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)

Newman, The Idea of a University

Newman, John Henry. The Idea of a University. New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1947.

First published in 1873, this is the collection of lectures and addresses Newman gave to an Irish Catholic audience in the early 1850s, when he was commissioned to argue for the establishment of an Irish Catholic university in Dublin, a modern, secular university that included theology as a course of study but not a universal frame of study, a university that would provide a Oxford- or Cambridge-level education. His campaign failed, but his articulation of an educational mission – one that would educate the entire person in a liberal tradition – has influenced educational thought since. Full, holistic, liberal education cultivates a habit of mind that lasts a lifetime, with the acquisition of knowledge, not professional training, as the ultimate end. The university’s mission, according to Newman, was not the creation of knowledge, but the dissemination and teaching of it.

Quotable Quotes

liberal education will cultivate a habit of mind with attributes of “freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom” (90).

“A University is, according to the usual designation, an Alma Mater, knowing her children one by one, not a foundry, or a mint, or a treadmill” (128).

“If a practical end must be assigned to a University course, I say it is that of training good members of society. Its art is the art of social life, and its end is fitness for the world. It neither confines its views to particular professions on the one hand, nor creates heroes or inspires genius on the other. Works indeed of genius fall under no art; heroic minds come under no rule; a University is not a birthplace of poets or of immortal authors, of founders of schools, leaders of colonies, or conquerors of nations. It does not promise a generation of Aristotles or Newtons, of Napoleons or Washingtons, of Raphaels or Shakespeares, though such miracles of nature it has before now constrained within its precincts. Nor it is content on the other hand with forming the critic or the experimentalist, the economist or the engineer, though such too it includes within its scope. But a University training is the great ordinary means to a great but ordinary end…It is the education which gives a man a clear conscious view of his own opinions and judgments, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them. It teaches him to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought, to detect what is sophistical, and to discard what is irrelevant” (157)

Notable Notes

the importance of educated laity

connections to Freire, Shor, process

Trimbur, Composition and the Circulation of Writing

Trimbur, John. “Composition and the Circulation of Writing.” CCC (Dec 2000) 188-219.

Trimbur argues that compositionists need to focus on and teach about the materiality of production, delivery, and circulation. Without an understanding of how writing circulates, composition courses and their students stay isolated from society, either in a strange father-child in loco parentis relationship with their teacher or investigating cultural artifacts in a cultural studies classroom, but remaining a reader, reporter, and consumer of culture rather than a producer or active participant. Trimbur uses Marx’s Grundrisse to explain Marx’s term circulation (which Trimbur uses interchangably with rhetorical canon of delivery after he explains the terms), which understands the circulation as a dialectic hierarchal power move, a deliberate distribution of knowledge and information, a relationship between labor and those in charge. Trimbur shows how he teaches about the circulation of writing in his “Writing about Disease and Public Health,” when he asks students to transform medical journal information to public news stories, which shows them how information gets changed and presented (in specific, political ways) in circulation.

Quotable Quotes

“Marx wanted to explian the various moments in the circulation of commodities – the cycle of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption – not as a series of separate events taking place in a predetermined order over time but dialectically, as mediation in mutual and coterminous relations that constitute the capitalist mode of production as a total system” (206).

“The process of production determines – and distributes – a hierarchy of knowledge and information that is tied to the cultural authorization of expertise, professionalism, and respectability.” (210)

“We cannot understand what is entailed when people encounter written texts without taking into account how the labor power embodied in the commodity form articulates a mode of production and its prevailing social relations” (210).

“Negating delivery has led to writing teachers to equate the activity of composing with writing itself and to miss altogether the complex delivery systems through which writing circulates” (190).

Notable Notes

delivery isn’t just technical (document design, Trimbur says) – it is political and ethical, can be used to democratize and circulate ideas, expand public forums (190).

exchange value v. use value – academic work in public channels

Apostel and Folk, First Phase Information Literacy on a Fourth Generation Website

Apostel, Shawn and Moe Folk. First Phase Information Literacy on a Fourth Generation Website: An Argument for a New Approach to Website Evaluation Criteria. Computers and Composition (Spring 2005).

Writing instructors need to change how they teach students to evaluate online sources both to account for students’ own “insider” knowledge of online sources and to account for the shift from alphabetic, text-centered criteria to integrated, multimodal digital design. Their article explains the current shift to incorporate visual literacies into the teaching of composition and gives an overview (with examples) of the four generations of web site design. Old standards for online site evalutions favored objectivity and centralization, ignoring a multitude of rich, subjective sources in blogs, forums, and multimedia. The digital world is rapidly evolving – we have to keep up, change our standards, and teach our students to use it well.

