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AssignmentsDear English 610 Students,
I am writing to welcome you to the seminar, The Teaching of Composition, and to give you an informal reading and writing assignment for our first class meeting. To begin, please download an essay by Richard Rodriguez, “The Achievement of Desire,” from his memoir Hunger of Memory (1981). You can do this by Googling: The Achievement of Desire Richard Rodriguez. Or you can go directly to the following website: www-scf.usc.edu/~clarkjen/Richard%20Rodriguez.doc The third way you can access this material is by emailing me so that I can send it to you as an attachment: Judith.Goleman@umb.edu (I will be more than happy to do this—don’t hesitate.)
Rodriguez’s essay can be seen as a literacy narrative, his representation of learning to read and write in school. At the same time, it can be seen as a case study of the relation between a reader (the mature Richard Rodriguez) and a writer (Richard Hoggart). By examining this essay from both these perspectives, we will give ourselves a point of departure for our course’s inquiry into the teaching of composition. I expect that we will return to Rodriguez’s story often as we read and evaluate theories and pedagogies for teaching critical reading and writing. To begin this dialogue with Rodriguez, the course texts and each other, here is the question I would like you to write a few pages about:
What kind of reader and writer is the Rodriguez who composes “The Achievement of Desire”? Is he still a “scholarship boy,” or would you say that description is no longer appropriate?
To address this question, please include an examination of how Rodriguez works with passages from Hoggart. On the basis of Rodriguez’s work with quoted passages from Hoggart, how would you describe the relationship? Do you see any changes in the way Rodriguez works with Hoggart over the course of the essay?
Please bring your papers and the Rodriguez essay to class. Also, please keep the notes and drafts that you generate as you prepare this paper. In a later assignment, I will be asking you to look at your writing process in relation to articles we will be reading about composing. Please note: I am not looking for a certain kind of process or proper note-taking method. There is no such thing. I will only be looking for you to have materials by which to reflect on how you go about writing a paper. Furthermore, please be assured that while I will read your essays, I will not grade or critique them. This assignment is just a way for us to begin our conversation—very low-stakes. In fact, if you do it, you can’t do it wrong. So, relax and enjoy the process.
Finally, I look forward to meeting you on January 29. I will spend the first part of class introducing the course and then we’ll discuss your responses to Rodriguez’s essay. Once again, feel free to email me before then with any question you have.
Sincerely, Judith Goleman ______________________________________________________________________ English 610 Reading/Writing Guide for 2/5
Please read Ann Berthoff’s article first. Please give particular attention to her description of the double-entry notebook—its form and its purposes.
Then, read the three articles assigned in Cross-talk. Experiment with a double-entry notebook, using one column to record ideas from the readings that give you something to say back in the opposing column about your own writing process in the Rodriguez paper. In other words, put yourself and your own experience as a writer into dialogue with these experts on the writing process. Try to use the double-entry format as a means of generating cross-talk.
You can also use the opposing column to think further about Rodriguez’s comment about his own schooling as an “inevitable miseducation.” Given these articles, would you say Rodriguez’s miseducation was inevitable? _____________________
English 610 Reading/Writing Guide for 2/12
Richard Rodriguez was a highly motivated if unconfident “good” student, universally admired and noticed by his teachers. To put it mildly, not all struggling students are appreciated as special in the way he was. This week’s readings focus on what might be considered the opposite case from Rodriguez: the “poor” student who is conventionally defined by his/her reading and writing deficiencies.
All three assigned articles are written or co-written by Mike Rose. In the earliest of these three pieces, ‘The Language of Exclusion” (1985), Rose concludes with a set of recommendations, things that “those of us involved in writing can do about the language that has formed the field.” One way of working on these three articles is to look at the extent to which Rose himself, as a writer and researcher, follows through on his own 1985 recommendations in the next two articles published in 1990 and 1991.
Use a double-entry notebook to represent in one column what Rose (and Hull) are saying and doing in these articles. Use the opposing column to reflect on the relationships among the three: To what extent are Rose’s recommendations in the first carried through in the others? To what extent has his research and writing of the 1990 and 1991 articles changed/advanced his thinking?
In other words, as you study these articles in the usual way to learn more about the teaching of composition, I also want you to look at them a little unusually too-- as telling a story about one scholar’s process of development as a teacher and researcher across a number of years rather than a number of drafts. I think observing Rose’s process over six years can give graduate students useful perspectives on their own writing, teaching and their developing professional identities. ____________________________________________________________________________ Goleman: English 610 Complete, typed essay due for peer review 2/26: Bring 2 copies Revised draft due 3/5 (titled, proof-read, 5 or so double-spaced pages)
Meanings are relationships: they are unstable, shifting, dynamic . . . (Berthoff 42)
Successful learning is . . . engaged, committed, personal learning. (Emig 126)
We have spent the first few weeks of the course studying the teaching of composition in three ways: through Rodriguez’s literacy narrative; through work on a set of scholarly articles; through reflections on yourselves as writers in dialogue with the narrative and the articles. Your double-entry notes give you a partial record of your thinking. In addition, much has been discussed in class. Still, there is much meaning that remains to be made through the forming of relationships among these articles, relationships that can advance your understanding of composition in personally significant ways.
