Authenticity of Learning, Inquiry, and Audience

Over Valentines Day weekend in 2008, I met up with my future husband (though we hardly knew it then) at the AWP Conference in Chicago (held at the same Hilton that Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones have their great shoot-up scenes in The Fugitive). I was a creative writer back then, but I was apparently already losing touch with the professional side of my inner poet because I skipped all but two of the panels and spent most of my time in the Chicago Art Museum across the street. I say I lost touch with the professional side of my inner poet, because all the authenticity of the fleshy parts of my inner poetness were drinking in more inspiration from the Chagall stained glass than had I ended up in panels from 9:00–5:00.

Ferris Bueller's Day Off is one of my favorite John Hughes films. I always feel like Hughes should have been a professor because his criticism of pedagogy is brilliant. Hughes seems to be an advocate for collaboration, voice, and finding the authentic audience. Ferris Bueller's high school is a hyperbolic example of everything inauthentic and dry in traditional education. There is no inquiry in the classroom, no real questions, no real discovery, and no real audience. Ferris and friends apply more critical thinking and reflection during their day off than they ever could have managed sitting in the stuffy classroom where even history seems like something that never could have happened outside of the midterm test. I like to think that my similar days off from an important conference were comparably inspirational (I did, after all, have enough wits about me to recognize good things in the man I stared at Hopper's "Nighthawks" with, enough to end up marrying him six months later to the day).

What I mean by all this is that when Bueller and the gang go to the Chicago Art Institute, with Dream Academy's cover of The Smiths' "Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want" playing through the montage, I am always struck by the profundity of their experience. "Please let me get what I want," indeed. This is a film about finding real experiences in a world of hypocritical, routine delusions of school, work, jobs, money, responsibility.

When Cameron stares at Seurat's "Sunday Afternoon" until the pointillism blurs into abstraction and he realizes the child staring out at him through the painting actually has no face, but rather a fleshy blank combination of pink and beige dots--well, it's a gorgeous scene, a scene he wouldn't have seen at his high school.

So what is it that made the Chicago Art Institute trip authentic? Why are the conversations between Bueller, Cameron, and Sloane mixed parts shallow and brave? Why are they authentic to each other, despite their great differences? I'm reminded me of another Hughes classic, The Breakfast Club, and the great discourse community created by the most stereotyped and iconic members of high school characters in a situation that never should have happened in their routine, regular worlds outside of Saturday morning detention.

Perhaps what I'm going for is a sense of spontaneity and chaos. Unfortunately, this is exactly the type of learning that you can't plan in advance. I have to think about this some more before I'll know what to say about it. But I think there must be a way to run a classroom that allows for a sense of chaos. I know there are essays in our composition text for 5060 that talks about this. If only I could have my own day off to read it right.

Why Goofing Off in Class Can Be Good, or, My Hippie Creed

The most influential professor of my life is a woman named Sharon Morgan who works at a small university in southeastern Idaho and who doesn't have a PhD, but who did publish her memoirs at the start of her career. She is the head of the Writing Center, and I worked for her as an undergraduate. The job required that we enroll in a 2-credit writing seminar taught by Sister Morgan (it was a religious university we attended, where instead of specifying between Dr. and Prof., we were asked to refer to our teachers as Brother or Sister) that included lessons in both tutoring and composition. Our underlives were not only welcome, but demanded. Our knowledge of her underlife was another requirement. She taught personal essays before she taught anything else. Every semester (usually more than once), we would have a big barbecue at her house by a river, where she lives alone with a cat and a dog.

That class mattered. That job mattered. Sister Morgan was our mentor, our respected professor, and our friend. We rode her canoe in the river, we made birdhouses with her on her back porch, we had movie marathons, played cards, and did homework there on weekends. We cried over relationship breakups on her sofa, and we all read her memoir even though she told us not to bother with it.

My point is, we were safe to be goofy, and we were safe to be serious. We had a large notebook that we kept in the Writing Center where we could all leave entries and talk to each other even if we tutored on different days, different hours. Knowing each other was important. We read each others' writing, knew each others' interests. We gave each other criticism because we wanted success for each other. Being one of Sister Morgan's tutors meant giving a part of yourself to the cause.

I've worked at other Writing Centers to know that ours was unnaturally effective. Her tutors became better students in their other classes. Her enthusiasm for the writing process and for literature was not only admirable but addictive. Our work felt important. The students we tutored felt important. Writing was important.

After laughing hard while playing games and tossing frisbees, we would quiet down and talk about all the kinds of serious topics undergrads are supposed to talk about late at night with each other, and we would talk until well into the a.m. at this professor's home. These conversations always felt so important. So vital. So meaningful. We would go home with things we wanted to research, things we wanted to write about.

