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09/28/2004 Archived Entry: "WPA II"

WPA II
This post follows the previous and the two comments offered by John and Derek.
I'm reading Nancy Sommers' article in the latest CCC, "The Novice as Expert," and here we find a nice example of the WPA instituting order. Like Andrea Lunsford's St. Martin's Handbook, Sommers justifies her work and research as WPA at Harvard with student comments collected in an evaluation process. All of the comments are supportive and enthusiastic. Of course, students experience joy and pleasure in a first year writing course. But many also don't. Where are those students? Why this "ordered" view of the first year experience that sounds so perfect and wonderful? Where are the students who complain about the unqualified teachers hired to man the class, who are in and out of the university as fast as they can (another gig in 20 minutes to make/you only pay me to teach and nothing more/I don't care), who really don't know themselves about writing, who are just passing time until a better job comes along? The consequences of this kind of experience, particularly in the urban university, is students drop out due to bad feelings about the low quality of fyc. Sommers doesn't seem to be aware of such problems, not even by the end of the essay when brief mention of student failure is overshadowed by "order" again.
Where are the unordered experiences? This essay reads like a morality piece – echoing the morality central to literacy studies. It's too easy to dismiss Sommers at Harvard (and Lunsford at Stanford) as working with the elite students (thus, these students enjoy fyc or appreciate it more). I don't buy that argument. What I do see is the overall trend to order our WPA experience, and to do so often in terms of morality and life learning experiences (“I’m a better person because of this class/literacy”). No dissent here, folks. Look all you want, but you won’t find it. Look at this cliché Sommers repeats about student "Jeremy":
"Everyone questions everything at college. Each day another thing I used to see as an immovable truth in my life is severely shaken."
Now where have I heard that one before? The Cosby Show (Theo goes to college...) or just about any popular representation of the collegiate experience. Hardly enlightening.
We see these same ideas carry over into technology-oriented pedagogies (also see recent thread on WPA-L for evidence) where order is foregrounded in its usage and application (professional writing/usability studies) or refusal to acknowledge the half-hazard nature of digital rhetoric which is often allusive, confusing, and straight up weird.
The two forces come together in these kinds of essays, like Sommers’, which repeat story after story of students praising the fyc experience. Why this repetition? So you, too, dear reader will see the necessity for order and compliance in fyc. Don’t rock the boat. This is ideology at its loudest. "Hey you!" interpellation to make us all nice and ordered.

Posted by John @ 09/29/2004 07:42 PM EST

Jeff wrote:
There you go. My critique of this genre. It will always end up happy in the end. But we know that's really not the case.

Yes, the rare unhappy pieces are published pseudononymously in the CHE, often as swan songs when one leaves teaching, or sometimes as quasi rants in local paper op. ed. pages that typically blame the students.

The only other place you'll see unhappy, is in larger scale studies where a research is observing or commenting on the teaching of another, and where the person is detached enough to be a little more frank or a little less need of applying a redemptive coat, though they might end with some prescriptive calls for change.

Research in the Teaching of English type of pieces, ethnographies, and dissertations do this. Empirical surveys reveal these disjunctions too. But it takes a kind of forensic remove you often don't find in the first person narrative or the textbook genres.

I think those kinds of once-removed studies are needed more maybe, to balance the information.

But as a practical matter, most teachers know that the happy stories have some degree of artiface and they know to correct for that when they try to apply a pedagogy. They know after having taught at least one course, that things aren't always a 100 percent.

That's the blessing of a genre, you internalize its limits.

Posted by Nick Carbone @ 09/28/2004 04:40 PM EST

"But even that genre, the this-didn't-work essay, is usually a story of redemption, ending in what I learned and will do different (better or never again) insights that portend toward a stable future."

There you go. My critique of this genre. It will always end up happy in the end. But we know that's really not the case.

Posted by jeff @ 09/28/2004 04:30 PM EST

I think, in the context of Lunsford's book, Jeff, that the stories tend to be positive because that's explicitely what the book seeks to model: students who had a positive experience. So on page 964, which shows a student portfolio coverletter, the sample letter is from a student who wrote a good letter (and did well in the course where the letter comes from). So yes, it's a success story.

