Writing Groups Inside and Outside the Classroom

Beverly J. Moss, Nels P. Highberg, Melissa Nicolas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135620073
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Curricula

This unique collection considers the nature of writing groups inside and outside the academic environment. Exploring writing groups as contextual literacy events, editors Beverly J. Moss, Nels P. Highberg, and Melissa Nicolas bring together contributors to document and reflect on the various types of collaborations that occur in writing groups in a wide range of settings, both within and outside the academy. The chapters in this volume respond to a variety of questions about writing groups, including:
*What is the impact of gender, race, and socioeconomic class on power dynamics in writing groups?
*When is a writing group a community and are all writing groups communities?
*How does the local community of a writing group impact the participation of group members in other local or global communities?
*How does the local community of a writing group impact the participation of group members in other local or global communities?
*What actions contribute to a strong community of writers and what actions contribute to the breakdown of community?
*When and for whom are writing groups ineffective?
*What is it about belonging to a community of writers that makes writing groups appealing to so many within and beyond the academy?Each chapter highlights how writing groups, whether or not they are labeled as such, function in various spaces and locations, and how collaboration works when writers from a variety of backgrounds with diverse interests come together. Writing Groups Inside and Outside the Classroom illustrates that writing groups outside of the academy are worthy of study and serve as important sites of writing and literacy instruction. Offering significant insights into the roles of writing groups in literacy and writing practice, this volume is appropriate for scholars and teachers of writing, rhetoric, composition, and literacy; for writing center administrators and staff; and for writing group participants.

Chapter One

Introduction: Writing Groups as Literacy Events

Nels P. Highberg

University of Hartford

Beverly J. Moss

The Ohio State University

Melissa Nicolas

Pennsylvania State University at Berks-Lehigh Valley

I think I can speak for the Harlem Writers Guild. We’re glad to have you …. Well, in this group we remind each other that talent is not enough. You’ve got to work. Write each sentence over and over again, until it seems you’ve used every combination possible, then write it again …. So, Maya, you lived through your baptism. Now, you’re a member of the flock.

—Maya Angelou, Heart of a Woman

In the previous excerpt, author, activist, and entertainer Maya Angelou recounts comments made to her the first time she read her work as a member of the Harlem Writers Guild, a writing group to which she belonged with Paule Marshall, John Killens, John Henrik Clarke, and other renowned African American writers, a group that had a tremendous impact on her growth as a writer. This writing group gave Angelou and its other members support and encouragement while at the same time acting as critic—sometimes harshly—pushing its members to work harder and do better. More important, this writing group was ever mindful of the context in which they found themselves—a group of African Americans, writing in the turbulent sixties and trying to get published during a time when few African Americans were being published. They were poets, fiction writers, historians, playwrights, essayists. They were like-minded in many ways, completely different in others. Yet they were a flock, a writing group, who depended on each other. As the excerpt illustrates, the group welcomed, judged, and motivated. Most important, they took an intense interest in helping members grow and succeed as writers.

Although the Harlem Writers Guild is unique in both context and makeup—no two writing groups are alike—some aspects of writing group participation remain relatively constant across groups and for each member. Worth noting is that every writing group, while engaging in meaningful and meaning-making talk about texts, operates in a particular context, and that context shapes the group, making certain demands on it. For some, those demands may become obstacles to work through or bridges that group members use to move forward, and, from time to time, they are both. Each group must negotiate a group identity and establish group rules, implicitly or explicitly. Every writing group is a socially constructed entity with language at its core, and through the process of interacting, each group influences the writing of its members. These constants as well as the uniqueness of each group are important sites of scholarly inquiry that, when investigated, can provide insight, for teachers, writing center staff, and group members, into making writing groups maximally effective in whatever context they operate.

Though many teachers think of writing groups as recent pedagogical inventions existing primarily in and around the academy, Anne Ruggles Gere, in Writing Groups: History, Theory, and Implications, reminds us that writing groups originated and existed primarily outside the academy in home communities and have been a staple in our society for centuries. Interestingly, they continue to grow in prominence across disciplines and occupations as well as across communities. This growth has led to such important work as Candace Spigelman’s Across Property Lines: Textual Ownership in Writing Groups, which highlights the need to look inside writing groups, wherever they exist, to learn more about what makes them succeed, what makes them fail, and what makes them so appealing to writing teachers and community groups.

Writing Groups as Literacy Events: Collaboration, Power, and Community

For us, writing groups function first as literacy events. Shirley Brice Heath defines literacy events as “occasions in which the talk revolves around a piece of writing” (386). Such talk can center on texts that have already been written—an act of interpretation—or on texts in the process of being written—an act of production. Such talk of both kinds almost always centers on how to improve texts—an act of revision. Obviously, writing groups sit primarily (but not exclusively) on the productive side of literacy events, and thinking about writing groups in this context highlights the centrality of oral speech in the development of texts. Literacy events, though, are rather amorphous. They take many forms and embody numerous functions. Understanding writing groups as literacy events, then, requires, as we state previously, that they be seen contextually. And as such we can begin to comprehend more fully the different types of collaboration that take place in writing groups across settings and communities and the nature of those collaborations.

