[Teaching_Basic_Writing] RE: Portfolios and revision

Sun, 14 May 2006 16:56:03 -0400

Marcia,

Your observation that 

many of our students come from high schools where
attendance
counts more than turning in assignments, an assignment turned in, regardless
of its excellence, gets a passing grade, and the focus is on grammar and not
on
thinking.  It's often a struggle for our basic writers to express their own
ideas,
because they've been taught that there are "correct" answers and only the
teachers have them.  , 

is exactly part of the problem.  And when you add into the mix that they believe that there is only one draft,  revision becomes, at best, an exercise in proofreading.  Having come up through the ranks in the eighties, I am well familiar with the idea of wholesale rewrites of sections or papers, but I wonder if doing so doesn't confuse my students. Even when I forge ahead and make a big deal out of revision, their end -of -semester reflections speak of understanding grammar better, of knowing more clearly where to put a comma or semi-colon.  I want to undo that kind of thinking, but I wonder if attempting it in a one-semester class is possible--and that my goal should be to acclimate the students to being college students and to begin to develop writing habits, like making changes in sentences or rewriting a thesis statement, that can be built upon in ensuing courses. And that maybe my portfolio expectations should reflect that. I've always been opposed to rote learning for its own sake, but I think that some rote or rote-like activity might help the students adjust to the rhythms of studying and of writing.

Joanna Howard

________________________________

From: teaching_basic_writing-admin@mailman.eppg.com on behalf of Marcia Ribble
Sent: Sun 5/14/2006 3:32 PM
To: emwhite@email.arizona.edu; teaching_basic_writing@mailman.eppg.com
Cc: gglau@asu.edu
Subject: RE: [Teaching_Basic_Writing] RE: Portfolios and revision

Ed, and all, at UC we're doing some work trying to think about how the
assignments, readings, and processes we place in our syllabi manage
to help or detract from our students' responses to their own writing.

Some of the issues we're looking at:
Problem Based Learning
Learning Communities linked to other disciplines' courses
Scaffrolding of assignments
Service Learning

Many of us have made a major shift away from the use of the
standard composition readers and toward readings that are based
on course long examinations of things like work (Erenreich, etc.) justice
(Kozol's
Savage Inequalities), how one begins to belong to a culture (Villanueva's
Bootstraps),
the problems likely to be caused by the next 20 years of demographic changes
in
the US (US Census Projections, business predictions, etc.), and the
university
itself is talking about a student project for each student to produce a
portfolio
suitable to take to job interviews.  We're aren't sure about what these
changes
might mean, or whether they'll help the students to think about their
assignments
as something "real," rather than disconnected, irrelevant activities.  Nor
whether
this will help students take increasing ownership of the texts they produce.

At this point we have far more questions than answers, but one thing we have
identified is that many of our students come from high schools where
attendance
counts more than turning in assignments, an assignment turned in, regardless
of its excellence, gets a passing grade, and the focus is on grammar and not
on
thinking.  It's often a struggle for our basic writers to express their own
ideas,
because they've been taught that there are "correct" answers and only the
teachers have them.  These are some of the problems we see as hampering
revision efforts in basic writing students' text creations.

I'm sure that some of you have gotten much further in thinking about these
issues and would love additional insights to help us help our students.