In the context of the book it's to help teachers who choose the book convey what they think will be successful to students, not only in terms of a good portfolio coverletter, but in terms of what those teachers hope students will get out of the course. Or put another way, teachers *want* students to come away from their courses feeling like they learned the things the course was trying to teach.

So yeah, that's part of the success narrative, and it's an important part of teaching and WPAing. I think you need to look at different kinds of research/essays for stories of failure. Steve Krause's piece in Kairos on when blogging goes bad is an example, http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/9.1/binder.html?praxis/krause/index.html.

But even that genre, the this-didn't-work essay, is usually a story of redemption, ending in what I learned and will do different (better or never again) insights that portend toward a stable future.

That is, essays that describe disorder seek cures.

So either the student learns a lot or teachers focus on students who didn't learn a lot and figure out how to cope with that. Those are the two strands you see in publishing publically.

Students liked my course essays are often arguments for a teaching pedagogy. Or, in my business, a textbook's approach, under the phrase class-tested. And usually these things are true. But in any approach, there's always a percentage of students who won't be pleased.

I also think we write about success and/or redemption because in private, in hallway conversations, we obsess over the negative comments and evaluations. We spend more time worrying about the one or derisive comments, or often more poignantly, the one or two that calmly reject what we tried or say simply and nicely that what we tried just never worked.

But that's a kind of private pain that doesn't get published much. Or if it does, it becomes a redemption story.

I think the impulse for the work-a-day instructor who doesn't have tenure, some 70 percent or so of FYC course instructors is built in because job reviews will frequently note the evaluations that criticize, even when 90 percent of them praise.

There's thing management feel compelled to do: look for something, anything to critique. And for contingent faculty, evaluations are often the source of that. So the success and redemption narratives, in addition to touting programs up the academic food chain, also touch on the need for instructors to find comfort when their jobs might be on the line.

It's a powerful set of forces.

Posted by Nick Carbone @ 09/28/2004 04:24 PM EST

Hi Nick
Thanks for the response.
One thing, though, that I'm not comfortable with, and you're not addressing, is how these stories of fyc experience are always: I learned a lot.
In Lunsford's book, one place it occurs is on pg 964:

“In just ten weeks, my persuasive writing skills have improved dramatically, thanks to many hours spent writing, revising, polishing, and (when I wasn’t writing) thinking about my topic”

Why these narratives? They re-enforce a specific order of the "good work" we do and students are supposed to do. That is all fine, of course; we want to do good work. But they are not realistic assessments as well. They are about "ordering" student behavior (and, of course, instructor behavior). In the Lunsford text (not Sommers') a student is the audience. By reading this "other" student response, she is supposed to, in turn, be ordered .

You write:
"So I don't see how a WPA can proceed without some order. Or how a textbook can be orderless, even if it were purely hypertextual in every sense of that word. But it should be possible to create a model where there was room for recreation and reinvention."

There will/should be order. The question is how much do we allow "order" to become a trope which doesn't reflect the need to also have lack of order (so invention can occur)? In other words, we can be restricting our ability to innovate b/c of too much order.

I'm drawn to the puncept as one model of digital invention because its logic is associative, and thus not predetermined by an order (though we can argue that an order may develop). The print model would be the outline. Order your thoughts first. The puncept would be: uh...what does this remind me of? Huh. Never thought of that...what does that mean to join these two?

Posted by jeff @ 09/28/2004 02:47 PM EST

I started responding to this post here in this comment, and as I wrote, it got longer and longer, so I converted it to a blog entry that I put here: http://ncarbone.blogspot.com/2004/09/research-and-order-in-wpa-land.html

For here, I'll just say, I'd really love to see student's puncepting on Hacker/Hackers, just as long as it didn't involve students actually hacking dianahacker.com. ;-)

Posted by Nick Carbone @ 09/28/2004 02:28 PM EST