Anderson, Prescribing the Life of the Mind

Anderson, Charles W. Prescribing the Life of the Mind. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1993.

Anderson offers his critique of the contemporary American university curriculum and offers his vision of an alternative that would bring the disciplines together under the pursuit of practical reason. Influenced by Dewey, Anderson believes that a unifying force in the university – one that brings together the disciplines – can only be taught through and by the disciplines, and so it is the duty of the faculty to create a core curriculum that threads together the different areas of intellectual and practical inquiry in a way that students will find coherent and meaningful. The free elective system, marked by a core curriculum where students take a wide variety of courses that don’t necessarily speak to each other, puts the onus on the students to find the coherence when they don’t even have a sense of the map of the breadth of university knowledge. Practical reason is characterized by ongoing, purpose-driven inquiry, self-reflexive thinking and the application of judgment – of deciding that some things are valuable and some things are not.

Quotable Quotes

Practical reason: “the activity of examinign a pattern of practice, and criticizing it, analytically, reflectively, with an eye to its improvement. Practical reason is a matter of distinguishing excellence and error. It also implies mastery, the effort to do something as well as it can be done” (97).

“The aim is not to fit the individual to the disciplines but to organize the disciplines so as to develop the capabilities of the individual” (90) – how does this speak to Latour?

“If we are going to teach something greater, we are going to have to teach it through the disciplines” (88) – the disciplines are instruments toward a larger goal

Practical reason: “being acutely self-conscious about our ideas of the purpose of a human enterprise and about the practices we institute to achieve them.” (4)

Notable Notes

the core of Anderson’s curriculum: civilization (how did we come to think as we do?); science (a theoretical framework for scientific reasoning); the human situation (social sciences); the humanities (beauty, form and function, elegant design, subtle ends, cultivate judgment); and practical studies (applied fields – what do you do and why do you do it.) all meant to go deep, to find connections and meanings

practical reason as an organizing principle teaches judgment – it is complex, not simple relativism or inclusiveness

goal of American university education – traditionally open to all to cultivate practical reason necessary for democracy; the goal should be not an all-knowing individual but a particular kind of craftsman, worker who brings good practice to a field, who has a particular habit of mind

contemporary university: teaches only a certain kind of critical, detached, observant knowledge

tension between the public function of the university (to educate the public) and the private function (inquiry by academics)

Trimbur, The Problem of Freshman English (Only)

Trimbur, John. “The Problem of Freshman English (Only): Toward Programs of Study in Writing.” WPA 22:3 (Spring 1999) 9-30.

Trimbur articulates two of the problems of the first-year writing course: first, it tries to compact an entire field’s inquiry, research, discussion, and debates into a single course and second, it perpetuates a First-World English-Only attitude in American colleges and universities by privileging English vernacular literacy over other languages. He argues for the creation of larger curriculum in writing (minors, concentrations, and majors) to solve both of these problems. First, it will rescue the first-year course from being the only child of the discipline – the sole site of study and pedagogy in writing and rhetoric – transform it into an introduction to the discipline, where ideas and theories can be introduced and built on in later courses. Second, this major can and should reach beyond the traditional English department and seek interdisciplinary connections across the campus, finding ways to connect disciplines, faculty, and students toward the study of writing in the context of global, international, multilingual literacies. Such minors and majors need to be locally constructed and situated, and must be designed through answering hard questions of disciplinary identity: what do we study? what are our theories? how to our courses connect and build upon each other?

Quotable Quotes

“the relation of the study and teaching of writing to English departments is both accidental and overdetermined – the result not of a necessary belongingness between the two but of a particular historical conjuncture when written composition replaced rhetoric just as English departments were taking shape in the modern university.” (27)

“curriculum planning that looks for interfaces between disciplines, programs, students, and faculty” (25).

Notable Notes

first-year course is overpacked, overprogrammed like an only child

grad programs churning out students to teach and administer one course – what other field is so centered around a single course? shouldn’t our research, theories inform more than a single course?

composition and literature have worked together to promote vernacular, English-Only literacy and a homongenous national culture

O’Neill, Crow, and Burton, Field of Dreams

O’Neill, Peggy, Angela Crow, and Larry W. Burton. A Field of Dreams: Independent Writing Programs and the Future of Composition. Logan: Utah State UP, 2002.