Marcia Ribble

>From: emwhite@email.arizona.edu
>To: teaching_basic_writing@mailman.eppg.com
>CC: gglau@asu.edu
>Subject: [Teaching_Basic_Writing] RE: Portfolios and revision
>Date: Sun, 14 May 2006 09:12:36 -0700
>
>Marcia, your interesting post on this topic referred to Greg Glau and the
>stretch program he administers at ASU. As it happens, I had breakfast--and,
>of
>course, coffee--with him just a couple of days ago, and I know how
>interested
>he is in the topic. So I've forwarded your post to him to see if he'd like
>to
>respond to it.
>
>Meanwhile, Joanna's post below raises some profound questions about the
>issue of
>revision and pfs in BW classes. Let's think about them together.
>
>Revision is a matter we generally take too lightly in rhet/comp, as if
>everyone
>knew just what that means. I think for most students, and particularly BW
>students, it means tinkering with their text to meet more or less unclear
>teacher complaints. That's at best what we would call editing; we want them
>to
>see the whole essay afresh (re-vision), to do what Nancy Sommers back in
>the
>1980s called a return to the chaos out of which ideas emerge. Yeah, sure. I
>think nobody can really revise until they have some genuine commitment to
>the
>topic, some real interest in exploring it, and some ability to assess their
>own
>work (with some help from the teacher) to see where it might be improved.
>But if
>they had all of that they wouldn't be in a BW course. So I think the
>problem you
>pose is much deeper than a matter of grading portfolios. It has to do with
>somehow helping our students see that revising should matter to them, not
>just
>for points from the teacher. I'm sure that others on the list have faced
>that
>underlying issue in a variety of ways.  I'd like to hear about it. --Ed
>
>Quoting "Howard, Joanna" <Joanna.Howard@montgomerycollege.edu>:
>
>>Ed, that's something that has been bothering me lately, having just
>>witnessed my BW students putting together their portfolios.  But it's not
>>so much giving out poor grades for improved writing--mine is the reverse: 
>>I feel like there is not much revising at all (unless I write comments all
>>over the rough drafts and force them to revise).  Rarely do I see genuine
>>effort put into revision unless it is an assignment for which points are
>>given. What bothers me is that I don't have any sense that they've
>>internalized, or retained, anything from the semester. And I'm also
>>bothered by the thought that I'm expecting too much from them in terms of
>>portfolio quality.  Given that I teach the lowest level of writing at an
>>open admission community college, I wonder if I shouldn't be putting more
>>energy into teaching them how to pay attention and sustain attention, and
>>leave the portfolios for the credit-level courses.
>>
>>I'm wondering in the truest sense of the word.  It's the end of the
>>semester and academic year, a time when I'm typically grouchy about
>>things.  I would love to hear from you and other BW instructors about how
>>you construct and score portfolios and what sort of weight the portfolios
>>have in terms of the final grade. I don't want to throw portfolios  out
>>completely, but my experience with my BW students has been much different
>>than with FC students.
>>
>>Best,
>>
>>Joanna Howard
>>Associate Professor of English
>>Montgomery College, Rockville
>>Rockville, MD
>>
>>________________________________
>>
>>From: teaching_basic_writing-admin@mailman.eppg.com on behalf of
>>emwhite@email.arizona.edu
>>Sent: Sat 5/13/2006 7:44 PM
>>To: teaching_basic_writing@mailman.eppg.com
>>Subject: [Teaching_Basic_Writing] Another cup of coffee?
>>
>>
>>
>>Such quiet on the list! I feel a sense of freedom; I handed in my grades
>>on
>>Thursday and I'm done at the university until August. I suppose many of
>>you are
>>still working on those final portfolios and suffering with assigning
>>grades. You
>>can't make time to drop into the coffee room to chat. Bu let me pose a
>>problem I
>>have with portfolio grading: I think I lie to my students about them.  I
>>tell
>>them that the portfolio grade is a process grade, determined by the
>>improvement
>>they show in their revisions and overall. And I mean it.  But then I get
>>some
>>really terrible end-of-term portfolios that, true, show improvement, but
>>all
>>the way from awful up to just really bad. If I followed what I say, I
>>should
>>give such work an A, since they demonstrate hard work and genuine
>>improvement.
>>But I can't give really bad work an A, even if it shows improvement! That
>>seems
>>irresponsible. So I waffle, giving out a C here and a NC (no credit)
>>there,
>>among the good grades for good work. Seems wrong, even somehow dishonest,
>>though.  --Ed White
>>
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>
>
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