TCR 5060 - Week 9 - Five You Don't, Five You Do

Five Terms/Words/Names, I don't and haven't tried to do:

Donald Murray, Ed Corbett, Feminism (waiting for Brandy's response!), Maxine Hairston, Scottish tradition

Here are my I did's:

Connor's and Travis' blogs (paradigm shift) 

Chen's and Rachel's and Collen's and Meghan's blogs (Genre Theory) - http://www.slideshare.net/HeworthMedia/genre-theory

Michelle (Delivery)

Nancy (Deconstruction)

For the Group Key Terms Document:

At the 1966 Dartmouth Conference, often referred to as the Dartmouth Seminar, leading British and American English instructors gathered to answer the question of "what is the study of English?" and debate the direction of English studies in the academy. The debate resulted in major pedagogic shifts, which forever changed writing instruction in the United States. The conference participants wanted to move away from a content-based pedagogy (emphasis on Grammar and structure) to a process-based pedagogy (expressivism and process composition). Herbert Muller writes that grammar instruction should not be the central emphasis in the English classroom. James Britton's expressivism appears at this conferences (e.g. writing can bring understanding, even understanding of self) and Wayne Booth's appearance is said to have been the origin for two dynamic foci in research: (1) composition as process; and (2) four emerging theories of invention (classical, Burkean, Rohman, and Pike). As a result, "Composition studies" was born. Some implications for composition are:

• The writing process can help students learn and learning can help the writing process;
• Assigning and grading writing is not enough; and
• Students should be supported with a composition process which includes generating ideas, reflection, planning and revising.

[This needs some serious revision - (MDD)].

TCR 5060 - Week 8 - Updating Classroom Assignments

Globalization and technology have provided an opportunity for higher educators to rethink literacy and reinvent curricular offerings.  We have new layers of literacy which are important to effectively engaging in composition and rhetorical practices, including multiple literacies: cultural, technological, print, screen, digital, and film.  Thinking of composition as engaging in multiple literacies and modalities offers a new challenge in the 21^st century ready classroom, especially when catching students up to basic kinds of literacy is still needed.  New genres and modalities offer us creative tools to engage student writers in composition and “get” more out of their education.  It is for this reason, that I enjoy creating group work and collaborative discussion assignments for my 1301 sections.  If I had the opportunity to teach some more advanced composition, research, or technical writing courses, I’d like to incorporate a number of assignments including, but not limited to:

• Hosting a blog site for a class wherein students conduct free writes regularly and respond to each other with peer-critique and encouragement;
• Conducting a class project to build a website with multiple pages that has a clear socially relevant and civically minded purpose for a particular audience; 
• Having students work together to create class presentations via power point or video projects; and if I ever get the opportunity, 
• Rhetorical film analysis through video production, blog or papers. 
• Please do not watch if you are offended by strong language.

 

Some of my favorite and most challenging assignments included working with others and learning how to use new technologies; however, when we have the opportunity to meet these kinds of assignments consistently, it helps prepare us for the kind of rapid technological change that characterizes our new context and will prepare students for the kinds of thinking they will need in the 21^st century.

TCR 5060 - Week 7 - Composition as Acquiring Multiple Literacies in the 21st Century

Yancey, K.B. (Dec. 2004) draws our attention exciting changes in the field of composition and English—innovation in the way we think of literacy.  Technological innovation and globalization have provided a rich context for multimedia and changes in the way we think of literacy.  I enjoy that Yancey reminds us that new writing is not restricted by the University (p. 300, 302), but rather, that writers are writing for the pleasure of writing.  This new context for creation of text is reminiscent of the 19^th-century wherein writers and readers created “their own social contexts” for reading and writing (p. 301).  Technology and innovation often leads to new ways of seeing and thinking and imagining the world.  This new context has contributed to changes in the field of education.  We do not think of composition or literacy in the same worn grooves.  We can think of new kinds of literacy, regardless of whether these literacies always were: cultural literacy, technological literacy, print literacy, screen literacy, digital literacy.  New kinds of literacy have their own terms which help us to think and see the world through a new lens.  According to Daley, screen literacy has the 21^st century reader thinking about life through film jargon (Yancey, 2004, p. 305).  Literacy is not merely restricted to print mediated genres.  Yancey raises a poignant question, “shall we teach print, digital, composition, communication, or all of the above?” (p. 306).  In order to provide a 21^st century ready education to college students, we must rethink composition.  According to Yancey, process and post-process thinking have prepared us well for this new globalized context (p. 309).  At the same time, I argue that before we can move into new genres of composition (Blog, website development, film, etc.), basic print literacy is needed.  Blogs, websites, film, still very much rely on the written word.  This makes our work more challenging, because in order to provide 21^st century ready classrooms in higher education, we must revisit and revamp the building blocks that lead to the college track.  Grade schools through high school need to consider new ways of thinking of education.  What are the implications for higher education leaders?  We must seek for ways to work with high schools, building bridges, so that education becomes more seamless, building literacies leading up to new and engaging literacy exposure in the First Year Composition classroom.  We must resist the notion that education must lead to the gatekeepers remaining in higher education.  In a hyperconnected global context, innovative minds may choose to hack their own education if not provided with sufficient challenges and opportunities to explore creativity and meaningful education.

References

Yancey, K.B. (Dec. 2004).  “Made not only in words: Composition in a new key.”  College Composition and Communication. 56(2).

TCR 5060 - Week 6 - Voice

Ken Macrorie's "from Telling Writing" is hilarious!  Even if we’ve never graded student papers or read our peer’s writing in junior high, high school, or college, we’ve all probably been subject to that strange process wherein we fight to allow our ideas, our voice, us, out and onto paper.  The words resist us.  The false voice of Engfish attacks and sticks to us like silly string.  We feel a need to impress to write up to the university.  With the Wizard of Oz, himself, ready to read and evaluate our prolific language, invented for the purpose of speaking professor-speak—or at least imagined.  And, how could we imagine that such stilted gibberish is academic language?  I don’t know, but how strange a thing that uncovering our own voice could be so difficult a work?  This of course, this work, is composition, a process of revealing self.  According to Macrorie, the authentic writer has the following characteristics:

Couldn’t resist sharing a list.  Lists can be fun and help us self-reflect on our process.  This one can help us reflect on whether our true voice is permitted to live, to thrive, to come alive on paper, in journal, in classroom comments.