We find another relevant question regarding pedagogy when we examine the Expos model. Spellmeyer does an excellent job explaining the logic behind the course:

Teaching Expos 101 from Expos the Movie on Vimeo.

The process approach detailed makes sense in many ways. Still, what we are hearing is the conflation of a few practices. Among them:

• The legacy of Bartholomae and Petrosky’s Ways of Reading. Cultural studies inspired analysis - close readings of texts - accompanied by some element of “finding the conversation” at stake.
• Expressivism. All the answers are unto me.

I say this because if you look closely at the sequence Expos teaches, you’ll see that, at first, the only way to do a “close analysis” is to look within one’s self. In later parts of the sequence, there is some opportunity for context (two texts, three texts) but is still limited in focus and depends greatly on a student looking within for ideas.

Writing Exercise: One Text, Close Reading

The first assignment of the semester focuses on a “close reading” of a single text—an article, essay, or book chapter. A “close reading” is a response that requires more than a cursory summary. Close reading asks students to explore the specific details of the text’s argument as well as the larger implications. Even though many of the readings assigned in Expos are challenging on the first try, students can improve their understanding through class discussion, writing, re-reading, and revision.

Students are asked not to do a summary, and Spellmeyer details the pedagogy of throwing out parts of a paper that are summary as opposed to analysis. “90 percent summary, 10 percent argument,” he notes regardingt he average assignment turned in early on. One has to ask, however, how a student can do work that is not really summary or that is more than “cursory” by only examining the text itself. First year students - and undergraduates in general - come to the classroom with limited cultural capital, or what we might call a limited database of information to draw upon. In doing a close reading, then, a student looks deep within herself, and finds some type of response (”I think….”). Without context or sources, that response can easily be cliche or commonplace. For this reason, William Coles yells at his students in The Plural I for their lack of understanding of the amateur. Coles is mistaken in his disappointment; what else can the students do but look within? They have not yet been given the opportunity to do the in-depth work he wants. Coles believes that these databases are natural, rather than built.

For me to use terms in this short post such as:

• Ways of Reading
• Expressivism
• William Coles
• Database

I have to have some level of cultural captial regarding rhetoric and composition or some type of database to draw upon. I have a PhD, so this process is not as difficult for me. I can trace a network of information without consulting sources first (and if my mental tracing is not detailed enough, I know where to look quickly). Those who are being interpellated into academic or school thinking are not yet at that level. They are left with the methodology folks like me spend much time trying to break: the writer writes based on what she already knows. What she already knows, in many cases, is limited. Writing does not become a vehicle for learning, then, but becomes a confirmation of what is known unto me. This was Expressivism’s greatest fault as a pedagogy.

This is not an argument agaist Rutgers or its own challenges regarding teaching writing across what is likely over 100 sections taught by graduate students and maybe non-tenure line instructors. I don’t believe the pedagogy I’m critiquing here is unique to Rutgers. It’s here at Missouri as well.

I spent a few minutes today watching Rutgers’ intriguing clip from a documentary on the writing program’s expository writing class.

The Expos Five from Expos the Movie on Vimeo.

I love the idea of studying one’s own program via a documentary (I wish we had done one on the CWP). This video is extremely well done. With this film, however, I was immediately drawn to some issues:

• Five papers (each five pages in length) in 15 weeks.
• An artificial breakdown of the writing process into the five tasks.
• Lack of visible exigence for the writing.
• Over dependence on analysis as the basis of a writing pedagogy (as opposed to invention).
• Over dependence of argument (via the concept of thesis) as genre.
• The claim that “no one gets an A” in a course or that there is expectation of failure (as opposed to teaching toward success).

It is too easy to critique teaching done elsewhere. Still, when I hear the fairly common cliches associated with writing circulated (cramming, last minute work, stress over five pages), I have to perform the critical gesture we supposedly value. I find this pedagogy - from a distance - problematic.

