t .77 .4. A3?! . WW» 4 .I!‘ ab 75; xi 15“. \{ 4x: 4. I. ‘v. '25. c 13...: 0...... 5W. .. » q: ‘ 2.2!. 1.... i .1. I. 1. sun I! 5 .Pc I ..!!'L n mu. In .v 00' .L/ ! gnaw. n mar . . v. J r v g,'_ .. 1 LEE; L 1’ . . _~va; ‘1‘: T find: ‘3- 3 :: 3:51.113 “a? 5g: :wl 0:17" gig-IFS,“ Jul-23 Kr \fi'BQ"! . "fig txM MM 4 ‘— ‘ fi- r‘r ) f 9 t 93'.“ '- ”(3?th A’ CU“ PERSPECTIVE AND PERCEPTION: A QUALITATIVE STUDY OF TWELVE COLLEGE TEACHERS DISCUSSING WRITING By Debra K. Courtright-Nash A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ENGLISH 2001 9359mm A" co: [the mm: $1355 and com 534 1....L ‘. ' ' m- If? L‘ no “7111.", PW | i _ I. ,MIAC mm "s. i . ' ‘I _ MESA: In 5311\900 IT. their 051m :5 a rt fit: 01‘. :13 am pm :3me self-retort. t Ti: research v 5?; menieus \x t' 4'3 Tmbers xx ho 1* t s 4 ' ' “him queshom m ‘° the} med n {Liam} ' km mmjeih's 2 as; ~ ms min 1‘: Ihc '3 Q?! ‘ L hegmllp i: ABSTRACT PERSPECTIVE AND PERCEPTION: A QUALITATIVE STUDY OF TWELVE COLLEGE TEACHERS DISCUSSING WRITING By Debra K Courtright-Nash In this qualitative study, I consider the writing assignments, expectations, objectives and conversations of faculty members from a four-year liberal arts institution at which there is no writing across the curriculum (WAC) program, nor have there been any workshops or attempts to start a program. In addition, I re-consider the view of faculty in previous WAC research, the categorization of genres as a means of determining what is occurring in classrooms, faculty perspectives on what they are preparing students for, and the value of lore as a means of developing a narrative understanding of pedagogy. I also reflect on my own process of making meaning of the data I collected, which was primarily informant self-report, collected through surveys, audiotape and field notes. The research was comprised of three stages: a survey of the entire faculty, a series of group interviews with twelve faculty members, and individual interviews with three laculty members who had attended the group interviews. The survey, comprised of four open-ended questions, elicited the faculty’s view of writing within their discipline, what assignments they used in courses for their majors, what they wanted students to learn fi'om these courses and how they felt writing assisted students in learning. The group and individual interviews allowed the teachers to expound on their understanding of writing and learning within their disciplines, to explain the nuances of their assignments, and, in the case of the group interviews, to discuss their similarities and difl‘erences. . , .- I f . . . ~ 91 l 1 .5133. Li Wiu- )_\ £55.33: Which I at =5 11:5 3m tines: fa. rnmmmtuz‘; “x: armors ship: 31ft: 5:5 extras: 55:31}. '11 111cm 1". the hflwiht' 55:11.; hr: of facuhx i . . 3:5. murded in "k 5331mm [be it“: My narrative of their narratives reiterates the fact that each discipline, even each faculty member, defines and uses assignments difi‘erently: “journals” and “essay exams” take on several very different shapes in the classrooms of my informants. My narrative questions the usefulness of categories by problematizing James Mofl‘et’s broad categories of discourse, whichI at first believed corresponded to what I was seeing in my data. It also notes that these faculty members are concerned with preparing students for a broader, perhaps uncertain, fiiture as well as introducing the constraints of the discipline, and that their expectations shape their assigning and evaluating of writing. It ponders how or whether their emectations create a theorized pedagogy. Finally, it focuses on the conversations that occurred, via discourse analysis, developing the hypothesis tlmt when lore rooted in current composition theory meets the writing lore of faculty in other disciplines, there are a few possible results: the instructors are so grounded in the lore they bring with them that no deliberation or contemplation of change occurs, the lores “match” and one or the other is assimilated into the other, or one lore is discarded in light of the evidence in support of the other. The extent to which any of these may happen depends upon the amount of shared experience, the apparent validity of the evidence, and the confidence of those sharing. To my parents, Barbara and Edwin, the pride of their children iv Iwouid first 1:5 .:3:55 10 pan 1;. Iwould also in 55:: lk. Pm: .\' £233.11}. 3115 550:5 —' "J v. '1 mi} kc‘pi {It 0 F. 52:35 mi 51:22:51 ”Odd El: 10 1 311‘: ‘ ‘ ~ .. .. 4h. CROU‘PL:; .33.; 5.. . ““1“ 451i“ {C‘sd‘y‘t ”‘55 Hm. Lori Afr! try" _ ., «AID ”Eldon 3': = " '1 fl“"i’ign’rnent a: ; “Vim In»! , ‘g-L- “‘ “ Went. 5; h 51 » .13- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would first like to thank the twelve faculty who participated in my study. Their willingness to participate made the research enjoyable and this dissertation possible. I would also like to thank my committee, Dr. Diane Brunner, Dr. Kathleen Geissler, Dr. Patricia Stock, and Dr. Sheila Teahan for their support, for their patience, and for taking my work seriously. I especially thank my chairperson, Dr. Marilyn Wilson, who kindly kept me on track and offered direct, well grounded advice. All of their comments and suggestions taught me much more about research, writing and theory. I would like to extend my gratitude to my colleagues and fi'iends who offered support and encouragement: Dr. Linda Walvoord, Dr. Dan Goodman, and the Clermont College faculty research forum; Dr. Gwen Curry, a valued mentor; Tracey Hawkins, Theresa Hare, Lori Albanezi-Weller, and Jodi Simmons, my dear friends; and others too numerous to mention. I would like to thank Dr. Rafiit Ansari and his oncology staff for their encouragement and skill. I am thankful to God that I am alive to complete this dissertation. Finally, I would like to extend my love and gratitude to my family: Barbara and Edwin, my parents who fostered my love of language and learning; Cindy and Harvey, Mark, Chrissy and Darrin, my siblings who cheered me on; Lula Nash, my mother-in-law who values education; and the rest of my extended family who supported me. I especially want to thank my husband, Dr. James Nash, for his constant encouragement, excitement about writing in the classroom, assistance in all the little details, fortitude during tense moments, and above all, for his persistent love. - I r . '1‘? "OWNER . . itiiRODD ANT ll]: Context: li The Settrgt «. 1}: Plot: A St I It: Chandra - I A Short DJK‘T' TCIi‘CEXT fill YE (Gib-gem am 5:15:55 and c. Ra‘urd; 1:15:51; Cogizatt “'11:ng Genres ' (03mm Or 31W NUS] Bits 0f EXP“ Future 1 COurge ExpeCli mg Ex; ‘ 'Si’s’ni Cn mm”) 0 (Ollie) TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES .................................................. viii INTRODUCTION .................................................... 1 BACKGROUND AND METHODS ...................................... 11 The Context: History of WAC and of this Project ....................... 12 The Setting: Description of Location ................................ 47 The Plot: A Short Description of Method of Gathering Data .............. 51 The Characters: The Faculty Members Who Participated ................. 57 A Short Description of Method of Analyzing Data ...................... 60 CONTENT ANALYSIS: CONVERSATIONS ON ASSIGNMENTS ............ 68 Categories and Genres ........................................... 70 Surveys and Conversations About Assignments ........................ 78 Recording: Journals ....................................... 81 Investigating and Reflecting: observations, case studies ............ 95 Cogitating: Critical Analysis, Reviews, and Research Papers ........ 100 Writing as Testing?: Essay Exams ........................... 106 Genres without Categories and Categories without Works ......... 114 Commentary on Categories, Genres, and Assignments .................. 117 CONTENT ANALYSIS FOCUSED ON EXPECTATIONS ................... 125 Types of Expectations. .......................................... 129 Future Expectations ...................................... 131 Graduate or Professional School (132); General Work Force (148) Course goals and assignment objectives ....................... 157 Comparisons of Survey Responses (161); Further Consideration in . Interviews (165) Expected student behaviors and backgrounds ................... 177 Conveying Expectations: Assigning and Evaluating .................... 183 Assigning Writing ........................................ 184 Commentary on Expectations ..................................... 194 311315 ,,,,,,, CONVERSATIOXS A. Comm-1:51:15 .1 0:55.55: moments: in I ' Y I tor: and min, smear“: 5115155155: ‘. kWh B; #3311101 C; ( kitten r; .,.,' 35‘} min 0; ( '/ - CONVERSATIONS AS CONTEXT: NARRATIVES IN PERSPECTIVE ........ 200 Conversations as Context ........................................ 200 Defining Lore ........................................... 201 Involvement in the conversation ................................... 205 Repetition .............................................. 207 Constructed Dialogue ..................................... 208 Lore and Involvement in One Conversation .......................... 209 Simultaneous Sharing of Practice ............................ 215 Development of Lore and lore .............................. 216 Conversation in Contrast ........................................ 220 Lore and Change .............................................. 223 EPILOGUE ........................................................ 231 Appendix A: Writing Across the Curriculum in Old Testament Literature . . . 236 Appendix B: Surveys, letters and agenda ........................... 239 Appendix C: Charts from surveys ................................. 243 Appendix E: Assignment for Education Observation Journal ............. 249 Appendix F: Assignment for Developmental Psychology Journal and Essay . . 250 Appendix G: Cost Accounting Syllabus ............................. 253 12151551: 0131: 1521.535 of .1595 T253 [meg-cries of .- its: Reported Gem: 13565 Rsponm' 1'56 T215566 Reported L83: 7:5: ‘ Rm emu». 153‘ 8 P 31"55‘5 for ‘5? .259 9535056811" ‘ LIST OF TABLES Table 1 Schedule of Meetings With Participants .............................. 55 Table 2 Types of Assignments Reported by Faculty in Survey ................... 78 Table 3 Categories of Assignments Reported in Survey ........................ 80 Table 4 Reported Genres in the Disciplines ................................ 137 Table 5 Reported Uses in the Disciplines ................................. 138 Table 6 Reported Learning Objectives ................................... 158 Table 7 Report of How Writing Assists in Learning .......................... 160 Table 8 Purposes for Writing from Elrnhurst Survey of WAC participants ......... 162 Table 9 Purposes for Writing fiom Elrnhurst Survey of non-WAC faculty ......... 163 "mama Smitiii’lfl 5 i 9 {35 3.11 we 1.10. M 171.721: new. with :i‘smne else" i5 - :2 :1: 5:515 of the r: certified ‘5} 5mm; “Firm: 5.3125 our .- 3310; Rather 571.51 E: hen simple co: trimmed in tin-era In 11115 l’Eiit‘L‘IiU 1:251:11}: bid} of ”7" Ni! 10 Ciki‘tlt‘t 01: L“: sud} I We 5:51:10 as South“ "1‘. ' 554271 ,- will xvi-$1.371 IX .2710 : “m “035110115 it?“ - 3’ Wheat-1.. INTRODUCTION “Tell the story. Then tell how that happened to be the way that you told it ” Harry Wolcott, Transforming Qualitative Data, 17 Storytelling is intriguing, especially when we consider how we go about telling the stories that we do. Many of us have had the experience of comparing our account of a memorable event with that of someone else who participated in tint same event. Perhaps the “someone else” is a sibling, a fiiend, or a colleague on a committee. Yet often we find that the aspects of the event that were embedded in our minds, or are accessible later on, are controlled by many variables that influence our perceptions and memories. Our emotional status, our cultural context, our degree of investment in the event, and our position, whether spatial or psychical, all influence stories of the same event that we tell later. Even simple conversations that we consider straightforward can be interpreted and reinterpreted in diverse ways. In this reflection on my research my concern with telling stories is twofold, because in the body of this work there are stories being told within a flame story, in many ways similar to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The primary fi'ame story is my narrative about the study I undertook to investigate writing at a small h'beral arts college, which I will refer to as Southwark College, that did not have a formal writing across the curriculum program nor had the faculty members participated in any writing across the curriculum workshops. The stories within are the stories my informants shared, which like Chaucer’s clmracters’ stories, provide a richer understanding of themselves and develop according to the context of the conversations. This literary reference in a qualitative study is not misplaced. In fact, even though Margery Wolf expresses some . . .- “'0‘. "Sn-dz”; “kid 1‘ ‘ :1; 3f “ti: 1 ilk \» 3:10:12 1:355 5 5111011 In “tiff 111:? 3.3111 11: the 'f 11:5 and napalm: ma: int 557?. warming 5)”? I 1mm: 01 a o mgim. {ht ll: star-g: 115. on to L"): :5 :1: I! T’s l ' -. tl’lt‘t'rplfltliltm = if '35-’11 commit tit-at ,. :1:- .. -.|-~ f-I‘ .. . .Ltn 5mm if? = ' ' lap-33mm. Gem‘s and R £51711?! _.' \L, $1.101“. r ""333 i-' . ». ~ “High E It}? consternation tlmt “if the firm boundaries between fiction and ethnography are allowed to blur, we weaken the value of ethnographic research and gain little in exchange,”(59) Clifford Geertz draws a parallel between the rhetorical firnction of writing in ethnography and fiction. In Works and Lives, he purports that the main reason that ethnographers are concerned about the blurring of the line between the two is Western misunderstanding of rhetoric and narrative: that the writing of ethnography involves telling stories, making pictures, concocting symbolisms, and deploying tropes is cormnonly resisted, often fiercely, because of a confusion in the West since Plato at least of the imagined with the imaginary, the fictional with the false, making things out without making them up. The strange idea that reality has an idiom in which it prefers to be described...leads on to the even stranger idea tlmt, if literalism is lost, so is fact (140). In The Interpretation of Cultures, he likens the tension between truth and verisirnilitude to the apparent contradictions in a murder mystery. Renato Rosaldo agrees that narratives have too long been suppressed by those attempting to make anthropological or ethnographic studies scientific. He emphasizes the power of telling stories, noting that everyone tells “stories about who they are, what they care about, and how they hope to reach their aspirations. Such stories significantly shape human conduct” (130). Geertz’s and Rosaldo’s interpretative approach to qualitative research provides a strong basis for my research and reflection. This qualitative study is an ethno- methodology, which, according to James Kinneavy is based on the principle that the “methodology to be used in describing and analyzing a culture is the methodology which that group itself uses in its internal interactions to accomplish its own goals” (79). In other words, as Michael Quinn Patton phrases it, ethnomethodology asks, “How do these peOple make sense of their everyday activities so as to behave in socially acceptable .f:r:‘11( SKnm'h or . l 11". _L IL | an: 1: 13:15:53“ 33; 35 $21.1?“ 2" mid: 01:11“: 51371551117}. .1: i '1'): reader 115 .' 5610111 “1173 I $342335 1*; "51': 311.5112 11 11115 5' fight-1.155111: C .. we. ii... 1' 5.. 5.9.55 0111-. F»;* .' O. C: 5. f0. pastcm\ .5151 mitfltx‘ii (”:35 131316813 fat“ I 3:15 hi' How 011:: W‘ 1330311111: 11 LL‘ 1",“ ' £11. :5 expects 10. 17.3373“ 531011 of {he £623th 31 {if “a ways?” (88). My method of collecting and analyzing data led me toward questions that did not focus singularly on discovering culture; it also made it difficult to participate in or to observe the participants within highly acculturated situations. However, the study can be seen as ethnographic in nature, as Clifford Geertz defines it: The job of ethnography, or one of them anyway, is indeed to provide, like the arts and history, narratives and scenarios to refocus our attention; not, however, ones that render us acceptable to ourselves by rendering others as gathered into worlds we don’t want and can’t arrive at, but ones that make us visible to ourselves by representing us and everyone else as cast into the midst of a world of irremovable strangeness we can’t keep clear of (Available 84). It is my intent in this study, or at least my attempt, to refocus the attention of research in Writing Across the Curriculum and the portrayal of faculty who teach, work and write within disciplines other than composition. I do so by first examining portions of the narratives for patterns that reveal or create new knowledge about and within them, then by ofi‘ering a contextualized view of portions of the discussion that offer a different understanding. As I undertook this study, I had some specific questions in mind: What are the attitudes of these faculty members toward the writing that they assign in the courses that they teach? How often does the writing that is endemic to the faculty’s particular field or discipline inform the types of writing to which they introduce their students? How do the instructors’ expectations of student learning impact the types of writing that they assign? When they consider their expectations or the expectations of their discipline, do they choose different types of writing assignments? If so, how do they go about it? What is their perception of the skills or knowledge that result from writing? My intent was to look more closely at the ways the faculty perceived and utilized writing in their discipline and in 3325:0078 1 10; 11:1: contain 1 3351:0311 no 9: 21161610311 1’“ 1 11:7. 155 an}. in 151.2: muffin; 111111: 1: 1:51:05 I 1151.": 1:3 flirted 11:15: is} 31615111}. three .3 .11}- imitate of item 01111.11: £11 3010911311. C1 it“: it “Wed 10 their classrooms. I found that although I could determine what the faculty reported to me about the connections between their discipline, their expectations and the writing that they assigned, I could not assume cause relationships based on my research. As I reviewed my data, I developed new questions, such as what was actually taking place in the group interviews and in what ways did my different approaches to my data shape my understanding of the teachers’ assignments? In order to attempt to answer my original questions, I distributed a survey to all 100 faculty members at Liberal Arts College, interviewed twelve volunteers in small group interviews, and then conducted individual interviews with three of those twelve faculty members. My methods of triangulating my data were twofold. First, the method of gathering was a means of triangulating: the personal interviews and surveys were ways of changing focus, so to speak. Conclusions that were drawn fiom the conversations that occurred could be compared to the larger context of the many responses to the initial questions. They could also be compared to the more intimate consideration of what one particular individual had to say. The other method of triangulation occurred as I coded the data, looked for themes and portions that resisted themes, and began to write this thesis. This method, mentiomd by Ronald Chenail in “Keeping Things Plumb in Qualitative Researc ” and outlined in an earlier article by Chenail and Maione, is to consider how the project at hand fits into the larger context of literature on the topic, how it can be compared or contrasted with previous experiences the researcher has had, and how sense is made ofthe phenomenon itself. As a result, “this circular process of comparing and contrasting what was known of the phenomenon fi'om field, literature, and personal experience becomes the triangulatory engine of qualitative inquiry” (1). Therefore, as a researcher, it is important 't {a (L .13 /b_ r z, ’7’ gram 1‘.) 5nd} 511.155 5:561:73 32?}“1; it: '11: ramps-:15 ‘. 3:15. 1:3: 11“.: mi 3111: plan 1132751 1153. for if“. :52: L32 76350115 11 2:35.551: ii. iii:- .. 3min”. program «.7115 “15:3 them i: -'-...-.;g_ . s~ plank“ In a m1rc that I locate my self as a researcher in respect to the perspectives that I take toward the phenomenon. My study shows signs of the “technical eclecticism” and “context irreverence” that Stephen North attributes to clinical research (202-203) since I distributed surveys and asked the participants to speak to me outside of a particular context, in arranged interviews. Unlike the clinicians that North describes, my perspective on the process has been much more phenomenological than positivist. Although I have looked for themes, I have also looked for threads that did not fit those themes. In addition, I have tried to examine the reasons why the faculty make the choices they do about including writing in their classroom in the absence of the social support of a formal writing across the curriculum program. Thus, I have listened to the stories my participants have told me, and I try to present them in a manner that is faithful to their context and intent. The appearance of “irreverence” is less a disregard for context than a need to pursue information in a more direct manner, and I view the “eclecticism” as a strength, providing thicker description than if I had not used varied methods of approach. The description I provide required many choices. In telling the story of what happens in qualitative studies, researchers choose which details to include and which to exclude. Margery Wolf discusses the issues of power involved in the ways of telling the story of ethnographic and other qualitative studies in her introduction to A Thrice Told Tale. In the book, she lets readers look at the same event through field notes, a fiction based on the event, and an ethnographic report of the event. However, she prefaces these accounts by noting that there is “no way to avoid this exercise of power and at least some of the stylistic requirements used to legitimate that text if the practice of ethnography is to 53:21:71} 1. The ' _ 1551: says. '1' 2;: m1 1: and: Ti: 510:1:5 1.”, Will} 1511.113 1:, airs: m 11.1: ' 5:55:01. 0:51.; | 3L?) l ItallJt‘tl ' 3.5 if “1111‘: 11m: ~ . 51:15 56511 1 5:? 35331 1105111115 a?“ . . “5.51365: $10315, 3".93a I ' 9 ‘ ‘1‘ 4 II' 11:55:: .: “7:55am 1. '1‘». It; - . t . 3 $30} 3631101] C1: :7 n.- mflig. i , .1.) _ i‘F 51'13: - it Wines ”111 5.. continue”(l l). The intrinsic nature of creating closed texts, or works, fi‘om informants’ opinions, she says, involves arbitrary choices. Although Wolf argues that such a view might not be popular, I find it refi'eshingly candid and true in my case. The stories that appeared within the framework of my study were the stories that the faculty whom I interviewed told their colleagues and me. Margery Wolf makes an important point that individual “testimony” is just as selective as the reporting of it by an investigator. Dealing with these narratives as I sifted through my transcripts posed some difficulty. I realized that the “ ta” had gone through at least two processes of selection: first, the “informant’s” selection of what he or she wanted to share, and then my, the researcher’s, selection of which details to note. This at first created some consternation, as my latent positivist reflexes made me worry about whether I would be able to find reality in these stories and whether I would be able to draw universal conclusions.l However, I resisted the notion that I was called upon to link the signifier and signified that Lacan and Derrida had successfirlly liberated (Johnson 39-42). I had to keep in mind that “Language and spwch do not mirror experience: They create experience and in the process of creation constantly transform and defer that which is being described” (Denzin 5). The faculty members’ stories were creating a new rhetorical and subjective reality, not necessarily showing me a reality that already existed, and my purpose was to consider what those stories ‘fineant” as the faculty made sense of how writing fit into the social patterns of their classrooms, their respective disciplines and the groups in which we conducted the interviews. The story of this study is told from my perspective, as a young female adjunct Assistant Professor attempting to teach her courses as student-centered and encouraging 1.111111111111111: 1:: arms form if“ . L" i; gamma :01. av" ‘Jestgu t“- 315111.11 1h: '1. maratwprmi. 12.211111101111531 y3731101 teaming ' 53.353111513111111. ilk 601mm 3 57.115 511101: :5 3351;113:158“ 0. critical thinking, balancing four composition classes, various committee meetings, and work to complete her doctoral studies; as a colleague who discusses writing with faculty members from difl‘erent disciplines often, in the hall, at lunch, and at meetings; and as a first generation college graduate returning to her alma mater to discuss writing with professor/colleagues there. My intent is to resist the urge to become too “academic,” to remember that the history I represent is a story, and to tell it the way I would any conversation--providing my audience with context, highlighting the interesting topics, and trying to provide a sense of “being there.” Rather than try to squeeze universal truth out of the information that I have gathered, I have tried to incorporate verisimilitude in my story, not assuming that verisimilitude provides validity, but realizing that it is a primary step in understanding. The connection between writing across the curriculum and qualitative research in this study is more essential than merely the fact that I chose one method in order to investigate a field of interest. Both areas have a notion of learner and epistemology that redirect the focus fi'om delivering information from one subject to another to investigating and reflecting. Writing and rewriting this dissertation has helped to make me more aware of this. As I analyze the narratives that my informants construct, I also try to amlyze my reconstruction within my own narrative. According to Margery Wolf, feminists and postrnodernists, although not in agreement on some tmoretical points, have both been questioned for “questioning objectivity, rejecting detachment, and accepting contradictory readings. Feminists who Inve only recently gained some academic security might think carefiilly about whether intense reflexivity in their research and writing will be evaluated as being in the new postmodernist mode or as simply tentative and self-doubting” (135). Wolf’s well-meaning warning is well taken, and not having gained such security yet, perhaps I rush in. However, I would agree with Audrey Kleinsasser that ‘reflexivity enables the researcher to present a passionate, wise and rich account”(157). Kleinsasser draws a connection between reflexivity and “writing to un-learn,” picking up on Wauchope’s theory that writing should no longer act as “...an agency in the articulation of knowledge and redistribution of power; instead it would become an indispensable agency for making the world strange and infinitely various” (101). This enriches Susan McLeod’s description of writing across the curriculum proponents’ view of writing to learn “as a way of objectifying thought, of helping separate the knower from the known” in order to learn it (1992 4). Un-learning is a means of subjectively connecting the knower to the known. By reflecting on my study I am thus both writing to tm-learn and writing to learn. In chapter one, I describe the context, setting, characters and brief plot of the study. The context of the study is not only my own personal interest in writing across the curriculum, but also the larger situation of the Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) movement. I focus first on my understanding of the prevailing attitude of rmny WAC researchers towards the faculty members in other disciplines as subjects and informants, particularly the sometimes pejorative light in which these informants are placed. I then show how this view of faculty in other disciplines results from some of the tensions over writing in the disciplines and writing to learn that have arisen in WAC, tensions that result fi'om a falsely constructed dichotomy. Finally, I discuss the relationship of lore to WAC, particularly in the way that concepts of writing and writing instruction are distributed in academia, a definition that I expand later. I then introduce the college and twelve faculty - ni . “11393, H. 3511' all): 6111;” I 33.5 mm: illfo ('1' Sousa am} 5'5" in 5 well ill ilk SCCOT? sci 1:1 classrooms m as a legfiinut . I21 0! “Thing acr. 33331056113 the I 3-“ filmy Stud} . Eire I also Silt)“ } m genres in 1h, 7... «gr and 131mm: In the Ihird t 3th.», bf; h‘gtms 0f [hm ng to I}. members who participated in the second stage of my research, the group interviews. At the end of the chapter, I explain that I have chosen to look at the data in three specific ways in the three chapters-- categories of genres, taxonomy of expectations, and discourse analysis-- in order to provide a thicker narrative and to reflect on the point of view as well. In the second chapter, I discuss genre as a means of considering how writing is used in classrooms. Historically, many WAC researchers have seen evaluating types of genre as a legitimate way of determining whether faculty members were using writing to learn or writing across the discipline in their classrooms. The categories of genres held implied assumptions about the genres themselves. I use categories of genres based on James Moflett’s theory of discourse as a means of discussing the types of writing that the faculty in my study assigned in their classes and discuss a more rhetorical definition of genre. I also show how problematic it is to assume that faculty are using the terms for certain genres in the same way, an observation shared by other researchers like Walvoord, Zerger and Jamieson. In the third chapter, I discuss the expectations and assumptions that the faculty members bring to the writing that they assign, since many of the teachers provided descriptions of these expectations and assumptions as a means of explaining why they assigned writing in the ways that they did. These explanations include their perception of what the writing assignments are preparing students for in the future, the anticipated results of the assignments, the means of evaluating the students’ writing, and what preparation or background students are bringing to the classroom. My concern in this study is not whether the faculty accurately communicate their expectations to the students; 5.11 I am 60’“ ._ ‘ 4:-a1“ 35mm w—‘r “‘3 m Irefk‘Cl 0“ ‘ 25.3.3411“? or “T 4w a 5:. 50 351mg 30W Icomnue “ 375‘ a m led,“ 3:33 a dcx‘eijpc; traded under: Ila] ’lk‘or} or I'm ofthe grout I”$23005 and 1" .. . | ”A 5 War l0 Ii): mm 318m our m‘hmwmmmc in" ii? i ' I ha: l mm) .51.,” Lox ' . ",‘ v,! 1 cable L“. instead, I am concerned with whether or not their self-reported perceptions and assumptions display consistency with their understanding ofthe assignments that they make. I reflect on whether such discussion of intentions provides any more accurate understanding of writing in other disciplines. Finally, I begin to determine how their expectations or assumptions may reveal, in a sense, a theorizing of learning and writing that constructs lore. I continue with this discussion of theory development and lore in chapter fan as I turn from content analysis to discourse analysis. As I do so, I engage in a discussion of “Lore” as knowledge about writing that has theoretical underpirmings in composition theory as developed within the discipline of composition, and “lore” as shared knowledge or received wisdom that may or may not have any of the basic tmderpirmings of current rhetorical theory or research. I begin to look at how the construction of narratives in the context of the group discussions was an aspect of the participants’ involvement in the conversations, and in some ways was a means of constructing themselves as teachers. This is similar to the processual analysis in which the researcher “tries to understand particular cases by showing how a number of factors come together rather than by separating them out” (Rosaldo 93). Finally, I consider whether my figuring of “Lore” and “lore” has moved me any fiirther away from the tensions and privileging of one’s own discipline that I critique in my first chapter. 1. Both moves that Clifl‘ord Geertz provides a convincing argument against in “Anti Anti-Relativism,” a chapter in Available Light 10 3L7 itintfht‘ftis hi3. ”Mitzi; Jt‘t‘u’.. hflmem. realm aid: um; ammmamt Item tWAC l. N mailed fit." “his mum in ‘ on, :mttor. .\ km‘i’m More Chapter 1 BACKGROUND AND METHODS But nonetheless while I have time and space,/ before Ifitrther tell this tale a pace, I think that 1, according to reason,/ should tell you first all of the condition of each of them so as it seemed to me,/ and what they were and of what degree, and also what array that they were in/ and so then...1 will begin Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, Prologue, lines 35-40 In telling this story of my research, I begin by offering the contextual details, the history, the setting, and then proceed to the characters and plot. The historical background or context encompasses my own growing interest in Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC), as well as the influence of WAC in higher education. My interest in WAC procwded fiom my attraction to rhetoric and composition that had begun in my master’s program in the mid-1980's and naturally proceeded from my experience as a writing instructor. My research focused on peer groups: methods which would make peer responses more helpful to the revision of writing students. At that time, the teaching of composition was growing not only as a pedagogical field, but also as a research area. It was also struggling to become a discipline, as North, Miller, and Crowley attest. It was a time of proliferation in approaches to, research in, and Modes of, writing and teaching of writing. My approach to the writing classroom as well as my own research interests was influenced by cognitive psychology’s influence, through research conducted by Linda Flower and John Hayes; expressive theory, through texts by Peter Elbow and Donald Graves, and communication across the curriculum, through the case studies and interviews of James Britton and Nancy Martin; to name a few. ll lid! 1 kg;- ifii‘ifi‘lmafl} its mshl tool to him come: m; and the ex; WEE 351.36) at" £343 0‘ .. ' k-t 11638 ideas 1U 1:3:me Ofcou'se 1} {WI}; m [hf 891 3331 mmmm 1 first; f halo; “C researChers‘ 372m . 5“. L0 m i and 3 ' - 3x as “611 &\ IA}; What I began to realize as I taught writing courses and then literature courses-- which naturally became writing about literature courses--was that the pedagogical approach I took toward writing and learning could be useful to disciplines other than freshman composition. The peer group interaction, the focusing of in-class journal writing, and the exploration of topics through short essays were as much methods of learning as they were means of evaluating whether learning was taking place. I began sharing these ideas with colleagues in other areas who found some of them useful and began implementing them in their own courses. Of course this idea did not originate with me. As I became more interested in WAC during the late 1980's, I began learning more about the movement that had begun growing in the early seventies, a time when composition studies were beginning to gain great momentum. In order to provide a clearer perspective of my narrative, I will first offer a brief history of WAC and then focus on three issues of importance to my research: WAC researchers’ view of teachers in other disciplines, the question of tensions between writing to learn and writing in the disciplines, and the mention of lore in regards to WAC theory. Within this history, I note how the terms writing to learn and writing in the discipline as well as the terms expressive and transactional--terms that were originally meant to enlarge the understanding of language and composition--have been pressed into a false dichotomy that is not only reductive but misleading. The Context: History of WAC and of this Project Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) as an area of theory, pedagogy and study appeared a little more than twenty-five years ago, although David Russell traces rmny of its ideas to the turn of the century and through the progressive education of John Dewey. 12 fir: ,, {WAC T l mini! discipf'l mm The 56; I fig‘xfi who Ol‘ it its One ofI me of learns; it: tritium} p5 Wax work had 336$ ll] “M11 5 fired to. He an. Eii‘géssiie mm J 233's 5eint-3M dc isn‘t fig diflfflr, Lid he Uscc‘ Etienne, in“ Wio}; Ex: is: .. £1,411,138“; s.- l “Mm? V P... t xaéc fie" The current WAC movement resulted from research and theory focused on learning to write in the disciplines, writing to learn, and doing both of these throughout the education curriculum. The seeds of that theory and research started with James Britton and his colleagues, who observed conversations between students and teachers in Great Britain in the 1960's. One of the central theories that arose from their research was that language is a means of learning. Today, this may seem to be a given, but it was insightful at a time when behavioral psychology was just beginning to give way to cognitive perspectives. Britton’s work had also led to the conclusion that writing is a “complex developmental process” in which a variety of aspects like audience, purpose, and situation must be attended to. He and Nancy Martin also found that development in writing could be seen as progressive movement starting with oneself as audience or with audiences very similar to one’s self and developing toward more specific and distanced audiences. In order to describe the different kinds of writing according to the audience, purpose and situation involved, they used the terms expressive, transactional and poetic. Expressive, according to Britton and Martin, is the initial type of writing that novices employ. Expressive describes writing that is more personal, informal, and immediate and serves as the “tentative first drafts of new ideas” (1975 82). It is a beginning stage from which transactional or poetic writing emerge as a writer becomes more experienced in making choices of function, and more aware of audience and differing contexts. Transactional, as James Britton and Nancy Martin first defined it, and Janet Emig expanded, describes writing that focuses on the audience and on accomplishing a task, which, in the case of most students, is proving to the audience that the student has learned the topic. Poetic writing would be writing that focuses on itself, in some ways it 13 ‘ ‘ ".1393; and a: comet... . ' l ‘1' l‘q‘ ‘ as. W» ...~c mare mm" 3mm its $2 These can T‘...'. l ' (Saki. at others -. t‘ .' ._'\, ' ' it deem le’lf‘fit and in some t: mg Freessriiir , 33mm mm The exact i311} emu {on ‘J " Kfmell‘i T 555‘," . 7:15 31 Brooi 333.", w z 31 Central ( 31.. will. gain, \. krill? .mm Work. 19W»... “will. B.) \ ‘ktr ~PS Sit let'l ; v. T ._ “Lia‘s $5M“ 3 pr could be considered writing for the sake of art. Transactional and poetic, if any of the terms, would have more of a tendency to be at separate ends of the spectrum. These terms are important to keep in mind as they began to take on different meaning fiom Britton and Martin’s original intent in WAC research. These conclusions correlated with the aspects of classical rhetoric that Corbett, Burke, and others were revisiting with renewed vigor in composition studies. The return to classical rhetoric re-emphasized invention. Invention and expressive writing became conflated in some composition circles as each was discussed as a means of beginning writing. Freewriting, for example, was a more informal, immediate writing, and composition instructors often suggested it as a means of developing or locating a topic. The exact location at which WAC began in the USA. is hard to pin down because so many campuses began focusing on it at the same time. Certainly, many have attributed several of the main ideas to the Bay Area Writing Project that began in 1971, providing interdisciplinary, grass-roots level workshops by English faculty for secondary teachers. In 1972, Kenneth Brufl‘ee initiated a tutoring program staffed by students from several disciplines at Brooklyn College. In 1975, Barbara Walvoord began leading a group of faculty at Central College in Iowa in discussions of student writing each semester (Russell). Elaine Mairnon dates the beginning of the WAC movement to summer faculty development workshops led by Harriet Sheridan at Carleton College in 1974 and 1975.(Smith, B.) Maimon’s own institution, Beaver College, began WAC in 1977, with workshops she led aspart ofaNEH grant. Inthe sameyear, Toby Fulwilerand Art Young started a program at Michigan Tech with 15 faculty volunteers (Russell). 14 As WAC began to garner support, Janet Emig, in her seminal article “Writing as A Mode of Learning,” published in 1977, articulated the view of WAC proponents that the purpose of WAC was not merely to teach a set of skills or grammatical concepts in other classes. Writing, Emig noted, has many unique characteristics which lend it to the learning process. Emig defined learning via Piaget, Dewey and Brunet, using the categories of enactive learning (which incorporates the use of the hand), iconic learning (which incorporates the use of the eye), and symbolic learning (which incorporates the use of the brain). Emig claimed that writing engages all three and is bispheral: connected to both hemispheres of the brain and their functions. Thus, writing can engage the entirety of the brain, enhancing learning in a variety of subjects. Proponents of writing to learn were and are often focused on activities that promote such learning through writing, centered on the use of fiee writing, journaling and collaborative writing in order for students to think through problems, flesh out ideas, and derive conclusions. They reject notions of writing as a means of simply regurgitating information that has been imparted tlu'ough methods that view learners as receptacles. As Susan McLeod noted in her 1992 article, WAC assumes that students learn better in an active rather than a passive (lecture) mode, that learning is not only solitary but also a collaborative social phenomenon, and that writing improves when it is critiqued by peers and then is rewritten (6). As they became engaged in dialogues with faculty fiom other disciplines, WAC researchers and theorists began to see each academic discipline as having its own Specialized procedures for which and through which writers develop strategies. In the mid-1980's, rhetorical investigations of particular genres began to appear in WAC 15 tars wiring n shalom if," tier 3 discipih attests of, mm} of rant; ii '3: Simmer: 7m research a}. Wisteria] 3.. “Wk. 3 Men: - Jamal 0’ REM-yr T we , . . , ”Kim?- “ mm: mm «Kt- Bmh Bare Wm and It... in“ . t 'va Wis fOr ‘5 l; is; W? shim. im‘ suQ we tang?” ~ it literature. Within the focus on disciplinary genres, Ann Bunting has located three approaches to the focus on genres: Maimon’s approach, a drafting, process approach to reaching product; F ulwiler and Young’s approach, a psychological process in which students’ writing moves from expressive to transactional in form; and Bazerman’s social contructionist approach, viewing types of writing as the means of teaching students how to enter a discipline. Charles Bazerman’s work considering the development of the characteristics of genres within specific disciplines has brought an awareness of the specificity of various disciplines as well as the need to make novices in the field aware of both the characteristics of discipline specific genres and their developmental nature. More recent research along these lines has tended to look at specific disciplines to discover the socio-historical and immediate formation of epistemology within specific fields. For example, a recent study funded by the National Science Foundation published in the Journal of Research in Science Teaching focused on “The Epistomological Framing of a Discipline: Writing Science in University Oceanography” found that instructors’ interactions with students re-produced and produced expectations of writing within oceanography (Kelly)- Both Bazerman and David Russell have proceeded to work on the theoretical constructs of the connections between genre and social contextual theories. All of these researchers and theorists see each academic discipline as having its own specialized procedures for which and through which writers develop strategies, and all of them view disciplinary writing as socially constructed. Within particular discourse communities, students are taught how to move fi'om writing that focuses primarily on their own 16 experiences in individualized ways toward means of communicating in ways that are acceptable to the particular discipline. Around the same time as this interest in disciplinary discourse began to emerge in the mid-eighties, and as I was entering the field, research on all aspects of WAC blossomed. In 1985, C. William Griflin surveyed 322 institutions that had been represented at WAC sessions at NCTE and CCCC, and in addition, 82 well known schools. Out of 401 schools, be received 194 responses; 55 had no WAC, and 139 described their programs. As a result of the study, he learned that faculty who attend WAC workshops are primarily interested in writing as learning and in understanding rhetorical concepts through writing, reading, and discussing. Griflin concluded, based on the positive response and the existence of so many programs, that “the WAC movement is a success” (403). This led to an important question that became central to WAC researchers: what are the requirements or standards according to which WAC is to be considered successful as a movement or program? According to Toni Haring-Smith’s 1985 A Guide to Writing Programs, many campuses had instituted WAC programs. However, when one looks closely at many of them, only about twenty-five percent of the faculty were involved in a rmjority of their voluntary programs. In fact, only four schools listed seventy-five percent faculty involvement or higher. My use of “only” certainly skews one’s perceptions; there were many who considered such numbers to indicate positive change in view of the difficulty in instigating real pedagogical changes. Thus other questions emerged, such as: Is WAC success based on the number of campuses that have WAC programs or the percentage of faculty volunteers in those programs? Does it take faculty involvement? 17 Does it take faculty doing it the “right” way? (And who decides what is the right way?) Does success require that students’ writing improve? Does it require that students’ learning improve? Does it require radical change in curriculum? Researchers since the 1980's have examined each of these questions. The research to determine whether WAC is successful has been done on both macro and micro levels. On a macro level researchers have tried to determine how widespread WAC is on college campuses, how specific WAC programs operate, and how WAC can be more successfully implemented and continued. Such macro level research has tended to be broad in nature because it requires either surveys of several institutions, such as Griffin or Haring-Smith’s, or longitudinal studies of individual institutions with WAC programs. On a micro level, researchers have examined whether WAC affects studentwritingorleamingandhowWACisusedbyspecific faculty. Asameansof contextualizing the research that informs my research, I will highlight a few examples and themes of both macro and micro studies. Many macro oriented studies are longitudinal studies that have described the institution and growth of WAC on particular campuses. For example, in her 1983 study of Colleges of Education, Humanities and Fine Arts, Natural Science, Social and Behavioral Sciences, and Business, Charlene Eblen sent a two-page questiomraire asking 471 full-time faculty to rate writing qualities on a Likert-like scale, to list four major dificulties they felt students have with writing and to answer questions about the ways in which writing was handled in their classroom. About fifiy-seven percent of the surveys were returned. Eblen's study revealed the views of the faculty on may areas of student writing and also revealed much about the respondents' reported classroom practice. According to the 18 gym {INC .1" ”he about “his .1255 terrestufl if to *he mm: are“: Inlet me more In a 1936 : was at cm 5mm inciu. Sting across the 33 Problem an “C. In her rep: HI mill-1316 flu E"? be] vm' T0 deiem . ’nl rewa ”m that a}: Werner responses, more than eighty percent of the faculty assigned some type of writing in the chsses about which they were questioned. The amount of required writing in their courses corresponded to the type of academic division to which the respondents belonged and to the amount of credits for which the course was offered. Faculty in fields such as engineering tended to require less writing, while faculty in the humanities tended to require more. In a 1986 survey of writing programs, including several varieties of WAC programs at campuses from Yale to Vanderbilt, Carol Hartzog elicited vast amounts of information, including the fact that forty—one percent of the programs were responsible for writing across the curriculum in some way and in some form. She found that one of the main problems arising in assessing most programs was the lack of a standard definition of WAC. In her report, she offered details of eight types of WAC programs; these varied from graduate students fiom various discplines being trained to teach introductory writing to upper level writing intensive courses . To determine in what stage WAC programs were in 1988, Susan McLeod surveyed a much larger group of institutions: 2375 post-secondary schools. With a forty percent response, she learned that only five percent of those Ind closed down a WAC program, that although sixty-two percent did not have a WAC program, one percent were planning or interested in beginning one. Thirty-eight percent of the respondents did have a program. In many ways, this verified the previous studies. McLeod concluded that filculty development, fimding and administration of programs were major issues to those With existing programs (1989). One question that arose as I was reading these surveys was “what was going on at institutions that did not respond or do not report a WAC l9 33:33]? No W 9:33: a £01.:ch Ackerrr‘at I ‘ ~ ‘4; 0m sun program? No writing in disciplines other than composition?” This led me towards studying a college with no WAC program in place. Ackerman’s comment on these large scale surveys in 1993 was that they “report categorical fiequencies, but they are far less adept at providing descriptions of complex educational institutions. Thus they typically do not clarify either the theories or educational agendas behind writing programs” (340). This may explain why such surveys did not proliferate through the 1990's. Another type of macro research, longitudinal studies, offered more of the description that would provide some of these details. Longitudinal studies began appearing in the late 1980's, primarily as institutional program reviews. In 1986, Art Young and Toby F ulwiler and colleagues reported their findings fiom surveys, assessment strategies and case studies at Michigan Technological University (MTU) in Writing Across the Disciplines: Research Into Practice. The information gathered fiom their research considered the efficacy of particular approaches to writing to learn in specific disciplines, such as jorunaling in a mathematics course and writing poetry in a psychology course. It also measured student exposure, faculty attitudes and practices, and students’ writing apprehension and skills overall. In 1990 another such study related the two-tiered, four year process of training and implementation of writing by Writing and Reading in the Technologies staff of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Technology department of Queensborough Community College in New York. Linda Stanley reported that English teachers could influence other departments and that vocation oriented faculty typically would implement useful assignments into their upper level courses, although the suggestion of a narrative lab report was resisted, a term that I discuss at length later. 20 —— .t'iotlrr lt' its for comps. iEtieues at EL": 1’33th has 3 SEC m sorisht‘: dimes sent 0 .. Another longitudinal report, which was shared in a 1991 CCCC presentation and is useful for comparison to my own research, was done by Theodore Lerud and his colleagues at Elrnhurst College in Illinois. Elrnhurst's WAC program is voluntary for teachers, has a steering committe with members from various departments and provides a summer workshop and monthly focus meetings for follow-up purposes. Lerud and his colleagues sent out a preliminary survey at the inception of the WAC program in 1985, in which they asked faculty to check writing activities fiom a prepared list that the faculty considered "appropriate and necessary for study in your discipline." After Elmhurst's WAC program had been in place for about four to five years, with almost sixty percent of faculty participating in the program, two further sets of surveys were sent out: one in late 1989 to participants in the WAC program and one over the 1989-1990 school year to all faculty, looking for techniques, assignments, and responses to writing. The first survey focused on techniques and how they had been modified; respondents reported techniques from the use ofjoumals to parodies and rated the importance they gave to those techniques. The second survey asked faculty to give percentage ratings of ways in which they used writing in their classes, to list and rank purposes for using writing and to indicate what parts of process they required before the final draft. The responses fiom faculty who participated in the WAC program were compared to the responses hour the faculty who did not. They found that faculty who participated in WAC assigned more writing and provided more feedback in preliminary stages. They also found that the WAC faculty reported that the purpose ofassigning writing was to assist student learning and cognitive development. The techniques that faculty used most were jomnals, mulitple drafts, in-class writing and peer review. 21 0n the mi; rm} SlUtilCS W first tool the sh test an 'he 51‘. a“ surmise SIL mmmam min with; 135 datum such as an; as a singfi Climate and 1h tam-g- is situath if m was for 1 Such stunI A . a: , . _ * minim Cr. 17.. On the micro level of considering the effects of writing across the curriculum, several studies were completed in order to determine if writing indeed improved learning. These took the shape of case studies and classroom experiments with control groups and focused on the student writers. John Ackerman considered thirty-five of these empirical and qualitative studies that had been reported on between 1979 and 1989 to see if there was enough evidence to conclude a causal link. His meta-analysis led him to conclude that certain writing tasks, particularly analytical writing, could be correlated with learning outcomes such as synthesis and reasoning (357). Ackerman cautioned against seeing writing as a singular tool to facilitate all learning; he concluded that “Writing does complicate and thus enrich the thinking process but will result in learning only when learning is situationally supported and valued” (359). His suggestion for future research in the area was for qualitative and longitudinal assessments of writers in context. Such studies did begin to arise. In 1991, Barbara Walvoord and Lucille McCarthy published Thinking and Writing in College. This study of students’ dificulties in meting teachers’ expectations used self-report, but also provided thick description in the form of student interviews, analysis of assignments, and student protocols. The authors examined the ways in which a teacher’s conversation and assignments in courses such as social science, biology and history affected the students’ understanding of what was expected of them as a writer. They also examined the ways in which students constructed themselves and their audiences in their writing, and what difliculties arose fiom these constructions. An important consideration which arose from their study is the way in which faculty conveyed those expectations through the assigrunents and through the ways that they talked about the assignments in class. Dissertations such as Judith Solsken’s 1993 “What 22 reset mes; fazed or. . m I The {OCLL‘ W1Tofthe 1 titles focused 0 5‘3 “it‘ll facuh} 'u T: 0T mlS-COngc Him 30316 S “if IBTRICth :ffi‘tukys resist. Tammi: conju: 323s a regime ihlous ahusjon “9 s with [h mm has. bee: “is“ that an 1t me?“ ha\ 6 is it Like to Write in College: A Phenomenological Study Using In-Depth Interviews” appeared, investigating the experience of student writers.‘ Often these studies additionally focused on how teachers shaped the students’ understanding and performance in writing. The focus on teacher’s roles had been a part of the WAC articles from the beginning of the movement; many “how-to-nm-a successful-WAC-workshop—or-program” articles focused on faculty members’ attitudes. However, more research began to focus on what faculty in other disciplines were doing in their classes after the workshops, wlmt pre- or mis-conceptions they brought to the workshops, and what opposition they posed to WAC. Some studies considered faculty perceptions and the potential they held for WAC (Bratcher & Stroble, Braine, Beaver, Soven, Watkins). Other considered the nature of faculty’s resistance and how to overcome it (Boice, Walsh, Weiss). The concept of resistance conjures images of badly constructed aerodynamics or a militant movement against a regime. In fact one title refers to faculty in a “period of retrenchment,” an obvious allusion to foxhole digging (Walsh). WAC research has also investigated problems with the implementation of and faculty resistance to WAC. Much more attention has been focused on determining how writing is used in the classrooms or on proving that writing actually affects learning. In effect, the major questions asked by most researchers have been whether teachers are using writing as a learning tool correctly and whether that use of writing does make a difference. In F ulwiler and Young’s 1986 Writing in the Disciplines, “Surveying Classroom Practices: How Teachers Teach Writing,” a section written by James Kalmbach and Michael Gorman reports their findings of a survey of faculty members who had attended one or more writing workshops offered at MTU. The survey was answered by 104 faculty 23 members, which represented an eighty percent return rate. Their study combined qualitative andquantitativeanalysisand focused onfacultyattitudes andtheuseofwriting in the chssroom. All the questions were posed in a “before workshop” versus “after workshop” format, asking them to determine what types of writing they asked for and to evaluate how writing had changed the courses they taught before and after attending. They concluded that the workshops did have an effect, but that they affected faculty selectively, according to discipline. The disciplines in which less effect was noted were those in which less follow-up or interaction with colleagues about writing was present. In the same year, in Teaching Writing in the Content Areas, Margaret Parish’s and colleagues’ chapter on “Programs in Writing Across the Curriculum” contained reports on faculty involvement from six different institutions. The report from the University of North at Carolina Wilmington included results flour a survey of faculty that was constructed to determine faculty attitude toward writing and to determine the role and type of writing used in their classrooms. The faculty senate at UNCW had recently published a monograph on WAC, appointed a writing committee, and voted to lmve writing emphasis be a relevant factor in advancement. This survey, returned by 99 out of the 300 that received it, was sent in the fall of 1984, after a writing workshop had been offered in the spring of 1983 and a writing brochure had just been published. John Evans, in his summary of the findings, lamented the state of writing at UNCW, even saying that “Writing English is the foreign language experience of undergraduate study on today’s campus...,” and that if the current trend continued, “...students will need only the ability to darken the rectangle on a computer card to demonstrate their proficiency in a field of my” (79-80). According to him, those reasons range fiom teachers not assigning 24 writing because of poor student writing skills to teachers who are well meaning but misinformed about assigning essay exams or term papers. Evans despondently described the faculty at the University of North Carolina who were interested in offering writing in their courses as misguided: Then there are the teachers who feel they are on the WAC bandwagon because they assign long term papers or give students essay exams at least once a semester. These teachers are overlooking a very basic assumption underlying discipline- based writing, that is, the integral part writing plays in learning any subject. When the most frequent use of writing in the disciplines emphasizes only the final product, even that writing is stripped of its usefulness as a medium for teaching and learning (80). Do these teachers merely avert their gaze from "underlying assumptions" about writing that they should know, or are they bringing different assumptions to those very genres? In either case, faculty from disciplines other than composition or rhetoric, with good intentions toward writing, have often found that the ways in which they implement writing are bemoaned. In a 1990 study, George Braine examined the syllabi, handouts, and semester reports of faculty who were teaching assigned WAC courses at the University of Texas. He formd that the majority focused on quantity of writing over process or writing to learn. Braine concludes tlmt asking ”interdisciplinary factu who are largely unaware of the current composition research and pedagogy to teach writing appears to be unrealistic" (30). This would leave WAC proponents with two possibilities: training fitculty in the current composition theory or considering WAC a loss. Braine’s study was conducted in a way that did not focus on faculty teaching of writing per se, as much as on their seeing Writingasavitaltooloflearning. 25 run >12 if} hate be“ 3 it. John F. E‘ W (03-326 ~‘ if. my mrlllll C‘ T- 1‘21 1531 fiflt‘M’C sense of Mt 10d) S's ELEM/ll [“0 fat Ti»: testers sht- it to stimulate 53in“: nested rt “ms the it. his 10 holds 11".