Talking to Students About Writing

Staffing the WAC table at the Student Resource Fair last week gave me an opportunity to chat with some students about the writing they are doing in their courses here at Longview. We distributed tip sheets on college writing (Writing in College and Writing Tips) created by some Longview WAC instructors, which prompted a number of students to comment about how much they needed these since they were presently in the throes of working on projects.

That reinforced what I already knew, having visited a number of classes since the semester began August 24 where the instructors had gotten students writing immediately—in response to readings, in lab reports, in brief paragraphs. At the resource fair, students were eager to tell stories of their own writing situations from their concerns about the projects they have ahead of them this semester to their anticipated career plans.

When I have the opportunity to help present an assignment or run a peer workshop in a class, I jump on the chance to get students talking about their majors and career aspirations.

In any given Gen Ed course there is usually a pretty wide array of majors. In the Anatomy and Physiology class I worked with last week, most students intend to become heath professionals. Student ownership of writing and learning in a course ramps up when students realize that this course and the writing therein is leading them directly to the next level, whether that is a 4-year college or employment.

In A&P, we discussed the nature of the writing they will likely do: care plans, charting, patient education documents, as well as the current communication staple of most workplaces, email.

I usually use a brief survey to capture their perceptions of writing in order to launch a discussion of writing in school and the kinds of writing they will likely do in their professional lives. There are often discrepancies between their perceptions and the data I have to share with them. The instructor and I team up to mitigate those gaps and bring the discussion back around to the project at hand as we coach them on strategies for fulfilling it successfully.

Today I presented information on professional writing to an introductory Engineering class.  This group is often surprised by the sheer volume of writing even entry level engineers are required to produce. The writing in this course is a mix of different kinds and genres of writing---descriptive, technical, research-driven---and includes small-stakes (brief reports and discussion posts) as well as a semester project (career exploration).  All of the writing students do in this class is in service of the course outcomes and the instructor's goals to have students experience firsthand the kind of thinking and writing that is paramount in the field of engineering.

Students are willing to make that connection between the writing and learning in the course and their ultimate educational and career goals if we encourage it. Such a connection makes the course project relevant on another level besides just the immediate one—to get a grade and to complete the course successfully. This is perhaps especially true in the introductory courses students take to complete General Education requirements.

Visiting with students about writing is enlightening and gives you a perfect opening to tout the myriad values you see reflected in the writing projects and experiences you have designed for them.

How do you get students talking about writing?

Read-Along Reviews and Interviews

This post is devoted to mention of some resources that might be useful as you begin to read Here Comes Everybody. Worthwhile reviews of the book are readily available through numerous magazines, journals, and websites. These two seemed to capture the essence of the book.
This review appeared in Ars Technica, a technology news and information website:
http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/04/book-review-2008-04-1.ars/1
It is immediately followed by an interview with Clay Shirky by the book reviewer, Timothy B. Lee:
http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/04/book-review-2008-04-1.ars/4

This brief review appeared on the Paper Cuts Blog of the New York Times when the book came out in paperback:
http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/gutenberg-is-dead-long-live-gutenberg/

You can really get to know Clay Shirky in a more in-depth, two-part interview by Russ Juskalian which appeared in Columbia Journalism Review:
PART I: http://www.cjr.org/overload/interview_with_clay_shirky_par.php?page=all

PART II: http://www.cjr.org/overload/interview_with_clay_shirky_par_1.php

Finally, here are some preliminary questions to ponder in advance of the book meet-up at Next Door Pizza next Wednesday, September 15, 2:00 PM:
What do Shirky’s stories like that of the lost cell phone illustrate for you? What examples of technology use have you seen driving other changes in the social environment?

 What distinctions does Shirky make between these concepts: sharing, cooperation, collaborative production, collective action? Have you seen evidence of these in play when you use social or other media?

If you would like to share initial impressions of the book based on your reading so far, please post a comment!

Starting Small: Low Stakes, High Yield

Interested in WAC, but wondering how to integrate writing into your already crowded semester? Some instructors begin the semester by easing students into writing with small-scale, low-stakes writing activities. These range from formulaic bio-poems and creative icebreakers through which students introduce themselves or each other to the class to informal paragraphs directly related to assigned reading or class discussion.

