[Teaching_Composition] Why study transfer?

[teaching_composition@mailman.eppg.com]

I have a great deal of respect for other teachers and we have some very
good ones here, many of whom have completed Steve Wilhoit's WAC seminar and
are really trying to get students to engage with writing. The students in
my study are extremely clear that there are assignments that engage them,
teachers who engage them, and when those come along, the students are
excited to talk about them. When they don't come along, I am interested to
know what triggers the students not to generalize or engage. And it usually
is something pretty complex, a combination of lack of time, lack of
interest in the subject, recognition that they can satisfy the teacher
without exerting a lot of effort, etc etc.

I have made careful efforts to ask text- and process-based questions that
don't encourage bad mouthing of other teachers. But I do want to know what
happens when students engage/generalize and what happens when they don't,
and I can't think of a way to get at that without some form of interview.

It helps a lot in avoiding the pitfalls you describe to focus my analytical
lens on the system. I'm not particularly interested in teacher A or teacher
B. I'm interested in what aspects of the system engage students and which
don't. Teachers are part of the system. When I see students "subvert" very
good assignments in order to intentionally not engage, that is a systemic
issue, not a teacher issue.

Maybe an example is in order. My most complicated student, Matt, took a
report and proposal class. One of the assignments was to work with a local
non-profit and write a grant proposal for them. They were supposed to work
with a real client. Matt claims he would have learned a lot from doing that
and that he that it was a good assignment. But he didn't do it. He had a
friend who worked at a non-profit and he got that person to give him
materials, and then he and his group proceeded to pretend to work for the
client. So, Matt claims to have learned nothing but he told me multiple
what a good assignment that would have been if he had really done it. He
just didn't. The conversation we had was not about the teacher at all; it
was about what Matt found engaging and why he did not engage and what he
did do in writing, and so on. So there are ways to focus the interview on
the activities and the system and the way the student understands those
rather than turning the interview into a critique-fest of other teachers.

Elizabeth

Elizabeth Wardle, PhD
Assistant Professor
Director of Writing Programs
Internship Coordinator
Department of English
Humanities 277
University of Dayton
Dayton, Ohio
937-229-3003
ewardle@udayton.edu

-----teaching_composition-admin@mailman.eppg.com wrote: -----

To: <teaching_composition@mailman.eppg.com>
From: "Kathy Fitch" <kfitch@kafkaz.net>
Sent by: teaching_composition-admin@mailman.eppg.com
Date: 09/19/2007 10:11PM
Subject: RE: [Teaching_Composition] Why study transfer?


<< recognizing them, minimizing them, making choices, and including them in
the full reports.>>

Well put, Tiane--I hope I meant all of that with the shorthand "avoid."  I
think I did!  I suppose the alarm that goes off for me is the one that
blares whenever I sense us edging up on any version of "we are the real
teachers." It's such a pervasive thing, and all too easy to do, even when
we
are aware of the pitfalls, and consciously attempting to minimize them.
Certainly, students have subtly drawn me into that conversation (all about
those other teachers whose classes weren't *fill in positive thing here*
like *this* one is), even when I definitely didn't want to go there, and so
I'm cautious about it, always.  Now, if we could get their Econ and Soc and
Philosophy and Psych etc. teachers to report what students are telling them
about English, we'd be on to something new. (And, often, those teachers are
probably hearing that Comp left their mystified students with no clue at
all
about how to do the things those teachers think "writing education" should
of course entail.  So.)

In any case, it's hard to envision a student telling an English teacher
that
writing is much more fulfilling, sensible, fun, or whatever in other
courses, even though this may well be the case for them.  Certainly, I'd
often rather write for a course in which I could determine the assignment,
record the due date, maybe touch base with the teacher now and then to get
a
question answered, and then work on my own until the thing was done than
write for one that entailed endless drafts, peer review workshops (ick!),
group work (double-ick), and so many revisions that all of my enthusiasm
for
the topic at hand ran out well before I could check that darned paper off
the list of things to do.  It isn't easy, I don't think, to create the
occasion in which students are clearly able to say things like that, when
they are the case.  However, I *have* heard lots of teachers remark that
they struggle a good bit to make peer-review (for one) a meaningful thing,
so it might be very interesting, indeed, to see what students have to say
about the general value, for them, of that activity as it often plays out
in
the writing classroom.


Kathy





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