Teaching Academic Literacy

The Uses of Teacher-research in Developing A Writing Program

Katherine L. Weese, Stephen L. Fox, Stuart Greene

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 1999
• ISBN:
  9781135681746
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Études sur la communication

Teaching Academic Literacy provides a unique outlook on a first-year writing program's evolution by bringing together a group of related essays that analyze, from various angles, how theoretical concepts about writing actually operate in real students' writing. Based on the beginning writing program developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a course that asks students to consider what it means to be a literate member of a community, the essays in the collection explore how students become (and what impedes their progress in becoming) authorities in writing situations. Key features of this volume include:
* demonstrations of how research into specific teaching problems (e.g., the problem of authority in beginning writers' work) can be conducted by examining student work through a variety of lenses such as task interpretation, collaboration, and conference, so that instructors can understand what factors influence students, and can then use what they have learned to reshape their teaching practices;
* adaptability of theory and research to develop a course that engages basic writers with challenging ideas;
* a model of how a large writing program can be administered, particularly in regards to the integration of research and curriculum development; and
* integration of literary and composition theories.

Part II
CLASSROOM RESEARCH STUDIES

Chapter 4
The Legacy of Schooling: Secondary School Composition and the Beginning College Writer

Nicholas Preus

Waldorf College

In their efforts to write in academic contexts, basic writers in the first year of college fall back on strategies acquired in their years of secondary school. This, of course, is well known, and studies not only demonstrate this contention but also catalog and explain the particular strategies on which students rely. Yet we need more knowledge about those strategies and how reliance on them affects students struggling to enter the world of college writing. Instruction is frequently made difficult because of the horizon of students’ assumptions, a “legacy of schooling” (Flower 224) whose boundaries limit the range of possibilities open to student writers; the difficulty is increased by a concomitant unfamiliarity with academic discourse and its conventions (Bartholomae). Students’ assumptions interfere with the acquisition of new strategies and hinder entrance to a discourse community. They also impede possible development of a critical stance toward authoritative conventions and ways of knowing (Mortenson and Kirsch 557).

In this chapter, I attempt to extend our understanding of the legacy of schooling by analyzing the responses of students to protocols and interview questions during a paper-writing assignment. I gathered the data from my section of English 101, a basic writing course at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. These data revealed not only the components of a legacy of schooling, but also students’ efforts to move beyond them to new understandings. The writing strategies identified here arise from a still common, highly validated practice in secondary schools, even in the post processwriting era.¹ This practice is not limited to the schools, however; colleges also inadvertently, sometimes explicitly, underwrite the strategies enacted by students such as these.

Analysis of student responses for this study revealed the presence of three powerful constituents of the legacy of schooling: the demand for quantification, the deployment of the generalizing commonplace, and the insistence on a distinction between opinion and material that can be evaluated as either right or wrong. These are components of the standard repertoire on which many first-year college writers, and especially basic writers, rely.

For Linda Flower, that standard repertoire consisted of “writing strategies [freshmen] control with comfort and call up without question” (232). Gist and list involves getting the gist of a text and linking its main points with a simple connecting term or idea. This strategy, Flower said, is the “product of years of paraphrasing, summarizing, and recitation in school” (235). TIA— for True, Important, and I Agree”—involves reading with a filter. Any item registering in these categories is retained for use and anything else is deleted. A “pool of ideas the writer likes, understands, and can elaborate on” is created (235-236), but problematizing voices from texts tend to be filtered out. Students who engage in the third strategy, constructive planning, think about content, goals, evaluative criteria, and design problems in relation to their papers. They look “at their writing as a rhetorical problem and a constructive act” (240). This strategy is powerful and adaptive but clearly not all students use it, and a number in Flower’s study relied on more limited processes (242). The Madison data suggested that the occurrence of this strategy was infrequent and that students seemed to fall back on more limited strategies even when they had a sense of how limited those choices were. In at least one case, however, a student’s responses show a movement in the direction of constructive planning.