These brief writings can serve the instructor in a number of ways: as early evidence of a student’s writing abilities, as a baseline for purposes of observing writing and thinking growth over the semester, as a diagnostic tool through which to determine the need for encouraging some or all students to use additional resources, like the Writing Center.

Instructors rarely grade these types of writings except in a holistic way or to issue some modest credit simply for engaging in the exercise. A check or plus accompanied by a 1-sentence reader-response comment or question is a reasonable response to these brief writings. One way or another, it’s important to let students know you read what they wrote.

For students, such exercises can be a painless introduction to using writing as a way to learn course material. Without the pressure of a grade and without the stress of trying to produce a larger piece of text, students can focus on the question or issue at hand.

Students often get hung up on the end product of a larger high-stakes project before they’ve engaged in a process of developing ideas for it. Low-stakes writing opportunities early in the semester can situate writing for them as a means to the end. 

Instructors who use informal writings in response to readings typically craft open-ended questions that invite a host of legitimate responses which can then serve as springboards for class discussions.  Students who have written even briefly about something usually feel more confident about speaking up in class.  Having students write before they speak reinforces the idea of thoughtful reflection, which can lead to deeper exploration, especially in the case of a controversial issue or difficult topic.

Peter Elbow, a composition theorist whose early work greatly influenced writing pedagogy, describes the goal of low-stakes writing in or out of class as "not so much to produce excellent pieces of writing as to get students to think, learn, and understand more of the course material."  He asserts that the piece of writing itself is not what's of value because what the brain actually retains are the new neural pathways generated by the act of writing.

Low-stakes writings, if used with any frequency, can norm students to instructor expectations in regard to critical thinking and can increase student comfort with writing on demand, making them better poised to tackle a larger semester project.

Do you use any small-scale writing assignments in your classes?  What has worked for you?  What kinds of questions do you pose?  Do you grade these or give credit?  

For more information on the benefits of low-stakes writings, see Peter Elbow's piece, "High Stakes and Low Stakes in Assigning and Responding to Writing," in Writing to Learn: Srategies for Assigning and Responding to Writing Across the Disciplines, Sorcinelli and Elbow, eds., Jossey-Bass, 1997.
 
For a sampling of low-stakes writing assignments (25 different kinds) and a template of the bio-poem and how it can be used to prepare students to write about historical figures, see John Bean's book, Engaging Idea:The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom, Jossey-Bass, 1996.

Both of these books are available at MCC-Longview Library.  Additional copies of Bean's book are abundant in every division--see your WAC Cadre rep or me for a copy!

Why a WAC blog?

Well, there are several answers to this question. Perhaps most obvious is that a blog is all about communicating through writing, which seems like a reasonable enterprise for a WAC Program to promote.

Blogs also provide a different kind of space for discussions. Given the frantic rush of our personal and professional lives, due in no small part to the technology that fuels some discernible portion of that frenzy, it is worthwhile to grant ourselves through benefit of this technology some time to read and reflect on topics connected to our work.

Pertinent articles appear before me regularly and many I'd like to share with colleagues. A blog seems a perfect professional development tool in that regard:
• I can link to articles and studies you might not get a chance to see otherwise and you can read them at your leisure.
• I can provide brief commentary on relevant issues and let you know how some of the experts are weighing in on a particular topic, like plagiarism or the impact of social media on writing.
• You can respond to posts if you like and discussions can ensue.
• Posts and comments are archived so you can always get back to them whenever is convenient or desirable.

In short, there is considerable convenience provided by a blog and we'd like to take full advantage of it---a blog seems like the next natural step for our WAC program. For the record and in keeping with our year’s scholarship theme, I've been researching the phenomenon of blogging for the past year and found it to be far more prevalent than I would ever have guessed.

Blogs have also found their way into pedagogy. Many top-notch journalism schools, including the University of Missouri, now offer major coursework in blogging and other emerging media. Through the generosity of a Journalism professor at the University of Kansas, a nationally known journalist on environmental issues, I was able to observe her online service-learning courses over the past year which trained students to blog effectively about environmental concerns in Lawrence.

Previously, I'd clung to an early stereotyped image of blogging that is woefully inaccurate: nerdy politicos in a darkened room lit by the glow of a monitor and huddled over a keyboard pounding out manifestos that only a handful of like-minded folks would read. While that could well account for some blogs, or perhaps earlier iterations of blogging, it's probably now an infinitesimally small number of the estimated 23 million bloggers because I haven't bumped into many that would fit that mold.

