Threshold Concepts and Blog Summary

The pedagogy of teaching a first-year composition (FYC) course has revealed itself to be far more complex and varied than I expected when I entered this course. The necessity for taking the course, I was told, was to become familiar with the goals of the course and the outcomes expected by the university's English Department - how complicated could that be?  Wasn't it essentially a matter of teaching students the skills, the "nuts and bolts," of writing a basic all-purpose college composition, a framework they could fill in with the specifics of whatever course they were taking? Showing them how it would differ from the high school papers they were already used to writing? I was very quickly disabused of this notion as it became clear that moving from point A to point B in the classroom was not straightforward as I had assumed. 

     Through class discussions and readings, I gained many important insights regarding my own preconceived notions, ways I could improve on my previous teaching methods and approaches, (especially in the area of grading and evaluation), and most importantly, ideas about how to creatively address the challenges of teaching FYC in the spring. From this work, focusing on my own reading and the review of the articles posted by my peer group, three threshold concepts have emerged as governing principles for how I will approach the development of my syllabus and teaching strategy.

 Threshold Concepts:

1)  Traditional approaches to teaching first year composition (FYC) would greatly benefit from expanding the traditional limited focus on narrow rhetorical discourse to include creative writing and more diverse forms of communication.

      Both Nishat and Christopher discuss creative writing as an aspect of composition in reference to Hesse's article, "The Place of Creative Writing in Composition Studies," although they take slightly differing perspectives on Hesse's proposal that the two be united in writing programs; Nishat agrees, Christopher raises methodological and other problems. Nishat amplifies his discussion by focusing on Hesse's point that "engaging in higher critical thinkings of writing is important, and that people studying the pedagogy understand that composition studies and the learning of its teachings refers to the whole of the studies." The result can be, and I have heard of this happening, major splits between creative writing programs and composition programs, which is to the benefit of no one. Another article that touches on the idea of creative writing is by David Hanauer, who discusses the ability to measure voice in poetry written by ESL students. (Hanauer) While this article was also relevant and supportive of my second threshold concept of the importance of helping students develop their voice through their writing, it is also a demonstration of the value of how different genres of creative writing can be sued in the classroom to facilitate teaching. Christopher uses an article, "Mocking Discourse: Parody as Pedagogy," (Seitz} as the basis for describing an assignment he would use in his FYC class as a " fun way to engage students, wreak some havoc, and show language's ideological foundations." It can involve rewriting fairy tales, or any other piece of writing, for that matter, with samples provided by the instructor. This is a great example of how a non-traditional form of writing can be used in the classroom to help what I call deconceptualize what a writer is for students who have built up barriers and preconceived notions of their own about what FYC is all about. These articles, in combination with the articles I discussed in my own blog (Janks, Lim, Spade) provided the foundation out of which my first threshold concept emerged.

2) it is critical that FYC courses recognize that diversity and “multiculturalism” extend far beyond simply having students of different races and ethnicities in the classroom, and that instructors must proactively work to make their classrooms safe spaces for all students to express themselves.

     Many of my classmates blogged on articles related to what emerged as my second threshold concept, which I believe speaks its relevance and persistence as an issue of concern to those entering the classroom for the first time especially. Maddie (Madeline), for example, blogged on three different articles that addressed ESL students and how they are treated in the classroom. Silva, in “On the Ethical Treatment of ESL Writers,” describes a four point "code of ethics" for working with ESL students that he developed based on research he conducted using journal articles. Land and Whitley discuss discrimination against ESL students and their disadvantage in standard written English (SWE) composition. This is based on what Land and Whitley call "the singular rhetorical convention accepted in U.S. academia" as opposed to "differing ESL rhetorical conventions that inexperienced composition teacher’s (sic) might read and analyze as having poorly constructed and unorganized arguments." In Maddie's third article, “Should We Invite Students to Write in Home Languages? Complicating the Yes/No Debate” by Bean et al., she discusses the questions raised in this articles about the highly-relevant and interesting debate over how to teach students who may speak (and write) in AAVE or are ESL students who may also not speak standardized English yet. Maddie reports that "As a rule, the authors decided that it was paramount to create a “safe place” for this style of writing in Composition classrooms, and the article provides examples and when and how." (emphasis added) Christopher blogged on an article that informed one of the writing assignments on my syllabus, J. Buzard’s” On Auto-Ethnographic Authority." Although Buzard appears to argue against the use of the auto-ethnography in the composition classroom, Christopher found it "a useful tool." I believe that a modified version, the first part of it, which is writing the personal history, can be a wonderful exercise for the free write early in the semester, and found this article very useful myself. 

