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FYC Chapter 13: A Cornucopia of Composition Theories: What These Teachers Tell Us About Our Discipline

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FYC Chapter 13: A Cornucopia of Composition Theories: What These Teachers Tell Us About Our Discipline

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Allow me to wax philosophical for a moment (I'm an English teacher who focuses on philosophy and discussion in several of my classes; what can I say?) and use my classroom from this semester to emphasize the point. Upon reading this particular chapter, I found myself fascinated by Deborah Coxwell-Teague and Ronald F. Lunsford's ability to condense nearly 350 pages' worth of information and argument into 30-some pages' worth of an article. They truly deserve some credit: that was a monumental task to accomplish, and I constantly found myself being reminded of different aspects of the readings (an "aha moment" of my own, if you will) that I greatly appreciated as I wrote.

However, I would like to focus specifically on one aspect of their writing, particularly because before this course, I had not thought nearly enough about this topic: reflection. I had always thought about writing (and teaching writing) as "brainstorm ideas, write the things, complete the edits for yourself and peers, and publish - rinse and repeat." However, reflection for me hadn't been part of the equation. If I were being honest, I found reflection to be slightly tedious: "I/the students did the thing," I'd tell myself, "so what's the point of reflecting on it? The ideas and practices learned through the thing are already gained (or not, in some cases); how would reflection help this?"

However, over the course of the past quarter or so of my Language Arts classes, I have tried to incorporate constant reflection - and it's fascinating. Whereas students would - just as I did at times - groan and roll their eyes at the beginning of this experiment, they now utilize formal and informal reflection constantly. A great example of it is today, where a student completed a writing prompt for me in class, quit after five minutes (usually for writing prompts, they are expected to write for ~15 minutes), and said, "Mr. Heins, I just don't have it in me. I probably could do it, but I don't have the motivation today."

While I rolled my eyes at the student a bit (it was first hour, after all, and this kind of attitude is a constant battle at 8:00 in the morning) I also couldn't help but admire her honesty: she knew she had the ability to do it, she knew she possessed the skills, but her brutal honesty highlighted importance of reflection that I had realized this semester: reflection isn't just "let me opine on what I did," but rather "do I know what I'm doing? Do I have the skills to complete this? Are there things I could do to complete something similar to this in the future?" By reflecting on this thought process, students are able to better understand why they completed the assignment, and understand the goals and skills associated with it.

A composition class is similar to this. As Coxwell-Teague and Lunsford put it, "Reflection is a tool these teachers use as a means of learning: Students write to learn about writing" (356). To utilize reflection in a classroom - whether about writing, about chemistry, about FACS, or about any other subject - the students are also realizing the very concepts intended in the course. This isn't simply a writing-centered focus: this is something that students can utilize across content areas. As Chris Anson mentions in the same page as above, "Both the content and processes of the course turn around language; just as the students explore language as a uniquely human activity, they are also reflect[ing] on the ways they use language in the course to communicate their explorations with others" (Ch. 1). If we intend for our students to not only glean the skills and information we want them to take from the course, but also to recognize specifically what they have taken away, reflection is critical to achieving the goal.

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Jennifer Sheppard's "Pandemic Pedagogy: What We Learned from the Sudden Transition to Online Teaching and How It Can Help Us Prepare to Teach Writing in an Uncertain Future"

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Jennifer Sheppard's "Pandemic Pedagogy: What We Learned from the Sudden Transition to Online Teaching and How It Can Help Us Prepare to Teach Writing in an Uncertain Future"

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I assume I can accurately speak for all of us when I say that teaching during the past year-and-a-half has been difficult. Ad-hoc shifts to distance learning with very little preparation time were tough. Creating multiple curriculums in preparation for teaching both online and in-person hybrid students in the fall was exhausting. Switching, once again, to full-distance learning in the winter was heartbreaking. Even my school district's transition back to hybrid - and eventually full in-person in the spring - learning was exhausting. By the end of the previous school year, I distinctly found myself hoping never to have to try to do this again. So why on earth did I choose this article to read?!