- h‘ilmfiiing Wf Witter ' meta! stud} 3h; - “W In order '. 5w: ‘ . I ”fit? S. Li} Other studies have not been as concerned about the qualification of the faculty as they have been about the attitudes and perceptions of the faculty who are involved in WAC. John F. Beaver and Nancy Deal surveyed faculty at Elizabethtown College and SUNY College at Fredonia and found that attitudes toward student writing corresponded to the amount of training and support given to faculty. When WAC was implemented in a way that allowed faculty and administrators to have a shared and clear sense of the purpose of WAC, attitudes toward WAC were better too. Jody Swilky, in a 1992 study resembling Deborah Swanson-Owens’ 1986 study, followed two faculty members after a WAC workshop. Swanson-Owens found that the two teachers she studied saw the teacher as the locus of knowledge and adopted writing only to stimulate interest, fill down time, or to aid in learning how to write. Although Swilky viewed resistance differently from SwansomOwens, noting positive aspects and explaining the reasons for it in a less pejorative light, the study focuses on resistance and tends to holds the teacher accountable for implementing ways of assigning and incorporating writing that correspond to the researcher’s views. Another important study in this area was Suzarme Bratcher and Elizabeth Stroble’s three-year study on a National Writing Project site with roots in the Bay Area Writing Project in order to investigate findings fiom studies like Judith Langer and Arthur Applebee’s. Langer and Applebee’s study, published as “How Writing Shapes Thinking: A Study of Teaching and Learning” in 1987, found that teachers’ responses to WAC workshops were positive, but that implementation of WAC strategies was not always complete. Bratcher and Stroble acted as research participants and used a "triad mode," collecting quantitative data from questionnaires and qualitative data from self-report and 26 hisenhthflS. T? Lager. and yet . ammmu h the. ugh Iht hated One of I? that Emmett meha. rain as uric- ~~0'S 'rmplt" “£38 The} s: use in gain ‘1‘” E3 1336 hir: Ml? EOCTLQL‘ Emmi her... Triad “filing T.’ 1111994, 1 h Chmmm .- h «a; A is. “er l0 ”We such a. a?“ that observations. Their findings, reported in 1994, in some ways supported Applebee and Langer, and yet also questioned from where these results came. For example, when teachers did not focus on the process of writing in the classroom, the researchers realized that althoughtheprocesshadbeendiscussed inthe Surmner Institutes, ithadnot been modeled. One of the conclusions Bratcher and Stroble drew from their results is that in order to lmve instructors include writing process instruction in their classrooms, the instructors mustseethevalueofwritingintheirownlives. Theyfoundthatasteachersincreasedin comfort as writers themselves and increased in confidence about themselves as evaluators/implementors of practice, they developed greater competence as teachers of writing. They state that “Full implementation of writing process instruction may require more than gaining a repetoire of strategies: it may require a reconstruction of what one values in teaching and learning and time for doing so” (86). Bratcher and Stroble’s research focused on teachers in grades 1-12, but it is usefirl in that it emphasizes the relationship between teachers as writers themselves and the approach that teachers take toward writing in the classroom. In 1994, Douglas Rogers surveyed previous WAC literature to determine what the best classroom practices were, according to WAC experts, for his dissertation “Are College Content Area Professors Practicing WAC Procedures?” He then distributed a questionnaire to community college professors that measured whether they used those practices, such as multiple drafts, process writing, and in-class writing. He found, not surprisingly, that the only variable that influenced whether professors did so was discipline 27 ,‘w‘. . “T area, since English professors scored highest, and that less than lmlfof the 41 practices he defined were used. In the same year, Audrey Kleinsasser, Norma Decker Collins, and Jane Nelson in “Writing in the Disciplines: Teacher as Gatekeeper or Border Crosser,” asked at the begirming of their study of WAC workshop participants, "When faculty agree to integrate writing into their courses, what kind ofteaching and learning tool do they think they are using?" Based on this question, they seemed to be interested in the fireulty’s definitions and perceptions. However, their study proceeded to become just as much a study of what kind ofteaching and learning tool the researchers thought the faculty were using. In their study, the fimction of writing was considered a reflection of the teacher's role, and there were two possible roles: gatekeeper or border crosser. Faculty were interviewed individually and as a group to determine whether the manner in which the faculty incorporated writing into the classroom assisted students in maintainingtheirownwaysofwritingandthinkingwhile learningthewaysofthe fieldor whetherit made studentsconformto thewaysthatthefieldusedwritingandobtained knowledge. Those whose assignments led toward assimilation were gatekeepers, while those whose assignments retained student autonomy were termed border crossers. Although the researchers looked beyond mere genres to how the faculty managed and maintained, or perhaps resisted managing and maintaining, writing and learning, the faculty were still categorized with one of the two labels. Thus the researchers, although reflective of critical political concerns important to composition, still utilized dichotomous categories. 28 Another Perception of: 0‘33th stud}. mini; assists disarm. t mush led that Its sau “Thin 01' 35 EDWIN 115m tearing “12th; “it her 1% CiiSS‘oom 31 3T; its: iii‘i‘tul d .1: ' ‘ .,, . K333115111 h“ I g. S C! 1.,” . Rut: agreed I it", . . "41335ch Another CCCC presentation, “This is Chemistry, Not Literature: Faculty Perceptions of Student Writing,” by Sandra Zerger in 1997, outlined the first phase of an ongoing study. In the first phase, Zerger and colleagues had surveyed 1300 faculty and teaching assistants fi'om a “College of Liberal Arts and Sciences”, to determine what types of assignments faculty gave and what they considered good writing. Their immediate analysis led them to determine that very few instructors used writing to learn and that most sawwritingasawayto exhibit learning, andaminoritysawitasameansoflearning or as connected to their field. Their distinction between writing to learn and writing to exhibit learning was a problematic one that arose in many studies. Marjorie Barnes, in a paper for Issues in Education at Community Colleges, related her 1999 survey to determine faculty attitudes towards assigning writing in the classroom at an institution at which the WAC program that had begun in 1978 and had been adopted as policy in 1988 had “failed.” She speculated that the reasons for the failure might have been the lack of follow-up after WAC workshops, lack of specific direction and guidelines in the policies, or lack of communication between the faculty involved in the writing intensive courses. She found that “eighty-two percent of the fitculty agreed that there is a difference between using writing and teaching writing” (5), yet later added that “some faculty in other disciplines may have very traditional notions of what it means to teach writing even if they know that there is a difference” (7). However, her surveys did not have questions that would elicit information that would support the second claim. Jeanne Ragland Ezell, in a 1999 dissertation, investigated the relationship between five professors’ early reading and writing experiences and their use of writing in the 29 :bSSTO'Om She to. he a ratunl \ masts honest serpents to 5 half she had archive tutu.r mien oftrrate ‘3? that the ins E1531?! the ct 10m data. est mi! dlCiTOlOIE: ”3 in Kitscht. 111‘;ng facui BM) Sir FIJI} “mm! 131m at ML. WWI ctz mt if0r a c “c 4‘ — EmtobeeXL ' ‘Orl. 1‘ W mUL‘ 31ft classroom. She noted that “viewing writing to learn as the purpose of assignments seems to be a natural way for teachers to use writing in the disciplines.” She asserted in her final analysis, however, that although “four of the five professors said they used writing assignments to stimulate thinking more than to develop their students’ writing [emphasis hers],” she ind found “they were not necessarily assigning writing of an informal or expressive nature...[they] were using writing more as a way for students to demonstrate nmstery of material than to actually learn the material” (219-20). She claimed that the way that the instructors graded the writing turned them from expressive to transactional. Ezell uses the concepts of writing to learn and learning to write as an organizational tool for her data, even though she nods at the fact that this suggests a false and potentially lethal dichotomy, rooted in the conflicts of the entire field of commrmication (found as well in Kirscht, Levine and Reifi‘ ; Berthofi). As a result her research continues a tradition of judging faculty use of writing based on particular types of writing assigned. Billy Smith, in his 2000 dissertation, “Using Writing Practices Inventory to Predict Faculty Willingness to Adopt Writing Across the Curriculum Teaching Techniques,” does not look at what is happening in the classrooms, but seeks a method to select faculty for participation in WAC training based on their attitude. His intent is to explore a measurement device that could be used to determine who would be a more promising prospect for a WAC program and who would not, and he states right up front that it is not meant to be exclusionary, but to “identify...a suitably enthusiastic audience” (vii). This inventory works much like a personality test with a “battery of questions” that ask faculty about how much they write, how much they ask students to write, what their level of confidence towards WAC is, what their perception of the institution’s level of investment 30 'nWAC is. and red is of intere: {t‘t’fil of tiew. S Tia: sill work it briefs about u r intrigues“). at calm that " in: tiaehing. t Erich. and Theo 33’} 118“ oft} Another in WAC is, and how often and how well they think about writing assignments. The final area is of interest to me, since it seems to bring some level of evaluation fi'om an expert’s point of view. Smith feels that the results will help WAC proponents to find techniques that will work in training faculty and “to avoid activities that violate deeply held faculty beliefs about writing pedagogy that could lead to rejection of [WAC] teaching techniques”(4). At the beginning of the study, he quotes a 1976 study by Hunt to support the claim that “ although most faculty identify no particular theoretical underpinning to their teaching, their teaching efi‘orts point to some sort of theory” (9). Smith’s focus on beliefs and theory, although still assuming a measurement stance towards faculty in other disciplines, reflects Walvoord and colleagues statements in In the Long Run, that connect to my view of theory and lore in a later chapter. Another recent study measuring faculty members’ writing assignments and evaluations is Pauline Chinn and Thomas Hilger’s “From Corrector to Collaborator: The Range of Instructor Roles in Writing-Based Natural and Applied Science Classes” in the Journal of Research in Science Teaching. Chinn and Hilger considered the connection between students’ understanding of teachers’ roles and the teachers’ objectives and assignments; in doing so, they placed the teachers on a scale that saw the teachers’ role as corrector or collaborator depending on their work in writing intensive science classes. The WAC researchers in many of these studies envisioned faculty in other disciplines as “other,” which Clifford Geertz identifies as a trope that is often used to define oneselfin research by differentiating between the researcher and the person, or other, who is being researched (After 106-12). Margery Wolfconunents that whether a researcher is aware of it or not, she always creates and becomes responsible for an 31 'ot'rrr.’ HOW , . p . 'y ‘D‘ ‘Dmpsmg 1.. macs. nature omiss- “ or email so? times the ' Barb £51985- (01’s,: r Y , V “”3412? (out DB “T7 resistant facult} ; eloquerf- the cur: mile“ {7, Shared r “We a: fac‘uh} } “other.” However, Christine Farris warns WAC researchers and proponents, in “Disciplining the Disciplines,” that “in viewing disciplines as Other, we see them as noble savages, natural inquirers, or imperfect versions of ourselves in need of reform. In both of these instances, their context becomes our context, whether we want to praise their use of jourmls or analysis or blame their grading of surface level error” (5). As Farris notes, sometimes the “other” is seen in a pejorative light, and at times, somewhat patronizingly. Barbara Mallonee, comments on the pejorative view point WAC researchers take in a 1985 College Composition and Communication review of Fulwiler and Young’s Language Connections: The writers assume that faculty in the disciplines are not only unenlightened but resistant. They lament, as did Elaine Maimon in “Talking to Strangers,” that faculty in this discipline do not treat students like junior colleagues, and plead eloquently for insight and sympathy on behalf of these students. I suspect that annoyance, nay, even hostility toward our colleagues across the curriculum is not only tactless, but also rarely appropriate. Faculty “over there” may be more eager for the continuous integration of the curriculum and the shared responsibility for language and learning than we think....One wonders if there are not startling discoveries to be brought back fi'om over there and if writing faculty haven’t their share of egregious blind spots (245). I noticed some of this hostility when I was sharing some of my preliminary data from the surveys in this study at a College English Association of Ohio conference-the audience had two quite vocal attendees who adamantly voiced their fi'ustration with faculty and their sense that faculty members fi'om other areas viewed the composition courses as “service courses,” and were unwilling to acknowledge “their share of the responsibility in student writing.” When I read one negative opinion from one of the surveys, which had a grammatical error in it, one of the attendees scofl‘ed that since he/she responded with such error, we should place even less value in their comment! This is not to say that all WAC 32 room‘s OTC to ale 1}” for“. mole”. ex; on: Vi“ I‘m. 1513“”M sm mic-m moss red on 7 “3:“ MW“ “If so: 8131“ '“L’ ...esf’? student doctorl MT} P9 world 0| lit If: “Ewell" Cornish NESNEHI‘ 9* mold the” ‘ I mos-V Moment ‘ l" I {well tom min; +35 lie and l proponents or composition experts take such a view, but overall, much research does tend to take the form of evaluating whether faculty fiom other disciplines are matching the researchers’ expectations. This view of faculty from other disciplines is similar to Martin Buber’s I-it or I- thou. James Mofl’ett, in his discussion of Buber’s theory, points out: “I and you inhabit some space-time, but in a given communication situation, he or it [or other] inhabits only the timeless realm of abstraction. Thus if Tom and Dick want to exclude Harry even if he is standing right before them, all they have to do is refer to him [emphasis his]” (11). The third person reference is not always a conscious eflbrt but an unconscious forgetting, Buber states that ...every Thou in our life is doomed to become an It, a thing... A young medical student dreams passionately of curing suffering humanity. Then he becomes a doctor in a crowded hospital, with pressure, with not enough time to devote to every patient. And the suffering humans become objects. They recede into the world of the It. This is the tragedy of being human. And in order to avoid using the I-Thou we must make a stand... only [people] who are capable of truly saying “Thou” to one another can truly say “We” with one another (qtd. in Hodes 57). Considering faculty as “they” who need to be sorted out into resistant or nonresistant, gatekeeper or border crosser, makes them abstract. I realize this is difficult to avoid when one writes up research, “fi'eezing it unnaturally and giving it unearned legitimacy”(8-9), as Margery Wolf phrases it. However, I would like to suggest tlut a more apparent tendency to “other” fiaculty from disciplines other than composition in WAC research and theory can be traced to tensions, perhaps imagined, perhaps real, between writing in the disciplines and writing to learn and between the concepts of expressive and transactional writing. 33 The roots in early research and theory led to two early focuses: one investigating writing as learning and the other investigating writing within specific disciplines. WAC could mean writing in the disciplines (WID) or writing to learn (WTL) or a combination of both. Susan McLeod provides two different views of WTL and WID: in “WAC: An Introduction,” she equates WTL with a cognitive approach of discovering or transforming knowledge, and WID with a rhetorical approach “attempting to model in the classroom the collaborative nature of the creation of knowledge” (5); in “The Pedagogy of Writing Across the Curriculum,” in the 2001 anthology A Guide to Composition Pedagogies, she rephrases this distinction as a writing to learn and writing to communicate, noting that the focus on genres is a focus on communicating within specific disciplines. McLeod and Elaine Maimon have taken great pains to explain tlmt viewing WTL and WID in opposition is a “serious misunderstanding” of WAC in “Clearing the Air: WAC Myths and Realities,” published in College English in 2000. They point to lack of suflicient evidence for, in fact substantial evidence against Knoblauch and Brannon’s claims that many WAC programs had become “grammar across the curriculum. They note that Knoblauch and Brannon’s 1983 article and Mahala’s 1991 article have been “cited, most recently in doctoral dissertations by students who understandably bring a greater degree of acceptance than critique to what they read in a major journal” (574), myself indeedincluded, sinceitisonlywithmuchguidancefi'omconunitteemembersand this article that I dare to question the myth. Later in “The Pedagogy of WAC,” McLeod points to Mahala’s and Knoblauch and Brannon’s consideration of Maimon’s (now out of print) text, Writing in the Arts and Sciences, as an example of ways that WAC proponents have set up “...a false dichotomy, 34 watering mm the I“ in fad. mm fro? settlemenm: i511. Shf a“ El finalise : 3,, ways of u. Efmg I0 “7 “hen ‘ approaching a it are and}? arm ofthe ' ".21:- prOci‘ss ... I A: comet? to“; «on (less; characterizing a text as an introduction to mere forms and formats and opposing it to ‘writing to learn’” (2001 151). WID and WTL are interconnected. As Randall Freisinger stated in his 1980 College English article “Cross Disciplinary Writing Workshops: Theory and Practice,” one brings a writer into contact with herself, and the other connects us to the larger community, and “...genuine communication requires an organic interaction between the two.” Susan McLeod warns against seeing them otherwise. In fact, McLeod goes on to state that “most of us who have been involved in WAC programs fi'om the beginning see ‘Navriting to learn” and ‘fivriting to communicate” as two complementary, even synergistic, approaches to writing across the curriculum” (2001 151). She and Maimon agree that WAC “is a pedagogical reform movement that presents an alternative to the ‘delivery of information’ model of teaching higher education...[in] two ways of using writing in the classroom and the curriculum: writing to learn and learning to write in the disciplines”(579). When we consider students, this makes sense. Students must learn the way of approaching a problem that is consistent with the way it is approached in the field that theyare studying. Theymust also learnto becomecriticalconsumers ofthe languageand writing of the discipline if they are not already. Writing to learn is an important part of their process of learning the language and the genres of the discipline. In many ways, these connections hark back to James Britton’s definition of writing: "writing is a complex developmental process which promotes learning set in a universe of discourse with a broad range of audiences and purposes” (1970). ThetensionscreatedbetweenWIDandWTLcanalsobe seenintheuseofthe terms transactional and expressive; these have also taken on oppositional roles in research 35 mi hematite: Maths orig: Kant} Klan is: ' W? seam to However, in ti: fLWILng amt infom i'r‘set m3; 7‘ J!" ‘_‘ ILLICIB of“ and theoretical literature that difl‘er fiom their original denotation, despite Britton and Martin’s origiml intent. When the terms expressive and transactional were first coined by Nancy Martin and James Britton, they were not intended to be used as a dichotomy; they were meant to describe characteristics of progressive stages of writing rather than types. However, in time, expressive writing became linked with writing to learn, a means of experimenting and thinking; transactional writing with writing to cormnunicate, or to transmit information within a discipline. Emphasis must be placed on the fact that all of these terms cannot be viewed as separate categories. All writing might be seen as Inving elements of expressive and transactional, and writing in the discipline involves writing to learn and vice versa. Oneexample ofhowtransactionalwriting begantobe seenasatypewouldbe Abron’s discussion of unchanical writing as transactional, which does not call for composition, so to speak; in other words, it requires little input fiom the student. Examples of this type of writing would include filling in the blanks, simple computing, and copying. Applebee, Auten and Lehr mention note-taking as another type of mechanical writing; however, Stephen Tchudi considers note-taking to be "workaday writing," that is, writing which "grows directly fiom the students' need to get things done in class or laboratory" (21). He lists such types as: class notes, reading notes, field notes, observations, journals, learning logs, free writing, micro themes, reading reports, abstracts, summaries, letter, newsletters, reports, annotated bibliography, and evaluations. The focus of workaday can shift from the writer toward readers. Workaday writing can be taughtasapartofformal, rotelearning, oritcanbetaughtasamethodofinquirythatis becoming more prominent as a result of the dissatisfaction with the status quo of 36 arms i-‘i’ 1mm. note- Esprr‘ nhesis. or F apressi‘m a1.» toothed “it? 15:2»: time R lam Mo tie: Fermi; bs er krone a nai- The te: disciplinary genres. When used for inquiry, Tchudi asserts, and not as a means of rote learning, note-taking can be considered expressive. Expressive writing, or writing to learn, mistakenly came to be considered the antithesis, or perhaps the antidote to mechanical and transactional writing. The term expressive also became linked to types of writing like freewriting and journaling by being conflated with invention. This tradition had already taken root in composition classrooms by the time WAC gained momentum in the USA. Peter Elbow, Donald Murray, and James Mofi‘et had provided impetus for such an approach to writing through theory and research by emphasizing invention and discovery through writing, and it had eventually become a minstay of many composition textbooks. The terms transactional and expressive became more widely utilized as categories as WAC proponents sought ways in which to measure their success. As all educational movements do, WAC proponents sought tangible data to evaluate as evidence of change, andtypesofassigmnentswere moretangible waysto lookatwhat writingwastaking place in classrooms. Unfortunately, the genres became linked with either one category or another, and became static. So, the "older, traditional" methods of essay exams, lengthy term papers, and note taking were viewed as non-expressive writing while genres such as journals, reflective essays, short responsive writing, and narrative, were considered "correct" expressive methods. Thus, for much of WAC research history, the transactioml versus expressive categories became a standard measure of whether WAC was being implemented successfully. Using dichotomous categories, in turn, resulted in a kind of pass/fail situation for faculty whose writing assignments in classrooms were studied: if they assigned genres 37 considered transactional, they "failed" at implementing writing into their classrooms; if they assigned genres considered expressivist, they were successful. Such a standard is one of the main techniques in the "match to sample" studies that are scrutinized by Walvoord, Lawrence Hunt, Dowling and McMahon in In the Long Run, In match to sample studies, researchers and proponents evaluate whether instructors' assignments call for transactional or expressive writing, determining whether this ”matches" the types of writing that they "know" are the correct forms for WAC. Unfortunately, certain genres such as journals are assumed to be good, expressivist assignments, while others, such as essay exams or long term papers, are considered to be transactional and thus negative assignments. Wimt many researchers who take this approach find, based on their definitions, is that the writing that is assigned is usually mech anical or transactional in nature (Applebee, Eblen, Fulwiler, Laipson, Lerud). Britton and Martin’s original intention--to describe the tendency to focus on audience, in the case of communication or transaction, or on discovery, in the case of learning or expressiveness-may require new descriptive terms. The terms transactional and expressive have been given such reductive meanings within WAC theory and research that their use as two polar and dichotomous categories leads to false impressions and misunderstandings. Thus, they can no longer be useful in discussing characteristics of genres. Writing in the disciplines and writing to learn may unfortunately face the same fate. McLeod and Maimon state that although they understand how the myth of a WID/WTL dichotomy began, “what puzzles [them] is how it persists, given the much broader understanding now of the social contexts for rhetoric” (577). My suggestion is 38 that iv, persi not a hcne 2,: hers 317* irinto. i meades amaze m' l: (OW‘IWI' “trash social class. tome m f . I‘ ‘ “*mos; \ .5 ‘- ' ,- \. ‘tcmalg ‘ that it persists because by claiming that transactional writing or writing in the disciplines is not as beneficial to student learning as expressive writing or writing to learn, composition teachers and WAC proponents can assert our expertise in the field. By constructing a dichotomy and casting other disciplines as “other,” it may be possible that WAC researchers attempt to cast themselves as better educators. In some way, this theory may resonate with Crowley’s connection between composition and the rise of the bourgeoisie in Composition in the University. Crowley proposes the theory that the need to distinguish literature was a bourgeoisie act to privilege texts in order to privilege a rising social class, and the humanist view that required composition courses will empower or improve students appeals largely to the bourgeoisie. If we fi'ame the discipline of composition as similar to a social class, attempting to distinguish itselfin order to gain status, much like the bourgeoisie, and retmn to Geertz’s notion that “othering” is a means of defining self, then using a dichotomy in order to determine if “other” instructors match our definitions inherently becomes an act of establishing class status for our discipline within academia. Taking this view further, one could say that distinguishing certain modes of writing assignments as better than others may be the act of a field, composition, struggling for disciplinary status by asserting itselfas expert. Even Crowley produces a sense of “other” when she notes that academics in all areas want students to learn how to “write”; however to them, she says, this means sentence construction. “Academics’ desire that students master the so-called “basic” principles of composition in Freshman English is understandable, given their own lack of interest in attending to student literacy. Freshman English is supposed to ‘fix’ students supposed lack of literate mastery once and for all...”(8). This comment appears in the 39 . ; . ‘ tam": 0‘ miss and . m semi ofifrcif [103' are threaten hearts" 31 are am I] beginning of her polemic on the role of composition as a discipline in light of literary studies and other disciplines in higher edcuation. In "Writing Across the Curriculum: Transforming the Academy?" Cynthia Cornell and David J. Klooster intimated a very similar sentiment. In their opinion, WAC programs were struggling for survival because of their political status. Despite recognition of their “educational value,” such programs are threatening to others because they insist that universities and colleges rethink their “identity” and expose misunderstandings about learning: “Ultimately, WAC proponents are asking the academy to transform itself and shift the emphasis from research to teaching.” Such a sentiment is shared by many in the WAC community (F reisinger, Farris, Jones and Comprone). Seeing other faculty members as “they,” or “other” would be a natural result of attempting to gain status in the throng of disciplinary voices by claiming that we have more knowledge or more correct knowledge of the use of language, particularly writing. WAC researchers may be wittingly or unwittingly participating in a struggle for disciplinary status through retention of a WTL/WID or expressive transactional dichotomy. Recent WAC Research and theory has reflected a realization of the “othering” of faculty members. Walvoord, Hunt, Dowling and McMahon state that the notion of “adopt” and “resist” should be “reexamined,” since faculty see themselves as “...sensible people trying to find what ‘works’” (93). The faculty in their study are shown as more than subjects through their narratives: “what emerged for us from all these fiaculty stories was the sense of faculty as active constructors of their own meanings, as changers and searchers, each struggling to find a self, to help learners, to develop community.” (120). 40 lhus memo: “T1 or WI doing in thezl par of it. It. at ofhis res 10- m: 'llt 01? Elk Work ‘ “him" ll. 10‘ Coxjdemmn Wificflb 'n‘ in or; “mated‘ . 1715,” Feat ”‘3‘ fee? 501 SLR _ 3} 1 - Thus rather than sort faculty according to their aptitude for WAC, their implementation of methods that WAC experts consider appropriate, or their use of either WTL or WID in the classroom, perhaps WAC research should be asking what they are doing in their classrooms, why they are doing it, and how writing may be or may become a part of it. In a sense, this observation echoes the questions that Ackerman suggests at the end of his review and discussion of various studies and theoretical approaches to writing to learn: "How, why, and with what consequence for you and your students do you carry on the work of daily classroom, disciplinary, or everyday practice?" and "How would the activity of writing and other forms of literacy combine and fold into this practice--to enhance it, to complicate it and render it new?" (363). Ackerman's questions focus on the consideration of not only what faculty are assigning, but what they believe writing specifically helps to accomplish. In order to learn what faculty believe, we must listen carefiilly; as Kurt Spellmeyer commented, “We will need to become ethnographers of experience: I do not mean armchair readers of the “social text,” but scholar/teachers who find out how people actually feel” (911)[emphasis his]. Even though he was primarily discussing the need to draw connections between composition and literary studies teachers, his comment applies to the larger scale of disciplinary conversation. Martin Spear, Dennis McGrath and Ellen Seymour in “Toward a New Paradigm in WAC” note tlmt “The next generation of WAC, if it is to confront the central problem of open-access institutions-the paling of literacy standards and the weakening of disciplines--must assume a sympathetic but critical stance toward earlier practices” (28). By “the paling ofliteracy standards” they mean the view ofliteracy as basic skills 41 acquisition, rather than the critical literacy that both McCormick and Giroux define as “the knowledge and ability to perceive the interconnectedness of social conditions and the reading and writing practices of culture, to be able to analyse those conditions and practices, and to possess the critical and political awareness to take action within and against them” (Giroux qtd. in McCormick 49). This paling can apply to all institutions, not only those with open-access. What I hope to have done in this study is to have taken just such a “sympathetic but critical” view of the manner in which faculty fiom other disciplines have been considered in previous WAC research. There have been attempts to see the faculty as other than “other” including Walvoord and colleagues’ research reported in In the Long Run, which is discussed later, as well as collaborative work including reports from both participants. McCarthy and Fishman’s “Boundary Ways,” which they call a “twin study” entails both researcher and informant writing together. Since both are faculty members who have similar standing at their respective universities, none of the issues of unequal collaboration that Geertz cautions against interfere with the ability for the faculty member from the “other discipline” to explain his reasons and reasoning. One finding fi'om their examination of their collaboration was that “it may be oversimple to view people as inhabiting single epistemic positions...serious intellectual work requires a full repertoire of epistemological stances”(465). In my own prelimimry work in WAC, I had been doing some very informal research in the early 1990's. A tenured colleague fiom the philosophy and religion department at the college at which I taught in Indiana, approached me, because he was interested in teaching his Old Testament 11 course that focused on the Psalms, Proverbs 42 and Job, as a writing to learn course. We spent a few afternoons discussing what he wanted the students to learn fi'om his course and how writing might accentuate and facilitate those goals. As a result, the class was given no exams and focused primarily on journals, summaries, outlines and short essays. Many of the assignments were creative in nature, such as having students write their own psalms or write what they would say to the character Job in the book of Job in the Old Testament. As a means of examining how writing might influence the students, I administered a short survey to the students at the begirming and end of the course. I found tint their confidence in their writing rose, as did their view of whether writing was important to their lifestyle and their intentions to use writing to study in the future. The professor who taught the course was very pleased with the results, from the level of participation in the course to the results of some of the more formal essays. (See Appendix A for further detail). Soon I was having similar discussions with professors who taught psychology, anatomy and physiology, and mathematics courses. As they presented me with their fi'ustrations and hopes, as I gave them ideas of what they might try in their classrooms, and as they implemented and found them useful, WAC was slowly growing in their classrooms and across the campus. Two of the techniques that I found most useful in persuading colleagues to think about using writing in their own classrooms were to have them consider the writing that they did in their own field, as well as to have them consider how the ways that they learned to write for their discipline and the ways that they learned about the content of the discipline were intermingled and useful to them. They had specific memories of solving problems, learning vocabulary, and even conjuring epiphanies through writing tasks. This 43 offal. pmm allege in“ he: he col mi mfom‘x“ M} 1 L rag illh‘ l tats-record: corsidered r .l'-. . Lbfl‘fliltm led to designs of writing assignments and writing experiences in their current classrooms which promised to provide similar experiences for their own students. Eventually, the college invited an outside speaker to inform the Language and Literature department and then the college faculty as a whole about WAC, leading toward a more fully implemented and informed approach to WAC. My focus of interest had shifted fi'om student attitudes toward faculty attitudes during this time. Unfortunately, I had not done specific research in the form of field notes, tape-recorded conversations or surveys to substantiate the theorizing I began to do as I considered my interactions with my colleagues. As I then began to approach my dissertation research, I knew that I wanted to complete it in the area of WAC, but I was not sm'e in which direction to go: action research in which I implemented a specific WAC program, a case study of a particular professor, or another form of qualitative research In the meantime, I was moving to Cincinnati, Ohio, and would not be able to follow up on the work in WAC that I had done at the college in Indiana as a faculty member. I began to cast around for new ideas within WAC to pursue. I imd originally begun with a desire to measure faculty’s definitions of WAC: whether they were closer to WID or WTL, and how it clmnged as a result ofmy discussions with them. Yet this seemed too close to the “match to sample” approach, which, as mentioned before, Barbara Walvoord, Linda Lawrence Hunt, H. Fil Dowling and Joan McMahon questioned in their 1997 review of literature for In the Long Run. Match to sample studies, in the form of faculty surveys and case studies, have tended to focus on whether the behavior of the faculty reflects the researchers’ definitions and expectations. One of the difliculties of such an approach is that it implicitly tells the story 44 1 from 3 p05; treats?“ of a: it do“ [ma‘iédge 1 a: if Emmett [flag Run. be on 1513‘“ from a position of power and suggests that “the only acceptable change is change in the direction of full implementation of WAC-defined classrooms” (58). Another difficulty is that it does not investigate faculty motivation in a way that would lead to deeper knowledge of choices; instead it infers qualities of acceptance or resistance on the part of the participants. I was influenced to move toward a different approach after looking more closely at the approach that Walvoord and her colleagues took in the research reported in In the Long Run. Walvoord and her co-researchers did not focus on whether faculty “resisted” but on how faculty decided what worked and what did not. As a result, they found criteria that faculty used to judge WAC strategies: Does it build community? Does it aid learning? Will it fit within my constraints? How does it match my style and philosphy of teaching? Their findings suggest that continual change is a foremost characteristic of faculty who become involved in WAC and that teacher change is more complex than how they handle WAC; it is connected to their sense ofself(12). The faculty were seen as “self-directed managers of their own continual change and growth,” who came with goals and problems that they hoped WAC would help read and solve (49). Change resulted from specific problems, sometimes fi'om colleagues’ ideas. Walvoord, Hunt, Dowling and McMahon found that what faculty expected influenced how WAC was used in their classrooms. WAC gave a sense of community, provided safety to explore ideas, and helped them give a name to methods toward which they were already leaning. The conclusions that Walvoord and colleagues drew were tlmt faculty do not come to WAC in a vacuum, that they define WAC differently, that community is important, and that philosophy and attitude is more helpful than specific strategies. In 45 efiect "WA Math mum of t chssoom c firming Enter as ' Hov 551335 from Idle} not “a 0155? Voice; tr} mute. lib" effect, “WAC’s most important outcome may be that underneath the shifting strategies, underneath the teacher’s necessary accommodation to real-life constraints, lies a deeper stratum of faculty life--a stratum of belief, attitude, habit, commitment, and community-- that can be changed, in some cases profoundly” (90). Thus, using writing in one’s classroom could be recursively connected to the teachers’ place in their community, influencing and being influenced by the choices that they made. This view of a faculty member as complex and involved in constraints interested me. However, Walvoord and her colleagues were considering faculty after they had attended some form of WAC workshop, whereas I was interested in some of the same issues fi'om the perspective of faculty who had not been through formal WAC workshops. I did not want to treat WAC as a set of strategies or way of teaching which excludes all other voices and ways of teaching. Nor did I want to study the faculty to determine how they resisted or whether they implemented WAC correctly. Instead, I wanted to consider faculty understanding of writing and learning when there had not been previous WAC program influence, in terms of previous workshops, surveys, or discussions. I decided that rather than consider myself as an expert, holding the perfect definition of WAC that they must emulate in order to be successful, I would try to create conversations in which I would value the experience, knowledge and language skills that they bring to their classrooms and writing. My research differs from that reported in In the Long Run in that way: I approached the faculty to learn what they were already doing, prior to any formalized discussion of WAC. As I discussed the possibilities of my research with my dissertation chair and other committee members, we discussed some of my theoretical assumptions about WAC. In 46 titan 1 IT:- _ l denied that discover how their thought there we for 515555 in m Watt so.- {it English Stub.“ all; M . “31 2: "y n; [kw ( at?“ I Pull in k thwart en a71310 beg; addition, I mentioned my conversations with my colleagues across the disciplines. We decided that the questions that I had been asking the faculty in order to allow them to discover how writing might work in their classrooms would allow me to learn a lot about their thoughts on writing in the discipline and writing in the courses they taught. From there we formulated a means of moving from survey to individual interviews, which I discuss in more detail below. The next step for me was to decide which faculty to work with. While I was trying to decide where I might request approval to work, I attended a dinner given by a group of alumni fiom my undergraduate years at the home of the retiring English chair person. In the course of the dimer, since many of us were educators, the conversation turned to student writing and learning. I began to describe my perspectives and interests and mentioned that I was in the midst of composing my proposal, but needed a location. The chairperson immediately suggested that my alma mater would be a wonderful place to conduct such interviews. Thus, after some phone calls and e-rmils to the present chair of the English department and the academic dean at what I will call Southwark College in Southwark, Kentucky, and with the approval of my conmiittee and the university committee on research involving human subjects, I began my research. The Setting: Description of Location When I pulled into the visitor parking lot of Southwark College on March 6, 1999, my first thought surprised me. I wondered if my car would get towed. This was a strange way to begin the field work for a dissertation, but proof that I had learned one lesson in my time as a student at that same college fifteen years ago: park in the visitors’ slots at your own risk. It was a risk I had taken at many occasions when I had been a student, and 47 now “he 53: rotor. ilk oith m) col Sou anoma- religioss ha at Wed [h k now the same sense of excitement arose despite the fact that I was now a legitimate visitor. The fact that parking in the visitors’ spot was one of the major risks associated with my college days reveals a great deal about the character of the college. Southwark College is a small hberal arts college afliliated with a large Christian denomination. Students tend to choose the college because of the mix of academic and religious background. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, Southwark’s undergraduate enrollment in the fall of 1998 was 1,354. Of those enrolled, 42.8% were men; 57.2% were women. The students were primarily white, non-hispanic, in fact 96.3% were; other race and ethnic background was recorded as Asian or Pacific Islander, 0.1%; Hispanic, 0.4%; non-resident alien, 0.6%; and Black non-Hispanic, 2.7%. For the 1998-1999 school year, 408, or 31%, were full-time, first-time undergraduate students. Of those full-time, first-time undergraduate, 95% received financial aid. About 92% of all students receive some financial aid, with a total of 11.9 million dollars in scholarships and aid administration by the college annually. The cost of attending the school is about $16,000 per year, including room, board, tuition, and books. The majority of students live on campus. The total enrollment is close to the same enrollment that Southwark had when I was an undergraduate there. The college has also maintained a student-to-faculty ratio of less than fiiteen-to-one for many years. In the early 1980’s, my junior and senior level courses in philosophy, psychology and English had enrollments of fewer than ten students, in fact in some courses, I distinctly remember being one of five students in a class. This allowed the professors to teach actual seminars with maximum student participation. According to Peterson’s Guide to Colleges, “Southwark has an outstanding faculty; 48 amen-on seismic courses." Sc ofS-cience degee in . Salem's. ir mums first. con Comm, glif‘3'71'331 10; P 33193 [)0 ninety-one percent of its members hold the terminal degree in their area of expertise....No academic classes are taught by graduate students, and filll professors teach fieshman-level courses.” All together, there are 133 faculty members, and 67% of them are full time. Southwark College offers four undergraduate degrees--Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Science, Bachelor of Music, and a Bachelor of Music Education-«and one graduate degree in Education. The college offers thirty-seven majors and twenty-eight minors to students in the following subjects: accounting, American studies, art, biology, business administration/computer science, business administration and ethics, chemistry, church music, communication arts, computer science, elementary education, English, environmental science, European studies, finance, French, German, history, information systems, international business management, kinesiology, management, management information systems, marketing, mathematics, music, music education, philosophy, physics, political science, psychology, religion, sociology, and Spanish, as well as engineering arts, medical technology, and nursing arts, which are dual-degree rmjors. The college also has pre-professional programs for dental, law, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, physical therapy, ministry, and veterinary studies, although these are all taught with a strong hberal arts basis. Southwark prides itself on offering quality education on campus as well as opporttmities to participate in study programs in conjunction with Harvard and Oxford. Southwark’s web page boasts that is was “one of the first colleges in Kentucky to complete a Technology Infrastructure Project that allowed the campus to be completely wired for Internet access, entertainment and educational cable TV, voice mail and worldwide e-mail available in each residence hall room, and voice/video/data access from 49 ! .-.- tier} {Ema coiege a 8.: 1- Q coieze s gr: fifths pm but: for cross count Nz‘nts ho. SOCIhWag-L‘ ll.» .i _ , “Twill < Eda. kl every classroom.” The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching rated the college a Baccalaureate (Liberal Arts) College I classification. Thirty percent of the college’s graduates go directly to graduate school. Opportunities outside the classroom include Greek sororities and fi‘aternities; honorary fi'aternities and societies; the band, chorale and campus musical productions; student religious groups; student government; the Maskrafters Theatre Troupe, a forensics team; and the campus newspaper and radio station. Southwark College has a fairly large athletics program for its size. It has fifteen intercollegiate teams including football and baseball for men, volleyball and softball for women, and men’s and women’s basketball, cross country, soccer, tennis, golf, and cheerleading. The college advertises the fact that students hold Mid-South Conference and NAIA awards for individuals and that Southwark recently won the 1991 national football championship and 1998 national men’s basketball championship. They were able to afford a College Athletic Complex by building it in conjunction with a nearby large city’s NFL football team; it serves as the NFL team’s ofl‘ season Football Training Camp. Southwark College is located just to the east of the center of Southwark, Kentucky. The city of Southwark claims to be the first place where Kentucky bourbon was produced. Apparently, a Baptist minister brewed the first mixture using water from the natural spring located there, in 1789. In fact, the citizens of Southwark still drink the spring water as part of the public water system. Students can walk downtown to the small diners and shops, but they usually drive ofl campus to the nearby strip malls and first food areas or to a larger city about ten miles to the south. Southwark has had several new additions in the past decade that have added to the local economy. A major motor 50 . p mulaetun major cont Sou artiste w Southu ark ma red ‘ 501131“ at reside. is a built in the ““68 and he dorm: manufacturing company and a computer printer and servicing corporation are two of the major corporations that have brought jobs and an additional financial boon to the area. Southwark College has the physical appearance that people stereo-typically associate with colleges. When one turns off the main street of the small town of Southwark onto a dogwood-lined drive, she is met with the sight of the large red brick administration building on the top of a knolL The rest of the campus is comprised of similar red brick structures, many of them remodeled structures fiom the early years. Southwark College itself was founded in 1829. The quad, where many of the students reside, is a large green area surrounded by a dozen identical, square brick dormitories, built in the 1970s. The only noticeable differences between the the dormitories are the names and the landscaping. The sororities and fraternities at Southwark must rent one of the dormitories on campus, rather than use nearby homes. This is the familiar landscape tint greeted me as I prepared to collect my data. The Plot: A Short Description of Method of Gathering Data My study had three stages, in order to obtain breadth and depth: a survey, group interviews and individual interviews. (Appendix B contains the surveys, agendas and letters fiom each stage.) The first stage of the study was a survey of all the faculty members of Southwark College, using an instrument composed of open-ended questions, which I discuss individually here. The surveys were sent to 109 factu and had a forty percent response rate. The questions on the survey were open-ended and were intended to elicit information and opinions about writing in the disciplines in which the professors were experts, as well as about the writing that they asked students to do in courses designated for majors. The first question was stated as: “How is writing most often used 51 tryout 1 iEi‘At‘t’fl her ch: resume For mjor lthsecn ' question" 10 {hose 1 l] in your field or discipline?” I found that at times the faculty did not make a distinction between their field and their classroom, thinking that I was asking about what they did in their chrssrooms, not in their own writing. Those who did answer proffered two types of responses, either by stating the genre or by descrrhing how writing was used. The second question was “What kinds of writing do you usually assign in courses for majors in your field?” This next question was included to begin the comparison between the two. I was hoping to compare and contrast the responses with the first two questions in order to discover whether there were any genres assigned in courses similar to those that the faculty claimed used by professionals in the discipline. The third and fourth questions turned from description of types of writing to explanations of the intents and purposes behind the use of writing in their own classrooms. These two questions were “What do you want students to learn fi'om these same courses for majors in your field?”, and “How does the writing that you assign in these courses assist the students in learning?” At the end of the survey, I asked for names and contact information for those who were interested in participating in the next stage of the study. The next stage involved two series of meetings: any faculty who indicated interest were invited to attend these metings to discuss both writing within their discipline and their students’ writing. These meetings were informal discussions between four to five faculty members, which I tape-recorded and of which I took field notes. I had many reasons for conducting group interviews. For one, speaking in groups provides the respondents with other ideas tlmt may spur on their memories or ideas of classroom practices. Also, I wanted to give the fhculty an opportunity to interact with one another 52 M3336 I I; sitting in ‘. l h- my though. rrmhers a would oft. lmed to sou-dents ihf fistula} [heir sits“ because I felt that these conversations develop a base of ideas and knowledge about writing in the disciplines. I had two primary reasons for deciding to use a conversational approach. First, my thoughts about conversations came fi'om my own experiences talking to fellow faculty members at the institutions at which I taught composition. As I mentioned before, I would often participate in conversations in which I asked faculty to describe how they learned to write, especially in their own discipline, and to discuss how they might aid students in doing the same. When these conversation included more than the two of us, the faculty members would actually build on each other’s memories of good practice in teaching, strategies of writing and learning, and techniques for implementing their ideas in their classrooms. Sometimes I would give my input, but ofien I found that they more readilyusedwriting to learn ifthey recognized howtheyused writing to leamintheir own circumstances. I wondered, though, if similar conversations about faculty practice and anticipated learning would lead to similar conclusions. Second, I had heard of WAC Programs that had arisen out of conversations faculty had about their own writing. In one such instance, Rebecca Faery had attended a NEH Iowa Institute writing workshop that made a great difi‘erence in her own writing, so she went back to her imtitution and started a faculty writing workshop, which turned into a WAC program. She learned that such a group creates a sense of community and increases willingness to include writing in classes so that students can have a similar experience. The firct that open dialogue about faculty members’ own writing led to WAC practices in the classrooms is intriguing and leads one to wonder what would happen if similar conversations focused on the classroom as well. 53 El. smash” pf’SCniin: \t'cilémi or their 0 l' Mail} ' such as hi 153M10- " ossn c120“ Tr Although Lt. :hes '- goups of m :1 figwed 03. 1 thus en. hhtsh i‘om the : WWI 0 ‘s'ifle :he herded ' Elizabeth Caldwell and Mary Sorcirnillie’s experiences at University of Massachusetts at Amhurst’s Center for teaching supported Faery’s assumptions. In their 1997 article, they describe a WTL series they developed for campus wide workshops presenting the practice of teachers in different disciplines. One overt practice of the workshop was to focus on professors as writers; they had them work in groups to focus on their own writing. The “embedd ” purpose of the workshops was not to focus primarily on WAC but to allow faculty to experience ideas as they worked on other issues, such as how to evaluate student work. They found that the workshops were extremely usefirl to the faculty and that the faculty were able to adjust WTL ideas to work with their own classrooms. The response I received to my request for volunteers was pleasantly surprising. Although I had been expecting only a handfirl of volunteers, I had many people respond that they would be happy to assist me. I then tried to arrange two meetings with three groups of faculty. I intentionally chose to keep the groups small, since it would be difficult for everyone to have input in groups much larger than five or six. When we figured out the schedule for everyone to meet, it was not quite as tidy as I had anticipated. I thus ended up having six meetings attended by groups of two to five people. The chart below shows the dates of each meeting, as well as the reference I will use for the excerpts from the transcripts; the first two numbers are the month and date, the third number is the number of participants. As seen in Table 1 below, one group met consistently two times, while the other groups changed participants. There were a few instructors who only attended once; I was able, though, to meet with seven instructors twice. For each 54 ilt‘filfi‘s. \lrch l. ii tines; Hitch f I ‘- Emil; V‘rth I N “3de V -':h I N Thou Mach 2 \ Mom, \lvfi‘L N ‘ "Lt: meeting, I provided an agenda ahead of time, in the form of questions that followed up on ideas that had arisen in the previous survey and discussions. (See Appendix B.) Table 1 Schedule of Meetings With Participants Field or Disc' uline ofTeacher in Attendance Monday, . Political Science, Psychology March 8, 1999 Wednesday . History 1, Foreign Language, Classical March 10, 1999 studies, Sociology Thursday . Accounting, English , Education, Religion 1, March 11, 1999 Religion 2 Classical Studies, Sociology Accounting, English , Education, Religion 1, Religion 2 History 2, Foreign Language, Psychology, March 29, 1999 For the final stage, I interviewed and acquired syllabi and assignment sheets from three faculty members who provided the most interesting data in the first two stages. After the series of meetings, I then contacted three of the participants for individual interviews of about an hour in length. I chose the participants based on two criteria: first, my interest in what they had mentioned in the group discussions. Second, I chose them based on the differences between them as inforrmnts: two were female and one was male; two were junior faculty and the third, a department chair; and each taught a different subject, accounting, psychology and education I had originally intended to attend the classes of these participants, but they expressed reluctance about my doing so, because it was nearing the end of the semester, 55 mi hey '- to share h asigmw hfisitiuaj inmtew at!) other professor- chose l0 > 30”? 0ft: he grout Miran: ”Nettie , and they were no longer discussing writing in the classroom. However, they were willing to share handouts and syllabi with me, as well as to show me examples of student assignments, keeping the identity of the students anonymous. I met with each of the individual instructors once in their offices, spending approximately an hour. For these interviews, I did not have an agenda. I asked them to merely comment on the syllabi and any other part of their courses that had to do with writing. The education and psychology professors went over their syllabi and assignment sheets with me; the accounting professor chose to share examples of student writing that she had graded previously. Although some of the information from the individual interview is intermixed with information from the group interviews, I primarily used their comments in the section on assigning and evaluating writing in the third chapter. Thus, my interaction with the faculty members proceeded fiom responses to a survey to individual conversations about writing assignments in specific courses. Another important aspect of gathering the data was the attitudes and assumptions that I was bringing to the situation. As I began the study, I was very much influenced by recent critical approaches to WAC. In a sense, this approach incorporates Friere’s view that “training” or education should incorporate learners as active, willfirl partners, rather than objects. It should allow the learner to take control of the learning situation. Along these lines, Christine Farris, along with James Berlin and Daniel Mahala, says that the version of reality that faculty tend to teach to students is not one that allows the student to break into and reform the conversation and knowledge of a discipline, but one that tends to exclude, to repress, and to commercialize the knowledge of the discipline. This any or may not be true of the faculty I encountered in the course of this study. 