The New York Times (3-12-10) reports that a 2009 study by Blogher and its research partners puts the number of people blogging (those who read, write, or comment on blogs weekly) at 23 million---and that’s just women! Blogs have proliferated wildly, widely, exponentially and at the speed of light. They are written on every imaginable topic, reflect every possible world view, and are open to the entire world to read. They can be remarkably thoughtful windows into the mind of someone who has something powerful and insightful to share about life, the universe, and everything.

Then again, they can be gratuitously self-indulgent and vacuous even as they offer up striking or artistic photographs. They can be hilarious or dead-serious, affirming or provocative, somber or sweet. I’ve seen some blogs use questionable ploys to grab an audience and commercial sponsorship. Interestingly, it's not uncommon for smaller-scale blogs to host contests and giveaways or special events, which surprised me a bit but speaks strikingly to the interactive nature of this beast.

There are many genres of blogs and subgenres of blogs. Food blogs, gardening blogs, health blogs, fashion blogs, spiritual blogs, and pet blogs. You name it, it’s out there. However, I never found the kind of WAC blog I was looking for and soon realized that, well, we are just the right college to host it.

I have also learned how much blogs are about establishing and building community. Bottom line: people want to connect with each other in more complex ways than other technologies afford.

The writer/teacher in me is genuinely amazed and heartened by the fact that so many people write completely voluntarily and regularly outside of school: this could be the writing utopia we’ve been wishing for! OK, maybe I am the only one who has actually gone so far as to wish for it…

The rhetorician in me says this entire subject warrants far more investigation than has been done to date, like articles and dissertations probing the genres and subcultures of blogs. Or some exploration of the metaphoric constructs evidenced in discussions about blogging: blog as house or home, blogosphere as neighborhood, blog as a physical/geographic place in cyberspace, the implications of blog titles, and narrative structures in blogs or the lack thereof.

Should you look, you would also notice that blogs are increasingly about the integration of photos and visual imagery, but we'll save the topic of visual rhetoric and our evolving expectations regarding it for another post.

You will be alerted via email to a new post every Wednesday. You can check it out or disregard it. The blog is permanently housed on the WAC website (also see link at the bottom of the screen) so you can easily find previous posts there.

To get things rolling, we'd welcome comments about your own experiences with blogging.
Do you write a blog? Do you typically read any blogs? Did you have any idea that so many people now do?
Have you used blogs in any of your courses? If so, to what effect? How has it worked?

To post a comment, click on "comments" and enter your comment in the space. You can use an existing id or create one expressly for use on this blog when you hit the "post comment" button.

Welcome to The Lake Effect!

MCC-Longview’s Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) Program is about to enter its 25th year. What better way to celebrate than to provide a space for sharing ideas about writing and learning as well as a forum for instructors to identify their own successes and struggles in using writing as a learning tool.

Some history to note: this program began in the mid-1980s as a broad-based WAC approach involving faculty from general education and occupational curriculums at the college. Early efforts focused on infusing writing into courses that had not traditionally relied on writing, like Math and Music, and emphasized incorporating strategies based on writing theory and best practice, like having students produce drafts of projects and encouraging them to revise.

Eventually, large-scale General Education writing assessment efforts in the mid to late 1990s led by WAC faculty, which by now included instructors from all divisions and most disciplines, including Math and Music, culminated in the adoption of a Writing Intensive course requirement as a way to formally extend students’ opportunities to develop as writers during their time at the college.

In 2001, MCC-Longview was honored as a "College of the Year," along with Clemson, Cornell, and Sarah Lawrence College, based on its WAC Program.

Today, the WAC Program at MCC-Longview continues to enjoy broad faculty interest and participation as well as strong administrative support, and, fortunately, our students find themselves writing at every turn during their time here.

The campus of MCC-Longview sits next to Longview Lake and our sports teams are known as the Lakers. Given the strong culture of writing that has prevailed here for so long, it seemed fitting to honor the entire academic community at MCC-Longview for its deliberate and sustained efforts to value writing as a critical tool for learning by calling this WAC blog The Lake Effect.