Facts, Artifacts, and Counterfacts--Chapter 6

Chapter 6: Empowering Revision

Nicolas Coles states something that is common knowledge for English teachers—that students (here, “basic writers”) don’t like to revise.  Most of the experience they have writing may actually inhibit revising, but a semester long sequence of assignments on a topic students know something about may provide a context in which students can come to see the value in revision.

In revision, a writer can confront problems that are easily ignored in a first draft—if something didn’t make sense, if something needs more explanation, or if what s/he wrote did not have the desired effect on the audience.  By revising for these kinds of problems, students start to become members of a “scholarly community.”

Coles uses examples of students’ papers in various states of revision to discuss two revision activities: reshaping a narrative so that is provides a basis for generalizations, and forming those generalizations within the context of a story.  He also discusses students’ use of cliché and slogans as “ready-made languages of cultural convention.”  He also discusses an assumption of basic writers that they need to tell the “truth” of a story, and that reshaping the “facts” of the story will be somehow untruthful.  He makes a reference to Moffet, saying sometimes it’s better to “trade a loss of reality tor a gain in control.”

I wonder if students today feel this as strongly as they did back when this book was written.  With Facebook and Twitter, I think that kids today might be more used to presenting something that is shaped to form a perspective.  I know that when I post on Facebook myself, I often write what I want to say and then look at it for a few moments to see if it is hitting the right tone and message.  On the other hand, I “know” a few people on Facebook who seem to just post whatever comes into their heads, with clearly no thought of what they might be presenting to the world.

The last point that I thought was important was Cole’s discussion of teacher comments.   He says that his intention when giving comments is always to

“draw the writer into becoming an active reader of his own paper…so that he can go on the the next draft to produce a fuller, smarter and more satisfying representation of himself and his relation to his subject.” (190)

In my own teaching I have been struggling with assessment and comments.  I am coming out of a phase where I taught (ESL) composition as a simple series of mechanics to follow.  I think the students learned what I was teaching well enough, but the problem was that the product was just that: mechanical.  I am looking to spread my wings and find better ways to help my students write more deeply and spread their own wings, so looking at comments in this way helps me to frame the way I give comments, by looking at the goal of comments in this new way.

At the end of the chapter, Coles seems to pull back from his title, "Empowering Revision," but still makes the point that in revising in this way students can start to move against "authoritative institutional languages" which structure their discourse.  I'd also like to think this is true, that by understanding how society expects them to think and how their thinking might be different, they might be able to find some personal power.  

Facts, Artifacts, and Counterfacts--General Comments

The first chapter is great, and dense.  There were so many things that I wanted to take from it, to mark and remember.  Here are some of the things that I wanted to take away from it.

I like that they choose a topic that the students are already masters of—either adolescence or work.  In ENG 700 last week, Professor Ching mentioned that he likes to do something similar, and he explained it as a way to balance out the inherently unbalanced power dynamic between the student and the teacher.  “You teach me what you know,” he said (that he said to his students), “and I’ll teach you how to write about it.”  This is important because in a basic writing class, I don’t think we want to get into a situation where we have to teach something to students so they can write about it.  That is the purview of other classes—history, sociology, even literature.  We are teaching how, not what—so that what needs to be something that the students know already.  It’s interesting that even though the students described in Facts are “experts” in adolescence, they are not as experienced in thinking about the topic, at least in an academic way.  This made me realize (again) that the how that we are teaching is not just how to write, but also how to analyze, how to discuss, and how to use these skills and writing to make one’s own thoughts clearer.

I like that they began the course with students writing about their own experience with the topic, and then moved through other people’s accounts of the topic, and then finished with academic papers.  This is not a new idea now (the concept of a course-long “arc” was introduced in our first class), but is still interesting.

I like how they frame the students’ problems with reading.  They say that the problem is not that the students don’t know how to read, but that the students don’t know how to compose a reading of a text.  Reading is not memorizing facts (or even events) of a text, and the fact that students can’t remember every detail of the text is seen by the students as a deficit.  They refer to Frank Kermode and his idea that the gap between a text and a reader’s version of the text is what makes the reading his or her own.  The authors say that “it is this act of attention that initially defines his (the student’s) authority as a reader.” (29) 

I find myself going through this same process as I write these words and think about this chapter.  I am looking through the parts of the book that I highlighted, pulling out ideas and briefly discussing them—these ideas were the ones that struck me as important or interesting (for some reason) when I was reading them for the first time.  The choices I made at that time affect how I understand the reading the second and third time I read the text, and this allows me to come up with an understanding of the text that is my own.  I think it’s interesting that Bartholomae and Petrosky say that this partial reading is what allows us all to have personal readings of a text, but that this same partial reading is what makes basic readers feel insecure about their reading skills.

I don’t really have any problems with the course.  It’s interesting to see a full course laid out and described in detail.  The course and materials are clearly dated.  I think it could be interesting to use some of the ideas in this course in my own course, especially since it will be based on different ways we use language, and this is something that everyone does, but might not thing about very much.  In some ways my topic is analogous to adolescence, the topic of Bartholomae and Petrosky’s course.

