Simmons, Encouraging Civic Engagement Through Extended Writing Projects

Simmons, Michele  “Encouraging Civic Engagement Through Extended Writing Projects: Rewriting the Curriculum.” The Writing Instructor: Special Issue: Disruptions of/in Professional Writing Pedagogy (May 2010).

Simmons points out the pitfalls of single-semester, single-course service learning projects (for students, faculty, instititutions, and community orgranizations) and, arguing for the real rhetorical benefit of service learning writing courses (she focuses on professional writing), claims that service learning projects need to be envisioned as extended projects that are taken up and valued by an entire curriculum.

These extended projects need to encompass multiple courses, multiple disciplines, and complex problems that require critical inquiry.

Simmons gives an example of a project she did with undergraduate and graduate students: storm water pollution prevention education and outreach website.

Simmons also addresses the issue of assessing a long-range, multi-stakeholder community project and emphasizes the importance of real community collaboration and partnership.

Hauser, Teaching Rhetoric

Hauser, Gerald A. “Teaching Rhetoric: Or Why Rhetoric Isn’t Just Another Kind of Philosophy or Literary Criticism.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 34.3 (Summer 2004): 39-53

The Association for Rhetoric Societies’ 2003 conference in Evanston led to an alliance among rhetoric scholars to promote the centrality of rhetorical education in civic education. This article lists the five areas where Rhetoric Studies needs sustainable structures in order to reinvigorate rhetoric into the curriculum.

The scholars underscored that rhetoric is inherently tied to teaching: there is no rhetoric without teaching. What has happened in the modern academy, one that values theory and knowledge over praxis, is a divorce of rhetoric from the public and civic sphere, which rhetoric depends on. Hauser and those at the conference call for rhetoric to be reunited to the concerns of the public civic sphere, of preparing citizens and leaders. The Association for Rhetoric Scholars, through Hauser’s article, argues for a manifesto about rhetorical education that can be adopted by institutions, a forum to share rhetorical pedagogy material between scholars, and a way for individual institutions to circumvent the balkanization that happens with rhetorical pedagogy, coordinating it into one collective pursuit.

Notes and Quotes

“Free societies require rhetorically competent citizens. Without rhetorical competence, citizens are disabled in the public arenas of citizen exchange—the marketplace, the representative assembly, the court, and public institutions— and democracy turns into a ruse disguising the reality of oligarchic power.” (52)

Rhetoric has always been a central part in educating future leaders and citizens. Rhetoric is practical, is human, is considered with the right time and right place (kairos.) It seeks to give students a way to pursue and articulate knowedge, not a set content.

Rhetoric is about seeking truth and excellence (aerte), questioning, reflection, learning about values and beliefs, and moving to action. Very similar to Ignatian pedagogy

“Rhetoric is a practical discipline; it has a strong tradition that merges theory and praxis in the concrete conditions of performance, especially as these are realized in democratic societies.” (42)

Students need rhetoric – need to learn how to present their ideas, understand their audience, evaluate their sources and claims, negotiate between different perspectives, see the connection between ethics and action. Rhetoric is needed in a democratic society (so a small elite does not take over power.)

Ideas for the assessment of a first-year writing and speaking course: students develop analytical skills, performance skills (written and spoken), invention skills, an awareness of language, civic skills, consequences of rhetoric

call for K-12 and university educators to come together in the Association for Rhetoric Scholars to talk about rhetorical education, collaborate, work together

Cooper, et al, What Happens When Discourse Communities Collide

Cooper, Allene, et al. “What Happens When Discourse Communities Collide? Portfolio Assessment and Non-Tenure-Track Faculty.” In Administrative Problem-Solving for Writing Programs and Writing Centers: Scenarios in Effective Program Management. Ed. Linda Myers-Breslin. Urbana: NCTE, 1999. 44-52. Print.

Cooper, the Writing Program Director at Boise States, explains in this case study how her program moved from a proficiency exam to portfolio assessment to evaluate students at the end of the required writing courses. This change in assessment method came at a difficult time for many of the adjuncts in the program: 1. the new president of the university called them, along with the other adjuncts at the university (who taught 40% of the courses) “a dime a dozen,” 2. the number of TAs teaching in the program quadrulpled (making the adjuncts feel like their jobs were threatened, and 3. the TAs formed a strong teaching community around a shared syllabus (making the adjuncts feel outside this new constituency and thinking that they too would have to teach around a shared syllabus.) There was obvious tension between the adjuncts and TAs, a tension that came out in a shared grading session of the portfolios, where instead of focusing on the students’ writing, the adjuncts and TAs began to attack one another’s assignments and teaching methods. There was hope that the portfolio assessment would help cultivate camaraderie, but it was apparent that there were deeper issues between the two discourse communities, who “ran aground on issues of theory, pedagogy, hegemony, and economics.” (48). Cooper describes the options a WPA has in this situation and the WPA’s conflicting responsibilities: running this student assessment, training TAs, cultivating morale.