56 trims it. now fro." lithium discipline Stuck b} teacher iii in 111 i130 their DEiug 1h “Ting 2L". However, the same descriptor might apply to WAC proponents whose research reflects their own biases. An alternative would be for WAC proponents and researchers to move from being leaders and judges to a new role. “If we see ourselves, rather, as mediators, facilitators between discourses,” Farris comments, “we are merely helping disciplines incorporate what they already know. We are the midwives, the mirrors” (5). Struck by this statement, I hoped to influence the subjects of my study, not as an action researcher, but as a mirror that allowed them to learn fiom our conversations as much as I did. In fact, by serving more as a mirror than a midwife, I hoped to help faculty members turn their gaze toward their own discipline, their own writing and their own teaching. During the conversations, I found that my gaze was also turned toward my own discipline, writing and teaching as well. The Characters: The Faculty Members Who Participated As I mentioned, I was pleasantly surprised by the survey respondents who also volunteered to participate by providing me with contact information and times that they would be available. For the sake of clarity as well as confidentiality, I use fictional names to refer to the participants. The twelve faculty participants who attended the group interviews were as follows: Betty, an accounting professor; Bruce, an education professor; Ellen, an English professor; Sarah, a professor of classical literature; Daniel, a foreign language professor; Kyle and Alex, both history professors; Heather, a psychology professor; Samuel, a political science professor; Victor, a sociology professor; and Reed and Lance, both religion professors. All of them were firll time faculty members when we spoke; Daniel has since retired. Of these participants, four were chairs of their departments: Bruce, in education; Ellen, in English; Daniel, in foreign languages; and 57 Reed, in religion. However, all of the faculty taught general studies courses and courses for majors in the field. Sarah, the professor of classics, was the exception to this, and only because there is no major in that field at Southwark. I was familiar with some of the professors at the college; as a student fifteen years before, I had known Ellen, the English chairperson, and Lance, one of the religion faculty, and I had taken courses fiom Daniel, the foreign language chairperson, and Alex, one of the history professors. One aspect that intrigued me about the participants as we entered the second half of the study was that despite their willingness to participate, they displayed apparent reservations they had about their qualifications to participate. I have provided some examples of the responses they wrote in accompanying letters or as notes at the end of the surveys they returned: From Daniel: Since I do remember you fiom the time you took a semester or two of French fiom me, it was a pleasant surprise to hear fi'om you, although I had heard previously that you were doing graduate work. I am happy to provide the enclosed information and ideas. Although I am dubious about the usefitlness to you of a follow-up with a foreign language person, I am willing to make myself available if you decide that this would be helpfiil. For that eventuality, I have indicated some available times. From Lance: Hi Debbie, Good to hear from you. I doubt that we in the religion dept. use writing extensively enough to assist you in your project, but you may certainly feel fi'eetocallonmeifyouthinklcanbeoffurtherassistance. From Betty: I doubt that a meeting would prove to be fi'uitfirl since I teach only one upper level course, but feel flee to email me if you like. 58 Interestingly enough, Daniel, the foreign language professor had much to say about the need for writing across the curriculum and had students turn in rough drafts of essays for his comments. The religion professor, Lance, required several pages of writing; in fact, when I had been a student at Southwark, I knew him for his reputation because of his expectation of essays. Betty, the accounting professor, also assigned a good deal of writingandhadspecificairnsindoing so. Later, when I reviewed their participation in my study, I wondered about these initial responses. They could be seen as polite attempts to say “no” without actually saying “no”: encouraging me to think of them as unqualified, rather than as unwilling. It rmy also be construed as polite demurring: saying “yes” without sounding too eager or too proud of the work. But as I talked with these faculty members and others, I began to surmise that it may have been an honest reflection of their view of themselves as teachers who use writing in the presence of someone who has studied, and is in the process of studying, the teaching of composition, as well as someone intent on investigating how writing is used. My inference is based on my interactions with not only the three whom I quote, but many of the faculty participants during the conversations that we bad. There were moments during our conversation when they would look for my approval of what they were saying about writing or grading. In fact, in one conversation, they specifically asked me for my input as to whether students were still asked to write abstracts in graduate courses. When I eventually chose the three faculty members whom I would request to interview individually, I tried to choose individuals who would be representative of the larger group and who had offered interesting information in the group interviews. In 59 order to l when fonts and no order to be representative, I decided to choose persons of varied ages, subject, gender and position. I asked Betty, the accounting teacher, Bruce, the education chair, and Sarah, fiom psychology, who all agreed to meet with me and allow me to look at their syllabi and handouts. A Short Description of Method of Analyzing Data “Now dame ” said he, “So have [joy or bliss, This is a long preamble of a tale! ” (Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, lines 830-831, FragmentD) Beyond wondering what my participants’ apparent reticence meant, I also reflected on other parts of our conversations and interactions, trying to make sense of them in a way that might inform me and others interested in Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC). Harry Wolcott claims researchers should begin to attempt to make sense of data by writing about it while we are doing that research; we should weave facts and interpretation in order to give a sense of what has been going on and what is going on. However, according to Clifford Geertz, qualitative researchers put together or make meaning of what has happened after the fact. In writing this dissertation, I found myself doing both. Analyzing the data has been as much of a recursive process as writing can be. As I moved fiom the surveys, into the group interviews, I performed some initial coding on the surveys to determine where the conversations might go. In doing so, I found myself counting and charting the data. I realize that in a qualitative study, such work with numbers may seem odd, but as Miles and Huberman note, “When we identify a theme we’re isolating something that happens a number of times...When we say something is ‘important’ or ‘significant’ or ‘recurrent,’ we have come to that estimate, in part by making counts, comparisons and weights” (253). Although Miles and Huberman have 60 been of mist batch 0 mm comers l0 nge h e ‘. 3»? L:‘~ been charged in the past with bringing too much quantitative method to qualitative analysis, their ideas on the use of numbers to look at distribution and make sense of large batch of data helped me to look at the results of my surveys in a methodical and usefitl manner. The charts that I made from these surveys did not represent the rich variety of response I had, but it did allow me to look at the consistency of what I thought I was seeing more clearly. (See charts in Appendix C.) The information in the charts appears in the body of this text in more readable table format. For the first group interview, I developed eight more open-ended questions based on some of the issues which secured to stand out to me. I sent the eight questions to the participants before we gathered, to allow them to have some time to ponder them before we met. Later, I returned to the surveys with a new focus, based on what I had heard in the conversations and discovered in my coding of the transcriptions and field notes. In order to code the data I had gathered in the interviews, I followed Miclmel Quinn Patton’s suggestion for initial coding: I began by reading through the notes and transcripts, highlighting and noting down what I was seeing in the data. I looked for areas of repetition and connection as well as areas of discomwction. I then developed an index of the kinds of data I would be looking for and proceeded to label a fresh set of transcripts according to the data. Ialso usedthedisplaymethod ofconsideringthedataassuggestedbyMilesand Huberman in Qualitative Data Analysis. I drew overlapping circles of the areas that seemed to stand out to me and tried to show how they connected to each other. Unfortunately the two-dimensional design did not represent as clearly the connections that were developing as I continued reading and writing. 61 PINES; 5). W; As I coded the transcripts, I found myself naturally shifting between content analysis and discourse analysis. That is, I found myself looking at how the conversation was taking place as much as what was being said. I realized, as I read through the transcripts and notes, and listened to the tapes, that my understanding of both was connected in many ways. In regards to my experiment in particular, I had to keep in mind that “Language and speech do not mirror experience: They create experience and in the process of creation constantly transform and defer that which is being described” (Denzin S). Whatthefacultyaresayingiscreatinganewreality, not necessarilyshowingmethe reality that already exists. Thus, I had to keep reminding myself of the phenomenological characteristics of my study. To do so, I was determined to return to my research questions periodically in order to be sure not to coast ofi‘ course. However, in order to keep on course, I did find that I had to realign my questions in order to reflect the data; as Renato Resaldo notes, qualitative researchers often “begin with a set of questions, revise them throughout the course of inquiry, and in the end emerge with different questions than they started with” (7). Ronald Chenail discusses the importance of consistently measuring the “mission question” against the data to be collected and the procedure for analyzing the data in a Qualitative Report article. In this article, “Keeping Things Plumb in Qualitative Research,” Chenail described a study completed by his research group to determine why parents of children with benign heart problems showed high stress at referral appointments. They began by looking for information on what was occurring in referrals by conducting interviews with the parents about the referral. What they discovered was that‘thetalkofthereferralisnotthesameasthetalkaboutthetalkofthe 62 ‘ 1 [‘1 referral....[They] had substituted something about the thing (i.e. the interviews) for the thing itself ”(5). Thus, they had to remind themselves of the same thing that I did: that stories being told did not perhaps reflect a completely accurate account of what happened in the referral or classroom, respectively. They did, however, reflect the participants’ experience of the events. This focus on experience as an important aspect of adjustment or change echoes Barbara Walvoord and her colleagues’ view of this types of qualitative study. They found tint the data they collected more likely reflected “what faculty believe to have happened... than to pin down precisely what kinds of classroom changes actually happened in a scientifically verifiable way” (31). This did not dissuade them, or me fi'om considering the data as valid since “...it is possible that beliefs and intentions are what we really need to know” (4). The self-report is what led me to consider conducting both content analysis and discourse analysis on the transcripts and field notes. Since what I was looking at was the talk about writing in the classroom and not the writing in the classroom itself, I realized that in addition to examining the themes, connections, and discrepancies, I would need to examine how they presented and contradicted them. In the content analysis, I consider the faculty participants’ assignments, expectations, and understanding of writing. In the discourse analysis, I determine how they present their assigmnents, expectations and understanding in order to make sense of them for themselves, and present a persona as teacher to the other participants and to me. The decision as to what excerpts from the faculty narratives for the content analysis would best represent what I was perceiving entailed choosing parts of narratives 63 that both reflected common elements that I noticed in the surveys and interviews and at the same time provided a more specific sense of just how those common elements could be represented in more individual and unique ways. Making this distinction was not a statistical process; I looked through sections that I had grouped together and coded as similar, then chose the statements that made me say “hmm.” At times some statements were coded for two sections: the description of the assignment and the description of the objectives for the course. The choice for the narratives I share in chapter four was based on two processes: first, I had gone through the documents and color coded conversations for “markers,” which I discuss later, that indicated that the participants were really participating and not taking turns talking to me. Certain sections stood out immediately, and among these, there were two in particular that included statements that had been excerpted for chapter two and three. By including them, I hope to provide an opportunity to read through my reading and narrating of the conversations. One additional focus arose from my reading in composition studies and what I noticed as i read through the transcripts also shaped my view of the research: the ways in which the faculty interacted reminded me of conversations about lore as a means of knowledge construction. To me, the concept of lore connected to qualitative research in its emphasis on narrative as a way of revealing and exploring knowledge as created. The use of the term lore in regard to composition pedagogical theory seems to have originated fi'om Stephen North’s description of practitioners’ knowledge, in The Making of Knowledge in Composition. In his description of the many ways that the body of knowledge on which composition theory and practice is grounded, acctunulated, or 64 MEL terrier] meet, I l r I theat- txpnj contra- l deseiol created, be implied that lore is almost a primal knowledge, shared in restrooms, at conferences and in teachers’ lounges. It is distnhuted through narrative and supported by anecdotal evidence. Patricia Harkin picks up where North leaves off in defining lore, and contradicts the apparently negative view that he and Knoblauch and Brannon take. She reiterates and expands on the characteristics of lore that North points out: the fact that it can be contradictory, that it is passed down through generations, and that the knowledge is developed through teaching. In her essay, Harkin proceeds to examine the criticism of lore as a method of inquiry, made, she claims, by foundationalists who look to a ground or foundation with which to compare and contrast claims of knowledge. She includes Stanley F ish’s comments tha “...antifoundationalism offers you nothing but the assurance that what it is unable to give you-knowledge, goals, purposes, strategies--is what you already have” (qtd. in Harkin 133). It is in the context of antifoundationalism that lore has strength. In this way, lore is theoretical as it takes into consideration many angles and avenues. “Lore is a site and a moment at which differing praxes meet as praxes” (154) she states; it is theory in its being flexible and resistant to using a Platonic ideal for validity. Lore is mentioned briefly in other writing across the curriculum studies, without much discussion of its meaning. However, William Broz, in “Growing Reflective Practitioners,” considers lore as part of the way that a group of instructors and participants in an Iowa Writing Project (IWP) surmner institute establish beliefs about writing. During the institute, both groups tell stories that provide an opportrmity for reflection. In many of these stories, metaphors develop. Broz’s connection between 65 metaphor and lore is interesting in the way that it correlates on many levels with qualitative research as well. Miles and Huberman point out that metaphors have been shown to be ways in which physical scientists and anthropologists make sense of problems. The metaphor is a trope that calls attention to similarities, overlooking apparent differences. Metaphors, they say, can serve as data-reducing devices, pattern-making devices, decentering devices, and ways of connecting findings to theory as researchers examine data (250-252). Broz noted that IWP institutes are “purposely structured to be rich in symbols and metaphors and that still other local symbols and metaphors are developed by participants...”(xvii). He states that “These metaphors and symbols stand between theory and practice and the meaning of theory flows through them like filters. Through these reflexive filters the meaning of practice flows back toward theory to articulate the individual practitioner’s understanding of theory” (xvi-xvii). This serves as yet another portrayal of lore similar to that of Harkin’s. The reflexive nature of lore is an aspect of my study that allows me to reflect on the rest of my study. That is, in discussing the context of the conversations in chapter four, I provide another point of view for the second and third chapter. As I present the information and narratives in chapters two, three and four, I have tried to choose ones that add detail and life to the statistics fiom the surveys. Some quotes from my transcripts reflect the primary responses of all the faculty, but most are ones that seemed to provide a flesh look or complicate the perception that the surveys provide. By allowing the reader to view portions of my transcript rather than my summary or generalization of what the participants in my study had to say, I hope to make them and what they have to say about writing and learning seem more vivid and memorable. 1. In the opening passage to The Redford Bibliography for Teachers of Writing, 1996, entitled “A Brief History of Rhetoric and Composition,” Patricia Bizzel and Bruce Herzberg comment that in the area of writing across the curriculum, as well as in the areas of writing process, argument, and academic discourse, 'relatively little new work has appeared in the 19903" (15). It is true that in the mid to late 90's, dissertations tended to be the repository of most published WAC research. Roger Sensenbaugh commented in his ERIC Digest article “WAC: Toward the Year 2000” that the number of articles “that primarily advocate WAC is small, as might be expected of a maturing and evolving educational movement”(l). The smaller number might also indicate a sizing up of the next areas to be researched, as theoretical and retrospective articles began to appear towards the turn of the century. 67 “HM €iEMt built, ' F." Chapter 2 CONTENT ANALYSIS: CONVERSATIONS ON ASSIGNMENTS “If we presuppose that some things are structures and other things are substantive elements which go into structures, we have trapped ourselves at the outset. Everything is both, which is to say that things and relations are matters of conceptual option. ” James Mofl'ett, Teaching the Universe of Discourse, 2 Assignments are a tangible way of relating what occurs in our courses. They can also be valuable commodities in academia. Whenever I attend a conference that inchrdes pedagogy as a focus, I feel most satisfied if I can leave with an assignment that fits my theory of writing and learning well. When I engage in conversations with another writing instructor about teaching writing, in the end I often find myself wondering how I might incorporate a particular assignment into my course that would best facilitate students learning a particular skill, approach or idea. Even as I prepared my appendices for this document, a colleague in the social sciences leaned over my shoulder at the printer at one point and asked “Is that an assignment for developmental psychology? Could I have a copy of that to consider for my own course?” In academia, assignments have many purposes: facilitating learning, evaluating learning, consolidating learning, and introducing disciplinary constraints. Many WAC studies have focused on assignments as a means of determining what occurred in classes, because of their tangibility and also because they tend to connect to the perspective of the instructor toward learning the subject. Of these studies, as I pointed out in the first chapter, many have compared “before” and “after” results; they focused on how an introduction to a WAC program or ideology impacted the types of assignments given. The first and second questions of my survey were developed to elicit a different 68 comparison: a comparison between writing done by professionals in the discipline, according to my respondents, and the writing that they asked their students to do in courses for majors in that field. At first glance, those assignments that appeared to be similar to those used by professionals in the discipline were critical analyses, book reviews, journals, outlines for public speeches, note taking, and research articles and papers-if one was to consider the research papers assigned in class to be similar to the research article. The assignments which had no immediately apparent correlation with the types of writing reported to be used in the discipline were essay exams and quizzes, reaction papers, personal accounts or rmrratives, samples of class rules and communication with parents, group project, medical documentation, and practice in order to learn Japanese characters. This does not mean that these types of writing are not done in the disciplines that were represented in the survey, but that they were not mentioned. My conversations with faculty provided more than a numerical consideration of the genres they expected fi'om the assignments they gave. In the interviews, the faculty shared how they used those genres in more detail and expressed what they believed the genres allowed their students to experience or learn. As I began to code the data, I found myself trying to sort out the assignments in order to make sense of them. Perhaps this was primarily the influence of previous studies, perhaps it was a natural result of having asked a specific question in the summry. Nevertheless, in order to look more carefirlly at the assignments, I looked around for categories proceeding fiom theory in composition that reflected what I was seeing in my transcripts and would avoid dichotomy. 69 In this chapter, after noting the patterns and exceptions that appeared through my use of such categories, I also investigate the ways in which categories break down and the terms to describe genres can be fluid. Often naturalistic WAC studies that are attempting to display validity will appeal to categories developed from composition theorists work; in actuality such use may actually interfere with a valid reading of the data if those categories are not also examined carefirlly. I also try to reinforce research and theory that suggests that discussion of the use of writing in the disciplines needs to move beyond viewing genre as a static form and towards considering genre as a dynamic and changing tool that must be considered in regard to its fimction. Categories and Genres James Moffett’s categories seemed to fit the areas that I was already noticing. Having said this, I must admit that what I was noticing could have just as possibly emanated fi'om my experience with Mofi‘ett’s categories. I had been introduced to Moffett’s ideas during my studies in the teaching of composition for my master of arts degree, and then had more recently been reintroduced to them by James Moffett at a 1993 Conference on College Composition & Communication Winter Workshop in Clearwater Beach, Florida. However, there are other features of Mofl‘ett’s categories and the theory behind them that made them useful to my interpretation of data. One of the first is articulated by Richard Larson; James Mofl'ett's theory develops a hypothetical continuum, that Larson applauds as being “flexible” and “descriptive” (210). This continuum can be visualized as having “x” and “y” axes that consider the relationship between the writer and reader on one axis and the relationship between the writer and the materiaLs/experience involved in discourse on the other. Within this continuum, Mofiefi’s 70 ts: let, A N A. a: _- . t \ LEIL . I _ Illl ’ categories, as described in Active Voices IV, are interrelated and include various genres: "noting down" or recording which takes the form of diaries or journals; "looking back" or recollecting which become autobiography and memoir; "looking into" or investigating, which results in surveys, interviews, sketches, profiles, factual articles, biographies, and chronicles; "thinking up" or imagining, resulting in poems, scripts, and fiction; and finally, "thinking over," or reflection, and "thinking through," or cogitating, resulting in editorials, speeches, direction, reviews, proverbs, narratives, theories, and theses. According to Mofl‘ett, all of the categories use the first as a primary source: the jo urnals, notebook and diaries of a writer. Virtually all of the writing in recollection, investigation, cogitation and reflection "falls somewhere between instances and ideas, because most discourse written about actualities falls somewhere on a scale between narrative and essay, story and statement, instance and idea. Variations depend mainly on vsrhether the emphasis is on the evidence or on the generalization that the evidence supports" (Mofi‘ett Teaching 13). This sense of a spectrum based on the emphasis of detail or generalizations drawn from conclusions presents a realistic sense of the genres which appear in various disciplines and in various classrooms. Within the discussion of M0 1T‘sa‘tt’s categories, the term genre can then be used to discuss the more specific types of aSSigllnrents which move within his categories. One reason that Moffett’s categories can be deemed usefiil is that he bases them “0‘ on thesubject ortexts,butontheiruse. Histheoryisbasedinpartonthespectrumof iInterior dialogue to public discourse in Piaget’s theory of human development. Another reason that I formd Moffett’s categories appealing was his perspective that his theory SI“mid be “extended and amended by readers for themselves”(Active vi). which I fully 71 me; .. intended to do. Finally, I appreciated Mofiefl’s awareness of the complications and chimeric nature of categories as he noted in the epigraph above fiom Teaching the Universe of Discourse. His definition of structure, to explain the quote fiirther, is one adopted from Suzane Langer’s concept of structures as parts or divisions of a whole that are somehow related to one another. He notes that although usefiil for research, Structures are not useful for teaching. In this context, he recognizes that “genre divisions Satisfy a passion for taxonomy” (Teaching 5). He further contends that such divisions can be “...too cavalierly equated with form and structure” and when thought of in this manner, may become “...marketing directives. As such, they provide convenient rhetorical bins” (Teaching 5). Mofi'ett’s warning connected with my understanding of genre. In my discussion of the assignments that the faculty described in the surveys and interviews for my study, I ofien use the term “genre.” The genres that I refer to are not Static structures, but categories that have been formed to describe certain types of writing as they appeared in classrooms and disciplines in a particular context. Interest in defining genre harks back to Aristotle’s conversations as to the nature of tragedy and comedy, Wl‘ich were descriptive rather than prescriptive in nature. Recent interest in genre studies has also looked to Mikhail Bakhtin’s work in genre, particularly literary genres in (:0 “hectare with socio-historical and linguistic understanding. Many resist the notion that any genre is an inflexible form. According to Brian Paltridge, who bases much of his disQl-‘Ission on Labov, Wittgenstein and Rosch, the “blurred edges” of genre are related to the concept of prototypes, a theory that “people categorise objects according to a I) to tetypieal image they build in their mind of what it is that represents the object in 72 ‘ question” (55). These prototypes are categories that at the center contain common attributes, and toward the edges, become more “fuzzy,” as Labov would term it. One of the more current influential WAC discourse theorists, Charles Bazerman, defines genre in Shaping Written Knowledge as "...not simply a linguistic category defined by a structured arrangement of textual features" but "...a sociopsychological category which we use to recognize and construct typified actions within typified situations... It is a way of creating order in the ever-fluid symbolic world" (319). Bazerrnan does not offer Specific categories. He recommends examining each discipline’s discourse and history to determine how it defines genres and what those terms mean within the field; for example, Shaping Written Knowledge focuses on one specific genre in the field of science: the emerimental report. Thus, terms such as journal, reflection and critique may take very diflermt shapes in different disciplines at different times. The shape is connected to rheto rical features such as audience, situation and purpose. Despite the differences tWeen disciplines, there are similar marked characteristics that lend themselves to a c - ertam types of texts being considered as the same genre. James Moflefl's categories provide a useful and tentative structure for considering the Various genres which faculty expect students to use, since the categories are based on the pragmatic theory that types of writing are organically connected to function. Mofiefl Illent ions that his categories "naturally accommodate 'writing across the cu'ficulummettve 7), a result ofthe fact that when he developed them, he considered and compared types of discourse that is, any whole sort ofwriting actually practiced in O ‘11- s()cxiety" on and ofl‘ campus (Active 6). Ofl‘ campus, he found a plethora of genres and f0 ‘ln d very little writing for writing's sake. Moffett’s emphasis on actual practice connects 73 ‘ with the concern I noted in the faculty whom I interviewed and surveyed. They were eager to discuss what expectations students would be facing in the workplace--if not focused on the genres of the field, another aspect of my study that I discuss in chapter three. In order to explain the rationale behind his categories, Mofiefl develops the idea of levels of abstraction in connection with Buber’s theory of Mt and 1- Thou relationships and with the basic formula of “somebody-talking-to-someone-about something.” Within his concept of discourse, reference changes relationships. When one uses third person, or “it”, ”one makes that subject into an object. When one uses second person, or “you,” the Suhject becomes “equal to” and “independent of” the communicator. These are his tenets for abstraction He explains further: The I-it relation concerns information—how sormone abstracts from raw phenomena. The I-you relation concerns comrnunication--how someone abstracts for an audience. The first is the referential relation; the second is the rhetorical relation (Teaching 18). Both types of abstraction require developing hierarchies or paradigms and selecting which e1fifil‘tl'i‘etzlts to attend. Selection occurs through perception memory and generalization. The i1xflJ‘lence of cognitive psychology is very apparent in Mofi‘ett’s definitions; an active mind constantly focusing and refocusing on stimuli, attempting to make sense of it and to relate that Sense to others. In other words, “To abstract is to trade a loss of reality for a gain in c()1'1t1‘()l” (Teaching 23). His categories reflect the amount of abstraction involved in Wing. Note-taking or recording in a personal journal in which the writer would be zilz'strfiltcting primarily fiom “raw material” would involve a very different amount of abstl‘action, than writing that occurred as a result of thinking through or cogitating, since 74 ‘ SOFT l dcW his. it‘ll \ ob‘l'lit in this case, the writer would be abstracting from someone else’s abstractions and then perhaps abstracting once more in order to “talk” to that “someone” about “something.” This is in a large part, wlmt leads to his definition of rhetoric: “the art of acting on someone through words, is an abstractive art” (Teaching 31). Later he recognizes that “acting on others through words is merely one aspect of the larger rhetoric of belmvior.” He recognizes that there is more to rhetoric than individual choices-that the manner in which we abstract is shaped by social interaction. Mofi‘ett phrases it in the following Inanner: ...the tool of thought is an instrument socially forged from biological givens. The abstractive structures we are born with are open and flexible and may, as research in anthropology and cognitive styles show, produce very different abstractions in different groups. It is from his groups that the individual learns these particular ways of cognizing and verbalizing (Teaching 70). I decided to use the terms recording, investigating/reflecting, cogitating, recollecting, and i1lazi-gining as larger categories in which to discuss the genres. Despite the fact that Mofl‘ett’s categories seemed to best reflect what I was beginning to perceive in the surveys and conversations of my study, it soon became O{3"i0us that they, like any category, would not be entirely appropriate for every type of Whig discussed, nor would every category necessarily be addressed or filled by a type of Writ ing in my study. In addition, the genres that the faculty in my study mentioned, as one thight predict in light of Bazerman and Paltridge’s comments, were much more fluid in definition. For example, a journal or essay exam in one context would be or become an e11tine-1y difi'erent entity, although called by the same name, in another context. At the san‘e time that an assignment displays the characteristics of a particular category, it also dis plays characteristics that would not make it fit that category, whether because of the 75 ‘ way it is assigned, evaluated, perceived by the instructor who assigns it, or interpreted and then written by the student. My discussion of assigrmients thus problematizes or complicates the way that WAC researchers generalize about or categorize those genres as an indication of success or correct integration of WAC concepts. A problem that I noticed as I first began to use Moffett’s categories was the fact that he originally separated cogitation, reflection and investigation. He must have realized this difficulty, because later in handouts that he distributed at the 1993 CCCC , he combined reflection with cogitation. (See Appendix D) His choice in doing so reflects his investment in cognitive psychology and the mode of research associated with it. Putting inVestigation on one side and reflection and cogitation on another is similar to the separation of data, “unadulterated,” fi'om results and conclusions that occurs in cognitive research. However, my information and my qualitative perspective suggest that this is a false separation Very few ofthe instructors asked only for investigation without some reflection involved, and in qualitative research, as I have noted before, we are only too aware of the fact that reflection is very much a part of investigation. So I chose in this Study to conflate investigation and reflection into one category and leave cogitation as a separate category that involves abstracting fiom documents for which both referential and 1‘1) e t(Jrical abstraction had already occurred. Comparable Studies Many studies seemed to contain results that were comparable to the results of my 8 Ill‘“'€=ys and were informative as background to the interviews I conducted. Two I tiCuilarly comparable studies that I have mentioned previously are Charlene Elben's and More Lerud and colleagues' self-study. One of the conclusions Eblen drew about 76 ‘ classroom practice was that faculty tended to use assignments which were more transactional in nature. The nature of a larger institution would perhaps lead to larger classes, and the logistics of assigning writing that might require interaction with the students would seem daunting to some of the faculty. Although Eblen notes that class size was not significant to whether writing was required, she does not note whether class size was significant to the mode of writing assigned. Nevertheless her study provides a useful comparison for my data Another study which helps to provide context for my own is one done by Theodore Lerud and his colleagues at Elrnhurst College, a liberal arts college with approximately twice the number of students at Southwark College, about three thousand. Lemd’ 8 study consisted of surveys given at the beginning of Elrnhurst’s WAC program and then four years later. Although the conclusions tlmt were drawn were primarily f()‘3‘18ed on whether their program was successful or not, they provide very useful data in uieir appendices as to the types of writing asked for and the expectations of those types of Writ ing. Three other studies that provide useful information with which to compare my study are James Kalmbach and Michael Gorman’s work found in Toby Fulwiler and Art Yolll'lg’s larger study Writing Across the Disciplines, Margaret Parish and colleagues’ Study reported in Fulwiler and Young’s Programs that Work, and Sandra Zerger’s study 0 f gculty perceptions of student writing. Each of these studies included surveys asking : ulty what types of writing they asked their students to do. Eblen, Lerud and others, Mb and Gorman, Parish and others, F ulwiler and Young, and Zerger’s studies Dr - Q"l<1t:: a useful backdrop for my surveys. Lerud’s study in particular offers more 77 ‘ comparison as I proceed into chapter three, since the surveys be distributed also asked teachers to comment on what they hoped to accomplish with writing in their classrooms. Surveys and Conversations About Assignments The results of the first two questions on my survey were intended to elicit comparison between the genres that the faculty were familiar with in their profession and in related fields in their discipline with the writing assignments that they gave their students. As I have mentioned above, at first glance they seemed quite different. Yet When considered through the lens of Moffett’s categories, they begin to look more similar. The level of abstraction, and the focus on audience for many of the types of writing they r eported having students do and doing themselves were similar. As I look at each category, I note some of those similarities, as well as differences. As the study proceeded to the next stage the conversations added to my l711(1e1‘standing of the assignments in two ways. First, their definitions of some of the terms gave Inc a new understanding of what they meant when they used it to describe a genre. Ofien this complicated my previous ideas about exactly what category the genre might belong in, based on what they asked students to do. Second, I found that many of them had developed those assignments over time to meet specific needs to help students learn material or skills they felt were important from their courses and to help students prepare for a fiiture other than a discipline-specific one. '1‘ able 2 Types of Assignments Reported by Faculty in Survey Column two displays that number of times that the faculty members mentioned that particular genre in their response to question two of the survey. Some faculty mentioned multiple genres. Column two shows the percentage that this number indicates out of the total responses. 78 Gmres Number of Percentage of faculty responses responses research papers 19 44 essay examrJquizzes 17 39 critiques of articles 11 25 critical analysis essays 8 18 reflective, reading and observation jom'nals 7 l6 reflection papers 6 l3 position/reaction papers 6 13 book reviews 6 13 field work] lab reports 5 ll math problems/proofs 4 9 topical mini projects and group projects 3 6 h iStol‘ical biographical summary 3 6 sertlIons/outlines for oral presentation 3 6 salnples of teaching materials 2 4 e3"‘131ication of foreign language text 2 4 l3‘3‘TSOnal accounts/narratives 2 4 thoughtsbeforediseussion 1 2 plot summary 1 2 note taking 1 2 medical documentation 1 2 erelltive writing 1 2 Ill‘sterin Japanese diameters l 2 As I discuss each category, I share the results of the survey and then include the narratives fiom the group and individual interviews that expand the definition ofcertain g Genres, In order to make the survey information a little clearer, in table two, I provide a list of all of the genres that were reported by the respondents to my survey, with the 79 ‘ amount of times those genres were mentioned, and the percentage of respondents who mentioned them. Some respondents mentioned several types of writing, others only mentioned one or two. I also indicate how many of the responses I placed into each category in table three. Table 3 Categories of Assignments Reported in Survey This table indicates the total number of responses that were considered to belong in each of James Moffett’s categories. Categories Number cogitating 79 reflecting/investigating 19 recording 3 recollecting l imagining l When I grouped them into categories, I used the genres that James Mofl‘ett had indicated. I followed Brian Paltridge’s advice that “conditions for the assignment of a text to a particular genre category are, in the case of stereotypical representations, an interaction of bOth Pragmatic and perceptual conditions. In the case of untypical representations of the pl'otOtype, however, it is argued, it is then the pragmatic conditions that hol ” (100). If a genre was mentioned that Mofiefl had not indicated, then I considered how much abstraction might occur based on my definition of that type of writing. For example, medical documentation would fall into the investigation/reflection category, since it required more abstraction than referent abstraction into a journal. It would require abstracting firrther in order to be understood by other rmdical personnel. 80 Ci) alt Recording: Journals Since James Mofl‘ett sees recording as an essential source for many other types of writing, it is a useful place to start discussing the types of writing that faculty assign. In the journal, a writer "records both information and a personal reaction to i " (Active 46). In the course of considering the data from my study, all of the types of writing that were called jom'nals seemed to have some portion of Mofl‘ett's concept of referential abstraction, but I found that the definitions and uses of journals widely varied. Some were Used as reading logs, others for field observation, and still others for personal reflection. Thus, they moved beyond the usual definition of the term “recording.” Journals are one of the more fiequently discussed types of writing across the Curriculum assignments. Toby Fulwiler identified clmracteristics of journals in The Journal Back based on his conversations with other teachers. He surmised that journals OOHSist of fi'equent, chronologically ordered entries; that these entries require cognitive aetivities such as observing, questioning, speculating, synthesizing, digressing, revising, and diSplaying self-awareness; and firmlly that the language that these entries are written in tends to be informal, perhaps even colloquial (2-3). Fulwiler distinguishes between diaries and journals, locating more private personal Writing in diaries. However, Cinthia Gannett resists this separation. She traces the hiStol’ical roots of journals and diaries as she explores male/female language connections and CODStraints fi'om a feminist, social constructionist perspective. She points to the fact that bOIh terms were synonymous in their beginnings (106-7) and that there were four pmtOtylaes to the diaries and journals we know today: the public record book, in which ho“Sellold accounts, military ventures, and public office records were kept (some found in 81 relics from ancient Sumeria); travel journals (most used by young men in both Europe and Japan); commonplace books, in which quotes, drafts and observations were noted by educated persons; and spiritual journals, which were very popular in early American history. Journals used in educational contexts in the United States appear in records in 1915 and were discussed in articles in the 1940's (107-11). Many WAC articles and studies have centered on journals more than on other genres.l There are several reasons that WAC proponents think that teachers should Consider using journals as a means of connecting the personal and the academic worlds of our students. First, based on recent understanding of cognitive development and learning, the best way for students to learn is by finding connections between new information and the knowledge and experience they already have. According to Karoline Lrynock and Louise Rob: ”What we know from current brain research is that we form more lasting mernories when the new subject connects in some way to old, familiar memories. Because the root of every problem springs from students' prior knowledge and proceeds logically, Students internalize the new information to a greater extent” (30). In journals, students are asked to make sense of that with which they are coming in contact within the classroom in light of what they already know or have experienced. 1n the same way, having them use journals to connect personal or prior information with what they read for our courses can help them understand the text better. Kim Sung-ll and Lani M. Van Dusen cite Moravcsik & Kintsch, 1993, and Schneider, Korkel, & Weinert, 1990, as evidence and concur that “It is well established that prior knowledge has strong effect on text comprehension and memory” (358). 82 A second reason WAC proponents encourage teachers to use journals is that they view it as a safe way for students to access academic ways of knowing. In his article “Writing in a Safe Place,” Howard Tinberg describes how he employed journals as a means of having his students look carefully at their experiences. He notes “returning students need the space to reflect on what they know and what they need to know. The reflective journal affords them that space--a space that welcomes the expertise they bring into the classroom” (41). A third reasonjoumals are often promoted is that they are seen as a means for teachers to develop relationships and learn from their students. Barbara Wauchope writes of her use of journals as an assignment: “I see journals as contributing toward both intellectual and emotional growth for both student and teacher. One of the most useful aspects of this is that growth can be charted by both student and teacher over the course 0f the school term” (5). The material that the students were learning could be directly related to the material of their lives, “particularly in their ability to place their own experience into the context of the larger world of social relationships” (6). However, larger social relationships might be a matter of definition. In a discussion described by Art Young in Writing Across the Disciplines, this very problem ”086 as the WAC committee at Michigan Tech attempted to assess writing to learn techIliques in classes that were part of the WAC program One of the committee m"snubs-rs, Cindy Selfe, had developed an experiment to study the street of journal writing on learning in a mathematics course. As the committee looked at the questions that the Professor had devised, Toby F ulwiler noted, "These assigned journal entries are fun and cute, but they're not really expressive writing. They're just problem-solving assignments 83 sed in a cuter way. " Another member conceded: "Expressive writing involves values, tions." They proceeded to discuss how the journal questions ask for the students to it more of themselves. In the discussion, Toby Fulwiler offered “an example of a l journal assignment fi'om a Chemical Engineering class: 'Explain the mole concept to 53 of freshmen.' This kind of entry forces them to speculate." They proceeded to nmend that the professor include more questions which called for speculation as sed to specific answers (Young 39). Perhaps this was a way to make the students about the information in terms of a larger context, but it seemed phrased in a way vould provide a false audience for them. Explaining a concept to another audience help the student create his or her own “drama,” as Mofl‘ett would term it; but it to still be phrasing the request to explain a concept recently learned in clear terms than involving emotions or values. Although I was not able to closely examine the 0113 that the faculty asked their students to answer in their journals, I did learn that 30k very different shapes in different courses. The number of professors at Southwark College who reported that they assigned 11s turned out to be much smaller than I at first anticipated. In the responses to my Yr 9% of the faculty indicated that they asked students to keep personal journals, 6% 1 students to keep observation journals. The total, 15%, was a little less than the 0f faculty who reported assigning either personal or other journals in Charlene 1'8 study. This was also comparable to Kalmbach and Garner’s study, which, with )osition instructors included in the numbers, showed that 22% assigned journals ,‘e attending their workshop, and 62% assigned them afterwards. In contrast, the minary Elmhurst study found that 49% of all pre-WAC faculty reported that they 84 r 7‘1 ,n; 'LJ__ asked students to write "sustained but informal out of class responses to class assignments" which was the researchers' provided definition of journals. In later surveys, journals were not defined in the same way. Of those involved in the WAC program in 1989, 62% said they assigned journals, and of those not involved in the WAC program in 1989-1990 at Elmhurst, 16% assigned ungraded journals and 19% assigned graded journals. These percentages were more comparable to Eblen's and to mine: in less than one-fourth of the cases, respondents used journals, ill contrast to over half. The percentage of faculty who reported that they assigned journals in their courses was simiklr to percentages of non-WAC faculty at other institutions, except for Elrnhurst's preliminary survey. What might account for the higher percentage in that prelimimry survey at Ellnhurst could be the definition of journal that the researcher used. As Walvoord and Others note in their research, “some faculty had definitions of WAC strategies that were difl‘erent from ours. A few confidently declared that they weren't using journals or peer 001laboration; however, their classroom documents or their own statements later in the interview showed that they had, in fact been using those strategies by our definition" (Walvoord 1997 92). However, faculty who ask for informal or expressive responses tnight not consider them journals per se, or even see them as actual writing assignments. In fact Alex, the history professor who described very extensive use of journals, as ‘nentioned immediately below, did not mention journals on the survey. Looking beyond the numbers, I was interested in determining how journals were used~ In the interviews I conducted, I determined that journals were often used with a SDeCifiC purpose in mind and were usually graded. For example, Alex, the history 85 professor, noted that he usually asked for journals from freshmen rather than upperclassmen and that they were designed to teach the students what he considered good reading habits: In the first semester, I give them a series of questions related to each chapter because I'm discovering that they haven't been taught to read in a professional sort of way. So what I'm trying to do is get them to read toward certain kinds of issues, and they have to answer these questions as part of the journal. And then they can raise any questions they have as well. There's some freedom in it, but there's also structure, and I loosen that up a bit for the second semester because they've been doing practice. (3-10-4) Alex was interested in directing the reading of the students toward a way of reading, and assuxned that they learned how to read as they progressed, so that he could then allow them to ask their own questions of the text. Alex was not the only professor at Southwark who assigned specific questions to be answered in journals. Reed, the chair of the religion department ofi'ered me a description of the philosophy department’s journal assignments, stating, "It is unfortunate that they're not represented here, because they are very good at this." He prefaced his description with another interesting comment: "Of course, they have fairly small classes. This is the way they teach, so they get to keep the size of the classes down." Reed’s ref€31‘ence to the workload that is involved emphasized the fact that the journals must be read in filll by the faculty. He went on to explain that for their "basic" philosophy classes, inchiding ethics, ...For each reading assignment, there is a writing assignment. There are specific questions which they are to be able to answer, and if they are able to answer those questions, they have pretty well understood what they've read. So the student who Will take the questions, read the stuff and write out answers... Then that has several benefits: one, it helps to understand stufl‘. In any case, they have some snidance as to what is important and what they can perhaps overlook. But it also gives them a kind of shared minimum common denominator for discussing the 86 ideas. That is the reason they went to this way of working, because without it the students might or might not run their eyes over the text, but they came to class wfilglg for the professor to explain it to them. They weren't going to learn it. (3- focus on "get[ting] them to read toward certain issues" and providing "guidance as to : is important and what they can perhaps overlook" reflects a theoretical assumption ar to David Bartholomae’s and Anthony Petroskey's, as outlined in Facts zterfacts and Artifacts, a description of the basis for a more reader response oriented reading and writing course. What teachers should envision when we are teaching *nts reading skills, according to Bartholomae and Petroskey, is not "students ing information fiom texts to teachers and back again, but shuttling, themselves, ten languages--theirs and ours--between their understanding of what they must say to >ut what they have read" (Bartholmae 4). Students are moving from one realm of language to a new realm, and they are trying to discover how to navigate in the new . What results may seem like misreadings of texts, however, misreading a text is not Sarily a mark of poor reader; it is the type of misreading that causes instructors to 1e they are poor readers. Good readers are able to construct readings that are ited in academic circles. In their first chapter, Bartholrme and Petroskey quote Jonathan Culler's much ited phrase "all readings are misreadings" (6). What Culler means by this is that the 3Ilse complexity of texts as well as the myriad of factors involved, such as context, Lphorical language, and selection in reading, results in incomplete readings every time. >erts" are able to attend to the aspects of the text which will provide a reading that is Ptable in the appropriate context. However, the task that students often have 87 difficulty with is finding those incomplete readings which are considered the "correct ones" by the discipline in which they are trying to participate. Thus, Bartholomae and Petroskey claim, a course which teaches reading and writing needs to assist the students to evaluate their reading. Whenever we read, our reading or “misreading” is not entirely complete. Since we read through the complex field of the background we bring to the reading, of the context of the reading and the text, and of the metaphorical language of the text, certain details are noticed and others are overlooked. In a way, both reading and Writing are acts of composing, and both require revision. The questions devised by the philosophy department faculty, according to the religion chairperson, give the students a means of selftesting their reading comprehension, PTOVide a basis for class discussion, and, in a sense, guarantee more intensive interaction With the texts. This type of writing is not as informal nor as expressive as one would initially think a journal might be. Ellen, the English chair, supported this notion in the same conversation with Red, Stating, That's what I'm doing with my Milton class right now. And it is twenty-five questions that they have gone through and tried to find in the text and come up with a way to answer. But that isjust as much an oral as it is written; it's not necessarily, at least in my class, so much a written response. But in my lit survey class where they do reading journals to reflect a single question, that ends up being the focus, the beginning point, for the discussion for each day. Before I started doing that, I think maybe five out of thirty would read every day, now I'd say it's closer to twenty-five out of thirty. And they actually have opinions, not always intelligent ones, but they have opinions! (3-11-5) Although Ellen provides the questions in order to focus students’ attention on a point to be discussed in class, the added and intended benefit of assigning and grading this type of Joul‘llal is to promote reading before class discussion. In fact, her assignment seems to 88 promote more than reading, and perhaps more than exploring ideas which evolve from the reading; it seems to focus the readings on what the professor considers important and to move the students toward reflection. Just as Reed, the religion chair, mentioned, the professors hope that with such journal writing, the students would not come to the class "waiting for the professor to explain it to them." However, the faculty do have certain knowledge or characteristics in mind for the students to learn. However, it is possible that when students are answering particular questions, they place more emphasis on proving to the professor that they read and understood the material than exploring ideas or recording personal thoughts. By making the questions directive, the professors are assisting students in learning how to read in a way that is acceptable to the particular discipline. The faculty whom I interviewed who used journals found them to be helpful in guiding students, assuring reading, and providing students with a place to work out thoughts before class discussion. Although the professors would argue with any attempt to portray the reading they are promoting with passive reading as McCormick lms accused academic reading of doing, they did not mention in the interviews that their questions are written in a way that would lead the students to question the authority of texts. As a whole, the faculty whom I interviewed did not think that any positive results would be possible if the journals were not graded. However, the system of grading the journal, or at least the focus of grading the journals was often not the same as the criteria for grading more formal writing. Bruce, the education chairperson, noted that In the journals that my students do for their TA [teaching assistantship], I do a plus and minus system. If they get a majority of pluses on them, then they get all the points. And it's to encourage writing and elaboration of their ideas... And I really 89 don't 'grade' them... but they seem to like it, because they can slough ofl a couple times and not reach that perfection level which is the problem of some of the better students here...it's hard to write at perfection... (3-11-5) Even though Bruce states he does not grade them, there is evaluation present. The students may not receive detailed responses that consider gramnmr, punctuation, mechanics or style, but they do know that their writing, perhaps their content, is in a sense rated. Bruce’s comments reflect a small percentage of faculty in both my survey and the Elmhurst surveys. When asked about the purposes of writing in their classroom or how writing aids learning, two percent in my survey at Southwark and three percent of non- WAC faculty at Elmhurst answered that it encouraged the expression of ideas. The method of evaluating students that the education professor describes allows students to write without considering the consequences of poor sentence structure or mechanics, which may fiee them on one level to explore their ideas. However, I question how freely students might express ideas; that might depend upon what they see happen in other circumstances. If challenges to the text and mainstream ideas are met with great resistance, the students’ journals might look very different fiom those written in the context of a course in which questioning texts and majority views are modeled and encouraged. The difference that evaluation made arose again later in the conversation. As the English professor mentions, I think what they learn is different in the graded and ungraded writing. For example, in my lit survey class, they do a daily response journal that gets informal writing, but it isn‘t formal writing, so they're not learning structure or logic necessarily, but they are exercising sentence skills by trying to put together ideas down on paper in a more relaxed atmosphere because they know it's not going to begradedinthesamewaythatfornmlpapersare. Andlthinktheirwriting 9O improves as a result...and it improves their reading skills more than just their writing skills. (3-11-5) So although the journals are graded, they are not marked for errors. The focus instead is on whether the students show attempts to explain ideas, to experiment with the thoughts and with the language. Such experimentation accompanied by class discussion helps the students begin to construct readings which are more congruent to the expectations of the professor. One characteristic, then, that the teachers say distinguishes journals from other types of writing assignments is that the focus is not on style, but on exploration and drawing connections. Usually journals “... are not read with issues such as correctness or formal coherence in mind,” as Marilyn DeMario descnhes in Bartholmae and Petroskey’s Facts, Artifacts and Counterfacts, “Instead we look for the generation of new ideas, the ability to make connections between one book and another or between something in a book and the writer’s personal experience....Journals are intended to be a place for private experiment, where the writer is in charge of what he or she wants to say and‘ accomplish”(92). This experimentation can give students confidence as they enter classroom discussions and encounter new material. This was a characteristic that Linda Flower and John Hayes found to be useful to experienced writers in their protocol studies. Experienced writers spent more time considering how they would develop their ideas, as Opposed to less experienced and less successful writers who concentrated on correctness, often to the detriment of development or explanation. However, the nature of a graded journal could lead to less experimentation and more awareness of the teacher’s expectations. This would lead to assimilation and 91 learning about the methods of reading in the discipline but might not allow for divergent approaches or points of view, at least in the preliminary stages. Does this completely negate student voice or erase any expressive content? Perhaps the results of Cindy Selfe’s study of journals that had been discussed with F ulwiler and Young would be helpful. She described the results later on in Writing Across the Disciplines in "Journal Writing in Mathematics." From the researchers’ analysis of student journals, they found that rather than merely giving regurgitated facts or ideas, students clarified ideas and definitions in their own language, tried to evaluate content in view of their own experience, developed strategies for learning content, and "demonstrated their understanding of abstract mathermtical concepts." (198). Even when asked to provide answers to questions which the researcher thought would elicit rote responses, many of the students formulated the answers in their own ways, showing a sense of ownership of the ideas. The benefits that the mathematics professor reported at the end of the course was that the journals made students concretely state their understanding, which helped them learn, increased their confidence, and allowed the professor to evaluate their understanding, not just the answers to problems. The students’ taking ownership of rote questions may be a result of the students’ own experience and definitions of journals from previous courses. In one of the conversations Bruce turned to Ellen and asked, “There’s a question I’d like to ask you, [Ellen], in the last couple of years, have you seen people more acquainted with their writing process and able to express themselves or not?” She answered “Yes, more acquainted with writing process and able to express themselves personally; a lot less SOIIletiInCS able to engage in analysis...Very comfortable with writing and expression, 92 much more than they used to be” (3-25-5). This acquaintance in high school with process and expression might also indicate an acquaintance with journals. Their ownership of journals may also have a great deal to do with how confident the students feel about their own rhetorical powers within the class, or how much they believed that the journals were to be their own personal writing with the professor merely glancing over their shoulder. Another benefit that the faculty who participated in the interviews saw proceeding fiom journals was personal growth. Although Reed, the religion chairperson, did not use journals in his upper division courses, he did assign them in a fi'eshman orientation course. Now, in the fieshman experience class we teach--I've been involved in tlmt several times-- they are required to write four journal entries per week and the purpose, the subject of the freshman experience in many ways is themselves. Certainly it's the subject of the journals: what they are experiencing, what they're thinking. 