First off, you need to know a very important part about me that helps explain this: I am a writer. I've always been a writer - my parents apparently have notebooks back in my childhood bedroom full of short stories I wrote in elementary school. Even today, I use my writing to play Dungeons and Dragons (I know, nerdy), work as the head Speech Coach at school, and tell stories within the classroom that relate to our activities. As a writer, I am also constantly analyzing what I do each and every moment. It's who I am. So, I wanted to read an article that reflected on the best practices found at the college level, in hopes to possibly take away some results to use in future classrooms - especially if, HEAVEN FORBID, we have to teach through distance learning again.

Upon reading Sheppard's article (which contained the results of a survey she completed with her colleagues at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln) I found myself fairly pleased. Most of the practices I had undertaken in the previous year and a half were listed in her "Recommendations and Best Practices" section of the article. This isn't to pat myself on the back; this is to make myself feel a bit better for the advocacy I undertook the previous year and a half (and, okay, maybe a bit of back-patting). While some of my colleagues insisted on trying to cram everything into their online learning from their in-person learning, I focused on what Sheppard called "reflecting explicitly on pedagogical commitments" (71). I focused on what was absolutely necessary, both content-wise and pedagogy-wise. In addition, I recognized that this was a learning process - and invited the students to help me make it better. As Sheppard points out, this will help students "feel more engaged because they have a voice in how a course is designed" (73). It also serves a dual purpose by checking in with students and viewing what is too much for them (looking at you, unnamed Chemistry teacher at my school who assigned a 91-question word problem assignment to a general Chemistry course to be completed in two days). I was open and honest with the students, and it made the time (slightly) bearable. If - heaven forbid - we ever have to do distance-learning again, I will take this article to my school district and make sure that we are designing our online classes with the proper goals in mind.

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Jeff Rice's "Falafel Memories" (Objects Category)

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Jeff Rice's "Falafel Memories" (Objects Category)

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This piece by Jeff Rice is a combination of two things: first, it contains an argument by Rice for a different type of writing (more on that in a second). Second, it gives an example - written previously by Rice - to showcase how effective he believes his different type of writing could be. In his piece, he uses writing about food to create a new spin on a genre. In his own words, "Instead of a critique of falafel or a decoding of its cultural representations as they circulate...in this essay I work from a mix of research and my food memories and travels because...I promote a writing that allows space for the writer alongside an object of interest" (126). Rather than traditionally arguing for writing what Rice calls "contemporary (and traditional) approaches that decode food representations" (124) he instead argues that "a good piece of food writing is never just about the food; it is, among other things, about place and time, desire and satiety, the longing for home and the lure of the wide world" (125).

This fascinated me, and his approach to this new take on writing made quite a bit of sense as well. In essence, Rice argues more for creating an authentic writing sample that incorporates all of the considerations of that sample - in this case, the ins and outs of falafel and how it plays a part in Rice's life. His exemplar writing sample combines narrative, explanatory, comparison, and research-based writing in one into a creation that almost reads like a short story you'd find in The New Yorker - an extremely pleasant read, if I may add. He discusses how he grew up with falafel, including how he fell in love with the food upon his move to Israel after college. He writes about his struggle to convince his (American-born) family, formed after moving back to the States, to similarly fall in love with falafel like he did, and how that attempt largely has eluded him. He also explains the cultural and societal history and impact of falafel, and how it varies from culture to culture. It was a natural read, and one that reminds me of the multimodal research writing ideas proposed to us by articles back in weeks 6&7, making authentic research-based projects that play a central role in the lives and interests of the writers a priority. I don't think that his proposal was inherently a new strategy of writing, but it was pleasant nonetheless.

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It's funny that, in a book where nearly every chapter author starts by saying FYC has to be everything to everyone, the concluding chapter begins with what FYC is NOT. And my favorite section header is "First-Year Composition Does Not Focus on the Improvement of Writing" (353). Perhaps it's more accurate to say that FYC doesn't teach writing improvement. It just does a lot of things that eventually, at some point down the road, result in improved writing. I take heart in this, particularly because I basically said to a teaching colleague just the other day, "I don't really know what I actually taught to my 12th graders, but I hope they learned something about reading, or about writing, or maybe just about themselves."

In this final chapter, I also took note of the comments on learning "about writing" vs. learning "to write" (354), the communal nature of writing (359), and the multiple modalities of writing, including what can be considered texts (362-363). Since I like to sometimes "start with art" in my English 12, and because I've mentioned multiple times this larger conversation I'm trying to get my students to consider, all of these points ring true.

