|
Volume 5
Number 1 Spring 2004 PRELIMINARY EDITION—IN PROGRESS
Please note:
because of changes in the security for Web pages at Arizona State University,
the editors have not had the opportunity to “publish” this issue
of Bwe: Basic Writing e-Journal as
professionally as they would have liked.
So, this is a “work in progress,” with just the essays and
review “put up.” Please
excuse any errors in formatting, etc.
Thank you.
Patrick L. Bruch Universality in
Basic Writing: Connecting Multicultural Justice, Universal Instructional
Design, and Classroom Practices Patricia McAlexander University of Georgia Using Principles of Universal Design
in College Composition Courses Aaron
Barlow Leading Writers, Teaching Tests Andrea Deacon Review
of Rhetoric and Composition as
Intellectual Work , edited by Gary A. Olson Southern
Illinois University Press, 2002
Universality in Basic Writing: Connecting
Multicultural Justice, Universal Instructional Design, and Classroom
Practices By Patrick L. Bruch Abstract This article proposes
an understanding of universality that links the work of Basic Writing to
recent political philosophy and the pedagogical movement Universal
Instructional Design. It then discusses the value of this renewed vocabulary
of universality for understanding pedagogical best practices. As Tom Fox demonstrates in Defending
Access, Basic Writing owes its existence to the concept of universality,
the very concept that justifies many attacks on Basic Writing programs and
students in policy and practice. On one hand, the ideal of universality
sustains arguments for efforts, like Basic Writing programs, that work to
remedy systemic preferences. On the other hand, as Basic Writing teachers and
students are painfully aware, appeals to “universal standards” of
literacy all too convincingly justify treating particular differences as
deficiencies. Fox concentrates on standards, and argues convincingly for a
set of standards that can sustain access. I wish to parallel and extend his
work to affirm sustainable standards by concentrating on developing a
sustainable understanding of universality. As Basic Writing professionals, we
cannot afford to give up on universality any more than we can afford not to
challenge dominant understandings of what universality means for our work. In
this article I bring two resources to bear on the challenge of reinvigorating
universality for Basic Writing. The first is recent theories of multicultural
justice and the second is the movement known as Universal Instructional
Design. In order to suggest the implications that an enriched vocabulary of
universality can have for Basic Writing instruction, I give classroom
examples that show how well-established best practices in the field of Basic
Writing can be understood, explained, and defended, as pursuing universality. A Multicultural Theory of Universality In her study of political philosophy, Iris Marion Young (1991)
highlights transformations in ideas of justice that have resulted from the
social theories and group movements that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. For
Young, feminist, anti-racist, gay rights, disability rights, and other
movements drew attention to the shortcomings of those definitions of justice
that were understood to be universal in the sense of being timeless and
independent of specific contexts. As an alternative to pursuit of “a
self-standing rational theory . . . independent of actual social institutions
and relations” (p. 4), the social group movements highlighted the need
for understandings of justice that were able to recognize and address
unintended consequences of seemingly or actually neutral policies and
practices. As Young explains, rather than searching for a universality good
for all people and all times, contemporary critical theories see justice as
rooted in specific social and historical contexts. Here, rather than be an
abstract principle that stands outside of experience, justice depends upon
“hearing a cry of suffering or distress or feeling distress
oneself” (p. 5). Where more traditional theories valued detachment and
distance, current theories like Young’s are participatory and process
oriented. Building
on Young’s arguments about the need for a more contextual and
processual understanding of universal justice, Nancy Fraser (1997) has
recently drawn attention to the dynamic relationship between two domains, the
material and the cultural, in the current social and historical context. For
Fraser, listening to the experiences and voices of marginalized social groups
suggests that injustice operates in different ways on these two conceptually
distinguishable, though overlapping planes. The first understanding of
injustice is material. Here, attention to injustice focuses on unequal
distribution of things like income, property ownership, access to paid work,
education, health care, leisure time, and so on. The second understanding of
injustice is cultural and symbolic. Here, injustice refers to “cultural
domination . . . nonrecognition . . . and disrespect” (Fraser, p. 14).
These forms of injustice often overlap. Physical disability, for instance, is
often related to economic disenfranchisement. But the conceptual distinction
is useful because it helps draw attention to the fact that economic
enfranchisement may not, alone, remedy the unjust relations attached to
disability in current institutions. Persons labeled as disabled may still be
culturally marginalized, misrecognized, and disrespected. Disentangling
these overlapping planes of injustice, then, is useful for Basic Writing
professionals because doing so enables us to explain how universality as an
ideal can both justify our programs and protect them from appeals to
“Universal standards”. Through Fraser’s multicultural
conception of universal justice we are better able to recognize and better
equipped to explain, the need for multiple and perhaps seemingly
contradictory remedies for injustice. For, as Fraser highlights, where
emphasis on the material view leads people to appreciate injustices rooted in
the political-economic structure of society and encourages them to advocate
for material equality—remedying injustice by redistributing
goods and abolishing group difference—the cultural view recognizes the
injustice of misrecognition and disrespect and thus leads its proponents to
advocate remedying injustice through recognition and revaluation of
group specificity. The connections to Basic Writing are probably obvious: in
order to enable universal access, redistributive and recognition work must be
intertwined within professions like Basic Writing. In our case what gets distributed,
literacy, must be understood in ways that remedy misrecognition and cultural
disrespect. Of course, this intertwining is difficult to achieve. Summarizing
the essential insight that these movements have helped to generate, Catherine
Prendergast (1998) has argued that, in order to overcome injustices such as
White privilege and male privilege, “it will not be simply enough to
add women and people of color and stir. Without significant changes to the
profession and pedagogy, women and people of color will continue to wind up
on the bottom” (p. 50). What is needed are redefinitions of what it
means to participate in social practices like literacy so that part of the
purpose of participating in such practices is to change the practice itself.
Within such a view, the universality and thus justness of our practices
becomes participatory—they are always in the process of being redefined
as we continuously learn more about how our practices relate to material and
cultural injustice. Instead of creating a system that applies to any
situation, multicultural universality as an ideal encourages working within
concrete contexts to enable more people to participate more fully in defining
inequities and better alternatives. Operationalizing Multicultural Universality:
Universal Instructional Design Growing out of architecture, a field of knowledge in which the
connections between material and cultural issues is uniquely visible,
Universal Design (UD), in its affirmation of critical revisionary feedback,
potentially responds well to our need for new models of participating in
knowledge (http://www.design.ncsu.edu/cud/univ_design/ud.htm).
