I am Matthew Williams and You are Not

One might look, for example, at Ken Macrorie's books, or Elbow's Writing with Power or Brannon, Knight, and Neverow-Turk's Writers Writing. Here, in more intimate, self-conscious personas, the monolith of correctness is recast in a less important form, and attention shifts to the act of writing. But of course the result is no less propaganda. The only difference is that an alternative set of political values is at work. To frame it in somewhat oversimplified terms, the "traditional" texts present writing as a matter of learning to conform, with an emphasis on decorum as a means of identify- ing individual with group; whereas the "non-traditional" books present it as a liberating activity, a means of defining individual as separate from group. The point here is that writing is necessarily more complex, and more variable, than either position can depict-encompasses both of them, and more. In either case, then, the users of such books are presented with proselytizers who differ only in their particular doctrinal allegiance: in short, with propaganda. (31)

--Stephen North in The Making of Knowledge in Composition

* Writing manuals and how-to textbooks devalue the role and integrity of the composition instructor. They follow in a long and storied tradition of seeing the act of teaching as a non-academic or non-intellectual activity. In short, it turns the instructor from a practicing academic into a mere clerk or technician that carries out predetermined activities and routines. A writing manual allows instructors to think less about teaching and consequently prevents them from engaging in self-reflexive pedagogy.

* Textbooks remove the most important element of learning from the equation: the student. It relegates authority to entities external to the localized, specific classroom (e.g., publishing companies, textbook authors, etc).

* The yearly cost of tuition at the University of Minnesota is now over five figures. For many students, it is much more once living expenses are added in. The average student debt upon leaving the University of Minnesota is in excess of $20,000; one of the highest figures in the mid-west for a public university. Government funded aid is lessening and state support is drying up. A 60 dollar textbook represents a small fraction of the total expense of going to college. Yet, a lot of 60 dollar textbooks add up over the course of 4 years.

* Most (if not all) writing manuals are geared towards writing correctly to fill out mythical standard forms of writing with out considering that these forms are constantly changing as they are composed. Research of professional and technical writers has time and time again noted that "correctness" in writing is one small part of many factors that go into being able to "write well."

* The prevalence of writing manuals is a reflection of the state of the discipline and not a reason to use such texts in the classroom. Educators who specialize in composition are actually a tiny minority of people who actually teach composition. The majority of composition instructors are specialists in other areas or graduate students from other fields. For these instructors, the belief is that writing manuals and text books are necessary as the information and knowledge contained within them is too important to let a non-specialist handle on their own. Simply put, it "teacher-proofs" a classroom.

* Textbooks introduce corporations and their marketing into the classroom, whereby decisions of how to teach are guided by successful marketing of publishing company representatives and not necessarily academic or scholarly research/theory. Consequently, the available set of "teaching methods" becomes constrained by what the market makes available to instructors. Further, new theories of writing are constrained by what could be used in a textbook.

* Textbook publishers are typically for-profit endeavors who make a profit from first year writing classes, creating troublesome conflicts of interest for both instructors as well as departments.

* It is unavoidable that textbooks create an environment where students "discover" or "locate" the correct answers, principles, or theories instead of creating them.

* Local, community, individual, and inter-generational forms of knowledge are devalued while institutional, non-localized forms of knowledge via experts contained within writing guides are privileged.

* Writing manuals and textbooks perpetuate a specific ideology of what the classroom should look like and how it should operate. Reliance on textbooks makes it difficult (if not impossible) to envision other, alternative, and potentially viable/valuable ways of understanding the mechanics of the classroom space. An inability to even conceive of how a class might work with out a textbook at the center of it demonstrates how narrow our conceptions of how learning happens really are.

* Textbooks and writing manuals run the risk of being the educational equivalent of setting a child down in front of a TV in order to socialize it.

