I recently came across a copy of the Spring, 2004 edition of Viewpoints, and one academic-conversation-in-print caught my eye. In “Possibilities and Purposes for Reading Texts Aloud” (Spring 2004), Charlene Leaver responds to Dr. Joseph Howard’s article “Speaking Out about Reading Aloud” (Spring 2003) by asserting that Lab activities which require students to read aloud from “real academic texts” enable them to become more familiar with an academic style of writing and reading and, perhaps, come to appreciate it. In particular, she believes reading aloud in Lab allows students to be more liberated from regular classroom constraints and, therefore, better able to focus “on making every sentence sound like the academic music that it is.” I think this is quite a beautiful way of arguing for reading aloud activities, and I can even buy into it to some extent—I actually did as I was reading Professor Leaver’s article—until I reached the part where she claims, “I have always found it surprising that, in general, the Learning Lab faculty do not respond well to this request. Often the Learning Lab faculty simply refuse to have my students read aloud.” Although she qualifies this response by Lab faculty as a “general” one, I found myself somewhat surprised at her reaction, as I can think of no Learning Lab faculty member I know or have worked with in my five years teaching in the Lab who would “simply refuse” to comply with a classroom faculty’s request; in fact, most Learning Lab faculty would be elated to receive feedback or communication of any kind from classroom faculty about how we can best support their particular objectives for their/our students. While this does not mean that we will always agree with what we’ve been asked to do, we are here to provide support and, I think, we do the best we can. However, classroom teachers need to recognize that we need support, too.
Over the years, I have been both heartened and disillusioned by classroom and Lab faculty collaboration for the Lab classes: when communication is consistent, clear, and receptive—when mutual respect is valued and practiced—Lab classes can be very productive. This also requires some amount of flexibility and adaptability on both teachers’ parts because sometimes a lesson or strategy just doesn’t work in Lab and another tactic must be taken. The point is that Lab works best through open communication between the teachers. On the other hand, when there is no communication or respect—or when a Lab instructor tries to explain why a particular activity or request didn’t work in Lab and the classroom teacher is not empathetic or sensitive or supportive—Lab instructors may not be able to provide students with the kind of help that will be most beneficial to them. From my experience, the greatest value the Lab classes present to classroom faculty is their potential usefulness in addressing the individual needs of students, and an important aspect of attending to these needs is helping them to become independent writers and readers of academic discourse.
Without falling into unrealistic, idealistic, or unfair musings about student empowerment and teacher responsibility, I think it’s important for me to explain my idea of “addressing the individual needs of students.” The theory of education I hold is one that makes me mindful in trying to resist a tendency to look upon students as abstractions. I have come to believe somewhere deep down in my teacher’s conscience that whenever we generalize and categorize our students so that they lose individuality in our minds, causing us to disregard each individual student’s needs and concerns, we fail, to a certain extent, as basic writing teachers. This failure occurs because our abstraction of our students may hinder our teaching them to develop whatever skills they may have in order to succeed as communicators of academic discourse.
The term “BW [basic writing] student” is an abstraction that can easily get in the way of teaching. Not all BW students have the same problems; not all students with the same problems have them for the same reasons. There are styles to being wrong. This is, perversely, where the individuality of inexperienced writers tends to show up, rather than in the genuine semantic, syntactic and conceptual options that are available to the experienced writer. (Shaughnessy 40)
Like Shaughnessy, Bartholomae also has observed that such abstractions are “based on the assumption that basic writers are defined by what they don’t do (rather than by what they do), by the absence of whatever is present in literate discourse: cognitive maturity, reason, orderliness, conscious strategy, correctness” (67). Such theory is valuable in reminding us that we often see and treat our students in the collective: as developmental writers or as a class rather than as a larger group composed of individuals. Of course, practicality frequently necessitates that teachers instruct and deal with students in the collective; depending on their course load, teachers can be overwhelmed and exhausted by grading, prepping, conferencing, etc. For the English 097 and 098 classes, Lab can be a place where some of that burden is relieved; through consultation, classroom teachers can specify to Lab faculty what needs for one-on-one attention students may require with their writing.
Another complication to consider when deciding to address students as individuals or as a collective is that, sometimes when we talk about the errors each individual student makes in his/her writing, we are identifying these errors as the reasons why the student exists on the margins of academic discourse. In effect, then, whether we are talking about errors of “absence” or “presence,” we have remarginalized these students in our own pedagogical discourse. But while theory is useful in reminding us of these contradictions, practicality again insists that we have to help the students improve in whatever ways we can. This means that we have to strike a balance between discerning what students do and don’t do and help them find ways to be proactive in becoming better at seeing what the quality of their writing is for themselves and making the necessary changes to develop it. Towards this end, the Learning Lab can be a valuable resource for classroom teachers and students alike.
