Thursday, March 23, 2006

Session on Logitudinal Research

Chaired by Deborah Brandt (U. Wisc.-Madison)

Speakers Anne Harrington (U. Mass.-Amherst)
Anne Beaufort (Stonybrook)
Nancy Sommers (Harvard)

Respondant Andrea Lunsford (Stanford)

This was a fascinating session, a huge number of people stuffed into a tiny room (bad planning?). Anne H. started with a discussion of her project, which used the case study method. She called them “intrinsic” case studies, which are case studies undertaken for the understanding of the case itself (as opposed to being undertaken in order to understand some larger issue). The project had four case studies. One matter that came to the fore in her investigation was the ways that there could be a disjunction in academic “ways of knowing” and one’s religious beliefs. She discussed one of the subjects of her case studies, a Vietnamese immigrant, whose traditional ways of knowing seemed quite at odds with academic epistemologies.

There are several research issues with case studies. One is that, if you’re trying for some kind of representative sample, a limited number of case studies will be problematic. Another is that the researcher must decide whether to try to remain neutral, or to essentially see herself as on the side of the subject of the research. Finally, the researcher needs to be open enough to what’s at hand in the case study, and try not to be too dogmatic, but on the other hand trying not to be too idiosyncratic.

Anne Beaufort talked about the effects of the research on the researcher. Her study was supposed to be a one-year ethnographic study of a particular workplace, with the research question being why college graduates can’t write. Over time her research question changed to something like: What are the factors in the social context, and in writers’ relationship to that context, which aid or impede the learning of new genres? (relevant question to any writing teacher, really)

She offered this definition of ethnography, taken from Andrea Fishman’s study Amish Literacy: it is “making the implicit explicit, articulating the ineffable . . . seeing the invisible, then making it visible to others.”

Finally, she came up with a model of writing expertise that drew from Shirley Brice Heath, Birkenkotter, Swales, speech-act theory, and the notion of the discourse community: Discourse community knowledge is comprised of rhetorical knowledge, writing process knowledge, genre knowledge, and subject-matter knowledge. She called this her “theory building,” and there was a picture with overlapping spheres that I will insert:

She quoted Jaroslav Pelikan, Scholarship: A Sacred Vocation, saying: “The scholar is called to a process of research, to an attitude of curiosity.” This, I believe, summed up her idea of how a longitudinal research project affected her as a researcher, enabling her to make the connections between research, theory-building, and practice.

Nancy Sommers described the Harvard study of undergraduate writing by reminding us that within the word “longitudinal” is the word long. She gave a lot of information, partly outlining the study’s methods (400+ participants, 2 web surveys in the first year, with one web survey in each of the following years; they selected 65 students to follow in depth [the sub-sample]). One of the most interesting things she talked about was what social science researchers called “creating study loyalty.” Initially, they offered students a coupon for a free pizza, and they followed up with gifts of chocolate, mugs, pens, etc., all with the study logo. They kept 94% of their participants, which is pretty much unheard of. 87% of those said that they participated, at least initially, because of the “opportunity for free pizza.”

Sommers also said that longitudinal studies are notorious for losing their principle investigators. Given the mountain of data they assembled—520 hours of interview data, along with truckloads of student writing—she said she often thought of the investigators as being akin to the early Mt. Everest mountaineers, especially Sir Edmund Mallory, who was “last seen through binoculars, clouds closing in, never to be seen again . . .”

Anyway: she said the most compelling thing about the study was the “call of stories—the stories students wanted to tell, and not the ones we could have told without going through the study.” The difficulty comes in turning stories into findings; there are ultimately “limitations to what one can learn from surveys and interviews.”

She also said that students often wanted to talk about the writing students did in their extracurricular lives—as part of campus groups, as part of community service, and so on. She said that the lessons learned in such writing “do not transfer seamlessly to academic writing,” and that students seemed to make a distinction between “real” and “unreal” writing. Student writers’ awareness of audience developed from such writing, but indirectly.

Finally, she said that it was “through engagement with subject matter (discourse) and its methods” that students “prospered as writers”—by connecting with their material, both content and method.

The follow-up discussion offered several interesting points, though I can’t trace for you the threads of the conversation. Here are the points:

• Programs wishing to start researching should start with a baseline survey of students to find out how much writing they do, where it is happening, and where it is not.
• Writers who stalled as academic writers generally stalled over how to use sources. They could agree or disagree with sources, but they had trouble learning to make other moves with sources. The writers who stalled had a limited sense of how to use sources.
• Andrea Lunsford talked about studying Shaughnessy’s Errors and Expectations alongside Geneva Smitherman’s Talkin and Testifyin. 

I made my own presentation after this. Here it is. [coming soon!]

After that, I was exhausted, sorry to say, for the day. So I rested.