* When we select a textbook, not only are we supporting the ideologies contained within the book, but we are also perpetuating the system and the network (in all of its socio-political facets) that created and consequently ensure the hegemony of the textbook as the primary source of instruction. In short, the purpose of the textbook ideology is the preservation of the textbook ideology, especially when we consider that much of the information contained within various writing guides and manuals can be found for free in other places (e.g., the internet, libraries, and most importantly, communicative communities).

Posted by Matthew Williams at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the animated segments on Saturday Night Live that I always enjoyed was the "Fun with Real Audio" segment in which they would take the audio track of something, usually an interview, and then animate something else while the audio went on. The effect was to de-contextualize the audio and to turn it into something else. It was always comedic because the words, depending on the animation going on, took on drastically different meanings. Of course, on SNL, the goal was comedy, as many animations quickly evolved in to hilarious juxtapositions of serious interviews and bizarre and surreal animations. But there's an important process going on here that I was reminded of today. During our first year writing instruction symposium I was reminded several times that similar things could be brought upon our own teaching practices. For instance, for those who don't know, the current description of our FYC (first year composition) class reads as follows:

WRIT 1301 fulfills the first-year writing requirement. It involves critical reading, writing, and thinking as students practice some of the types of writing they may expect in their college career such as summaries, essays, academic arguments, bibliographies, and papers built on research. The course helps students develop, at a minimum, an approach to writing that relies on clear statement of a thesis and support of that thesis with appropriate sources and documentation. Time is spent discussing rhetorical elements of writing such as audience, purpose, and argumentative structure. Students also practice steps in the writing process such as invention, research, organization of ideas, paper drafting, revision, and editing. Students report, synthesize, and draw conclusions regarding the significance of what they read. Students become more aware of the rhetorical choices available to them and learn to make appropriate choices. Some sections may be taught in computer classroom. Some sections are offered online. Some sections may include a service-learning component.

As I see it, there are 5 key "terms" that the whole endeavor is built on. These are the 5 "Rs:" Reading, Research, Revision, Rhetoric, and Writing. I've highlighted them in the description. But returning to the idea of "Fun With Real Audio," one thing that struck me as I was listening to my colleagues at a FYW (first year writing) symposium today was that when we use these terms, we all assume we know that we all agree on what the terms mean, but in actuality we don't. For instance, during a panel discussion on teaching with "research," in my notes I had the question "what IS research" and "what is the function of research" written down several times. I also noted that with research, we all "know how to do it" but don't really know what "it" is when we teach it. The question of "well, what IS research anyway" seems so simple that we just neglect to ask it, let alone attempt to answer it. But returning to these terms themselves is fruitful and important if we're concerned with not just replicating the errors we've made in the past. So, this got me thinking: what happens to the writing class (real audio) when we change the definition of these terms that we use to describe it (the animation)? That is, what happens when we de-familiarize the familiar when we approach designing a writing class? As such, I offer "alternative" definitions to the 5 "Rs" (and yes, I know "writing" isn't an R word, but it sounds like one, so just play along, ok?).

Continue reading "Teaching Composition as Fun with Real Audio" »

Posted by Matthew Williams at 1:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Act I, Scene 1

The dingy yellow radiator occasionally clunks, a poster hangs precariously on its last thumbtack off of a overflowing cork board, and every where the air is filled with the dry powdery scent of chalk that has been collecting in the carpet, the wood trim, the areas above shelves that are skipped when dusting, and even in the clothes of children that hang in washrooms toward the back. No one really notices this, though…except one person. He sits in the back wearing a plaid shirt and tennis shoes that are only laced halfway up. The jeans he wears jeans are from WalMart and his sandy blonde hair is matted down on one side of his head. Most of the time he is quiet, silently observing everything else going on around him. He watches two girls get up to go talk to another girl. He catches a friend of his out of the corner of his eye go to sharpen a pencil at the grey crank sharpener bolted to the door frame. In front of him is a mess of paper; mostly torn from a green spiral notebook he keeps stashed inside his pop-up desk. His handwriting is awkward and nearly illegible, something his sixth grade teacher had reminded him about earlier in the year. In a bit he is going to go share what he has written on it with the teacher. For the moment, however, he is lost to his senses taking in the swirling hustle and bustle of a class humming with activity.