Notes and Quotes

“Your adjunct faculty, like their counterparts at other colleges and universities, have traditionally faced problems of low pay, no job security, no benefits, and no upward mobility within their profession. In addition to these issues of professional insecurity, they have faced the more subtle problem of isolation. They teach at odd hours and odd sites. Many feel almost invisible – it’s not uncommon for other faculty members not even to recognize them as fellow teachers” (48).

suggests that replacing adjuncts with full-time instructors might be a solution (50)

Lindemann, Three Views of English 101

Lindemann, Erika. “Three Views of English 101.” College English 57.3 (March 1995): 287-302. Print.

Lindemann uses the CCCC debate between herself and Gary Tate (who debated the place of literature in the first-year composition course) as a way to explore what those in the field believe is the purpose and identity of the first-year course. She uses Young, Becker and Pike’s heuristic procedure of viewing an element as a particle, wave, or field (static, dynamic, or as part of a larger network) to explain three ways to teach first-year writing (she focuses on pedagogy, not theory or institutional relationships or departmental politics). Seeing writing as a particple – a product – results in a course that is based in the reading of texts (content) with the idea that reading enough good literature will give students stylistic models to imitate in their own essays and themes, a course where the teacher is the expert, the student is the novice, and that relies on grammar exercises and emphasizes form over invention. Seeing writing as a wave – a process – results in a course that based in process and expressivist pedagogy, where students write on subjects of their own choosing, where a variety of kinds of writing are assigned and encouraged, and where the teacher is placed as a coach or mentor for the student. Invention, practice, and drafting are given primary importance in a process course, and the course is interested primarily in the development of the individual student writer and his search for truth. Seeing writing as a field – a system of social actions – sees student writers as involved in multiple social systems that use writing to communicate and to make meaning (drawing on Cooper’s ecological argument.) It rejects the overarching emphasis on the individual in process theory and instead tries to teach students that they are part of several discourse communities, either through inquiry readings, connections across the curriculum, or connections across the community. How readers and writers relate to one another dependes on the context of the discourse and the values and norms of the community from where that discourse came out of. Lindemann makes the argument that compositionists must understand how they see writing – and how their programs and departments do – in order to have meaningful conversations and assessments.

Notes and Quotes

“Until we can find some common ground in instructional practices (or articulate our differences when we cannot), other discussions seem irrelevantly secondary. Until we can say why teachers and students meet together to read and write in a place called college, we cannot address other practices: placement tests, teacher training, program administration, hiring, and so on, meant to advance this work.” (289).

“Because product-centered courses assign primacy to texts, teachers pay considerable attention to form” (291).

Janangelo and Hansen, Resituating Writing

Janangelo, Joseph and Kristine Hansen. Resituating Writing: Constructing and Administering Writing Programs. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook, 1995.

This anthology addresses and situates WPA work as academic scholarship, arguing that WPAs are administrators who have a deep, necessary connection to their disciplinary speciality and knowledge. The book is organized in three sections: first addressing the philosohpical and ethical issues WPAs need to address when running a writing program; second explaining how WPAs can form productive relationships across the university campus, especially through WAC initiatives; and third, arguing that WPAs need to present their work as scholarship to higher administrators and form regional and national professional ties with other WPAs. The audience for this collection of essays, written by a variety of WPAs from many different institutions, who tell their own personal stories of crisis, change, and opportunities as a WPA, is for other WPAs, graduate students in composition and rhetoric, and other university administrators. This collection seeks to forward the agenda articulated in the Portland Resolution – to make WPA work recognizable as scholarship in and outside the discipline.

Notable Notes

Ed White chapter about WPA consultant visits as informed, qualitative assessment

Barrios, Grading the Writing Program Web Site

Barrios, Barclay. “Grading the Writing Program Web Site: Assessing Some Assessments.” Computers and Composition (Spring 2004). http://www.bgsu.edu/cconline/barrios2/index.html

A writing program web site, since it serves numerous audiences (administration, funding sources, teachers, students, prospective students), must have multiple assessment measures because each assessment has advantages and disadvantages that serve each audience in a particular way. Barrios reviews the many kinds of assessment the Rutgers Writing Program used to evaluate its web site, including corporate tracking services, server logs, anecdotal evidence, online surveys, and print surveys. He draws on Yancey’s assessment heuristic as a possible alternative assessment.

