On Shipka's Process Compositions

While I can appreciate Jody Shipka's suggestions toward a class in which students composed non-alphabetic texts only, I can't help but see the drawbacks to such a class. But before I become all negative and start sounding hoarse - what with the constant cries of "get off my lawn" - I want to talk about a few of the things that I find valuable in the reading.

I think that the general idea of having a composition classroom that explores different ways of "writing" is valuable not only at the theoretical level, but also at the practical one. By imagining a classroom that doesn't prescribe to the "freewriting, draft, revision" formula, we can address the notion that it's possible to compose differently. We can isolate each step and examine if there's a different / better way to go about it.

Example - If we isolate the process of revision and look at it through a non-alphabetic filter, we might discover useful strategies and assignments to enhance our own understanding of revision.

Because I wonder what a ballet-shoe revision looks like. Or a revised video. Is a revised video the same as a differently-edited one? Or does the composer go back to the field to take more footage? Is that a feasible thing to do? Maybe that moment for making the video has passed.

Can a moment for revising an essay pass too? Can it be "too late" to go back into the field and get "more footage?"

I don't believe this to be true, but perhaps it is for some students. Once they are "finished" with an essay, going back becomes this incredibly difficult endeavor. And maybe it's more than just being lazy -- maybe there's something to this complaint.

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Sorry, I got a little off topic. 

I also believe that multimodality should be taught in a different sort of class than a FYC classroom. Otherwise, we run the risk of multimodality as just being this "container"  that content can be poured into. And the thought of teaching to each individual medium while still addressing the needs of some of my students who are struggling with academic writing makes me wonder if this multimodal approach should happen later in a college career.

Because there is some value in what we're teaching now, right? Even if it's hard to pinpoint places in the "real world" that well-formulated essays come into play, there is value in teaching students to write to certain specifications, utilizing certain styles that they may or may not have to use later in their lives.

So I'm conflicted on the whole issue. As much as I enjoyed reading about all the different projects that students really took to - engaging the material in a way that makes sense to them, I worry about some things that we lose. Though the interpretive dance project was probably spectacular to watch and academically rigorous, do we lose the sense of communication that writing seems to rely on? What did the students watching the dance think while it was happening? Was it confusing and disorienting? Does that matter at all?

And with all the successes of the program, what about the failures? How did Shipka judge that a particular presentation wasn't acceptable? How do we take away some of the subjectivity of grading? Or does that not really matter in a whole composition course?

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How technology shapes writing and how I'm supposed to feel about that

Does anyone write for themselves anymore? I’m sure people do, but I don’t really. I used to. I used to journal in notebooks, in word documents, write little scraps of poetry on little scraps of paper that wind up torn into little scraps in my wastepaper basket. Now it seems like everything I write, I write to produce for someone or some purpose. Those one-time poetry scraps make it into my online journal that 3 people can read. Same with my rambley journal posts about personal things. Three people can read them. In a way, it’s like having a journal / diary that you leave unlocked on your desk in your middle-school bedroom. For whatever reason, you want SOMEONE to read it, even if you say you don’t.

For this reason, I keep coming back to the Martin reading. I’m not sure if it was purposeful, but I kept seeing this theme of writing as a social activity spring up through the text: libraries become useful for conservation of knowledge, Cuneiform develops as a way to keep social contracts, Luther promoting literacy so individuals could develop their own understanding of scripture, the Koran written in classical Arabic to keep a sense of Muslim unity, and indecipherable writings on Roman statues leading others to invoke magic.

It’s all interconnected, and I don’t want to start sounding sappy, but writing seems like a way that we as people connect to other people, and technology shapes how we do this. It’s easier than ever to have others read the things that I write. If once I left poetry in library books or lying on floors, hoping people would read it, now I disconnect that uncertainty entirely and watch as my blog-visit numbers climb.

So these new writing / publishing technologies open others up to this same experience. Even if the writing comes through social networks, it’s still this open sharing of words that others read, and our instant-posting technology allows this seamless transfer between thought and distribution.

In class, we talked about how writing things out by hand slows us down, making us consider each word, and might lead us to more thoughtful writing. We also posited that typing is much faster, and allows for a better stream of thoughts to paper. I’m sure that this phenomenon changes the way we communicate through writing.

Project plans, or something like that

Sometimes, I get stuck on something, read a prompt, and realize that I haven’t thought about that thing in a week. This is one of those times. As I’m always sort of thinking about the project, I have yet to make a decision between the two I proposed earlier.