These standard strategies, according to Flower, comprise a robust repertoire that is at the same time “limited, and ripe for change” (229). The legacy of “practiced strategies and strong assumptions” (224) may no longer serve students’ needs in college writing because the students have perhaps failed “to appreciate the conflict between those prior assumptions and the unstated expectations of an academic discourse community” (224). Flower identified sites where the standard repertoire comes “into conflict with the demands of the rhetorical situation,” places where the repertoire was “hitting its limits, failing to deal with inherent problems in the task…and failing to meet other expectations for academic sophistication” (232). Her study reveals that assumptions stemming from previous successes in school tasks can prevent students differentiating these tasks from the more “complexly constructive” acts of college writing (233).

The Madison study bears out Flower’s analysis; it shows students employing the fundamental strategies she described. At the same time, in the protocols, interviews, and texts of these basic writers, there is also much trouble along the way, many well-learned strategies that can hardly be called strategies at all inasmuch as they tend to disrupt both processes and texts rather than to advance them. Past experiences maintain their hold in unexpected ways in spite of students’ struggles to write in a manner less dependent on responses that they are now finding either inappropriate or ineffective in a new academic context.

Flower’s catalog of the fundamental elements of students’ working knowledge is important to our understanding of where to begin our teaching. In addition, I suggest we consider three other basic issues that every high school and college writing teacher will recognize and that our data show to be common problems embedded in the products and processes of basic writers.

The first of these responses—ubiquitous among first-year college writers— is the concern with quantity: the number of pages, quotations, citations, and sources needed to satisfy what the instructor is looking for. This familiar issue appears whenever a task is assigned and it constitutes a major element in a student’s representation of that task.

Students in English 101, after completing an autobiographical narrative unit, began work on a multiple-source analytical-synthetic paper—the type of paper they would encounter in other college courses. For many, it was an anxiety-filled time. In his interview at the end of the process, one student, Tom, said:

It was an experience. It’s the hardest paper I’ve ever had to write so far. But if he [the instructor] is right…in saying that this is going to be your typical paper…I greatly needed this paper, you know. Because I’d rather have it now in a pass-fail course [than], you know, maybe get a C or D on it. It’s good practice, I guess.

Tom’s comment expresses his sense of having entered a world of new expectations. But it also reveals the degree to which he thinks in a framework where external motivations and strictures determine his response. Those expectations being unfamiliar, he posed an anxious question very familiar to teachers of writing: “What are you looking for?” During a conference, in response to the instructor’s comment that they should set the paper guidelines aside for the moment, he said, “Well, I’m just saying, am I along your guidelines, kind of what you expect so far?” And in response to the instructor’s question about a text, he replied, “What are you looking for?” One of Tom’s classmates, Sarah, in a think-aloud protocol, said, “So, basically, he’s looking for references and quotations that help him understand what you are talking about.”

As Peter Elbow remarked, the “basic subtext in a piece of student writing is likely to be, ‘Is this okay?’” (81). A concern for what the instructor is looking for generates particular kinds of responses in the students’ acts and texts. For one, questions concerning acceptable quantities of elements appear repeatedly as an issue in the interviews and conferences of the students. These concerns reflect their desire to specify measurable items that, when sufficiently provided in the final text, will qualify it for an acceptable evaluation. Years of training in which attention to numbers of pages, citations, and supporting points—coupled with a response to authority that seeks to contain uncertainty by recourse to a hopefully safe and manageable criterion of measurement— produce an overconcern with quantity at the expense of other possible strategies.

In the protocol, Sarah explained what she would find difficult about this assignment: “Finding enough information from each author…so that will probably be one hard thing and also this 5 to 7 pages.” Later, in the conference with the instructor during the writing process, Sarah asked, “So there is enough quotes in here? Because, like, when we read Tiffany’s yesterday, she had like so many quotes. And then I felt like, god, maybe I don’t have what he’s looking for?” Sarah’s concern over quantities—of sources, information, quotations, and paper length—were based on what she took the instructor to be looking for. On the one hand, she tried to reassure herself that there is a measurable quantity of these elements that will produce a successful result; on the other, she was anxious because she did not know what the teacher’s, or college’s, expectations were. And she was not alone.