This collection focuses on independent writing programs, writing programs, majors, and graduate programs that have split off from traditonal English literary studies. The various case studies in the book show the challenges of independence: how the new program situates itself theoretically, politically, and institutionally, taking on questions of identity while trying to maintain daily operations. The editors hope that this collection, and the trend of independent writing programs, will help the field begin to define itself positively, by what they do, instead of in opposition to what they don’t do (traditional English studies.) The book is divided into three parts: 1. local case studies and their problems and possibilities 2. connections from local case studies to larger theoretical and ethical issues in the field 3. the future of the discipline and the place of rhetoric and composition in the changing 21st century university.

Quotable Quotes

“The creation of stand-alone writing units – whether programs or departments – provides us with an opportunity to define ourselves in new ways instead of against literature and literary scholarship. It is a chance to begin new and better academic traditions where we can enact what we value instead of spending our energy defending it” (9).

Notable Notes

the challenge of defining a vertical curriculum (a major) when the discipline is still being defined, negotiated

building a program means building a community

variety of ways these independent programs are formed: top-down, bottom-up, slowly, quickly, horizontal v. vertical curriculum

what traditions, values does the independent writing program adopt?

Giroux, Ideology, Culture, and the Process of Schooling

Giroux, Henry A. Ideology, Culture, and the Process of Schooling. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1981.

In this collection of essays, Giroux advances his neo-Marxist theory of American education, which is situated as a sort of meso-level, between a micro-level theory of Freirian liberatory pedagogy that places potential change in the hands of individuals and a macro-level theory along the lines of Bourdieu that shows that change is impossible because of inscribed institutional relationships and politics. Giroux rejects one-sided determinism, arguing that schools themselves are sites of action and structure, sites where people negotiate contradictions and forge identities through actions and the effects of actions (curriculum, textbooks, spatial structures, etc.) Giroux calls on educators to take action, not just critique, and reconstruct their schools. His theory is not a student-centered theory of individual education like Freire – it is a call for reflective praxis for educators.

Quotable Quotes

“The entirety of the educational process will have to be analyzed for its normative and ideological meanings. Curriculum, teaching methods, forms of evaluation, textbooks, school organization, and the organization of teachers will have to be seen as componets of the educational process, shaped by the latter’s dialectical role as a representation of a vital human need and as a class-based instrument of the established power structure” (79)

“Schools are social sites whose particularity is characterized by an ongoing struggle between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic forces” (15).

his is a “radical pedagogy that connects critical theory with the need for social action in the interest of both individual freedom and social reconstruction” (8).

Notable Notes

investigate the hidden curriculum (75)

people can be critically conscious but cannot not, ultimately, escape objective and subjective realities, cultures, ideologies, and histories

radical pedagogy teaches an integration (an investigation) into ideology, hegemony, and culture – both the daily, individual material practices of these and macro relationships and power structures in society….have students think across these two levels

three modes of American educational scholarship (that he sees are problematic): 1. technocratic rationality (scientific, managerial, ahistorical) 2. interpretative rationality (how people use language to make meaning, rejecting positivism, embrace subjectivity and individuality, divorced from institutions) 3. reproductive rationality (institutions shaping society, one-sided determinism)

hopeful

Yancey, Made Not Only in Words

Yancey, Kathleen. “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key.” CCC 56.2 (Dec 2004) 297-328.

This is Yancey’s 2004 CCCC Chair’s address, which was billed more as a multimedia, multivocal “performance” because, in conjunction with her speech, she had a slideshow that displayed images and quotes that did not directly illustrate her speech but rather interpreted her thoughts in a new way.

Her address asks compositionists to reimagine the content, structure, and location of the field of rhetoric and composition. Pointing out that digital technology has created a writing public in the same way a reading public was created in the late 19th century, she argues for changing composition curriculum that more accurately reflects the kinds of writing students are already doing on their own, the kinds of writing that are requried for 21st century lives. In order to teach students how to write and develop multimedia, multigenre literacies, a vertical undergraduate major must be developed, one in which courses focus on the intertextual, dialogic circulation of composition, the interrelatedness of the canons of rhetoric, and the effect and the deicity of technology on literacy. Finially, this “new key” of composition requires faculty to be willing to change their curriculum structure and embrace this new literacy space to live and work in.

Quotable Qutotes

“Composition in this school context, and in direct contrast to the world context, remains chiefly focused on the writer qua writer, sequestered from the means of production” (309) – solitary, tutorial model vs. social, productive model.

“Never before has the proliferation of writings outside the academy so counterpointed the compositions inside. Never before have the technologies of writing contributed so quickly to the creation of new genres” (298)

“Literacy today is in the midst of a tectonic change” (298)

Notable Notes

problem….training teachers

McClure and Baures, Looking In by Looking Out

McClure, Randall and Lisa Baures. “Looking In by Looking Out.” Computers and Compositon. (Fall 2007).

