The following text of Evan Seymour's presentation ws the focus for this year's Scholarship of Teaching and Learning program. The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) was first defined by Ernest Boyer in his 1991 Carnegie Report “Scholarship Reconsidered” and has been honed by Lee Shulman, current President of the Carnegie foundation, and scholars such as Pat Hutching and tom Angelo. While the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning has not been around long enough to have engendered a range of definitions and analyses, three principles espoused by Lee Shulman seem to have achieved ready agreement. These are that SoTL must, like all good scholarship, be 1) part of the public record, 2) susceptible to critical review, and 3) accessible for exchange and use by other members of one’s community. Clearly, Evan’s work on his syllabus (the syllabus is available from Tom Ott via e-mail), his presentation of it last September, and the appearance of that presentation in print here serve as a vine model of the SoTL initiative. Viewpoints encourages response to Evan’s text as well as original articles that address the practice of teaching at Community College of Philadelphia. The Spring 2005 SoTL agenda will be distributed to faculty mailboxes early in the Spring semester.Tom Ott, editor
If Gerald Graff’s book Clueless in Academe is right, we college teachers are not doing a very good job. We fail, he claims, to bring our students into those academic conversations that constitute the real life of college, that “life of the mind stuff” that some students dismiss, only a few students grasp, and many never hear of.
Graff’s conclusions are based on his investigations of classroom culture – particularly as that culture is expressed in the writing students do – in high schools, community colleges, undergraduate curricula, and graduate schools. Everywhere, he says, the story is the same: when students write, they write as if no one is “listening,” as if no one else is “talking,” as if there were no conversations going on of which their writing is a part.
The writing that results is dreary stuff, with students either merely repeating what their textbooks say or coming up with their “own opinions,” which they believe to be unrelated to what others have said but are usually repetition of some piece of popular culture. The poverty of students’ choices here is well expressed in their frequently asked question, “Do you want the facts, or can I use my own opinion?”
I think Graff is onto something: whatever the sources of this intellectual poverty under which our students suffer, we college teachers are the ones who must change our ways if students are to change theirs. Somehow we need to teach our courses and structure the college curriculum in ways that will initiate students into the conversations that constitute the fields in which we teach.
Graff is not alone in thinking that colleges and college teachers need to move in this direction. For the most part, he is working within a concept of student writing developed by David Bartholomae and his colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh. Like Bartholomae in his famous essay, “Inventing the University,” Graff sees students facing the daunting task of having to “invent the university” every time they sit down to write an exam or paper in a college setting. Bartholomae and his colleagues several years ago invented a six-credit reading / writing course for “marginal” students that provided a reading and writing environment that engaged the students in a semester-long series of common research projects and conversations that imitated the conversations that professional researchers commonly engage in.
The idea that what we college teachers should be doing is bringing students into some ongoing academic / professional conversations is seriously at odds with some other views of what we should be doing. Let me briefly describe three of these opposing views.
The first might be called the Fill-In-The-Blank approach to student writing and to student discourse in general, including class “discussions.” Here teachers ask students to “tell me what I told you.” The classic written form for this approach is of course the fill-in-the-blank exam. In English Composition, the classic fill-in-the-blank form is the 500-word theme, where students follow a particular form of thought – thesis statement, three supporting topic sentences and their attached paragraphs, and a concluding paragraph that repeats the thesis statement. The teacher is the only serious reader for such writing, and his / her role is reduced to that of clerk who checks each theme to be sure it has all five of its basic parts.
A second view of student writing sometimes appears in the classroom simultaneously with the first and is sometimes called “Correct Writing.” Here the focus is on correct grammar, punctuation, and spelling, and the characteristic intellectual activity is the spoken and written drill.
A third approach to student writing arose as a challenge to these first two and is often referred to as “Expressivism.” Here the teacher’s effort is to get each student to find his or her own “authentic voice,” a voice that has been denied and left undeveloped by years of schooling dominated by the suffocating forces of fill-in-the-blank and correct writing. Ken Macrorie and Peter Elbow have been two of the most eloquent advocates of this approach.
The one big problem with these three widespread but very different approaches to student writing is that they ignore the intellectual environments that distinguish colleges and universities from training schools. Whether focusing on blanks to be filled in, commas to appear in the proper places, or personal emotions to be expressed, all three of these approaches ignore the conversations that constitute the intellectual life of colleges and professions.
Thus my effort in following a fourth way, the way pointed to by Graff, Bartholomae, and others, has caused me to put together an English Composition syllabus focused on bringing students into an academic conversation, pushing them towards thinking of all their writing tasks in college as parts of some larger academic conversations. That is the large rhetorical goal of the syllabus for its student readers.
As mentioned earlier, I have been brought to this in part by writers like Gerald Graff and David Bartholomae. But I have also been influenced by a number of experiences here at Community College of Philadelphia, among them teaching and learning in the Honors Program, participating in two large and interesting but failed attempts at curricular reform, the General Studies Curricular reform project and the even broader “Dimensional Reform” effort. Much of what I learned there has been well presented in what is still one of the best books on community colleges, Martin Spear and Dennis McGrath’s The Academic Crisis of the Community College. But Martin and Dennis are prophets in our own country, and so, of course, we pay them little heed.