Developing (a unit on) Language

I am interested in building a unit situated in a course that takes language as its theme.  In this course I'd like to have a unit on American English dialects, including non-standard or vernacular English vs. standar English vs. academic English, a unit on language and advertising, a unit on gender roles and language use, and others.  I would start the course out with mostly expressive and cognitive discussion of language, and end the semester with more sophisticated critical analysis.

I have not pinned down which unit I would like to do for this class, though the idea of working on a series of lessons/assignments on non-standard or vernacular English (which should be near the beginning of the semester) is interesting to me.

Take Aways from Foster, Community and Cohesion

David Foster, Community and Cohesion in the Writing/Reading Classroom

In a nutshell: Solidarity, not consensus

Slightly longer: As teachers using group work, we should encourage students to value each others’ differences (even, or actually, especially, if they are dramatic), but for group work to be successful, the students in the group have to have mutual trust and common goals.

(Solidarity + Interdependence = Cohesion)

Very Long:

·         Group work has a long history in composition

·         Proponents say it is a part of democratic education

o   Nurtures collaboration and commonality

o   Based on participatory liberalism

·         Critics say that it diminishes differences and masks inequalities

o   Since deep inequalities still exist, efforts to create consensus in the classroom has the result of stifling individual differences

o   White middle class teachers don’t understand

o   Bringing into the classroom the non-academic world of “disadvantaged students” does little to help them change their status

o   Working in groups encourages participants to avoid conflict; these conflicts are exactly what should be confronted in a classroom

·         It is important to value and preserve difference, yet there still has to be mutual trust and interdependence—cohesion

·         The problem with many of the theories of community building is that they don’t address why students will be motivated to participate in group work

·         Teachers must encourage students to want both community and difference

o   This should be a goal of doing group work, not an assumption

o   Students should be asked to write about doing group work and its difficulties to build self awareness

·         Lack of cohesion makes students uncomfortable dealing with conflict

·         Students should be encouraged to recognize that cohesion can help them resist domination and help them with their own personal success

o   Question: who or what is the source of this domination?  Teacher?  Other students? Society? 

o   Using this as a source of motivation rings false to me.  At the very least, students would have to come to this conclusion on their own, inductively.  A teacher standing in front of class telling them that working in groups will help them resist domination will not be effective, I don’t think.

A non-reader focused passage in a section on poststructuralist theory

A 1985 essay  by John Clifford  and John Schilb,  "Composition  Theory and  Literary Theory," reviewed  the  work  of literary theorists  who  made it possible to imagine the teaching of literature  and composition,  reading and writing, as inter-connected disciplines. Clifford  and  Schilb  assessed  the  influence  of reader-response poststructuralist theories  and rhetoric and  examined  the  work of  those compositionists  and literary critics who,  they  argued, offered ways of thinking about reading and writing that  would  elide programmatic and disciplinary separations  (to name  a  few:  Susan Miller,  Richard Lanham,  Ross  Winterowd,  Wayne  Booth, Nancy  Comley and  Robert Scholes, and Terry  Eagleton). Though remarkably different from one another, these theorists share a concern with acts rather than facts of reading (Ray).

Salvatori, Mariolina, “Conversations with Texts: Reading in the Teaching of Composition.” College English, Vol. 58, No. 4 (Apr., 1996), p. 443

I chose this passage to discuss in my “Difficulty Blog” because I had to read it over several times before I could absorb it.  The most obvious difficulty I had with this passage was with some of the vocabulary: “poststructuralist,” “…would elide programmatic and disciplinary separations..”

First, I am not familiar with the term “poststructuralist,” so I went to Wikipedia to get that meaning.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-structuralism

That was helpful, and is something I will remember, as it seems to be a common term for theories of reading that is more reader focused rather than author focused.

Second, I had trouble with “…would elide programmatic and disciplinary separations..” I had to dig deep in my memory to remember the meaning of “elide” and had to think for a few minutes to determine how “programmatic” and “disciplinary” might be different and how those differences would affect the idea.

I think this vocabulary “problem” shows a gap between the general repertoire of the text and my own general repertoire.  They are pretty minor as far as problems go.  Just a quick google and a few minutes of thought and I was able to bridge the gap.  I did notice that it took some effort for me to incorporate the meanings of the new words into my understanding of the text.  The first time I read the passage, I understood very little, even of the phrases that I would normally understand fine—the gap caused such a disturbance that it impeded my understanding of the text.  The next few times I read it, it took a little effort to keep all the new meanings in my mind as I created the textual meaning.  It got easier the third and fourth readings.  But perhaps this analysis is too “cognitive” for a McCormick analysis?  Maybe not: I’m just describing how I was able to mesh my repertoire with that of the text.

Another difficulty I had was with all of the citations.  The way that the author rattles off a list of theorists, with no reference to titles, dates, or publications is a little off-putting for me, as if the author assumes that I know all of the writers that she mentions.  This is rather ironic, as the author is makes these citations in a way that is decidedly reader-unfriendly.  I have to admit, though, that I am probably not Salvatori’s intended audience.  She was clearly speaking to other theorists (I don’t identify myself as a theorist, at least not yet).

I think this was caused by a clash between the literary repertoire of the passage and my own literary repertoire.  I expect authors to give just a little more information when citing others, and the fact that Salvatori did not do that made me feel a little bit like an outsider—because everyone who knows anything will know this list of authors.  I’m pretty sure this was not Salvatori’s intent, but it was part of my interpretation.