Response to Readings for 24 Mar 08

“Diving In” by Shaughnessy

Shaughnessy encourages teachers of basic writing students to be more reflective about their own methods. Using her own “developmental scale for teachers” (312), Shaughnessy explains her four stages of: 1) guarding the tower, 2) converting the natives, 3) sounding the depths, and 4) diving in. To better understand how to improve our students’ writing, Shaughnessy argues that we must make a shift in our thinking between stages 2 and 3 from that of “what is this student’s problem?” to one of “what is problematic about my teaching strategies?”

Before reading Shaughnessy’s article I had not heard the term “basic” used in connection with writing done by students with special situations. I have never taught a basic writing course, but I have heard teachers who do refer to their students as remedial or unfortunately by more derogatory words. For example, I actually overheard a graduate student once say about her basic writing students, “They either need to get with the program or go start flipping burgers.” I have to say I like the term “basic” better because to me it connotes a foundation on which to build improvements.

I think Shaughnessy’s four stages adequately sum up the way many teachers feel about students who are not easy to teach. I know I have fallen into the gatekeeper (guarding the tower) trap in the past and thinking my methods should work for everyone. I quickly found myself in the illogical position of hitting my head against a wall thinking I would eventually break through without changing my actions. My only concern regarding Shaughnessy’s stages is that very few graduate students – the very people who end up teaching most of the basic writing courses – have enough time in their positions to fully evolve to the third and fourth developmental stages. How can we speed up the awareness and development of graduate students teachers?

“Inventing the University” by Bartholomae

Bartholomae argues that basic writers often are unable or lack the experience to easily enter the academic discourse community. Using samples of student writing, Bartholomae explains how each example either fails or succeeds in meeting the requirement to participate in a specialized discussion. Many times, the students who have the hardest time entering academic discourse use “commonplaces” (626) that originate from an author who is focusing on his/her own intentions versus writing for the needs of the reader.

Bartholomae’s points remind me of many discourse analysis theories that discuss how language-in-use conveys unique meaning to the individuals within a discourse community. By using specific words, phrasing, etc, members of a discourse community recognize others as having the right to speak. For basic writing students, Bartholomae asserts that the academic’s language-in-use has up to this point eluded the students’ understanding.
I know modeling writing behavior for students is not a popular method of teaching for many researchers, but I feel this might be a good way to introduce students to academic discourse. Providing a guide, of sorts, to a strange environment could help students grasp the “native” language more quickly. Total immersion in a discourse language may be appropriate for some students, but other students (e.g. basic writers) might benefit from seeing how insiders of a discourse structure their writing.

“The Language of Exclusion” by Rose

Rose demonstrates how the language writing teachers use to discuss basic writers actually excludes the very people they say they want to help. Much like Shaughnessy, Rose feels academics often reduce writing to a skill with easily identifiable parts, thus treating basic writing as a problem to overcome and influencing teaching that misses a larger issue. To illustrate his message, Rose discusses “five notions” (549) – behaviorism and quantification of writing, English as a skill, remediation, illiteracy, and the myth of transience – providing some history and explanation for each.

I think Rose proves once again how we often fall into the trap of reducing complex issues to the simplest, most measurable terms in order to make our tasks easier. As Rose points out, early efforts to quantify writing errors was “very American in its seeming efficiency” (552), and we continue this way of teaching in many classrooms because it’s quicker and lends itself well to delegation to graduate students, etc. In addition, when we reduce writing to a skill, we are in effect saying that anyone should be able to master the task and then move on to more challenging occupations such as research, discounting the fact that writing motivates us to think more deeply about that research.

The area of Rose’s piece that most interested me, however, was his discussion of remediation and illiteracy. I had never considered remedial writing as coming from medical terminology before, but I can see how this premise applies to many writing classrooms. As I mentioned earlier in this blog, I have never taught a basic writing course, so I don’t know how I would fare in that arena, but I have heard teachers discussing their students. As I recall, many of the teachers talked about themselves almost as surgeons would when they were going in to do exploratory surgery – “I need to take a look at him and see what I can fix about his writing.” I can also see how – as Rose mentions – literacy really depends on the context in which the term is being defined. Some basic writing students are literate in their own communities but not in others. Overall, I feel Rose accurately warns us to be cautious about the terms and labels we put on writing and writers.

“Narrowing the Mind and Page” by Rose

In this article, Rose continues to warn writing teachers and researchers about reducing their practices to the narrowest definition of a theory. As he explains the origin and premise behind such cognitive theories as field dependence-independence, hemisphericity, cognitive development stages, and orality-literacy, Rose shows how the over-generalization of each theory creates barriers to any real understanding of student needs. Specifically, Rose concludes that marginalizing cognitive theories collapses any differences in cognition, degrades careful study of student writing processes, and evinces unfortunate stereotypes. As Rose and the authors for our other readings this week have stated, our desire to simplify practice and theory typically results in a binary opposition.

What struck me the most about Rose’s piece is that it appears we, as writing teachers, have usually shown ourselves to be “field-dependent” when using cognitive theories. As I understand Rose’s explanation, early researchers thought field-dependent individuals tended to make broad generalizations, among other errors, about a given topic. So, when we try to apply hemisphericity theory or orality-literacy theory to a broad range of uses, we also ignore the specific tests and conditions for which the theories developed and force their adaptability to inappropriate functions. It also would appear that as children develop into the “formal operational” (362) stage, they become more field-independent.

Although I found Rose’s writing to be interesting, I was a little disappointed that he did not provide us with good examples of how writing teachers employed cognitive theories – in a good way or an unfortunate way – in writing classrooms. I can understand what Rose was alluding to as he worked his way through the various cognitive theories, and I learned a great deal of new information, but I would have been interested to see how problems played out in actual classrooms. For example, Rose asserts that field-dependent writers might have differences from field-independent writers, but “these differences should not, theoretically, lead to gross differences in quality” (349). I would have liked to have seen how papers produced by these two types of cognition groups compared.