Universal Design as a professional movement grew out of emerging awareness
within architecture of unintended consequences of design features that were
thought to be impartial. Specifically, persons with disabilities made
building designers aware that their designs were unjust both in terms of the
material access they made available and in terms of the cultural and symbolic
messages they sent to persons with disabilities and to those temporarily able
bodied. Buildings with stairs at each entrance, with doorknobs or other
mechanisms that require particular kinds of dexterity not possessed by all,
or other features that make the buildings very difficult for some persons to
use, materially obstruct equal access. Additionally, such structures send
cultural messages about who is expected to participate in public life and who
is capable of citizenship, messages that unjustly misrecognize and disrespect
certain persons. Universal Design holds great promise when translated to Basic
Writing if we remain aware of the central critical capacity that, in
practice, UD has placed at the center of the design process—listening
to the experiences of those who use the structure, observing the degree to
which the structure facilitates equal participation, and continuously
revising. In this sense, I see Universal Design as operationalizing an understanding
of the term “universal” consistent with the political philosophies
I described previously. Universal names an ideal and a process rather than a
realized outcome or a fixed state of affairs. Seeing universality as a
process values participation and discourages those privileged by current
structures from ignoring the obligation to listen, learn, and revise. Such an
understanding equips us to present the teaching of writing to Basic Writing
students and to administrators and the public as more than just the ability
to produce “correct” prose. It is the ability to use
communication to build relationships. In my view, Universal Design offers Basic Writing teachers a
productive way of implementing Paulo Freire’s understanding of teachers
as co-learners. It encourages us to position ourselves as listeners rather
than all knowing experts. As Young (1997) has argued, listening plays an
important role in identifying and transforming injustice: with careful listening
able-bodied people can learn to understand important aspects of the lives and
perspective of people with disabilities. This is a very different matter from
imaginatively occupying their standpoint, however, and may require explicit
acknowledgment of the impossibility of such a reversal. (p. 42) The lesson here for me is that at its best, the
design of structures aspires to universal access through listening and
learning about how different people understand their experiences in them.
With respect to this important process, it seems that teachers may have an
advantage over architects because the structures we design, our pedagogies,
are much more flexible and easily revisable. Thus, there is no reason that
pedagogy needs to replicate the situation where buildings meet the letter of
laws mandating access but fail to fulfill the spirit of equity. Connecting UID to the Basic
Writing Classroom: Redefining Writing as Literacy Work
So
far, I have offered an understanding of UID as a way of applying the insights
of contemporary theories of justice to education. This connection provides a
way to practically extend resources developed over the past 30 years within
Basic Writing. At the heart of the emerging attention to disability is a
recognition on the part of Basic Writing scholars that assumptions about the
physical, emotional, and cognitive norm have negatively impacted the
structures we design—our curricula, our profession, and pedagogies. But
Basic Writing teachers have tended to separate issues of distribution from
issues of recognition. Scholars have recently concentrated attention on the
overall failure of redistributive pedagogies that narrowly conceived
universality as universal access to a valued set of conventions.
Prendergast’s (1998) characterization of such efforts as potentially “detrimental
to enfranchisement” (p. 50) and Tom Fox’s (1993) recent argument
that “access through language pedagogy . . . . is an unqualifiable
failure” (p. 42) both draw attention to the professional tendency to
theorize about recognition while emphasizing assimilation in the classroom.
The injustice of redistributive pedagogies is less about the limitations of a
valued dialect to provide the economic access it promises, though there is
that. Additionally, the emphasis on assimilating valued conventions creates an
educational context of disrespect in which those who are the beneficiaries of
conventions are able to go on without questioning the ways that the
structures they are operating within unjustly privilege them. Transforming
our vocabulary of universality holds promise for better serving students with
disabilities as well as all others, since all are, ultimately, underserved by
curricula that concentrate solely on either issues of distribution or issues
of recognition. Applying
UID to the teaching of writing is a way of equipping ourselves to explain the
project of Basic Writing—the project of enabling participation in
transforming cultural and material obstacles to educational equity.
Materially, I am speaking of how the class itself operates—the physical
layout of activities, the material design of handouts, texts, the environment
of the classroom, how much time is spent in different ways, and so on.
Culturally, I am referring to questions about the identities students are
assumed to have or expected to inhabit by the class. As a conceptual
framework, UID draws attention to the interrelation of these cultural and
material issues. They both become the focus of critical reflection,
participatory feedback, and potential revision in pursuit of the goal of
multicultural universality. The
practice of UID has resulted in changes in the way that I understand what I
want my Basic Writing students to learn, in the assignments that I give, and
in the classroom activities through which we work on assignments. UID
provides a framework for shifting our attention from literacy as a stable
skill that we want to impart to a more participatory formulation of writing
as a matter of simultaneously doing and shaping in pursuit of equality and
difference. A term that, for me, names this understanding of what students
learn in Basic Writing classes is literacy work. In Basic Writing classes
students learn to participate in and reflect on the various kinds of work
that literacy does. They learn to appreciate that language use is a practice
of relating to others and to reflectively navigate those relationships. Applying
the insights of UID to Basic Writing classes, the idea of literacy work
defines writing as a reflective and revisionary practice. That is, when one
writes one accomplishes the immediate concrete goal of communicating in a
particular context and at the same time, one expresses ideas about
communication in that context. As one student, Asante, phrased this insight
in a paper for a recent Basic Writing class, “by me writing this paper
in this way, I am communicating my thoughts about communication to you, but
yet a lot of people may not see it this way at first.” In other words,
writing includes both participation according to current conventions and
reflection on those conventions and the relations of equality and difference
they are part of. This isn’t an earth shattering insight, but
I’ve never heard it come up in any discussion with any administrator or
lay person. UID
offers to Basic Writing teachers a way to break this silence and explicitly
value critical participation and revision. The material and cultural issues
faced when serving any group are so multifaceted and complex, and the ways
that students receive and interpret teachers’ messages are so
unpredictable, that no design for a class can address all issues and concerns
beforehand. Instead, UID emphasizes multiple formats supplemented by
participatory feedback and redefinition. No single pedagogy can achieve
universality and serve all students equally, so, as good Basic Writing
teachers know, classes must be built to serve the students that are actually
there. UID explains this work as implementing the universal ideal rather than
as a (necessary or unnecessary) departure from it. The role of student feedback is essential here. In one recent
class, for example, I learned an important lesson about my practices for
introducing new assignments. My method was to extensively describe the new
essay assignment on paper, including a discussion of the rhetorical practices
I wanted students to recognize and work on, why, and how. My introduction to the summary assignment
read like this: Academic writing is a
set of practices for participating in conversation with others. One of the
most important of these practices is summarizing. This first project is
focused on reading carefully and writing good, strong, summaries. Strong
summaries tell your readers what others in the “conversation” you
are joining have been saying. Strong summaries convince readers that your
view of the conversation has some merit. A strong summary convinces readers
that you should be listened to and creates a context for you to add your
piece to the conversation. In an effort to appeal to a broad audience, I
contextualized the assignment by linking something I thought students would
identify with, conversation, to academic writing. I also offered an in-class
overview and provided students with examples to use as models of successful
responses that could inspire them in thinking about how they might respond to
the assignment. When I asked students
for questions, there were none. When I requested feedback from students on their progress after
about a week, one student reported that she had been stuck because she
wasn’t sure if she understood the assignment “correctly.”