  

Both of them hold these exciting opportunities, and I can’t decide if they can fit together somehow. It feels like I’d be abandoning an idea before I really gave it an honest try, which doesn’t feel great.

I don’t know how I’d be able to build a self-learning utilityspacething in the next two months, so that feels more like a long-term thing. But if I don’t start working on it sometime, it won’t get done.

On the other hand, I would really like to develop a certain sort of class that focused on publishing constantly. This is making me think about what I want to write for the next blog post, so I’m going to go do that now. I'll be back.

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Ok, back, and also mentally drained. But I'm going to keep trying. I guess I might be looking for advice on how best to approach this? Would all of you be willing to volunteer your skills and thoughts as instructors to help me build this resource? I'll bring baked goods.

And maybe the other class-design can fit into my 701 project that I'm still not positive about. And then maybe they'll fold together eventually.

Things that might be good to revisit

I think a bit more work with Lingua Fracta might be helpful, especially looking further at categorizing memory as persistence. In my understanding, Brooke proposes this interesting idea on how memory becomes even further detached from the actual information and is instead attributed to remembering howto access that information -- like, remembering to add a blog to an RSS feed. Or bookmarking a site in del.icio.us.

I'm also a little confused on how these canons set up less as static categories and more as relational things (43).

Further, I think it might be interesting to revisit the disembodiment aspect of the Farman reading and frame that as a way to look at a virtual classroom. It feels right to say that it's better / more effective to run a body-in-classroom writing class, but if students occupy this virtual space, even when their physical bodies are in the classroom, can we totally discount online writing education?

What writing means or doesn't mean

When I’m teaching writing, it sometimes seems as though I have two very distinct and different minds about the whole undertaking. It’s a very strange dynamic because, when I sit in my apartment, stewing about how I have yet to receive work from [redacted], I start telling my roommate about how irritated I am with my students.

A quick example: I’m doing conferences this week, and pedagogically / practically, I think group conferences are my best option. I’m a believer in the whole workshop process, and I think it can help so much more than a simple peer review or an individual conference. So, in preparation for this, I told one of my classes that they would be responsible for emailing a copy of their revised to all of their group members by noon. I asked them to CC me on the email, so I could be sure that group members were given a fair chance to look over and make comments on the draft. I promised them that next conference, they would be able to send it in by Tuesday, and my other class would have to have things done by Sunday.

1:00 rolled around, and I had not yet received a revision from 9 people. I sent out an email, doing a little chastising, a little consequence-proposing, and waited another 3 hours to receive most of them.

During this entire time, I’m soft-ranting to myself and my poor roommate, who, let’s be honest, is probably sick of hearing about all this. I’m saying things like “I gave them so many instructions, reminded them so many times, sent reminder emails, what else can I do?” And then I started thinking about how attached to technology we all are, because I started assuming that I had students ignoring my emails. That I expect these emails I send to be received immediately, and responded to accordingly.

Which is probably the wrong sort of attitude to have, but it’s the sort of immediacy that the internet and new technology seems to demand. When students send me emails, I often receive a second one within a few hours if I haven’t gotten a chance to send one back. In fact, I often do see an email come in, but choose to put off answering it for a time if I’m engaged in another project.

I mean, do I owe my students an immediate response if I’m around to give it? What about as we integrate communication technology into the classroom? Do we build some sort of mutual expectation to be available at all times? Did I use technology to encroach on their “own time” that they shouldn’t be expected to respond to me?

This complicates further for me when I start thinking about the way in which I want to talk about writing. Speaking with Ash yesterday, I planned out a rough sketch of a new type of class that I might like to pursue – One that’s totally focused on writing and publishing for an online audience.

Sketch – Students develop a content blog / website for 14-15 weeks, during which they are responsible for not only creating content, but for curating, evaluating, and posting outside content for an audience. Students would choose the direction of their sites, and work to maintain / update on a regular schedule. Perhaps we could also look into promotion strategies, narrowing to an audience, and the economics of running sites.

Ash helpfully pointed out some pitfalls with this, but the one that sticks with me is this notion that students aren’t writing to any real sort of audience – Student blogging usually garners views through the class, or some other manufactured audience.

So is it real writing if it’s not being read by a real audience? That doesn’t quite seem right, because private journaling sure does seem like writing. And this content publishing seems a little like writing too. So I don’t think I’m ready to revise my last definition of writing – still as some sort of relationship between thinking and marking, the evidence of an inner dialogue. But maybe when it comes to technology, we sort of wear down that barrier between thoughtful composing and immediate verbalization. And maybe that’s how writing is changing – speed of content becomes somehow more important than the quality of it. Which becomes sort of problematic at the pedagogical level.