Act I, Scene II

It is early fall and the stuffiness left over from the hot afternoon has not yet left the building, despite every window in the cramped room being opened. Inside, eleven adults sit around four uneven tables pushed together to make one very large square. There are papers strewn all over the table, some in neat piles, others arranged as though they were playing cards being set down on a blackjack table. There is a seriousness that is accentuated by the amplified sound of papers being shuffled and thoughtful murmurs being exchanged. There is a young man sitting at the corner of the large square. He is wearing a black t-shirt, jeans, and sits in total silence as others pour over the typed manuscript in front of them. These are the rules of the workshop: the author may not speak. Next to him sits a teacher who dresses as though she were a thoughtful senator's wife. She has just flown back from giving a reading in New York. Later that week she will fly to Los Angeles to give another reading. Across from her sits a retired preacher who lives in a retirement community. Next to him sits a blonde, waife-like twenty something graduate student who is wearing a low cut t-shirt and metallic bracelets. The rest of the class is just as uniform. Before them is a fragmented piece about this particular young man's mentally disabled older sister. No one dares refer to her as "his" sister. Instead, any reference to this young man is replaced by the term "the author's." As the discussion goes on, the young man finds himself looking out the window into a courtyard as a chilly breeze pulls red leaves off a mushroom shaped Serviceberry tree.

Act II, Scene I

The reason I have written about the above scenes is that they are both about me. Not only are they both about writing, but also they are both about writing in a community. And while there are other similarities I'm sure (mostly revolving around my interaction in the community), the differences between the two scenes are the ones that I find most illuminating. Here we have a contrast between production and analysis, between children and adults, between the act of writing and the act of reading, and, most importantly, between the metaphors of voice and narrative. While notion of community is requisite for both scenes, how community is employed and for what purpose could not be any more different. The rest of this play is about how two different theorists, Donald Graves and Barbara Kamler, depict a writing community and the implications this has on a larger theoretical scale. I want to re-read the function of community through the lens of a larger democratic project and to ultimately argue that the loss of voice as a metaphor impoverishes notions of democracy.

Continue reading "Story And Voice: Meditations on Community" »

Posted by Matthew Williams at 11:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

(From my other blog)

Once the questions of "can writing be taught" and "should it be taught" are overcome, the general framework for creative writing classes seems to grow from a response to two problems. The first problem is a question concerning models. What "models" of "good writing" do we use? What ideological motivations are behind those selections? The second problem is a problem of application: once we select a model, what do we do with it?

The current-traditional mode of creative writing has answered these two questions in the same way since its inception. On the first hand, what counts as a "model" has always meant some form of canonical literature. This, in whatever form, is almost always some piece of published literature. Usually, it is a "major" work or one that has won several awards. This method always ignores the rather pertinent question of "what exactly constitutes 'good' writing?" The answer is bound with the response to the second problem...

Current-traditional methods answer the "what do we do with it" question rather simply: we interpret it. This is a direct appropriation of literary studies methods. In particular, the methods of new criticism. The lingua franca of any class discussion over writing in a creative writing class is always the "close reading" in which students are asked to analyze through some quasi-scientific method of reading what is "going on" in a text. To further shove this into the "new criticism" mold, in most workshops the author cannot speak, just in case you thought that something might exist "outside of the text."

Interestingly, what counts as "good literature" in the literary canon are works that literary criticism can be done on. Consequently, the "good literature" we are asking students to read in a writing class are generally works that are "good literature" to do literary criticism on because they fit a specific mold. Ponder this: a student creates a piece of work that is so new and so original that no one knows what to say about it. In this scenario, the entire process would break down. The writing would have no 'academic value' to the class, and as such, would be considered worthless in the academic sense. But this is why the confusion of literary interpretation and literary production is so dangerous: this piece of work might be a great piece of art that is tossed in the trash bin because it doesn't look like literature ought.