Although concerns with “giving the teacher what (s)he wants”
influence all students, the fact that this student had a learning disability
that required a very direct and linear understanding of tasks like writing
had made the situation paralyzing for her. In our discussion, I asked her
what she thought about the assignment and she said that she thought she could
take each author one at a time and tell readers what they say. We discussed
what she thought each of the authors was trying to say and made notes about
why she understood them as she did. When I assured her that her understanding
was fine she was relieved and said that she was thrown off by my introductory
discussion. I responded to this problem
by redesigning the way I introduce new assignments to be much more focused on
how the students understand the assignment rather than how I understand it. I
now include much more student generated discussion of how they understand
what they are being asked to do and how they anticipate getting to work. One
activity that has been very helpful in this regard is simply taking five
minutes to let students write the assignment in their own words and then
share them. Because I want students to think about the cultural work involved
in writing as well as the practical work, I have broken down this process so
that students begin by sharing their versions of the assignment in a small
group with two or three others. I ask them to share their versions and to
talk not so much about who’s right or wrong, but about the different
kinds of cultural work done by the different kinds of writing that each in
the group imagine doing. My role as
teacher while these conversations are happening evolves over the course of
the term. Early on in the semester I circulate in the groups helping students
develop a vocabulary for talking about the work writing does, the
consequences of writing in different ways. As students develop confidence in
addressing this issue, my role shifts towards helping groups maintain focus
and work out difficulties that arise. As a classroom practice, the exercise
teaches that rather than being right or wrong, different kinds of
writing do different kinds of work. Some of these kinds of work, such as
stating and defending an opinion, are more highly valued in some contexts
than others. In addition to operating as material transformations that provide
broader and fuller access, such curricular redesigns that evolve from student
participation in the design of the class, raise and contend with cultural
obstacles to equitable access as well. On one level, an activity like the one
described above creates a context of greater recognition for students like
the one who inspired the change, but also for many others. It creates an
opportunity for each student to make an understanding of the assignment that
recognizes their needs. Further, it creates a context for beginning to
grapple with the cultural work that writing does. For example, in one of the
groups I sat in on as students were discussing their understandings of the
“strong summary” assignment, two students began to disagree when
one African American student compared her understanding of the assignment to
another, White, student’s understanding by saying that she wanted to
make her opinion “plain rather than hidden.” The other student
responded that a summary shouldn’t have an opinion at all. To which the
first responded that, for her, a summary is “my view of how I see
them.” At this point, I intervened to remind the students that the object
of sharing was not to decide who in the group was right or wrong, but to try
and clarify different understandings and the different kinds of work they do.
This encouraged the two students to share their views of the work that their
own and each others’ interpretations do. Martha explained that she
believed her way of understanding a summary would let readers decide how to
understand the texts she discussed, using her opinion or not. Mary explained
that she believed her way would let readers decide by leaving herself out and
just saying what the authors said. Another student here joined in to add that
Mary’s would, then, be what Mary believed the authors said, which both
Mary and Martha agreed to. The value that I hope comes of such exchanges is
increasing students’ awareness of how different ways of understanding
writing might relate to common goals for writing. It clarified that one kind
of work writing strives to do is to help readers make informed decisions for
themselves and that there are different opinions of how best to facilitate
this. It provided a basis for each of the students to read and write in a
more informed way. An unexpected outcome of this new activity was that allowing
students to take a significant hand in interpreting the assignment required
that I clarify for myself the learning objectives and acceptable parameters
of responses. In other words, the activity made me more fully reflect on
multiple ways of demonstrating learning. In a writing class, flexibility is
restricted by the fact that students must write. But the form of that writing
is a point of negotiation with profound material and cultural implications.
Sarah was most comfortable using writing to communicate stable meanings.
Other students I have encountered find that trying to limit themselves to one
way of understanding what are invariably complex texts or issues is
constraining and demands they limit their writing to acceptable partial
versions. In negotiating with students
about the range of fully credible responses to the summary assignment, I have
had to think about what abilities I want students to work on and demonstrate.
For me, what matters is that students learn to read carefully and to help
readers see both how they interpret texts and why they think their
interpretations are credible in an academic setting. This means linking their
summaries directly to what authors say. I think that if students do that,
their writing will serve them well in many academic and public situations. As
I have learned from student suggestions of how they understand and approach
the assignment, this does not demand a thesis based, paragraph oriented,
linear, traditional school essay. An option that one student suggested for herself has become a
formal alternative on my assignment sheet. This student was uncomfortable
with the idea that she was being asked to be an expert on the various
positions making up a conversation that she was previously unfamiliar with.
She decided to write out a conversation between the authors that would show
readers how she understood their positions. For her, the imaginary context
would tell her readers that she was offering one, tentative interpretation of
how the authors’ opinions related to each other. My assignment sheet
now suggests two broad options for completing the assignment as follows: Option
1: find a common thread that emerges across the conversation we’ve been
reading and write an essay in which you present and discuss this common
thread by summarizing how at least 3 of the sources relate to it. Feel free
to bring in your own experiences or your own senses of the issues, but be
sure to concentrate on offering a substantial review of the perspectives
offered by each of the authors you discuss, explaining how they each relate
to the common thread. Option
2: Write a dialogue between four of the authors we’ve read in which
they continue the conversation that their essays are a part of. Incorporate
into what each author says your understanding of their view of the issues.
Have each speaker use some direct quotes from their pieces to explain what
they mean. In the dialogue, each person should talk at least three times,
each time speaking at least 85 words. Try to capture some of the voice and
style of each of the speakers in what you have them say. Overall, these curricular transformations shift the emphasis from
simple assimilation of conventions to a participatory recognition of the
contingency of those conventions and their effects. I say
“participatory” in order to call attention to the essential
insight of Universal Design that those who inhabit structures have important
roles to play in remaking those structures. In terms of a writing class that
implements this concept in its instructional design, students are expected to
learn that part of the purpose of writing is to call attention to aspects of
the structure of writing that “many people may not see,” as
Asante, my previously quoted student, phrased it. They are learning as well
that as writers part of their job is to participate in creating alternative
designs for texts. Students in such a class are learning about literacy work
by doing the work of literacy. They are interanimating redistributive and
recognition-oriented remedies to educational injustice. References Fox, T. (1993). Standards and access. Journal of Basic Writing, 12 (1), 37-45. Fox, T. (1999). Defending Access: A Critique of Standards. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook-Heinemann. Fraser, N. (1997). Justice interruptus: Critical reflections on the “postsocialist” condition. New York: Routledge. Prendergast, C. (1998). “Race: The absent presence in composition studies.” College Composition and Communication, 50 (3), 36-53. Young, I. M. (1991). Justice and the politics of difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Young, I. M. (1997). Intersecting voices: Dilemmas of gender, political philosophy, and policy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. USING
PRINCIPLES OF UNIVERSAL DESIGN IN
COLLEGE COMPOSITION COURSES by Patricia J.
