theoretical” (77-78). As is evidenced by the fact that 45 states and 3 territories have adopted the new Common Core State Standards, which will come packaged with two assessment options, high school education is driven by quantifiable data.

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Everything that is being taught, even writing, needs to be measured. This is where teaching things, such as the five-paragraph essay, come into play. I would argue, and Hjortshoj would agree, teaching students some structure, or a formula is necessary. As Hjortshoj explains, “Writers who were left entirely to their own devices in high school, without models and standards, face equally difficult problems of adjustment” (41). What happens, though, is teachers forget that the model is just a place to start, and that students should be encouraged to expand on the model to develop more complex pieces of writing. Instead, “secondary teachers feel compelled to teach to the test, and college instructors wish students hadn’t learned so well in high school that an essay is five paragraphs and a thesis statement can appear only as the first or last sentence in the first of those five paragraphs” (Fanetti, Bushrow, and DeWeese 79). Standards, but really the assessments that go with those standards, are part of the problem. High school teachers become so focused on the quantifiable data, or how well their students perform on the assessments associated with the standards, that they are no longer really teaching students how to write for college. But they are teaching them how to write to pass a test.

           

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It seems worthwhile to mention, if ironically, that the new Common Core State Standards are striving to bridge this gap with more standards and more assessments. The standards are touted as “a clear and consistent framework to prepare our children for college and the workforce” (“About the Standards”). Ideally, then, these standards would solve the issues being addressed by those concerned with the gap between high school writing instruction and college writing expectations. But returning to the idea of communication, even as the standards were being written, key associations in the field of compositions studies—NCTE, CWPA, and NWP, to name a few—were not included as part of the conversations. So, the standards define “College and Career Ready” students as those that “Demonstrate Independence,” “Build strong content knowledge,” “respond to the varying demands of audience, task, purpose and discipline,” “comprehend as well as critique,” “value evidence,” “use technology and digital media strategically and capably” and “come to understand other perspectives and cultures” (“Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts” 7). Holistically these ideas may not be far off the mark. In the “Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing,” a document written by those who were not part of the Common Core dialogue, the CWPA, NCTE and NWP identify “Rhetorical knowledge,” “Critical thinking,” “Writing processes,” “Knowledge of conventions,” and “Ability to compose in multiple environments” as they key components to developing strong writers (1). Comparing these two lists brings us back to the previous point made. While there are similarities—rhetoric being linked to audience, composing in multiple environments and using technology—the Common Core standards are broad to encompass all of the Language Arts and not just writing. And the real problem with this alignment may not be the general goals, but how those goals are then phrased in specific standards. For instance, the second 9-10 writing standard, includes sub-point e, which reads, “Establish and maintain a formal style and objective tone while attending to the norms and conventions of the discipline in which they are writing” (45). For most high school English teachers, this means an objective third person, and as Hjortshoj shows, that is not what is actually expected in college writing. Because of this lack of communication, even lofty goals of preparing students for college writing through standards will not work because people are not engaging in dialogue about what it really means to be a college writer.

           

Finally, while all of these discussions do highlight serious roadblocks that are preventing this gap from being closed, almost none of them are looking at how the classes are structured around technology. In the 21^st century, it makes sense to assume that technology use is having some effect on students’ preparation for college and the workforce.

The "Paperdigm" Grand Narrative

Despite the fact that there is a strong push to include multimodal writing with new media in the writing classroom, there is still a significant amount of fear on the part of institutions and teachers alike about how it will change writing as we know it today. In many ways, these fears are rational. If we ask students to start writing in digital spaces, then their projects and assignments are no longer going to resemble the 8 ½ x 11 sheet of white paper we are comfortable with. Not only does multimodal writing challenge students, but it also challenges us as instructors to accept something different. We can see this discomfort easily in the example Jody Shipka provides where a teacher asks, “‘I see how this gets students thinking creatively, but where is the writing? When and what, exactly, are students expected to write’” (140). In this instance, the woman who asked this question could not “see” the “writing” a student did for a research project that was presented as a game similar to Trivial Pursuit. As Shipka explains, “I would surmise that what she was expecting to see, indeed, what she was referring to as ‘writing’ was double-spaced, alphabetic text composed with a twelve-point font, printed on white 8 ½ x 11” paper” (140). This is what we have come to expect as instructors. When we start talking about multimodality, we start talking about projects, assignments, and “essays,” that don’t have to look like traditional papers and that scares us. It makes us uncomfortable because as a field, we have come to value alphabetic print over everything else.