Take the students who are unable to complete five pages for the first assignment; one student notes she would have to just fill up the remaining page with quotes to get the work done. Five pages is around 1,200-1,300 words. I typically give an assignment that is around 2,000 words. The key to the assignment, of course, is not word length, but need for space to flesh out an idea. If a student is learning organization strategies, then the length of 2,000 words can be thought of as necessary space of idea development. A given idea might be broken down into components; let’s say they are each 400 words long. That means that this particular idea needs five sections. Writing 400 words about each component of the idea, then, is hardly daunting. If anything, the writer will need to be specific and to the point because it will be too easy to go over 400 words. How this breakdown works depends on what the assignment is. I would never give such generic assignments, however, as the ones posed in the course’s sequence. This breakdown is also a principle of networked thinking, but I will leave that point for now.

Another obvious pedagogical error here are the five assignments. Jim Corder showed us long ago the fallacy of assigning too much in a short period of time (such as 15 weeks) and what the results of this overload are (bad writing, cliches, drawing from the already known when one is overloaded). If academics wrote five papers in 15 weeks - and for the sake of comparison, we don’t write five pages, but the higher level equivalent of maybe 25 pages - we would be tenured rather quickly. It is not realistic to assign so many disparate projects. They are posed here as connected, but the connection feels artificial. The big project is not visible. These five tasks stress an ambiguous process without revealing what the project is supposed to entail. How are these readings functioning as heuristics? What are students learning regarding organization, style, invention, arrangement, research, etc.  from these readings?

I don’t care that it’s Rutgers or some other school. I’m more interested in what appears to be a commonplace here regarding pedagogy - a fixed idea regarding teaching that deserves to be broken down for the mythology it is. Maybe more later.

Obviously, there are individualized assessments and programmatic assessments. The ideology that drives both does not entirely differ, though many call for a distinction between the two.  In both, a single act can be measured for success or for failure. Assessment is, in turn, treated as individualized experience (the program is individualized, the body beings studied is individualized, the work is individualized, etc.). Assessment seldom asks: what drives performance beyond the individual moment? What shapes or influences work?  Or it seldom asks these questions beyond limited study (usually studying written work for a specific occasion). Activity theory pushes the questions further than most do (Prior) but still focuses on centralized acts (after all, one cannot study every activity shaping a moment).  Some of activity theory follows Emig by asking writers what they are experiencing. Description, in this case, is put back on the person doing the writing: “Describe how you write.” Experiential knowledge is important, but cannot stand on its own.

The two areas of influence I borrow from in order to shape what I’m calling networked assessment are heuristics and network theory. Heuristics teach invention. What shapes, what informs, what leads to….a certain type of thinking. It’s useful to borrow from Ulmer’s popcycle here, not because we will use the categories it provides, but because it teaches the concept of categories that, when juxtaposed, will inform thought. Thought is not an individualized experience; we are informed by a variety of categories of experience (often disparate) that come together at specific moments via connections and pattern formation. We might, then, ask, what could inform or shape a writing moment in a program so that we don’t view the program as an individualized experience? How, in other words, is a program’s work generated by the juxtaposition of various categories of experience? What does that juxtaposition tell us that we don’t already know? To do that type of assessment we can start with an already noted category:

• Experiential knowledge (what we have experienced as program directors)

And then expand the list to a variety of other categories:

• Student writing done in class
• Student evaluations
• Comparisons of the same course taught with writing and without writing
• Teacher interviews about the class
• Student writing done outside of class
• Institutional history
• Course capacity (who takes it when and why)

The list could go on, of course, There as many categories available as we want to identify. The categories, as well, are not novel. They are familiar, commonplaces of meaning. That point is important since this type of study is not relying on unknown or foreign categories of experience. These categories are often studied, though in isolation of one another. Seldom, if at all, are they seen as being agents within a network. Seldom, if at all, are they seen as being in relationship with one another. We typically emphasize the human over the non-human in assessment; we focus on the human agent and forget how it is shaped by and shapes the non-human agents in the relationship as well.

An account, or tracing, of these categories’ relationships would reveal something that previous studies have not. That revelation, then, is the assessment. The account is another word for assessment.