Had either of those curricular reforms succeeded, students in almost every course in the college would find themselves writing extensively in a manner appropriate to the academic and professional conversations that constitute the field to which that course belongs. If those reforms had succeeded, the Administration would have been faced with the legitimate demand that class size maxima for many courses be reduced from thirty-six to something in the low twenties in order to allow for serious faculty attention to serious student writing. But the reforms failed, and so student writing at Community College of Philadelphia is confined largely to courses in the English Department.
This confinement has many costs, two of the most interesting and perverse being that English teachers have come to believe that only they are qualified to teach writing – and the mirror image of that belief: the belief by teachers outside the English Department that, since English teachers have failed to teach Comunity College of Philadelphia students to write, there is no sense in assigning writing in their own courses.
Perhaps there will be a third wave of curricular reform and some strong version of Writing Across the Curriculum established, with, for instance, at least one writing intensive course required in every discipline. Yes, I know, English composition is already required, but I am talking about writing intensive courses that are also courses central to a student’s “major” or curriculum. On this model, employed at such public four-year colleges as Millersville here in Pennsylvania, chemistry majors, for instance, find themselves writing as chemists in one or more of the courses required by their major – chemistry courses, taught by chemistry teachers.
But until such a reform, we will have to work on a smaller scale, having some hope that widespread small scale projects will build up pressure for school-wide curricular reform. Perhaps too Comunity College of Philadelphia’s Faculty Council on Education would respond to such pressure by focusing its interest in General Education on making writing intensive courses central to every curriculum.
In any case, these concerns about creating a college experience that places student writing inside the academic conversations that constitute our fields of study are what have shaped my work on the writing course represented here today by the syllabus entitled "Conversations about Language and Friendship."
As stated earlier, what I think I am doing is placing students into an academic conversation and encouraging them to write within that conversation, paying careful attention to what others in that conversation have said and to what effect they want their writings to have on that conversation. As someone whose professional training is in English language and literature, the conversations which I am qualified to lead fall within that broad field. In some past semesters I have had students write within conversations about literary works, short stories mostly, but recently I have moved over to conversations in another sector of my field, linguistics, the analysis of language. Finding in this sector a conversation which can become accessible to first-year college students is something of a challenge, but there are a number of linguists, such as the sociolinguist Deborah Tannen, who sometimes write for a general audience but do so in a way that honors the complexity of the linguistic concepts which they treat.
The initial presentation of the conversation in which Tannen is the major speaker and students are also participants opens the syllabus: on pages 3 to 4 students are told that the entire semester will be taken up with conversations that employ Tannen’s concepts, which provide a way of understanding how informal conversation helps both maintain and break friendships. Those concepts are to be applied to a series of conversations that appear in a half dozen ten-minute plays from an anthology titled Take Ten. The reading, note-taking, discussing, and writing involved in this semester-long conversation is summarized in the second section of the syllabus, pages 4 to 5, and presented in day-by-day detail in a schedule for the complete semester that runs from page 12 to page 35.
An educational issue these sections of the syllabus raise is this: why begin with, why focus on conversation? After all, our students come to us with so many needs, with “lack of preparation” in so many areas of college life: organization of their studying, ability to cope with abstraction and complexity in what they read, correctness in their writing, sense of what kinds of remarks are appropriate in a college classroom, etc., etc. Why focus on conversation?
One answer to these concerns is that a single, semester-long conversation such as that mapped out in the syllabus addresses simultaneously several problem areas and does so with careful repetition throughout the semester. Students are eased into a regular pattern of study by being given relatively small but significant reading and writing to do for every day of class. The writing usually takes the form of note-taking on the reading, note-taking of the “double entry” form described on pages 7 to 8 of the syllabus. This form, invented by Ann Bertoff and Bruce Ballenger, has students making a sharp distinction between what others say (placed to the left of a line down the middle of the page) and what the student says in response (placed to the right of the line).
A focused semester-long conversation also addresses some of the critical reading problems students have. Because the amount of reading is relatively small – Tannen’s book is 193 pages long, and we take an entire semester to work our way through it – there is time to examine very closely in class discussion the complexities and abstractions that make it a truly college-level text. In order to participate in the class discussions, to take notes on such discussions, and to write papers that draw on those discussions, students find it necessary to read, reread, and take careful notes on the text itself. They don’t do very well at this at first. But there is a lot of practice, a lot of repetition that occurs even as we move from chapter to chapter, and each concept builds on the one before.
In short, conversation shapes everything in the course: reading, note-taking, class discussions, note-taking during class discussions, and the writing of essays are all interdependent.
A second pedagogical and curricular issue is addressed by two sections that run from page 5 to page 7: the issue of classroom behavior appropriate to college students. These two sections get a lot of attention on the first day of class where they are the topic of small-group and large-group discussions. When a faculty group last Spring discussed this syllabus, these two sections again got most of the attention on our first day of discussion. I think that attention is caused in part by the fact that faculty (and, to some extent students) see student “misbehavior” as a serious pedagogical issue and a real problem for both the misbehavers and for students who encounter them in the classroom. “They don’t know how to behave like college students” is the frequent complaint.