In her final interview, Cheri considered whether she had done what the instructor wanted. She replied, “Um, yeah, I talked about three authors. It was five pages.” Tiffany responded to a similar question—did you fulfill the goals of this paper—with this answer: “I believe so. I, like, covered the three different authors, plus my opinion.” And Tom, the most concerned about quantities, extended his anxiety from expectations and formal elements to the time and effort that would be required to achieve sufficient inclusion of items. In the protocol, he responded to the 5-to 7-page guideline in the assignment, “Impossible—is what I’ve got to say about that…I don’t know—it’s just—the hardest part I guess is finding enough information to get 5 to 7 pages.” Certainly the concern over time is legitimate on the part of an academically at-risk, firstyear student. But the sense of Tom’s reply is that what is really at stake is the unaccustomed task of searching his texts to find enough information to fill 5 to 7 pages.

Of course, where quantity is the issue, larger concerns, such as a meaningful text, analytical and synthetic moves, a sense of rhetorical purpose, are elided. From the early grades—usually beginning in about Grade 4— through much of college and university, a value is attached to the quantity of elements in writing. In the face of other expectations that are very unfamiliar, even unknown, a student may understandably turn to what she thinks she can control, the quantity of something, in an effort to improve the rating of her product.

Teachers stipulate quantity with the sense that by doing so they will increase the amount of attention a student pays to a certain issue. However, as we have seen, quantity becomes the object of student overconcern as they contemplate finding enough information from three sources. In secondary school settings, numbers of paragraphs will frequently be stipulated in an effort to encourage students to write more extensively, just as later and for the same reason, certain numbers of pages are required for college term papers. The consequences of this kind of quantification can be seen in Tom’s reaction to the assigned length of the paper: He found it shocking. His initial attention was focused—and as the transcripts of interviews and the conference show, his continued attention as well—on the length of the paper and the amount of content it will require to fill that length. But Tom had considerable difficulty with the whole assignment and the processes he was asked to enact. Even objective matters such as quantities were daunting for him. Other students in the class, although concerned, seemed to have fewer anxieties over raw length.

All of the students in the study, however, worried about the second element of the legacy of schooling, the sine qua non of college writing, the thesis or central organizing idea. A problem of many papers is the thesis that has become a simple commonplace. Students bring with them a tactic for dealing with the central idea that might be thought of as a well-learned use of the “commonplace,” as Bartholomae termed it (149-150). Here, however, commonplace may stand for a kind of rhetorical move enacted in response to the requirements of an assignment, a move that students have developed over the course of their experience with teachers and school courses. This is the contention with which it is impossible to disagree, or what might be called the generalizing commonplace. Related to Flower’s TIA strategy, or perhaps emerging from it, students seek sources with which they can agree and construct around them a statement, or thesis, with which no one can disagree.

In the English 101 assignment, students were asked to stake out a position on some aspect of the literacy debate, to take into account the views of three other writers, and to construct an argument for their own point of view. Sources in the course had been specifically selected that presented divergent views and contentious positions. Yet the data show that students tended strongly to avoid contention and debate, collapsing or truncating arguments in ways that minimized their differences. Moreover, in their own position or thesis statements, the students also showed a marked tendency toward assertions that could not generate contention. One might think of these as statements formulated specifically to avoid opposition and argument: generalizing commonplaces with which no argument is possible. And yet, even as these are deployed in the paper, they tend to mask the real concerns and positions that students do, in fact, hold on the issues raised by their papers. The data show that students clearly have a stake in the discussion, but frequently they tend to occlude that stake beneath a surface of a vague commonplace.

Cheri proceeded in this manner. Her final paper sets out the following proposition in the introductory paragraph:

In our society we need to work together to form communication, and we need communication so we can work together. In other words for our society to reach the highest possible level of communication we need the cooperation of all of us, and in order for cooperation to occur we need communication amongst all of us. All of the authors we have read have touched this aspect in some way.