This recursive assignment gives you a chance to go back and review your notes and the course readings looking for moments when you sensed important connections or dissonances across the readings that you have not yet had a chance to pursue in depth. I invite you to write a personal essay that explores what for you are important connections and/or dissonances among these materials. Can you form relationships among these materials that matter to you and explain why? These relationships can be between any number of things, for example: between composition theory and practice; between specific cases and concepts; between your own entering assumptions and the ideas or examples you have encountered; between matters that seemed important on first reading and things that seem important upon review; between your experience as a writer or a teacher and the concepts or arguments you have encountered in the readings. How, in short, are these materials coming together or creating tensions for you that you find personally important and worth writing about in order to learn more?
Another way to go about forming relationships among these materials is to imagine what one of the authors we have read might say to another, for instance: What might Berthoff or Sommers say about the research of Rose and Hull and why? What might Rose and Hull have to say about Rodriguez’s literacy education and why? Would Emig find her arguments coming to fruition in the work of Rose and Hull? Would Rose and Hull support the premises behind Berthoff’s “curious triangle”? In other words, there are many possibilities here for probing these texts through cross-talk that you imagine and try to substantiate.
To write a strong paper, you do not need to sound like an expert who has been studying the teaching of composition for years. The newness of the materials can honestly be reflected in the way you construct your essay in pursuit of connections, dissonances and dialogue with and among these articles. I will value writing that uses close, specific work with selected readings to pursue an inquiry and to substantiate your thinking. I will value writing that does not merely summarize but that forms relationships that you can name and demonstrate the significance of. And I will value writing that raises new questions, that acknowledges any difficulties you encounter with the readings, and that does not side-step these difficulties with what Rodriguez calls “quick answers.” _____________________ ________________________________________ Goleman English 610 Reading/Writing Guide for 3/12
The essays that follow the assignment sequence in Facts Artifacts and Counterfacts offer teachers’ perspectives on different aspects of the course. As you read the chapters by Susan Wall and Mariolina Salvatori, keep double-entry notes that help you to think further about assignment sequencing as a method for teaching composition. Be prepared to bring forward passages from these chapters that have deepened your understanding of the FAC sequence or raise questions about it. The article by Nancy Sommers, “Responding to Student Writing” should be useful in imagining how to manage the most important (and difficult) aspect of a sequenced course: commenting on student writing. Be prepared to initiate cross-talk between her article and FAC.
___________________________________________________________________________ Goleman En 610 Writing Guide for 4/2
Our class on 4/2 will focus on your responses to the posted sequences. Choose three sequences to respond to on-line. Come to class prepared to offer your observations on one or two sequences to the class in a 5 minute presentation.
On-line responses Your on-line responses should demonstrate what you have noticed in three of the sequences that help you to think further about the craft of sequencing. Toward that end, you may use the following questions as guidelines:
5 Minute Presentations Your 5 minute class presentation should be seen as continuous with the kind of class work we have been doing all term: focus our attention on a specific part of one or two sequences; offer your reasons for this focus; give us your perspective; solicit our response. Please prepare handouts of any materials, including sequences, that you want us to consider.
The two goals for this assignment are to experiment with how technology can supplement the teaching of writing and to reach a deeper level of understanding about sequencing through close reading and analysis of each other’s work. _____________ _______________________________
Goleman English 610 Reading/Writing Guide for 4/9: Read: M.M. Bakhtin, 259-300 (skim the biographical section of Introduction) Nancy Welch, “Sideshadowing Teacher Response”
In the assigned chapter from The Dialogical Imagination, Bakhtin attempts to develop a stylistics of the novel in distinction to poetry. Poetry had traditionally dominated aesthetic theory and the effect of this was the relegation of novels to second rate status. You will discover why Bakhtin challenges this hierarchy of forms as you read. Through our work with so far we have begun to see how central the concept of dialogue is to critical thinking and writing. Bakhtin’s work will deepen your understanding of dialogue and its relationship to language and society. But it will take work to get there. First of all, you will need to adapt to Bakhtin’s idiosyncratic style and follow his argument about the special qualities of the novels. (Don’t worry about understanding every sentence; the most important ideas come back in varied terms a number of times.) Our work with Bakhtin is intended to give you the kinds of forming/reforming experiences that we have been saying are the common ground of critical writers. For instance, you will need to figure out how to push his analysis of discourse out of the sphere of fiction and into composition studies. By negotiating the difficulty of this text and reflecting on your experience, you will be learning something about the reading and writing process as it moves from chaos to form I strongly suggest that you keep a dialogical notebook for your work. Use the right-hand column for quotations, summaries, key terms. Use the left-hand column for paraphrasing terms, questioning, responding and connecting to the sequences we have studied, including your own. Welch’s article represents the way one composition teacher has extended Bakhtin’s principles into her own teaching practice and you will certainly want to make notes on that connection.