80 what I find myselfdoing is ...really spilling a lot ofred ink, but it's in response to what they're saying... not, it's not... I'm sorry, I was a high school English teacher for one semester... there are some knee-jerks that I just can't avoid (rmkes a motion like he's circling something)... (3-11-5) The conversation that followed this statement quickly turned into a light-hearted comparison between the faculty of their "knee-jerk" reactions to specific "errors," prirmrily specific mechanical eccentricities that particularly bothered them. What was apparent in his statement and even in their comparison of their "pet peeves" was the knowledge that they "shouldn " mark those errors: that the emphasis in grading journals like these should be on the ideas expressed in the journals. When asked how the journals were evaluated, though, he answered, “That they did what’s assigned. What’s assigned here is to reflect on what’s happening. It’s not graded for grammar per se. The other side of that is, my guess is, the students that writes just abysmally, poorly, is failing to communicate and is much more likely to get a minus than a plus.”(3-l 1-5) So a primary 93 focus on the grade is whether the students make sense of the experiences they describe in the journal. However, Reed acknowledges that the style and mechanics may play a part in whether the grader believes they are making sense. The fact that these particular journals are focused on the students themselves also reflects a purpose of writing which arose in the surveys: promoting personal growth. In my survey, one faculty member mentioned that writing aided students in persorml growth, two faculty members said that it was a goal for their classes. In Lerud's study, 9% of the faculty involved in WAC saw personal growth as a purpose for writing, while none of the non-WAC faculty saw it as a purpose at all. In my own study, of faculty not in a formal WAC program, 2% of the respondents claimed it nurtured intellectual growth, but none stated that they thought personal growth was a purpose. One other use of journals that arose was in a foreign language class. Daniel noted that the only ungraded writing he had students do in the first semesters of French was writing out sentences with particular structure and vocabulary as practice. He then stated, “I also use journals for the 4'h semester French course, which is designed for composition, approximately 250 words per week, and they can talk about anything they want to, althoughI encouragethemto tryto use vocabulary. Inthiscase, thejoumalsare ameans of giving them practice in using a language, much like a journal might be used in a fi'eshman English composition class. The use of vocabulary and the emphasis on length suggest that the journals are intended to make them more comfortable using the language and experimenting with ways of expressing ideas. Journals, then, the primary genre previously thought of as “recording,” serve various flmctions in various courses. The difl‘erence in function could result from the 94 differing perspectives of various disciplines. It may also result from professors observing certain needs in student learning. The characteristics that the journals that these particular Southwark college professors have in common are that they are ongoing works, that they are assigned over a period of time with regular intervals of input or noting down required, that the expectations of style, grammar and mechanics are often less stringent than other those of other genres, that they are often used as informal guides to learning, and that they are often ungraded or graded with less formally stated criteria. Not all of the journals could be said to be completely the act of abstracting primarily for the students’ personal use or for future abstraction to be used elsewhere. Some seem to be meant to teach students how they should abstract or select from texts and observation for academic or discipline specific tasks. The fi'eshman orientation journals also seemed to lead into another category: recollecting, or "looking back." Although the students were not writing official autobiographies or memoirs, the purpose of the journals was to encourage the students to make sense of their life. Four percent of the respondents in my survey stated that they asked for personal accounts or narratives. These were the only cases in which this category arose, although very similar writing appeared in the area of "thinking over," or reflecting. Investigating and Reflecting: observations, case studies The next category, investigation, or "looking into" includes field and lab reports, and observation logs, as well as the results of these: profiles, sketches and case studies. What distinguishes this category from what was traditiomlly consdiered recording is the movement from writing about the individual’s emotional responses, memory or knowledge 95 base for the individual’s use to abstracting from sources outside the self such as observations or interviews with a sense that what is written will become the basis for further abstraction and writing. The category with which I combine investigation is that of reflecting, which can include genres like case studies, biography, and profiles. Reflection is the step of abstracting from the previous abstractions that have occurred in recording or investigating, such as journals, field notes or lab reports in order to write for a more public audience. When looking for data on investigation, the fact that some faculty considered observation logs to be journals made it more diflicult to establish exact statistics. It secured that in most cases, the act of investigation was considered to be either an activity of journals or preparation for writing another kind of paper. Field reports or lab reports were mentioned by 11% of the respondents in my survey. This percentage in my survey was less than half of the 29% who assigned observation logs and 14% who assigned lab reports in the survey of University of North Carolina at Wilmington faculty in 1984. At Elmhurst, the preliminary survey indicated that the exact same percentage, 29% of faculty assigned lab reports and another 29% assigned case studies. Kalmbach and Gorman’s survey did not include logs as a choice, since they did not view it as a WAC category. One possible explanation for the difi'erence in numbers might be the types of programs offered. The schools surveyed by Lerud and Eblen seem to have larger nursing and engineering programs than Southwark College, which might explain the higher numbers, since such genres would be more likely to be used in the profession and passed on to students. 96 Although thirteen percent of the Southwark faculty responded "teaching reading and research skills" as skills that writing aided, since they mentioned the two together, I surmised that their reference to research meant primarily searching within texts rather than primary research. However, some of the faculty respondents recognized the importance of investigation. Both Heather and Bruce, the psychology and education professors whom I individually interviewed, assigned observations in which the students had to seek out classrooms or children to observe for their journals. (See Appendices E and F) Other than Heather and Bruce’s assignments, investigation that would result in a sketch or chronicle was either not asked for or it was expected to be done as a step toward a larger paper that would include synthesis or analysis. That is, the instructors at Southwark often may not see any written record of investigation or discuss it in class. This echoes Mofl‘ett's claim that investigation is the "stepping stone" that is often missing for students in courses who are trying to bridge the gap between their "expertise" on a subject and the professor's expertise on a subject. Investigation allows the student to discover others' knowledge on the subject, and to acquire more herself. In doing so, the students begin to categorize this knowledge, to define it, which leads to the generalization necessary for more formal writing. Reflection on observations or investigation secured to be asking for a little more. Thirteen percent of the faculty who responded to my survey claimed that they assigned reflection papers in courses for their majors. Neither Eblen’s nor Elmhurst’s surveys had any record of this genre. This difl‘erence could be accounted for by the nature of the institutions or the forum of the surveys; however, it may also be a result of the year in Which the studies were done. Assessment in education, whether in secondary or higher 97 education, has begun to place more emphasis on reflection on the part of teachers in the 1990's, despite the policies toward testing. In the individual and group interviews, Bruce, the education professor, pointed out state requirements that teachers show evidence of reflective teaching. The thirteen responses in my study may have come from faculty in disciplines affected by such emphasis. There were many assignments that called for investigation combined with reflection in my study. Two very good examples of such assignments were described by Victor, the sociology professor: What my writing is, in most cases, assignments, is to do that latter step, either a reflection paper or some or what I call a snmll research paper in which they do an observational study and try to make some sense out of observations, so what I try to do is get them to think sociologically about what it is they've seen and apply to a real situation that they ran in to for example, I might send them to a basketball gameandaskthemto withthenotionthat thisisagreat place to study sociology and you could write a whole bunch of stufl‘ on that. Helping them to see in their practical world what we are talking theoretically in the classroom and use them to make sense out of it. (3-10-4) This assignment called for students to observe, or to investigate, by paying attention to a sporting event fiom a sociological point of view and then to reflect on what they observed. One key reason that Victor assigns this paper is to influence the students to "think sociologically," as he phrased it. This concept is closely aligned to Bartholmae and Petroskey’s discussion of teaching students to read. In order for students to learn what the discipline considers important elements to pay attention to when reading, faculty must give them a chance to practice selective reading. Charles Bazerman confirms this idea in his analyses of the texts and history of scientific writing. In his conclusion, he emphasizes the need for professors to introduce genres to students in ways that allow the students to understand how the 98 genre works in that field, in order to give them a stronger sense of what it means to think in that field. However, all three, Barthorme, Petroskey and Bazerman are in agreement that the students should also be shown that they can bring something from their own experience to the discipline. Victor’s sociology assignment, as it was described, asks the students to do both; to apply what they have learned from the discipline and observe and analyze a situation, but they are given the fieedom to attend to those aspects of the event that they find interesting or of which they have more knowledge. Some students might consider the basketball team, others, the crowd of fans, and still others, the referees or staff who help manage the game. Victor also assigned a paper in which the students were asked to write about themselves, in that case it's a paper about their socialization process. I ask them to identify their sources of socialization and what they get fiom it and what they might be if they didn't have those sources. And that's an attempt to get them to apply the material that we're talking about to something they already know a lot about: sociologically explain themselves. Again, this assignment combined narrative, something which could be pulled fi'om an observation journal, with the means of analyzing it that the students learned fiom the texts and lectures of the course. In psychology, Heather assigned an essay which made use of the observation logs mentioned previously. In many ways this assignment was similar to Victor’s, in that it was asking students to combine their recorded observations with the information fi'om the course. Heather distrlhuted an explicit assignment sheet in her 300 level developmental psychology course that included the log and a resulting essay (Appendix F). During the first few weeks, students were to observe and record the activities of one child, avoiding 99 any interpretation of those activities. Then each week, the students were to continue recording all activities, with the additional work of highlighting developmental observations in accordance with the topic being discussed in class. For example, one week the students would have to highlight emotional development, while during another, speech and language development. At the end of the entire observation period, the students were then asked to summarize the observation in a five-page paper in view of the various developmental areas and to evaluate the subject’s levels according to expectations for that chronological age. This assignment benefitted students by specifically showing them how to connect the work they were doing in noting down observations with the texts and lectures they were interacting with in class. The sociology and psychology assignments were the most exciting to me because they allowed the students to learn the techniques of the disciplines and to practice analysis with some guidance and with the mediary step of investigation laid out for them instead of assumed. They also connected learning about the topic at hand with learning how to think in the way of the discipline. Cogitating: Critical Analysis, Reviews, and Research Papers Other types of essays asked the students to spend more time considering text and to then introduce their personal response as part of analysis. These types of assignments were third in line to research papers and essay exams. All of these genres would fit Mofl‘ett’s category of “thinking through” or cogitation. In my survey, 18% of the responding faculty claimed that they assigned critical analysis essays and 25% critiques of articles. This was very different fi'om the number of faculty who reported in my survey that they wrote critical analyses or book reviews in 100 their field: 6% and 2%, respectively. The total number is comparable to preliminary survey at Elmhurst, in which 18% of the responding faculty assigned critiques and 32% assigned "shorter essays requiring organized analytical and/or evaluative responses to readings or assigned topics." In Charlene Eblen's study, 26% assigned analytical papers and 18% assigned critiques. Another 13% assigned book reviews. Even higher were the percentages from UNCW, 40% assigned one to four pages papers, 12% assigned microthemes, and 33% assigned summaries. The high percentage of assignments of this type might be explained by considering what faculty said that they want students to learn; 34% said that they wanted students to learn to think independently, or to use critical thinking skills. In their opinions, critiquing or reviewing other works is a means of developing and displaying such skills. Forming and expressing opinions, when based on evidence and reasoning, involves acquiring knowledge, synthesizing it, analyzing it and possibly forming theory based on it. Betty, an accounting professor, did not articulate such specific expectations, but she did assign short writing assignments that were intended to make students read and think through the reading assignment and their opinion on it. In a cost accounting class taught by Betty, students were asked to do critiques. I have them do three critiques on some article in Management Accounting, usually a related issue or some other article. I ask them to write a summary of the article and to include a halfa page of their own view. If it is something that is controversial, to put their own opinion, if it's not really controversial, to put what they thought about the article...if they learned something new, what they want to comment on. (3-11-5) These were very simple assignments, but ones which Betty felt were valuable in giving them the practice in writing as well as opportunities to see what was going on in the field 101 they were about to enter. These assignments become much more focused on displaying knowledge or skills to teachers. As Betty mentions, “ Of course the main purpose is to communicate to me that they understood what they have read and then to also to express their opinions. So there are juniors and seniors who take this class, and that's my primary purpose: ...to make sure they can, in a written format, explain to me what they have read and that they understand it and express their opinions” (3-25-5). The assignment, although informal, has mixed rhetorical qualifications. The professor wants them to see her as an audience and to prove that they understand something. Yet at the same time, she is wanting to provide them with the exposure to writing in the field and with the opportunity to present their own opinions. Betty repeats the comment “express their opinions,” and this echoes a comment that a social scientist in Sandra Zerger’s study mentioned; she quotes him as saying “students as they get more knowledgeable are encouraged to take an issue... and then to justify the particular approach they take, but again it must be done on a factual basis and not simply saying ‘I like this one better’” (6). The struggle that many faculty reported having was helping students to see that their response is important and that they do have knowledge that they bring to class. Sarah, the classical language teacher, described an assignment designed to do this, which is described in the section on genres without categories. Perhaps the students’ reticence stems fi'om the type of writing the students have been asked to do up to this point—perhaps it proceeds fiom the ways in which the assignment is given. In an individual interview, when asked how she presented the requirements for the assignment to the students and whether she had a written assignment, 102 Betty, the accounting professor said during our individual interview, “I’ll write it on the board... double spaced. They always want to know how long; I tell them two to three pages.” She proceeded to explain how she tells them what she expects: “I want a summary and what you’d call a conclusion... I want your ideas and I want you to back up your ideas.” However, she did not distribute a hard copy of any assignment sheet. The description in her syllabus asked the students to “read and report on various articles from accounting periodicals in the library.” The goal that followed this instruction was “This will enable the student to become familiar with periodicals of his/her profession and to learn of the current issues facing the accounting profession.” (See Appendix F.) In fieshman and sophomore religion courses, Reed, the religion department chairperson, assigned a more formal and longer critique than the one Betty assigned. In fact, he notes that when he came to Southwark College as chair he asked everyone who taught the fieshman and sophomore literature courses to assign “some sort of critical writing assignment.” In his course this takes the form of a short book review. He described it in the first group interview: They have to write about a three page critical review. I want them to answer four questions: what is the author's thesis, what does the thesis mean, is it true, and so what? And that's their writing assignment; that's what they have to do. By the way, they have to convince me that they read the book. They also don't like books because they are fairly diflicult. They’re filled with all kinds of technical vocabulary, which they consider jargon. And they want to gripe about how poorly it's written. And my response is: "No. You don't get ofl‘ that easy. I want you to talk about the thinking of the book. Don't tell me you find the book confilsing; I'm not interested in your state of mind. I'm interested in whether what the man said was right or wrong and why. Whether it is better than what somebody else said. What are you drawing on? ...Well you're an adult, you've been going to church, or you haven't, or whatever. You have class. You have textbook. You are not coming to this totally uninformed.” Though often they write as though they are. (3-11-5) 103 Reed comments in this important aside-- “by the way, they have to convince me that they read the book”-- that an underlying purpose of the assignment is to prove to the audience that a task had been sufficiently completed. This is similar to the statement the accounting professor makes above. Yet the over-riding emphasis in his description, as in many of the conversations in which I participated, was on student input and analysis. His expectations reflect academic expectations: for the students to engage in analysis that expresses their opinion, but in a way that is acceptable to the discipline, to engage in meta-analysis, and to make judgement calls. The students’ avoidance may be a result of merely being novices to the discipline. The comments on jargon, writing, or whether they could understand may alleviate the pressure of making a judgement when feeling unworthy to judge. For his upper level courses, Reed has even higher expectations in the areas of fluency and independent thinking. For an upper level course, I generally want a fifteen-page research paper. So, in comparative religion class, at that point, they’re really into something so foreign; they’re scared about it. They don’t come to it with a wealth of information, so they know they’re really going to have to slug it out. This is tough So they will come to me, thosewhoaretlfinkingandworkmgaheadtheywillcometomeforhelpin conceptualizing. I’ll say “What are you interested in?” And they’ll say “well, you know, I’m kind of interested in Zorastoronism” I had a Japanese student yesterday who wants to do a paper on Shinto. But they may need help in conceptualizing... I’ll say: “What about that did you like?” “Well I like this that or the other.” “Well have you considered this possibility or that possibility?” And about, I would say, two thirds of the time, they come up with their own topic or their own way of conceptualizing it, not a suggestion that I have made. That is certainly true almost inevitably of the better students. Because of what they see when I toss out a half dozen suggestions, Then they say “Ah, now I see how to conceptualize.” Then they do their own. I require a first and a second draft, and I am getting absolutely nowhere with that. Even the best of student. I mean (names students) some of the best students we’ve ever had around here, I’m sure simply corrected what I...you know..(3-1 1-5) 104 A fifteen-page research paper is an interesting genre in itself. I questioned the length of it to myself, especially when he also mentioned that he required a first and second draft but was “getting absolutely nowhere with that.” Reed’s description of his assignment, his students’ dificulties with the assignment, and his interaction with the students has many facets to it. When discussing the writing project with them, he appears to use a Socratic method of asking them questions that elicit understanding. The fact that he “tosses out” some suggestions--he seemed to mean suggesting positive possibilities rather than telling students that certain suggestions were incorrect, in negative way--shows that he offers example topics that serve to guide the students toward the types of topics he thinks are useful. This seems to help them choose wisely; however, it seems to be the “better students”--those more familiar with academic expectations--who are able to make the connection between the examples and their own possible topics. It leaves one to wonder whether the less experienced or less empowered students seek this assistance, and then whether they benefit from such guidance in the same way. Reed’s explanation of another fifteen page research paper, which he offered without prompting from me or anyone else, was one that seemed to have more specific requirements. This paper was assigned in an Old Testament special topics course that he described as “the course where I think I’m most successful.” For this paper, he asks the students to begin by applying specific methods of biblical study, or interpretation, that he has introduced them to in the course. In his words, they need to complete their own application before turning to secondary sources, “because I can tell immediately if they do, because there will be nothing creative there.” Reed does note that 105 I have lad... I can remember students who were scared stifl‘ at the thought. “Just work with me on this. Do what I tell you, and your problem will not be how do write as much as fifteen pages, but how do I keep it under twenty-five to thirty pages.” And they never believe me until they learn methods and start trying to do it. And I’ve had students say “Oh, now I’m ready to go to seminary.” (3-11-5) Reed seems aware in both cases, of the fear and trepidation with which students approach these fifteen page papers, and sees hirnselfin some way as a guide through that fear to a final project. In his opinion, he is introducing them to a practice inherent in his field. In fact, between descriptions of the assignments he paused and stated, “I should point out that my scholarship is characterized by strict application of method and exhaustive bibliography. I’m not asking them to do something that I don’t practice every time I publish.” To Reed, the assignments for both courses are representative of what they will need to do when they leave college and begin graduate education. For majors in the field, he is introducing them to writing as he knows it. What results as students begin to reflect on the reading, writing, and investigation that they have accomplished is generalization, according to Moffett--a skill that is called for in many academic writing assignments, especially in research papers and essay exams. Generalization calls for going one step further in reflecting on experience and text from analyzing or evaluating to drawing conclusions. In some way, this is what Reed seems to be looking for in the critical review and research papers. Writing as Testing?: Essay Exams One genre that was not in Mofl‘ett’s list was the essay exam, that could be equated in some ways with a thesis essay, since in his investigation of writing, he found them to be inauthentic. Of course, authenticity in classroom situations is hard to create and can be diflicult to determine; graded essays often test something. Much composition theory 106 contains negative connotations in that using writing to test is not writing to learn or learning to write. Writing-as-testing can actually appear in many genres; it is not necessarily a genre of its own. It most often appears in the genres such as research papers and essay exams, but is not exclusive to those genres. James Mofi‘ett notes that ‘eriting- as-testing tends by its very nature to make student writing depend on other people’s conceptualization” (Active 14). The goal of such writing is to clearly display knowledge to a specific audience, the teacher. The nature of such writing is in exact opposition to both Betty’s and Reed’s desires when they assign their papers; however, it seems to be a danger that Reed in some way acknowledges and tries to avert. Avoiding an understanding of the research paper as a form of testing is diflicult. McCormick points out that most composition texts and handbooks teach research writers to acknowledge only rminstream sources and to avoid questioning them. The revision McCormick offers is to have research writers question texts, critique the ideology of their culture and examine each others’ texts for places in which they attempt to be “objective.” This might be one way to maintain research writing as a culmination of investigation, reflection and cogitation. Essay exams, however, might be a much more diflicult genre to control in such a way that it does not automatically become writing as testing, and thus force students to inadvertemly relinquish their own ideas in lieu of some “authority.” Essay exams, though, continue to be a popular means of having students write in courses. I found that 39% of the faculty who responded to my survey assigned essays exams; this, when compared with the other studies with which I have been comparing survey results, was markedly lower than usual. Lerud, in his 1991 survey, found that 70% of those in WAC program, 67% of 107 non-WAC. In her study, Eblen found that the genre that was most often assigned was the essay test. Eblen found that 55% of the respondents used essay tests as a form of writing. In sum, Eblen concluded that "writing in school is heavily weighted toward the extensive or transactional mode" (347), which in her view contained negative connotations. She categorized the use of essay exams with many of the modes that are related closely to the specific disciplines: as methods of testing student knowledge rather than encouraging exploration. The two do not necessarily need to be seen as antithetical. One aspect of assignments that may be overlooked in quantitative studies are the different functions in the classroom. In essence, the term becomes a “rhetorical bin.” Randall Popkin argued, in a 1989 Journal of Teaching Writing article, that the essay exam is a valid genre that in no way is detrimental to students’ writing. In a 1997 College Teaching article, "Essay Exams-Well Worth the Eflon," Craig Steele, an associate professor of Biology, also takes a more positive view of essay exams than many composition experts might. The intended audience of his article are colleagues in primarily scientific fields, and he attempts to persuade his readers to use essay exams rather than objective tests, which he considers to be the “least appropriate evaluation tools" in regards to helping students learn. The down side of essay exams for Steele, as a professor of Biology and Health Services, is reliability because of the subjectivity of grading, a concern different fi‘om Eblen’s. When he offers suggestions for improving essay exams, many of them are meant to offer solutions to the problem of subjectivity. For example, he suggests random sampling before grading, hiding student names, establishing criteria before grading, not grading exams all at once, and grading one question at a time rather than each test at a 108 time. Steele does make some suggestions that emphasize making the exam a better learning experience for the students, such as phrasing questions carefillly, sharing evaluative criteria before the test is given, sharing examples of strong and weak essays with the students, and discussing the test with the students afterwards. For the most part, though, Steele focuses on the positive aspects of essay exams. Some of the main reasons that Steele thinks tlmt essay exams are better are that they provide valuable feedback for students and professors, they can be more individualized for students, can reveal any misunderstandings or firulty thinking and can display actual breadth and depth of understanding. He considers the implications of the Writing across the Curriculum Association of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education's claims that an "active language element is crucial for any significant learning" (150). He also compares the ways that essay exams are used. Essays looking for lists or description are not usefirl; those that ask students "to apply knowledge, analyze data or situations, synthesize, or evaluate" are useful as learning as well as evaluation tools. The reasons that they are more useful, he claims, are that students study better. Steele cites studies by Mayer and Shavelson and Stern that showed that students tends to synthesize material and consider it as evidence rather than memorizing it in rote fashion as they study. Synthesis is one of the min expectations that many of the faculty whom I interviewed had of student writing, whether in essay exams or other types of writing. In fact, it was one of the higher cognitive skills mentioned in the respondents’ answers to my survey question about what they wanted students to learn in their classes—over fifty percent mentioned higher cognitive skills in one form or another. One professor, Heather, 109 the psychology professor, noted that those skills were specifically what she was looking for in the essay exams that she assigned. Walking over here I thought about essay exams. I require essay exams. Every exam has an essay component. I require some sort of synthesis. 1 provide those questions ahead of time, so that they're not thinking about this for the first time. They've had an opportunity to think about it with everything in fi'ont of them and practice it and write it out a couple times. Then they’re presented with parts of that question or several questions combined together to make these sort of relationships or links. Particularly in development. I teach developmental psychology. You can't view any form of development in isolation, so oftentimes, I ask them to integrate for a particular period of time how cognitive development impacts social development... and the impact...how they're impacted by motor development. So I want them to integrate and synthesize the approaches that they're presented with and look at that. (382) The synthesis Heather desires in essay exams reflects a type of synthesis similar to the synthesis she asks those students to perform in the ongoing observation journal and resulting summary essay that were mentioned previously. Her students should be accustomed to the concept of drawing connections between classroom material, textbook material and the observations that they are making. This expectation for synthesis proceeds fiom Heather’s understanding of the field: that development must be seen as a whole, not in parts. In her opinion, the essay exam, by having students make difl‘erent connections between some of the same material, may be transactional in nature, but it is also encouraging further practice of a skill that Heather sees as important: the skill of Another use of essay exams that seemed to move the genre away fi'om writing as testing was tlmt of Alex, the history professor. His essay exam questions, as he described them are “. . . a thesis kind of question, where you get differences of opinion among SCholars, and then I ask them to construct an argument. . .fi'om the evidence they have at 110 their disposal.” As Heather does, Alex looks for synthesis from his students. However, he goes a step further: . . .I let students rewrite the larger essay question so that they can see what it takes in their language in their thinking process and they can redo that as often as they want to the point it's where the grade that they want. In class because nobody writes quite the same way, and so to look at somebody's for the whole class, I don't think does much good, so I'll work with them But it's voluntary--1mless they make below a C. If they make below a C, they have to do it. If they nuke a C or above, it's their option. Some will do it and some won't. (3-10-4) Alex’s willingness to work with students in revising essays on an individual basis belies the usual assumptions made about essay exams. He sees his work with the students to be a means of introducing them to an important aspect of writing and thinking; as we see in his comments later in Chapter three, he believes that essay exams are a means of teaching students to “think on their feet,” an important skill for many work situations. When he lets them rewrite, he is slowing down the process so that they can learn it. When Alex was asked whether students really took advantage of his assistance by one of the other participants in the interview, he replied, Some ofthem will get excited and bring the grade up and some ofthem are just going through the motions, but I keep doing it, and so I perceive that there’s an advantage to doing it. I haven’t done an actual statistical study, but I think it helps enough that it’s worth doing. There’s a lot of kids coming in and they’re not used to that kind of wrrtmg Because what I’m doing... it’s not just memorization. They have to think about how they’re using the material to prove a point. So lots of times it’s a new level for them to get an adjustment to. (3-10—4) Two important points arise in Alex’s response. First, his comment about the success of the method displays a means of evaluating assignments that is termed as creating lore by Stephen North and Patricia Harkin He admits he has not done “empirical” research, but 111 his classroom research, his perception, is what guides him to continue using essay exams in this manner. Second, his cormnent reveals his perception not only of how successful the method of giving and revising essay exams is, but also of how what he believes actually underlies the students’ difliculty determines how he approaches the revision process. In his opinion, the students are not used to the “new level” of writing expectations. They seem to him to be entering college without the ability to construct a rhetorical argument based on evidence. Alex described in more detail what he discussed with the students with whom he worked on rewriting their essays. His description, which follows, focuses on introducing the structure of the genre rather than working specifically with certain texts as evidence: What happens is that you go over it, but they still have to put it in their language. You talk about the points: "And at this point you might bring this in...in terms of additional to support your argument," and we'll deal with structure and "here is how you can develop your essay so that it flows fi'om one end to the other." And that sort ofthing,andthentheygo backanddo itagainandyou'dbesurprised how many ways they can get it twisted...The thing that amazes me is that I have a very simple format. And I tell them fiom the very beginning, that this is what I'd like "State your thesis. And my questions are often open ended, like "Confirm or deny this historical argument." "So state your thesis, give the evidence that supports that thesis. Then, at the end, sum it up: “Because of the evidence cited above, I confirm the thesis that” But you'd be surprised how many of them can't make that simple progress. It takes a couple times just to get through. Maybe it's because they've been taught in such a rote fashion in high school to just spit out every thing they know on an essay. That the idea of out everything you know is too diflicult to overcome. (3-10-4) Alex does seem to teach a very structured form of essay for the student, one that is definitely teaching his understanding of good academic writing. However, this structure may give the students the frame they need in which to feel safe enough to explore their ideas on the subject. Even though it seems “simple” to Alex, this form is obviously 112 unknown to some students, who may not have been introduced to academic expectations for this particular genre. Also, it does reinforce the concept of writing as a learning and evaluative tool combined. Craig Steele suggests the same steps that Alex takes. “Without an opportunity to review their response,” Steele concludes, “any cormnents you make have little effect on improving subsequent writings” (4). Steele also suggests phrasing questions carefully, sharing evaluative criteria before the test is given, and sharing examples of strong and weak essays with student. Talking about the test in the ways he mentions “. . .reinforces the testing process as a part of learning” (2). From the statistics on the survey, though it was obvious that not all professors assigned essay exams, Sarah, the professor of classical literature explained her reasons for not doing so: I have gotten away from using essay questions on exams too, because I think that for a student to actually construct an argument, it’s so hard that you either have to...have them redo it and redo it, or have them prepare in advance or something. I think, in the two hours you have even in the final exam, if you want to cover other materials, too, it’s just like asking people to build a pyramid or something in twenty minutes, to build an essay.... I guess that answers one of your [the researcher’s] questions: “Is there any type of writing that we think students are not successful at?”—and I guess that’s what I would say is getting an essay question cold and writing it up. I think it’sjust too hard... Sarah vocalizes one of the problems inherit in essay exams or writing as testing. In her opinion, asking students to do something that is practically impossible in a timed and highly constructed situation-constructing a valid argument--teachers guarantee failure. The lessons learned from such a writing experience certainly cannot be the ones that the instructors want the students to gain from writing or learning in their classrooms. Obviously, there was much disagreement on the usefulness of essay exams in my study. Whose points were valid? The answer to such question may depend a great deal 113 on the expectations and perceptions of the instructor. If the essay exam is seen as the only alternative to objective testing, Craig Steele would think so. If it is seen as preparation for fixture spur of the moment thinking, speaking and writing situations, Alex would agree. If it is a way of giving the students one more opportunity to make connections between knowledge and experience, Heather would probably agree as well. Perception of what skills are needed and what future waits for students may play a large role in faculty choices of writing assignment. Genres without Categories and Categories without Works Before proceeding to discuss expectations and perceptions filrther, there are bits and pieces of data that must be discussed by merit of their peculiar nature. Whenever categories are used as a means of discussing data that lms been gathered through open ended questions and discussions, there are always some data, or in this case writing assignments without categories, and some categories without writing assignments. Diane Brunner mentions, toward the end of Inquiry and Reflection that despite efforts to choose without preferring, the act of choosing stories and using categories holds the danger of legitimizing some aspects of data and denying others, and in denying others, to overlook some important facet of the study. Perhaps a desire not to overlook is what moves me to include this section that considers those pieces that I could not seem to fit, since in using categories as I did, I realize I was “fitting” certain assignments into those categories. One assignment that did not seem to fit any of the categories was a type of collaborative assignment that Sarah used in her classical literature course. I’ve never assigned journals or notebooks, but one thing I like to do a lot is practicing writing in class about a passage because that is... I always put those on midterms and finals. A big part of the test is always giving them a short passage 114 from one of their readings and having them write an essay on it, so we do a practice of that in class. And then usually what I’ll do is take a passage and take everyone’s comments and put them on a lmndout and then they’ll have this handout, two pages of things you could say about this passage. And the idea is that itwillnnke themrealize that there reallyisalot youcould say about the passage. And that’s the main ungraded assignment I give. (3-10-4) Sarah asks the students to participate in interpreting a passage fiom a text, an activity that, in many ways, asks them to work out ideas as they would in a journal, but also to analyze and understand the passage. In addition, their interpretation becomes a joint text written for themselves as an audience. Reading their own text gives them a sense of real audience and allows them to see the variation in approach to the text within their own class. As an ungraded assignment, it is not testing their knowledge as much as encouraging expression, and perhaps creativity. Other types of writing that were mentioned in the surveys did not come up during the conversations because the disciplines that they were fi'om were not represented. Two seemd to be using writing to learn in a different way; these were working math problems and learning to write Japanese characters. When working out math problems, students do write out thoughts, equations and solutions to equations. Whether some other type of writing was indicated by this response, such as writing out the thought process from a meta-cognitive perspective, or not, is hard to tell. The other type of writing, in which students were asked to write out Japanese characters in order to learn them was a completely different perspective on writing, one that is not often considered after early childhood education in English, when children practice drawing 0’s and i’s and t’s and r’s. Having attempted to learn the Chinese language recently, I understood the unusual power that the physical act of writing out characters in neat rows several times, assisted not only 115 in learning the physical act of writing in a way completely new to me as well as assisting in memorizing the meaning associated with that clmracter. Another category that only appeared once in the survey or conversations was “thinking up” or imagining. The one creative writing assignment was for students to write a poem similar to a Latin poet in Sarah’s Latin 201 class. Although some of the other faculty wanted students to use their imagination to consider a time period or place themselves in a fictional setting, the time period or setting was provided for the students, and the students’ responses needed to include an understanding of the time period or the constraints of the situation. In that regard, the writing done in response to the assignment would more likely display Imderstanding or knowledge than the more risky action of creating. This is not to say that such assignments are unheard of in various subjects other than classical languages. In F ulwiler and Young’s Writing Across the Disciplines, Michael Gorman, Margeret Gorman and Art Young report on a case study of “Poetic Writing in Psychology.” In this course students were asked to write poems about schizophrenia before they studied it as part of the class, then they wrote a short essay on a case study of schizophrenia, in the end they wrote a new poem on the same topic. A majority of the students found the poetic assignment useful, and many of the students were more apt to take risks in their essays as a result of the exploration through creativity. Such an assignment would require risk taking on the part of an instructor as well, and would require knowledge of research into the advantages of creative writing in learning, as these instructors had. Other factors in the types of assignments that the faculty whom I interviewed used in their classrooms were the motivation in using writing in their courses and their 116 understanding of what writing would accomplish The professors whom I interviewed did discuss the goals for particular assignments and could articulate their own sense of what they felt their writing assignments provided their students. I look at this more carefirlly in Chapter three. Commentary on Categories, Genres, and Assignments It became obvious to me that as I was constructing this particular narrative of what happened in my research, that although I was attempting to analyze the results in light of categories that I originally viewed as proceeding from the data, I chose categories tlmt were already described in order to seek some theoretical basis. This is part of the nature of academic writing. As Foucault mentions in his writing, one of the author-functions in literature, and I would extend this to theoretical disciplines as well, is to legitimate text. By choosing a position with an author’s name attached to it, I seek to provide legitimacy to my own analysis. However sound the theory is, though, Richard Larson is correct that the limitations in these categories do not emerge, then, fi'om the inferences and conclusions drawn from those origins: that a finished piece of discourse can be classified into a box on a taxonomic chart; that in so classifying, a theorist [makes] a usefirl statement about that piece of discourse; and —even more significant—that one can employ these categories to erect a structure for teaching others to produce discourse (207). If one recognizes the variant features, as I must after listening to the descriptions the faculty in my study provided, then the categories become unmanageable as one looks closer at the particular features of the genres that one is trying to attribute to them. I would agree with Larson that drawing large scale conclusions about the teaching of writing based on my tables would be impractical, even problematic. However, those categories can serve a different fimction in reflective research. As Miles and Huberman 117 would concur, using the categories to trace metaphors, themes and connections between separate pieces of data provides a richer sense of wlmt is really occurring. As Walvoord and colleagues comment, It is in the mture of ethnomethodology and ethnography in that manner to use categories to some extent...In order to try to determine what threads or themes seem to run through. It has also been the habit ofWAC researchers trying to get a handle on what is happening to rely on genre categories...Genre can be useful as a place to begin, a way of developing a discourse that we can participate in... as long as we are looking at rhetorical features, disciplinary ‘influences’ and for places at which we may think we are speaking the same ‘language’ but are not. Sharing a re-enactment of that tracing in the publication of research through mrrative provides one’s readers with the ability to see how the researcher has come to make sense of the events as well as the ability to see what the researcher may be blind to. The strength of using categories such as Mofl‘ett’s to look at genres is that by the act of separating and categorizing, I have more opportunity to consider the different types of writing and what might be involved in creating them. Moflett’s categories, for example, made me consider what types and amounts of abstraction they would call for, as well as whether that abstraction was referential, that is, selecting in order to record or investigate, or whether it was rhetorical, based on a particular audience. What I found was that although Mofl’ett would place journals in the category of recording, because he would claim that they required referential abstraction, or drawing on the writer-subject relation, for the writer’s purposes, the journals that my participants described to me definitely had an audience and often required reflection on what the student was writing. In addition, journals were used to teach students how to select or record in ways acceptable to academic ways of thinking in the opinions of the teachers; they were teaching the “correct misreading.” As Judith Langer and Arthur Applebee 118 comment in “How Writing Shapes Thinking,” the flexibility of genres allowed them to be used in various ways in different disciplines and in different classes “contributed to a growing confusion: freewriting was not freewriting, was not freewriting, and journals were not journals” (68). The difficulty in placing genres within the referential and rhetorical areas may be a result of what David Foster sees ambiguity in his view of abstraction. In Foster’s opinion, Mofl‘ett seems to present both a cognitive, developmental views of forming ideas, as well as an empirical view (41). Foster asks “What if there are modes of experience quite independent of empirical stimuli, which form the basis of certain kinds of discourse?” He uses Pascal’s Pensees as an example of a text that is extremely personal although also written for a general audience, highly abstract and based on theorizing rather than mere recording of experience as an example of a type of writing tlmt would not fit in Moffett’s scale. This is much like the journals I have mentioned above. However, such criticism focuses more on the characteristics of the text or supposed text than on the situation of writing, which I think Mofi‘ett was trying to direct more attention toward: a triangular relationship between writer, subject and reader. If one follows Mofl‘ett’s line of thinking in Teaching the Universe of Discourse, natural development leads most communicators fiom interior monologue to public discourse, in other words fiom primarily referential abstraction to highly rhetorical abstraction, then such focus on cogitating within disciplines and within the genres requested in college would be expected. In fact, writing in the disciplines or writing with transactional features, previously considered negative terms by some WAC researchers, might actually be positive features. 119 Of course, this view of writing overlooks whom the writing is to. If the audience is not somehow authentic for the topic, then the activity of writing becomes hollow. As one of the students in Ann Herrington’s “Classrooms as Forums for Reasoning and Writing” mentions, “you’re not really presenting results because they don’t really seem to be results. Everyone else has done it one hundred times and the and the professor has seen it one hundred times” (410). This creates what Herrington terms an “absence of an issue” (41); it may also indicate an absence of an audience, since the writer is aware that the audience may not be involved in actually reading her writing as a part of the communication. If the assignments do not lead to genuine communication between the writer and the reader, then the student is not writing to communicate in any sense, nor may she be writing to learn, since she sees that wlmt she is accomplishing is repetition of prior knowledge production on someone else’s part. Mofi‘ett suggests the use of “drama” in classrooms to approximate the kinds of discourse that occur in rhetorical situations outside of the classroom. The writing of research articles, book reviews, and critical analysis might seem to be exactly that to the faculty who assigns those genres in their classrooms. A filrther question that might arise in this case is whether merely reiterating accepted norms of communication should be questioned rather than acted out. Perhaps the point of researchers like Kleinsasser and colleagues who are seeking to distinguish between gatekeepers and bordercrossers is exactly this: that the important question is not whether faculty are measuring up to expectations, but that there is a pertinent distinction between complicit participation in the drama and examining the drama for its biases. A goal of WAC curriculum may no longer be to determine what types of genres faculty are assigning, instead it may be whether in 120 introducing genres to students, instructors are intending to create critical or non-critical users through their assignments. Charles Bazerman encourages instructors to consider fundamental assumptions, goals in relation to those of community; structure of the literature, structure of community, the role of both instructor and student in both; rhetorical situation and task; investigative and symbolic tools (effort into what and how to research); and knowledge processes: “The formal features are only ways more fimdamental relations and interactions are realized in the act of communication. In recognizing and using genre, we are mobilizing multidimensional clusters of our understanding of the situation, our goals, and our activity” (319). Looking beyond the types of assignments to the goals and activity surrounding the assignments may provide firrther understanding of what the faculty are attempting to teach through their use of writing assignments. Taking these concepts a step further, David Russell, in his 1997 Written Communication article “Rethinking Genre in School and Society,” notes that one of the problems with ethnomethodologies is the difiiculty in connecting the specific occmrences of the locality they investigate with larger influences or systems. He tries to develop a “theoretical bridge” that will be “useful in analyzing how students and teachers within individual classrooms use the discursive tools of classroom genres to interact (and not interact) with social practices beyond individual classrooms, those of schools, families, peers, disciplines, professions, political movements, unions, corporations, and so on.” (1). Based on ideas fiom Vygotsky and Bazerman, Russell employs a metaphor of networks that are “any ongoing, object-directed, historically-conditioned, dialectically-structured, tool-mediated hunmn interaction: a family, a religious organization, an advocacy group, a 121 political movement, a course of study, a school, a discipline, a research laboratory, a profession, and so on” (4). The use of tools becomes a central metaphor within that network. Genres then are “shared expectations...among some group(s) of people of how certain tools...may be used together to accomplish shared purposes” (6), and should not necessarily be considered in terms of the common characteristics that genres have in different situations. This coincides with Bazerman’s conclusion that, “The formal features [of genres] are only ways more firndamental relations and interactions are realized in the act of communication In recognizing and using genre, we are mobilizing multidimensional clusters of our understanding of the situation, our goals, and our activity” (319). In other words, the features that would be used to define or describe a particular genre are not merely for defining and describing; they are indications of the rhetorical negotiations of a discipline. Russell’s definition also reflects Paltridge’s notion that “... both the stereoptypical representations of a particular genre and the conditions for its assignment are not static and may change through time in response to factors such as shifts in the philosophical position underlying the particular genre, the purpose of the genre and the participants engaged in the production and interpretation of the particular genre” (100). These shifts may result from new knowledge or even new participants. Genres serve a function of reiterating the shared use of tools like vocalization or inscription; new participants in networks learn to recognize and use the tools and the attitudes of the rest of the network towards those tools. Here Russell’s theorizing inchrdes concepts fi'om Smagorinsky’s definition of meaning construction(l63). These 122 newcomers bring with them ideas about those tools from other networks in which they are involved, and thus produce some change in the way tools are used. Russell proceeds to theorize that: through repetition of typified rhetorical actions, the system of written genres in conjunction with genres in other media operationalizes the goal-directed actions of the participants in regular (and usually unconscious) ways, bringing stability and through the process of appropriation change to social practices and institutions. Participants at certain more or less (but never entirely) stable positions within the system(s) interact in ways that make it more likely they will use (and perhaps transform) certain genres (and not others) at certain times (and not others). The teacher writes the assignments; the students write the responses in classroom genres... It is through this circulation of genres in systems, these regularized shared expectations for tool use within and among systems of purposefirl interaction, that macrosocial structure is (re)created. And at the same time in the same fundamental way the identities of individuals and groups and subgroups are (re)created( 1 0). He points out that institutions of higher education, such as Southwark College, for example, are a locus of many intersecting networks: various disciplines, various constituencies, the college itself, the classrooms within the college, families, and peer groups. Students who may be seeking to enter a certain discipline may need to first proceed through other networks; for example, a student planning to enter the field of psychology may find that she must first take statistics and learn, through the genres of that network, how tools are used within that network. Since the student may not be aware of the usefulness of particular genres in the network into which they hope to enter, the choice falls on the teacher: “instructors and disciplines must decide what tools/genres to ofler (teach) in order to accomplish both selection for their own activity system (specialization) and an offering of a broader range of tools useful to participants in related activity systems (introduction)” (16). Thus a professor’s choices can become filled with contradiction 123 In an activity system theory, one inmortant feature to consider, then, is the networks that are involved. To return to the exanrple of my choices then, as I consider an assignment, as part of several networks, that include the discipline of composition, the department of English, the college, the community in which I teach, as well as the classroom, full of students bringing their own concepts of how tools are used, I have many expectations to consider, some that contradict the others. The concern with whether to introduce a genre that would lead to specialization or one that provided broader range was evident in the discussions that the faculty had about genres. l. A brief bibliography may suffice to display this tendency towards work on journals: Boling, Anna L. “Writing Articulation and Assessment.” Paper presented at the Institute for Teaching and Learning Conference San Jose CA Oct 1993. DeNight, Slmwn - Writing To Learn Activities in Writing across the Curriculum Classrooms. ED360646 ,1992. Fulwiler, Toby, ed. The Journal Book. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1987. Gannet, Cinthia. Gender and the Journal: Diaries and Academic Discourse. Albany NY: State U of New York P, 1992. Macvaugh, Patricia Quinn. Writing to Learn: A Phenomenological Study of the Use of Journals to Facilitate Learning in the Content Areas DAI, Boston University , 1990. Mofl‘ett, James. Active Voice: A Writing Program Across the Curriculum. Montclair NJ: Boyton Cook, 1981. Selfe, Cindy. "Journal Writing in Mathematics" Writing Across the Disciplines: Research into Practice. Young and Fulwiler eds. New York: Boyton Cook, 1986. Tinberg, Howard .“Writing in a Safe Place,” The Journal Book: For Teachers of At Risk College Writers. Gardner Susan and Toby Fulwiler eds. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1999. Wauchope, Barbara “Using Personal Journals in the Classroom.” Paper at Annual Meeting, National Council on Family Rehtions. Seattle WA ED324698, 1990. 124 Chapter 3 CONTENT ANALYSIS FOCUSED ON EXPECTATIONS Part of a liberal arts education should be that you do a certain amount of writing, period.. it doesn’t really matter what or what style, because you learn by doing. An important part of being educated is knowing how to write. (Sarah, professor of classical studies 3-24-2) The expectations that teachers have of the courses they teach, of the students who take those courses, and of the graduates of their programs can influence the types of writing they incorporate into their courses, the types of writing assignments they give, and the ways in which they introduce, follow and evaluate the writing that students do. For example, when I decide to change a writing assignment, my decision to do so may be based on past experience with that assignment, on students’ responses to the assignment, on practical issues of time and energy, and on my own changing understanding of how that assignment helps me and my students meet my goals and expectations for that particular course. If I believe that students have not learned from a particular research activity, I will rethink the method of assigning it, the make up of the class, and whether the goals of my course are met by that activity as I decide whether I should shape future research activities differently. My reasons my not be very different fi'om many teachers’ reasons for shaping assignments and activities in certain ways. Hillocks comments that As teachers, then, we appear to think about purposes at three levels of abstraction. We can expect to find considerable agreement at the higher levels of abstraction. In the United States, most teachers would be likely to pay at least lip service to the purposes of enabling their charges to become active participants in a democratic society. We can also expect high levels of agreement among teachers [within the same discipline] at the level of general subject matter goals (70). 125 However, at the level of the methods of achieving the goals, Hillocks notes highly divergent practices. If this is the case among teachers of writing, how much more so amongst teachers of various subjects when it comes to writing assignments. Any understanding of the types of writing that the faculty in this study assign in their classrooms is enhanced by an understanding of their view of writing and its connection to what they want students to learn in their classrooms. The genres assigned can be useful to examine: however, they cannot be examined in a vacuum as an accurate measure of what is happeninginthe formofwritingwithinclassrooms. Many ofthe faculty inthis studyshared the abstract goals of preparing their students for the future, whether the future entailed graduate work or professional training in their discipline or it entailed entry into the more general workforce. Many of their perceptions of what might be necessary for the fixture were similar to one another’s. However, their course goals were not necessarily focused on introducing students to the types of writing that the faculty though would be expected of them. Rather, they seemed to assign writing that would elicit the cognitive growth and learning that they thought was necessary in the course. In the conclusion of Shaping Written Knowledge, based on what he has learned from his examination of a genre in the field of science, Bazerman encourages instructors to consider firndamental assumptions, and goals in relation to those of community; structure of the literature, structure of community, the role of both instructor and student in both; rhetorical situation and task; investigative and symbolic tools (effort into what and how to research); and knowledge processes. The faculty who participated in this study were concerned about community, but saw writing as a means of achieving particular goals or objectives within the classroom that might make students more prepared to participate in 126 community rather than in introducing them to ways in which the tools could be used within particular communities. In fact, in this study, very few teachers seemed to be worried about introducing students to specific genres within the discipline as much reaching specific goals that they had set out for their courses. As I discuss at the end of the chapters, the difference between perceptions of the future and course goals, objectives, and assignments may be an aspect of self-report or a result of theory in use overriding espoused theory. In post secondary education, teachers’ expectations of the outcomes of their particular courses and the programs of which those courses are a part can be even more complex than the above example. Often instructors are asked to outline some of those expectations in course descriptions, goals and objectives that appear in the course catalogs and on syllabi. With recent emphasis on assessment in education, those goals that are written out lmve become more tangible, as teachers have been encouraged to display whether they and their students have achieved those goals. However, some goals or expectations may not be dehberately articulated or immediately assessable. Depending on the particular field or discipline of the faculty, these expectations proceed fi'om many locales. Some expectations proceed fiom mandates fi‘om licensing agencies; others proceed from new theory in the discipline or in pedagogy. Some may proceed from the impetus to improve teaching based on internal or external pressures, such as reflective practice, student evaluation, or even tenure. Still others may proceed fiom instructors’ perception of wlmt students may face in the firture, whether that is an exam, a job, graduate school, or life in general. The changes implemented by the teachers whom Walvoord, Hunt, Dowling and McMahon interviewed in In the Long Run were attributed to many factors: ongoing processes 127 of change; intentional searching for new ideas; serendipitous events; and new stimuli, such as colleagues’ ideas, something they read in the literature, or workshops they attended. Although Walvoord and her colleagues were looking specifically at their participants’ motivations for attending a WAC workshop, they also observed the motivation for clunges in their classrooms. They noted that the faculty in their study “asked whether a strategy would help to achieve community, whether it would enhance student learning, whether it was feasible, and whether it fit their own philosophies, priorities, and styles of teaching” (120). In essence, one aspect of the process of change that was apparent in theirs as in other studies was that fact that “changes in their teaching were goal-driven, aimed at specific problems or concerns” (57). Joan McMahon had already noted the emphasis on problem solving involved in decisions about changes in courses and assignments in a previous study described in Teaching Strategies for Writing-A cross-the-Curriculum Faculty. I would like to focus more on the notion that the changes were also “goal-driven.” In addition to goals, because of the time constraints involved for many faculty, choices are often made based on whether the time expended yields apparent results. The decisions become a balance between pragrnatics and possibilities. As Leonard Kelly notes, “Writing to learn obligates the instructor to spend so much time and energy designing assignments, reading student papers, and writing responses to drafts. Thus, in order to be sustained from semester to semester, this effort ought to produce positive results with respect to the instructor’s usual goals for the course. It would seem a mtural course of events for instructors to give priority to their own most important instructional goals” (1 6). Although some WAC proponents would take exception to the claim that using writing assignments to foster learning obligates instructors to read every student draft, Kelly has a point: instructors have to see a comrection 128 between what they are asking students to do and the objectives that they have in mind for the course. Reed, the religion professor who participated in my study, pointed out that having students write journals that answer questions about reading is “so labor intensive for faculty members, because, ...the philosophy department, not only are they writing out all these questions for all these writing assignments, they are taking them up and grading them. It’s incredibly labor intensive”(3-l 1-5). However, he notes the usefulness of these assignments in assuring that the students are not only reading the text, but thinking seriously about the concepts that arise from that reading. The fact that the philosophy department continues to use them, says a great deal about the benefits that they seem to find in the work. Types of Expectations There were at least four difl’erent focuses of expectations that arose during my study: future expectations, what they felt would be expected of graduates of their programs or Southwark; course goals, what they expected students would learn in their courses; assignment objectives, how they expected writing to aid students in learning; and expected student background and patterns. These expectations were interactive and intra-determinant; that is, the different types of expectations played a role in the fixing or setting of other expectations. For example, if a teacher thought that students would be called upon to analyze situations fiequently in the future and thought that students did not receive enough training before entering their class, those expectations would affect the course goals. I found that in the conversations I had with Betty, Bruce, Ellen, Sarah, Daniel, Kyle, Alex, Heather, Victor, Reed and Lance, each of them mentioned certain goals behind their courses and their assignments. They often spoke as if the goals and assignments completely 129 coincided, although none of them mentioned that they specifically evaluated the assignments to see if they really were fitting the objectives that they had set out for the course. Our conversations about the firture were in some ways guided by my questions, but they all had in mind a particular fixture for which they were preparing their students. The basis of their understanding of the future was not always concrete; in some cases, it seemed that their knowledge was based on anecdotal evidence fiom alumni, at other times, it was based on an appeal to a general source. For example, Alex, the history professor, and Reed, the religion professor, mentioned alumni who returned to comment on their preparation at Southwark. In some cases, the professors even noted that they were unsure what to prepare students for. In fact, whether their understanding of what their students would be facing in the future, particularly in the area of writing, would prove to be an accurate reflection of what students actually would find as they graduated is not as important to this study as the firct that their expectations influence the decisions they make about the kind of writing they ask students to do in their classes. Heather, the psychology professor, stated that accountability or reliability was another important attribute that would prove important after graduation. She thought that the writing she required in her classes would benefit a student after graduation in any area; later, in another interview, she would also mention exercises in which she felt she was introducing students to writing within her field as well as her concerns that they learn the conventions in that field. She noted that . . . the kind of writing they do for me in the child development class is easily applicable anyplace that you have to show accountability. You have to keep a record in some way of what you’ve done on a project so that--no matter what the project is, no matter what your work setting is--and you have to report, which is a sort of summary of what you’ve done. So any kind of career related or occupationally related 130 writing is a matter of keeping enough documentation and then being able to summarize, being able to condense. So I think that is, well, that’s what I told them today. I said: “You have to have good enough records of what you’re seeing so that you can support that in a final paper, because I’m not going to take it-- just like nobody at work today would. I’m not going to allow you to sit down and write a gonderfirl paper if you can’t show me where in your observation you got that” (3-29- Heather’s concept of accountability echoes an aspect of strong writing that Alex had mentioned in a separate interview: evidence. Kyle, the other history professor, followed up her statement with a note of agreement: “...what’s your thesis?... how do you support it? ...is true of any area you’re in . . . ” (3-29-3). This was a theme that appeared in many conversations with faculty; they were concerned that students learn how to support claims with evidence, whether it was fi'om texts or fiom personal observation. Future Expectations Since we were primarily discussing writing in our conversations, our discussions of the future focused on writing; however, the faculty seemed to see some of the characteristics needed for writing to be applicable on a broader scale. In some cases, they felt a need to be concerned with both realms because of the diverse futures of the students in their courses. This can be compared to the responses of the faculty of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences whom Sandra Zerger interviewed for her 1997 CCC presentation ‘This is Chemistry, Not Literature.” Twenty-one percent of those who responded to Zerger’s survey expected students to write as if writing to colleagues within the discipline, but over half of the respondents said that they assigned writing that would prepare students for their careers (7). She adds that it appeared that the career writing that they were preparing students for was the writing that they did as professors. Many of the faculty in my study were acutely aware of the difference. The professors often spoke of wlmt their students could expect in the future as 131 “out there,” in terms of the general work world or in terms of graduate or professional school. Graduate or Professional School In regard to graduate or school, the faculty in my study mentioned disciplinary conventions, methods of investigation, and ways of thinking about text. The psychology professor, Heather, also talked about the specific expectations of writing within her particular field. Her comment was first couched in terms of what should be done as far as dialogue between the disciplines about writing was concerned. Her primary concern was that fi'om her perspective, students coming from English composition courses into her courses had been taught that the only format for papers was the Modern Language Association’s format. She noted that the MLA method “is very different fi‘om American Psychological Association and I have individuals that just don’t understand that there are many different conventions depending upon what field they’re in” (3-29-3). Sandra Zerger also mentions conventions in her discussion of the results of her study of writing at a College of Liberal arts and Sciences. The conventions she mentions are conventions of structure, documentation, discourse signals and language. In the area of structure, disciplinary conventions ranged from where thesis statements should appear to whether to use visuals. Seventy percent of all of Zerger’s faculty respondents preferred a specific format for documenting source, and more than eighty percent of the social science faculty were concerned that with the inclusion of “specific references to scholarship of the field” (4-5). In “The Pedagogy of Writing Across the Curriculum,” Susan McLeod describes looking at a student’s use of the term “horrifying” in regards to statistics on child abuse in an 132 essay, which a psychology professor had commented was not proper diction in APA style. She notes that “academics are so grounded in their own disciplimry discourse conventions . . . that it is difficult for them to see why students struggle as they learn them, or why writing in other disciplines has different but equally valid conventions” (155). This is not Heather’s problem; she recognizes that there are different conventions. She merely wants her conventions recognized in other courses as well. The other professors questioned Heather about whether her concern was really about writing or merely about some minor matters: “But you’re talking especially about things like footnotes and references and so on, not the actual prose, right?” Her response was that Well, there are some differences. You [referring to the history professor] mentioned the active vs. passive voice, I mean, there are some conventions that are held; like if you get the American Psychological Association manual, there are some things that, more recently, sort of violate the way I used to write. Particularly in professional psychology, we use the passive voice and the first person. So we used to say “the experimenter did” and now we say ‘Rve did.” So there’s some conventions that are difl‘erenttoo. I’mtryingtothinkofone. . . Ican’trememberwhatitis. . . butin other words, it’s agreed upon by a number of individuals who are psychologists, who have chosen this particular way and convention for psychological journals and it’s not always the same conventions that other disciplines use. There’s one in particular that always has change and I can’t remember and it’s not a grammatical issue, it’s a convention . . . (3-29—3) Here she distinguishes between grammatical or mechanical concerns, in which she includes footnotes, and conventions, by which she means accepted ways of writing. Rather than see conventions as merely stylistic, she sees them as necessary for successfiil communication within the field. Heather’s notion of convention is supported by Robert Madigan, Susan Johnson, and Patricia Linton in “The Language of Psychology: APA Style as Epistemology” in a 1995 American Psychologist article; they argue that APA manual of style is more than a guide to preparing documents and citing sources-- that it represents a way of thinking or 133 philosophy. Heather’s concern is that students learn that there are various disciplines, networks to use Russell’s term, that write in a specific way for a specific purpose. Her fear is that they are not being introduced to the possibility of other ways of writing by other teachers. Daniel, the French professor, followed up on Heather’s discussion of convention by asking, “Are some of these convention issues in your area, and maybe areas like sociology based on the desire to avoid any kinds of language which would be ofl’ensive to certain classes of people you’re discussing?” To which she replied, “Oh, there’s a whole host of things, obviously . . . one is political correctness . . . another has to do with how to save space in a journal I mean some things have to do with ‘say it this way because it’s shorter, and we can fit more in here.’ And that’s exactly what it is: being concise. And that’s different fi'om what one might expect. It goes a little deeper than just how we reference” (3-29-3). Heather here seems to be reiterating the fact that in her field, these conventions are important, and not on the level of merely surface difl'erences. These differences are connected to the accepted ways of communicating; if the students do not learn these conventions, they will not be able to enter the conversation as easily. Daniel, the foreign language professor, noted that the skills the students were learning by writing in his courses were applicable to both graduate school and the wider world of writing. However, he did feel that there were distinctions between the kinds of preparation needed for both areas: There may be some differences, that is to say, for example, that a person preparing to go to graduate school in a foreign language or in a foreign culture, or whatever, have to have a high level of analytical skills as in history or in any other area. If a person were not going to go in that direction at all, but to go immediately into business into the work force, it’s possible you could argue that the person should lnve higher levels 134 of skills, things like translation. And also some knowledge or specialized vocabulary such as business. That’s a distinction; I’m not sure how fundamental it is (3-29—3). What he means by translation is “More or less technical translation, in which one would have to have some grounding in other areas: economics or sciences or whatever” (3 -29-3). He went on to explain that preparing students for such specific technical translation “is something very difficult to do at a small college. We don’t have enough staff. These are pretty specialized courses. Which is not possrble when you have a staff of two or three people teaching language” (3-29-3). In his opinion, because of its size, his department was not able to provide specialized courses in language that would provide students with the kinds of experience and vocabulary to allow those students to enter highly specialized translating positions without However, I would like to return to his own question about the distinction he was making and “how fundamental it is.” What he considered an important type of preparation for graduate school was analytical ability, and the person immediately entering the workforce would need specific skills. This distinction may not mean that he sees the two as exclusive of the other. Based on other statements that he made during our conversation about process, planning and cognitive skills, it seems that he was drawing these out as extremes rather than absolutes. It would be hard to believe that a student proceeding into graduate school in foreign language would do well with only analytical ability and little preparation in translating or other language skills. Likewise, it would be difficult to imagine a student succeeding in a work situation with only translating skills and no analytical capabilities. In another conversation, Daniel defined the same types of writing as the type of writing that would be expected of students in graduate work. “In the upper level courses Spanish 135 literature or advanced Latin literature courses too, we would also have them also write term papers and they would be made to understand that level to what they would be doing in a graduate level course and maybe some other activity as well.” (3-10-4) Later Daniel also mentioned that he found it difficult to see how writing at the graduate level or professional level of their discipline could be integrated into their college level courses. In the case of foreign languages, it’s a very different situation, of course, because at the lowest levels, we have students who have basically no knowledge or almost no knowledge of the language. So, the writing they do is at first, probably similar to what elementary school is doing. It progresses fi'om there on. In the most advanced courses, we’ll have them write papers in French or Spanish or whatever the language is. They’re more serious papers. But obviously, the quality of the language cannot be near to what it could be in their native language, and certainly be no means can be language of a professional paper. Even scholars in the field, some of them will write in French or whatever the language is. And others will stick to their native language for serious scholarly papers. So it’s a rather diflicult situation with an enormous range of levels. You can see what we can expect and we can’t expect. (3-10-4) Daniel here was discussing how there were two barriers to students’ being able to write similar works to scholars in the field: ability to use the language as well as facility to work with “serious” concepts. A point that is perhaps applicable to other courses where basic linguistic skills must first be learned before students can participate in the larger discourse of the discipline. The term paper was mentioned by several faculty as the genre which most represented specific writing students would do for graduate work in their particular field; this perception of the term paper would explain why so many faculty who responded to my survey said they assigned research or term papers. At the same time that he stated that developing a thesis was a basic task anyone would need, Kyle, one of the history professors, mentioned that courses that majors would enroll in would include a different type of writing assignment, based on the types of writing they might anticipate: “In the upper division classes, I think, the closest thing 136 would be a term paper— the closest thing to an article that a professional would do. That would be another similar kind of writing” (3-29-3). This view of the term paper was similar to what is expected in graduate school corresponds to the responses to the first question on the survey. Some of the faculty members’ understanding of what would be expected of their students entering their discipline was informd by the writing that they, the teachers were doing or had done. These faculty members were beginning to assign projects that taught students to investigate and to reflect on that investigation in a manner similar to investigation and reflection in the disciplines of the social sciences and education. In their surveys, Heather had noted that psychologists conducted similar observations and case studies, but Victor had not mentioned any observation in sociology. This leads me back to the first question on my survey and one of the original intents in conducting this survey: whether the genres the class writing assigmnents were designed to elicit were similar to the genres that were used in the discipline. Table four contains the responses of Southwark faculty to the first question in the survey, focusing on the genres; table five notes the responses that commented on the ways in which writing is used. Table 4 Reported Genres in the Disciplines This table represents the types of writing that faculty reported using in their discipline on the initial survey. Columns two and three indicate number of faculty who indicated these. mm. 3.. e m research articles in journals reflective or observational journals critical analysis textbooks 137 NM, .... m inter-net publication statistical reports sermons/ outlines for public speeches notetaking psychological assessments historical narrative NNNNNA-fi-fi book reviews The highest percentage response, thirty percent, stated that research articles were most fiequently used in their field. Sixteen percent noted correspondence, and eleven percent stated that they used reflective or observation journals. Other types of writing that they claimed to do in the field were critical analysis, textbooks, intemet publication, statistical reports, sermons or public speaking notes, monographs, note taking, psychological assessments, historical narratives, and book reviews. Table 5 Reported Uses in the Disciplines This table represents the ways in which writing is used in the discipline, according to the faculty responses to the survey. Columns two and three indicate number of faculty who indicated these. highlight/communicate research specialized work clarify/record ideas persuasion to nurture intellectual growth 138 A quick comparison of table five to table three in chapter two might show some overlap between the genres. However in light of Moflett’s categories, there might be even more connections if one takes into account the amount of abstraction required. When that is taken into account, one becomes aware of how many of the types and uses of writing in the disciplines require more levels of abstraction and more focus on rhetorical abstraction for an audience, thus placing them in the realm of cogitating. Research articles, correspondence, critical analysis, textbooks, intemet publication, monographs and book reviews all fall within that realm. Those who responded according to how writing was used mentioned highlighting and communicating research (eleven percent), completing specialized work like math proofs, injury reports or cuniculum development (nine percent), and then clarifying and recording ideas, persuading, nurturing intellectual growth, and securing firnding (all below five percent). For some of the teachers in my study, the means of preparing the students for the future is through introducing them to a genre which, to the teachers, seems as close to actual writing in the field as undergraduate can come. When they teach, they may look at the possibilities offered in traditional class settings and select the genres that they think seem the most like what they do. In some cases, the faculty spoke of courses designed specifically with preparation for that firture in mind. Reed, the religion chairperson, noted that in his major, as opposed to others, they had a mandate to prepare students for further education, which resulted in a senior course. First of all, we would be an exception to that, in that almost all of our religion majors will go on to either seminary or graduate school of religion. And so in our senior seminar, we put a heavy emphasis on writing. In fact, usually, besides a major research 139 paper, there’ll be four essays as part of their grade, because, especially if they go on to seminary, they’ll have a paper due every two weeks for the whole year, and if they can’t write they’re dead in the water. It’s that simple (3-25-5). Reed first states the future prospect for most graduates in the major and by stating “so,” he indicates a causal relationship between the expectations of seminary or graduate school and the writing done in the senior seminar course at Southwark. The religion department was not the only one that offered such an experience for seniors in the major. Alex, the history professor, described a similar course aimed at preparing majors in history for graduate school experiences. We do our senior seminar a bit differently: We set it up just like a graduate writing seminar. They prepare a paper, and then in class, two students and a faculty member will critique that paper. And then they go back on the basis of those critiques and rewrite again. So they get one chance at it, in the process. And of course, honors papers: they do the same thing, fiequently, several times...The papers at the end, the senior seminar papers, are one part of the senior oral examination process; they have to defend the paper in front of three faculty on the oral examination.(3-10-4) When asked if this was intended to prepare students for the graduate level, Alex responded, “T 0 give them a taste of what graduate school is like. Without the harshness that sometimes [laughter] comes with the graduate seminar... We’re not that...” Although he did not finish his sentence, I supposed that he meant to say “hars ” or a synonym. He estimated that the number of history majors who would go on to graduate school would be a little more than half. The English professor, in another conversation, commented that their senior seminar was also a course designed for preparing students to proceed to graduate work. In the English department’s version of this course, thirty to forty percent of the grade would be based on a fifteen to twenty page paper. She noted that only four to six people graduated fiom 140 Southwark with English majors, and estimated that halfof them would go onto seminary or a school of religion rather than an English graduate program. There are several majors at Southwark College that either offer senior seminars or optional honors papers. For the honors paper, the student proposes a topic, chooses an advisor for the paper, and writes the paper during the span of two semesters on an independent study basis. At the end, as the history professor describes, the student defends the paper, and upon successfirl defense, is given a grade and graduates “with honors.” Obviously the goal of these types of courses and experiences is to prepare students for graduate level work, and the assignments follow suit. Having students model what graduate research and writing would be like definitely focused on how the students handled text. The professor of classics, Sarah, noted that she tends to “think of classroom writing like a junior version of professional writing . . . ” To explain what a junior version might be like, she continued: I teach beginning Latin, so I’m also a foreign language teacher, and Latin pedagogy uses translation into English more than other languages. And I’m interested in translation. First translation of poetry: That’s what I do professionally. And I have students, at the third semester level of Latin, they have an option of doing a creative firsttranslationasaproject. So I guessinthat case,thatitisthesarnethingthatyou would do professionally, only it’s more of an exercise. (3-10-4) Sarah considered the connection between the professional field of classical language study and the assignments in her Latin class. She noted that the exercise that she has students do is much like the kind of translating that would go on in her field. The fact that it is considered an exercise rather than a valid translation, is what seems to distinguish the first assignment she described as a junior form of a professional translation. 14] Sarah’s view of student writing as a junior version of echoed by the Reed, the professor of religion, who asks his students to conduct explications of religious text. He asks them first to complete their own “reading” and then to consider other views, saying that he is asking students to write in the same way that he does. Reed stated emphatically, I should point out that my scholarship is characterized by strict application of method and exhaustive bibliography. I’m not asking them to do something that I don’t practice every time I publish. So, I have had . . . I’ve lad students say “Oh, now I’m ready to go to seminary.” Or students in seminary: [student’s name], who graduated a couple years ago, is at Lexington Theological seminary, is really breezing through; he was a brilliant guy here. And somebody said “That’s all right. Wait till you get to the next class. You have to do an exegesis.” And he said, “Doesn’t bother me at all.” And it shouldn’t have, because he learned how to do that (3-11-5). Speaking of an upper level old testament course Reed went on to say, “That course is a second or third year seminary level course. And I’ve had people write back and say ‘I never hadanything like that inseminary. That isthe single best . . . ’ It’snotasmuchreadingasthey have in seminary. But it’s the single best course they’ve ever had at any level, or that they had until they got to graduate school” (3-11-5). What Reed seemed to be claiming is that what makes his assignments good preparation for graduate school is that the thoroughness and difficulty make them in one case, as challenging, and in the latter case even more challenging, than work they might be required to do later. Another important detail to note is that his understanding of how well those assignments are preparing students are the anecdotes or letters of students who write to tell him how they are progressing. Samuel, the political science professor also commented specifically on the expectations of law schools, but with a diflerent perspective. He told me that he does not assign essays; instead, he gives essay exams as a part ofwriting. His reason for doing so is because, in his words, “That’s what the law schools tell us: that frequent tests and essay writing is important” 142 (3-8-2). He did not explain exactly how the information is given to the political science department by the law schools, nor did he explain exactly what skills these frequent tests teach, unless it is to acquaint students with the experience of taking tests. Other participants in the study were not always as confident that they knew exactly what would be required of the next generation of graduate students, based on changes tlmt they had seen occurring in the field. During an earlier conversation on this topic, Ellen, the English professor, and Bruce, the education professor, discussed the changing expectations within the field. The conversation that proceeded was interesting in that it displays their speculation about graduate school and the expectations that will be placed on the student. Bruce began this thread: Another thing, I think, is that graduate school Ins changed. If you look at the articles that are out there now, versus what we did ten or fifteen years ago. It’s a different approach: if you write three or more pages, nobody deals with it anymore. Ten pages is a lot, at least in the field of education, and I know a little bit of reading in English education, because that’s my background abo. I think the requirements for going into graduate school levels have changed. Well not the graduate school level, but writing, the writing for publication is different. I know that sounds bad. Ellen: Oh yes, one of the difficulties we have in English is to try to figure out how we should help people do research writing in preparation of what graduate schools want. And it is so different fiom what we ended up doing that we are not sure we’re preparing them properly for graduate school. Bruce: so much is action research, you know: problems in the schools or wherever . . . Ellen: ...And deconstructive literary theory Bruce: And that’s a hard bridge to make (3-11-5). Although this part of the conversation ended in laughter, it was obvious that there were nebulous feelings about the changes that they had seen in their fields. The main change Bruce mentions at first is length, but he connotes that to him, the difference in length designates some 143 other difference. What surfaces in the short phrases which follow are newer aspects of research and scholarship of which they are aware of and yet, perhaps, wary. In the area of education, action research seems to be one difference that stands out. In literary theory, deconstruction comes to mind as another major difi‘erence. This surprised me, since I had not thought tlmt college professors who had been teaching at Southwark college for less than fifteen years would be experiencing this sense of change in the field. It rmde me wonder how much of this uncertainty exists in hberal arts colleges. As an attempt to provide experience in a genre that she believes will be useful in graduate school, Ellen, the English professor requires abstracts in order to have the students become familiar with the field as well as a type of writing tint they might have to do in graduate school. After describing her purpose in assigning abstracts, Ellen stated “I would assume people are still doing abstracts and things like that on the graduate level, I don’t know . . . but.” At this point, very aware that the research that I was doing was for my graduate work, they both turned and stared at me, as if to say “Well, do they?”(3-11-5.) I could only relate my experience, another anecdote for the file of future expectations. In a later conversation, Bruce informed me that to his knowledge, all education students fi'om Southwark College would face expectations outside the college that would lead toward graduate school and toward specific writing practices. This certain knowledge was based on state requirements for teachers: In education it’s a little bit different, because all of our people are eventually going to graduate school, because you’ve got to get your masters. In five years, you’ve got to have sixty hours of courses, and you lmve to do your masters, so urnm . . . It’s that reading, writing and arithmetic! Reed, the religion professor: Can’t get away fi'om it, huh? No matter how hard we try! 144 Bruce: Really! They have to be good in math too! We turned down a student yesterday because she’d taken biology three times! And I thought “Surely to God she could memorize enough facts to get through it the second time!”[laughter] Debbie: There is a basic literacy in everything. Bruce: Yes!!! [all laugh] (3-25-5). My comment on basic literacy, although intended to be somewhat humorous, was a reflection of what Bruce seemed to indicate in his discussion; a certain level of competency was expected for teachers. Unfortunately, the indication in this comment was that the competency sought was primarily memorization of facts. However, Bruce’s comments on the “three R’s” hints tlmt the graduate level experience would be intended to impart a continued competency and familiarity with the field rather than to develop scholars who specialized in the area. Another expectation that Bruce was certain that would face alumni who became teachers was self-assessment. His expectations of the firture directly influenced his choice of a particular assignment: keeping a reflective journal. He noted: In education, this is going to continue because reflection is a big part of the teacher internship program in Kentucky. If you don’t know that you’ve made a mistake, if you can’t recognize this, then you won’t be certified in the state because there are standards. One of the standards is reflective practice. You have to be able to ascertain where you are and where you need to go....And not only that, but you have to plan. If you do have what they call an area of weakness, you have to have a plan, some professional development, to remedy that situation. If I have a student who doesn’t reflect very well, usually, when they don’t hear what I’m saying, we tape it so they get to look at themselves. (3-11-5) However, when asked if everyone continued keeping reflective logs after their teaching assistantships were over, he responded that he wasn’t sure if a majority of them did, but that several students had mentioned to him that they did. So in some cases, the graduates may have found other means of proving to the state that they were maintaining reflective practice. 145 When we delved into more specific conversation about the types of firrther education that students fiom the college would pursue, Bruce, the education professor, Ellen, the English professor, and Lance and Reed, the religion professors, began discussing what percentages would go on into graduate education. Reed recollected that I do think we have a reasonably high percentage of students that go on to graduate work . . . some . . . At any given time, we will have about twenty former Southwark students, generally graduated, in seminary. Within a few years, a lot of people who have a business degree go back for an MBA. I think what our college statistics show is that we turn out relatively few people who actually earn a PhD . .. or certainly one in the discipline that they got here. And that’s a little bit of a puzzle. I know the college I went to turned out more PhDs in a year that we will turn out, ever. And, trust me, we’re a lot better school. So I don’t . . . I just don’t . . . Our kids tend to get masters’ degrees or professional degrees as opposed to PhD’s in a particular area, and I don’t know what that is. It may be socioeconomic background, or I don’t know. Bruce: It may have to do with our salaries here Reed: Or it might have to do with our salaries here. Lance: Economic facts: you can’t get away fi'om Bruce: ...you can make more in Scott County. I mean, I would make more in Scott County teaching... So there’s some monetary things that enter the picture. Ellen: I can’t in good conscience, encourage students to go into PhD programs any more... Lance: ...When I came to Southwark college, there was a guy teaching high school with a masters who was making seven thousand more than I was here at the college. Debbie: And you think they [students] pick up on that? Lance: Oh, they pick up on it! They are very money conscious, if they’re conscious of nothing else. They’re looking for way to get out there and earn... Bruce: There are places... but It’s hard to convince the masses. I do think we encourage furthering your education. It’s my expectation. I never think about them not doing that. And I think that’s kind of a pervasive feeling all over campus. There’s some I may not see...but the faculty in my department is wonderful... to encourage development. It’s not necessarily a PhD. But I think that’s a strength of Southwark College (3-25-5). In this discussion, as the participants tried to develop a theory of why more graduates fiom the college were not proceeding into graduate school, the group focused on economics. Reed, when he first mentioned socioeconomic background, probably meant that the students’ socioeconomic backgrounds influenced their decision of what vocations to pursue and 146 therefore what further education to receive. However, the discussion then turned to the students’ concern with their economic futures and how the lack of remuneration for the faculty there would affect their choice of career. When asked how she thought her courses were preparing students for the future, Ellen, the English professor, at first hesitated because of the variety of students she taught. She noted at first that“. . . the type ofwriting that they do in upper division classes is pretty much similar to what we do in our field.”(3-l 1-5) However, she then mentioned the low numbers of students graduating with English majors and even lower numbers proceeding on to graduate courses in English. ...very few of them are going on to graduate school we don’t encourage that any more because of the job market situation. So we end up with a lot more people going into education, secondary English education, for example, or into industry. That makes it very difficult to for us to figure out what the professional outcome of the English major is anymore; it’s going in so many different directions. That does change the way we approach the writing we require. (3-11-5) When asked if this meant that they were not asking for research writing similar to graduate research writing, she responded that I was conect: that it simply was not productive to do so anymore. Later in other conversations, we returned to the topic: We feel really strange in our department because people in English go into so many different fields. Especially, lots of them are double majors in other fields. And so we have many go into education, but the other half go into anything from journalism to . . some of them go into seminary . . . some of them, journalism, seminary, business. A lot of business, business communication fields. And it’s really hard to say what it is you are supposed to be doing to prepare these people for all the different fields. Some of these kids are going to end up going into law school. A lot of them go to law school, and what we end up doing is thinking that what we are really doing are developing two major areas: one is the ability to think flexibly and to analyze . . . (3- 25-5) Like the English professor, Sarah also mentioned in a separate interview (3-10-4) that the students taking her courses are not necessarily going to continue into classical language at a 147 graduate level. At another point in the same conversation she emphasized the fact that someone planning to go into her field would attend a “division one school” that offered a fixll- fledged major in that area. The note of uncertainty is similar to that of the faculty who responded to Zerger’s interviews. When questioned, the faculty “hedged or requested additional prompts” when asked about the types of writing their students could anticipate having to do in the fixture. Those who had some knowledge of fixture expectations did try to assign types of writing that they thought their students would encounter later (8). In the quote above, Ellen states that the way that she and other English faculty resolve their quandary is to avoid teaching specific formats or genres and to focus on teaching higher level cognitive skills. This corresponds with the input from the surveys that the wider faculty responded to; many of them mentioned analysis as a primary goal of their teaching. General Work Force The faculty in my study, as they considered what students might face in a wider work world, centered on aspects of writing that they thought were important such as clarity, accountability, ability to process ideas quickly, other higher cognitive skills and conciseness. Alex, one of the history professors, mentioned that he assigned certain types of writing based on what he felt students would be asked to write in the fixture. He did not restrict his expectations to his own field; rather, he tried to anticipate more general expectations: I ask students to do some writing experiences because of, particularly in the non-major courses, becauseofwhatlthinktheymay facewhentheygetout intothebusiness world or some other type of world. I have had graduates, for example, have said they have to condense things; when they get out there; there is so much out there to read that they have to read less. I lmve them do some synopsis, where they pull things down into a smaller piece that explains the literature that they are reading, something like that. I have them do a lot of thesis writing: arguing a point, finding evidence, using 148 evidence to support a particular question. Because I think that’s the kind of thing, the report writing that they’ll do if they go into a field other than history (3-10-4). Alex here bases his understanding of fixture expectations of graduates on conversations that he has had with alumni. I did not press the point at the time as to whether he felt the situations of the particular alumni he spoke to were representative of the vocations of most alumni. However, he spoke as if he had made that assumption because based on his information, he felt synopsis and thesis assignments would prepare students. In our individual interview, Betty, the accounting professor, also noted clarity as an important aspect of writing beyond college. In an individual interview, we discussed the overall goals and reasons that she uses writing. “Our students,” she mentioned, “after they graduate, write to us. They find out how important communication is, not only spoken, but writing clearly . . . good grammar . . . how my important it is.” Her statement echoes the fifty-two percent of the respondents to Sandra Zerger’s survey who also stated that they focused on improving communication skills when they constructed writing assignments (7). Betty added, “What I ask them to do . . . it’s not heavy, but it gives them a little experience.” I assured her that having them write, in my opinion, is helping them immensely, and she responded “I think it’s important for every class, no matter what the subject, to have writing.” Betty drew a connection between fixture expectations and her assignment objectives, as she discussed the critiques she assigns: It’s extremely important to communicate, to communicate accurately, so, of course, there are memos and there are other presentations and students are going to enter the business world, and so I was thinking that these critiques that they read will help them to write clearly and to communicate their opinions clearly, because if you mis- communicate information, it could mean a disaster for your career, for your company, whatever, so hopefixlly...(3-25-5). 149 The use of the term “so” indicates a causal relationship and the relationship that Betty designates in the statement is between the need to communicate in the business world and the critiques she assigns. For her, the importance of accuracy and clarity were important enough that they were suitable goals for the assignment. Ellen also reiterated the history professor and accounting professors’ concern with clarity. As she [referring to Betty, the accounting professor] was saying, it really is important in any field that you can communicate and that you can hear or listen or understand clearly as well. I think literature does that beautifully. With writing again, it’s clarity of expression, exactness of expression, ability to analyze and communicate what you are saying and I think that translates into almost every field. So I don’t ever feel like you have to train people in sophisticated literary analysis for PhD studies in English, basicallybecausewedon’thavetodothat,butwedoitin... Wealsodoitin. . . We have a girl right now who is very much preparing to go to graduate school in literature, but she’s going to take independent study for theory. We are not going to inculcate people who are going to teach high school students how to think and read deconstructionism or something like that . . . (3-25-5). The distinction between what is expected of graduate students in English as opposed to other field or professional degree programs, according to Ellen, has to do with the knowledge base and unique techniques used in the discipline. To Ellen, literary analysis of a higher level and familiarity with particular theories is what distinguishes English from other fields. What it has more in common with other fields are those characteristics tluxt she and others had already mentioned, such as analysis or clarity. Alex, the history professor, could also articulate the reasons that he felt essay exams should be part of the learning process. He saw the skill of taking essay exams to be an important skill that the students would need in the fixture. ..and in meetings, in the business world for example, you’re going to have to be able to think on your feet and to construct an argument in your head fairly quickly in some kinds of circumstances. And to me, it’s a preparation stage for that. It’s not easy. 150 And again, you’re talking at various levels. If they take it home, it ought to be a whole lot better than if they do it in the classroom. It develops a skill that I think they need, and they used to be able to do it better then they can now— which scares me for this group, because this group has to go out there and compete with the group that graduated in 1985. They’re not out in the work force yet. So if we don’t teach them some of these skills, it seems to me that we leave them at a disadvantage (3-10-4). Alex’s statement again resonates with Craig Steele’s perception of what essay exams can do for students. Steele does not bring up the concept of thinking on one’s feet, but he does emphasize the importance of essay exams as practice for writing after college: “Unfortunately many of these students discover too late that their writing skill in the ‘real world’, whether it is inthe form ofa memo, aproposal, orareport, isthe difference between success and failure” (1). Alex’s perception of the connection between essay exams and the tasks he believes graduates need to be able to accomplish appears to connect more closely than Steele’s perception of the connection between essays exams and works which can and do require revision. Later, when I asked if any of the participants in my study ever explicitly discuss the types of writing that might be expected with students who would be entering the field, Alex responded, “I do that more with the general type of writing: ‘These are some of the sort of things when you get out into business. You will write reports of some sort and we’re using history as a vehicle to get at that’” (3-10-4). This comment is particularly interesting, because Alex seems to view acquisition of the subject matter of history as not the only goal of his course. According to his comment, he even tells students that he is trying to teach them skills that move beyond the history classroom. Heather, the psychology professor, stated that accountability, or reliability was another important attribute that would prove important after graduation. She thought that the writing 151 she required in her classes would benefit a student after graduation in any area; later, in another interview, she would also mention exercises in which she felt she was introducing students to writing within her field as well as her concerns that they learn the conventions in that field. She noted that . . . the kind of writing they do for me in the child development class is easily applicable anyplace that you have to show accountability. You have to keep a record in some way of what you’ve done on a project so that--no matter what the project is, no matter what your work setting is--and you have to report, which is a sort of surmnary of what you’ve done. So any kind of career related or occupationally related writing is a matter of keeping enough documentation and then being able to summarize, being able to condense. So I think that is, well, that’s what I told them today. I said: “You have to have good enough records of what you’re seeing so that you can support that in a final paper, because I’m not going to take it-- just like nobody at work today would. I’m not going to allow you to sit down and write a wonderfixl paper if you can’t show me where in your observation you got that.”(3 -29- 3) Heather’s concept of accountability echoes an aspect of good writing that Alex lmd mentioned in a separate interview: evidence. Kyle, the other history professor, followed up her statement with a note of agreement: “...what’s your thesis? how do you support it? ...are true of any area you’re in . . . ” (3-29-3). This was a theme that appeared in many conversations with a fixculty; they were concerned that students learn how to support claims with evidence, whether it was from texts or fiom personal observation. The other history professor, Kyle, in a later interview reinforced the idea that he was preparing students for life outside of the discipline of history, focusing on the style that writing should take: I would argue that what you would write for a history course should not differ significantly from what you would write for anything, than what...that history should be read by anybody. What they write for me would be applicable whatever area they are in. I try to take out things that make it sound academic, which history can easily do. You know, I try to stress that it’s a story, it’s like you were reading out loud; how would you tell it? (3-29—3) 152 When questioned as to whether he was trying to teach them to avoid “academese,” so to speak, he respond “...which they’ll get in graduate school. [laughs] I try to get them... They’ll get enough of that later on, so I try to have them come out so they’ll at least have a remnant of that left after graduate school’s over.” The two history professors, then, felt that as far as communication was concerned, conciseness and clarity were important objectives to move their students toward. Conciseness came up again when Sarah, the classics professor and Victor, the sociology professor had a lengthy discussion about whether writing in college could prepare students for vocations outside of academia. I share a major portion of it here, because the dialogue is intriguing and insightfixl. Victor began this thread of conversation by stating that In the workplace, mainly what you need to do is write memos and they have to be precise, quick, to the point. Most businesses in public administration areas talk about people who don’t know how to write memos. They just write over and over and over. I’m not sure skills learned writing papers are helpfixl to memo writing; in fact, they’re probably harmfixl Sarah: I disagree because I think precision is a writing skill and umrn... Victor: ...but a memo is even more concise than even a good tight paragraph. A memo in the business world is three to four quick sentences that tell people and not in run-on sentences. Sarah: But writing a good one... I mean, I see that as a writing skill...I... [they talk over each other] Victor: ...1 think it’s a writing skill but it’s not anywhere close to the same skills in writing a paper. Sarah: I think it’s an identical skill. I think that whether you are writing a paper or a memo, you want to communicate the information as effectively as possible and not say things that are unnecessary. In fact, a lot of students’ writing is bad because they include a lot of unnecessary jxmk, because they try to fill up to, you know, three pages. Victorzl think that’s true, but when I think of writing a paper, I think of elaborating sufficiently, that I cover all of my areas, all of my points, and I communicated exactly what I want it to be. And I can’t do that in a couple of sentences. Whereas, a memo is more constrained not by what I write but by how muchI write. A memo has to be something thatcanberead inthirty secondto aminute. Aresearchpaperhasto be complete; a memo had to be to the point, concise, because people are not going to read five pages. 