Yesterday's class was a little silly. My underlife of a GoogleChatter came to the forefront, and my fingers forgot I was in a graduate seminar. But that doesn't mean I wasn't thinking. That doesn't mean I wasn't learning from others. In fact, it reminded me of old times, when "collaborating" wasn't pointed out or scheduled in, but it just happened because I WANTED to hear what these people I loved had to say. I wanted their fingers in my brain/heart clay, and I wanted not a grade, but to BECOME someone educated, strong, and eloquent. Embrace the underlife, I say, in all it's multitudinous forms. Care about where your students are coming from, and don't let them mark you as a robot. What the hell is this all for if the only thing I want from my students is to make them do what I say? That's not why I'm in this gig.

Here's a couple of us painting Sister Morgan's walls after a Pre-Professional Writing Conference she encouraged us all to read essays at (which we did):

Keeping the Band Together

In Thursday's class, we discussed social-epistemic rhetoric inside the classroom, as well as inside the academic institution. It all comes down to communication and respect, I suppose. Students need to respect students and teachers, teachers need to respect students and fellow teachers, the administration needs to respect students and teachers, and students and teachers need to respect the administration. Unfortunately, we also need to stay on the defensive--after all, teachers give out the grades, students dish out the teacher evaluations, and the all-mighty administration makes the rules of everything from class size to tenure. We want to be civil, and we want to be kind, but we also want to watch our own backs.

Students hate group work when they are the ones doing all the work (or of there is that one student that seems to hold them back). Teachers get frustrated when students don't have enough respect to pay attention to instructions. I'm not sure about the administration, because I've never been an administrator, and, as far as I'm concerned, they are the Man. And nobody loves the Man.

The last English department I taught in, we used to say that the campus was like Narnia in the wintertime, and even the trees had eyes and ears. Teachers weren't safe to voice their opinions, and one bad student review could result in major consequences for even the most weathered professor. Teachers turned against other teachers, and divisions between departments made faculty meetings full of scowls and tightly folded arms. The crazy thing about it all was that these people were some of the finest people I had known as an undergraduate. It was astounding to see how quickly a tight-knit department could become prickly and offended as soon as the administration started suggesting that they knew more about how their classroom should look than the teachers themselves.

I've started to see how this can happen in our classes, too. As we've talk about ideologies in the classroom, I've started to realize how I have a tendency of not only pushing my own ideologies on my students, but I question their current ideology and suggest that I know more about how they should run their lives than they do.

For example, I think students should read. I think they are cheating themselves if they don't. I think students should know current events. I think students should take their homework seriously.

But there are different ways of expressing these ideas without making my students scowl and tightly fold their arms. I think social-epistemic rhetoric helps keep the band together, because it isn't silencing anyone's current worldviews or value hierarchies. Instead, it invites everyone to bring ideas to the table in a safe environment where everyone, including the teacher or the administration, agrees to think dialectically. Maybe it's okay if not everyone stays absolutely current on the daily news. In fact, David Quammen wrote an essay on Darwin and earthworms that suggests that it can be dangerous for everyone to be tuned in to the same news anchors, and that, perhaps, studying something seemingly unimportant could be just as ethical and rewarding.

I'm not sure how this all works, or how I'll implement it in this next Monday's class, but I do know that John needed to be nicer to Paul, Paul needed to be nicer to John, George needed to speak up a little more, and everyone could have listened to Ringo better. Nevertheless, the White Album still kicked ass.

Blogs and Collaborative Learning

When I was a student, I never cared much for group projects--unless my group was full of really awesome people. In other words, the best group projects were the ones where I knew the people in my class, and we knew the teacher well enough to know to what he or she would be impressed with. We knew our collective ethos, and we knew our audience.

I put my students into some kind of partner/group collaborative work every week we meet for class. It's the only way I can get them talking to each other since we only meet once a week for an hour and twenty minutes. I don't like that I don't know my students' names. For the first time since my very first semester teaching freshman composition in 2003, I don't know all of my students' names.

It's not necessarily the number, either. Working at my last university, I taught a 5-5-4 schedule: five three-credit classes winter semester, five three-credit classes summer semester, and four three-credit classes fall semester (the school ran on a trimester system, and we only had a one-and-a-half month break between summer and fall semesters). At one point, I had 125 students in four composition classes and a British literature survey course. I knew all of their names. I saw them more than once a week. I encouraged them to get to know each other outside of class by putting them in four-person groups, requiring peer reviews to take place outside of class in the location of their choice. I assessed them by reading their reflections on how the peer reviews went, as well as by skimming over their revision ideas prompted by questions I prepared to guide them through their peer review process.

One semester, I had a British Literature class of only twenty students. They were a little shy, save five or six talkers, and I worried that not everyone was getting enough discussion in during class. So we started a blog. It's a private blog, so I won't link to it here, but my image up top is an example of a post inspired by Swift's "A Lady's Dressing Room." Another great one I got later on was about "The Art of the Ancient Mariner." It included five images of art inspired by the Mariner over the decades. Besides via blogging, how else could a student have shared these images or even had the desire to look them up and share them with the class?