These two sections “The Problem of Making a Space for a Real Conversation” and “Six Rules and Customs” provide two appeals to its student readers to abide by the six rules – be on time, no leaving class during the period, no food or drink, no side conversations, no cell phones, no packing up until the class session has ended. Those two appeals are first, to the individual student’s vanity, and second, to each student’s sense of what is good for the class as a whole. Both appeals are fairly simple and generally have been effective. The personal vanity appeal is “Don’t look like a fool – be taken seriously as a real college student.” The collective appeal broadens that: “If we are to have a real college conversation here, certain environmental conditions friendly to such conversation need to be in place. Let us all take the conversations in this classroom as serious preparation for a successful college and professional career.”
A third area of pedagogical and curricular concern is addressed by the section subtitled “Appearing in Public on the Page” (pages 8 to 10), by the “front matter” of each chapter (for instance, for Chapter One, pages 13 to 15), and by the descriptions of the five essays to be written outside of class, the first of which appears pages 16 to 17. That area of concern can be expressed by this question: what intellectual relations among students, professors, and the texts they consider best serve students’ progress in college? To put that question in the framework within which I have been working: in the conversation that constitutes a course of study, what roles should students, professors, and the writers they discuss play?
Intellectual relations among students is dealt with quite directly in the section whose full title is “Becoming a Serious Participant in the Conversation: Appearing in Public on the Page” on pages 8 to 10 of the syllabus. The apparent focus of that section is on the importance of proofreading, of getting the grammar, punctuation, and spelling right. But the underlying argument sharply divides this course’s approach to such matters from courses taught by those who one way and another insist that students must be correct first and then go on to think. This syllabus’s and therefore this course’s approach make fellow students the real readers for all the essays written in the course. Students don ’t believe that, of course, especially at first, but by the end of the semester have come quite a ways towards writing real essays for real readers. And from the first essay on, most students show themselves willing and able to find and correct errors in grammar punctuation and spelling. Avoiding the embarrassment of seeing one’s unproofread work in public turns out to be a quite powerful motivation.
I should also say, however, that one interesting feature of some of the strongest students’ writing is that as they attempt to put forward more and more complex ideas in the course of the semester, they sometimes fall into what look like “basic” errors. Run-on sentences, for instance, sometimes appear where they had not when the student was writing more simply. Such errors, then, are sometimes a sign of the student stretching, moving forward to more serious and complex thought.
An important practice that pushes students to take their fellow students seriously as readers and to get their own writing in turn to be taken seriously by those readers is the practice of publishing and distributing all the papers written for a particular assignment to all students in all of the sections of that course that I am teaching in that semester. There are no anonymous essays; the author’s name is at the top of the page. In class we discuss the lines of argument various student papers have taken, with an eye to furthering the semester-long conversation on Tannen’ s sociolinguistic concepts and their application and also with an eye to the rhetorical strategies that the papers deploy.
As for the intellectual relations between students and the professor and, in this case, Tannen, those relations are signaled by the “front matter” of each chapter and by the description of each essay. There and in class Tannen and I are the experienced members of the conversation, and the students are invited, especially by me, to try their wings in this new conversation, to be initiated into it. And as a teacher who puts comments (and yes, a grade) on each student’s essay, I am in the role of a person who stands aside from the attempt of the student writer to have an effect on the conversation in which he or she has been engaged. Standing aside, not the primary audience for the essay, I comment on the strategy and approach the writer has taken for whatever audience the essay at hand seems to be written. If indeed it reads like an essay written not for fellow students but for a teacher, I point that out in my comments.
Finally, and very briefly, a fourth area of pedagogical and curricular concern: what are we to do about those bureaucratic areas of academic life to which students, administrators, and too often faculty give a much higher priority than is good for students’ real progress in college? I have in mind, in particular, grades. And my advice is to put them way at the back. Placement in an appendix on page 36 is my syllabus’s attempt to set a low priority on grades. Students are all too fastened on this most crude and mechanical academic ritual, and there is no way for individual teachers to make grades entirely disappear, but we can attempt to put them in their proper place – again way at the back, not only in our syllabi but also in the way we talk about the work in the course, never, for instance, saying “You can get an ‘A’ in this course by...and a “B” in the course by…” etc.
I could claim that a syllabus written for students is in fact written for me: it keeps me in line during the semester, keeps me concentrating on creating and sustaining a college-level conversation within which students listen, think, read, talk, and write. I would certainly claim that the syllabus is also written for my faculty and administrative colleagues who are sometimes engaged in the business of shaping the curriculum in small (day by day in our individual courses and routine practices) and in large (year by year across the larger structures of the college). But these latter claims are actually questions:
The answers to these questions that a “conversational” approach to education suggests may well take the College in a direction very different from that proposed by the current Strategic Plan. If that is so, so be it. Let’s talk about that.
©Copyright 2005. Contact author for permission
Maintained by Jay Howard,Jan 2005