A major problem in assessment studies is how the object being assessed and the assessment itself are treated as “matters of fact.” This is Latour’s term employed in his known question: Has critique run out of steam? Fact, of course, should not be treated as a truth that we have somehow uncovered, a reality beyond all realities, an unveiling of what could not previously been seen, a something beyond the relationships that give rise to its various moments. Yet assessment often does just that. Its realities are given. They are truths. They have been here since some cliched dawn of time.

A recent example comes from Irv Peckham’s June College Composition and Communication piece, “Online Challenge Vs Offline ACT.” Peckham’s task is to determine which is the more valid assessment for determining student placement: the traditional ACT test or an alternative online test called iMOAT. I’m not interested in the comparison and conclusion that follows because I stop at the assumption of a given reality here. That reality tells us that diagnostic tests prove something. At no point in this essay, and we can assume at no point in the essay’s peer review, does the author ask or has the author been asked to question the practice itself. Diagnostics, for Peckham, his reviewers, and for the journal’s editor, are matters of fact. End of story.

Peckham could claim that the matter of fact is not his, but it is his university’s position (and he is victim to an already institutionalized practice). I doubt that. The journal is proof enough that if there is an institutionalized belief system here, we are it. We love matters of fact. Proof is its guide. Argument its medium. Let me show you a matter of fact, we say, in this assessment I will prove that when students do X, Y is the result. Case closed.

A networked assessment works differently. More shortly.

Cynthia Haynes once wrote that in the teaching of argument, everything is up for argument except the teaching of argument. One might say something similar about assessment.

As a WAC director, I hear a great deal about assessment. It’s a major topic of discussion at the WPA conference. It is a major topic of discussion at IWAC. The journals show numerous pieces devoted to assessment. Discuss new media and writing and the first question you get is, “how do you assess that?”  Assessment is the great mystery for WPAs. It is magical (it supposedly can save or destroy programs on its own). It is a safety net (good assessment supposedly will keep programs from being cut), it is an obligation (the mantra of some “mandate” from some place else). It provides standards (it supposedly keeps us following goals or set outcomes). WPAs are obsessed with assessment. They assess their programs. They assess student work. They view the field through the lens of assessment.

The topic of assessment, however, is seldom put under assessment. Take assessment methodology as example. There is a widespread assumption that quantitative data analysis is the method of assessment.  Such methodology might include gathering data about GPA correlation, might be based on rubric matching, might involve communal reading of student work, and might involve the collection and communal reading of student portfolios (with matching to a rubric following). This methodology depends on keywords: reliability, validity, measurement. These keywords provide a specific type of focus or lens. It is, though, a limited focus.

Typically, this work is meant to demonstrate to a supposedly hostile administration the value of the instruction being done. The work provides value to the WPA her/himself who often feels under the gun, unappreciated, and undervalued within the academic infrastructure for one reason or another. The work makes writing instruction slightly more “scientific” (we are gathering “data” after all) and thus on equal par with other university work. Thus, the keywords noted above. They are the keywords of science studies (to some extent). Assessment is posed as science.

One problem, though, is that in this type of conversation, assessment is treated as a given or a Barthesian mythology. The assumption being that assessment (at least of this sort) is “just something one does.”  Or those involved in assessment follow the Sammy Hagar mantra and change “there’s only one way to rock” to “there’s only one way to assess.” Another problem is that the gathering of such data (often done through reading student work and matching it to a rubric, student surveys, faculty surveys, GPA correlations) demonstrates causality. Indeed, causality - doing X caused one to write better or worse - is almost impossible to prove (see ANT).

Assessment depends too strongly on the concept of proof. Proof is a topos. Our values and world views depend on communal topoi (or we would have, as McLuhan noted, psychosis). As one WPA-L listserv comment notes, “gain” is the goal of this world view. Assessment should “prove” something called “gain” which tends to mean “improvement” or “skill” acquisition. Again, see ANT.