Friday a.m.

“Centering Peace: Theorizing Pedagogies for Rhetorical Action”

Harriet Malinowitz
Gae Lyn Henderson
Marsha Lee Baker
Heather Bruce

Either this was an irritating session or I was really tired. Either way, I resisted my own urge to bolt several times and was ultimately glad that I stayed to hear Heather Bruce’s talk, but after that I hightailed it outta there lickety-split, just in case a little more high minded rhetoric got on my nerves.

Harriet Malinowitz chaired and reminded the audience—which was pretty darn big, considering that the session started at 8 a.m.—that Charles Bazerman had asked a bunch of people on a listserv, at the start of the Iraq War, “Where are the rhetoricians?” This panel was in part a consideration of that question. (If you’re interested, some of these speakers are a part of the Rhetoricians for Peace project.

Ms. Henderson (associated with the Univ. of Utah’s Writing Center) started by discussing the importance of helping students to see the rhetoricity of science, which in turn helps them to see the rhetoricity of truth claims. For her, then, the big idea is that skepticism tends to tone down people’s acceptance of truth claims where there is no evidence, and also invites people to consider what is at stake and for whom.

Marsha Lee Baker posed for the audience what she called the “predicament of class discussion,” which she sees as a practice, but one that is largely “ceremonial rather than deliberative.” For her, this means that we must ask how class discussion teaches. The pedagogical question is “how to keep misunderstandings from spinning out of control.”

Her goal is “nonviolent language toward nonviolent living.” To this end, she proposes the “open-ended seminar,” which she takes in some fashion from Don Finkel’s book Teaching with Your Mouth Shut. The features of the open-ended seminar are as follows:

• The purpose is for students to deepen their understanding of something they’ve already examined
• The outcome of the seminar must not be pre-determined
• Students must be convinced that the hard work of inquiry is theirs to do

She sees this practice as promoting the idea that students are struggling with someone else’s power and that they must grapple with their own.

Heather Bruce talked about peace rhetorics. She began by noting that social structures will always produce conflict and argument; we must create ways to resolve disagreement that tend toward justice. She says that we must seek “rhetorical efficacy toward peace.”

Drawing from someone or other, she talks about three rhetorics:

• Peace-keeping, which uses “get touch” preemptive policies. It implements peace through strength
• Peace-making, which stresses conflict resolution or mediation. It mobilizes rhetors toward understanding and empathy
• Peace-building, which she sees as virtually absent from professional conversation—this rhetoric builds the capacity and the desire for peace

[note: in doing a little research, this tri-partite analysis is ubiquitous in any discussion about peace: Peace Studies, the United Nation, the European Parliament, etc.]

She quoted Cindy Sheehan, who said that “we need to learn a new language of peace and love that we can speak.” She also cited Terry Tempest Williams in The Open Space of Democracy, and the three stages of peace building, which are commencement (question, stand, speak, act); ground-truthing (projects in real time that put students on the ground); and engagement.

While this last talk (or rather, my notes of it) may seem sketchy, I liked the idea of three rhetorics and I liked (despite my skepticism about TTW) the idea of “projects in real time that put students on the ground,” though the phrase “ground-truthing” is no good. I defy you to dispute this.

“Mediating Genres: Examining Antecedent Genres as Discursive Resources in Academic and Public Spheres”

Anis Bawarshi
Amy Devitt
Mary Jo Reiff
Angela Jones

This session was pretty much awesome, in my opinion, and it started out with a bang, with Anis Bawarshi both chairing and presenting. His particular presentation focused on the notion of genre uptake. Here’s how it goes. Typified rhetorical actions connect with social actions and situations. A writer will approach any situation with his or her discursive resources, or templates, using Min Zhan Lu’s term. Genre knowledge is, of course, only a part of one’s discursive resources, and our discursive templates inform our encounters with new genres. The notion of uptake comes from speech act theory, and occurs when an “illocutionary act is take up as a perlocutionary act.” For example, a death sentence imposed at a criminal trial (illocutionary) gets taken up as an execution (perlocutionary), or a call for proposals gets taken up as a proposal. [I couldn’t find a link that explained uptake in a succinct way, but if you use “genre studies” as a Google search term, then use the “search within results” function, adding “uptake,” you’ll see that all sorts of genre theory deals with it.]

We learn to recognize the significance of typified situations and the genres in them; the typified ways that genres get taken up might be called, Bawarshi says, a “genre uptake profile.” As an example, Bawarshi cited A Million Little Pieces, which he says “perhaps exceeded its uptake profile as a memoir,” explaining the furor over Frey’s admission that he had exaggerated and even fictionalized certain “true” episodes in his book.