As an aid to classroom teachers, the Learning Lab can be utilized in a number of ways to help move developmental students from the margins of academic discourse:
Use the Lab to emphasize the editing process, particularly in recognizing and correcting sentence-level errors. A large amount of Lab time often seems devoted to addressing sentence-level errors. Attention to grammatical, mechanical, punctuation, and usage errors can be productive if classroom teachers provide Lab instructors with copies of unmarked in-class or outside-assigned writing and pinpoint concerns about specific and consistent sentence-level errors. When Lab instructors initiate discussion on these kinds of errors through lessons and exercises that focus on prevention during the essay writing stage, we frequently encounter resistance because students are sorely aware that they do not know grammar rules. Therefore, talking to them about these errors using the technical language of written grammar usually confuses and frustrates them rather than helps. By referring students to their own and each other’s writing, they can better recognize how vague terms, such as “independent clause,” subordinating conjunction,” “comma splice,” “conjunctive adverb,” “subject-verb agreement,” etc., are actual elements within their own writing or are errors they really do commit. Furthermore, if our concern as teachers is each student’s concern—namely, how can he/she improve his/her writing so he/she can 1) pass this class, and 2) succeed in the college system—then focusing on the importance of the editing process appears to be key.
Although editing exercises disappointingly prolong the writing process for students, these developing writers need to be made to realize how important it is for them to see their essays as readers would—including and most importantly, their college professors. It is telling that students are so quick to perceive their classmates’ errors in anonymous peer review exercises and can offer up a plethora of suggestions of how they can be corrected, but freeze up when asked to do the same with their own writing. It’s amazing how empowered they become when their own egos are not being squelched. How, then, do we transfer that same sense of power to each student when he/she scrutinizes his/her own writing? Whether we are working on their editing skills individually or collectively, we can reinforce students’ knowledge about writing and urge them to fearlessly seize control over their own writing. Instead of reminding them that they are developmental writers, Lab and classroom teachers can explain to students that making sentence-level errors is not an indicator of their intelligence level but a sign of their inexperience as writers—and readers—of academic discourse, and that improving is within their control. These errors further demonstrate that students are trying to understand and execute the structures, vocabulary, and conventions of this discourse; in this way, their errors demonstrate that they are somewhat familiar with it—they can build on this knowledge. Both teachers can also emphasize that such errors mean that students are trying to communicate complex ideas in a medium they have not yet mastered: the ideas are there; they just have to communicate them more effectively. Along with such student validation, classroom and Lab faculty can collaborate or consult with one another on various teaching strategies and individual/collective exercises that seem to be working most with the students they share, from group exercises to peer reviews to work sheets. Open communication and visible cross-class support benefits the students since this kind of work is often tedious and frustrating, and they need a sense of stability in knowing their instructors are cooperating and like-minded.
Provide short reading and writing exercises to be done strictly in the Lab. One of the most successful and enjoyable Lab/classroom collaborations that I’ve experienced was one where the classroom teacher not only communicated with me on a regular basis, but also collaborated on devising reading and writing assignments that were specifically for the Lab class period.
Working on students’ writing in Learning Lab is a tricky exercise to negotiate: as we all know, students often wait until the last minute to draft their essays—frequently the day before the assignment is due—and when Lab instructors see the essays, we cannot offer constructive criticism to students that will make a difference since we are usually told this is the version that will be submitted regardless of our comments. We are also mindful that some classroom teachers wish us to keep our comments of students’ essays to a minimum due to an apparent concern about whether the students are developing their own ideas in their essays or if they are getting too much guidance/help. Finally, many times when classroom teachers do allot Lab time for essay writing, students conveniently forget their papers or insist that they are finished, and we find ourselves in a difficult situation where the Lab class may potentially disintegrate into a study hall period rather than stay centered around a focused and prepared activity.
One 098 teacher with whom I was fortunate to work decided that the most productive approach to dealing with these challenges was to design short reading and writing assignments to be completed in the Lab period only. She would copy small editorials or news reports and send them to Lab along with a writing prompt. In the beginning of the semester, I instructed the students on active reading strategies and led them through the reading by modeling these strategies. As the semester progressed, I had the students read independently. The short in-class essay/response paragraph allowed me to discuss essay-topic identification, thesis statement/topic sentence construction, brainstorming, outlining, paragraph development, time management, and editing/proofreading. At the end of every Lab, I collected the paragraphs and mailed them to the classroom instructor, who then gave the students credit for the work.