I also appreciate the challenge related to creating a classroom community where we get to know our students while also balancing the need to, at some point, switch from formative to summative assessment. I feel like high school students expect this even more than college students because they know everything is graded, but particularly after what last year was like for students and because I'm new to the school (so every single student is new to me), I find this challenging.

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Color me obsessed with Coxwell-Teague and Lunsford after reading this chapter. As Isaac wrote, it's so impressive that they were able to synthesize so much content into one chapter. It literally felt like I was flipping through a yearbook of the rest of the book and being like "aww remember Isoue and Yancey?" But genuinely, this is an excellent summary and touches on some very comforting thoughts to writing teachers everywhere.

First of all, FYC courses cannot and should not be everything to everyone, even though most colleges believe one writing credit is sufficient to produce clarity in writing forever. However, I think one of the best tools in a writing teacher toolkit is that element of reflection and metawriting. One of the greatest things to come out of the pandemic was my commitment to journal writing with my students. Every Monday, no matter the grade level, my students have 20 minutes where their only focus is writing in their weekly journal. This started when I was in the midst of hybrid teaching (with 20 kids online and 20 kids in person) and I was just trying to figure out how to take attendance. I decided I would have them journal, (thinking it would literally just benefit me with time,) but I ended up being blessed with some of the most amazing entries and abilities to connect with my students when we were all so distant from each other, so that's what I want to focus on for this reflection because I truly cannot recommend weekly+ journaling with your students enough.

At the beginning of the year, I set up a google doc journal that has all the Mondays already on there so students know what days we'll be journaling. I always offer them a prompt, but there is no requirement to write on the prompt. I also do not grade this on mechanics at all (with which the editors of the FYC book seem to agree) so it's not a major time suck. I set a timer and as long as they are writing, they get the points for the day. Some students initially struggle with the time, but it turns out they are all really emotionally benefitting from this. Not only do I get peaceful Sundays (the only lesson planning I HAVE to do is coming up with a journal prompt,) but my Mondays are extremely peaceful. We journal for 20 minutes and then they always get flex time to work on what's important to them in that moment.

I've passed this onto a few of my other team members, but I cannot recommend reflective, journal writing enough no matter the age. Everyone needs time to process whatever's going on in their lives and in the world, and your students learn to trust you as an educator so much more when you actually read what they wrote.

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Teaching Racial Literacy through Language, Health, and the Body: Introducing Bio-racial Rhetorics in the Writing Classroom by Cherice Escobar Jones and Genesis Barco Medina

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Teaching Racial Literacy through Language, Health, and the Body: Introducing Bio-racial Rhetorics in the Writing Classroom by Cherice Escobar Jones and Genesis Barco Medina

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This article found in the College English journal was so fascinating. As someone who typically avoids scientific readings as much as possible (because of some weird lingering childhood trauma related to struggling in STEM courses because I thought girls didn't need to care about them) this was a piece I wanted to challenge myself with. I read Ta-Nehisi Coates' "Between the World and Me" every year with my college lit course and one topic that always comes up is his use of the word "body." He almost talks about his life in two ways: the emotional and the physical. This article from the journal of college English goes into the importance of recognizing race, but not allowing DNA or genetics to enter the conversation because it simply isn't true. Race is a social construction that has little to do with genetics, but rather the way you are treated in the world based on your location.

Coates writes, "...this is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it. I tell you now that the question of how one should live within a black body, within a country lost in the Dream, is the question of my life, and the pursuit of this question, I have found, ultimately answers itself," (12.) With this in mind, there's an important distinction between physical and emotional representations. The United States wants to control both with people of color, but it is NOT because of genetics. It is because of systemic racism. The two should never be conflated.

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Valuing Writers from a Neurodiversity Perspective: Integrating New Research on Autism Spectrum Disorder into Composition Pedagogy by Elizabeth Tomlinson and Sara Newman

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Valuing Writers from a Neurodiversity Perspective: Integrating New Research on Autism Spectrum Disorder into Composition Pedagogy by Elizabeth Tomlinson and Sara Newman

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As someone who works with many neurodivergent students, this article was so helpful in putting words to a lot of thoughts I've had over the years. For one, I often find my students on the autism spectrum experience imposter syndrome so much more than neurotypical students because they've gone through a lot of their academic years feeling othered and isolated. I had a 9th grade student last year who said, "Ms. Millea, you are the first teacher who treated me like a person and not like someone with autism." Now, I don't believe that I'm actually the first teacher who treated this kid like a person, but it did spark a lot of conversations in our staff development about the ways we interact with our neurodivergent students in general.

