I question the ability to prove success in the ways the CBS program believes it will do. If anything, a program like that should be sensitive to how it is not addressing a variety of other factors that play into learning, particularly when one is speaking about so called “at risk” students. Alas, it’s not. To get all ANT here for a moment, that may partly have to do with the pedagogical background its leadership has. And that point, too, asks for a more complex breakdown.

And, btw, I agree about the genre-based approach Trimbur takes, but as I explain here, I liked his emphasis on the flexbilibity of the essay form–particularly on how JT ties form to invention. That, for me, might be the starting point away from the “conservative” model here–invention, and inventing new ways to achive the same ends.

I may have the opportunity to work with these students beyond 1010 and pick them up (or many of them up) as 1020 in Winter 08. . .I’m hoping that maybe I can use 1010 to lay some foundations for a 1020 course that (like my current one) can address non-linearity, appropriation etc.

And as a final note–I hope you don’t think my tone above sounds defensive. I think I understand the point you’re making about the danger of a defective practice, but I think CBS’ goal is a noble one and–to a certain extent–wonder whether a course like my current 1020 wouldn’t make their task more difficult.

It is interesting to me that you brought up this point. You seems to imply that only traditional, ‘conservative’ teaching ‘improves’ student writing, and anything else, eg the mystory, doesn’t. (That’s not your exact point, but it comes off that way.) This is something I struggled with too when I started incorporating the mystory into my syllabus (not that the mystory is the only non-traditional assignment out there, it’s just the one I use too). And oddly enough, before that I spent several years using Trimbur’s A Call to Write as my textbook. The one problem I had with Trimbur was that I felt myself just teaching one genre of writing before I moved on to another—literacy narrative, letter to the editor, analysis of an article, research paper… I felt that both the students and myself were like “ok, check that genre off the list; on to the next one” and by the end of the semester we were all bored to death. As a result, I’m not sure that anyone’s writing really “improved.”

I think the struggle is, whether we use ‘traditional’ textbooks or ‘non-traditional’ textbook (I can see Jeff cringing now at the binary I’m creating), to find prompts/assignments that engage the student and encourage them to think for themselves and to communicate those thoughts. And I think the possibility is there to do that with any textbook.

Of course, this is the issue, no? At what point does even this realization - diagnostics and placement exams are too artificial to use - allow us to shift pedagogical emphasis? While your observations are helpful to the work you are doing, another position is to wonder if time could be put to more useful practices. Given that neither a diagnostic (as you note) nor a placement exam actually trace how someone writes, why the commitment to them? The answer typically given is that they allow us room to understand what to teach (ah! x amount of students did y; I need to teach y). But if we just recognized that these things don’t measure accurately, how are they helping us teach?

One might then realize that a program like the one you are teaching in or any other that is committed to the diagnostic or placement exam is actually re-enforcing problematic practices. Students who are repeatedly exposed to a problematic practice believe that it is the practice. This is how ideology works. Replace diagnostic with a racist, sexist, consumerist, nationalist and so on practice and you have the same thing. Repetitive exposure convinces us of a way to do something.

The observation, then, that a textbook like Textbook was confusing to “basic” writers makes sense. If I am exposed to schooling practices that tell me non-linearity writing, appropriative strategies, fragments, mystorys, etc are wrong, why would the book make any sense? I’ve been interpellated already by diagnostics (which must be simple in form in order to work in 45 minutes) and other similar devices.

I knew you’d come over to our side one day!

I find it interesting that many colleagues in rhetcomp began (as I mention here) in lit studies–particularly in medieval lit scholarship as you indicate. At C&W, I was chatting with a colleague (I don’t remember who or from what institution–it was on Sunday and my brain was just fried) who was just moving into comp studies from a medieval lit background too. Our chat focused precisely on what you allude to here, that both medieval lit and our own contemporary era encompass moments in which writing & literate practice is in flux and I think that might be what draws a lot of medievalists into rhet-comp.

But what accounts for me?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpOZPwN_Mes

As I read you hearing echoes of Sirc’s box logic, I hear echoes of what I describe –by way of Ulmer’s conductive logic– signature-bloc/k logic that extends such Sirc-cuitry in various directions. Although I don’t discuss “bloc/ks” directly in a recent piece I wrote for C&W Online, such echoes interests intersect as well with my interest in Rice’s hip-hop pedagogy.

http://www.bgsu.edu/cconline/gvcarter/

I note this piece not so much as an advertisement for my own work, but to extend the insight-cum-incites of the echoes found therein.

Be sure to check out in the same C&W issue Thomas Rickert’s and Michael Salvo’s award-winning essay on sound and writing.

gvcarter