153 Sarah: I just think learning to be a good writer means executing whatever form it is with... with your ideas successfixlly, whether it is a paper or memo or... Students who learn to write academically do go onto jobs that have a lot of different writing skills. And once you learn the principle of learning to write effectively and clearly, you can write a proposal, report, business report; there are a lot of different kinds of writing in the workplace (3-24-2). The conversation continues, but this passage covers the major portion of their discussion. Their concern and disagreement reflect one of the questions that has arisen within WAC: is writing a larger transferrable skill or must one learn specific gemes as they are used in specific fields in order to be successfixl? Each of the teachers makes sound arguments; each is defining writing skills in different way. Both are concerned with the question of what makes students more successfixl writers later on. One aspect of writing that students should be able to do for their fixture careers that they do agree on is conciseness. However, when I did ask if they thought academic writing should change to start including genres like memos, Victor and Sarah both replied that the memo was taught in the business writing course offered in the business department. In all of the discussions and statements pertaining to their expectations of the fixture and the goals that they set for their courses, the faculty who spoke with me offered a sense of how the writing that they perceived their students would be doing later influenced their decisions about their goals for the writing that they assigned in class. Many of them mentioned that they had dual tasks in their courses; they felt tlnt they needed to prepare students for two possibilities: one would be fixrther concentrated study and work within their specific discipline and the other would be broader prospects of multiple possibilities, fiom professional training to the workplace. Some of them were aware of the changing constraints in both areas, and they 154 expressed some trepidation as to what students might actually find themselves doing in the fixture. The professors’ uncertainty about the fixture is understandable. There is a popular conception that permeates modern society that an individual in the modern U.S. work world will change her career at least six times. Another popular conception is that education is the perfect preparation for entering the workforce. It is also interesting to note that this expectation that higher education be responsible for preparing students for the work force permeates the thoughts and expectations of the teachers. Steven Segal, whose research is in the pedagogical value of stress and anxiety experiences, also suggests that one of the tensions placed on teachers is the “expectations placed by the culture,” in a 1998 Journal of Curriculum Studies article. He adds, “That which is seen as virtuous within democracy ( independence of mind, critical and reflexive thinking, participation, and thus cormnitment) are themselves associated with notions of uncertainty” (202). These ‘notions of uncertainty” arise, in his opinion, fiom the actual experience in the classroom. The cultural and internal expectations proceed fiom a misunderstanding of pragmatic education; many have misread Dewey and other pragrnatists’ ideas about preparing students for democratic citizenship to mean preparation for malleable citizenship with solid work skills, like the usefixl “Unknown Citizen,” described by W.H. Auden, rather than for critical thinking. Concern with what writing students will be asked to do in the workplace is not an isolated concern of the faculty at Southwark College. Treadwell and Treadwell, in “Employer Expectations ofNewly-Hired Connnunication Graduates,” found from their interviews that the expectations varied so greatly between types and levels of positions and work areas that it would be difficult to generalize about what specific skills and abilities graduates would need. 155 Considering the same concern fi'om a different angle, Joseph Trimmer provides the transcript of an interview that he conducted with a former reporter/public relations execuective, a lawyer, and a doctor/ medical faculty member about their writing experiences as a way to inform composition pedagogy in a 1999 Journal of Communication article, “Real World Assignments.” The questions he asks them range from describing the aspects of writing in their field that distinguish that type of writing to where they learned to write. He specifically asks them “What particular kinds of writing assignments should we give our students?” Their responses varied from a genre— “a formal letter”- to characteristics —“those that require students to write aggressively and persuasively.” Trimmer notes at the end of the transcipt that one item'that other readers of the transcript had pointed out to him is that composition courses had taught the professional writers “that writing situations were shaped by rules, models, strategies and theories”(46), which helped them learn how to write in unfamiliar situations. This supports some of the speculations that the faculty in my study made about providing broader skills that might apply in any writing situation. To prepare students for work as scholars or specialists within the field, the participants in the study noted that they needed to introduce them to genres and conventions and to provide them with a specific knowledge base. The games that they thought would be expected of students who proceeded into specialized work or graduate study in the field were similar to the genres that had been mentioned on the survey as the primary types of genres used in the field: research articles and observational journals. To prepare students for broader possibilities, the faculty focused on the ability to communicate clearly, to support ideas with evidence, to analyze effectively, and to present their work in a professional format. In every case, the faculty had a sense of the flexibility that 156 graduates would have to have in order to write well in situations outside of Southwark College. They also mentioned the readers whom the graduates would have to consider: readers who would need to receive condensed and correct information quickly. The faculty members’ understanding of what was expected beyond graduation was in some ways informed by their own experiences and the feedback they received fiom alumni. At least four faculty» Betty, Alex, Reed and Bruce-- mentioned graduates who returned or wrote to tell them what as going on in the workplace. Daniel spoke of his wife’s experience in hiring Southwark graduates to work in her research firm. Only one person claimed to be in direct correspondence with a professional school in regards to expectations. I would be remiss it I did not include one other possible reading of the faculty members’ comments about the fixture. In several instances, especially in the interview that occurred the first week, many of the faculty included their perceptions of the fixture as they were explaining their assignments, sometimes in cases in which other faculty were questioning the purpose of the assignments. Thus, their comment about the fixture may not have been made to indicate an actual goal-setting framework on their part; rather, they may have been employing the rhetorical device of appealing to authority or outside reference. The authority in this case is two-fold. One authority is the cultural expectation that college serve as preparation for fixture employment. The second authority is the alumni who have left Plato’s cave, so to speak, and return to explain whether the shadows on the wall prepared them for the “real world.” Both authorities are constructions that are common in higher education, as I mentioned previously, and may be part of a cultural construction based on misappropriated pragmatism Course goals and assignment objectives 157 The course goals and assignment objectives were informed in some way by fixture expectations, and in other ways by their own understanding of what students need to learn in particular courses, according to the conversations to which I was privy and in the cormnents on the surveys I received. The third question on my survey, “What do you want students to learn fi'om these same courses for majors in your field?” elicited the goals and objectives. When the faculty responded to the survey, some of their answers were very specific, such as solving math proofs and problems, power of writing in the ministry, clear oral presentation. The results are presented in table six below; I grouped them according similarities that I noticed. This list displays a stronger interest in developing higher cognitive skills and then indicates smaller numbers of responses that mentioned more specific knowledge or skills as goals. The response given most, more than fifty percent, was that the course goal was for students to develop the ability to use higher cognitive skills, such as analysis and synthesis of ideas. The next four most common responses, in order of percentage of response, were the following goals: to think independently, to develop good communication skills, to learn a knowledge base, and to acquire the skills and vocabulary of the particular profession. Other goals that were mentioned, although less than ten percent of the time, were reading and research skills, personal growth, and expression of ideas. Table 6 Reported Learning Objectives This table displays the skills or abilities that were the goals that the faculty respondents to the survey reported for students in their courses. Columns two and three indicate number and percentage of faculty who indicated these. Peroen acorn-«u se , Skills or Abilities ability to use higher cognitive skills to think independently I 34 158 Skills or Abilitiesi Number of Responses Percentage of Responses good communication skills 32 14 material/knowledge base 21 9 [professional skills and vocab. 21 9 lreading and research skills 6 3 to promote personal growth 4 2 how to ex ress ideas Many of the answers used terms reminiscent of the domains of Bloom’s taxonomy, which lists skills that students should learn, from lower level cognitive skills to higher, as follows: knowledge, acquiring of facts and specifies; comprehension, understanding or apprehending meaning; application, using knowledge; analysis, dissecting and examining; synthesis, combining and deducting; evaluation, critiquing and forming opinion.1 I would speculate most educators have been exposed to the taxonomy in some form and have integrated it into the way that they think about education, since it has been a rubric by which most assessment procedures and course objective construction are guided and evaluated. The fourth question on my survey, “How does the writing you assign in your courses assist students in learning?”, was designed to determine whether the faculty members’ purpose for using writing assignments in their courses corresponded to their course goals. The answers to this question were the most highly varied of the responses to the four questions on the survey. I categorized them into broader groups in order to consider common elements, as can be seen in table seven. The highest percentage of responses, thirty percent, indicated that writing helps students to learn to think independently. Twenty-two percent of the responses noted stimulating higher cognitive skills as a purpose. Eighteen percent mentioned communication 159 skills, and thirteen percent noted that it was to teach reading and research skills. Nine percent mentioned that writing provided students with practice in professional skills and vocabulary. Only two percent mentioned personal growth Table 7 Report of How Writing Assists in Learning This table illustrates the faculty responses to the question “How does writing assist students in learning in your courses?” Columns two and three indicate the number and percentage of faculty who indicated these. Number ofReponse m helps students learn to think 13 30 independently stimulates higher cognitive skill 9 22 fosters communication skills 7 18 teaches reading and research skills 6 13 provides practice for professional 4 9 skills and vocab. helps them make sense of world 2 4 helps students learn material better 2 4 encourages expression of ideas 1 2 promotes personal growth 1 2 assesses learnin 1 l 2 Some quotes that seemed to stand out as I read the responses to the survey, but tlmt did not fit the categories I developed were as follows “One does not know something until they can express it orally or in writing for oneself,” “If you can’t explain it, you don’t really understand it” and “If they don’t understand it, they can’t write it (the common feeling we have that we know what we think but just can’t get it down in words is always an illusion)” All of these three statements, although they do not express a tangible objective or goal, display a perception of the connection between writing and thinking. Another statement, “I want 160 writing to engage them,” seemed to focus on drawing students into the activity of writing or participating in class if not the topic of the writing itself. There was one respondent to the survey, who when noting the concentration on writing wrote “KERA keep your hands ofl’ my courses!” Later, Bruce identified KERA as the Kentucky Educational Reform Act. The Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990 seemed to place accountability into the local schools, but actually placed much of the decision making in the hands of the state. As a result, a statewide testing system was set up, with very little guideline as to how to prepare students. The accountability, though, rests on performance; schools that have met testing standards in twenty years will be rewarded financially, those that have not will lose funding. In 1998, a revision to this act provided for math and writing portfolios as another means of assessment. Since KERA assessment was already suspect, the possibility of mandated portfolios without sufficient guidelines was a major concern of may educators. Certainly among those who did not attend the interviews, there was resistance to, if not resentment of, the notion that one would be asked to include writing in his or her curriculum. This may be a result of the connections to KERA. The KERA resistor who responded to my survey did add that “Good writing is important. Learn it in English, history, psychology etc. courses/ too little time to cover the math material as it is!” Comparisons of Survey Responses When comparing the course goals with the faculty members’ understanding of how writing would help students learn that were mentioned in the survey, there are some noticeable similarities. Most noticeable is the fact that thinking independently and using higher cognitive thinking skills, and communication skills were the top three responses to both questions. Learning and practicing professional skills and vocabulary were the fifth most mentioned in 16] both categories. Reading and research skills were mentioned more often as something students would learn than as a course goal and personal growth and expression were mentioned, although less than ten percent. The similarities could be a result of the proximity of the questions on the surveys. However, the wording of the two questions did not intentionally lead toward a comparison between course goals and assignment objectives on the part of the faculty respondents. Within the interviews, I intentionally did not ask questions tlmt would lead to such speculation, either. However, often, when we were discussing assignments in the group interviews, the participants would naturally mention how the assigmnents fit into the goals of their courses. In comparison to my study, Theodore Lerud and his colleagues found that the fifty-five faculty members who responded to their survey offered one hundred and four different responses when asked to fill in the blank for the statement, “My major purpose for writing is_______.” They tabulated the first response from each individual, which I’ve included in table eight, below. Lerud and colleagues found that for faculty who had participated in the WAC program, thirty percent felt that it was to help students lean material better, twenty-two percent thought it would stimulate higher cognitive skills such as analysis or synthesis, and seventeen percent said it was to foster communication skills. Nine percent answered that the purpose was to help students learn to think independently, to encourage expression of ideas in and out of class, and to promote personal growth. Table 8 Purposes for Writing from Elmhurst Survey of WAC participants This table indicates that ranking that faculty who had participated in WAC workshops and programs at Elmhurst College gave to a list of purposes that the researchers offered. Column one displays the listed purposes, column two indicates the ranking that it was given, and column three indicates the percentage of faculty that ranked it as such. 162 to help students learn material better to stimulate higher cognitive skill to foster communication skills to help students learn to think independently to encourage expression of ideas to promote personal growth to provide practice for professional skills In comparison, twenty-five of those who had not participated in writing across the curriculum said that the purpose was to foster communication skills, as can be seen in table nine, below. Seventeen percent stated that their purpose was to either stimulate higher growth or to help students learn to think independently. Thirteen percent mentioned that their intent was to help students learn the material better, and another thirteen mentioned that it was to assess learning and/or to make students prepare for class. The major difi’erences were that none of the writing across the curriculum faculty mentioned assessment as a purpose and none of the non-writing across the curriculum faculty, as Lerud termed them, stated students’ personal growth was a purpose. Table 9 Purposes for Writing from Elmhurst Survey of non-WAC faculty This table indicates that making that faculty who did not participate in WAC at Elmhurst College gave to a list of purposes that the researchers ofl’ered. Column one displays the listed purposes, column two indicates the ranking that it was given, and column three indicates the percentage of faculty that ranked it as such. 163 Purposes for Using Writing Rank by Non-WAC Percentage of Non-WAC facul facul to foster communication skills to help students learn to think independently to stimulate higher cognitive skill to help students learn material better to provide practice for professional skills to encourage expression of ideas It is interesting to note that in my study as well as Lerud’s study, stimulating higher cognitive skills ranked high among faculty, whether they had received writing across the curriculum training or not. Two responses that appeared on my surveys that did not appear in the top-ranking answers on Lerud’s survey were focuses on teaching reading and researching skills and providing practice in professional skills and vocabulary. Personal growth seemed to rank low among faculty in my study and was not even mentioned by non-WAC faculty in Lerud’s study, while it was ranked fifth by WAC faculty in the same study at Elmhurst. One other study, conducted by Hannah Laipson at Quinsigarnond College in the fields of nursing, respiratory therapy, secretarial studies, accounting, and hotel and restaurant management and reported in New Directions for Community Colleges in 1991, adds another aspect of instructional objectives. Laipson found that when she asked instructors “what positive value they find in assigning writing to their students, they cite their students’ confidence in expressing themselves about the course content, in speaking, as well as in writing” (Laipson 55). Confidence can be considered a part 164 of students’ personal growth. This was a factor I had noted in my pervious informal research in the Old Testament literature course. Perhaps faculty do not mention confidence or personal growth because they do not see that as the auspices of their responsibilities. Affect or attitude toward subject matter may also not be an aspect that is discussed often in their discipline. In the interviews, students’ growth was mentioned in relation to the ways in which applying or becoming familiar with new knowledge would help them understand themselves or their world better. Further Consideration in Interviews The intellectual growth the faculty mentioned in the group interviews centered primarily on higher cognitive skills. At times they mentioned taking students to a “higher level,” perhaps a reference to the notion of a taxonomy of cognitive thinking, perhaps a sense that they wanted students to move beyond the knowledge, understanding and ability with which they entered the class. Other skills they wanted the students to learn were more specific: to be able to evaluate ideas, to be able to apply knowledge or skills, to be able to read or approach texts skillfixlly, and to be aware of issues that were pertinent to the field. When the sociology professor, Victor, spoke about giving essay exams, he seemd to speak of course goals when he stated “my goal is to see that they learn. So whether they think about it for a couple days and then write it or not. Whichever gives me the best example that they’ve learned something is the method I want to use. So I switched to the ‘I-give-you-the- essay-you-think-about-it deal’ and I get much, much better essays” (3-10-4). Later on he noted that for Sociology final exams, which may or may not be written in class “I give three or four essays and I pick one. That way, it forces them to learn, but they have to put it down.”(3-10-4). He indicated tlmt by giving the questions out beforehand, he provided the 165 opportunity to consider his questions at length before answering them, within a take home exam or an in-class essay exam. “Learn” is an ambiguous term in the realm of pedagogical theory; the term could connote many meanings to different people. At first it seems that the learning Victor is looking for here is acquisition of a knowledge base, but it could also mean comprehension. This writing assignment seems to be very much writing as testing, if one were to label it outright, and perhaps the ambiguity behind the goal plays a crucial role in this. Overall there was a concern for moving the students to a “higher level.” Lance said, “I have my students ask me with some fi'equency to get them a book on their own level. What they don’t understand is we’re trying to get them to another level, not at their own 1evel”(3- 25-5). His desire is reminiscent of the professor of music at Whitworth College, who in his interview for In the Long Run stated that one of his favorite assignments was strong because it was a “carrying vehicle. It’s a construct or convention, a way that you develop in which students can be led to a higher level of understanding and knowledge.” “Higher level” or “another level” is also an ambiguous term. As an objective, it would be difficult to measure whether one had succeeded. Yet it reflects the same sentiment that over halfof the survey response gave in some fashion; a sense that students should be learning to analyze, synthesize, evaluate and theorize. Many professors adjusted particular genres to meet their objectives. They attempted to construct writing assignments that would lead primarily to higher level cognitive skills, and expected them as a result. On her survey, Heather wrote that one of the three major types of writing she uses in her classroom is “essay questions on regular exams”; Alex wrote, “Students generally write essay examinations.” However, their expectations of these genres 166 are difi‘erent. Heather notes that “Essay questions help students synthesize and organize course material, help them compare or contrast theories or practices, and help them critique theoretical positions or research conclusions.” This is in line with her goal that the students learn “theoretical material and factual information” that she reports on the survey and her objective that they learn how to analyze, which she mentioned later in her interview. Alex notes that there are two goals in history courses at Southwark College: “First there is a certain amount of information that a student shOuld know about in the past. Second, we seek to use history to develop analytical ideas.” According to the survey, he believes that the writing that he asks students to do in the exams “encourages analysis of evidence” and “requires synthesis.” During the interviews, he proceeded to explain that he allowed students to rewrite essay exams in order to give them practice in having to synthesis and analyze. Whether the assignments as they are used in these particular contexts actually produce the required results or merely test to see whether the student had these skills beforehand is another question that I did not investigate. However, in the context of this study, what motivates the professors to continue with such genres is contingent upon their perception of whether it works. Alex, for one, admitted that he has not done an actual statistical analysis, but commented that the fact that he still used it was evidence that he thought it did make a difference in student writing. In both cases, each professor continues to use the genre, indicating that he or she views it as useful. Heather’s objectives for the exams that she allowed students to take home to write were to elicit similar skills. In her developmental psychology course, she mentioned that she often asks students “... to integrate for a particular period of time how cognitive development impacts social development... and the impact...how they’re impacted by motor development. 167 So I want them to integrate and synthesize the approaches that they’re presented with and look at that.” Heather’s request for integration in such essays reflects an expectation of certain higher level thinking skills. It also reflects her perspective of the subject matter, since “You can’t view any form of development in isolation.” In these comments, she directly mentions synthesis and notes that the synthesis she wants the students to learn requires that they see their subjects as a whole, not in parts. Her intention is to have students move beyond those levels, perhaps to the level of theory. Theorizing requires that students have analyzed, synthesized and evaluated information. Then it takes them one step fixrther, which relates to Mofi‘ett’s concept of generalizing. They must step back and form an opinion, at the least, or more likely a new means of seeing the world. One other more specific goal that the faculty mentioned was the ability to apply learning. This was an objective mentioned in the surveys and in the interviews. There were also many assignments that asked students to apply the knowledge and understanding they had gained. The psychology, sociology and education assignments that asked students to observe situations and discuss them in terms of the text and lectures to which they had been exposed required application. Heather and Bruce viewed their journal assignments as a means of introducing students to a genre that many experts in the field use to make sense of their observations and experiences. Eventually, these more expressive observations were turned into reports which also mirror genres that Heather and Bruce envision students using in the fixture. Victor, the sociology professor, articulated the objective of having students apply knowledge in the context of two views of how sociology is done and how that relates to the writing he has students do: 168 In sociology, there are basically two groups: one is the purist that think it’s not supposed to be practical and not supposed to be applicable and the others who try to applyit. Andsincelwasarules sociologistbytrainingandtherulebookswillbemy background, but I kind of go that way so....Most of the writing I have them [the students] do--and I have a bunch of papers here-«is they take a social problem that they’ve read about in the paper and make sense out of it try to explain where it comes in, in the other type ofpaper they do. (3-10-4) Victor notes the forces that he sees in his own field and how those diflerent views affect his choices. Despite his own background, he sees the benefit to students in having them apply sociological principles. Victor mentions application more specifically in regards to another assignment: the sociology projects. The goal of the course and the objective of the assignments are geared toward “Helping them to see in their practical world what we are talking theoretically in the classroom and use them to make sense out of it”; in other words, “to apply the material that we’re talking about to something they already know a lot about: sociologically explain themselves” (3-10-4). Again his concern is having the students move beyond understanding sociological concepts to seeing how it relates to the students’ lives. Victor’s objectives parallel the goals of a UC sociologist who stated in an interview for In the Long Run, that he “...wanted my students to link their lives to the content.” Again, Victor describing an assignment that was mentioned previously in chapter two, noted that his goal in assigning “a small research paper in which do an observational study and try to make some sense out of observations” is to “get them to think sociologically about what it is they’ve seen” (3-10-4). Later on in the same conversation, be summed up his objectives for the assignments he gives as “an attempt to get them either as portion of an academic type of writing or as a way to to think about and evaluate concepts tlnxt we’ve talked about that are applicable to 169 their social world in order to discover their social world.” Here he notes that he has multiple purposes, each perhaps as valuable, or each perhaps a similar goal in his view. Charles Bazerman would find Victor’s objectives admirable, since he believes that “we do better to grant ourselves and our students the means to understand forms of life embodied in our current symbolic practice, to evaluate the consequences of received rhetoric and to attempt to transform our rhetorical world when such transformation appears advisable” (320). Victor may not be navigating his students toward a critique of his own field that is as large in scope as Bazerman suggests, yet he is encouraging students to move beyond comprehension to evaluation and discovery. Another type of evaluation that was stated as a objective was thinking through concepts learned in class in regards to ethical decisions. Betty, the accounting professor intends the questions for discussion that she asks the students to write out at the end of each chapter of the cost accounting book to lead to some higher cognate skills. As Betty told me in the individual interview, “rmxch of [the homework] is mathematical type problems although some of the problems involve maybe answering ethical questions, or political. They might ask how would you explain this to the president of the company.” She says that “Sometimes we discover...sometimes they’ll think beyond the textbook. 1 try to get them to think: what are things we should consider beyond the dollar sign?” In the long run she wants the students to “think through some of the long term considerations and ethical considerations.” The questions often provide scenarios in which an accountant might have to make a moral choice that would affect her job. The objective of having students deal skillfixlly with text had many aspects to it, each different for difi‘erent teachers. One was reading and interpreting in order to acquire 170 information in the way that people in the discipline would. The objective of the collaborative project in classical literature, according to Sarah, was to “...make them realize that there really is a lot you could say about the passage. They can see each other’s ideas.” There were other objectives within this assignment, but one that stands out is “a knowledge or understanding of the fact that there is a myriad of possible interpretations available” (3-10-4). Another assignment in Sarah’s course that exhibits a different objective in writing in regards to text occurred: in “Classics,” where we read classical literature in translation, there, I think the kind of writing mostly I ask students to do is literary analysis and the main way that it differs from an article or book that we’d publish is that I really, most of the time, don’t want them to research because I think that at the college level, it is much more important to figure out your own reading. And in some cases it really helps to read something else, but I’m much more interested in that: in coming to grips with the text. Rather than trying to think of something nobody’s said before, the way it would be in graduate school . . . I’d rather have them just be directly working with the primary text rather than trying to synthesize everything else that’s ever been written about it. I think they learn more fi'om that. (3-10-4) Sarah’s main concern centers on the students establishing their own voices and opinions, and she believes that attempting to synthesize research might detract fi'om this goal. Sarah’s comment was unusual compared to many of the other perspectives. She focuses on learning to work with primary texts as a way of figuring out their own readings. Alex states that his objectives in assigning journals in history is to teach students “to read toward certain kinds of issues,” an indication that he wants students to learn to read in certain ways that coincide with his and perhaps the discipline’s expectations. Ellen also brought up the concept of writing as a means of helping students to read: It’s a lot easier to think in a lot of ways of how the writing helps us deal with reading than the other way around. I know I should be doing that. We keep trying to do that more and more in our English ID courses: to use the reading as a way of informing 171 writing. And we do require a text-based essay in another course because of the expectations that we want to add that extra level of complexity of thinking about what somebody else had written and putting that into an essay is more difficult than just self generated information. But... I’m not sure how efl'ective we are... (3-25-5) However, before she continues to discuss how writing aids in reading, she turns to a second objective, teaching students to use text within writing. The distinction she makes between the two acts displays two perceptions of writing, as a means of comprehending and a means of communicating with the aid of text. The mention that using text is more difficult than generating information reflects a pervading notion that narrative is a less complex writing act than text based writing, a notion that Bartholomae and Petroskey call into question in Facts, Artifacts and Counterfacts, noting that often writers need to interact with text in order to make sense of what their experience means and in order to understand how to enter the conversation of academic writing. Ellen also said that there was another intention of having students write in connection with reading. Her objective in having students write abstracts was to “...become familiar with the literature in the field and that has a double purpose, because if you don’t require it they don’t go get it. It’s really to introduce them to the publications in the particular area that we’re studying at that time” (3-1 1-5). Her objective is to familiarize them with works that are deemed important in the field. She was not the only one with this concept in mind. Heather, the psychology professor, also had students read particular biographies and journals in order to make them aware of the important persons and writing in her particular discipline. She states: Two writing assignments, though, have direct bearing on the field: a research report. I ask them to review the life of a developmental psychologist and read an original research product, a journal article, and show how that extends their work or how they have veered into a new path. They have to link that. I ask them to critique, but I’m not 172 too... [laughs]. I just smile at anything they say. I’m just real happy if they say “Should have used a different subject” — “Oh you’re thinking!” So to ask them to critique is Sally way above their level. So mostly I’m asking them to summarize and link... (3-8- Her request of her students to surmnarize is a request to show comprehension Betty told me tlmt her accounting summary/critiques of articles fiom an accounting magazine were intended to increase awareness: “the latest topics or issues in accounting is what I have them look at mainly, like there was one article on environmental issues and the accounting problems customers are facing as they have to comply with laws and that sort of thing. I want them to be aware of that” (3-1 1-5). Betty also mentioned that she tries to assign problems tlmt use the peso and the yen instead of US. currency. When asked why, she said “I try to get them to realize that in the United States, we...I try to get them to think more internationally” [Individual interview]. She said that she wants them to be aware that there are exchange rates. She recalled a recent problem in which they dealt with the yen She laughed as she remembered just how many yen a bicycle cost. Although the students don’t learn exact exchange rates, she thinks that in terms of interacting with different cultures and currency, “familiarizing yourselfcan help you accept it.” By having students write about concepts that shethinksthattheyarexmtamiliarwithandyet myneedto knowastheyproceedinthe field, she fixlfills an objective of providing them with a background that is not just a knowledge base but an opemress to new ideas. Another objective that the respondents in my study mentioned was that of professionalism. Sarah, the professor of classical languages, expressed an unspoken desire that she related to expectations of professionals in the field: 173 I would like students when they write a paper to take it as seriously as a professional publication, even if in reality, it’s okay, you really don’t have to read everything that’s ever been written before. Don’t worry if it’s original, but still in effect, you’re publishing your ideas and that’s why it’s so important not to plagiarize you know because you’re putting your name on this. And you’re presenting yourself to the world, or you’re presenting this paper to the teacher to the classroom for a grade just like you’re publishing something professional. What I wish is that students would take that seriously, you know, take as must pride in their... realize how important... But I don’t really overtly say tlmt.(3-10-4) Her desire to have the students take their writing seriously and to act professionally had two specific parts to it. Professional writers, in her opinion, avoided plagiarism and were aware of presenting themselves to an audience. This professional presentation might include proficient proofieading or it might include a certain level of thought process. Later in the same conversation, Alex, the history professor, followed up on her comment. ...I will talk to them about how much revision goes into a professional article. And to think that you can get that the first time your put your pencil to the page is just, well, you’re fooling yourself. It’s not getting much out of it. It doesn’t do any good; they still turn in their first draft, but...(3-10-4) Although he notes that he does not speak to his students about the expectations of the field, he does let them know, when they are consistently not meeting the expectations, that revision is essential to professionals. So this may be a third characteristic of professional writing: noticeable revision in the finished product, a certain sense of serious work involved in it. The concept of professionalism is different fiom the way that Chris Anson or Sandra Zerger defines it. Anson sees professionalism as a mark of texts that are a part of the specialized discourse of a particular field. Zerger seemed to see it as using the particular genres into which these texts could be categorized (7—8). The respondents in the interviews seemed to see it as a sense of pride in the writing that resulted in a certain manner of polish and presentation. 174 The accounting professor in a separate interview echoed the expectations of the classical and history professors. Betty stated, “I want them to sit down and think about their own, you know ‘what are your thoughts?’ and be able to put it down on paper and have a neat presentation for someone else to see” (3-11-5). She was more exact on the aspects that she considered to be part of a professioml presentation. She said that she attempted, through her comments on student papers, “to emphasize the importance of . . . good structure and a presentation because in the business world, people will read something and will have a first impression. You want it neat, you want it in good order, you want things spelled correctly, proper grammar, because those things will turn people off even if the content is good. Those types of things” (3-1 1-5). In some ways Betty’s, Alex’s and Sarah’s idea of professionalism might be viewed as an emphasis on surface errors. However, their view seems to go beyond concern about proofreading to an overall emphasis on the students’ attitude toward their writing as seen through the manner and form in which they present it. These teachers’ concern with professionalism hints at the concern that Richard Lanham expresses in Style: An Anti- Textbook. Lanlmm, amidst his lamentation of the loss of passion for beauty in prose, claimed an essential conmction between style and thinking. He would agree that students need re- enforced messages about using good prose. Although the faculty in my study seem more practical about their aims, they might even agree with the “commandment” that he envisions: “Thou shalt be as clear as necessary in order that the world’s business be dbne efiiciently and civilization thereby preserved” (l 1). However, they did not give any indication that they might not go as far as to move toward wanting students to savor prose, as Lanham would. 175 Perhaps it is the environment of higher education, in which most teachers have been exposed to some portion of a learning paradigm such as Bloom’s taxonomy, that shaped the ' way the faculty in my study responded. Again, since the interviews were primarily self-report, it any just be that they realized that in the context of discussing education, they must mention goals in conjunction with any discussion of assignments. Yet, without claiming to be able to perceive insincerity or sincerity in people’s speech, I can claim that there was consistent mention of connections between their writing assignments and their objectives, throughout our conversations. I can also claim that there was a consistent mention of desiring to move students beyond knowledge base acquisition to higher cognitive thinking. There was also a desire to encourage students to move beyond average work and on toward more involvement and concern in the subjects. Again, just as in the case of the faculty members’ mention of what their students might face in the fixture, the faculty may have been mentioning these objectives and goals as ways of persuading their listeners to believe that their assignments were justified. Returning to the specific comments that the psychology professor and the history professor wrote on their survey, it is apparent that their understanding of the essay exam is different from the more negative view that composition specialists usually lave. Many WAC workshops already include course objectives as an integral part, by having faculty outline their goals in more formal terms. However, when the research after workshops focuses on whether faculty use certain types of writing in their classrooms, then problems can arise. In informal ways, the instructors in my study displayed an awareness of the relationship between community, goals, and tools as they constructed their assignments. However, their concern was often with a much wider and larger community than with the specific field in 176 which they worked. Also, they did not always consciously discuss the relationships between the genres they were using in the field and those they asked their students to write. Instead, they primarily considered what knowledge, skills or understanding students would gain fiom the writing experience. Many professors were looking for exploration as well as conformity to a genre when they assigned the writing that they did. In addition, the professors had immediate concerns and fixture expectations in mind as they constructed the writing assignments. Very few of the instructors mentioned communicating with a specific audience in their specific goals. This is one area in which their understanding of what students would need to be able to do in the fixture, writing with clarity and conciseness to communicate with a specific audience did not seem to match their more specific goals of having students learn to evaluate, synthesize, become familiar with issues and genres, and apply knowledge to their lives. Expected student behaviors and backgrounds Another aspect of the expectations that influenced the ways that faculty assign writing is their beliefs about students’ backgrounds, in other words, what the students bring to the course, and their beliefs about the students’ attitudes and activities in the course. This type of expectation was the least fiequently discussed and so there were not many specific comments; however, I did not ask any questions pertaining to their view of students. I did note a tendency to generalize most students as unconcerned or at least attempting to get away with the least amount of work or challenge. This is not to say that the faculty saw them completely in a negative light or in an adversarial role. In fact, when they spoke of specific students, their comments were always positive or sympathetic. The comments that were made 177 about students in general included the faculty members’ view of the effort that they put into the work and the abilities they bring to assignments. In regards to their view of the amount of work that goes into writing assignments, there were several comments made that gave me the impression that overall, most of them felt that a majority of their students did not put the effort that the teachers expected into the assignments. Some of these comments were focused on the products that the faculty saw, such as Sarah’s comment that “what they consider a finished product is not formed enough” (3-10—4) and Alex’s admission that “I have, in moments of fi'ustration, said to students that only at Southwark College do students turn in a first draft and think it’s the finished product” (3-10-4). Their comments seem to be based on evidence from interaction with students, not only conjecture fi'om the product they saw. Betty, the accounting professor, even mentions that “from hearing them talk, like they’ll ask me a question a day before, and I know that they probably put it together fairly quickly”(3-11-5). Lance’s comment that “I have my students ask me with some fiequency to get them a book on their own level” and Reed’s portrayal of students overlooking what he considers more important points of assignments: “inevitably half the class asks ‘How many pages is this going to be?’ and ‘What format does it have to be in.’ They have a hard time grasping the concept ‘read this, get the essence of it and make a short summary of it’” (3-25-5). Their comments did include some perspective of what it is like to be a student though. Reed the religion professor notes that: “...if I refer them to two books, there ain’t a chance of a proverbial snowball that they’re going to look them up” (3-11-5). However, he then goes on to note that “maybe that’s not even, maybe... I don’t know whether 178 I did before I was in graduate school, in all candor. I think I hold my students to a standard I’d never even seen in college.” When we discussed whether they allowed students to write drafts, at one point in our conversation, Victor and Sarah, the sociology and classics professors, talked about which students seemed to be more apt to ask for help on essays: Victor: Most of the students that ask me will I please read it, those students are going to do a really good paper anyway. Sarah: They’re the conscientious ones... Victor: Yea, it’s not the ones that are going to turn in lousy papers who want to know if they are on the right track...(3-10-4). Other professors note similar behavior: that it is usually the students who will do well anyway who approach them for advice on assignments. Many of them noted that they often merely talk the students through ideas, asking them prompting questions that will get them on the right track. I did not ask, nor did they offer any techniques they might use to encourage those who would really struggle with a writing assignment to access help. Victor did comment, “I do allow some rewrites after the fact. If it’s really poor and I feel like the student... It’s not because the student didn’t try... didn’t get the idea, then I will say something like ‘Do you want to talk about this?’ And if they want to talk about it, I will allow them to rewrite it and we’ll talk specifics” (3-10-4). This shows that he feels that he is able to perceive the amount of effort the student put into trying to understand an idea behind an assignment, and that if the student then doesn’t do well, despite his or her efforts, then he would take the time to talk about the assignment and allow them to rework it. Another area on which the participants in my study commented was students’ ability to complete certain tasks Some of the professors indirectly noted the reluctance if not the inability to complete tasks requiring higher level thinking skills. Heather, the psychology 179 professor, noted that she just appreciated their efforts when they attempted it. Betty agreed that evaluation was a portion of some assignments with which students struggled. Bruce, the education professor, conjectured that sometimes students did not want to think beyond a certain level. Bruce stated that even when he would “hand out a sample of what I would like to have them write in a draft, and they still have difiiculty with it because what they want to do is summarize; they don’t want to think; they want to sumrmrize. So I have changed my abstract grading form so points come fiom the implications of the article and that’s helped a little but it’s still dificult to do” (3-25-5). I would disagree with his view of surmnarizing as not requiring thinking, but is an indication of his view of the students’ reasons for not wanting to do more. Lance at one point added that in some ways they were not prepared to go beyond reciting knowledge. At the same time, some of the faculty did have general conceptions of what students should know about writing. Victor, the sociology professor, for example, assumed that students already understood invention and planning in writing. He admitted that “ If someone comes to me and says, ‘I don’t know how to get started.’ I help them out, but I don’t do that as a class; I just assume by the time they get to me they’re supposed to know how to do that.” However, most of the respondents realized that the students still needed much more training and encouragement in writing. In fact Daniel clearly noted, without prompting fiom me, that teachers need to remember that writing required practice and that process was important to This does not mean that the professors were completely negative about the work efion or the backgrounds of their students. At two different points, Bruce, the education professor, points out that the students “...feel very comfortable doing the journals, reflective kinds of 180 things. The first year I was here it was like really pulling it out of them,” and “I can see a significant improvement fi'om the first year I was here in the writing ability of the persons that come in... I already see there is a competency, and I don’t have to deal with. I really like that. It means you can go on and work with their ideas and dennnd some work of a different kind.” Later on, he describes one student who “...was an English education student and she was a strong student, but not the strongest. [he and the English professor laugh] But just a lovely person, very creative and likes to do different things, and often came to us for permission to be who she was. And we tried to reinforce that” (3-10—4). In other instances, when referring to individual students, other faculty gave similar types of descriptions. They discussed students who stood out because of their scholastic excellence or their creativity or “joie de vivre.” Another positive aspect that Bruce and Ellen, the English professor, pointed out about their students’ abilities was the sense of how to go about writing. In a conversation that I have cited previously, they noted that the students were “...more acquainted with writing process and able to express themselves personally...” They both seemed to have the impression that students were coming to college more prepared in the basics of invention in writing. George Hillocks, Jr. examined teacher attitudes and beliefs about students in depth than in Ways of Thinking Ways of Teaching. His study focused on writing faculty, but some of the concepts could be applied to any faculty member who assigned and paid attention to writing within his or her course. He found that he could discuss the teachers’ attitudes toward students in their courses in terms of the following categories: optimistic and non-optimistic. According to his description, a teacher who held optimistic attitudes made “direct positive statements” and even when recognizing weaknesses, expressed “faith in her students to have 181 ideas and to become interested in others” (44-6). A non-optimistic teacher would center attention on student difficulty and nuke “comments about students’ inabilities to think problems through beyond the obvious” (45). He measured the teachers levels of optimism according to scales he set up during the study. Hillocks found that optimistic teachers spent twenty-five percent less class time lecturing compared to non-optimistic ones(48). He also noted that group work was used two hundred and fifty percent more in classes by professors with optimistic perceptions of students. No significant difference was found in the amount of time any of the teachers spent on the types of knowledge presented; however, optimistic teachers spent more time teaching procedural knowledge. In his conclusions, Hillocks noted that he was not sure whether teachers’ attitudes definitely caused the difference in teaching methods. He speculated as to whether it might be a reciprocal act of their teaching resulting in poor reactions fi'om students, thus reinforcing teachers’ beliefs about students and causing them to simplify their teaching even further. He admitted that other variables may also be involved, but without mentioning specifically what those might be, although he had already mentioned that racial makeup of the campus nor course level did not appear to determine level of optimism. Hillocks concluded his fourth chapter with the comment that “whatever the case, it seems to me there is no doubt that teachers’ beliefs about students strongly influence their decisions about the purpose and content of instruction” (74). This conclusion seems, in some ways, commonplace; however, it is an important assumption to test and an important concept to keep in mind when discussing the goals and objectives of writing assignments. 182 In light of Hillocks’ study, I would consider most of the faculty who participated in my study to be optimistic. This may be because teachers with optimistic views of students would be more likely to participate in a study of this kind. Despite their doubts about the students’ efforts at times, many of them did have confidence that a majority of the students could complete tasks and would learn to think critically. Alex, for example, had confidence that students could learn to write better essay exams and to read toward important issues through his work with them. Bruce felt that he could see better preparation in incoming fi'eshman. Ellen felt that students had a better understanding of their writing process. However, the faculty had mixed assumptions about the skills and knowledge with which students entered their courses. Some stated that they assumed students learned about process in a previous English or writing course. Some did not. Many felt that students needed additioml training in reading critically. No one who attended the interviews seemed to assume that the responsibility for improving student writing lay solely on the English faculty shoulders, even though some did say they relied on the writing center when students’ errors seemed too many to handle themselves. Conveying Expectations: Assigning and Evaluating One other aspect of the assignments given by the faculty in the study was the way in which they were assigned, followed through, and evaluated. It is important to remember that the shape that writing assignments take in the classroom is influenced by the ways in which the instructor utilizes those assignments. Walvoord and McCarthy would agree that the way assignments are given play a major role in whether assignment objectives are met. “We saw students trying hard to meet teacher’s expectations—harder than we had often given them credit for. Students’ failures to meet their 183 teacher’s expectations were often directly traceable to mixed signals by the teacher, or to instruction that was needed but not provided. After seeing in our data how his assignment sheet had lead to student’s misunderstandings and difficulties, one of our teachers remarked wryly, “In other words, I got what I deserved” (237). This professor became aware that students’ success at a particular assignment was greatly influenced by what instruction he gave them only after noticing the results of his assignment. His use of an assignment sheet was a good start, though. I found that some of the faculty whoml interviewed did not give specific assignment sheets, but either described them verbally in class or included a short description in the syllabus for the course. Assigning Writing Beyond deciding on the assignment objectives, the faculty also had to communicate their objectives, requirements and methods of evaluation to the students through their syllabi or assignment guideline sheets. I was not able to view all the faculties’ syllabi, nor did my study involve an in-depth analysis of all grading procedures. I was able, however, to speak to three of the faculty who participated in my group interviews on an individual basis and look at their syllabi and assignment guidelines. The three I spoke to were Betty, the accounting professor, Heather, the psychology professor and Bruce, the education professor. All three professors included course objectives in their syllabi as well as a course description which can be found in Appendix H. In Heather and Betty’s syllabi, the objectives were few and spoke primarily of the information that would be made available to the students, although Heather’s spoke of the means by which they would be learning the material. Bruce’s goals and objectives were measurable and displayed learning outcomes. The objectives of the course varied from 184 being able to communicate effectively to being aware of gender bias in the classroom and planning to correcting it. In regard to assignment guidelines, each professor had a different means of presenting them. From my conversation during the individual interview with Betty, I learned that the students were given minimal instructions for the assignnxents. When asked how she presented the requirements for the assignment to the students and whether she had a written assignment, she said, “I’ll write it on the board... double spaced. They always want to know how long; I tell them two to three pages.” She goes on to explain what she expects: “I want a summary and what you’d call a conclusion... I want your ideas and I want you to back up your ideas.” In her syllabus, the description of the critical review was as follows: In addition to the homework assignments in the textbook, the student will also be required to read and report on various articles from accounting periodicals in the library, This will enable the student to become familiar with periodicals ofhis/her profession and to learn of current issues facing the accounting profession (individual interview) The primarily oral and general description of the assignment does not seem unusual to her at all. She explains the reason for the assignment and emphasizes the use of support for opinions. Bruce’s syllabus seemed almost to contain varying approaches depending on the assignments. Many assignments were guided very carefixlly by worksheets. For example, the observation guidelines for the course on Educating Exceptional Children were spelled out with reference to information sheets and preconstructed observation log forms. The article critique requirements, however, were described in the syllabus. They were to be “fi'om relevant periodicals correlated with chapters in the text book and written within the last three years and 185 following instructions as provided by the instructor on ‘HOW TO WRITE A CRITIQUE.’”