In academic settings, particularly classrooms, writing groups—commonly conceptualized as peer response groups—have become the most popular example of collaborative learning for writing teachers. Proponents of collaborative learning often assert that all writing can be seen as collaborative, that even individual writers never compose in a vacuum; their writing is influenced by membership in multiple interpretive communities; these individual writers seek the occasional input from others or, at the very least, shape their text with outside readers always in mind—all central tenets in the theories of social construction that continue to shape composition studies. Based on these assumptions, any text results from numerous, and sometimes competing, influences. Likewise, writing groups also embody numerous and, sometimes, competing influences.

Ideally, writing groups enable writers to make decisions about their personal texts with the supportive influence of readers/writers who are like-minded in their views of what it means to belong to and participate in a community of writers but who represent a diversity of perspectives, experiences, and opinions as readers and writers. In the classroom, teachers see writing groups as structures that empower students to become more thoughtful, engaged, and critical writers and readers. Outside of the classroom, writers believe that their groups will empower them to create a text that conveys their intended message as clearly and completely as possible. In both settings, members of writing groups not only try to empower each other, but they also constantly negotiate the power dynamics that inevitably exist within the groups.

Observing writers who gather in groups reveals the multifarious power relationships that shape group activity. Power is often envisioned in the obvious forms of the teacher who tells group members what exact questions to answer for each writer or of the dominating member who starts each critique with his or her extensive, detailed positions. But power is more complex, as the work of Michel Foucault makes clear. Although power can control, it can also create positive effects. Foucault writes:

We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it “excludes,” it “represses,” it “censors,” it “abstracts,” it “masks,” it “conceals.” In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. (194)

Writing group interactions cover the entire range of positive and negative experiences that ultimately produce texts, and the power relations of any group cannot be ignored because they directly shape such texts.

Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford, in Singular Texts, Plural Authors, created a framework for discerning the place of power in collaborative situations. “Hierarchical” groups are “carefully, and often rigidly, structured, driven by highly specific goals, and carried out by people playing clearly defined and delimited roles” (133). In the writing situations studied by Ede and Lunsford, hierarchical modes of group interaction exist as the predominant form. Opposing such dominant models are dialogic groups, which are “loosely structured and the roles within [them] are fluid: one person may occupy multiple and shifting roles as a project progresses. In this mode, the process of articulating goals is often as important as the goals themselves and sometimes even more important” (133). Conflict becomes a vital part of these groups because “those participating in dialogic collaboration generally value the creative tension inherent in multivoiced and multivalent ventures” (133). Though Ede and Lunsford focus primarily on groups that set out to produce a single text, their concepts also apply to writing groups where individual writers produce individual texts. Thinking about the hierarchical or dialogic nature of writing groups can show, for example, how teachers or writing group facilitators ultimately shape the functions of particular groups. We must, as teachers and facilitators, interrogate the relationship between our theories of group process and our actual practice of such theories.

How we, as practitioners, conceptualize writing groups is often influenced by our notions of community. This is especially true when applied to groups outside of the academy. Indeed, many of these groups are called community writing groups. As always, the term community cannot be used uncritically. It is a dynamic rather than static social construction and, as such, is constantly in a state of change and constantly contested. M. Jimmie Killingsworth offers a useful model for complicating the concept of community, distinguishing between global and local communities. Global communities “are defined by like-mindedness, political and intellectual affiliation, and other such ‘special interests’ and are maintained by widely dispersed discourse practices made possible by modern publishing and other communication technologies” (112). Killingsworth’s global community relates directly to Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Community, where “members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (6). Technological breakthroughs enable increasingly larger groups of people to feel connected because they speak the same language, think of ideas in the same general ways, and understand where the other is “coming from.” However, such mass groups rarely meet face-to-face, and they work together in rather limited ways. They exist in the abstract—“we’re all Americans”—or in cyberspace.

For Killingsworth, local communities are seen “simply as the place where writers ordinarily work” (111). Thus, writers are “involved simultaneously in both local and global discourse communities and will feel challenged to favor one over the other” (115). Writing groups are key sites where local communities evolve, and studying them enables one to explore the pressures of negotiating the relationship between local and global discourses. In other words, writers often write with numerous (and conflicting) audiences and goals in mind. Their participation in writing groups reveals the workings of these conflicts and relationships. These conflicts and relationships may center around the disciplinary demands of a local community or social divisions signaled by differences (and similarities) such as race, gender, sexual identity, and class.