I write this because I share the contradictory spaces of WPA and cynic regarding assessment. To put it another way: While I may run a major writing program, and while I am always interested in understanding how our program functions, I am cynical of the assessment practices familiar to our field. They are repetitive (many reach the same conclusions), involve tedious work (laborious collections and reading of papers that are solved by paying readers since no one person can ever read all this work), never fully demonstrate proof (even as they claim otherwise) and in the end are done mostly because of programmatic insecurity (”we’re good, we’re really good!”). I, too, though am engaging in assessment. Our program is assessing itself. But we aren’t following this tradition I briefly outline above. Instead, we are following a practice I am calling “Networked Assessment,” a practice that treats the program as a network and that poses assessment as the network practice of tracing an account (see Latour). We are not out to prove value. We are working to trace the relationships of our program in order to better understand how our program works (the way Latour does with law in The Making of Law or with the failed Aramis project in Aramis). Value could be found in such a tracing, and likely will be found as relationships are discovered within the network, but it is not the goal. And in such a tracing, validity, reliability, and measurement are not the keywords that provide a lens. The main keyword is description.

I’ve given a couple of talks on this subject and have had a piece  that outlines the concept and approach recently accepted for publication. I want to write more on this topic in the next few days, but for now, this post introduces the challenge to assess the concept of assessing. Who watches the Watchmen, and who assesses the assessors? Let’s trace the assessors. Let’s provide an account of their work and relationships. Let’s put assessment under assessment.

Still reading Latour’s The Making of Law. If Latour has taught us in the past to describe, here his descriptions are in hyperdrive. In Reassembling the Social, he wrote, “If your description needs an explanation, it’s not a good description.” The Making of Law describes everything about the French legal process. It is a massive description. Description, Latour told us previously, is difficult to do. “To describe, to be attentive to the concrete state of affairs, to find the uniquely adequate account of a given situation, I myself have always found this incredible demanding.”

I am looking for a way to describe so that I can at least begin drafting the next project.  In my notes, collections of materials, readings, I need to start describing. But this description, unlike Latour’s project, is not meant to focus only on the details. It has to focus on the affective dimensions of craft. It has to be emotional, personal, and about obsession. It is not about the reader (as in an argument or move to persuade) but it is about me (narrative of sorts).

In a recent Details essay on the artisanal, we read that technology is at the heart of a renewed interest in all things craft.

For all its Amish-like affectations, the artisanal movement is clearly driven by technology (see “Artisanal 2.0,” opposite). What would all those people with niche obsessions do without the organizing power of the Web? It brings a nation of local crafters and consumers together, and intimacy, however far-flung, is the glue of the artisanal community.

Technology is the pattern found amid descriptions of craft. In Abstracting Craft, McCullough made a similar observation. The editors of BeerAdvocate call the current state of the industry Beer 3.0. A tab on my browser is always open to Ratebeer.com. A little description, even this little bit of description, reveals a pattern. I, the reader, find a repeating moment, idea, item, concept that will motivate and guide my work.

But the kind of description Latour advocates and/or performs - as he notes early in the book - is not reader-centric. Latour knows that the average American reader will not understand the references nor find familiarity with the French legal system. For me, the average reader will not find familiarity with craft beer nor with my obsession. So what is the point of such writing?

Method.

I finished David Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect, and despite is repetitiveness and breezy history, it contributes to the continuing question regarding writing, expression, and where we choose to express ourselves. Facebook’s contribution is recognition of the need to be involved, as McLuhan might say. We are now involved with one another at levels never before possible. We make ourselves known to each other (thus, canceling our own privacy concerns) all the time. I’m here. I’m there. I’m reading this. I’m eating that. If there is indeed a Facebook effect, it is the continuation of making ourselves known.

Weblogs helped initiate the process at levels the book could not do. This activity occurs among friends, those we know, and those we know because of some level of celebrity (we know them, but we don’t know them). Notice a fact I know about food writer Ruth Riechl. On July 12, she had lunch with food celebrity and chef Marcus Samuelsson.  Riechl decides I, or someone like me interested in food, should know this. She also decides that I should know that Samuelsson “inhaled” a Swedish hotdog with shrimp salad in three seconds.