This idea has several implications for teaching. The explicit teaching of genre may often elicit performances from students that have a significant component of imitation. Bawarshi says there’s a complex relation between imitation and invention, but also that imitation involves uptake. He presents this hypothetical chain of events that we will recognize:

[Before the day is done, I will have written a Tristram Shandy-like tome. Black page ahead.]

There is an exchange, inherent in the above, between coercion and complicity, which nicely sums up how genre works.

Back to uptake: specific genre knowledge does not necessarily include relevant uptake knowledge, but uptake of a genre can be a site of intervention (for teachers of writing), and the points of transformation any writer exerts on a given genre in taking it up can be made analytically visible. Thus, the explicit teaching of genre must also include the explicit teaching of uptake.

Bawarshi suggests an ethnographic approach in examining how and when one genre creates an opportunity for another genre. Such opportunities “bear the traces of their uptakes.”

That was a lot of theory-talk, but I felt strongly that this would be a fruitful area of immediate investigation for me.

Amy Devitt spoke next, focusing her remarks on how genres interact—what she called generic intertextuality, or even “inter-genre-ality.”

She talked about genre sets (what Bazerman calls “genre systems”), the ways that genres interact in a culture, and how “a culture of genres already exists when new genres emerge.” Writers have a genre repertoire, and anytime they confront new genres, they have “antecedent genres, with which a person has experience, and from which a person draws when writing in a new genre.”

As teachers, she says we should look more closely at students’ genre sets, those that they draw from when writing a new genre. If we’re teaching writing courses based in part on “genre awareness,” then we should realize that the genres we teach will later serve as antecedent genres in some other situation. Also, when we consider the gap between what students already know and what we want them to do, we should consider what students know as opportunities—antecedents—rather than as “what I’m trying to move them away from.”

So, what genres do students already know? And how do they use that knowledge when they write new genres?

Devitt developed questionnaires for students that asked them to tell what “kinds of writing” they enjoyed most and least, and also to tell about the last paper they wrote. This allowed her to extrapolate which genres students in fact noticed, and what known textual markers from known genres. She noted that students tended to have a predilection for a favored genre, and that student writers tended to draw from the genres they judge will be helpful in writing the new genre.\

The high school genres students cited included research papers, comparison/contrast papers, persuasive essays, poems, informative writing, essays, and narrative. They cited a preference for “personal” and “creative” writing. They least enjoyed analytic writing, and of analytic writing, they enjoyed analysis of poetry least of all.

She cited a particular case, a student she called “Nathan.” In writing a college level paper, he drew from the disliked analytic genres, used an inverted pyramid paragraph for his thesis—drawing from the genre knowledge he had, and trying to use what he figured would be most helpful in this new writing situation. However, he relied heavily on personal narration as evidence.

From her study, Devitt concluded that people never write in a genre vacuum, and that people try to adapt elements of known genres to new writing situations.

We should see the remnants of high school genres as opportunities, rather than obstacles, and see that students try to select an appropriate antecedent. In first year composition, we attempt to add to their genre repertoire new genres that will serve later as antecedents, and will become a part of their genre scaffolding.

Mary Jo Reiff made a really fascinating presentation on the history of the petition as a genre. Between the 13 th and 15 th centuries, there were literally thousands of petitions to Parliament. Pre-Revolutionary petitions tended to be humble in tone and deferential in style. The writers framed themselves as humble suitors, and tended to invoke a depoliticized rhetoric, without appeals to any notion of “popular will.” Printing changed the genre, as printing itself became a right. Authorities began to use petitions as a way to gauge the popular mood. Petition and prayer were antecedent genres that transformed the political identify of women.

Reiff sees a “downsizing” of the right to petition. Short petitions—cut apart, pasted on separate pages ???? [here, my notes fall apart.—mentally insert black page??]

Last, Angela Jones talked about e-mail and what she saw as inappropriate uses of this genre by students. She thought that teaching something about the genre history of e-mail would allow students to take it up more intelligently and rhetorically.

Patricia Williams talk

“The Activism(s) of Rhetoric: Rethinking Rhetorical Theory as Activist Practice”

[notes to come]

Ellen Cushman
Matthew Abraham
MJ Braun
Charles Bazerman

Saturday a.m.

“From Panel to Gallery: 12 Digital Writings, One Installation”

Chaired by Victor Vitanza of Pre/Text. (You can also try Vitanza at http://victorvitanza.com –the site wasn’t accessible when I checked it this morning, but I think it’s still in operation.) Session of 12 different digital projects—short films, hypertexts, and podcasts. This was unbelievably cool, a perfect way to end the conference. No one stood up and talked—the attendees walked around to twelve different tables, most of which had laptops set up with the installations running. You could talk with the writers. I had a brief chat with Victor Vitanza myself.

After that, I saw this:

And this:

And this:

And this:

Also these:

And that is my report.

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