Steven D. Krause

John asked a while ago for “all the teachers who read this blog to identify the five most important issues or concerns you face when planning a writing course.” I’ve been meaning to post about this for about a week now, but I’ve been distracted by a variety of different things. And besides, it’s a toughie. How do I name just five things? How do I come up with five issues or concerns?

Well, here’s a start:
1) How does the course in question fit into the “big picture” of the program? For example, if the course is first year composition, there are certain “introduction to academic life” sorts of skills and lessons that ought to be in that course. Certainly there are different issues and concerns in fy com than there is in a 300-level writing class or a grad course.

2) What do other people do who teach the course, and what do they expect out of the course? With a course like fy comp, this might come in the form of programmatic guidelines, like these outcomes for the first year writing program at EMU. But I also think it’s useful to talk with colleagues who have taught the course before. Maybe that’s common sense, but I’ve seen a few too many examples where instructors take on new courses and just didn’t do this.

3) Where do I want students to be at the end of the term? When I’m writing up a syllabus, especially for a new course, I usually start at the end of the term and work back toward the beginning. Part of it is simple logistics, but the other part of it is to try and figure out what sorts of things I need to do in the rest of the class to get students to that point.
4) What’s the basic “point” or “argument” I want to make in the class? Maybe this is the sort of thing that you can only do after teaching a class a couple if times, but I like classes to have a point, at least in my own mind. I’m not thinking of anything too complicated, though. For example, I’d describe the point of my fy comp class as “research writing is a process, one best completed in small steps.” Nothing revolutionary, but keeping this point in mind helps me shape the class assignments and activities.
5) How is all going to fit and what will I have to cut? Every time I’ve tried to develop a new class, I always do too much. Knowing that in advance, I try to realize that I can’t do everything I want to do. So the trick then is figuring out what I can afford to get rid of and still be able to do the first four things.

I don’t know if that’s what John was looking for exactly, but….

Update (5/11):
When I checked the stats for this page just now (about 11:30 am), I was surprised to see the number of hits and all from people visiting Inside Higher Ed. What’s up with that, I wondered. And then I noticed that they linked to this post in a little sidebar called “Around the Web.” Go figure.

Anyway, to be fair, it’s important to note that I posted this originally to respond to the call that John Lovas had to the question(s) that he asked on his excellent blog. Also, I know that at least Mike @ Vitia has posted five things to think about, too.

This isn’t in really of celebration of Cinco de Mayo, but it turns out that 5-5-05 is the day when I’ll post a bunch of links, mostly from the May 3 NCTE’s Inbox:

• NCTE comes out against the SAT writing test. Shocking, huh? I agree with the basic sentiment of this press release (and I’d probably agree with the accompanying report), but I do have two reservations. First, testing writing was never meant to be teaching writing. In fact, as one of the other links here suggests, there’s an argument that more testing in writing leads to more teaching of writing. Second, this is a statement that is perhaps a day late and a dollar short. I’m not completely in agreement with Jeff’s critique of this, but it seems to me that the writing administrators at various places ought to have been a bit more forceful about all this earlier.
• On the other hand, maybe the SAT writing test will lead to more writing instruction in high school. That’s the gist of this article. I guess time will tell, right?
• Say, just what is “good writing instruction,” anyway? Well, according to NCTE, this is it in the nutshell. I hadn’t seen this document before; it seems to me that it might be kind of interesting to read closely in a teaching of writing class– perhaps my computers and writing class. I mostly agree with it, but it is interestingly problematic as well. The first paragraph starts out promising enough:

Just as the nature of and expectation for literacy has changed in the past century and a half, so has the nature of writing. Much of that change has been due to technological developments, from pen and paper, to typewriter, to word processor, to networked computer, to design software capable of composing words, images, and sounds. These developments not only expanded the types of texts that writers produce, they also expanded immediate access to a wider variety of readers. With full recognition that writing is an increasingly multifaceted activity, we offer several principles that should guide effective teaching practice.

Okay, that’s right up my alley. But then, in a list of 11 principles about what this paragraph means, direct attention to writing technologies (“Composing occurs in different modalities and technologies”) finishes in tenth place. I don’t know if the intent is to rank these items, but it is kind of how it reads.

• Leave it to someone outside of comp/rhet to offer some “common sense” about using machines to grade writing. See this St. Louis Post-Dispatch article, “Teachers look to computers to critique student essays.” The article is mostly about U of Missouri Sociologist Ed Brent and some software he uses to critique student writing. A lot of the article rehashes the same old problems of machine grading, but I thought a quote from Brent sort of summed up my (perhaps naive) take on the whole thing: “I don’t think we want to replace humans,” Brent said. “But we want to do the fun stuff, the challenging stuff. And the computer can do the tedious but necessary stuff.”