The blog was a riot. Multiple students emailed me after the course was over and thanked me for the opportunity to share their thoughts in that way. They said they struggled in class discussions, and this gave them an opportunity to think about the literature that they didn't get inside the classroom. The shy students found they could say much more via computers, and everyone loved added YouTube clips and pictures to their posts on Defoe, Dryden, Pope, and, later in the semester, the Romantics. We had great discussions online that prompted our discussions when we met for class later in the week (it was a Tuesday/Thursday class).

I had my students in three groups, with responsibilities to post on the blog rotating every three weeks. In one week, everyone from Group One would post reading responses to that week's reading, and then everyone (including Group One) would post three comments to whatever posts they wanted to (and they could post three times to the same post, too). What happened was that almost everyone posted MORE than three times, and some of the conversations grew long and interesting. Not every week was this effective, but it was about four hundred times more effective than the semesters I used discussion forums via Blackboard.

Blogging can be an excellent way to get students collaborating outside of class. But it helps to meet with students more than once a week, and it helps to know their names.

I don't feel like my classes right now can collaborate with each other because there is no incentive to know each other. Maybe for next semester I can figure out how to incorporate groups in my classes that meet outside of class. I'm just not sure I would know how to assess their participation in the 8 points allotted to me for instructor assignments outside the regular curriculum.

Four Things

I thought it was interesting that Fulkerson placed Peter Elbow in the Rhetorical area of composition, since he is usually placed in the Expressivist corner. This made me consider where I overlap as a composition teacher and a writer. The fact is, I find all four corners important inside a classroom and within my own essays.

Formalism, though frequently given a bad name because it focuses on the outfit of an essay as opposed to the heart of the essay, is still a crucial part of any composition classroom. I also disagree that Formalism is the "science" of composition. To be honest, I don't feel that "science" is a correct opposition to "art." Jacob Bronowski in The Creative Mind argues that all art can become a science if the creativity is taken out, and likewise, all science can become an art as soon as creativity (such as when forming hypotheses) appears. The definitions become problematic. My point is, sentence structure, diction, and language devices can be incredibly artful, and important for establishing ethos. However, formalism comes after a student has discovered something to say. Grammar means nothing if the essay isn't saying anything.

Mimesis is also a crucial part of the composition classroom because it provides a context for the students. One needs to be a great reader in order to discover what needs to be written. A student needs to research in order to formulate their own educated opinions on their subjects. A student needs to be introduced to other people talking about their subject in order to join the conversation. Imitation is a crucial part of the artistic process of finding your own voice. There is no need to reinvent the wheel, but once you know how the wheel works, it enables you to change the way the wheel is used or what it's made of.

Expressivism balances the potentially robotic Engfish that may result from mimesis. It isn't enough to read how others write--students need to find their own voices, too. However, expressing oneself is often easier after activities categorized under mimesis because students can learn about themselves by seeing not only who they are like, but who they are different from. It isn't enough just to learn how to imitate, however. Students need to learn to speak. They need to be able to create their own ideas and make their own connections, and to be able to phrase their words in a style that is theirs. Otherwise, they can never be true skeptics.

I would say that I learn more towards Rhetorical than any of the four, however. I think that's why I remember liking Peter Elbow from my earlier graduate studies; Elbow tries to work self-expression into a rhetorical situation where the audience is #1. For me, that's what composition boils down to: being able to reach your audience with something you want to say.

That said, my top four things are as follows (Note: this a rough, rough draft...not anything I would copy and paste into a teaching philosophy):

1. (Rhetorical) Audience is number one. Students must learn to imagine their audience members as they write. Ideally, they should write to a real audience and receive real feedback (oral presentations, sending letters to real recipients, online blogging or posting).

2. (Expressivist) Revision is the key to staying true to your own voice. Process counts, and it begins with free-writing. Internal critics need to be shut off, and students need to learn to explore in their writing, not being afraid to sound dumb, change their minds halfway through, or write a bunch of garbage before churning out some gems. The first few drafts will only partially say what they mean.

3. (Mimetic) Research is necessary for all types of writing. Even personal narratives should require some checking of facts or interviewing others involved in the story. Students need to learn that research isn't always as formal as they imagine, and they use research methods every time they look up a pizza menu online. Research should be as natural to their writing process and using spellcheck.

4. (Formalist) Style, diction, and grammar count. In order to speak what you feel, in order to reach your intended audience, and in order to join a conversation of outside authors, the form and functions of your essay need to be appropriate and correct. The art of writing exists in its form. Just as you wouldn't serve a piece of cake to someone on the lid of a garbage can, you wouldn't want to showcase your critical thinking under a smattering of comma splices and hanging modifiers. It shows respect to the audience, to yourself, and to your subject to clean it up. Even if you don't wear deodorant or shave your face or your legs in real life, you ought to at least make your writing respectable. You'll reach a greater audience that way.