McAlexander ABSTRACT While
debates rage over the best way to teach college composition, Universal
Instructional Design principles suggest that there is in fact no single best
way: students’ individual learning strengths and motivation require
individual approaches, whether or not students have learning or physical
disabilities. This article suggests some ways that a composition teacher can
adapt his/her teaching to individual learners while following a mandated
curriculum and engaging students in common classroom activities. USING
PRINCIPLES OF UNIVERSAL DESIGN IN COLLEGE COMPOSITION COURSES As
a college composition teacher, I know that first-year students often dread
freshman composition and, even more, the “developmental”
composition courses that are often also required for
“underprepared” writers. Both types of composition course have
fairly standard content: a typical
description, this one, of a developmental composition course, reads,
“Covers elements of effective style, careful proofreading, logical organization,
and convincing development of expository and persuasive essays” (The
University of Georgia Undergraduate Bulletin 2001-2002, p. 425). Nevertheless, debates have raged in
composition journals about the best ways to teach this material. Should assigned
writing topics be personal or political? Should the reading on which the
student essays are based be creative/literary or analytical? Should the
organization of student essays be tightly structured or at least sometimes
creatively “loose”? Should the class include formal grammar
lessons, or should grammar instruction be mainly through commentary on
student essays? Most articles dealing with such questions suggest that there
is only one “right” answer—the author’s, of course. Yet
the right answer is “all of the above.” As more students attend
college, diversity—not only of races and ethnic groups, but also of
learning styles and motivation—is now more than ever the norm. And as
composition instructors become increasingly used to modifying their teaching
methods for students with disabilities, they realize the general truth that a
single method of teaching will not suit all students. It is not surprising,
then, that we find a growing advocacy of individual approaches to students as
embodied in the concept of Universal Design for Learning (UDL). For several years now, researchers have investigated
individual learning strengths and motivation. One influential study, for
example, identified seven specific perceptual modalities, preferred senses
that an individual uses in the process of learning. Common modalities
described were “print” (learning through reading and writing),
“visual” (learning through observation with emphasis upon
pictures or visual patterns), “interactive” (learning through
participation in groups), and “auditory” (learning through
listening, for example, to lectures or tapes) (Michael Galbraith & Waynne
James, 1985). We also find studies of motivation. Part of motivation is based
on a student’s sense of what he/she can achieve. As K. Patricia Cross has often pointed
out, “Students must believe
that, with appropriate effort, they can succeed” (2001, p. 7). Another aspect of motivation is based on a
student’s goals or values—what he or she thinks is the point of
the learning process. John Biggs (1988) reviewed three different learning
approaches based on this element in motivation—surface (found in
students who emphasize the pragmatic—i.e., getting the degree), deep
(found in students who have an intrinsic interest in the task), and achieving
(which may be found in conjunction with either of the other two approaches in
students who want to make the highest possible grade) (pp. 186-87). Students have often been advised to be aware of both
their individual learning strengths
and the nature of their motivation. For example, in the textbook Lifeskills
for the University (2000), Earl J. Ginter and Ann S. Glauser provide an
inventory to help students analyze their learning styles (p. 67) and
recommend that they “take advantage of [their strong] modalities and
strengthen the weaker ones” (p. 59). As for motivation, Biggs argues
that students should be aware not only of their specific “cognitive
resources” but also of their “intentions” (p. 187). A bulletin board outside one
university Learning Center gives students representative advice relating to
both aspects of motivation—“Think positively”;
“Consider the benefits of completing the task”; “Set
specific goals”—while Ginter and Glauser’s textbook
emphasizes that “students . . . are responsible for maintaining [their]
motivation” (p. 31). But
if college students are often advised to take responsibility for their own
learning, legislation on disabilities has been a major force that stresses
the responsibility of teachers and institutions as well. In 1975 the federal government passed the
first version of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Since then, public schools have been
required to serve disabled students. Teachers and institutions are legally
bound to modify instructional procedures to compensate for various student
disabilities. At the college level, for instance, institutions are to provide
specified students with educational aids normally not available or permitted,
such as tape recorders to record lectures, taped textbooks, and (for essay
tests) word processors. The students
might also be provided with tutors, notetakers, proofreaders, private rooms
for tests, and special counselors.
Teachers of these students are often required to modify testing
techniques for these students. Depending upon their disability, the students
are allowed extra time on tests or given alternate types of tests (for
example, oral instead of written).
Specific teaching strategies are often suggested as well. For example,
a letter from a learning disabilities specialist to a composition teacher
concerning one of the teacher’s
“LD” students states,
“Whenever possible, verbal information should be supplemented
visually, e.g. with graphs, diagrams, and/or illustrations” (personal
communication, December 10, 1999).
Thus, under the influence of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the
educational process has become more and more tailored to the individual
learning abilities and needs of a particular population of students. However,
such modifications, when given to students with the “invisible”
problem of learning disabilities, are not always considered fair. Indeed,
many critics of the American educational system charge that it is mainly the
children of middle class parents who are diagnosed as learning disabled;
their parents have the money and incentive to have them tested. One such
critic is Gerald Coles (1987), who argues that LD legislation serves the
interests of the status quo—the government, schools, middle class
parents—any agency with an interest in preserving the social (that is,
class) order. The debate over the fairness of modifications for
students with learning disabilities has been particularly heated in the field
of postsecondary developmental composition, where questions have arisen about
the relationship between LD writers and non-LD but
“underprepared” writers. The characteristics of the two groups
are often similar. Both types of students may have spelling and grammar
errors, confusing organization, sparse development, and lack of audience
awareness, along with problems of motivation and attention. Yet, no matter
how similar the problems of these students, the legislation on learning
disabilities creates an either-or situation: either a student has learning
disabilities and is legally entitled to certain modifications, or he/she does
not—and is not. How can a student be identified as having
learning disabilities in a subject area rather than a theoretically more
easily improved “weakness”?
In Errors and Expectations (1977), Mina Shaughnessy’s groundbreaking
study of students she called “basic writers,” Shaughnessy
suggests that the writing problems of the students in her writing program at
CCNY could be explained simply by their background: Certainly were such errors to appear
in the papers of academically advantaged students, . . . there would be good
reason to explore the possibility of an underlying disorder. But where students have had limited
experience in reading and writing, they cannot be expected to make visual
discriminations of the sort most people learn to make only after years of
practice and instruction (p. 174). In the years
following, however, writing teachers have become less certain of that
position. Today, Jeff Elliott, Assistant Director of Stephen F. Austin State
University’s Academic Assistance and Resource Center, expresses the
thoughts of many in a posting on a Conference on Basic Writing Listserv: he questions how one can distinguish
“between students who have never had an opportunity to develop critical
thinking and writing skills . . . and those students who have some disability
which makes the development of those skills difficult” (April 5, 2001).