Honestly, tik tok creators with ASD have a done a lot of work educating the general public over the course of the pandemic on what ASD is and how it presents itself in people. There's this huge influx of people getting diagnosed as with ASD as adults because of the open conversations happening in the digital sphere. I can see this trickling down into my students who are not only open about their neurodivergency, but they also see it as such a privilege to have a brain that works atypically. The article by Tomlinson and Newman goes into detail about allowing flexibility within the process for students with ASD, which in my opinion should be a Tier 1 support for every student. I think one of the biggest ways reading and writing specific educators can help support all our students is by allowing room for different ways to reach the same end goal.

One way I've changed my writing courses over the last few years is by implementing a 20% project, where students get every Friday to work on a semester-long project of their own design. One of my students this semester partnered up with a few of their neurodivergent friends in the class and have been working all semester on creating new characters for the game Dungeons and Dragons that represent all of their various divergencies. While that concept alone is cool and wonderful, the growth I've seen in their writing over the course of the semester is enormous. Not only are the fulfilling all the standards, but they are excited and passionate about the opportunity to explore something they designed.

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Jennifer Lin LeMesurier's "Mobile Bodies: Triggering Bodily Uptake Through Movement" (Body/Posthuman Category)

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Jennifer Lin LeMesurier's "Mobile Bodies: Triggering Bodily Uptake Through Movement" (Body/Posthuman Category)

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I could talk about this article for hours!  As someone who danced ballet for years and who now teaches fitness classes and coaches a dance team, I related completely to the descriptions of movement, technique, corrections, and memorization. But I had never thought seriously about how any of these things might inform how I teach writing.

The author made many great points. I'll just summarize a few very briefly, along with my questions/thoughts about how each point might relate to writing:
1. The "call and response" format of a dance class demonstrates information uptake. The teacher explains (and sometimes demonstrates) a combination of moves, and the students are essentially quizzed on the spot on their ability to perform the moves, building on existing knowledge and muscle memory. This relates to metacognition in writing -- how well are we making students aware of their thinking process in writing? What would our students consider to be their writing memory?
2. Dancers often learn new moves and techniques through repetition, so knowledge is quickly deployed. How are our students getting their writing reps in? How are we asking them to deploy their skills?
3. Dancers often learn through moving along with the teacher (or "marking"). I just started writing along with my students, showing my scribbles on the screen up front as I go. I found students write more and for longer if I'm doing the writing with them!
4. Dancers are used to receiving corrections that may be immediate fixes and more long-term adjustments. How can we help our students be aware of the difference and the process (plus patience) for longer-term work on writing?
5. Dance teachers deal with proprioception, when dancers think/feel their body is in one place, but it's really in a slightly different place. How do we help our students see their writing for what it really is? To have an accurate view of what they're doing?
6. Dancers will have a much easier time learning and remembering choreography if it connects (rather than being a string of random movements). Of course there's a direct correlation with how we progress lessons on writing, or writing assignments, and how we connect both to the students' experiences.
7. Finally, dancers understand that their dance experience helps them be more kinesthetically aware of the world around them outside the dance studio. How do we help our writing students think about writing outside of their English classes?

I may have mentioned this concept in a previous post, but reading this article makes me think of Jill Johnson, the former director of the Harvard Dance Project who used to talk to her students about dancing without ego.  She didn't want them to get hung up on what a move looked like or whether it fit with dance styles/methods they had previously studied. She wanted them to explore movement, connect with the music, and express what they were feeling or what they wanted to say. The students produced intensely creative pieces. There are some obvious connections to having students free-write and experiment with different genres and modes, but there's a lot more to it that I'm not sure I can yet articulate.

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Qianqian Zhang-Wu's "(Re)Imagining Translingualism as a Verb to Tear Down the English-Only Wall: 'Monolingual' Students as Multilingual Writers" 

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Qianqian Zhang-Wu's "(Re)Imagining Translingualism as a Verb to Tear Down the English-Only Wall: 'Monolingual' Students as Multilingual Writers" 

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Right away I noticed that both articles I selected used the verb "colonize." LeMesurier quotes a dancer who said, "You should not let movement colonize your body," meaning you should not let your training from ballet inform how you dance anything else. And Zhang-Wu writes about English (as used by the U.S. education policy) as "a tool to colonize minds, preserving the privilege of those 'native' speakers of English and leaving behind culturally, racially, and linguistically minoritized students" (122).  There really are so many ways that our writing -- our composition, our ways of expressing ourselves -- is held back by some dominant idea/method we don't realize is influencing us.