I know about one thing they discussed over lunch (” the online site he’s creating, aimed mostly at men”), that Sameulsson has an assistant and Reichl doesn’t, that Reichl has an iPhone (”sent from my iPhone), and that Sameulsson likes hotdogs with shrimp salad. I don’t know these people outside of image (writings, TV). Now I know these items.

Where and why do we express ourselves? School promotes the essay. Online writing promotes the weblog (and subsequent favorite genre of online writers, the review). Facebook promotes status. Activity. Interests. Connections. Tastes. It is not the only outlet for such writing, but it is the most dominant because of the concept of “friend” connectivity. Its logic mixes with that of the weblog and Twitter: I must make known what I think, what I’m doing, what I like, what I dislike, who I know, etc.

Reichl is not my friend. Neither are most of the writers whose blogs show up on my RSS feed. Given the popularity of weblogs, Twitter, and Facebook, should we assume that the desire to “make known” is new? Or that for some time, people kept such desire bottled up (expressed in private diaries or unpublished work)? Schooling has done its best to interpellate writers as private thinkers. Invention and innovation works in the opposite direction. The Facebook effect is closer to that of the entrepreneur who needs to make known a given thought or idea than an essay about the meaning of a text. For some reason, we want to know and make known someone’s taste for hotdogs. Treat the photograph as metaphoric of a larger process of making and distributing information.

This morning on the Mike and Mike show, Mike Greenberg critiqued last night’s televised LeBron announcement. Greenberg took offense at the hyperbole and hype that the show promoted, arguing that LeBron had ruined his image in the process. Greg Doyle, at CBS Sports, feels the same, calling LeBron a “coward” for the media event. Others have chimed in as well.

The irony is not lost on us. Those that made LeBron “King” now complain that he has gone too far. ESPN, who pays Greenberg, televised LeBron’s high school basketball games. ESPN plays LeBron commercials all the time (my favorite is the one where he plays multiple characters at a swimming pool). For the last two years, ESPN has hyped a finals meeting between LeBron and Kobe (which has yet to occur) via speculation and further airing of commercials portraying the two as puppets. CBS Sportsline, ESPN, Sports Illustrated, and every AM Sports talk show in the U.S. have been discussing LeBron’s free agency since last year. Once this season ended, the conversation went into overdrive. You couldn’t turn on a sports show (and often a news outlet like CNN) without hearing the question: Where will LeBron go? Speculation ran wild. At the heart of this speculation was the concept of promotion. If LeBron goes to place X, he will be able to promote his image better than he can in Cleveland. So said the talking heads.

So why the hate over the one hour special? Celebritacy is made. It does not emerge out of nowhere. Those that made this King now argue against his rule. They created the meaning of the figure (after all, LeBron has never won a championship), and then complain when he fulfills that meaning (kings should rule; they should be arrogant; they should promote their image). Of course, most of sports talk is People magazine for athletics.  I have heard Greenberg complain previously about an athlete receiving too much attention, as he gives that athlete yet more attention. Interviewers, unable to find anything to ask about, ask provocative questions then turn off the cuff remarks into scandal. Image is circulated, circulated, circulated, then circulated some more as those who generate the image ask: is X over-exposed?

I couldn’t care less that LeBron went on TV. Promotion is the heart of the celebritacy moment. Promote meaning. Even though I have been a Heat fan since day one (they started playing the year after I graduated high school; my only positive connection to the city I grew up in is my love of the Heat), I spent last night watching a crappy movie on Netflix rather than the announcement. I’m used to promotion. It doesn’t faze me. The LeBron announcement is what the commentators wanted even as they say otherwise. They will promote and circulate the “scandal” of LeBron going on TV for an hour, critique the image they created, and keep alive this work well into next season. Hype can last a long time.  Good for them. Why should we pretend that news is otherwise? News, sports or other, is the promotion of a celebritacy moment. The event (Israel), the figure (LeBron), the movement (Tea Party) - news outlets turn the minor into the over-exposed. They create many, many kings. LeBron is only one such creation.