I
believe that it is right to give modifications to students who have been
tested and diagnosed with disabilities (McAlexander, 1997). However, I also
recognize that doing so for them and not for others may discriminate against
those others. Thus it seems not only
just but also logical that the concept of Universal Instructional Design has
arisen, encouraging teachers to adjust their teaching strategies, where
possible, to the learning styles, interests, and abilities not just of
disabled students but of every student. With
specific content usually mandated for a composition course and common
activities needed to engage the class as a whole, how can a composition
teacher adapt his/her teaching to each individual learner? As the UDL website
points out, teachers can provide material that is personally relevant to
individual students, offer a flexible curriculum that appropriately
challenges each student, and give students individualized feedback (CAST
Universal Design for Learning, 1999-2000). Here are some ways that
college composition teachers may employ this advice. Providing
Personally Relevant Material 1) As
much as possible, assign readings that engage student interests. I think
we all agree that the best kind of motivation springs from intrinsic interest
in the subject (see Biggs, p. 218)—and that students will be more
motivated to write if they are responsive to the readings on which
composition topics are based.
Appealing to student interests does not mean that a teacher must
assign a hodgepodge of individual reading assignments; students in most
classes turn out to have interests in common. As educator-psychologist Hamachek
states, “It doesn’t take long for a classroom to develop its own
unique personality,” depending in part “on the students and how .
. . their particular mix of backgrounds and experiences blend together”
(1995, p. 545). Thus,
instead of rigidly planning all reading assignments for a class before even
meeting it, teachers might wait to see what interests their students have in
common and how the class personality develops. Then they can select readings
from a textbook accordingly—or order a special book. When I had a class that included many
athletes, I assigned the brief novel A Short Season, the story of
football player Brian Piccolo (the movie Brian’s Song is based
on this book). Since the novel was not read until mid-term, I was able to
order it once the class had begun. The students really enjoyed this book. 2) Give a
variety of topics on the readings. Through conferences, student
discussions, and questionnaires, determine the direction of individual
student interests within the group. Then, for each writing assignment based
on a reading unit, offer a variety of topics that appeal to these
interests. For example, A Short
Season deals not only with sports, but also with racial relationships,
illness, and family conflicts; topics can focus on these different themes.
All the students in the class assigned this novel selected one of the
suggested topics to write on. However, if a student does not find a topic
that works for him/her, the teacher and student can discuss the problem and
together develop a new topic. 3) Use
the Internet for material. Traditional hard texts are not the only
sources for material on which writing can be based. Now the Internet provides
an infinite source of information, allowing a teacher to broaden the range of
sources a student might draw from and to do so more spontaneously. A popular
comparison-contrast topic I have given asks students to describe travel plans
to two places they want to go and then select the preferable plan, using the
Internet for information. Students who wrote on this topic found detailed
information on modes of travel, places to stay, and available activities in
the two possible locations, as well as on the cost for the two trips. Their
interest in the topic and their enjoyment of Internet research led them to
find solid, detailed information. 4) Use
popular television shows and articles in current newspapers and magazines as
material. Often such sources (as well as the Internet) can be used for
the most timely and controversial topics. Topics on television shows that
young people watch (Dawson’s Creek, The Real World, Road Rules),
on new technologies (the advantages and disadvantages of cell phones), or
local/state issues that affect students (raising the driving age or
scheduling their university’s fall break), often arouse strong student
feeling and interest. Offering
an Appropriate Level of Challenge 1) Give
students a choice of writing topics with varying levels of difficulty. As K. Patricia Cross points out, students
must feel that they can succeed, at least to some degree. Thus it is
important for composition teachers to offer topics that relate not only to a
variety of interests, but also to a variety of abilities. For students who
prefer the usually “easier” personal topics to topics involving
reading analysis, offer topics that combine both approaches (for example,
“Compare your grandmother to the grandmother in Mary Hood’s
‘How Far She Went’”).
For students who have problems with essay structure, provide some
topics that set up an organization plan (give specific points on which to
compare the two grandmothers); for more creative or advanced students, offer
more analytical topics and leave the structure open. Teachers may need to
guide students in their selection of an appropriately challenging (as well as
interesting) topic. 2) When
possible, offer alternative essay formats. This is particularly
appropriate if the composition course is oriented to business or technical
writing. In such courses, students might use graphs, charts, and other illustrations
as a supplement to the written text.
Those who prefer the visual mode do very well with such figures,
indeed sometimes creating more and better illustrations than print-oriented
students. (However, in one such class, I had to remind a girl who felt
insecure with grammar and mechanics that she needed more
“sentences” along with her excellent charts and graphs!) Also,
the use of headings and bulleted lists gives students with organizational
weaknesses more options for making their writing plan clear to the reader. 3) Use
teaching strategies that appeal to various learning styles. For example,
while traditional lectures appeal to the auditory modality, charts, diagrams,
and outlines on overheads appeal to the visual modality, handouts to the
“print” modality, and group discussions or peer review to the
interactive modality. 4) Accept
varying writing styles as long as the communication is appropriate and
effective. To show that writing styles can vary, teachers might give
samples of different types of writing—and discuss how different styles
can be effective in varying situations. There are stories of teachers who
recognize and reward just one style of writing, often to the detriment of
their students. A colleague of mine was criticized in her freshman composition
class for her direct, to-the-point writing style. A high achiever, she never
got over this experience. She went on to earn a doctorate in educational
psychology, but always felt inadequate as a writer. 5) If a
student needs extra time to complete an in-class essay, let him/her finish
the essay outside of class. Only students diagnosed as learning disabled
are eligible to take tests and write in-class essays in our
university’s LD Center, where they can have extended time. I let other
students who need more time come to my office to finish that last body
paragraph and conclusion. 6) If a
student finds writing in the classroom distracting, try to find another place
where he/she can write. One of my
students would sit staring at her almost blank sheet of paper all period,
writing only one or two sentences. A
deep thinker, she told me that she just could not concentrate on her ideas in
the classroom, yet she did not qualify for modifications that would allow her
to use a private room in our university’s LD Center. I found an office down the hall from the
classroom where she could write her essays;
there, in fact, proved herself one of my best writers. (Luckily the office
was available—and luckily not many of my students have had this
problem!) 7) Allow
all students to use word processors, even for in-class essays. Whatever the level of the student’s
writing development, word processors help greatly with writing; they are
particularly useful to students with poor handwriting and spelling. Yet when
writing in-class essays in non-computer composition courses, students who
have not been diagnosed as learning disabled generally must write by hand.
When possible, I send non-LD students who wish to compose on the computer to
nearby university computer labs to write their in-class essays. But when this
is not possible, I have students write by hand in class; then after I check
the often messy, crossed out, arrowed-about handwritten versions, students
type the essay at home. They turn the handwritten essay in with the typed
version so that I can see that the typed essay is basically the same essay as
the one written in class, and I ask them not to change grammar and mechanics
except for spelling, so that I can see areas in which they need instruction.