In making an argument for translingualism Zhang-Wu explains a few key concepts, including zero-point epistemology, which "deludes many learners through the false promises it holds out for social and material gain" (122). What we as writing teachers should do is destabilize English and help our students understand that English grammar is subjective (and mainstream), that writing involves taking risks (including deviating from the mainstream), that English is an ever-changing language "absorbing elements from other codes and social practices" (126).

In the second half of the article Zhang-Wu describes a cultural and linguistic identity self-portrait project that helped students understand how they use language, how they are not just multilingual but "doing translingualism" (133), and encouraging them to value these strengths -- to take part in "reflecting, reshaping, and reimagining their social practices and cultural and linguistic identities through a pluriversal lens" (133).

In the end, Zhang-Wu argues for standard English to be viewed simply as "one category of Englishes" instead of THE form of English. We, as students in this class, all seem to have moved past the "sage on the stage" form of teaching to something more dynamic and inclusive. I hadn't thought about how we approach English (as many of us are called English Teachers) as being like that large figure looming at the front of the room. What does it look like if we dissolve it and let it move around the room side-by-side with the students, the way we as teachers now move around the room with our students as they are working their way through the learning and writing process?

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"The Teaching Zone: Square Pegs in Round Holes" by Cheryl Hogue Smith

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"The Teaching Zone: Square Pegs in Round Holes" by Cheryl Hogue Smith

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This article covers six years of student data and analyzes how students who have not read a lengthy text are able to write successful papers about it. Three disclaimers: 1. This study was done between 2011 and 2016, so the world’s electronic pace has since increased, worsening the problem 2. Those years mean that I am a member of the age group studied and 3. Because of those two things, this post includes a bit of existential crisis—bear with me.

Smith opens with an italicized scene—like stage directions—which is absolutely intriguing. Her proposition is that standardized test culture was superficial and now students read on electronic devices, and those two things clash in a loud, harmful way. The article also addresses “tl;dr” or “too long; didn’t read.” The studies concluded that students were not reading the material but still writing effective papers. Smith blames herself for this. If it is a teacher problem, it is because we give students too many tools. By telling them where to look, are we teaching them not to look around? Not in the way we would think. According to Smith, they are actually becoming more dependent on us; changing our discourse yearly to better assist them “perpetuates their belief that knowledge is something to be given, not earned” (425). So, yes, students invent the university; they take all the tools we give them and write what we have told them they are supposed to get out of a specific text. And, it is beneficial to embrace multiple mediums such as audiobooks and videos, as these still require critical thought to analyze. There will always be students who do genuinely complete the readings and not understand them—and it helps those students, too, to lessen the length of texts.

Where I disagree with the article is that the problem is not a generational unwillingness to read. It is a generational change in capacity. I think of it like this: fifteen years ago, a student could fit a cup’s worth of water (knowledge) in one glass. Students now can still comprehend a cup’s worth of water, but they need to do so in many smaller glasses. And, the issue with technology is NOT that students are distracted as in switching between tabs, but that multiple things are existing at one time—like having plural radios on that are not in sync,  or the literal over-stimulation of having too many unused tabs open, or the situation with the pea under the mattress. They do not have to be actively distracted by their technology for their technology to be damaging their learning capacity. As a student, I experienced all of this, but it didn’t make my “head hurt” as the article suggests. I think this is the case for many students, especially now that it has been five polarizing years since this study. I did comprehend the readings when I did the readings, but sometimes I did not read because I did not have the mental capacity to spend hours with a book about the holocaust, such as the (although lighthearted) example in the article. This was not because of my own mental health, but because of my societal conditioning. It is not about the electronic devices, rather the psychological burden these people (not “these students” because this is not exclusively an academic issue) have because of them. Sometimes I feel like we exist simply to operate the machines. Things are obviously different, now. I love reading and writing. That’s why I am here. That’s why we are all here. I hope that this awareness continues to spread down the generational line.