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One thing we cling to in the humanities is the static nature of our texts. Once something has been written and printed, be that for a class or a published piece of work, we see it as unchangeable. This lends a certain amount of credibility to the work that we have decided to value. Although different editions of books can be published and papers can be revised, there is always a paper trail. Dennis Baron writes, “A writer’s reputation, or that of a publisher, predisposes readers to accept certain texts as authoritative, and to reject others. Provenance, in the world of conventional documents, is everything. We have learned to trust writing that leaves a paper trail” (29). Of course most forms of digital writing feature the ability to track revisions, but those revisions are not always made public to the reader and nobody has to approve or validate those revisions. As Baron makes clear, we value the authority of publication. In the humanities, we see publication as a seal of authentication—somebody thinks this is right and worth reading. Digital writing does require that same seal. Anybody, including me, can create a blog and write whatever they want. It can also be changed on any whim, and two readers, minutes part, might not read the same text. Richard Lanham adds, “We have proverbialized black-and-white expression as a guarantee of truth (‘I’ve got it down here in black-and-white!’), but the proverbs can’t hide the technological base of this metaphysical verity. ‘Black and white,’ like print technology as a whole, works by sensory exclusion; there is nothing intrinsically truthful about such a technique” (157). In other words, even print publications cannot tell the whole truth. There are things that are removed and left-out. But as a culture, and as a field of study, we have come to rely on the authority of black-and-white text and it is difficult to imagine an always changing digital text as having the same credibility to offer.  

According to Jeff Rice, the humanities, and composition studies specifically, can trace this value of alphabetic texts back to 1963 and what he refers to as the “grand narrative.” In The Rhetoric of Cool: Composition Studies and New Media, Rice explains, “North creates, intentionally or not, a modernist grand narrative regarding the field (a permanent theme), one that stresses more or less a moment centered on a unified theory of empirical (or scientific-oriented) research, one that has found a home in many subsequent discussions and publications on composition studies history” (15). What Rice means is that in 1963, the “supposed rebirth” of compositions studies, the narrative told by North failed to mention “technology, cultural studies, and visual writing” (11,13). This limited the field of composition, then, to the monomodal, alphabetic text that we still teach today, and specifically to our emphasis on the empirical or the objective. Striving to try and be considered “scientific” or at least equal to “scientific,” the field of composition studies focused on being formal and objective. Ultimately, this emphasis results in what Rice, via Ted Nelson, refers to as the “paperdigm.” Rice writes, “The paperdigm limits technological integration into writing, for writers (and educators) expect writing machines to duplicate the familiar and ubiquitous writing practices we normally engage with in print culture…Merely uploading print documents to the Web or engaging in file sharing does not allow writers the ability to rhetorically work with new media; instead such writing duplicates the logic of print in structure, content and delivery” (81). Since the grand narrative neglected “technology” and “visual writing,” even when we try to use new media in the classroom, we expect it to resemble what we would normally encounter with print media. What happens, though, as Rice points out, is educators think just having students upload a file previously written in a word processor is the same as having them create a piece of digital writing that really demands the use of the medium. That’s not the case. As I discussed in “TechnologyUse in the Classroom,” merely using technology is not enough. To truly integrate new media requires that we break away from our reliance on the “grand narrative” and our comfort with the “paperdigm.” For example, check out this person's idea of a "Grand Narrative."

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In order for the humanities to start playing the digital game, it will require a revision of our concept of writing. This means loosening our preconceptions that print is everything and that something has to be published by a publisher to be valued. Hidden behind these fears and discomforts are, of course, other issues of copyright and money. But ultimately, it means we need to revise the idea of writing in our classrooms. It doesn’t make sense to keep asking students to write traditional essays and claim it has “real-world” application. I agree with Dana Wilbur, who writes, “Learning is much more likely to transfer, too, when students read and write in the classroom in ways similar to how they do outside of schools” (81). It would be hard to argue that people outside of school are still only writing traditional essays, but because of discomfort with the way writing is changing and our inability to value writing that hasn’t been “published,” we are still stuck in the grand narrative.