Some ideas for the multimodal projects

A few sentences about the ideas I'm thinking about for my project. I have a couple of ideas I might want to explore.

• One thing I really want to look at involves self-learning some of the basics of language. I'd like to get multiple sources to present some basic grammar lessons the way they might teach it in a classroom, and then offer a way to switch between sources until students find a teacher that "works" for them.

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• Another thing that I've been thinking about is stems from our last class, where we started thinking about the forms of writing we're teaching. Maybe I'd like to look at developing a beginning writing class that focuses less on analyzing "reader texts" and more on a dynamic sort of project-focused class. Maybe one where students manage a blog/website/content generating sort of thing. Part of the class would focus on curating material, always with proper attribution, but also on the creation of content.
• It's all a little hazy right now.

Reflection on: Reflection on: Writing and Thinking Academically

Maybe reflection is how I know when I'm thinking academically. Whenever anything I write down doesn't seem to say exactly what I'm thinking, or if it only gestures vaguely toward it. Maybe thinking academically means reflecting on your thinking, but reflecting as you're thinking about something. Which gets all sort of muddled, but maybe it's a layer thing. Being able to detach yourself from the moment to reflect as that moment of thinking is occurring. Maybe that's what it means to think academically.

Reflection on: Writing and Thinking Academically

Is that really the only way I know when I'm thinking academically? When I try in a particularly hard way to not use profanity or distasteful / blasphemous metaphors? There has to be more to it than that.

It's difficult because, to be honest, I don't think I know when I'm writing academically. I guess it's an external thing? When someone tells me that I'm doing academic work? Otherwise, it all sort of runs together. Like, the bit of journaling I do a few times a week informs my class writing, as does the conversation I have with a friend, the shower-thinking, the constant self-conversation, all of that.

Does that mean "fuck it. I'm always thinking academically because everything I'm doing can move toward writing academically?" Or is it more complicated than that? Is it a threshold? Because I sure don't feel like I'm thinking academically while yelling at the TV about whatever sport I currently am too invested in.

So maybe I'm not always thinking academically, but maybe it's happening more often than I'm giving myself credit for. Maybe it's anytime I'm engaged with my surroundings rather than numb to them. When I'm trying to look at every single side and dimension of a thing, or at least trying to look past that first visible surface.

But that doesn't seem right either. Because I'm looking at layers of those angry sports thoughts, thinking about how sports are really about parallel play, or something like that. Which can develop into academic writing, so it must be academic thinking?

And this feels like academic thinking/writing, even though I said "fuck" a few paragraphs back.

Writing and Thinking Academically

This separation between academic and non-academic thinking and writing has always bothered me, I think primarily because academic thinking and academic writing seem interchangeable. We seem to take a clear, well structured essay as clear, well structured thinking. But these essays are more like a constructed posturing, adopting a language, a style, and a structure that somehow is seen as "more academic" than any other.

A bit about my history with this:
As an undergrad, I focused on creative writing. It was what I liked to do, it was what I found a weird restricting sort of freedom in. My academic writing, while fairly sound, was something completely different. It was stilted, awkward, and seemed like it came from somewhere else. So I would make uninteresting papers that held to this either imagined or suggested format / voice.

I think that this was my problem - I separated critical writing from creative writing, thinking that critical writing could, in no real way, be any sort of creative. I don't think I was alone in this sentiment.

So how can I tell when I'm thinking/writing academically? There are a few easy signs, like I try to not use profanity in academic writing, but apart from that, I've started to view every piece of writing as some sort of academic writing, even if It's not composed with the purpose of being "honorably" published. And I don't know if this is a good approach at all, but by approaching my "creative" enterprises with this sort of critical mind, I've sort of mixed things up in my mind. So now, when approaching "academic" writing, I try and think about it in a creative way.

Kind of like the Galloway and Thacker. They have all this pertinent information that they separate from the academic writing. But in reality, it's more interesting to see the process behind it. That's how I've started to approach my academic writing - like it's a conversation that I'm still figuring out. Because as I'm writing, that's what I'm doing. And I realize that everything I'm putting down is some manner of posturing, that I'm lying when I deliver this "more authentic" text of the "process behind the conclusion," but it at least points towards how I came to my conclusion. It's at least an attempt to show my own academic thinking.