Cheri’s thesis has its origins in E.D.Hirsch’s point that a shared body of knowledge is the basis for the effective communication that, in turn, makes a complex society and a functioning democracy possible (xv-xvii). But Cheri’s formulation has dropped Hirsch’s contentious assumptions in favor of a more obviously true statement: Communication requires cooperation and cooperation requires communication. The chiasmic form of the statement suggests a meaningfulness that it really does not have; it is a self-evident proposition, an assertion with which no one can disagree. Yet at the same time, this is not simply a defensive move. Its appearance is not a function of Cheri’s uncertainty about the validity of her ideas and-or desire to conceal or mitigate inadequacy before the scrutiny of an evaluating reader.

Cheri’s thesis falls, in part, under Flower’s category of a TIA statement. She found, or contrived, a proposition with which she agreed, which she felt she could support, and whose truth claim readers will acknowledge. But there is also more going on here than Cheri’s enacting a well-learned strategy for picking ideas out of the reading for use in a paper—Flower’s explanation of the TIA strategy. In fact, Cheri did have a stake in this argument and she was quite serious about the importance of her claim. She said in her protocol, “I kind of like this because I like writing about things that are important to society and stuff.” In the draft conference, she tried to clarify her point for the instructor:

You have to cooperate or you need people for input to communicate. Do you know what I’m saying? You need each other’s ideas in order to communicate effectively… And then, you need to communicate in order for you to be able to work together and get these ideas—do you know what I mean? Everyone needs to be able to say what they feel in order—they need to—you know what I mean…

After considerable time discussing the relationship of cooperation and communication and her sources’ points of view, the instructor asked, “How did you arrive at this idea?” Cheri replied:

Um, I don’t know. It was kind of related to my last paper. But—I don’t know—it kind of—it’s important to me. I think it’s really true that, you know, things could be better if we did do it. If we shared more, rather than always competing and stuff. [In the last paper] I talk about cooperative versus competitive learning. And it’s—I don’t really talk about competition in here as much, but, you know, I just try to talk about more like how we communicate together and everything.

Her final paper gives examples from her sources of the importance of communication and working together. And then, in the final paragraph, while summing up the cooperation-communication point, she included this thought, “I personally feel that an environment that encourages working together rather than one that encourages working against each other is significantly better. It may work for some to work alone, but I don’t see much sense to it.” Here we have a momentary glimpse of the issue that really concerned her, an issue she wrote about in her first project (the literacy autobiography), and one which she was trying to theorize in her analysis-synthesis paper, having read material on the national educational debate. She was concerned that competitive education, to her the norm, is less effective than cooperative education. Specifically, as a first-year, at-risk student at a major university, she was anxious about her status and ability not only to compete but even to survive in a competitive academic environment. Her preference was a more collegial, cooperative learning environment such as she has found, to some extent, in her ungraded, literacy-based, English 101 course.

In conference, she noted that Frank Smith advocated working together with others on one’s writing (796), and she said:

I think what he’s saying is, sure it’s okay to write alone, but—you know, like what we’ve been doing in class is helpful, to have each other to give you ideas and help you get started. It’s still your paper, but you’re able to have more insight on it with the help of others…it opens your mind to more—it makes it a better paper.

Later she commented, “At first everyone was like, ‘Five to seven pages, that’s going to be hard.’ But once we started talking to each other, it seemed more possible.”

Cheri had a stake in her paper and the issue with which it deals; her personal investment was, in fact, painfully real. She was concerned about her academic survival and, in the competitive world of the university, she was not at all sure her prospects were good. She felt her chances would be better in a less competitive system, one that was more supportive, collegial, and cooperativ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction: The Value of the University of Wisconsin Madison’s First-Year Writing Curriculum
• The Wisconsin Program
• Part II: Classroom Research Studies
• Afterword: A Nation of Authors
• Appendix A: Major Assignments in the UW-Madison Literacy Course
• Appendix B: Prewriting Exercises and Writing Assignments to Aid Students in Composing the Formal Papers
• Appendix C: Suggested Readings