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.