Continue reading "Writing for interpretation" »

Posted by Matthew Williams at 8:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

(From my other blog)

In any English department, there are, at the least, three main "areas" or "groups" of inquiry/study/scholarship.

These three are:

Composition
Literature Studies
Creative Writing.

In a strange twist of common sense, however, there exists two competing and often antagonistically opposing camps: Those who see Literary Studies as the most important thing, and composition. Creative writing, interestingly, is a part of literary studies, NOT composition.

Think about it:
In most creative writing classes, students are required to read a "wide variety" of poetry. They are asked to engage in the interpretation of those works as well as the interpretations of the works of others. They may even be asked to read common literary criticism of works they are reading.

In Literature classes, students are required to read a wide variety of poetry. They are asked to engage in the interpretation of those works. They are generally asked to read common literary criticism of the works they are reading as well.

The only difference between a literature class is the output. Students in a creative writing class are expected to turn literary studies into literature. Students in a literature class are asked to turn literary studies into literary criticism. But while the output is different, the methods are generally the same.

Composition, on the other hand, concerns most of its work and scholarship with the actual processes that produce writing. It combines both the rhetorical tradition as well as the more recent "composition studies" tradition which is where most of the mainstream process orientated writing theories have come from.

Composition studies, since it is a forward looking inquiry, can do work into how to break genre lines. Literary studies can only, at best, recognize where the lines exist. This, in my opinion, helps to explain why most poetry that comes out of a poetry class is really, frankly, dull. We aren't teaching them to be innovators or revolutionaries. Rather, we're teaching them to look backwards, interpret, describe, and then mimic.

As I've said before, creative writing when it utilizes the literary studies approach to writing can only result in the fulfillment of a pre-determined idea, form, or conception of what poetry "is." And by "is," I mean what already has been.

Craft-Criticism

In Tim Mayer's book (Re)Writing Craft, there are several ideas that I think are just crazy enough to work. The main one is his idea of craft-criticism.

When Mayer's talks of craft, he's not talking about what most in creative writing think when they think of craft: technique. Rather, Mayer's argues for a radically exploded definition of craft that is so wide that it can even question its own tenants. Craft-criticism in this formation can even be utilized to address the question of "what IS craft, anyway?" and "what IS the function of the poet-critic."

Academic literary criticism is preoccupied with the question of interpretation. Craft-criticism, while it may use interpretation as a tool, is more concerned with the question of production.

Literary criticism asked "what does this mean?" Craft-criticism asks "how can this happen?" One is always looking back, the other has the potential to look forward.

Craft-Criticism as Radical Pedagogy

In a sense, this is what I am trying to set up in my advanced poetry class. A community of writers who are engaging in craft-criticism. Why this is so radical is that it turns the current-traditional pedagogical methods of creative writing completely upside down and runs the risk (although a healthy one) of turning its own guns on itself. By allowing and even encouraging craft-criticism to happen, the doors open to allowing harsh and brutal interrogations and investigations into the hows and whys of "creative writing" that have, traditionally, been feared to the point of censorship by the vast majority of those who teach creative writing.

The end result that I see in this is that it does something very important: It returns the power to the student over their own definitions of writing. It gives them a voice in their own writing processes, and a weapon to use against future attempts at order and institutionalized process censorship.

Posted by Matthew Williams at 4:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So stop me if you've heard this one before.... A student walks into a composition class and is told how to write in concise paragraphs. They are told of the relationship between topic sentences and supporting sentences. They are taught that it all flows in a logical and coherent way. They are told how to craft a good thesis sentence and that everything in a paper should cohere to that one sentence. They are taught the idea of the '5 paragraph argumentative essay.' They are shown....what? You say you've heard this before? That this is pretty much every composition class? Well, I guess that really isn't funny then, huh?