This way, I have the required “in-class” essay, and all students
use a word processor. Not only are the essays more legible, but also the word
processor file version can be used if the students revise the essay. It is interesting to note that
when I apply these methods to in-class essays, many students eligible to
write on the computers in the university’s LD center choose to write
their essays in the classroom with the other students. Giving
Individualized Feedback 1) Be available to consult with students
as they write. Some students
prefer to write without asking the teacher any questions. Others, however,
need the teacher’s encouragement and advice, whether with individual
sentences or with organization or content. It is helpful for such students,
when writing in class, to be able to consult as they write, while those doing
out-of-class essays may want to drop in to the instructor’s office to
ask questions. Such in-progress consultation provides an excellent, if often
brief, individualized teaching opportunity. The Socratic method—asking
students questions about their content—can evoke better specific
details as well as a clearer organization plan. Student questions on the
grammar and mechanics of individual sentences give the teacher an opportunity
to present a quick individual grammar lesson to supplement the more formal
lessons often given in composition classes. And working on problems with
organization with the teacher provides models of the thought processes
involved in setting up essay structure. 2) After
grading an essay, schedule one-on-one conferences to discuss each
student’s essay and specific strategies for revision. Such “conferencing,” which
generally involves a longer encounter, further individualizes instruction
while giving the teacher an opportunity to learn a student’s interests,
abilities, and background. There are many good books and articles on the art
of conferencing, but basically I find it a conversation in which a student
collaborates with a teacher on an essay revision and thereby learns more
about writing techniques. Part of this collaboration involves the teacher
playing the role of reader in order to increase the student’s audience
awareness; part of it involves the teacher offering specific advice. The
focus of this advice will vary greatly from student to student: for a more
advanced writer, the conference may focus on style; for a weaker writer, it
may focus on such basic elements of writing as setting up a thesis. A teacher might also employ specialized
teaching techniques in a conference. In one case, I had a student whose
written sentences were incoherent. I
asked her to read her paper out loud, recorded her so that she herself could
literally hear the incoherence, and then had her record, in more informal
language, what she meant. I gave her the tape, and she revised the sentences
more as she had actually spoken them into the recorder. At the college level, teachers might cancel one or two
class meetings to give time for such personal conferences. 3) Encourage
individual tutoring sessions and, if a Learning/Writing Center is available,
advise students to go there also for tutoring. These tutoring sessions
will be much like the conferences described above, but may not deal with the
revision of an essay. Rather, they may simply give individual lessons on such
specific writing problems as dangling modifiers, comma splices, or
wordiness. 4) In
some situations, offer peer review sessions as part of the class. If the
class has an appropriate level of writing ability, self-concept, motivation,
and social interaction, peer review sessions can be an excellent source of
individualized response to essays (McAlexander, 2000). Having fellow students
respond to one’s writing, along with responding to the writing of
fellow students, develops greater awareness of the reader as well as of
one’s own writing weaknesses and strengths. Peer review will be
particularly effective for students with interactive learning styles. While
some of these teaching techniques may involve changes in the overall
structure of the composition curriculum, most of them, I think, work well
within the framework of standard composition courses. Some teachers may fear
that such individualization in teaching will undermine student responsibility
for learning or lower standards. These fears are ungrounded. After all,
students still need to do their part; further, many of the described
individualizing techniques have been used for years, and even when they are
not used, students still achieve at different rates and levels. In my mind
there is no doubt that the application of UDL principles to the teaching of
composition will result in more students—gifted, average, weak,
“disabled”—improving their writing while enjoying the
process. REFERENCES Biggs, J. (1988). Approaches to
learning and to essay writing. In R.R.
Schmeck (Ed.), Learning strategies and learning styles (pp.
185-228). New York: Plenum. CAST (Center for Applied Special
Technology) Website (1999-2000). http://www.cast.org
(2001, May 30). Coles, G. (1987). The learning
mystique: A critical look at learning disabilities. New York: Pantheon. Cross, K.P. (2001). Motivation: Er
. . . will that be on the test? [The Cross Papers Number 5]. Mission
Viejo, CA: League for Innovation in the Community College and the Educational
Testing Service. Galbraith, J., & James, W.
(1985). Perceptual learning styles: Implications and techniques for the
practitioner. Lifelong Learning, 8, 2-23. Ginter, E.J. & Glauser A.S.
(2000). Life-skills for the university and beyond. (2nd
ed.). Dubuque, IA: Kendall-Hunt. Hamachek, D. (1995). Psychology in
teaching, learning, and growth (5th ed.). Boston: Allyn and
Bacon. McAlexander, P.J. (1997). Learning
disabilities and faculty skepticism. Research and Teaching in
Developmental Education, 13 (2), 123-129. McAlexander,
P.J. (2000) Developmental classroom personality and response to
peer review. Research and Teaching in Developmental Education, 17 (1), 5-12. Shaughnessy, M.P. (1977). Errors
and expectations: A guide for the teacher of basic writing. New York:
Oxford University Press. The University of Georgia
undergraduate bulletin 2001-2001 (2001).
Athens, GA: The University of Georgia. Leading
Writers, Teaching Tests By Aaron Barlow Student voices must be encouraged if
students are to succeed as writers. We
know this. When students come to
recognize their own works as parts of dialogues, writing improves remarkably. We know how to facilitate this. Yet factors within many academic settings
can push us to abandon our effective methodologies in favor of ones that
don’t develop communicators. These factors can run from institutional
inertia and outside political realties down to the degree of departmental
support and the placement procedures that attempt to narrow the range of
student preparation and experience within the particular classroom. For example, at New York City College of
Technology (NYCCT)—the CUNY campus where I teach as an Adjunct
Lecturer—incoming students are placed in writing courses on a
restrictive basis: Either they have scored at least 480 on their Verbal SAT
exams, have reached a 75 on the New York State English Regents, have attained
a 7 on the CUNY/ACT writing competency test, or they must take developmental
writing classes and then take or retake (and pass) the CUNY/ACT exam. All students who do attain any one of the
required scores are assumed to be competent to start Composition I. No other factor—such as evaluation of
classroom writing performance—moves a student in or out of remediation,
for the CUNY/ACT exam serves as both entrance and exit exam for basic writing
courses. The requirements of the exam, no matter
how little I may like them, influence the structure of my developmental
writing course. Success on it rests on
four factors: the taking of a position, organization, elaboration, and
mechanics. The hour-long test asks
students to write on one of two either/or propositions. Each exam is graded by two Readers who
evaluate the paper on a scale of one to six.
According to CUNY’s Information
for Students and Faculty: Spring 2002-Fall 2002,
“exceptional” (earning a six) papers “take a position on
the issue defined in the prompt and support that position with extensive
elaboration. Organization is unified
and coherent. While there may be a few
errors in mechanics, usage, or sentence structure, command of the language is
apparent” (10). A
“superior” (five) paper shows only moderate elaboration and
command of the language need not be “outstanding.” “Competent” (four) papers
contain only “some” elaboration and organization need only be
“clear” while language usage shows “competency.” An “adequate” (three) paper
shows only “a little” elaboration, organization can be followed
“without difficulty,” and there is “apparent” control
of the language. When the scores of
the two Readers are added together; an exam must reach a combined seven to
pass. If I don’t address the
specifics of the exam over the semester, my students will fail, no matter how
much they have improved as writers.