Quotable Quotes

“as websites evolve from their text-only beginnings, the book-derived criteria for evaluating credible sources are becoming increasingly archaic.”

“Here we see that teaching students to evaluate websites based on alphabetic skills may no longer be a sufficient way to equip students to critique and create rhetoric. As websites move into future generations of development, they will—if the current trends continue—incorporate more digital images, video and audio files, and animated images into their designs. If these communication devices are going to be used to orient our way of seeing the relation and display of information, then we need to empower our students with the ability to negotiate these sources so they can critique the information being presented.”

“Before dismissing our students’ current habits, then, we might look at how they are “making do” and how their strategies can be utilized and/or improved to impact our current ideas of website value in the classroom.”

Notable Notes

4 generations: 1. heavy text dump, no formatting 2. introduce tiled backgrounds, tables, frames, animated GIFs 3. thoughtful multimedia design (CDROM technology) 4. all of #3 plus non-CDROM technology like online shopping, IM, broadcasting live

student ways to evaluate sites: who links to this site? where did the original content come from? what does this site feel like? (“technological ethos”) where else is this information found?

opening up subjective possibilities in blogs gives students a whole new range of potential sources to enrich their research.

lots of Kress, Selfe

language isn’t the only semiotic system

Selfe, Students Who Teach Us

Selfe, Cynthia L. “Students Who Teach Us.” In Writing New Media. Eds. Anne Frances Wysocki, et al. Logan, Utah: Utah State UP, 2004. 43-66.

Selfe uses a case study of a student of hers, David Damon, a young black man interested in hip-hop and website design, to show that students are bringing extensive knowledges of new media to our classrooms, and we as writing teachers, in order to stay relevant and important, have a responsibility to both learn these new media literacies and incorporate them into our classrooms and assignments. She pulls out three lessons from Damon’s story: 1. that literacies naturally change and grow at differing rates; they all have lifespans 2. new media literacies play a role in the development of identity, in the construction of power relationships, and the creation of social codes and 3. composition teachers need to move beyond alphabetic texts and learn about composing in other modalities. Composition studies needs to look to students to teach us the kinds of literacies necessary to be successful in the 21st century.

Quotable Quotes

“If, however, English composition teachers recognize the insufficiency of maintaining a single-minded focus on conventional alphabetic texts – which generally comprise hte officially sanctioned literacy in our contemporary society – and, indeed, have an increading level of interest in such texts as they encounter them in their personal and professional lives, they do not necessarily know how to design a meaningful course of study for composition classrooms that accommodates a full range of literacies, expecially those literacies associated with new media texts” (56).

Students’ “enthusiasm about reading/viewing/interacting with and composing/designing/authoring such imaginative texts percolates through the sub-strata of composition classrooms, in direct constrast to students’ laissez faire attitudes towards more conventional texts” (44)

Notable Notes

assignments include literacy autobiography, looking at new media texts identified by students, providing alternative means to composing, affect of new media on different genres

need to pay attention to the literacies our students bring to the classroom

what does it man to be literate in the 21st century?

what to we as writing teachers need to learn and teach?

plagiarism and copying code

Marsh, Plagiarism: Alchemy and Remedy in Higher Education

Marsh, Bill. Plagiarism: Alchemy and Remedy in Higher Education. Albany, SUNY Press, 2007.

Instead of focusing on student motivation for plagiarism, this book looks at student plagiarism in higher education from a broader historical and theoretical perspective, investigating the evolution and ideologies of plagiarism prevention and internet-based plagiarism detection software. These software systems simultaneously cling to a model of authorship, reading, and writing that does not take into account the networked literacies and composing practices of today’s students and use these literacies and practices to detect improper source use by copying, scanning, and keeping student texts for their own profit. Both plagiarism and plagiarism detection are authoring activities with particular perspectives, with software detection services operating out of disciplinary, power, rehabilitation, control, and enforcement motives (43). The networked computer challenges these assumptions and calls for a new way of thinking about student research, writing, and reading.

Quotable Quotes

Plagiarism detection services “already use remediation techniques to produce student texts toward the formulation of safe, healthy, and legitmate writing subjects. In today’s institutions of higher learning, the time may have come to turn those techniques around – literally and figuratively – to better serve today’s post-media, multimodal learners” (156)

“I approach the plagiarism problem as an instance of social and political contestion mader real in the micromechanisms of composition pedagogy, intellectual property law, and, more recently, computer technology” (7)

The new media composer has new conventions and techniques that “revamp or remediate a range of authoring practices not altogether lost in our new media age” (148)

“Plagiarism detection services promise more generally to correct, or right, errant information flows while also teaching the prevailing lessons of modern authorship and intellectual property in the digital age” (4).