There has always been something wrong with composition. Even from the start, there has never been any "right" answers to how to go about doing this. Theories would be borne out of theories and scaffolded on assumptions and traditions that are now so old that they are hard to untangle from the entire endeavor. Is there nothing new, then? Maybe. Maybe not.

The study of the history of composition and writing instruction has traditionally been the study of various theories of how writing happens. If you look through various textbooks dealing with composition, ideas such as the paragraph as the main unit, the idea of "themes" to write on, the notion of expository writing as the main domain of writing...all these ideas have had their time on the chopping block.

But what is curious is that this question, the question of how writing happens and its related question how do we teach how writing happens? is only one of three questions we can be looking at. The other two, in many regards, may be far more interesting and important to be looking at.

Continue reading "Reformulating the Questions of Composition" »

Posted by Matthew Williams at 11:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This has been the debate in my head lately: Do I include a link to this blog in my email signatures or do I not? On one hand, I hope that if nothing else, the ideas that I work through on this blog give the readers I have something to think about. They may not agree with me, or they may think I just don't know what I'm talking about. But this is much better than not having ideas at all, or theorizing stuff but never telling anyone. And if this is what I believe, the increase in readership can only be positive.

Yet, there is that phrase I just used: "ideas that I work through on this blog." Even though the words and tone may mask it, there is a high degree of uncertainty in everything I say on here. This truly is a place for me to roll out ideas that pass through my mind, regardless of how rudimentary, over-generalized, and academically naive they may be. I am the first to admit that blog entries on here are the start of the intellectual investigative process, definitely not the end. I have so much to learn still. Sometimes, I am fearful of my colleagues finding this blog for the sheer reason that what I say here is so debatable (even within myself) that I don't want to be seen as that person "who believes X" (or Y, whatever).

It occurred to me today while talking to Geoff Sirc that in this internal debate in my mind, there is something to be realized or understood about blogging. What I was beginning to understand is that there is a very large rift between how academia views public displays of thought and how the blogosphere understands it. This rift, in a sense, might mark the loose thread that will someday start to unravel some very closely held ideas and assumptions. Additionally, it points to many signs that how we view "drafts" in composition classes is entirely off the mark for the new generation of students filling our classes.

Continue reading "Blogging is not Publishing; Publishing is not Blogging" »

Posted by Matthew Williams at 8:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the previous entry, the usage of the term "prime mover" is not as accidental as you might think. If we are to believe that the goal of education is to effect learning, then we are forced to reconcile the idea that no effect exists with out a cause. Starting to sound like the cosmological argument? Then let's go there...

Continue reading "More Metaphors on Student Centered Learning" »

Posted by Matthew Williams at 1:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As discussed in earlier entries, the instructor centered framework of education takes two flavors (usually a combination of the two): the lecture and the recitation. Technology, when employed in either of these concepts, will exhibit the following characteristics:

* A need on the instructors behalf to be prescriptive in regards to how the technology will be utilized
* The presence of grading rubrics
* Samples / models are distributed to students to demonstrate appropriate / satisfactory work
* Presence of grades as motivation for activities (evidence of external motivation as primary motivation)
* Assignment based
* Considered to be part of the pre-existing concept of "class participation" within the grading structure.
* Language is often seen as imprecise (a sign of students using their own experience as a basis for discourse and not "academic" language). This is followed by a need to "fix" this on the part of the instructor.
* Instructional tools are modified and restricted to fit into learning objectives

Continue reading "Characteristics of Technology Enhanced Learning Within the Instructor Centered Paradigm" »

Posted by Matthew Williams at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In 1995, Robert B. Barr and John Tagg described what they felt was a paradigm shift happening in universities; a shift from what they called the instruction paradigm to the learning paradigm (Change Magazine. Vol. 27. No. 6). However, in the 11 years since that article, the learning paradigm still seems to be forever "stuck on the horizon." Postsecondary instructors who buy into student centered learning are still "radicals" on campus in many locations. Were Barr and Tagg wrong?

Continue reading "Mapping the educational paradigm shift..." »

Posted by Matthew Williams at 12:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)