It’s National Teacher Day. Go figure.

I’ve been pretty swamped the last couple days because I had to write a proposal for the 2006 CCCCs (and while the NCTE software/site for all this is a bit clunky and/or unclear, I think I sent stuff off successfully), because I’m trying to get back into my textbook project, and also because I’m teaching a section of first year composition this spring term. (For the non-EMU-types: the term that runs from January to the end of April is known here as “winter,” the first half of summer school is called “spring,” and the second half of the summer school is called “summer”).

It is as both fy comp teacher and fy comp textbook writer I’ve been interested in a whole series of posts by Collin, Will at Weblogg-ed, Alex Reid, Derek at Earth Wide Moth, and I’m sure a bunch of other folks about this essay by Jon Udell called “The New Freshman Comp.” Let me sum this all up in a super-duper simplistic and dangerously reductitive fashion: we ought teach writing like we teach (and learn and understand and practice) technology, we need to get beyond composition as simple “words in a row” literacy, and we need to teach and practice with the tools that students actually use to communicate and interact with media: video tools, sound tools, PhotoShop,etc., along with more traditional writing tools like MS Word or what-have-you. Oh yeah– screencasting is pretty cool.

Now, I agree with all of this and all of the above quoted posts, more or less. I’d argue that this has pretty much been the underlying philosophy of about 75% of the presentations at the computers and writing conference for at least the past 15 years. I think screencasting has a lot of instructional potential, and yes Jenny, I think there is a place for podcasting in writing classes, too. In fact, I’m going to give that (and probably screencasting) a try for an online class I’m going to be teaching in the fall.

I’ve been teaching students how to make web pages for over 10 years now, I’ve been using emailing lists and other technologies for longer, and I keep trying to learn new tricks. This spring, one of my experiments is to use blog writing as a way for students to keep “research journals” about their on-going projects. The mantra in the 300-level class I teach all the time is “writing is a technology, writing is a technology.”

And actually, I think that a lot of other more “traditional” comp/rhet folks are coming around to this position, too. Collin says “Our emphasis on writing, and this despite the work of some really smart people, is really an emphasis on writing in the narrowest scriptural sense. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard otherwise sensible people fall back on the excuse that creating a web page isn’t really writing…” Yeah, I think those types still exist. But at the same time, the level of acceptance or even practice of more sophisticated technologies in writing classes across the board is so much higher than it was just a few years ago.

So, I agree, I agree, I agree.

But…

I have some problems with all this, too.

• I don’t want to put on that “bona-fide expert with my PhD and experience and publications and junk” hat, but I don’t know if Jon Udell necessarily has the ethos to tell me how to change teaching freshman comp. For one thing, it sounds like Udell’s teaching experience involves work at an ivy league school, the kind of place where they don’t have a lot of regard for the need for freshman comp. Which leads to…
• … my second point: at the first year level and in a class like freshman composition at EMU, I have students who have some serious problems with good ol’ fashioned words-in-a-row literacy. I’m talking about students who are “basic” writers, or who have basic writer-like sorts of problems with things like making paragraphs, writing complete sentences, orality in their written prose, etc., etc., etc.. What it boils down to is a lot of the students at EMU in entry-level writing classes are woefully unprepared for the experience. They didn’t have the same kind of successes in high school and earlier experiences as the kind of student who attends an ivy league school.

  These students need to work on these kinds of skills, and I guess I want to make a claim that is perhaps seen as common sense by everyone outside of the computers and writing community: students need to have a pretty good handle on words in a row (aka “print”) literacy before you can get much out of the sorts of literacy skills that comes with screencasting, podcasting, flash, etc.

  It’s not that they can’t learn more about writing with these things; obviously, they can. The problem is one of time and priorities. If I have to include time in a first year composition class to teach students how to make web pages or to allow them to work on web pages, then that is time I can’t use to discuss readings, to do peer reviews, to talk about revision strategies, or to do any number of other “more basic writing” activities.

• Last but far from least, what we’re also talking about here is an access gap. I’ve written about this before, including as a response to Collin’s post on his blog. We don’t teach any sections of first year writing in a computer lab, and while I can assume freshmen will have some basic computer skills (word processing, email, basic web surfing, etc.) and will have access to a basic computer to practice these skills, I can’t assume much more than that.

  I don’t want to harp/whine about the access thing too much because, as Jeff Rice has pointed out before, this “lack of access” argument too often becomes an excuse/cop-out for not doing anything new. But I’ve got to say that when folks at other schools talk about all the cool stuff they can do with technology in their first year composition classes, well, I get jealous.

Of course, my ranting here is really just about first year composition. In junior and senior-level classes, I’m much more able to do what Udell et all are suggesting. Another story.