McClure, a WPA, and Baures, a librarian, argue for greater collaboration between librarians and compositionists to revise first-year composition curriculum to better serve the information literacy needs students have in today’s digital world. They illustrate their collaborative method for curriculum revision in this article, the triangulation of WPA standards, ACRL standards, and institutional individual course objectives. They argue that librarians and compositionists have similiar literacy concerns and challenges when working with students, and a rich collaboration with library and information science can enrich the content of the first-year composition course.

Quotable Quotes

“Therefore, to better understand the complexities of information literacy and provide instructional strategies to help students develop information literacy skills, composition might once again be served by exploring other fields, in this case the field of Library and Information Science. This field not only acknowledges the complexity of researching in the digital age and crafts a whole series of standards for information literacy, but it also give teachers something they often search for—content for composition.  ” (emphasis mine)

“the disconnection between “college-eligible and college ready” must be addressed, but it cannot be done by correlating high school and college level standards, irrespective of whether they are information literacy or subject content standards. Nor can systemic needs for remediation be ignored. Yet in the absence of a viable solution to this problem, librarians and writing composition instructors must design and develop curricula to provide students with the basic research and writing skills to succeed academically.”

Notable Notes

Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL)

new need: how to evaluate, analyze, synthesize sources. Learning how to use and analyze sources will make students better researchers and writers.

Moss, Can There Be Validity without Reliability?

Moss, Pamela. “Can There Be Validity without Reliability?” Educational Researcher 23.4(1994): 5-12. In Assessing Writing. Eds. Huot and O’Neill. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009. 81-96.

Moss challenges the primacy of reliability in assessment practices, arguing for the value of contextual, hermeneutic alternative assessments that can more accurately reflect the complex nature of writing tasks, knowledge, and performances. She describes the difference between hermeneutic and pyschometric evaluation, the latter which uses outside scorers or readers that do not know the context of the task, curriculum or the student, as teachers would. Pointing out that many high-stakes assessments are not standardized or generalizable (like tenure, granting graduate degrees), she argues that the warrant that writing assessment scholars use in the argument of generalizability, the warrant of standardization, needs to be re-evaluated and rearticulated from a hermeneutic perspective. By making reliability (meaning standardization, I think) an option rather than a requirement, assessment practices can be opened up that reflect more of a range of educational goals.

Quotable Quotes

Hermeneutic: “an ethic of disciplined, collaborative inquiry that encourages challenges and revisions to initial interpretations; and the transparency of the trail of evidence leading to the interpretations, which allows users to evaluate the conclusions for themselves” (87).

“There are certain intellectual activities that standardized assessments can neither document nor promote” (84).

“potential of a hermeneutic approach to drawing and warranting interpretations of human products or performances” (85).

Notable Notes

some hermeneutic assessment practices: allowing studnets to choose the products they feel best represent them (not just the same tasks for all) – fair, ethical, and places agency in the student; alos critical discussion and debate during assessment, disagreement does not equate invalidity, the importance of a dialogic perspective of a community (what Broad and Huot draw on)

detached, impartial scorers silence the teachers, those who know students and curriculum best

look @ public education accountability movement

The New London Group, A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies

The New London Group. “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures.” In Multiliteracies. Eds. Cope and Kalantzis. London: Routledge, 2000. 9-37.

This article, published prior to this collection, lays out the New London Group’s fundamental arguments. They see current literacy education as inadequate for preparing students for full participation in their working, community, and personal lives, arguing that because literacies and discourses are central to these “lifeworlds,” and since those literacies aren’t the literacies taught in schools, literacy curriculum needs to change to take into account the multiliteracies inherent in the 21st century communication technology and the multiliteracies of students’ diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. They advocate that literacy curriculum be organized around the concept of Design, teaching students the steps of surveying the available designs, going through the design process, and remaking themselves and society through producing the redesigned. In order for literacy curriculum to be changed in this way, educators need a metalanguage to describe the types of meaning and discourse available to design and create with and pedagogical strategies for encouraging their students to expand their literacies (what they deem the “what” and the “how” of a pedagogy of multiliteracies.)

Quotable Quotes

“An authentically democratic new vision of schools must include a vision of meaningful success for all; a vision of success that is not defined exclusively in economic terms and that has embedded within it a critique of hierarchy and economic injustice” (13).

“the proliferation of communications channels and media supports and extends cultural and subcultural diversity” (9).

no “glib and tokenistic pluralism” (19).

“As curriculum is a design for social futures, we need to introduce the notion of pedagogy as Design.” (19).

“Through their co-engagement in Designing, people transform their relations with each other, and so transform themselves” (22).