Interpreting Technology Survey Results Podcast

The following podcast discusses the results of a survey conducted from 12/3/2012 through 12/9/2012 that focused on technology use in high school and college writing courses.

To see the full survey results, please check out the "Survey Results" page.

Technology Use in the Classroom

During this past summer I had the wonderful opportunity to take part in the Yellowstone Writing Project, which is a local site of the National Writing Project. The National Writing Project is a resource and community that I knew very little about during my first two years teaching, but I wish I had known more. While I have visited the main website a few times over the semester, it wasn’t until Collin Gifford Brooke re-introduced me to Google Reader that I have actively been following an online “conversation” between two people as a follow-up to NWP’s Digital Writing Month. As Anna Smith explains, “As two explorers during Digital Writing Month, Kevin Hodgson and I, Anna Smith, have decided to continue that conversation through consideration of digital literacies and contemporary composition by coordinating a multimodal conversation that begins with the idea of Digital Writing Month and then stretches outwards from there” (Smith’s hyperlinks). You can read Anna’s first blog post here, which gets the conversation started, and the video embedded below is Kevin’s first response.

As part of the conversation, both participants are engaging in reflection. As Kevin Hodgson writes, “We also want to reflect on how those platforms inform our writing." Here you can see his reflection on the video. Writing this way, through a variety of digital platforms, is the type of writing we should be striving to include in all of our writing courses.

           

To see Kevin's Post, please click here

Although Jody Shipka argues that multimodality is not exclusively associated with technology, she presents a convincing argument for asking students to create writing that is multimodal rather than monomodal, or straight alphabetic-text. She writes, “A mediated activity-based multimodal framework not only requires that students work hard but also differently, and it does so by foregrounding the complex processes associated with goal formation and attainment” (100). What Shipka is advocating for is inquiry-based learning. She and others see multimodal writing as a way to engage students in their own learning and decision making processes. Rather than passively writing a monomodal, alphabetic-text that answers a prompt, multimodal writing provides students “with tasks that do not specify what their final products must be and that ask them to imagine alternative contexts for their work”, and if this occurs, then students will “come away from the course with a more expansive, richer repertoire of meaning-making and problem-solving strategies” (Shipka 101). Looking back at the digital conversation between Anna and Kevin, we can see this decision making process in action. Kevin chose to do a video for his first post because, as he says, “Video allows us to see and hear each other, which is what I am hoping for. The format will give us an initial connection beyond the Twitter and blog texts, where we imagine our voices” (Hodgson). Even though Kevin and Anna are adults who are choosing to participate in this project, in the context of students, they have had to pick a goal and decide the best means of achieving it. Both participants realized the limitations of just one modality—blogging or Twitter, which are heavily based on written text—and so they are trying to incorporate other modalities to attain the goal of continuing this conversation. Just as importantly, as Kevin recognizes, is the need to reflect on this process in order to recognize the choices being made. As Shipka points out, “The questions comprising the SOGC ask students to focus specifically on the texts they produce in response to a task and to catalog the various rhetorical, material, methodological, and technological choices they made with their work” (118). This, Shipka argues, is really where the learning takes place. It is here that students are truly practicing rhetoric by justifying their composition choices.

However, just including technology in the writing classroom is not enough. As this article indicates, there are better ways to incorporate technology. New media should not be used to just replace what is already being done with traditional essays, but rather the entire way we conceptualize writing and what it looks like needs to be revised. At the beginning of his book Lingua Fracta, Collin Gifford Brooke gives a great example of how just using new media does not necessarily result in re-thinking writing. He argues against MaryLynn Saul’s essay “The Limitations of Hypertext in the Composition Classroom,” by noting that “Her study rests on the assumption that hypertext has little to do with writing, that it is simply a technology which can be added or subtracted from a writing classroom without any appreciable effect on the goals, aims, purposes, or strategies of the classroom or of the writers themselves” (21). In other words, it is not the technology itself that makes good writing or good writers. Instead, it is the use of the technology, the deliberate choices and defined purposes that make using new media in the classroom powerful. For instance, Doering, Beach, and O’Brien explain, “Given this ready access to these broader, even world-wide audiences, adolescents must then know how to go beyond simply creating multimodal texts to knowing how to design these texts using visual rhetoric to effectively attract, engage, and influence their audiences” (41). As these authors are showing, writing teachers need to not only rethink the tools we use in the classroom, but the assignments as well. It is not enough to just ask students to write a traditional paper anymore. Instead, we need to be asking them to compose via new media and our assignments should demand the use of these skills.