Notable Notes

The software which reads for “high-value” words remediates reading practices and calls to mind alchemy, “a new methodology for determining (reading for) authorial orginality.” Through ordering information, it orders human beings. (151)

Chapters

Chapter 1: plagiarism scandals of Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin, compare to how student plagiarizers who don’t have power are treated.
Chapter 2: definitions of plagiarism as failed authorship and the stealing of intellectual property; plagiarism detection software as a form of social control, 2 wrongs of plagiarism: stealing property and appropriating authorial originality
Chapter 3: early 20th century plagiarism prevention and management of student writing, 1913 U of Minnesota instructions
Chapter 4: Renaissance understandings of plagiarism through metaphors of alchemy and literary change
Chapter 5: inadequacy of handbooks to teach techniques for avoiding plagiarism because they rely on genre and insider knowledge
Chapter 6: inquiry as essential to late 20th century composition pedagogy, Ballenger’s research paper, influcenced by Montaigne
Chapter 7: internet plagiarism detection services (4 of them), how they regulate student writing and draw upon the alchemical, rhetorical, and legal traditions of plagiarism prevention
Chapter 8: how this all plays out with the networked internet and computer as a compositional tool

Research paper: contradictary because it requires students to create something original in an exercise that requires them to recognize the originality of other authors and to cite it in their papers. (88)

Hult, The Scholarship of Administration

Hult, Christine. “The Scholarship of Administration.” In Resituating Writing: Constructing and Administering Writing Programs. Eds. Joseph Janangelo and Kristine Hansen. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995. 119-131.

Hult, a longtime member of the Council of Writing Program Administrators and an editor for WPA, argues two things: higher education needs to acknowledge and reward the work of WPAs as scholarship of administration and WPAs need to do a better job of convincing the academy of the scholarly nature of their work. She points out that WPAs do all four kinds of scholarship outlined by Boyer: application, integration, teaching, and discovery. This work is not service; it is intellectual scholarship because the writing and administrative work that WPAs do is rhetorical in nature, informed by disciplinary knowledge, and “published” (and has an impact) on a broad audience. To increase recognition of their work, WPAs should forward department chairs and deans important documents that they create, include administrative work under the “scholarship” section of their tenure and promotion cases instead of under “service,” and work to create an administrative portfolio that highlights their work, much like a teaching portfolio.

Quotable Quotes

“As WPAs, we shouldn’t succumb to the myth of the superhuman professor. Rather we should consciously direct our career paths in the best interest of both ourselves and our campus communities” (127) – can’t be a super-duper researcher, teacher, and administrator all at once

How to achieve recognition: “through agressive public relations, thoughtful publication, and careful documentation of our work” (130) to create systems to evaluate and reward WPA work.

The scholarship of administration: “The systematic, theory-based production and oversight of a dynamic program” – akin to music, theater, dance (126).

Notable Notes

Scholarship of application – creating programs, syllabi, training teachers, WPA is often the only composition scholar leading a teaching staff of non-specialists (different from a department chair administering over faculty)

Scholarship of integration – reading across disciplines, running WAC programs, incorporating technology in writing curriculum

Scholarship of discovery – published or not, informal and formal reseach into the program, working to keep programs reflective of the work in the field

Scholarship of teaching – evaluations, syllabi, course development

Section of the development and history of the journal WPA

Council of Writing Program Administrators, Evaluating the Intellectual Work of Writing Administration

Council of Writing Program Administrators. “Evaluating the Intellectual Work of Writing Administration.” The Allyn and Bacon Sourcebook for Writing Program Administrators. Eds. Irene Ward and William J. Carpenter. New York: Longman, 2002. Appendix F. 366-378.

First published in the 1996 Fall/Winter issue of WPA, this statement builds on the MLA Report “Making Faculty Work Visible” and argues that five specific areas of writing program administration work are intellectual work (dependent on faculty expertise, research, and knowledge, and worthy of tenure and promotion.) The five areas include program creation, curricular design, faculty development, program assessment and evaluation, and program-related textual production. The statement includes guidelines to evaluate this work, pointing out that not all work by every WPA should be considered intellectual work; only work that has produced knowledge which results in activities and products that can be peer-evaluated (whether that knowledge is innovation, improvement, dissemination, or empirical research results) should be considered scholarship. The goal of the Council is to prove how academic service, which consumes a WPA’s daily existence, is just as important, rewardable, and scholarly as faculty research and teaching.