Yet, as a Certified Reader of the CUNY/ACT exam, I know that passing
CUNY/ACT essays are not often examples of the effective communication I want
my students to aspire to. Still, the specter of this test looms
dreadfully over the students in my basic writing classes. All have failed it at least once. Understandably, they look at passing the
test as their primary (in fact, only) goal for the semester and constantly
scramble to find a formula that will insure their success. This exacerbates the problems I face as
their teacher. Most of my students
need to do more than prepare for a test: they need to learn to be students,
to negotiate between informal and formal language, and to tailor their
arguments to academic demands. They
make it abundantly clear, though, that they are not willing to work towards
these ends unless it is apparent to them that they are also progressing
toward success on the CUNY/ACT exam. Though it
may be unintentional, the test has become a barrier that students must find a
way over, not a means of forwarding student learning. In effect, as Ira Shor (in another context)
points out, this test, like most “writing instruction has in fact been
working from the top down to protect and reproduce inequality but not from
the bottom up to develop democracy and to level disparities” (34). My purpose as a teacher, on the other hand,
is to help people find a way in. The CUNY/ACT can be an extremely
frustrating hurdle for students, particularly for those who ended up failing
the test for reasons that have nothing to do with their writing, failing
simply because they were not aware of the demands of the test. In each of two remedial courses I taught in
2002, one student stood out from the others.
Both were good writers, but neither had known what was expected from
them on the exam, for they were older students, long removed from the
classroom. Each had opted for brevity
while writing the exam (which is required to be in the form of a letter),
thereby failing and being consigned to a remedial course. Each suffered through the course, took the
exam again (now knowing what was expected) and passed with a high mark (ten
on the scale of twelve). Each could
have done just as well the first time—if someone had taken fifteen
minutes to explain what was required.
The cookie-cutter nature of the test and its grading failed them, cost
them money, and delayed the start of their regular college work. It also can lead to a tense classroom,
where students who feel (sometimes with justification) that they failed
unreasonably take their anger out on their classmates and their teacher. In such a situation, it would be way too
easy to let my frustration reign, to slip into a regressive approach to
teaching, to fall back into the “dominant writing pedagogy for the last
100 years—refined usage […], basic skills, grammar drills,
abstract forms like the five-paragraph essay… and impromptu writing
exams—[which] is a curriculum to produce mass failure among students
who are then declared ‘cultural deficits’ needing more
remediation and more testing” (Shor 34). To protect myself, I could claim I am
“forced” by the combined conservatism of students who want to be
told what to do and by a restrictive exam to teach through an outmoded
methodology. My failure, then, could
be blamed on the system. To stay away from that failure, to
“teach to the test” and still help students improve as writers,
requires a difficult negotiation. If,
as I would prefer, I only worked on assisting my students toward becoming
effective writers, many would fail the test.
There simply isn’t time in a semester to lead classes of 20-plus
students to competency in the formulaic writing the test demands and to separately see them on the way
towards developing their own voices and the writing skills they will need
later in their education. So, I must
find a way to combine test preparation with at least some development of
writing skills, to do both when I have hardly the time for either. Some of my colleagues, accepting the
‘truisms’ of the past, avoid the issue, arguing that mastering
the techniques required to address CUNY/ACT questions gives students a
foundation for becoming strong writers.
A student who understands how to avoid the pitfalls of the comma
splice and who can manipulate the formula of the five-paragraph theme,
developing a position and a two- or three-part support, they say, can go on
to successful written expression. Some
of these teachers develop formulae for the students to memorize, formulae
allowing the students to drop in the particulars of an answer to any
CUNY/ACT-type question, in this manner producing an essay that might earn a
passing grade. Sometimes this even
works, though I doubt its value in future educational venues. In one
CUNY/ACT reading session I attended in 2002, an example of these formulae
appeared that was disturbing enough for two Readers to query the Chief
Reader. They had come across a number
of papers, four or five, that followed an almost identical pattern of
argument. Among other things, each one
used the word “visual” as an aspect of the first supporting
argument and talked about “communication” in the second. The readers were concerned that what they
were viewing was not really writing, but was the putting together of the pieces
of a puzzle. And they were right. But the Chief Reader was right, too, when
she told them that they had to ignore such things: Writing based on a formula
cannot be held against the student.
The papers were in no way “good” writing and failed completely
as examples of communication. But they
were “passing” writing.
Given the parameters of taking and grading the CUNY/ACT, nothing else
could matter. Even if I am to assume that there is
some truth in what my colleagues say, that there are formulae that can be
learned and that can help students pass the test and also help them learn to
be better writers, I’m still faced with a simple pedagogical question:
What’s the next level? In terms
of the students’ future education (and, after all, I am supposed to be
preparing them for that), what do the five-paragraph theme and the other
formulae lead to, and how? In other
words, is the ability to elaborate on a topic sentence a step to another sort
of writing, perhaps a more effective and academic form of communication? If I cannot find and describe that next
level, I have to assume that the skills required for the test are sufficient
in and of themselves, at least in the academic arena, that even the writing
that those two Readers objected to is good
enough writing for attacking college projects. Yet I cannot see it being so. I do not see where the five-paragraph theme
points and I do not see it as academically enabling by itself. As far as I can tell, it’s no roadmap
to better writing: it provides none of the basic skills—nothing
analogous to command of the use of perspective by a student artist—that
are either useful on their own or that eventually lead to prose essays
acceptable for college work, for communicating research and personal consideration. Effective writing contains a dynamic no
formula can emulate and starts from within the writer. To function well, therefore, a course in
writing, as David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky say in the Introduction to
their Facts, Artifacts and Counterfacts,
“whose goal is to empower students must begin with silence, a silence
students must fill. It cannot begin by
telling students what to say. And it
must provide a method to enable students to see what they have said—to
see and characterize the acts of reading and writing represented by their
discourse” (7). Anecdotes, if
they are used by a writer, serve the point and arise from it. They are not placed simply because an essay
“should” contain one. If a
student learns to develop an organizational model through personal
interaction with the topic and the audience, that student will likely be
learning to produce interesting college essays. Effective writing, after all, says
something to somebody. Memorizing a
formula, where topic and stand are “dumped” in, will rarely lead
to the same. Instead, reading the
result will be nothing more than a tedious exercise for some poor teacher. I need to find a way to do two things,
to teach to the test and yet encourage effective writing, doing so with an
eye to the students’ academic futures.
The trouble is that I have found no extant methodology for effectively
bridging the gap between my two goals.