[Emphasis his] Bruce did not have a copy of the instructions, but I might infer from the detail in the syllabus and other assignments, that it probably offered step by step instructions. One interesting note Bruce included in the syllabus was “CAUTION: one point will be counted off for each spelling or grammatical error.” [emphasis his] This final cautionary note caused me to wonder wluxt students then felt obliged to pay most attention to when writing the critiques: the analysis or the form. For Bruce’s reflective journals, when I asked if he had any guidelines, he stated, “Actually I don’t...Well, it’s very general The reflective journals are for them to talk about things that they learned in class, and those kinds ofthings... It is specific inthat asks them to write about. In the syllabus his description of the learning journal, which is to take the shape of a log, the guidelines takes the form of grading criteria. For example, for the learning journal, to earn total credit, the students are told that the journal must be a minimum of two pages per class period and must “have demonstrated knowledge of the texts, supplemental readings, critical areas of reform in education, and class ‘happenings,’ observations... and developed connections for yourself among them.” This corresponds with the graphic he lms placed on the front of his syllabus. The graphic shows a circular connection between critical reflection, pragrmtic action, and knowing. This is what he seems to be doing in his journal assignment: asking them to move between these three areas. Heather provided even more detailed instructions for the journal, the observation laboratory notebook, for her junior level child development psychology course. The students were to select one child to observe and then each week were to make entries on observation The details included the actual equipment they were to use, including specifications on the type 186 of binder. For each week the students were given specific instructions on what to pay attention to and how to consider their entries. Heather told me that the aspects of development that they observed corresponded directly to the chapters of the text they were covering. This journal culminated in a surmnary paper that was expected to draw connections between the information covered in class and the student observations. Another assignment Heather and I discussed was the brief journal article reaction paper. She asked students to write two, and included the one and one-half page guidelines in the syllabus. Similar to Bruce’s learning journal guidelines, these guidelines were given according to grading requirements. The first portion provided a brief outline of those items that “the quality of the paper will be determined (and points given) based on.” These were comprehension, critique and mechanics and format. The second portion provided the organization the essays should take, which also included descriptions of the sections themselves. Along a similar line of thought, Bruce, the education professor, had earlier mentioned that in his case, I usually don’t ask for a revision unless when I eyeball it I see such glaring errors that I just say “This isn’t acceptable” But I refuse to go through and correct everything at that point. So I often send people to the writing center. I say “You must go...to the writing center and have someone work with you.” So that’s what I do. (3-11-5) Bruce did not relegate the expertise in writing to the composition classroom, but saw the writing center as a valuable resource. However, during the individual interview, when I asked him if referring them to the writing center meant tint they lost points or were given no points or the particular work that he found unacceptable, he said “Oh no! They can rewrite it...I don’t 187 believe that is good educational practice...not to give them an opportunity to learn...” He allows them to rewrite and uses a portfolio system in his classes. Bruce, the education professor, described a similar type of grading in regards to the reflective log of which he first noted, “There’s a lot of ungraded writing. I can’t grade everything. And if they’re reflecting on a daily basis, like the student teachers, I just can’t, I mean, I do read all of them, but you can’t respond to all of them. Sometimes, when you get in a hurry, you’ve got to [he makes motion like flipping pages] skip a few.” Based on this comment, it is apparent that Bruce is evaluating the logs and giving them grades, but is not necessarily responding to every entry as he does so. When we began to discuss the logs that Bruce asked the student teachers to keep on a daily basis, he went into fixrther detail on how be assigned grades to a journal: In the journals that my students do for their TA, I do a plus and minus system. If they get a majority of pluses on them, then they get all the points. And it’s to encourage writing and elaboration of their ideas, similar to what you’re [speaking to the English professor] doing. And I really don’t grade them...but they seem to like it, because they can slough off a couple times and not reach that perfection level which is the problem of some of the better students here...it’s hard to write at perfection all the time. Again, Bruce’s definition of grading seems to be marking consistently. However, he does evaluate the students’ work. Bruce was aware that grading criteria can affect the way students view assignments. He mentioned that when he assigned the abstract in his course, “... I hand out a sample of wlmt I would like to have them write in a draft and they still have difficulty with it ...So I have changed my abstract grading form so points come hour the implications of the article and that’s helped a little but it’s still difiicult to do.” He noted that by telling the students that a certain feature of the product would count for a weighted amount of the grade, students would then understand its importance and include more of what he was looking for. 188 Bruce also noted that he di “...incorporate in the abstract that they do a peer review. That seems to work very well versus the things that I give them, which seem to be over their heads. It just goes “bye-bye,” you know. [As he waves over his head] But the peer thing seems to work.” The reason he thinks that it works is that “I think we’re on a different level. They think we are, perceive us as that. I don’t think they’re inclined to listen a lot.” In Bruce’s opinion, the students don’t listen to instructor’s comments on rough drafts because of their perception of professors. Having someone on the “same level,” as Bruce perceives it, aids the students in using the feedback for revision purposes. Evaluating Writing In order to get a more vivid sense of the ways in which the faculty evaluated the writing that their students did, I asked the three final interviewees if they would show me the types of responses and grades tint they gave to their students. I was not interested in looking at them alone to evaluate their methods; instead, I wanted to get a sense of how they viewed the grading that they were doing. Only one of the teachers whom I asked was willing to go over student grades with me: Betty, the accounting instructor. WhenI went to see Bettyinheroflice, she brought out amanilla folderwithessays in them. She mentioned that they were examples of the article reviews she had students do in class. She stated that she asked for students to turn essays back in at the end of class so that she could keep them. “Many are very good,” she told me, “I’m not a real stickler. The English department would probably assign difl'erent grades.” She seemed tentative and was looking closely at the cormnents and grades she has given the students. 189 “I try to point out grammar.” She said as she noted a place that she had marked an error with red ink. The marks in the essays vary. In some, there are no marks until the grade at the end. In others, she had pointed out awkward wording, a spelling error, incorrect word choice. “Some of my comments are on content,” she commented. She turned to the third essay in the stack. She had underlined a sentence and written “awkward.” “This student could speak so well, but he had a difficult time writing.” The students had left out words important to meaning, had some spelling errors, and sentences that were dificult to read for meaning. The grade was a B+. “It was good other than mechanical” she explained without my asking. She felt the student had good content, but it was hard to read. She also described the student’s prose as “rambling.” She said that it was important for students to understand that poor writing would cause people to “misunderstand as well as not take them seriously.” As she turned to another essay, she noted that this student “reviewed fine,” that is reviewed the article well. The note at the end of the student essay read: “Actually, what we are studying in cost accounting i_s_ managerial accounting...” The note is in response to the student’s statement about not knowing much about managerial accounting. Betty remarks “I didn’t count off for it,” as we read the comment, “but her opinion was weak.” She pauses and adds “I should have written she needed to expand on that.” She tells me that one thing she wants fi'om the writing assignments is for them to “see connections between what was written and what was done in class.” We proceeded to another group of assignments. For this assignment, the students were to read five articles pertaining to students in the Institute of Managerial Accountant’s journal and to surnnmrize them. On one of the articles, they are “to go a bit fixrther and write their 190 opinions.” As we looked at the first paper, she noticed aloud that the marks on the paper were her comments on their cormnents. I asked, “You mean, backing up their comment?” “Yes” she answers. As she turned to the next paper in the stack, she remarked, “She did an excellent job. She did what I wanted.” She pointed to the opinion section of the paper, and summarized the student’s point: the student has commented that she would be worried about the security of email use and that the article has not pointed this downfall out. The student locates a few important problems with the article. Betty says of the student’s opinion, “That was good thinking.” The next few essays have many sections underlined. I asked Betty why she underlined certain phrases and sentences. “I underlined things that caught my eye. If I want to comment, I underline it and comment.” She also said that if it was interesting, she would underline it too. I noticed that there were places that she also underlined when she was offering a different word choice or correction, but she did not mention that use of underlining. Betty then stopped looking at the essays and said, “One thing that you should keep in mind: The article reviews are not really worth a lot of points in the end. About thirty out of five hundred points. I can look it up to be sure if you want.” To explain why the writing assignment is not given a lot of points: “It could ...” she shrugs “tend to lead to grade inflation.” “They [the students] still take it seriously, and try hard.” I ask her if she tells them that she will take it easy when she grades. “Oh, no,” she answers, “I want them to do their best.” “If somebody gets a B, they say ‘ I tried, and I can improve.’ I hope they don’t get totally discouraged.” She stated that if the students make mistakes, she points them out 191 without taking a lot ofi‘ and then tells the student, “Next time, I’ll grade it more carefixlly.” In this way, she reasoned, “the student thinks ‘I need to be sure I improve on that.’” She then turned to another paper. As she leafed through it, we both noted that she had marked a word choice, underlining influential and suggesting sim' cant instead. She explained that she felt the student was misunderstanding the connection between two items in the sentence and that the relationship did not show influence. At the end of the paper, the student had written that the article “brings up a very good point.” Her comment written on the essay was “what is it?” She showed me that the student mentioned that there is a good point, but didn’t explain what that point is. The student still receives an ‘A,’ and Betty states, “she did a good job of reviewing,” after she points to the grade. Another essay we glanced at included the statement “I enjoyed this article...” She stopped and said, “I know in the discussion we had the other day...If they say they enjoy the article, it’s okay with me, as long as they say u.” Betty mentioned that she got the feeling from the meeting with the other professors that they did not approve of students saying they liked or didn’t like an article, and she repeated that as long as students explain their reasons, she thinks it is fine. For the three next papers we looked through, she pointed out what she liked about each one. In one paper, the student chose one approach to managing costs out of three in the article; another student mentioned the consequences of dealing with nuclear waste— Betty had elaborated on the consequences in the margin; in another, the student had given both the positive and negative sides of an issue. One other essay at which we looked had along paragraph written to the student. She laughed, “I had a lot to say.” She examined her paragraph more closely and commented “she 192 might not have realized... I think there is something here she should be aware of, something she seem to be confixsed on, and I wanted to explain it to her.” She showed me the paragraph and the student’s sentence she had underlined. She explained that in public accounting, there are a lot of governmental controls and rules, and in managerial accounting, “...whatever the company needs. those are the rules.” The student thought that the development of stringent guidelines and rules meant that an area must be more advanced. The student stated that managerial accounting was behind the times. Betty’s paragraph explained that the two types of accounting could not be compared in this way. On the final essay, which had no mark other than an ‘A’ at the end, she commented “I didn’t write comments because... I couldn’t think of anything in particular.” Betty’s method of grading appeared to me to be very different from my own. Through my study in composition and the practical suggestions given to me as I have taught, I have developed rubrics and have had students develop rubrics that I use to guide the grades that I give as well as my students’ understanding of those grades. Betty did not seem to evaluate based on an explicit set of criteria, and yet she did have a sense of what she was looking for. Perhaps it is as Sandra Zerger comments: “By the time faculty such as these become professionals, their expertise includes a mental template of how writing fixnctions in their discipline and what the accepted conventions are. It is against this template that they judge students writing, usually unknowingly utilizing such a template” (10). Betty also does not seem to focus too heavily on gramnmr and mechanics, reading the papers for content. Her comments seemed to be evaluative, treating the text as a final draft, and contextual, treating the text in relationship to the discourse community. Betty may or may not be representative of the other faculty, since I did not have an opportunity nor was it my 193 intent to closely examine their methods of evaluating student work. One difiiculty with drawing conclusions about the means of assigning and evaluating writing fi'om this study is that I only examined the assignment sheets of three of the respondents in my study and discussed grading at great length with one. I did not compare these with students’ texts to determine what results the professors received. However, the cormnents that Betty and the other professors made about what was important to them as they assigned and graded their student papers provided another perspective on the shape of the types of writing that they would receive in response to their assignments. In most cases, although drafts were an option, professors who assigned essays anticipated grading final copies of essays. Those who did assign drafts responded to them in varying ways, fi'om providing detailed feedback on grammar and mechanics to discussing the writing with the students in conference. Very few stated that they assisted students in working through a process of writing essays, although a few in the social sciences did have students work through sequenced assignments, moving fiom observation or reflective journals into a more analytical essay. All of the professors’ comments on grading student writing leaned toward evaluating content and critical thinking, although they admitted tlmt there were some grammatical or mechanical errors that, although they knew they should not focus attention on them, they could not avoid marking. Commentary on Expectations As Judith Langer and Arthur Applebee commented in “How Writing Shaped Thinking: A Study of Teaching and Learning,” the question “What kinds of writing ‘work’ in academic classrooms...cannot be answered at the level of particular writing activities. Each of the classrooms developed its own unique configuration of writing assignments, a configuration 194 that reflected the individual teacher’s subject-specific goals, general constructs of teaching and methods of evaluation” (65). This discussion of the fixture expectations, course goals and assigmnent objectives, perceptions of students and the ways in which these are conveyed or not conveyed, was intended to provide fixrther perception of how the kinds of writing work rather than what kinds work. However, it is still hard to draw large generalizations about the genres even now. It is possible to locate some themes that appear in the surveys and interviews at Southwark College. One theme that seems to run through the interviews especially is that the teachers all displayed a sense of the need to connect assignments to expectations or objectives. This was not part of a conscious discussion of the connection between the two. Instead, it became apparent through their fiequent mention of objectives and goals whenever they were discussing a particular genre. As Shawn DeNight states in _Writing To Learn Activities in Writing across the Curriculum Classrooms, “Teachers give assignments with predetermined pedagogical purposes that meet short or long term learning objectives for the class.” Another cormnon theme in both the surveys and conversations was that a majority of the instructors implied an overall goal of having the students move beyond their current status and toward higher cognitive skills and that many of them saw writing as a means of achieving it. A third theme was that when assigning writing tasks, many teachers focused on the skills necessary to accomplish them as a way of communicating with an audience rather than a focus on audience in order to think of means of cormnunicating with that audience. Some discrepancies that seemed to stand out in this study are the differences between the instructor’s perceptions of fixture expectations and the goals and objectives they had for their own courses and assignments. The teachers at Southwark college became much more 195 focused on higher cognitive skills in courses and assignments; whereas in the discussion of what writing their graduates would do in the fixture, they discussed audience or at least skills necessary for reaching an audience more. Having said this, I must acknowledge that many of them mentioned a certain ability to “think on one’s feet” and use analysis in writing for the fixture audience. Another gap that seemed to appear, at least when speaking with Betty, was between the expectations, goals, awareness of how writing might meet those and the way in which that was not conveyed, at least fi'om my perspective to her students through the assigning and evaluating of those assignments. Heather and Bruce, in comparison, both provided more detail about their objectives through their assignments. I would note that Bruce was the chair of the education department and articulated an understanding of the need to practice one’s philosophy of education; Heather as a developmental psychologist, had also had taken courses through a local university’s education department. Betty did not articulate any past training in education and conducted the individual interview in which I sensed the most uncertainty about her methods. Although I would be unable to draw conclusions about causation without further research, I would suggest that training in educational principles my be necessary in order to connect teachers’ goals with their actual assignments. Another perception of the connection or disconnection between the teachers’ expectations and assignments proceeds fiom Stephan Segal in “The role of contingency and tension in the relationship between theory and practice in the classroom,” who states that “teachers cannot rely on the authority of anything other than their own judgement; a judgement that is not justifiable in terms of a universally accepted master narrative but in terms of the particular (vulnerable) subjectivity of the teacher” (203). Even the “master narrative” of 196 WAC, when offered to instructors in the form of specific assignments or techniques, is subject to the teacher’s judgement; thus, they are often assimilated or even rejected on the basis of the teacher’s perceptions. Add to this the variables of the instructors’ previously constructed theories of classroom instruction, their methods, or lack of method, of investigating the results of their assignments and the actual fixture situations students will face, and the practical time constraints of teaching in an institution, and it is not surprising that two types of theory regarding writing assignments might arise: a theory reflective of larger concerns and a theory of wlmt seems to work in a practical sense in the classroom This is similar to Segal’s as well as Argryis and Schon’s definition of ‘espoused theory,’ which is the theory that one advocates and ‘theory in use,’ which is the theory that develops within the constraints of the classroom and puts into practice. Segal notes that I would surmise fi'om the surveys and interviews with the faculty, that a large part of how writing is used in their classrooms, is not merely based on their understanding of a particular genre, but on the theory that they develop fiom their experiences, expectations, and goals. This theory is perhaps a combination of espoused theory and theory in use, but is should be a central consideration when discussing writing across the curriculum. In light of the connections between faculty members’ perceptions of how writing assignments could and did meet their course objectives, perhaps sharing theory may be just as important as techniques, when discussing writing across the curriculum What influences the type of theory philosophy of education an instructor might have? As I noted before, expectations may influence it, but so does the knowledge that teachers have accumuhted about the subject matter and the standard ways of teaching within the discipline. This knowledge is lore. 197 The theory behind many of the faculty members’ goals, objectives and understanding of writing displayed the characteristics of lore as North and Harkin, as I mentioned in the introduction and Hillocks define it. Hillocks notes that assignments that the writing teachers whom he studied used were established traditions in teacher lore. (70). Hillocks terms lore as “practical learning theory” and states that the instructors in his study were “closely aligned to the rhetorical and epistomological stances they have adopted” (115). In other words, their understanding of knowledge construction within their discipline formed the core of their philosophy or theory of teaching. When speaking of lore, he refers to Atran’s term “folk theory” that he terms “egocentric, experiential and partial”(115). His view of lore as theory is that is can be limited to and by personal perspective. However, it is difficult to determine exactly what theory cannot be criticized on the same basis. During the interview and coding process of the study, I was constantly aware of the context of some of the statements I was isolating and categorizing. I knew, despite the fact that I was categorizing, comparing and contrasting the individual self reports of the participants in my study, that the tenor of each statement was influenced by the ongoing conversation. I will admit that not all of the group interviews were fixll-fledged conversations. While the interviews were in progress, it seemed that in some instances the respondents were actually taking turns responding to my questions, rather than listening to each other or participating in a conversation However, at other times, the faculty seemed to be listening to each other and responding to the comments being made. Looking closely at the transcriptions of the recordings of the group interviews, I realized that the linguistic patterns suggested that my initial view of the interviews was correct. In the discussion about students’ revising, for 198 example, Reed, the religion professor, commented in response to Ellen, the English professor, “So it’s not perhaps that they are unwilling to revise, though, that’s often the case...but it my well be that they can’t see how to do it better the second time through.” This comment showed that he was moving away from offering me information as a researcher and was listening to Ellen’s view of why students focused on smaller error issues. These moments of faculty interaction interested me, because at these times, the narratives they were sharing seemed to build from the other participarxts’ narratives. Since the faculty’s perception was a focus of my study, I thought I would be remiss not to include some discussion of the interaction that occurred between the faculty and the possxble conclusions that might be drawn fi'om them. Their conversations might provide an insight to not only how faculty from various disciplines talk about writing but how new knowledge is formed. I also began to notice that it was very possible that the self-reports that the faculty were sharing were a rhetorical discourse in which statements about expectations, goals, students and grading were as much to create a persona and convince an audience as they were to present information Therefore, I realized that in order to provide an even more contextualized sense of the experience, I must provide a sense of the conversations themselves. 1. Bloom’s taxonomy is actually the 1956 Taxonomy of Educational Objectives and was written by a team of psychologists led by Benjamin Bloom, after such a taxonomy was called for during the 1948 Convention of the American Psychological Association. Rohwer and Sloane state that the team followed a "vision of what constitutes education for productive learning” (62), so that the taxonomy was not based on one singular theory- in a sense, making it timeless. Yet according to Bereiter and Scardamalia, who cite Bruner’s Acts of Meaning and Stich’s “From folk psychology to cognitive science: The case against belief,” the taxonomy was actually based on theory that combined behaviorism and “folk psychology,” also known as “common sense.” 199 Chapter 4 CONVERSATIONS AS CONTEXT: NARRATIVES IN PERSPECTIVE “...I must rehearse/ all their tales whether for better or worse,/ or else falsity some of my matter. ” Chaucer Canterbury Tales, lines 3174-3175, P Conversations as Context The conversations that occurred for my study of faculty perceptions of writing were as much a constructed drama or exercise as many of the writing assignments that are examined in Writing Across the Curriculum research The volunteers who kindly participated arrived having completed a survey on writing and received an agenda; when they first arrived, I explained that I wanted our interview to be a discussion and welcomed their questions. Invariably the interviews did not begin as conversations, but as round table sharing of answers to the questions on the agenda. However, just as invariably, someone would mention a particular assigmnent or perspective that would conduct us into a conversation It was in the midst of these conversations that I felt I learned the most about the participants and about writing. In order to slmre a complete sense of the conversations, I am including some discussion and presentation of a few of the moments in which the faculty members participating in my study became engaged in conversations about writing. As Patricia Stock and Jay Robinson mention in “Literacy as Conversation: Classroom Talk as Text Building” in which they develop a model of interactional analysis of conversations, if someone is to make meaning out of a conversation, portions of it “cannot be isolated from its contexts that exist in space and time or fiom its linguistic contexts, all of which also exist in space 200 and time” (181). These moments, in my opinion provide a more complete sense of the faculty members’ perceptions, especially when read in light of the previous two chapters. Before engaging in a discussion of the actual conversations, I would like to present some context to the way in which I consider these conversation First, it is important to think of these conversations in light of lore, or that meeting of praxis and theory that I have discussed in the introduction and chapter three. I believe tlmt what is happening in these conversations is the sharing of lore on the part of the faculty members, and in one of them, there may even be the locus of a change of perception on the part of one faculty member. I expand on Harkin’s and North’s definition of lore to distinguish between lore that is based primarily on praxis and Lore that reflects composition research and theory. I also want to provide more than merely my sense that the participants became involved in the conversation, since I believe it is involvement in discourse that precedes any change or learning, and I think that this involvement can be identified through discourse analysis. Finally, I want to return to the reflection of the previous chapter on the possibility that the information that the faculty ofl’ers about writing in the classroom is also rhetorical in that it is a means of creating a persona and convincing an audience. Defining Lore In “The Postdisciplinary Politics of Lore,” Patricia Harkin explains that lore can be open to faculty from other disciplines: she asserts that “discourse can unintentionally be theory” and that “informed intuition” is a theoretical means of dealing with the production of knowledge. If lore does not require intention to be theory, then it makes itself available in another way to practitioners from disciplines outside of the discipline of composition. Harkin’s notes right away that “Lore is nondisciplinary: it is actually defined by its 201 inattention to disciplinary procedures. Lore cannot provide abstract accounts of the writing; it tells us what practitioners do” (125). This non-disciplinary nature makes lore more readily available to those who attempt to use writing outside the auspices of the discipline of composition Faculty who teach in other disciplines have learned lore through different avenues than composition faculty. Since they do not attend conferences about writing or have access to texts on writing, even in the form of the composition textbooks that writing teachers often receive, their sources may have even more varied perspectives. As a result, since it is not from their own discipline, nor is it accompanied by the procedural dictates of composition research, the knowledge instructors gain is not required to be tested by either their own or composition’s restraints. This is reflected in part by the response that Alex, the history professor in my study, gave when he was asked if his method of teaching essay exam-taking skills was successfixl, as will be obvious in the conversations examined below: he noted that he had not really researched whether it worked, but that his perception that it worked well was substantiated through his continued use of the method. The test of the validity of lore in such an instance then becomes faculty perception rather than disciplinary scrutiny. Clifford Geertz wisely points out, “Floundering through mere happenings and then concoctirxg accounts of how they hang together is what knowledge and illusion alike consist in” (Works 3). In fact, as Harkin comments, “we can ask what kinds of problems lore has solved and reexamine those problems with the understanding that they are overdetermined” (135). By “overdetermined,” she means that within every context there are a multitude of factors which determine the outcome: so many that they cannot be simplified to the constructs of traditional inquiry. 202 I would note that faculty in other disciplines who use writing in their classrooms, particularly on campuses that do not have established training in writing across the curriculum, are pragrnatists, certainly: they are trying to develop methods which best serve their aims in the classroom. Often their choices to retain or discard a method are based upon what they perceive as outcomes. Guskey notes, “evidence of improvement in the learning outcomes of students generally precedes and may be a prerequisite for significant change” fiom more traditional methods of teaching to those commonly associated with WAC (7). However, the evidence necessary in the case of writing in other disciplines may not be the evidence composition researchers or researchers within the faculties’ fields would require for conclusions. As Harkin says, lore “differs fi'om ‘normal’ disciplinary inquiries, which usually end by establishing the validity of a hypothesis about causal or explanatory relations” (127). In addition to expectations, goals and objectives, the perceived outcomes become another factor in the choices faculty make about assignments. This is true of the faculty who participated in my study. Their practice and theory has the logic that North and Harkin mention, as well as perhaps, its myths. The lore or knowledge base they develop for teaching writing has the characteristics North and Harkin describe: methods that are reputed to work well are assimilated, elements are not rigorously checked to avoid contradiction, and any new contributions are adjusted by the users to fit their own needs. This may be why many WAC administrators and composition researchers, when working with faculty who are already assigning writing in some form in their classroom, may experience, in North’s words, “considerable confixsion and frustration” in the same way that “those whose loyalties lie with other modes of inquiry,”(27) such as quantitative, clinical or even ethnographic 203 research within the development of composition knowledge and theory may be frustrated with practitioners in the field of composition In discussing the practical knowledge shared within composition and writing and in other disciplines, it is usefixl to draw a distinction between two types of lore, which can be designated by an uppercase and lowercase Lore and lore. That knowledge whose basis for development has theoretical underpinnings in composition theory could be termed Lore. This Lore is similar to the lore that Harkin celebrates. Despite the firct Mt Lore has “loose” guidelines for research constructs, it must withstand the examination of instructors with a group of shared experiences and definitions. The examination and proceeding development of Lore might be compared to the development of interpretation of texts by informd readers. It is reciprocal theorization of practice. The other lore, is shared knowledge or received wisdom Mt may or may not necessarily have any of the basic underpinnings of current or rhetorical composition theory. Often there is no resulting examination of shared knowledge. When Lore meets lore, there are a few possible results: the instructors are so grounded in the lore they bring with them that no dehberation or contemplation of change occurs; the instructors find Mt Lore corresponds to their own lore and one or the other is assimilated into the other; the instructors’ lore creates conflict with Lore, however, through conflict or dialectic, Lore begins to become part of the instructor’s lore, or lore is discarded in light of the evidence in support of Lore. The extent to which any of these may happen depends upon the amount of shared experience, the apparent validity of the evidence, and perhaps the confidence of those sharing. The first question that arises, then, is what does lore or Lore look like when it is being shared or developed ? From Harkin’s and North’s descriptions, both Lore and lore 204 would be represented in phrases that seenwd to represent claims about writing as well as claims about ways to teach writing. Challenges to Lore or lore would take place when someone questioned the reliability of those claims, and finther development of lore would take place when dialogue centers on those claims in attempts to apply the practice to other situations. The concept of sharing and refixting claims echoes one of Hillock’s implications in his study: “not all [teacher] thinking is paradigmatic or narrative as Bruner suggests, but Mt much of it involves arguments in the form of claims, grounds, warrants...” and other aspects of argument outlined by Toulmin (137). Whether the development of theory in teacher thinking is paradigmatic or based in logical argument, it is developed through experience and interaction Involvement in the conversation As a result of the nature of the interviews I conducted, I was able to observe interaction Mt not only contained narrative reasoning, but also attempts at persuasion In order to find those moments when the participants were actively engaged in trying to persuade or legitimate their own theory, I looked for times Mt they seemed to focus on involving the other participants. To begin with a discussion of how participants become interact and share lore or Lore in a conversation, it is usefixl to consider the specific characteristics of conversations. On a very basic level, conversations are a matter of participants waiting their turns to respond to a prompt of some sort. Moving beyond that level, Deborah Schifliin, basing her conclusions on the work of Searle, van Dijk, Bauman and Sherzer, Savliie -Troike, suggests that participants’ input into a conversation constitutes attempts to provide information, to develop and adjust relationships, and to express personal perspectives (12). 205 There are moments when the input becomes interactive, according to Schifli'in, who defines interactive as influencing another person’s actions or assumptions, whether intentionally or not (5). One way to distinguish interactive conversation is to consider characteristics of the conversation which show increased involvement. In Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue and Imagery in Conversational Discourse, Deborah Tannen discusses the aspects of conversation that show involvement. Based on her own work, as well as the research of John Gumperz and Wallace Chafe, she notes that a conversation is not merely people talking, but an inter-action, referring to Erickson’s metaphor of “climbing a tree that climbs back” (Qtd.in Tannen p.13). This metaphor illustrates the active nature of both or all of the participants, rather than one active person moving against or upward through a static figure. In her discussion of involvement and interaction, Tannen points out various strategies— using this term in the linguistic sense of a systematic use of language, not intentional use— Mt have been identified in literary as well as spoken discourse. These can vary from rhythm to figures of speech. Two strategies Mt she spends much time on in her book and Mt are usefixl to my understanding of the conversations Mt occurred in my study are repetition and constructed dialogue. Repetition would be times that a speaker or speakers either repeat phrases and words Mt they have previously said themselves or Mt other speakers have said. Constructed dialogue is when a person reenacts dialogue which may or may not have occurred. These strategies often denote more concentrated involvement in a conversation 206 Repetition Repetition has many benefits to maintaining and unifying conversations, in similar way to repetition in literary discourse. In fact, Tannen claims that “ordinary conversation and literary discourse have more in common than has been commonly thought” (15). It facilitates production of language, by providing ready-made utterances that the speakers can use while pulling together and constructing their next statements. It also facilitates listening, since the rest of the utterance can be attended to more carefixlly since the repeated utterance is known. Repetition calls attention to both the repeated utterance as well as the differences between those utterances Mt are new. According to Tannen, when repetition occurs between speakers, it also creates a sense of listening to each other, responding to each other, and even accepting one another’s statements. In a sense, repetition in discourse is similar to the concept of mirroring in body language; it forms or denotes a connection between the participants. As Tannen phrases it “All of this sends a meta-message of involvement.” However, J. Hillis Miller presents a point well taken in the understanding of repetition: Repetition may seem to form a web of connection, but when carefixlly considered or followed through to the conclusions draw, repetition may actually represent misunderstanding or acquisition of the term to mean something else. This is roughly apparent in the fact that when faculty use the term 1911M, they are not all using the term to mean the same thing, when fixrther detailed description of the assignment reveals at times entirely different understandings. However, despite the break in threads Mt is part of the nature of language, the attempt to draw connections through repetition in speech still indicates involvement. 207 Constructed Dialogue Constructed dialogue, the other signal of involvement in conversations, is a type of narrative that reports the speech of participants in a previous event. Deborah Tannen warns against considering “reported speech” to have an actual connection to real speech. Looking once again to literary terms, she asserts that a better term to describe the strategy of constructing what has purportedly been said in other conversations, either through change of voice or the tags such as “he said” or “I said,” would be constructed dialogue. She offers various reasons that speakers use constructed dialogue. For example, a speaker might use dialogue as “instantiation of a general phenomenon” (111). The speaker pulls together numy experiences into one statement or “instant.” In other words, the speaker gives a specific instance to represent a common occurrence. One example of this would be when Ellen is describing her interaction with students about the amount of reading that she asks them to do. She relates Mt she has “several in my upper division classes right now who say, ‘Do we have to read Wuthering Heights again?’ Now they’re having to read it in English novels, and they’re saying “I just can’t take this.” This is an instance when Ellen is relating an interaction Mt occurs in several instances. The students may or may not have spoken the exact words she attributes to them, but by constructing the experience as spoken, she makes it more engaging. A speaker might also construct dialogue to report “other people’s” criticism to a listener or to present her assumption of their own or others’ inner speech Tannen notes Mt in some cases, when the listener is very involved in the conversation, he or she will add dialogue as a participant. “Dialogue...” Tarmen concludes, “enables listeners (or readers) to create their understanding by drawing on their own history of associations. By giving 208 voice to the characters, dialogue makes story into drama and listeners into an interpreting audience to the drama” (133). So when participants in the conversation begin using dialogue, there is a certain drawing in of the audience. Drawing in or involving the audience, in conversation as well as writing, is important to persuading the audience; this has been a concept agreed upon by most rhetoricians from the sophists on. Repetition and constructed dialogue serve as important indicators that a speaker is attempting to involve her listeners and that a speaker is already involved by previous speakers. Both repetition and constructed dialogue occurred in several of the conversations in my study. Although their presence does indicate involvement, involvement does not necessarily indicate the development of Lore or lore. It does, however, indicate the sharing of lore or Lore and reveal any challenges made to the claims made in that sharing by revealing questions or statements of disbelief. These challenges and the resulting answers are the locus of possible theoretical shifts by those engaged in the conversation Lore and Involvement in One Conversation One conversation in which a high level of involvement became apparent occurred during the first set of interviews, on March 10, 1999. The participants who were present were Daniel, foreign language professor, Sarah, the classics professor, Victor, the sociology professor and Alex, the first history professor who attended. The conversation was guided primarily by the questions I had developed to encourage the faculty to elaborate on their survey responses. We had discussed professional expectations, student writing, the types of assignments they used in various classes. Then in response to my question of whether they gave ungraded assignments in their classes, Alex, the history 209 professor describes his method of using essay exams in a process. At this point in the conversation, the rotation of sharing methods or narratives is broken Alex: I have a particularly on the first exam of each semester- my exams are essa -- and I let students rewrite the larger essay question so that they can see what it takes in their language in their thinking process and they can redo Mt as often as they want to the point it’s where the grade that they want. In class because nobody writes quite the same way, and so to look at somebody’s for the whole class, I don’t think it does much good, so I’ll work with them But it’s voluntary-- unless they make below a C. If they make below a C, they have to do it. If they make a C or above, it’s their option Some will do it and some won’t. Debra: And does Mt usually have good results? Alex: For those who take it seriously, yes... Yea, because they see in their writing what it would taketo make the Aandmost ofthemwant anA, andthey’ll seewhat ittakes in their writing style to get them there. And then once they’ve got Mt, they move on and do a lot better. [ long pause] Of course, that’s a very motivated student, too. Daniel: Yea. Alex: The ones that are really giving it a good effort and that probably has something to do with it. Debra: How about the one’s who have to do it, below a C? Alex: Some of them will get excited and bring the grade up and some of them are just going through the motions, but I keep doing it, and so I perceive that there’s an advantage to doing it. I haven’t done actual statistical study, but I think it helps enough that it’s worth doing. There’s a lot of kids coming in and they’re not used to that kind of writing. Because what I’m doing... it’s not just memorization They have to think about how they’re using the material to prove a point. So lots of times it’s a new level for them to get an adjustment to. [Sarah the Classics professor, leans forward] Sarah: You just have them-~lt’s the same? -rewrite the essay? Alex: Yea, We go over it; I have them rewrite it; then we’ll go over it again and sometimes, sometimes three or four times. Sarah: So do you think you could bring a student up to say, a least a B? Alex: If they stick with me, yea. Victor: If you go over it, how could they not get a B? Sarah: 0 gosh, I, I think Mt’s amazing if you think you could bring any student up to a B. [She says this looking first at Sociology and then at history professor] Alex: Well, I don’t know that I can bring anyone [Classics laughs here ], but Sarah: Well. In this part of the conversation, Sarah, the professor of Classical literature, appears intrigued by Alex’s comment. When considering the level of involvement as 210 indicated from the amount of repetition among the speakers in this passage, it was apparent to me as I read and marked the transcripts as a whole Mt the amount of repetition in these passages increased notably. This can been seen above in the repetition of words and phrases such as “rewrite,” “a ‘B”’ and “construct an argument.” It is also apparent in the repetition of longer discourse sequences, in this case, each telling how they manage essay exams. Repetition does not necessarily indicate agreement; it indicates involvement. Victor, the sociology professor, also uses repetition, but it is to disagree. This point of involvement began with Alex’ description of his practice of working with an assignment. I then challenged the practice: did it work? The history professor was willingto standbylfismethodofrequiringandaflowingrewrhes,clairningthathmade students aware of the expectations. The challenge continues, with the sociology and classical literature professors asking for details and questioning the efl‘ectiveness as well as the need for the rewrites. One professor’s rationale and results are thus being shared and challenged. Alex: What happens is Mt you go over it, but they still have to put it in their language. You talk about the points: “And at this point you might bring this in.” Ummrn. Victor: Okay. Alex: “...in terms of additional to support your argument,” and we’ll deal with structure and “here is how you can develop your essay so Mt it flows from one end to the other.” And Mt sort of thing, and then they go back and do it again and you’d be surprised how many ways they can get it twisted Victor: Because sometimes, not very often students will... will bomb an essay and come up and say “Can I rewrite this?” And they’ll say that after you’ve already gone over the test. And I’ll say “no you can’t rewrite Mt one. I can give you a different one to write.” But my feeling is I’ve already told them the answer. If you rewrite it; anybody could rewrite it. Maybe I, if I let them rewrite it, I’d find out that anybody couldn’t rewrite it correctly. I’ve never tried that. I just assumed Mt since I’ve already gone over it, surely they can spit it back to me. And Mt’s not going to help, so if I do anything, I give them a whole new question So it’s similar, but so they’ve still got to think. 211 At this point, Victor, the sociology professor, seemed to be finishing the History professor’s narrative; in the conversation be interrupted so smoothly that his story at first seemed to be a continuation Instead it becomes his own story. Victor’s narrative takes a different form than the other narrative. He hesitates in the midst and expresses doubt about his method and considers the other possibility. At the end, though, he seems to decide not to change hismethod, but reassures himselfthat hismethod isas usefixl, sincethe students have to think. The history professor picks up as if he were not interrupted: Alex: Victor: Thethinth amazesme isthatIhaveavery simple fornmt. AndItellthemfrom the very beginning, Mt this is what I’d like “State your thesis. And my questions are often open ended, like “Confirm or deny this historical argument.” “So state your thesis, give the evidence that supports that thesis. Then, at the end, sum it up: ‘Because of the evidence cited above, I confirm the thesis that’” But you’d be surprised how many of them can’t make that simple progress. It takes a couple times just to get through. Maybe it’s because they’ve been taught in such a rote fashion in high school to just spit out every thing they know on an essay. That the idea of spilling out everything you know is too dificult to overcome. Yea, I guess I quit giving in class essays. I mean, I give in-class essays, but ...At least in the lower levels, I give my tests in two parts: one part’s a short answer in class, and that class, I will give them three of four essay questions, and the next chsstheycome inandlpick oneandtheyhave to writethe answer, so theyhave had several days, hopefirl... And I try to do it like an end of a week. Sometimes I give them a weekend. And I tell them “You can talk with anybody, you can get together in groups. I don’t care. You can even write it out, try to memorize it and spit it back out; I don’t care.” But I found I got a whole lot better essays doing it Mt waythanl do ifIhand ittothemintheclassandinthecontext ofaclockwrite ananswer. Andinmythinking, mygoalisto seeMtthey learn So whetherthey think about it for a couple days and then write it or not. Whichever gives me the best example that they’ve learned something is the method I want to use. So I switched to the I-give-you- the-essay-you-think-about-it deal and I get much, much better essays. And I even do that with the finaL because the final, when I give finals, and I don’t always give an in-class final exams. When I give an essay, I give three or four essays and I pick one. That way, it forces them to learn, but they have to put it down. So they have had a chance to think about it, which may be very different than in your case, if you’ve given a test in the class Mt explains why rewrites wouldn’t be all Mt helpful the way I do it, but probably work for you, that helps; I forgot that... 212 Sarah: I have questions...I have gotten away from using essay questions on exams too, because I think Mt for a student to actually construct an argument...it’s so hard Mt you either have to do it the way you did it, you know, have them redo it and redo it, or have them prepare in advance or something. I think, in the two hours you have even in the final exam, if you want to cover other materials, too, it’s just like asking people to build a pyramid or something in twenty minutes, to build an essay. And Mt’s why I usually do these passage discussions, because they’re writing about the reading and they can bring in a] the ideas they want fi'om everything we’ve read, but I think I just decided Mt-- I guess Mt answers one of your [Debbie’s] questions: “Is there any type of writing that we think students are not successfixl at?”—and I guess that’s what I would say is getting an essay question cold and writing it up. I think it’s just too hard... In the passage above, Alex, the history professor begins using constructed dialogue when he is trying to involve the listeners in his story, through drama, in order to show them exactly how he uses his first essay exam as a teaching tool for writing. His dialogue was apparent in the audiotape by the way he changed tone, and is noticeable in the dialogue by the use of second person to refer to someone not present in the conversation If one looks closely at his comments, he uses “you” in “But you’d be surprised how many of them can’t make Mt simple progress” to refer to the other professors, but obviously, when he is stating “here is how you can develop your essay so that it flows . . . ” he is not instructing the professors. Rather, he is using dialogue as instantiation: telling us how be generally speaks to his students. After Alex’ uses of dialogue in this manner, the other participants begin constructing dialogue in the same way. Victor, the sociology professor offers a choral question, much like the Greek choruses; of course, in his dialogue, they ask “Can we rewrite this?” Here he repeats the term “rewrite” that has been used by both Alex and Sarah, the classic’s professor. In met he seerm to be providing a mirror to the Alex’s case. Alex allows his students to rewrite. In fact, in some cases, he requires them to rewrite the 213 same essay from the exam Victor portrays his students pleading for the chance to do this, “...after you’ve already gone over the test.” Here he refers to a more general “you”... in a sense all faculty. His constructed response to the students might actually be the response he is making to the history professor’s suggestion The fixture tense, designates a general situation as well as a fixture one: “And I’ll say, ‘No you can’t rewrite Mt one. I can give you a different one to write.”’ Rather than speculate as to whether he ever really makes this offer, I would conclude that this is not a specific report of actual utterances that have occurred, but constructed dialogue. Whereas repetition shows involvement of listeners, constructed dialogue shows attempts to involve the listeners. The attempts to involve are in many ways attempts to persuade the listeners. As these faculty members return to an exchange of narratives, they are also explaining why they believe the method of rewriting an essay exam is effective or not. William Joseph Broz found, as part of his ethnographic study of participants in an Iowa Writing Project summer institute for teachers, that one of the outstanding features of the “culture of lore” was the ‘problem setting stories’ Mt became a factor in reflection on practice. These stories took the form of artifacts or spontaneous narratives. Sarah’s participation in this conversation is to question the use of essay exams. She comments Mt she thinks they are too diflicult, but does allow Mt the history professor’s means of working with them is a way of changing the exam so as to improve it. She emphasizes the difficulty of essay exams as well as the irnpracticality of assigning them through an analogy to building pyramid. She returns to a previous question I had asked as a means of reiterating her point: they are too diflicult for students to succeed. 