This 098 teacher’s approach to the Lab not only helped alleviate the common challenges Lab instructors encounter when trying to work on students’ writing, but also enabled her to troubleshoot for the writing portion of the midterm and final. Collaboration occurred when we consulted about each student’s writing and decided which areas for improvement we could tackle in Lab, including more attention to grammar problems, time management, and in-class essay writing strategies. Overall, open communication, Lab-work relevance, and student accountability made this a very successful Lab class.
Request the Reading Curriculum Lab. With communication minimized to the sending of Lab attendance sheets, the Reading Curriculum Lab appears to conveniently set up a situation where classroom and Lab faculty do not have to consult or collaborate during the semester. Classroom instructors, however, do have access to students’ Reading Lab folders and can review their work and, subsequently, give them credit for it, if they choose to do so. Though it is true the Reading Curriculum Lab enables Lab instructors to be more self-sufficient and relieves classroom teachers of any responsibility for or consideration of the Lab, the Reading Curriculum definitely provides many benefits to the students which can be applied to their classroom work.
As the Reading Curriculum Lab has been conceived and designed, students are given articles each week to read in Lab class. For a few weeks, each article approaches a common subject—tattoos, for example—but represents different textual forms: e.g. an article from a popular magazine, an excerpt from a history textbook, a portion of a medical journal. Lab instructors lead students in the reading and teach them to practice active reading applications, from composing preview questions to annotating in the margins to locating main ideas. As students become more adept at active reading strategies, other skills can be practiced and developed. They may be asked to answer reading comprehension questions (in complete sentences), which test the quality of their marginal notes and content retention as well as their ability to write brief, cohesive, and pointed answers. Advancing through the semester, Lab faculty may assign more formal in-class writing activities, such as summarizing an article, and may discuss with students any approaches they can utilize to help them become more efficient at writing various kinds of response assignments to their readings. The goal is to make the Reading Lab relevant to all the students’ potential college work so that they recognize the value of learning these approaches to reading and of integrating them into their own study practices.
The Reading Lab is a place where reading aloud activities seem appropriate, but as with all Lab lessons and work, the execution and practice of such activities may need to be negotiated. From my experience, having students read aloud in Lab is both beneficial and detrimental. For me as the Lab instructor, hearing a student read a short passage gives me some indication of his/her familiarity with academic discourse, and, in turn, signals what kind of problems he/she might execute as writers. Students also gain some benefit in hearing each other read, but, from their perspectives, reading aloud is a childish, embarrassing, and often anxiety-laden exercise. Most students are agonizingly self-conscious about reading aloud in front of their classmates, and forcing them to read often leads to resistance and resentment. To ease into the activity and to relieve some of this tension, I usually do much of the reading aloud in the beginning of the semester. Clearly this is a modeling strategy: following along in the text as I read enables students to hear the rhythms and sounds of academic discourse as well as to become more familiar with how textual signals change rhythm and sound. Even a form of punctuation which we academics often take for granted—the dash—can be an epiphany to students when they understand how its presence not only impacts the text visibly but also aurally. After a few classes, more and more students feel comfortable enough to volunteer to read aloud from the articles, and while a few of them will still resist and refuse to read aloud, many of them gain significant confidence and demonstrate better proficiency at recognizing and reading the textual markers of written academic discourse by the end of the semester.
Obviously the preceding suggestions are anecdotal and experiential, so I do not mean to say these are the only successful approaches to Lab classes and faculty interaction. In terms of viability, it is important to acknowledge that most activities have the best chance of being a productive learning experience for students if both teachers are cooperative and supportive of one another. Such support also necessitates that adaptability be a key component of collaboration when some strategies or approaches do not work. Therefore, rather than regard any Lab instructors’ expressed concern about a certain exercise or request as simple resistance based on assumedly different teaching theories or practices, classroom faculty would do well to acknowledge Learning Lab faculty as colleagues instead of as assistants and, in turn, receive their comments as reports about the Lab class environment for their particular class so as to determine ways for maximizing Lab activities for this group of students. Towards this end, we all can contribute positively to helping our students engage with academic discourse as more proficient and independent readers and writers.
Works Cited
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Maintained by Jay Howard,May 2006