Obviously technology has become a large part of our everyday lives, and as I discussed in “Technology Language in the Common Core,” it is making its way into the classroom. There is language in place to encourage teachers to start thinking about how to use technology effectively. Dana J. Wilber explains, “Our students choose from email, text messaging, instant messaging, blogs, Facebook/MySpace and other social networks, Twitter, social bookmarking, Google Earth, digital storytelling, and more to communicate daily. Not everything they do belongs in the classroom. But it makes sense for us, as teachers, to know about these technologies since they occupy so much of our students’ lives and because they are a big part of the ways in which students read and write today” (x-xi). Besides language in documents such as the Common Core, there are organizations, like the Partnership for 21^st Century Skills, that are advocating to “help the U.S. education system keep up by fusing the 3Rs and the 4Cs (Critical thinking and problem solving, Communication, Collaboration, and Creativity and innovation)” (Partnership for 21^st Century Skills). Especially at the primary and secondary level, teachers are being pushed by administrators, districts, and states to include more technology in the classroom. Generally, this push is working. In a survey I conducted, 66.7% of respondents reported they had been “asked to create projects or complete assignments that utilized technology outside of producing a traditional paper or presentation” in their English classrooms. The results from the survey can be seen on the “Survey Results” page, and I also have a podcast discussing the implications of the results.

Whether focusing solely on technology or not, multimodal writing using new media should be a focus in our writing classrooms. As these authors have shown, it is time to move beyond assigning our students writing prompts that only ask them to answer a question instead of asking them to solve a problem and justify how they go about presenting their solution. If we do this, we are preparing students to much more effectively tackle all types of writing assignments, and we are teaching them about the impact their choices have on the reception of their final product.

For examples further examples of digital writing in the classroom, check out this blog post by Rachel Bear, who provides links to her class wikis at the top of the post.

Technology Language in the Common Core

As the new Common Core State Standards are adopted and implemented, there is a considerable amount of dialogue about their effectiveness and how they will impact teachers’ decision making processes and teaching styles. In this video excerpt from her keynote address to the Chicago Public School system, NCTE Author Sarah Brown Wessling does a good job of discussing her own challenges and successes with implementing the Common Core.

  
The Common Core State Standards have formally been adopted in 45 states and 3 territories and are in the process of being implemented into the curriculum and classroom. According to the Common Core State Standards Initiative: Preparing America’s Students for College and Career, “The standards were developed in collaboration with teachers, school administrators, and experts, to provide a clear and consistent framework to prepare our children for college and the workforce” (“About the Standards”). In principle, these standards are not inherently bad. Few educators will argue that it is wrong to set goals for student learning and align teaching practices to these goals. However, what I’m most interested in is how language about the use of technology is presented in the Common Core and how this language compares with the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) “Standards for the English Language Arts”, the Council of Writing Program Administrators (WPA) “Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition,” and finally, the Montana State University-Bozeman “WRIT 101 Learning Outcomes,” which are still in draft form.

Image Courtesy of the Common Core State Standards

Beginning with the Common Core English Language Arts standards, then, I’m predominately focusing on the ninth through twelfth grade writing standards. In explaining the rationale behind the design of the Common Core, the document states, “students need the ability to gather, comprehend, evaluate, synthesize, and report on information and ideas, to conduct original research in order to answer questions or solve problems, and to analyze and create a high volume and extensive range of print and nonprint texts in media forms old and new” (“Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts” 4). Here we can see the Core’s emphasis on research, which is one area where it recognizes the role technology should be playing in the classroom. While it does not prioritize “new media” over “old media,” it does highlight that today’s students are part of a technological society and teachers should be using that technology in the classroom to “produce and consume media” (“Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts”4). Even though the document claims technology is a key component to the design of the standards, it really only shows up in one of the writing Anchor Standards. The Common Core states that students will “Use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing and to interact and collaborate with others” (41). This anchor standard is then rephrased for the 6^th writing standard, which for 9-10 grades reads, “Use technology, including the Internet, to produce, publish and update individual or shared writing products, taking advantage of technology’s capacity to link to other information and to display information flexibly and dynamically” (46) and is modified slightly for 11-12 grades as “Use technology, including the Internet, to produce, publish, and update individual or shared writing products in response to ongoing feedback, including new arguments or information” (46). What is positive about these standards is they are general, which leaves room for teachers to decide how to incorporate the standard. Additionally, there is a strong focus on using new media for collaborative purposes, helping to dispel the myth that all writing is done in isolation.

