FoolsCap

Desperation for subject lines sets in when I find I’m resorting to homonyms.  Homonyms!

I know I’ve been the object of some fun-making regarding my devotion to a certain prof’s work, both in the classroom and out of it; of course, much of that is self-deprecating fun-making too: I admit I’ve been sort of in thrall to the prof in question.  I try not to use this space for too much self-analysis anymore, so I’ll spare my reader(s?) my third-rate psychoanalysis on why that should be the case.  In any event, while it seems fruitless to deny his or her influence on my work, this prof is soon to be leaving my institution, it seems like a valid opportunity to start crafting–or at least, looking for ways to craft–a scholastic identity apart from being this prof’s acolyte but still admitting his or influence on my research interests.

And no, dear reader, I don’t kid myself that all the efforts toward ambiguity and anonymity in the above paragraph mean you won’t figure out to whom I’m referring.  Hint: with all due respect, it’s not Cannon Schmidt.

Anyway, as I have so often in the past, I start with this prof’s work as a way to begin my own post.  Particularly, what is written here:

Those conversations, implicit and explicit, can occur in a shopping list (which is one example Trimbur provides from his textbook; a writing some students dispute and label irrelevant) or on a website or in an encounter, or in a book, and so on. This writing, however, is not, as Trimbur offers, symbolic. Its process or flow does not represent another experience or encounter. It is writing itself. The challenge is to ask: how does one generate or maintain such relations with references? How does one teach that writing within an already established network that poses references as proof or confirmation?

I was revisiting this post (from January 07) because I’ve been using Trimbur’s textbook, The Call to Write, for one of the courses I’m teaching this summer.

Granted, I’m still a new teacher, so I don’t make any claim to owning an expertise or even having the necessary body of research to draw from when framing some question and comments that follow.  My goal here, if anything, is to ask some questions about my pedagogy and (hopefully) get some helpful feedback from more experienced readers.

I’m teaching two classes this semester.  One is good ol’ 1020.  No problems there (but I am growing bored with the syllabus so might draft a new one for fall).  The situation for my other course is a bit more interesting: I’m teaching a writing workshop for my university’s Center for Chicano and Boricua Studies (CBS); the program & the workshop (there’s also a maths workshop) are designed to lay the groundwork so that students can enter collegiate level courses in these subjects and be prepared to perform at the expected level.  I’ve decided to teach the course as sort of a prelude to 1010; in fact, I’m already committed to teaching a CBS-sponsored section of 1010 in fall with these students and a handful of other CBS students.

What has been instructive for me, thus far, is the difference between expectations in teaching for CBS and for my own dep’t.  My dep’t (at present at least) allows its GTAs an extremely wide latitude in how/what they teach in their composition courses.  For example, I teach from Scholes/Comley/Ulmer’s Text Book and have a very strong emphasis on technology and hypertext (in this syllabus at least); many of my peers from this year’s crop of GTAs opted for World is a Text and took a more conventional cultural studies approach.  My dep’t, to the best of my knowledge happily accomodates both pedagogies and that has been a source of much pleasure and relief for me.

The organizer and administrator of the CBS program, a friend and colleague named Ethriam Brammer, has been very gracious about my role in the program.  While the CBS program has specific goals of its own, Ethriam has made very clear that I have pedagogical autonomy in both this workshop and in the fall 1010 course; CBS sets no expectations from me other than academic rigor and a commitment to the mission and goals of the Summer Enrichment Program.

This will be my first time teaching 1010 and in drafting the syllabus I moved away from the sort of textual research work used in Text Book to (what I assume is) a more conventional stance of writing pedagogy.  Why? 

One thing I’ve picked up from teaching two courses from Scholes et al. is that students have expectations of their own; on the recently returned student evals from last semester, one student complained that they didn’t think they’d learned anything about academic writing from my course.  (I had expected this reply, but it still stung a little.)  This could mean at least a couple of things.  First, this student didn’t understand the connection between the research and (sorry, Jeff) critical thinking I was asking of them and conventional forms of academic research.  This, in turn, would indicate a gap in my pedagogy: I failed to make clear these connections or to establish their value.  Another suggestion, one that is most problematic for my formative pedagogy, is that the value of such text work for academic use is nil.  (As Jeff might counsel, drawing on Sirc: But do we choose to teach writing simply for school or for life?)  Of course, I don’t thinkthat such theories of writing and research are without value, but having a student make that claim so emphatically gave me pause to consider the possibility.

Given, then, that students have expectations of their own, as do departments and centers of study and universities, the experience of the novice instructor (like myself) can sometimes seem a precarious one.  While I like the emphasis on textuality, mystorical work, and poststructural theory that Scholes et al. incorporate into Text Book, I didn’t really feel it was appropriate for the CBS course.  I think, in part, it had to do with my own boredom with parts of the syllabus that uses it, but also because I had some uncertainty about what level of writing development I would see in these students.  (Thus far, results have been encouraging.)  So I wanted to approach the workshop (and 1010 as well) in a somewhat more. . .eh. . .conservative fashion in order to be able to better help any students who were having particular difficulties with the assignments.  That is, I wanted to be able to focus more on improving student writing than on explaining the theories and value of and behind the work I ask students to do in my current 1020 syllabus.

But, at the same time, and after looking at some sample 1010 syllabi, I didn’t want to just push the 5P theme on these students either, and the sample syllabi that I looked at relied too hevaily on that model and texts that taught that model for my interests.  So I chose Trimbur’s The Call to Write for its emphasis on context and connectedness in writing as well a stress on the flexibility of the essay form.

The word essay is derived from the French word essai, which means to try or test out.  This derivation captures the spirit of the essay as a genre of writing in which writers invent forms to embody their purposes.  Many examples of writing in this book might be described as an essay as well as, say, a memoir, a commentary, or a proposal.  The exact meaning of the term essay has been debated by scholars in literary studies, rhetoric, and composition.  Some want to restrict it to a particular type of literary or journalistic essay that uses a personal voice and other self-revelatory features to fashion experience and observation into writing.  Others use it more broadly to refer to writing tasks where the form in open and flexible.  In this chapter, we’ll use the term essay in its broader sense, as a catch-all category that includes a range of other genres.  For our purposes, the defining feature of the essay will be the openness and the flexibility it gives writers to shape their thoughts, feelings, and experiences into written forms.

I quote Trimbur at length here because I think the explanation of the essay here reveals something important of both why I chose this text and why I’ve always like the essay personally.  Pedagogically, I like Trimbur’s emphasis on openness and flexibility and invention–that form is something that is created by the writer rather than something the writer is slavishly beholden to.  In this sense, then, I could (if I chose) teach the "Discourse" assignment as an example of the endless mutability of the essay form–or the cut-up, or, or. 

There’s a lot more I’d like to say about Trimbur and 1010 and pedagogy, but my thoughts are drifting.  Perhaps later.