Notable Notes

Yancey’s heuristic: 1. What arrangements are possible? 2. Who arranges? 3. What is the intent? 4. What is the fit between the intent and the effect? Yancey, Kathleen Blake. (2004). Looking for sources of coherence in a fragmented world: Notes toward a new assessment design. Computers and composition, 21, 89-102.

assessment depends on the audience – need to use lots

Hamp-Lyons and Condon, Questioning Assumptions about Portfolio-Based Assessment

Hamp-Lyons, Liz and William Condon. “Questioning Assumptions about Portfolio-Based Assessment.” CCC 44.2 (1993): 176-190. In Assessing Writing. Eds. Huot and O’Neill. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009. 315-329.

The authors argue that portfolio-based assessments are not inherently better, more valid, or more ethical than other kinds of writing assessments. It takes much critical reflection and work on the part of WPAs and writing instructors to make portfolio grading, which is more time consuming, a better assessment. They point out that more texts and genres doesn’t always make scoring decisions easier, that pedagogical and curricular values aren’t taken into account because they are not articulated, and that collaborative portfolio grading is often conflict-ridden, for it is hard to build consensus over assessment and instruction values. They do not argue to abandon portfolios, just to warn that certain stipulations – like criteria and conversations about program goals and values – must be in place to make portfolios a better assessment.

Quotable Quotes

“Increased accuracy is not an inherent virtue of portfolio assessment” (327).

Carter, A Process for Establishing Outcomes-Based Assessment Plans for Writing and Speaking in the Disciplines

Carter, Michael. “A Process for Establishing Outcomes-Based Assessment Plans for Writing and Speaking in the Disciplines.” Language and Learning Across the Disciplines 6.1. (2003): 4-29. In Assessing Writing. Eds. Huot and O’Neill. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009. 268-286.

Carter outlines how the Campus Writing and Speaking Program, a WAC-like program at NC State (where Chris Anson is), helped departments establish speaking and writing outcomes for their undergraduate majors. Outcome-based assessment asks programs what skills and knowledge graduates should have, how the program helps students achieve these outcomes, and how the program could assess their outcomes and use their assessment for program development. The essay contains a list of questions departments can use to develop both objectives and outcomes (which, unlike objectives, are teachable and measurable), and gives an extended example of the outcomes from the anthropology department. Carter argues that such a discipline-specific assessment broadens both the responsibility of teaching writing and speaking skills to all departments and the timeline in which a student will be able to achieve these communication outcomes.

Notable Notes

outcomes need to be student-centered, faculty-driven, and meaningful (271)

outcome-based assessment does not assume that students will achieve something based on one course; it looks holistically at a whole program to assess its effectiveness in helping students achieve outcomes

compare to the continual improvement assessment in industry (ISO certification) and accountability movement in K-12 schools

the departments can state the disciplinary goals for their majors

what about students not in a traditional major? at schools with more blending capabilities?

articulate an assessment procedure with each department – including things like tests, exit interviews

the function of a speaking/writing professional (a WPA?) changes with outcome-based assessment

Durst, Roemer, and Schultz, Portfolio Negotiations

Durst, Russel K. , Marjorie Roemer, and Lucille M. Schultz. “Portfolio Negotiations: Acts in Speech.” In New Directions in Portfolio Assessment. Eds. Black, Diaker, Sommers, and Stygall. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1994. 286-300. In Assessing Writing. Eds. Huot and O’Neill. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009. 218-232.

Using the conversations from two groups of instructors grading portfolios (one beginning TAs, the other veteran teachers), the authors show how the discussion that takes place is a performative speech-act (J.L. Austin), whereby the conversations are making judgments, negotiations, and setting community standards and values for student writing. They argue that grading papers is an act of reading, a complex and inexact process, that will result in inconsistency among graders, but this inconsistency is a powerful force that can be harnessed for further program development and identity-making.

Haswell and Wyche-Smith, Adventuring into Writing Assessment

Haswell, Richard and Susan Wyche-Smith. “Adventuring into Writing Assessment.” CCC 45 (1994): 220-236. In Assessing Writing. Eds. Huot and O’Neill. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009. 203-217.

Haswell and Wyche-Smith, from Washington State University, explain the process by which they had a direct influence and control over the new writing assessment put into place at their institution and use their story to give other WPAs and composition faculty advice for how to create writing assessments. Their advice is four-fold: 1. assume administrators want the writing faculty to create the assessment (even if it seems that they don’t); 2. let local context shape the assessment, not vice versa; 3. take into consideration recent scholarship on assessment; 4. solict advice and suggestions from the teaching staff, who will be using and maintaining the assessment system.

Quotable Quotes

“Writing teachers should be leery of assessment tools made by others…they should, and can, make their own.” (204).

Notable Notes

my idea – look at writing assessment arguments K-U with the quality assurance programs put into place with ISO certification