However, in a document that is new and set to replace already existing state standards, some which also included language about technology incorporation, one standard out of 10 may not be enough. “Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing,” a collaborative document developed by the Council of Writing Program Administrators, National Council of Teachers of English, and the National Writing Project,” was written as a response to the Common Core. Instead of standards, the “Framework” refers to “habits of mind” which are “ways of approaching learning that are both intellectual and practical and that will support students’ success in a variety of fields and disciplines” (5). One way the “Framework” sees teachers fostering these habits is by providing students with the “ability to compose in multiple environments—from traditional pen and paper to electronic technologies” (5). On the surface, this does not seem to differ too much from the Core’s goal for students to “create a high volume and extensive range of print and nonprint texts in media forms old and new” (“Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts” 4). What’s different, though, is the “Framework” really focuses on the teacher’s role and makes a distinction between using technology and using it meaningfully. It states, “While many students have opportunities to practice composing in electronic environments, explicit and intentional instruction focusing on the use and implications of writing and reading using electronic technologies will contribute to students’ abilities to use them effectively” (14). In other words, it is not enough to have students use the Internet to publish their work; instead, students need to be evaluating the reasons for that medium of publication and be making deliberate, and rhetorical, decisions about their choices. This language, though, as the “Framework” points out, is not part of the Common Core.

While the Common Core is not a perfect document, and while the “Framework” is advocating for more emphasis on rhetoric in conjuncture with the use of technology, at least the Core provides the possibility for students to create writing that does not resemble traditional essays. In the “WPA Outcomes Statements for First-Year Composition,” technology is limited to the “use of electronic environments for drafting, reviewing, revising, editing, and sharing texts” and “locate, evaluate, organize and use research material collected from electronic sources” (3). These are important elements of the writing process and should not be ignored, but they imply that students should still be creating traditional assignments. Even though I agree with Jody Shipka that if we focus too much on the screen in our “attempt to free students from the limits of the page” that we might instead “institute another, limiting them to texts that can be composed, received, and reviewed onscreen,” technology use in the classroom should be defined as more than mere word processing. Elsewhere in the document the WPA outcomes acknowledge “the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes,” but technology use is limited to drafting and editing (“WPA Outcomes Statements” 2). Additionally, when we look at the NCTE standards, the 8^th standard reads, “Students use a variety of technological and information resources (e.g., libraries, databases, computer networks, video) to gather and synthesize information and to create and communicate knowledge” (“NCTE/IRA Standards”).  At least the NCTE standards mention creation in connection to technology, but there is still a sense of limitation. Technology is being used to just “gather” information and then it is used to “communicate” that knowledge, whereas, the Core does a good job of emphasizing collaboration. Finally, when looking at the “WRIT 101 Learning Outcomes” for MSU-Bozeman, technology is not mentioned at all.

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Although many people have reservations about the Common Core, and there are undeniably areas for concern, when looking at language about technology in isolation and comparing that to other standards documents in the writing field, the Common Core seems to recognize a wider range of application for the inclusion of technology in the classroom. Not only is it possible for high school teachers to create assignments that challenge students to think about writing in terms beyond the traditional essay, but they are really being asked and even required to do so by their guiding document. Comparatively, the documents guiding instructors at the collegiate level are not using language about technology nearly enough, nor are they really advocating for innovative uses in the classroom. Instead, these documents still see technology as being used to continue to promote the “paperdigm” as described by Jeff Rice, where the emphasis is on print media and how technology can be used—to edit and revise—to create what we are already comfortable with in the field of composition.