Where We Began

As editors, though we embody diverse and multiple perspectives ourselves, we have a shared starting point in our scholarly conversation on writing groups. Our conversation began in a particular place. We are writing teachers, writing center veterans, and writers. Each of us has been (or is currently) a member of a writing group, and we’ve also used peer response groups in our classes. So we bring those experiences to this project. Its conception, however, can be traced to the two rooms where the three of us first came together, two small rooms filled to the brim with books, tables, couches, computers, paper, coffeemakers and teapots. It began in a writing center.

At The Ohio State University, students enrolled in the second-level, basic writing course meet in writing groups facilitated by undergraduate peer consultants once a week for eight weeks of the ten-week quarter. The peer writing consultants are trained in a quarter-long course taught by faculty in composition studies, and they are supervised by a peer writing consulting director who is housed in the writing center and the writing workshop (the university’s location of the basic writing program). Beverly directed the writing center for four years and taught the peer consultant training course several times, and Melissa served as the peer consulting director for two years. Though Nels was a graduate student tutor and Writing Across the Curriculum consultant in the University Writing Center, he participated in the undergraduate peer writing consulting program during a quarter when we needed an extra consultant. He brought to this project his experience facilitating an undergraduate writing group. When Beverly and Melissa worked together as teacher and peer consulting director, they discovered a mutual concern: most tutor training books and writing center scholarship focus on one-on-one tutoring. At the National Writing Centers Association conference in 1998, Beverly and Melissa noted the need for more scholarship on the connections between writing groups and writing centers, lamenting the lack of texts geared to group tutoring. Tutoring through the writing group model continues to be sorely neglected in the literature, leaving whoever teaches the peer tutor training course—as well as the undergraduate tutors themselves—to adapt assigned readings to the circumstances in which they find themselves. These circumstances first led the three of us to explore a project that focused on writing groups in the tutorial setting.

However, when we began to discuss such a project, it quickly became clear that this book could be more useful to teachers, tutors, and students if the book focused more broadly on writing groups inside and outside the academy. After all, writing groups are rarely neat, orderly, clearly defined entities. For example, while our students are in university-sponsored writing groups, they meet outside the classroom, sometimes on campus but more often off campus at coffee shops, fast food restaurants, or other student hangouts. The groups always meet without a teacher present and for the most part make decisions as a group about how they proceed, fulfilling Peter Elbow’s Writing Without Teachers model. Although these groups are classroom mandated, they also operate somewhat autonomously, like nonschool-sponsored groups. Due, in part, to this autonomy, these groups share some characteristics with voluntary writing groups while simultaneously continuing to be classroom-mandated peer response groups. In many ways, the precarious nature and place of these particular involuntary writing groups extend classroom boundaries, making the boundaries more fluid, broadening the sites where writers interact.

Our experiences working with these undergraduate writing groups (in our various capacities) led to our recognizing the importance of these extended boundaries and led us to broaden the scope of how we understand writing groups. This book, then, investigates the variety of writing groups inside and outside academic settings. In broadening the focus of this book to include writing groups outside the academy, we found that many of the essays that focus on “outside” groups have much to say about and to writing center practitioners and classroom teachers; vice versa, many of the essays that focus on academic writing groups speak to concerns about how writing groups function in all settings. Writing Groups Inside and Outside the Classroom provides readers with the opportunity to see the connections as well as the differences between voluntary writing groups and school-mandated writing groups. Obviously, a central assumption of this collection is that students and teachers of writing have much to learn from writing groups in a variety of settings and configurations. Those in Ohio State’s undergraduate peer-consultant training course as well as tutors and trainers in other writing center situations will be well served as they take a more comprehensive look at writing groups by crossing boundaries and breaking down the walls between the academy and the community outside those walls.

Writing Groups Inside and Outside the Classroom extends the scholarly conversation by emphasizing the value of studying writing groups in their particular contexts. Our goal in Writing Groups Inside and Outside the Classroom is to provide readers with a multivoiced, multilayered look at writing groups. In short, we want to present a complex, multidimensional portrait of writing groups. To this end, we selected essays for this collection that fall into many categories: classroom-based and community-based writing groups, academic and nonacademic writing groups, student and nonstudent writing groups, women’s writing groups and mixed-gender groups, predominantly middle-class groups and predominantly homeless groups, among others.

To understand the contextual workings of writing groups requires the use of extensive methods of study and styles of pre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Foreword
• Contributors
• 1. Introduction: Writing Groups as Literacy Events
• Part I: Writing Groups Within the Curriculum: Pedagogical Approaches and Concerns
• Part II: Writing Groups in the Extracurriculum: Broadening the Focus
• Afterword
• Author Index
• Subject Index