214 Simultaneous Sharing of Practice The next section of the conversation returns to the level of involvement Mt the first part of the conversation displayed. In this section, the last exchanges before the conversation turned to another topic, the characteristics of involvement continued, with added features to designate involvement: interruptions and simultaneous speech Victor: ..Well, I have a lot of students; what they would tell me is that they’d never written an essay question before. Now I don’t know whether Mt true or not, but... Alex: I think they can do it. I think they can do a lot more that we ask them to... Sarah: ...well...History is different too, because there... are certain aspects of the content Mt are much more focused than literary... Daniel: ...But unless... You have the same principles of organization as in literary. Of course, they’ve got to analyze critically and organize their thought about the text, but in history they have to go thought a similar process, it may not be a text per se, but it’s a similar process, I think... Victor. It could be an event... or...or...a situation.. Alex: It’s a thesis kind of question.. where you get differences of opinion among scholars and then I ask them to construct an argument... Victor: ..yea.. Alex: ..fi'om the evidence they have at their disposal Daniel: You know, I do wlmt you do quite a bit, and I do it because, indeed, I find that most students can not sit down and write an essay and in a timed class situation, and yet it’s something we used to have to do a whole lot, and I don’t know... something has happened. Alex : yea Sarah: yea (simultaneous) Sarah: To me, that’s what the papers are for, you know; that’s where you have the time to put together an argument... Alex: ....I think they get better the more times that you did it, you know, it’s something Mt you learn over time, you learn to mamge your time Daniel: Yea Alex: ...and in meetings, in the business world, for example, you’re going to have to be able to think on your feet and to construct an argument in your head fairly quickly in some kinds of circumstances. And to me, it’s a preparation stage for that. It’s not easy. And again, you’re talking at various levels. If they take it home, it ought to be a whole lot better that if they do it in the classroom Victor: yea. Alex: But it develops a skill Mt I think they need, and they used to be able to do it better than they can now... Victor: ...But I guess... Debra: They’re not going to have that... 215 Alex: ...which scares me for this group, because this group Ins to go out and compete with the group that graduated in 1985. They’re not out in the work force yet. So if we don’t teach some of these skills, it seems to me that we leave them at a disadvantage. They’re going to be competing with.. What is occurring in these passages is a simultaneous sharing of practice. Each professor begins to describe “instances’ in which they interact with students regarding essay exam questions. The problem Mt the practices are all meant to solve is the difficulty that students have with essay exams. Each member begins discussing their view of essay exams and how they have come to cope with the problem The final statement of the professor of classical literature is a different challenge to the history professor’s practice and theory: are essay exams necessary or usefixl? The faculty are struggling with a problem and attempting to describe a solution Differing praxes meet praxes. This, in my opinion, is where lore as theory begins to be developed. Development of Lore and lore Within the last section of that particular conversation, several challenges are offered and met, not just by Alex, but by other participants as well. When Sarah tries to distinguish between the disciplines as a reason that a method will not work the same way in her courses, Daniel steps in to describe characteristics that the fields have in common. When the question of time for dehberation and thought is brought up as a reason for not using essay exams at all, Alex appeals to fixture expectations as a basis for making decisions about assigrnnents. His comment implies that if students are not required to practice thinking under a time pressure, then they will not be able to do so when they need it most: in competition for jobs against previous students who have those skills. These fixture expectations, since they are a major influence on decision making, as mentioned in a 216 previous chapter, seem to be accepted as valid support for Alex’s use of essay exams. No one challenges his understanding of fixture expectations, and no one questions whether he has researched to see if timed exams actually prepare students for “thinking on their feet.” This again, is a marked characteristic of lore: as noted before, Lore and lore do not end, as many disciplinary tests of hypothesis do—with proof or disproof of cause and effect by data. The question of what exactly has happened as far as Lore or lore is concerned then arises: has deliberation or contemplation of change occurred, has Lore or assimilated the other, or has lore been discarded in light of Lore? As far as Victor is concerned, it seems no deh'beration has occurred. Many of his narratives served to reinforce his own understanding. Daniel seems to have maintained a position of observing the conversation and clarifying points. Alex, too, has reinforced his own beliefs about teaching through his narratives and evidence. Sarah, though, seems to be considering Alex’s approach carefixlly, weighing it against her own understanding of writing assignments. She makes many assertions, but also asks questions aimed at gaining knowledge. Finally, at the end of the conversation, after Alex and Victor have left, she confides to Daniel and me Mt she is very interested in pursuing her conversation with Alex fixrther. She said, “I am very interested in what he [Alex] was talking about with his essay exams. He made it sound like he could bring my students up to an ‘A’.” Daniel interjected “No he couldn’t...,” but she continued “I know he couldn’t, but maybe a ‘B’.” She seems to suggest Mt if he can demonstrate improvement, she might consider using a similar method. Thus, although like Hillocks, I must admit I did not see anyone change his or her practice, I believe I may have been witness to the first step in making a change. And like Hillocks, I would have to say that 217 this is based on Sarah’s view of learning and of students. Whether this clunge is exchanging lore for Lore, assimilating lore into Lore, or vice versa depends upon one’s perspective. Obviously Sarah entered the conversation resistant to using essay exams for a valid and accepted reason, according to many composition experts: the time constraint does not seem fair or realistic. In this sense, she comes with what many would consider Lore and if she begins using essay exams, might be seen as either assimilating Lore into lore or exchanging Lore for lore in a negative way. However, an argument might be made Mt Alex entered the conversation with a understanding of composition Lore: the usefixlness of teaching students to revise, spending one-on-one times introducing them to a genre used within the academic history with some regularityaswellasto askilltheywoulduse inthefixture. Then, Sarahmightbe assimilating or replacing Lore with lore if she begins using essay exams in Mt way. The reason assimilation rather than adoption is a real possrbility is because faculty usually adapt new information and methods to fit fi'ameworks Mt are already present. This fact is supported by several researchers including Walvoord and McCarthy and Desforges. Another view of the conversation is Mt these faculty are developing their own Lore, based on evidence Mt there are similarities between their disciplines, Mt they have similar expectations and objectives of assignments, and through conversation, they are creating a common understanding of a theory of writing. Is this Lore beyond criticism? Of course not. However, in order to change ones lore, one would have to establish new understandings of writing, fixture expectations, objectives of assignments, and outcomes. In the conversation above, Sarah seems the most willing to reconsider her Opinion of a writing assignment or a way of rmnaging a writing assignment in light of new 218 infornuxtion. Many perspectives on why Sarah is the one who displays this willingness to consider could be investigated. One possibility for her opermess in comparison to the other participants could be her gender. As the single female of the group, she may have been more interested in facilitating the conversation, a characteristic of male-female conversation Mt Tannen and Cazden have noted in their more intensive studies on gender and discourse. Another influence might be Sarah’s more positive view of students, something Hillocks identified in his study. Sarah had previously mentioned an assignment in which she compiled student input in order to show the class the breadth of their interpretations of a text. This displays a very optimistic view of studentsm-Mt their interpretations were valid and worth sharing with their peers. Thus, she would also be more open to discovering means of helping students learn to improve writing. Finally, a third variable is Sarah’s discipline: classical literature, particularly interpretation Her discipline, by its very nature, might predispose an expert in the field to be aware and open to new ideas about language and language learning. A third possible reason for Sarah’s ability to consider other possibilities may be her approach to text within class; her view of writing may allow her to be open to challenging her own “text” of teaching. In a later conversation, when we are discussing whether the teachers do or should share their writing or writing in progress, Sarah makes a revealing statement: The thing about using your own articles...In a way you want to teach students not to just simply accept authority, not tojust read something and say “ This is right cause it’s in the book,” and you should also want to teach them not to have the idea Mt whatever the teacher says is the thing Mt she wants us to say...In a way, if you assign them your own work, it’s kind of “double whammy”-- you’re the classroom 219 authority-slash-written word authority...It may be hard for them to read it critically. (3-25-2) This statement reveals Mt Sarah is interested in teaching the critical literacy Mt resonates with Giroux, Friere and Crowley. In the conversations about writing, although other faculty members mentioned Mt they wanted students to think critically or to think independently, Sarah was the only one who voiced the desire to teach students to be critical readers of authoritative text in either written or spoken form Her approach may permit her to consider any assignments Mt might allow her to reach her objectives. Conversation in Contrast A conversation Mt could be viewed in contrast to the conversation above is one that was partially discussed when Reed, the religion chair, Lance, the other religion professor, Ellen, the English professor, Bruce, the education professor, Betty, the accounting professor, and I were looking at drafts. In this conversation several things are happening. Repetition and constructed dialogue appear; however, one person primarily uses constructed dialogue and the repetition is scarce. Betty and Bruce do not speak in this sections, and Reed is the primary speaker in much of the passage: Reed: So comparative religion class, at Mt point, they’re really into something to foreign, they’re scared about it. They don’t come to it with a wealth of information, so they know they’re really going to have to slug it out. This is tough. So they will come to me, those who are thinking and working ahead, they will come to me for help in conceptualizing. I’ll say “What are you interested in?” And they’ll say “well, you know, I’m kind of interested in Zorastorisrn” I had a Japanese student yesterday who wants to do a paper on Shinto. But they may need help in conceptualizing; they know... I’ll say: “What about that did you like?” “Well I like this Mt or the other.” “Well have you considered this possibility or Mt possibility?” And about, I would say two thirds of the time, they come up with their own topic or their own way of conceptualizing it, not a suggestion Mt I have made. That is certainly true almost inevitably of the better students. Because what they see when I toss out a halfdozen suggestions, Then they see “Ah, now I see how to conceptualize.” Then they do their own. 220 Irequireafirstandaseconddraft,andlamgettingabsolutelynowhere with that. Even the best of students. I mean [names students] some of the best students we‘ve ever had around here, I’m sure simply corrected what I... you know Ellen yes, That is always the danger when you do drafting, especially if you do mark on them, especially if you don’t have the time to have some sort of conference Reed: I won’t say that I don’t have time, but I will confess to not taking the time (laughter) Now, the course where I think I’m most successfixl is an upper level course in old testament electives, Old Testament special topics course. And the topic varies: Isaiah one year, Jeremiah one year, and Ezekiel and Daniel the third year. Actually I rotate them backwards. It just kind of works out Mt way. (Looks at Lance) Keep your mouth shut. (All laugh) Lance: I didn’t say a thing! Reed: Oh yes you did! Your body language is screaming. Anyway, iert course,thenameofthegameaslteachitishowdolasa biblical scholar, how does the student as a biblical scholar learn to read the text to see wlmt the text says. And there are, I guess, twelve to fifteen so called methods of biblical study. And so they have a book with brief discussion... In the conversation above, Ellen, the English professor, interrupts Reed’s monologue to comment on the results of his method of working with drafting. In doing so she ofl'ers an alternative: conferencing with less marking. Reed responds with a joke that lms some seriousness to it. The issue of how much time to spend with students on their writing has been debated for some time in many arenas. It is apparent from Reed’s remark Mt he does not want to debate about or to discuss that issue. He also shows some awareness of criticism fi'om Lance, the other religion professor, in regard to the way in which the courses are conducted. Lance had previously served as chair, and perhaps some of the interaction may be based on a history unavailable to the onlooker. Reed continues for a few more minutes, describing his class, ending with his comment on drafts: But even there what I get, the difference between the first draft and second draft, is they go back and correct the mistakes Mt I’ve marked. And even if I...Now, if I 221 Debra: Ellen Reed: Ellen: Reed: Ellen: write out in the margin, “This belongs earlier in the paper, see page three”, you know, they’ve got computers, they can cut and paste, they will do Mt. But if I refer them to two books, there ain’t a chance of a proverbial snowball that they’re going to look them up. Maybe Mt’s not even, maybe... I don’t know whether I did before I was in graduate school, in all candor. I think I hold my students to a standard I’d never even seen in college. I make no bones about it. That course is a second or third year seminary level course. And I’ve had people write back and say “I never had anything like that in seminary. That is the single best...” It’s not as much reading as they have in seminary. But it’s the single best course they’ve ever had at any level, or that they had until they got to graduate school. I don’t I tell you what I can’t get them to do. Well on the other hand, I’m usually pretty darn proud of what I do get We had a Russian student here a year so ago, and I could see he had awfixlly good training in Russia before he came here. But he did a paper on Jeremiah for me-- which by the way, he politely declined help in translating the passage fiom Hebrew, and I think he declined it because he had already figured out he read Hebrew better then I did—I sent a copy to a fiiend of mine at Southwestern Seminary, they were supposed to have some in depth program I suggested he might be ready for graduate school. I said “Read this” He wrote back “You’re right! He’s ready for graduate work in Old Testament!” Well, going back to that idea about getting students to more than just changing what you marked in the margins. And the whole question of getting them to apply things outside as you said “have you referenced these?” Have any of you done, tried some different techniques to help them do that differently. I get best revisions when I use one on one conferencing where I don’t mark on papers. If I mark on the paper, they don’t really change. But if I talk to them, and especially try to work through their argument orally and have them take notes while they are going along, I’ll often get fairly substantive revisions. So it’s not perhaps that they are unwilling to revise, though, Mt’s often the case yea ...but it my well be that they can’t see how to do it better the second time through yes, Or Mt they do; it’s sort of a knee jerk reaction Mt something is wrong, it’s marked, I fix it, its better, that’s something. And they think that they’ve made a stride, and if there is a bigger stride they could have made they may not do it simply because it means extra work and extra time and they think they’ve made some gain, so it doesn’t seem quite as much worth it to go back and make the larger gain. In this case, Ellen, the English professor, and I both interrupt in order to refocus and offer “advice.” For a moment, Reed appears to listen and learn It is more diflicult to determine if his comment might result in change, because immediately following Ellen’s comment, he moves the conversation on to a new topic. In order for lore to be developed, Reed would 222 have to assume an attitude of inquiry and would need to be offered proof perhaps in more concrete and real terms. Something else may have been occurring here, something that was probably occurring in other situations. I have mentioned before Mt the faculty may have been appealing to their expectations and goals as persuasive techniques to defend or present their case to their audience of peers and investigator. I would like to proceed a step fixrther and build from Stock and Robinson’s reference to the “projected selves” of speakers within interactioml conversation. They note that these projected selves appear most fiequently in the talk of teachers. What occurs when many teachers lmve a conversation then? I would speculate Mt in the first few meetings, they continue to use constructed dialogue or enactments and reenactments in order to rhetorically construct themselves as teachers. As Reed presents his constructed dialogue, and interacts with Lance in a provocative fashion, he is constructing a rhetorical self within the conversation Having been a student at Southwark, I was aware Mt Lance had been at Southwark many years before Reed had become part of the faculty. I might speculate that one of the reasons Mt he may not have been open to participating in inquiry may have been a perceived need on his part to project a strong and controlled self. Lore and Change As my discussion of Sarah and Reed as they appear in the two conversations above shows, there are several variables that may come into play in the decisions about or even contemplation of using writing in the classroom The variables involved in changes reflect the review of literature Mt Dave Brown and Terry Rose offer in “Self Reported Classroom Impact of Teacher’s Theories About Learning and Obstacles to Implementation.” In their 223 review of literature they point out that instructors’ understandings of teaching are influenced by several factors. They note that according to a study by Kagan and others, experience in the classroom and interaction with other ficulty influenced teachers more than cognitive research studies. In their own study, Brown and Rose found Mt the respondents’ practical theory was eclectic, including foundational knowledge as well as newer concepts. The example of colleagues was one of the major influences in their decision making processes in regards to classroom practice. In Ways of Thinking: Ways of Writing, George Hillocks commented that although he and the other researchers did not observe the ficulty whom they studied make many any changes during the duration of the study, they did notice deh'beration about changes, and these deliberations can be connected to theory. In fixrther discussion of the results, he notes that If teacher knowledge is constructed as I have argued it is, and if epistemological stance plays an important role in its construction and use, then it is unlikely that teachers will change because of outside efi‘orts to change methods or curriculum. Further, if epistomological stance and teacher knowledge have a powerfixl influence on reflective practice, direct efforts to help teachers become more reflective will very likely fiil. Change in thinking and reflective practice will almost necessarily entail that teachers reconstruct their knowledge, especially if the teachers hold non- optirnistic beliefs about students and if they have adopted an objectivist stance. Reformers will have to find ways and means of helping teachers reconstruct their knowledge and stance (1999 135). Thus, his conclusion seems to lead to a point that has been hinted at in many Writing Across the Curriculum studies: those instructors who have an active student centered philosophy of teaching and learning will be more apt to adopt writing to learn activities and assignments to their courses Mn those who have a passive, teacher centered understanding of pedagogy (Walvoord, Kleindasser). 224 According to both Wendy Bishop and Janet Emig, changing teachers’ practices require a kind of “conversion” In Something Old, Something New, Bishop describes what she saw when she followed students of a seminar on teaching Basic Writing taught by Tom Bridges, an instructor who based his classroom technique and content on research and theory that leads towards collaborative work in the classroom The degree of change that occurred in the teachers’ own practices was connected to their identities and “modified by teachers’ preexisting histories and personal style or preferences and was influenced by their current estimation of student needs” (135). What Bishop observed in the instructors she followed back to their own classrooms over the following year were versions of either conversion or appropriation of a few ideas that were deemed useful Some of the instructors put aside information for fixrther use, others expressed verbal agreement, but then either did not use the methods or abandoned them Two experienced “conversion” either in giving up old methods in exchange for the new or internalizing the ideas Mt were the basis of the method. Bishop notices how the terms used in talking about the seminar were much like religious terms. One characteristic that Bishop identified as most important for changing classroom practice and leading to “conversion” was tolerance: tolerance for oneselfas an instructor, for the student as learners, and for the methods (140). Janet Emig uses the same term “conversion” when she discusses what its takes for teachers to change their classroom practices. She lists many activities in which teachers must be involved in order to be converted, like writing, and watching other people write, watching patterns of writing development, and paying close attention to the paradigms of those learning to write. “What is most powerful and persuasive, developmentally, of course, is direct, active personal experience since only personal experience can transform 225 into personal knowledge” (65). Janet Emig is referring to research; this is another area of change Mt has corresponded to and affected classroom practice. Of course, I am cautious of equating involvement or interaction with learning; but it is a more likely place for learning or the development of a shared body of knowledge to occur. My reason for saying Mt it is a location for shared knowledge is created is based upon Norman Denzin’s observation Mt “Language and speech do not mirror experience: They create experience and in the process of creation constantly transfer Mt which is being descrxhed” (5). What the faculty say creates a new reality not necessarily revealing a reality Mt already exists. This resonates with the theory of emergent text that Stock and Robinson develop. The conversations Mt they describe are comprised of a variety of actions within a context of student and teacher dialogue. The emergent text Mt is created in conversation is the location in which and hem which student learning occurs: Because they are characterized by dual references to a recalled past and an imagined fixture, and because they are realized in an enacted present consisting of the relations among a set of actors presently engaged, we find these actions, realized in language to be dramatizations not only of individual’s processes of learning but also of the community’s emerging hermeneutics— its informing and patterned processes of negotiating meanings and values.(l 89) This relates to David Russell’s activity theory in which epistemology is developed within particular networks. The ficulty participants became part of a short lived network, and in the case of Sarah, Victor and Alex, developed a new understanding of the genre of essay exams. Thus, whether any of them change or not, we can say that lore was developed. Commentary on Lore I stated above that I could not make any claims of seeing change occur, however, I can discuss my own change and the possibilities of change when Lore is invovled. After 226 my participation in the conversations, I returned to my writing classroom with a new perspective. The journals I had been using had been slowly evolving into journals that did not teach the students to use that genre as a method of note-taking or even investigation. I hadbegunusingthemasagradebasedmeansofmakingsuretheywerereadingthetext enough to answer certain questions, more than to ensure close reading of the text. Participating in the conversations made me realize Mt I needed to rethink them, and I am in the process of deciding just what role they will play in my writing classroom I also felt validated in the approaches I took towards text, following Barthohnae and Petroskey’s lead, and have continued to discuss both readings and misreadings with students in my courses. Faculty may benefit fi'om discussing writing, especially when they discuss it in terms of the goals and objectives of education. Perhaps in fixrther conversations, voices like Sarah’s who list as their goals critical literacy will be heard. Faculty are interested in change, according to Walvoord and colleagues. In 1994, seventy percent out of 112 members of eight departments of University of Cincinnati ficulty said Mt in the past two years they had read something on teaching. WAC may need to collaborate in order to fill the “need” these faculty have to improve. As Robert Jones and Joseph Comprone stated in their 1993 article, “Where do we go next in Writing Across the Curriculum,” “permanent success in the WAC movement will be established only when writing faculty and those from other disciplines meet halfway, creating a curricular and pedagogical dialogue Mt is based on and reinforced by research”(61). And as Norman Denzin noted, 227 ...active theorizing—theorizing that grows out of practice/experience rather than theories into practice....the ways in which each of us understands theory that already exists or theory Mt we generate seems to be through a lens Mt is particular to our experiences and is uniquely personal as it collides with and against others in this society....Therefore, personal meaning here suggests self with other, not selfin isolation, and is suggests self Mt is continually made and changed and made again depending on experiences with others(28). As I approach the end of my narrative, I see Mt I have proceeded fiom the tensions of researchers who might perceive the need to continue research Mt would create “others” through studies that are based on dichotomy to conversations in which connections between ficulty create new knowledge about genres and writing. Using categories can have a place in ethnomethodology, because it allows a researcher to perceive themes and where those themes break down However, it is imperative that WAC research in particular be fiarned in context, both of the goals of faculty and disciplines and in the new networks Mt are created when ficulty come together to discuss writing. My concern with my own research is Mt by discussing Lore as knowledge formed and infoer by composition research as opposed to lore as that knowledge about writing that is formed without Mt research, I have not created my own dichotomy. However, if more composition research is open to the conversations with other faculty Mt allow for real exchange and knowledge formation, then Lore will be informed by lore. Writing Across the Curriculum proponents may find the three different persepctives I have taken on my data as informative. Discussions of genre within disciplines requires defining those genres by what they are and what they are not. My use of Mofi‘ett’s categories shows how the use of categories helps to illuminate characteristics Mt do and do not fit those categories’ pre-set definitions. Thus, it reinforces Russell and Bazerman’s 228 emphasis on investigating genres within the active networks in which they operate. My research should also warn WAC researchers to avoid considering surveys of types of assignments as valid ways to determine what writing is actually occurring, especially surveys meant to reinforce filse dichotomies. My second approach to my data, a focus on ficulty intent, allowed a closer look at the expectations of the ficulty in my study and revealed the differences between their understanding of what they were preparing students for in terms of writing and other skills and their objectives in assigning writing in their classrooms. I also realized Mt the ficulty members’ self-report of these expectations and objectives was as much a means of constructing their own rationale for what they asked of students as it was a representation of practice. In many ways, I realized that in the discussion Mt we were having was a locus of theorizing or at least expressing and composing theoretical lore in the faulty members’ exchanges with each other especially. At the same time Mt this second approach validated findings such as Walvoord and colleagues in In the Long Run, that ficulty assimilated WAC approaches and techniques into their classrooms according to their own self-assessed needs and goals, it also disphyed the fict Mt faculty theory in practice may vary fi'om espoused theory. This of course, led to my third perspective of my data, which considered the ficulty conversations from a more contextualized point of view. By applying discourse analysis to my data, I was able to note the level of involvement and the interaction of the ficulty members’ individual lore. What became apparent was that while some of their lore could be considered Lore-theorized practice based on theory and research validated and accepted within the discipline of composition- -others shared lore Mt might not lead to 229 writing that would enhance students’ understanding of the discipline or of writing itself. Certain characteristics of the self report of ficulty members who seemed to have some concept of Lore and to be open to adjusting their lore in light of new information correlated to their optimistic view of students arxd adherence to educational prinicples Mt were more critical in nature. This third perspective provides fixrther impetus for WAC proponents to see WAC as connected to a larger force working towards change in higher education Susan McLeod notes in “Writing Across the Curriculum in a Time of Change” that in light of researcher Michael F ullan’s map of paradigmatic change, flexible and local level efforts are necessary for making changes in the larger institution. She notes Mt “One of the strengths of the WAC movement has been its work on that very level, with individul teachers, on their pedagogical practice, in collaborative workshops” (21). She firrther state Mt the collaboration leads to “one of the common outcomes of such workshops, the conversion experience...(21). Thus, WAC proponents must look for fellow advocates who are concerned with critical education and Open to discovery of Lore and they must engage them in conversations in which open exchange can occur. 230 EPILOGUE Here, the maker of this book takes [her] leave... now I hope that those who listen to this little treatise or read it. . . that if there is anything that displeases them, that they attribute it to my inability and not to my intent, that would have willingly said better if I had ability. (Chaucer ’s Canterbury Tales) I would like to extend the metaphor of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales further in my final comment on the research Mt I have done. My experience in completing this study has caused me to contemplate the connection between the construction of this dissertation and the, the parallels between my experience of reading the work and reading my own transcripts, field notes, memories and perceptions, and the similarity in the way in which the authors of both narrative frameworks appear within their own texts. I do not claim to be a Chaucer scholar, but I as an English major I have been required to study his work at length in at least three situations. Each one provided me with a new understanding of the work. As I understand Canterbury Tales now, I see Mt Chaucer attempted to provide his readers with a vivid picture of the characters, like the Wife of Bath or the Miller, to name two more well known, through at least three different methods: his description at the beginning that provided a sense of their status in society, his “recor ” of their conversations, and his retelling of their stories. If he had only provided one of the three, our sense of who the characters were and what their perceptions of their world were like would be limited. In a similar fishion, if I may so twist our texts to connect, I have attempted to provide a stronger sense of the experience I had. By discussing the ways in which the genres Mt the ficulty at Southwark College did or did not fit into James Moffett’s categories, I hoped to provide not only a closer look at the genres, but also a closer look at the use of categories in WAC research as a limited mean of understanding 231 how writing is used in other disciplines. By then turning to the expectations, goals, perceptions of students, and assigning and evaluation of genres, I meant to provide a wider context in order to portray the ways in which such a context added or complicated one’s understanding of writing and of the instructor’s theory of education and writing as it occurs in SouthwarkCollege. In that chapter, I also pointed out the fact Mt their comments were not only report of what was occurring, but also a means of presenting themselves. My third perspective provided an even broader context of the conversations themselves, though still limited. Within Mt context, I pointed out the ways in which the conversations were an intersection of lore and of the creation of themselves as teachers. My ermerience in constructing these three views mirror my experience of reading the Canterbury Tales. My first experience in reading the stories was in high school. We were required to memorize and recite the prologue in the original dialect and to read portions of the tale, skipping the bawdy portions. My reading and memorizing was filled with delight and dread. Having to make sense of the language, to commit it to memory and then to annunciate it properly in front of thirty other students provided the dread. Finding color and humor in the stories provided the delight. I came away with an understanding of Chaucer Mt could be simplified to this statement: It is a nice group of stories, good example of a fiame story, perhaps it might be worth working through the details of the language to understand. My reading of my research project similarly provoked feelings of dread and delight. I was struck by the immensity of notes and transcripts, certain Mt my presentation would revealmeastheirnposterinthegraduateprogram, anddauntedbytryingto make sense of what had happened. My delight was in the interaction with the ficulty members—teachers 232 who were sincerely trying to educate students just as I was--and in the extremely interesting conversations Mt we had. I was also delighted by the realization Mt I was seeing something new, or at least new to me in these conversations. My final impression was: nice interaction, good examples of certain categories of genres, certainly worth the effort to pursue and present. My next reading of Chaucer occurred in college, at Southwark College, actually, during which I might say, I finally saw the Wife from Bath. By reading the description more carefully, by having aspects of her personality pointed out to me, and by realizing Mt her story was in response as part of the larger discourse, I came to see her as a much more dimensional character and to see my own views of being a woman reflected. In my reading of the narrative of my research, I also began to realize Mt the act of separating out portions of the conversations in my coding kept me and my reader fiom seeing the larger discourse. In order to provide and understand the narrative, I had to consider aspects of the conversation through discourse analysis. Many of these aspects began to stand out to me. As a result of a meeting with my committee members, I also realized Mt the perspectives I was providing needed to connect to my understanding of the work as a whole. Ohio University was the next institution Mt asked me to consider Chaucer again, and I approached the work with more confidence, since I had previous experience and Mt experience had been positive. In this course, my reading was enhanced by two new aspects: more discussion of the social and historical environment of Chaucer’s writing and application of theoretical models for reading. This allowed me to notice the social commentary occurring in the dialogue as well as the way in which Chaucer constructed 233 himselfas narrator in the text; the work was no longer merely an example or a story, it became, for me, a part of a larger dialogue. I was also able to consider my previous readings and critique them For this dissertation, my committee meeting provided a similar rethinking of my perspective. I realized Mt my reading needed to be more theoretical and more rhetorical in my approach. Also, between the meeting and the submission of this docmnent for defense, I presented two papers at two different conferences in which I presented fiesh perspectives, on different topics, and received positive feedback. Both of these experiences encouraged me to reconsider the work that had been done in WAC fi'om a more critical perspective and to present my own ideas more boldly. Finally, I have arrived at a point tlmt reading Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is as much about reading Chaucer as it is about reading the tales. And it is more about reading constructions of Chaucer Mn it is about reading Chaucer. In other words, the act of reading is a reading Mt is aware of the construction of not only the text but the persona. This dissertation likewise becomes a process of reading my own readings. In some ways the construction of my persona has migrated from ethnomethodologist to narrator, and the narrative I have written is as much a means of presenting myself as much as presenting the research I have done. 234 APPENDICES 235 Appendix A: Writing Across the Curriculum in Old Testament Literature Discussion : For this informal study, I worked with the professor of Old Testament Literature to rewrite his syllabus to include journals, creative essays, outlines for sermons as part of the learning and assessment plan for his course. The exciting portion of the course for both the instructor and myself were the creative assignments Mt asked the students to imagine themselves as part of the text or to apply the principles Mt they were learning fi'om the text to their own decisions about ethics. I distributed surveys to the students in the class at the beginning of the course and the end of the course, asking them about their view of writing, their usual use of writing and a self-report on their level of writing skill. Included in this appendix are the course syllabus and the some data included in tables under each question Results: The survey was designed to determine attitudes towards writing. The students were asked to answer the following three questions as sincerely as possible. 1. How confident are you about your writing skills? Very Somewhat Not at all Before class 6 l4 4 After class 11 11 0 2. How important do you feel writing is to your lifestyle and work? Very Somewluxt Not at all Before class 11 10 3 After class 17 3 0 3. Have you improved your writing since the beginning of this class? (On final survey) Discussion: 18 responded yes; 4 responded no The results of the survey indicated Mt using writing Mt allowed students to interact with texts through writing, to engage in learning with the use of journals, summaries and outlines was usefixl in helping students to feel more confident about their writing and to view writing as usefirl to their lifestyle, work and learning process. Students reported Mt they would use writing to study in the fixture and Mt the types of writing that they did outside of class were lesson plans, journals, business memos, newsletters, sermons, personal letters, and notetaking. Syllabus 236 BIBL 212 OLD TESTAMENT H SPRING SEMESTER, 1993 Four Semester Hours Credit 1. DESCRIPTION A close examination of the ma or themes and important Psalms e. g., Messianic Psalms) along with a study of the practical wisdom ound 1n Proverbs, Ecciesiastes, J ,and Song of Songs. I]. OBJECTIVES 1. To be able to identify and describe the wisdom perspective in the OT. 2. To be able to interpret various types of Hebrew poetry. 3. To be able to analyze the five OT poetic books. 4. To be able to express responses, summaries, and feelings in clear and accurate written form. 111. OUTLINE 1 The wisdom perspective 2 Hebrew poetry 3. Analysis of Job 4. Analysis of Psalms 5 Analysis of Proverbs 6 Analysis of Ecciesiastes 7 Analysis of Song of Songs 1V. PROCEDURES 1. Beginning with the second class session, students are expected to complete the assignments before each class session. Late work will be penalized. 2 A "writing to learn" approach will be followed, requiring that a journal and a record of all writing assignments be kept. 3. No exams will be given. Written work will be graded. A copy of all written work will be brought to each class session, to be left with the professor. 4. Grading Jan. 14 Feb. 11 Journal Entries - 30 pts. Journal Entries - 30 pts. Paragraph Summaries - 30 pts. Twenty proverbs - 30 pts. Preaching/Teaching Outline - 50 pts. Preaching/Teaching outline - 50 pts. Jan. 21 Feb. 18 Journal Entries - 30 pts. Journal Entries - 30 pts. Paragraph Summaries - 30 pts. Paper - 30 pts. Hand-in paper - 50 pts. Preaching/Teaching Outline - 50 pts. Jan. 28 Feb. 25 Journal Entries - 30 pts. Journal Entries - 20 pts. Preaching/1’ caching outline - 50 pts. Response - 30 pts. Preaching/Teaching Outline - 50 Pts. Feb. 4 Journal Entries - 30 pts. Psalms for each type - 30 pts. Hand-in of3 best psalms - 50 pts. 5. Attendance Policy. Attendance of all sessions is required. In case of an unavoidable absence] additional make-up work will be required. 1t 15 the student's responsibility to check with the lprofessor concerning make-up work. Tardy arrival or early daparture that results m a student missing one or more of a class session will require make-up work. e will meet for only 32 clock hours of class sessions. A person missing more than 8 cloglaihaours should not expect to rece1ve credit for the course, and will ordinarily be counseled to wit w 237 6. Late penalty A flgrace period of 5 days after the due date will be allowed for all work. Work received in the ofessor's 0 cc within this grace period will be counted as "on time." Once the grace period has expir a 10% per day flade penalty will be assessed. R uired make-up work will be due two weeks after the absence, and wi 1 subject to the 10% per day pena ty linmediate y following the due date. V. ASSIGNMENTS Jan. 14 Assignments 1. Read Job 1-21. Journal Entry. 2. Read Text pages l-62. Journal Entry. 3. Prepare a one sentence summary of each paragraph assigned to you. A. Eliphaz/Job 4:1 - 7:21 B. Bildad/Job 8:1 - 10:22 C. Zophar/Job 11:1 - 14:22 Journal Entry. 4. Hand-in a preaching/teaching outline based on a passage in Job. 15:1 - 17:16 18:1 - 19:29 20:1 - 21 :34 Jan. 21 Assignments 1. Read Job 22-42. Journal Entry. 2. Read Text pages 63-112. Journal Entry. 3. Prepare a one sentence summary of each paragraph assigned to you. A. Eliphaz/Job 22:1 - 24:25 B. Bildad/Job 25:1 - 31:40 C. Elihu 32:1 - 37:24 Journal Entry. D. God/Job 38:1 - 40:5 God/Job 40:6 - 42:6 4. Hand-in a two page paper - What 1 Would Say to Job. Jan. 28 Assignments 1. Read Psahns 1-41. Journal Entry. Read Psalms 72. Journal Entry. 2. Read Text pages 113-154. Journal Entry. 3. Hand-in a preaching/teaching outline based on a passage in Psalms. Feb. 4 Assignments 1. Read Psalms 73-106. Journal Entry. Read Psahns 107-150. Journal Entry. 2. Write a psalm of your own creation in each psalm type. Journal Entry. 3. Hand-in three of your best psalms. Feb. 11 Assignments 1. Read Proverbs 1-31. Journal Entry. 2. Read Text pages 155-188. Journal Entry. 3. Write 20 proverbs of your own creation. Journal Entry. 4. Hand-in a preaching/teaching outline based on a passage in Proverbs. 1. Read Ecclesiastes 1-12. Journal Entry. 2. Read Text pages 189-222. Journal Entry. 3. Write a two page paper -Where 1 Think I Can Find Meaning in Life. Journal Entry. 4. Hand-in a preaching/teaching outline based on a passage in Ecclesiastes. Feb. 25 Assignments 1. Read Song of Songs 1-8. Journal Entry. 2. Read Text pages 223-258. Journal Entry. 3. Write a two page response to the Song of Songs. 4. Hand-in a preaching/teaching outline based on a passage in Song of Songs. 238 Appendix B: Surveys, letters and agenda Initial Survey The following questions are intended to gather information about how faculty use and view writing as a tool for learning. The term writing in this survey includes journals, marginalia, note taking, email, and other types of informal writing, as well as formal writing. Please answer the questions to the best of your understanding. Thank you. 1. How is writing most often used in your field or discipline? 2.What kinds of writing do you usually assign in courses for majors in your field? \ 3.What do you want students to learn fiom these same courses for majors in your field? 4.How does the writing that you assign in these courses assist the students in learning? *ttt****#***IttttiItt*******#**#**#*i****tt*i*******#********#**¥#**#***** Any comments? 239 Agenda for First Round of Group Interviews Dear , Thank you for agreeing to participate in the rest of my naturalistic study. I appreciate your thoughtfixl response to my survey, and I look forward to discussing writing with you in person As I indicated to you in my previous letter, the second stage will entail my tape recording and taking field notes of two one hour-long meetings at which you, your colleagues and I discuss writing as it occurs in your disciplines. For the first meeting, which will take place on in Knight Hall C004, the agenda will be determined by your responses to the following questions. Feel free to glance at them beforehand so Mt during our meeting we can discuss any of them that interest you. The first two groups of questions look at connections between the first two questions of the survey you completed. If you do not ask students to complete writing assignments that are similar to the writing normally done in your particular field, what makes the assignments Mt you give more usefixl to the students? If you do ask students to complete writing assignments that are similar to the writing normally done in your field, do you introduce them to your students as such? That is, do you tell students that this is the type of writing Mt they will do as they proceed into the field? Do you present them with examples that are done by “experts” in your field? The rest of the questions pertain to the third and fourth questions of the survey. Of the writing assignments that you have your students write in courses for their major, at which assignments are a majority of the students most successfirl? At which are they usually unsuccessfixl? What steps do you take in order to assist the students to learn what you would like them to learn fiom their writing assignment? Do you look at any of the writing assignments in process? Or do you normally see the finished product of their process? Do you assign ungraded writing? What type of writing assignments are not graded? When you grade writing assignments, what percentage weight do you place on various features of writing? For example, do you place 40% weight on logical analysis, 50% on development of ideas, and 10% on grammar and mechanics? Do you inform students of the percentage distribution when you give them the assignment? We may not cover all of these questions, but I think they will provide a sense of structure for our conversation I'll see you then! Sincerely, 240 Agenda for Second Round of GroujLInterviews Our Agenda: Having listened to the tapes of our prior meetings, I decided that there were some paths I would like to follow. However, I would be happy to discuss other areas of our prior conversations Mt interested you, so these questions are not meant to be definitive: 1. What are the specific connections between reading and writing, in your opinion? Should consideration of writing in the disciplines include consideration of reading as well? 2. Do revisions help students? Are there ways to help convince students Mt rough drafts are not always first copies? 3. Do you ever consider showing students your own work or writing in progress? 4. Many of you mentioned Mt you do not see yourself as preparing students to go on to graduate school in you field, but to enter the work place, since only a few will proceed on to graduate work. What skills do you feel are important specifically for broader success? What does your field offer them in this instance? How does writing enhance these skills? 5. How should the college at large, or even specific departments handle writing? Should there be larger conversations? 241 Letter Requesting Individual Interviews Dear, Thank you for participating in the first and second stages of my dissertation research. The data that you have allowed me to collect has given a more accurate understanding of how writing takes place in classrooms in various disciplines. I am writing to request your fixrther assistance. Would you consider participating in the third stage of my study? For the third and final stage, I would like to conduct a halfhour interview with you about what you are doing with writing in your classroom I am making this request because the assignments and responses to writing that you make sounded particularly interesting when you discussed them in the meetings we had. During the interview, I would be interested in seeing examples of student writing for those assignments and any prompts, syllabi or reminders that you pass out to your class regarding writing. If you are grading any essays, I would be interested in seeing the comments you have made. I would also like to attend a classroom session or two in which writing is assigned, discussed or used, if that would be possible. We could schedule a meeting to follow a class time, if Mt would work for you. Classroom practices will not be evaluated; they will be observed. My purpose is to get an accurate account of what occurs in regard to the use of writing in courses other than composition courses. If it is not possible for me to attend a classroom session, I would still like to interview you, though My schedule is very flexible, and I would be able to meet with you any Monday, Wednesday or Friday, with the exception of April 9, at any time of day. I would also be able to meet with you any Thursday afternoon, after 3:30. If you have a halfhour of time that you could allow me to visit you in your office or classroom, please let me know. I would like to complete my study by April 19, since you will be heading into the last weeks of the semester after Mt, and I realize you will have many time constraints at Mt point Feel flee to contact me at home, 8920 Monsanto Drive, Cincinnati, OH 45231, by phone (513) 729-3937 or via email at courtwdk@email.uc.edu. I will call and email you next week to confirm a time. Thank you for your time. Sincerely, 242 Appendix C: Charts fi'om surveys Figures 1 and 2: Writing Used in the Discipline of Faculty at Georgetown College Writing Used in the Disicplines '5‘ 30 TypeeorGenrac g; [3 research articles in journal: 26 E] reflecfiveorobservational journals :3 I criticulamlysis 21 [:l textbooks 33, - intemet publication 1a [:3 statistical reports I; z. E] sormonsloutllnosforpublicspoechos :3 . I mnosmphs 13 :3, El mm 13 1:] psychological assessments 1: 3.121: L I historic-Imam , 2: hi E] bookrwim ; , :4 6 Uses otWri'ng |:] Igllgltmnnbfiscrael l spehlmtnlt |:l alumnus I neural» 1:] am“ ssmgm I trellis-”mt 243 Figures 3 and 4: Writing Assigned in Courses at Georgetown College IDIDIDIDEIUDIDIDID Categories of Genres Assigned in Class 20* ‘E-‘é’l “Lit 62:35:)?" Types of Writing Assigned in Class 100 — 80 [j reflection I investigating D recording 60 I practice in specialized f1e|d [j recollecting 40 I moaning research papers essay exams/quizzes critiques of articles critical analysis emys reflective, reading and observation journal reflection papers position/reaction papers book reviews field work/ lab reports math problems/proofs topical mini projects and group projects historical biographical summary sermons/outlines for oral presentation samples of teaching materials explication of foreign language text personal accountdmrratives droughts before distension plot surnnnry 48 32 28 24 20 it %age 244 Figures 4 and 5: Faculty Expectations What Faculty Want Students to Learn in Courses ability to use higher cognitive skill ‘ to think independently 40 7 good commtmication skills material/lamwledge base professional skills and vocab. reading and research skills to promote personal growth DEIDIDID how to express ideas FIetItyrosporIeth‘ Mmponulni How Writing Aids Students in Learning 30 W 25 l] helpumdeatsleunsotlinkhdependsfly a [j fostersoomninfirnskfi 20 ‘1" I mmmmm [:1 providesprsofioeforpofeuhndsfilbsnd I helpsthemmskeseueofmid 15 [j helpsstudentsbnmmdslbemt E] mummofideu 10,,, I promotespenonalgrowlh messesleuning 245 Figure 6: More specific details of faculty expectations How Writing Assists Students in Learning NOD-5010) _L Requires research and reading Requires examining/criticizing others' Ideas Requires organiatlon or thoughts Fosters critical thinking Helps students think Multiple straits/feedback helps refine writing Teaches summarizing Introduces professional vocabulary Increases awareness of precision required In writing Makes them think Fosters learning Fosters learning how to learn Allows exposure to recent literature Requires clarification of ideas Requires verballzaflon of Ideas Displays understanding/ability to apply knowledge Requires synthesis Makes them examine their own Ideas C! I i: I [:1 I El [3 I E? D I [j I D I [:1 I 246 Figures 7 and 8 Lerud's Elmhurst Survey—WAC faculty rating of purpose of Writing 30~ UIIDIDID EDIE-DID tohslpstudentsiearnmaterislbetter tost’muletiehigheroowitiveskill totoetercomnuiestionekile tohelpemdentsieamtothinkindependeniiy mencowageexpresslonotidess topmmotepersonaiu'owli'l toprovldepnctleetorproteosiondsldls tcuseulesrnlng 25s 20s 15— 10r 5 m 0 __ wnc faulty-rank WAC boldly—56 Lenid's Study Non-WAC Faculty 257 20 l to foster cosmunieation skills 51": to help students learn to thinkindepenrhn 1 5 , to stimulate higher cognitive skill ‘ to help students learn material better to assess learning to provide practice for professional sldl to encourage expression of ideas to promote personal growth 247 Appendix D: James Mofl‘ett’s “Kinds of Writing” handout KINDS g5 URITINO Jones Noffett % : ew/ FICTION (Wflj’? EDITORIAL PLAYS REVIEH PERSONAL ESSAY POETRY THESIS ESSAY . M ( ) K (may) rACTUAL ARTICLE 774-153} M Mag») lfiUTOBIOGRAPHY BIOGRAPHY CHRONICLE NENOIR CASE PROFILE These kinds of sriting are exemplified by student samples in ACTIVE VOICES. s series of anthologies from elementary school through college. Jase: Noffett with“otnsrs.(Boyntbn/Cook); and by professional seaples in POINTS OF DEPARTURE: AN ANTHOLOGY OF NONFICTION, Jesse Noffett, and POINTS OF VIEN: AN ANTHOLOGY OF SHORT STORIES, JAMES Noffett~snd Kenneth R. NcElheny, Mentor, Nos Asericsn Library. 248 Appendix E: Assignment for Education Observation Journal OBSERVATION GUIDELINES FOR EDUCATION 307 Educating the Exceptiorml Child Georgetown College Education 307 requires a minimum ofien field hours in a special education setting. For these - experiences, I would like for you to view yourselfas an active observer. Be assertive by volunteering to help your assigned teacher with routine tasks or various other responsibilities which may include: (1) Small and large group instruction (2) Assisting with clerical work (3) Constructing instructional materials (4) Grading tests (5) Reading or telling stories, and (6) Tutoring students. However, you should plan to perform the following tasks which substitute for an observation log using the attached forms as guidelines: (1) Special Education Teacher Interview/Description of the demographics of the classroom and the category(ies) of the disabilities (2) Identify at least one community resource to address the disabilities identified in (1) (3) Identify school resources (included computer programs) that your teacher uses or can use to meet the needs of the identified students (4) Identity and discuss the tactics your teacher uses to teach social skills (5) Identify and discuss the classroom rules and procedures used by your teacher (6) Identify and discuss the physical environment interventions used by your teacher HO 6.1 (7) Using your observations/experiences as a starting point, complete the following HO 13.0 Self-Assessment of Teaching and Non-Teaching Responsibilities HO 13.1 Developing Effective Classroom Rules and Procedures HO 6.0 Effective Classroom Rules and Procedures (HO 6.0) (8) Visit the Family Resource Center and find out how the Center impacts services to special education student in the school. Visit the school counselor if the school does not have a Family Resource Center and find out how the counselor works with special education students in the school. (9) Regular Log (10) Regular Log 249 Appendix F: Assignment for Developmental Psychology Journal and Essay PSY 340 Observation Laboratory Notebook Weeklv Assignments Select any child you prefer for your observations. (If possible, observe one child throughout the ten weekly sessions - should the child you choose be absent during your observation session, you can observe another child of the same gender and include these as peer comparison observations in the final surmnary paper). The following information should be included in your observation notebook. This information will then be used in writing your summary paper. You will need an inexpensive stopwatch, a pen or pencil, a clipboard and paper for each observation. These observations will then be kept in a 3-ring, l-inch binder in chronological order. Each entry should include the date and week of the observation. During the later observations you will focus on specific areas of child behavior, and you should entitle the observation with the developmental focus (e. g., physical and motor development). The observation iournals will be reviewed during the middle of the semester You will turn them in on Monday. March 8th. I will return them to you as soon as possible. The notebooks will not be graded at this time, but feedback on your observations and recording format will be provided. Suggested changes should be incorporated during the last weeks of the semester. Observation Guidelines Week One In this first observation, spend initial time recording the name of the center, the name of the child observed, the age of the observed child, and a physical description of the child. Real-time observation with specific emplmsis on recording descriptive behavioral information about the child's specific behaviors and language during classroom activities. Record the setting, the activity, and the activity changes of the child. Record the number of children in an activity with the child, whether the teacher is present, and as much as possible, the language that other children and the teacher use toward the child. Avoid inferences or interpretations regarding behavior. Record directional arrows to indicate the positive or negative nature of the child's behavior. Week Two Real Time Observation Week Three Real Time Observation Week Four Real Time Observation Development.the observation. Week Five Real Time Observation focusing on PhyBIcal and Motor Bracket in red all examples of motor development that occur during Give a physical description of the child including body proportions,size, muscle tone, and coordination of movement. Consider influences of clothing and physical setting on freedom of movement and balance. 250 Week Six Real Time Observation focusing on Emotional Development. Bracket in red all examples of emotional expression; happiness, anger, affection, shyness, belongingness, loneliness, self-reliance, aggression, fear, sympathy, resentment, excitement, enthusiasm, fi'ustration, eagerness, and any other. Identify a behavior of concern (aggressiveness, difliculty sharing, noncompliance, shyness, resistance, lack of engagement in activities) and complete an ABC analysis (form to be provided). Include the ABC analysis with the real time observation in your observation notebook. Week Seven Real Time Observation focusing on Personal-Social Development. Bracket in red all social interactions which take place during the observation. Identify incidents involving sharing, parallel and cooperative play, sociodramatic pretend play, cooperative constructive play, or conflicts surrounding these areas. Document play initiations to the child fi'om other children) child's responses to those play initiations, the child's play initiations to other children. Week Eight Peal Time Observation focusing on Perceptual and Cognitive Development. all examples of mastery of basic concepts, problem- solving skills, creativity, inmginative play, and pre-academic skills. Week Nine Real Time Observation focusing on Speech and Language Development. Try to capture the exact words that the child uses - as complete a language sample as possible. Bracket in red instances of language and communication. If the child talks throughout the session, nmking direct quotations difficult, try to capture the number of words in each sentence, the vocabulary that the child uses, the sophistication of his or her grammar. Note if English is hisTher first language. Capture nonverbal communication as well - gestures, tone of voice, facial expressions, play sounds, etc. Week Ten Use an interval time sampling form (provided by the instructor) to capture child behaviors and interactions. Focus on tallying frequencies of each belmvior as it occurs, and summarize the behaviors at the end of the observation. Summary Paper and Completed Journal (Total = 250 points) At the end of your 10 week observation period, you will need to summarize your observation in a short paper. This would need to be a minimum of 5 typed, doublespaced pages which have 1 inch margins and use a default font. The paper (150 points) and your observation journal (100 points) will be due during the last class period. The paper will summarize and analyze your observations, based on the informtion presented in your text, classroom lecture material, videotape illustrations, demonstrations and class discussions. Analyze the child's development in different domains - does it appear typical, delayed, problematic for the child's chronological age? If you observed comparison peers, contrast the comparison peer's behavior with that of your identified child. Give specific examples of child behavior to illustrate your discussion points. The surmnary paper should give the reader a complete description of the child's behavior over multiple observations, in several play activities and play settings: 251 1. Describe the physical development of the child, including signs of illness, fatigue, estimations of energy level and activity changes, muscle tone and coordination. 2. Describe the child's perceptual, cognitive, and language skills. Describe the child's mean length of utterance (number of words in average sentence), the typical vocabulary, and the concepts conveyed. Describe the child's mastery of pre-academic skills necessary for school success. Describe the child's sensory-integration - sense of him or herselfin space and success in perceptual-motor activities. Describe the child's problem-solving skills and creativity. 3. Describe the child's social skills - independent or solitary play, parallel play, or cooperative play. Describe the child's preferred play areas and themes and the consistency or variability of these preferences. Describe the child's preferences in play partners. How skilled is the child in play entry? conflict negotiation? sharing? Does the child need the teacher to facilitate successful play? Does the child exhibit empathy, and the ability to take another child's perspective? Does the child comfort children when they are upset? Note instances of negative social behaviors - aggressiveness, taunting, inappropriate play themes (aggressive or sexual in nature). 4. Describe the child's emotional expressiveness. What range of emotional expression have you observed? Is the child able to label his or her feelings and those of others? Is the child able to regulate his or her emotions or does he or she get "out of control" until calrmd or soothed by adults? Does the adult need to prepare the child for change or for nonpreferred activities? Does the child exhibit tantrums? How long do they last, and how easily his he or she redirected or comforted? 5. Describe the child's independence and skills in adaptive behavior. Is the child able to follow individual and group directions, follow the classroom routines, remember classroom rules, and comply with them? Is the child able to meet his or her self-care needs within the routines of the classroom - eating, toothbrushing, coat on and off, toileting, naptime? Is the child able to organize materials to complete an activity? Does the child follow entry and clean up routines or does he or she need teacher assistance? 6. Summarize the child's developmental levels according to chronological age expectations. 252 Appendix G: Cost Accounting Syllabus Georgetown College BUA 318 - Cost Accounting (3 credit hours) Syllabus, Fall Semester 1999 Course Description: Business cost accounting, special records and cost statistics and application to particular business organizations. Textbook: Homgren, Foster, and Datar, Cost Accounting: A Managing Emphasis. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997. Ninth Edition. Course Objectives: 1. To provide a study of the fimdamentals of cost accounting as they relate to routine and non-routine reporting to managers. 2. To provide a study of cost accounting techniques used in external reporting. 3. To provide a study of cost accounting for various decision and control purposes. 4. To study some international settings regarding cost accounting issues. Requirements of the Course: 1. Class attendance is expected of each student. In borderline cases of grades, attendance and attitude in class are important factors. Any student missing more than 20% of the class periods will automatically receive a failing grade. 2. All homework must be turned in to me. Any homework I receive after it has been requested will be considered late. Any late homework will be given ‘/2 credit. Written homework need not be perfect to receive full credit. However, Lotus or Excel homework assigrmients will need to be correct in order to receive credit. 3. There will be a comprehensive "make-up" test given at the end of the semester to any student who missed a test during the semester with a medical excuse. 4. Throughout the semester several quizzes will be given. If a student misses a quiz, the grade will be a zero, and no ”nuke-up" quizzes will be given. I will, however, drop the lowest quiz grade for each student. 5. In addition to the homework assignments in the textbook, the student will also be required to read and report on various articles from accounting periodicals in the library. This will enable the student to become familiar with periodicals of his/her profession and to learn of the current issues facing the accounting profession. 6. Each student is expected to participate orally in class discussions and review of homework. 7. Each student will be required to use the Internet as a part of the homework grade. 253 BIBLIOGRAPHY 254 BIBLIOGRAPHY Ackerman, John M. “The Promise of Writing to Learn.” Written Communication. 10 (1993): 334-70. Anson, Chris M. “Toward a Multidimensional Model of Writing in the Academic Disciplines.” Writing in Academic Disciplines. Ed. David A. Jolifl"e. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1988. 1-33. Applebee, Arthur, Anne Auten and Fran Lehr. Writing in the Secondary School: English and the Content Areas. Urbana IL: NCTE, 1981. 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