“All written text is also a process of Visual Design” (29) – important connection with graphic design, Wysocki, George – desktop publishing

“Designing restores human agency and cultural dynamism to the process of meaning-making” (36).

Notable Notes

working lives and connection with fast capitalism/postFordism, importance of collaboration in schools, sense in society that to be successful is to get to the top even though there’s not enough room up there.

taking diversity and multiliteracies on as a resource in pedagogy and community

people have multiple, overlapping identities because they belong to many different communities and use many different discourses

available designs always include the discoures of those designing and include the grammars of all the semiotic systems and orders of discourse

listening and reading are also productive forms of designing because the listeners and readers make meaning by combining what they are taking in with their own experiences

good graphic of the grammars of the types of meaning on page 26

explains in detail the four methods of the pedagogy of multiliteracies

design requires agency and responsibility (36).

design as both a noun and a verb

children’s childhoods are co-opted by mass gloabl media and invasive global texts (16)

Gouge, Conversation at a Crucial Moment

Gouge, Catherine. “Conversation at a Crucial Moment: Hybrid Courses and the Future of Writing Programs.” College English 71:4 (March 2009) 32-362.

WPAs need to anticipate, not react, to moves to create online courses and curriculum in their writing programs. By anticipating, they will be able to retain control over the design and assessment of the courses, a design and assessment that should reflect the goals of the entire program, not just respond to the constraints of the technology of online teaching. Gouge contests the idea that assessment in hybrid courses is more objective than in face-to-face courses by looking particularly at the hybrid courses offered through Texas Tech in its ICON (Interactive Composition Online Program). Gouge’s article includes a brief section of the origins of online teaching - pointing out that it has its roots in centuries-old correspondance studies – and explains both the advantages and disadvantages of “hybrid” courses.

Quotable Quotes

“There is no such thing as value-free, objective hierarchy of power, even if that power is distributed” (relates to assessment in online courses.) (355).

“In spite of ICON’s best intentions to provide students wiht a fairer assessment process and in spite of its explicit claims of the possibility of objectivity in evaluation, the structure of the evaluating process ultimately undermines these claims and asserts the value of the subjective position of the classroom instructor – the instructor with the knowledge and experience to make him or her a final authority. The result is a program that propagates the myth that ‘fairer grading’ means that students should be evaluated objectively. However, the result is also a hybrid program structure that undermines what it purports to value and values what its structure is claimed to have been designed to prevent” (356).

“We need to be careful not to allow the technology to structure our programs, even if our programs are being restructured to incorporate the best uses of new technologies. Writing programs ought to be designed such that the program structure supports the logic of the rhetorical processes that the program intends to teach students” (342).

Notable Notes

with hybrid courses – lead with the values of the program

WPAs have the responsibility to teach themselves about online teaching to act as the best advocates and designers for their programs

Selfe, Toward New Media Texts

Selfe, Cynthia L. “Toward New Media Texts: Taking Up the Challenge of Visual Literacy.” In Writing New Media. Eds. Anne Frances Wysocki, et al. Logan, Utah: Utah State UP, 2004. 67-110.

A good first step in incorporating and teaching new media texts in composition classrooms is through focusing on visual literacy in print and digital texts. Composition teachers, because many are not formally trained in the applications associated with many digital new media texts (Dreamweaver, desktop publishing, photo editing), feel like they don’t have the expertise to teach and guide students in composing new media texts. The assignments Selfe offers connect visual and alphabetic literacies (which composition teachers are more comfortable with), use rhetorical approaches, not entirely Web-based, and position the teacher and the students as co-learners. Though teachers will probably feel outside their comfort zone at first, Selfe argues for the importance of bridging to visual literacies and to begin to question the privileging alphabetic texts in our society and in the structuring of our writing programs and pedagogies.

Quotable Quotes

“By adding a focus on visual literacy to our existing focus on alphabetic literacy, we may not only learn to pay more serious attention to the ways in which students are now ordering and making sense of the world through the production and consumption of visual images, but we may also extend the usefulness of composition studies in a changing world.” (72)

Notable Notes

faculty feel like they lack the necessary skills to teach new media literacies, to help students compose with it – the faculty has an illiteracy that they have to come to terms with, will “force us to acknowledge gaps in our own literacy sets” (72)

change “author” to “composer/designer” and the reader to “reader/viewer”

assignments include a visual essay, visual argument, visual exhibition, and a text re-design and re-vision for the Web

composition studies needs to continue to be relevant to our students, so we have an obligation to learn about them and use them (new media literacies) in our classrooms as we ask our students to compose