These blogs from my fellow students showed how problems and the approaches to resolving them in different contexts are relevant to my interests and have broad application. They contributed to enlarging the scope of understanding how to implement the challenges of my second threshold concept.

   

 3) Writing can no longer be seen or taught as only an individual activity isolated from the society in which it exists. In the age of digital communication, writing has become more of a social act than ever before.

Given space considerations, my final summary is of an article in Casey's blog which was of particular interest to this concept. "After Incarceration and Adult Learning: A Collaborative Inquiry and

Writing Project," by J. Schwartz, reports on the experience of "a group of three black, male students [who found] and publish[ed] counter-stories of the black male experience returning to learning after incarceration." This article is an excellent example of the intensely collaborative nature a writing (and publishing) project can be.

Works Cited

Bean, Janet, et al. “Should We Invite Students to Write in Home Languages? Complicating the

   

      Yes/No Debate.” Second-Language Writing in the Composition Classroom, edited by Paul Kei

    

       Matsuda, et al, Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2006, pp. 225-239. 

Buzard, J. "On Auto-Ethnographic Authority." The Yale Journal of Criticism 16.1 (2003): 61-91.  

     

       Project MUSE. Web. December 21, 2016

Hanauer, David I. "Measuring Voice in Poetry Written by Second Language Learners." Sage 32.1 

        (2015): 66-86. 23 Dec. 2014

Hesse, Douglas. "The Place of Creative Writing in Composition Studies." College Composition and 

       Communication 62.1 (2010): 31-52. Web.

Janks, Hilary. The discipline and craft of academic writing: building writing capacity in institutions 

  

        of higher education. 2012. Reading & Writing. 3(1). Art #25.    

       

Land, Robert E., and Catherine Whitley. “Evaluating Second-Language Essays in Regular 

        Composition Classes: Toward a Pluralistic U.S. Rhetoric.” Second-Language Writing in the 

        Composition Classroom, edited by Paul Kei Matsuda, et al, Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2006, pp. 

  

        324-332.

Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. Lore. Practice, and Social Identity in Creative Writing Pedagogy. (2010).

.        Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture. 

         10(1). 79-93.

 

Schwartz, J. (2015). After Incarceration and Adult Learning: A Collaborative Inquiry and 

          Writing Project. Adult Learning, 26(2), 51-58.

Seitz, D. "Mocking Discourse: Parody as Pedagogy." Pedagogy 11.2 (2011): 371-394. Project    

  

          MUSE.

Silva, Tony. “On the Ethical Treatment of ESL Writers.” Second-Language Writing in the 

          Composition Classroom, edited by Paul Kei Matsuda, et al, Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2006, pp. 

          154-157.

Spade, Dean. Some Very Basic Tips for Making Higher Education More Accessible to Trans 

           Students and Rethinking How We Talk about Gendered Bodies. (2011). Radical Teacher.  92, 

           57-62.

.

 

Blog #5: Designing Writing Assignments for Working Class Students at the College Level

October 17, 2016

Mack, Nancy. "Ethical Representations of Working-Class Lives: Multiple Genres, Voices, and Identities." (2006) Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture. (6)1: 53-78.   Online.