The books and articles I have sought for help merely tell me how to
approach the teaching of writing in situations where I am in command of
course goals. Among other things, they
assume a greater control of the academic environment external to the
particular classroom than I, as a part-time teacher, can possibly maintain. They also ignore tests like the CUNY/ACT,
or brush them off by arguing that students who do learn to write well will
always pass such tests if provided with the parameters of evaluation. This may be true, but time constraints make
the point irrelevant. The students in
my basic writing classes do not have the leisure to delay the test, and their
academic careers, until they really are competent writers. So, I am forced to ignore too much that
is right in the pedagogy of
rhetoric and composition (to concentrate on the student voice and let it
guide the development of the class; to use classroom
“publication” to encourage students towards understanding of
their own voices, etc.) and to concentrate on what my experience tells me
might be minimally effective, given
the limits of my immediate situation, both in time and in student
background. I must develop a new
strategy, one that makes the best of a bad deal without completely ignoring
proven methodology. One that works for
my students, in terms of the test, their own desires and expectations, and their futures as writers. As I am figuring out what to do in these
classes, I have to keep in mind that my aim is to find out what my students
and I can do in this particular
situation, not to complain or concentrate on what we can’t. I am not so
foolish as to think that each of my students will succeed, but I cannot write
off any portion of them at the start of the term. My planning needs to include possibilities
for every one of them and, while taking their current skills and expectations
into consideration, I must present high (but reachable) goals to them. Like Bartholomae, “I would never
teach a course where I would meet a group of students, know that some would
fail, watch those students work to the best of their ability and my
preparation and then fail them” (“The Tidy House”
173). Many of my students will fail the CUNY/ACT again, but I
cannot start the semester making my decisions based on that knowledge. One of the greatest problems faced in
any of my developmental classes is that the students are perilously close to
giving up. Many of them have been
refused and rejected any number of times, and not just in school. They don’t need to be
coddled—most are adults, after all, who have weathered many a
storm—but, in a class, they do need to feel that they are not alone,
that someone inside the academic community believes that they do have what it
takes to make it in college. If I am
to expect them to succeed in my class, I have to back them up with my own
confidence in their possibilities. It would be much easier were there other
means of support for the students whose needs are greatest, but the courses I
teach are among the lowest levels of remediation at CUNY. The university, responding to outside
political pressure, no longer feels it can be a provider of basic
literacy. So I have to find a way of
providing avenues of success for each student in my classroom, no matter
their actual skill levels, at the same time as I am trying to convince them
that they can actually walk those streets. Because of the constraints of time and
class size, I need to conflate my goals, determining elements common to both
passing the CUNY/ACT standards and writing well enough to enter a Composition
I. Six of these follow: 1.
The
ability to follow directions. 2. The ability to write extemporaneously
for an hour (completing two pages or so). 3. The ability to keep a focus on one
clear point. 4. The ability to organize thoughts into
discrete paragraphs. 5. The ability to elaborate. 6. The ability to proofread one’s
own paper. 7. Even without a clear focus on the
formula of the five-paragraph theme, students who have mastered these six
skills will likely pass the CUNY/ACT test—as long as they know what is
expected of them on the test. They
will also be able to dive into their Composition I classes… and swim. One proven method for improving student
writing centers on development of a portfolio of work written, selected and
presented by the student. Where my
students are faced with an exam allowing for no revision, no careful contemplation,
a portfolio also permits them to show that they can present considered
work. It gives them something tangible
to build while preparing for the CUNY/ACT exam. At the end of the term, it also provides me
with a means of evaluation quite apart from success on the test. So, early in the term I tell students to
review and save their writings, keeping the best aside for later revision. Of course, a writing teacher needs to
know where students stand at the beginning of a term, so a diagnostic test of
some sort has to be given during the first class. I use the particulars of such a writing to
tailor each semester’s class, rather than composing an iron-clad
syllabus before I meet the students. I
can see the CUNY/ACT tests the students failed, and examining them is useful,
but I need to find out more than that test alone can tell me. Also, I don’t want to give a
“practice” CUNY/ACT test early in the term, for the students have
just failed the actual test and are not going to feel positive about taking
another. So, I try to find a
diagnostic writing that can tell me more than the “real” test
can. The diagnostic test I choose,
however, can be evaluated in light of the demands of the CUNY/ACT test,
allowing me to decided to spend more time on organization, say. One of my colleagues uses a
“problem/solution” writing that provides the information I
seek. Though there are other sorts of
assignments that can work as well, this one provides a particularly good look
into the students’ abilities.
Students are asked to write a two-page paper on a problem that they
faced in the past, one that they successfully solved. They are asked to write one page on the
problem itself and the second on the solution. They are given no other instructions on
organization or topic. Given the results of the diagnostic
writing, a semester syllabus can be structured that focuses on the needs of
the specific class—and I, as instructor, can be alerted to anomalous situations. By using a diagnostic test, I am veering
from the path I would like to follow in guiding a writing class. Normally, I would first work to enable the
students to express something—anything at all (but likely related to
the topic of an assigned reading)—then use that as the basis for moving
to more polished writing and more organized essays. My experience, and that of many of the
Adjuncts at CUNY with whom I have spoken, is that our basic-writing students
have a great deal of trouble following directions, so I spent a few classes
immediately after the diagnostic test with exercises designed to improve
their direction-following ability. Perhaps, in their high schools, any
effort was considered better than nothing; whatever students handed in may
have been accepted as sufficient. I
don’t really know. However, many
of my students have a hard time understanding even simple instructions like
“write a letter to… ,” let alone slightly more complex ones
such as “support one position or the other.” The writings that soon will be asked from
the students do not arise from within them, as do the writings I would like
to use in helping them become good writers, so instruction in
direction-following here becomes an important initial part of the process. Few of the students in my CUNY
developmental writing classes enter with the ability to write a coherent full
page, let alone the 400 or so words needed for the CUNY/ACT test. Here, again, the best method would be to
work slowly with the students, gently following their lead in developing
topics and voices on their own as they develop fluency. With limited time and a lot to accomplish,
however, another method needs to be used, one that quickly gives students the
confidence that they will have enough to say on the exam. A series of directed exercises, instead
of the more individualized writings that I would otherwise encourage, could
accomplish this. These exercises,
tailored to the particular abilities of each class, would start with a focus
on developing the ability to elaborate.
One of the problems students have when taking the CUNY/ACT exam is
that they don’t know how to go about expanding on topics. These exercises should change that. Because the CUNY/ACT format encourages
three reasons for whatever stand is taken, along with elaboration on each
reason, my model for teaching development follows a three-part form. All questions posed can be answered from an
individual viewpoint, then from the perspective of a specific community, and
finally from a wider view of the society as a whole. Students first answer the questions through
a personal story, or one about someone they know. Then they answer the same question as it
would relate to their neighborhoods.
Lastly, they provide generalized answers pertinent to all. The questions also have both short-term and
long-term consequences, and the students are encouraged to think about both
as preparation for their answers. Behind all
of the questions I am teaching my students to ask and answer is memory of the
questions and suggestions from a writing facilitator that Peter Elbow and Pat
Belanoff imagine at the beginning of A
Community of Writers: ·
Are
you really sure that what you are saying is interesting? ·
Are
you sure that what you are saying is right? ·
Are
you really sure you understand what you are saying? [...] ·
Make
sure what you say is well organized. ·
Think
carefully about who is listening. Are
you speaking in a way that suits these listeners? ·
Watch
your language. Don’t make any
mistakes in grammar. Don’t sound
dumb. (1-2) |