To help you focus your work this week and next, I am listing below a set of key concepts from Bakhtin’s text to watch for and to define in context:
We will carry our discussion of these key terms into the following week's reading as noted in the syllabus for: 4/23 _______________________
Goleman En 610 Reading/Writing Guide for 4/30 Paul Heilker, “Theory and Pedagogy for an Active Form,” Intro, Preface, 1-86
In the conclusion of his Preface, Paul Heilker focuses his readers on a qualification:
. . . I wish to make it clear from the outset that I am not advocating that we displace thesis/support writing from the center of academic discourse and composition pedagogy and replace it with the essay. Rather, I am arguing that we need to problematize students’ understanding of the thesis/support form (and thus improve their performance in it) by including the essay as an alternative, supplementary form in composition instruction. (xx)
As you read and take notes on the assigned pages in Heilker’s book for next week, please work on understanding his argument. To do this, you will need to be able to compare the elements of the thesis/support form and the elements of the essay. Come to class prepared to contribute to the making of comparative lists.
Please make notes sections that you find particularly significant to Heilker’s argument as well as those sections that you want to challenge or question. __________________
Goleman English 610 Reading Guide for 5/7 Read in Heilker, pp. 87-183
In Chapter 5, “The Essay in the Composition Classroom,” Heilker offers interesting assignments that help students build their dialogue with themselves and with texts toward essayistic discourse. Look back at your own sequence. Find one or two places that might benefit from some of Heilker’s methods and try them out. You can revise a current assignment or imagine a new one.
Try to aim for a 1 page response. Include a brief introduction giving the background we need to understand that place of the assignment in your sequence. Bring 4 copies to class. I will ask you to work in groups, choosing samples to bring forward for the entire class to discuss. ____________________________________________________________ Complete draft of final paper due for peer review: 5/14 Finished draft due 5/21: 5-7 pages (or more), titled and proofread
Bakhtin:
Internally persuasive discourse—as opposed to one that is externally authoritative—is, as it is affirmed through assimilation, tightly interwoven with “one own word.” In the everyday rounds of our consciousness, the internally persuasive word is half-our and half-someone else’s. Its creativity and productiveness consist precisely in the fact that such a word awakens new and independent words . . . and does not remain in an isolated and static condition. It is not so much interpreted by us as it is furthered, that is, freely developed, applied to new material, new conditions; it enters into interanimating relationships with new contexts. More than that, it enters into an intense struggle with other internally persuasive discourses. Our ideological development is just such an intense struggle within us for hegemony among various available verbal and ideological points of view, approaches, directions and values. The semantic structure of an internally persuasive discourse is not finite, it is open; in each of the new situations that dialogize it, this discourse is able to reveal ever newer ways to mean. (345-46)
Lu: As I think about what we might do to complicate the external and internal scenes of our students’ writing, I hear my parents and teachers saying: “Not now. Keep them from the wrangle of the marketplace until the have acquired the discourse and are skilled at using it.” And I answer: “Don’t teach them to ‘survive’ the whirlpool of crosscurrents by avoiding it. Use the classroom to moderate the currents, but teach them from the beginning to struggle.” When I think of the ways in which the teaching of reading and writing as classroom activities can frustrate the development of students, I am almost grateful for the overwhelming complexity of the circumstances in which I grew up. For it was this complexity that kept me from losing sight of the effort and choice involved in reading or writing with and through a discourse. (447)
Not only do M.M. Bakhtin and Min-zhan Lu both use the word “struggle” in the above passages, but they use it much more positively than is customary—especially in relation to developing one’s language and writing ability. Your challenge for this paper is to try to figure out why they would use it this way.
Please reread both texts to figure out why these authors affirm struggling with discourse. In terms of the paper itself, I strongly suggest that you start with (or at least include) an interpretive paraphrase of the Bakhtin passage above. This passage draws explicitly or implicitly on terms key to Bakhtin’s dialogical philosophy of language. If you can paraphrase it, that means have been able to form relationships among the key terms of his philosophy, thereby “making meaning” of it. Having done so, you will be in a good position to push your understanding of Bakhtin further by opening it up to dialogue with Lu’s story and Lu’s commentary on her story. That, ultimately, is the purpose of this project: to develop more internally persuasive relations with Bakhtin’s philosophy by relating it to Lu’s story.
Bakhtin describes the process you will be using when he writes that we can take a discourse “into new contexts, attach it to new material, put it in a new situation in order to wrest new answers from it . . . “ (346). In the next paragraph, Bakhtin comments that this sort of writing process leads to “gifted, creative exposition” (347). Now, that is a comment I would love to make on everyone’s paper.
To receive such a comment (or, in other words, an A or B, on this assignment) you will need to work specifically with both texts, explaining each author’s concept of “struggle.” You will also need to explain the extent to which you think Lu’s story and the conclusions she draws about struggle support Bakhtin’s own notion of struggle in the passage above and why.
I am interested as well in your reflections on this work with Bakhtin and Lu—both the insights you value and questions you have. In the concluding section of your essay, or if you prefer, in a separate section (call it an epilogue if you like) please look back at your own assignment sequence in light of the argument you make about struggling with discourse. Does your sequence prompt this struggle? If so, where and how? If not, why not? Is there any way that you might revise your sequence now in light of your work on Bakhtin and Lu? How so?
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