Nancy Mack’s central contention is “that working-class students need writing assignments in which they can occupy an authoritative position . . . that is not discounted as underprepared or limited but (is) a respected, working-class-academic identity (54).”  She goes on to say that the types of papers traditionally assigned to working class students frequently discount their “experiences, histories, and ways of making knowledge,” focusing instead on topics with which they may have little experience or interest. I would suggest the way the academy creates these barriers to students who identify as working class is the same way it creates them for other students who are outside of what she calls the “competitive, elite culture.” She points out the unacknowledged stigma attached to working class students, the assumption of an inherent “deficit or liability;” the same assumptions that attach to many students of color entering major universities. These assumptions ripple out in many directions, impacats of which are to disempower, undermine, and alienate students, often resulting in their dropping out before they graduate. The point here is not to say that all of this can be attributed to how students are treated in composition courses; however, Mack cites a report showing that the skills working class students worry about the most are their writing skills, and that marginalized students, among whom are women, working class, and students of color, leave “university because of their perception that their writing is fundamentally unacceptable (56).” To combat this problem, Mack developed a theory that stresses the importance of recognizing the plural identities working class (and other marginalized) students bring with them to the writing table; for example, the struggle of students to reconcile their identities of upwardly mobile students whose use of the language of  the academy is exactly that interpreted by their friends and family as “getting too smart for the rest of us” or in some communities of color, “acting white.” Writing assignments should give students “the discursive space” to create their own academic identity that “legitimates and ethically represents their multiple identities” (60) as workers, students, and all the other identities they bring with them into the classroom. The model Mack describes to do this is a multigenre research project that focuses on either family, community, or “peer group folklore.” She particularly emphasizes the folklore project as an opportunity for students to combine direct one-on-one interviews with academic readings; the final project is presented as multiple pieces of writing from different genres. The final step is what she calls an “expository cover letter” which students use to reflect on the processes they used in creating their project because, as she concludes, “Reflections can help us to connect theory to practice (74).”  Mack’s ability to join theory to concrete classroom assignment is the value of this article and why I think it is useful to other students in terms of creating assignments. She raises issues that must be considered to teach successfully in classrooms with students from a diversity of backgrounds.

Cognitive Process of Writing in Practice

Blog #4

Janks, Hilary. The discipline and craft of academic writing: building writing capacity in institutions of higher education. 2012. Reading & Writing. 3(1). Art #25. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/rw.v3i1.25

In their article, “A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing,” Flowers and Hayes introduced the idea composition was a set of distinct, hierarchical thinking processes that the writer organizers as she sets her ideas down on the page. The response to this article resulted in a major pedagogical shift in the way teaching writing was viewed. The one thing they almost all had in common was that no longer was the writing product the focus of the teaching pedagogy as much as the process used to produce that product. Writing from her experience as a participant in a two-week course on academic writing, Janks presents what can only be seen as an almost perfect case study of Flowers’ and Hayes’ theory in practice. She describes the pedagogy used in this course as a synthesis of academic writing with several techniques of creative writing, by a professor whose philosophy was that even research writing was creative writing. Janks describes the structure of the course – two weeks of classes with the weeks separated by a month in-between – and then describes in detail the exercises done and the impacts those exercises had on her writing. Sessions such as “creativity” and “pushing the boundaries”; peer groups where members critiqued each other’s work. Activities such as free writing on “I am the color of…”  “what stops you from writing…”, drawing mind-maps of students’ research and free associating on the word “before.” These go directly back to Flowers and Hayes’ four points; they are examples of how process can externally introduced and guided and how it works. That is its relevance for this course. The activities may seem far out, the methodology, “kooky,” but I it is critically important to have an open mind and understand what the theory of cognitive process really means when put into practice creatively. Its application becomes even more relevant because we have students from all different disciplines but they will all have to write research papers and do academic writing. It is our responsibility to teach them  how to do it in a way that demystifies it, makes it accessible to them, and gives them alternate tools to break through what are sometimes long-established barriers from historically bad experiences with writing. Although this may have been an unorthodox article, it was valuable article in demonstrating in a concrete way what process can mean and how we have to open our own minds to being more creative.