Quotable Quotes

Administration “has for the most part been treated as a management activity that does not produce new knowledge and that neither requires nor demonstrates scholarly expertise and disciplinary knowledge” (366).

Goal: “refiguring writing administration as scholarly and intellectual work,” it is “worthy of tenure and promotion when it advances and enacts disciplinary knowledge within the field of Rhetoric and Composition” (366)

Notable Notes

exchange value and use value of teaching & research v. service

three tenure case studies of faculty who have concentrated in research, teaching, and service

not all service counts as scholarship – just that work that involves disciplinary knowledge (theory informing practice)

Ernest Boyer, Scholarship Reconsidered

McLeod, The Pedagogy of Writing Across the Curriculum

McLeod, Susan. “The Pedagogy of Writing Across the Curriculum.” 149-164.

The literacy “crisis” of the 1970s, coupled with open admissions policies, led college administrators and writing instructors to discussions on how to improve students’ writing. One solution, pioneered by Barbara Walvoord and informed by British and American curricular movements spearheaded by James Britton and Toby Fulwiler, was writing across the curriculum, which has two complementary agendas: writing to learn and writing to communicate (often called WID, writing in the disciplines.) A WAC coordinator has the tricky job of modeling the pedagogy they are trying to get the faculty, who hail from all different disciplines, to teach: not to dictate what is correct and incorrect writing (rather, invite a discussion); have faculty write themselves; and encourage opportunities for faculty to talk with each other about their expectations and reactions to student writing. Some of the benefits of WAC and WID is that it increases students’ awareness of the conventions of different discourse communities and genres, it shows them that different fields (and workplaces) write differently based on their fundamental theories, missions, and values; and it highlights the fact that good writing is important in all disciplines.

Notable Notes

Attributes: student-centered, active learning, reflective, constant feedback loop from students to teachers to faculty

Berkenkotter and Huckin (genre theory); Elaine Maimon; Patricia Lindon; Britton (Language and Learning); Fulwiler (The Journal Book); Russell (“Rethinking Genre in School and Society”); Emig (Writing as a Mode of Learning)

WID emphasizes learning discourse conventions, genres, and the processes of acquiring knowledge in that particular field.

apprenticeship model

Howard, “Collaborative Pedagogy”

Howard, Rebecca Moore. “Collaborative Pedagogy.” 54-70.

Howard, tracing the rise of collaborative pedagogy to Kenneth Bruffee and open admissions policies, explains several kinds of collaborative writing and learning used in the composition classroom: collaborative learning (the kind that happens in whole-class or small-group discussion); student collaboration in solo-authored text (through peer workshops and writing groups), collaborative writing assignments, and the collaboration that happens between a writer and text when a writer engages in source-based writing. Collaborative pedagogy contends the romantic notion of the solitary author, instead foregrounding the inherent social nature of language, meaning-making, and knowledge. It provides a social context for students to think and write in, flattens the hierachy in a classroom(which empowers students), and models the kinds of writing tasks students will have to do in the workplace.

Quotable Quotes

Writer/text collaboration – “re(formative) composition” that allows students to play with the language in sources without worrying about textual ownership issues: it could have “the potential for expanding students’ linguistic repertories and increasing the authority of their academic prose voices” (67).

Movement “away from a normative solitary author and toward an appreciation for collaboration” is necessary for the acceptance of and success of the pedagogy in the eyes of the discipline (56)

Notable Notes

Bruffee’s 3 principles: 1. thought is internalized conversation 2. writing is internalized conversation re-externalized 3. collaborative work is establishing and maintaining knowledge among a community of knowledgable peers.

Rorty – social-constructivist, knowledge is a “socially justified belief”

Ann Ruggles Gere; Kris Bosworth and Sharon Hamilton; Diana George, Marilyn Cooper, and Susan Sanders; Chet Meyers and Thomas Jones; Lusford and Ede; LeFevre, Glynda Hull and Mike Rose; Mary Minock; Keith Miller (African-American preaching)

With collaborative pedagogy, a teacher needs to discuss methods and problems of collaborative learning before the assignment, have the sutdents commit to a timetable and schedule, prepare for dissent and conflict, discuss the grading policy, and allow room for minority opinions/counterevidence in the project.

Question of plagiarism and cheating