Teaching Mindful Writers

Brian Jackson

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781607329374
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Teaching Mindful Writers introduces new writing teachers to a learning cycle that will help students become self-directed writers through planning, practicing, revising, and reflecting. Focusing on the art and science of instructing self-directed writers through major writing tasks, Brian Jackson helps teachers prepare students to engage purposefully in any writing task by developing the habits of mind and cognitive strategies of the mindful writer.

Relying on the most recent research in writing studies and learning theory, Jackson gives new teachers practical advice about setting up writing tasks, using daily writing, leading class discussions, providing feedback, joining teaching communities, and other essential tools that should be in every writing teacher's toolbox. Teaching Mindful Writers is a timely, fresh perspective on teaching students to be self-directed writers.

Part I

Designing Tasks for Mindful Writers

1

What Does It Mean to Teach Writing?

DOI: 10.7330/9781607329374.c001

Where to begin? At the beginning, before we’re neck deep in a writing task with students.

The chapters in part I will help you understand, and then plan, writing assignments for mindful writers. We begin with First Principles—specifically, how we have come to see FYW as the site for teaching students to understand writing as a social act (rhetoric) and an iterative activity (writing process) best performed mindfully (metacognition) (chapters 1–3). We’ll talk about a learning cycle (chapter 4) you can use to plan each unit of writing instruction for a major writing task. To engage with the learning cycle, students will need a meaningful writing task (chapter 5) organized with ends in mind (chapter 6) and laced with minor writing interventions that will build metacognitive skills (chapter 7). First, let’s take a brief look at how people learn to write.

Writing from the Start

It is remarkable that almost all children, in any culture on earth, with the ability to send and receive sounds, can learn to speak a sophisticated language structure with hardly any formal training—by just babbling to the people they live with. Whether this is an instinct (Pinker 1994) or a faculty (Yule 1996) or some other ability, children pick up complex morphological, syntactic, and semantic principles in speech without us forcing them to use flash cards or complete drills. Even their so-called mistakes are brilliant. We learn to speak in social environments—some more language-rich than others—that fuel our need to understand, connect to, and influence the world around us. This is a sociocognitive theory of language.

While we routinely point out that writing, unlike speech, is an unnatural act (see Dryer 2015), we know from research that little children participate in prealphabetic writing—that is, scribbles lined up like prose—for the same reasons they participate in speech: out of a desire to communicate, to “take part in literacy activities with adults and to form friendships” (Rowe 2008, 403). Our earliest forms of full writing—sets of symbols representing phonetic values and abstract ideas—emerged ostensibly from a desperate need to interact with others, specifically to interact economically (Robinson 2009). As symbol-making animals, our first shot at written language was something like, “You owe me.”

Unlike speech, writing takes a long time to master—by one account over twenty years (Kellogg 2008). While there is no absolute sequence for learning to write, children must understand that letters represent sounds, that letters combine in a particular order to form words, that one word is distinguished orthographically from other words (in speech, there are no spaces), that words muster up in particular orders called sentences, and that these sentences combine to create texts that serve a variety of social purposes. And that’s just what the young writer needs to understand. Without also mastering the orthographic labor of writing (including handwriting and typing), children can’t move to the higher-order dimension of writing as social discourse because their working memory is jammed with the challenge of just getting words on the page (James, Jao, and Beringer 2017; Tolchinsky 2016).

In short, writing is a cognitive, sociocultural, technological, and embodied activity—“a complex social participatory performance,” writes Charles Bazerman, “in which the writer asserts meaning, goals, actions, affiliations, and identities within a constantly changing, contingently organized social world” (2016, 18). We write to commune.

Teaching People to Write

Then the formal schooling kicks in. As Deborah Brandt has taught us, we all learn and use writing under the influence of sponsors of literacy—“any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy” (Brandt 2009, 25). I see two important takeaways from Brandt’s research: (1) “literacy takes its shape from the interests of its sponsors,” who control the “ideological freight” and use of reading and writing (27), and (2) sponsorship takes place under “unequal conditions” of opportunities to learn and use reading and writing (29). We learn to write, as Tom Miller explains, under “prevailing ideologies and social practices” over which as children we have little control (2011, 14). While writing to commune may be a sociocultural impulse, its learning and practice are governed by sociocultural forces that don’t always support equal and healthy literacy practices.

This overview of language acquisition is important to you because you are now a sponsor of literacy. You are a writing instructor with the potential to enable, support, teach, and model for a novice writer. More specifically, you are a writing teacher at the college level, and you teach a class that has been historically constructed, institutionally molded, and discursively contested for over a century.

Of course, writing instruction is way older than that. For all that Mesopotamian clay scratching to make sense, both sender and receiver had to know the conventions. Archaeologists have discovered a 4,000-year-old clay tablet upon which a student in a scribal school explains, in cuneiform, that when his headmaster reviewed his writing, the headmaster said “there is something missing,” and then “caned” him as a result—an early example of how sponsors of literacy “regulate” learning (Robinson 2009, 126). In the Western tradition, writing instruction in ancient Greece was both “oral and literate,” since nobody really read anything silently and most everything written was meant to be “performed aloud” (Enos 2001, 16). Greek writing students—all males, yes, like nearly everywhere else in the world for millennia—learned from a single master as apprentices, whereas the Romans instituted a system of writing education with classrooms and a common rhetorical curriculum, a system that “dominated European practice” for 2,000 years (Murphy 2001, 37).

This enduring system of writing instruction is fascinating in light of our recent turn to transferrable habits of mind (which I’ll discuss in the next chapter). Quintilian had argued that the primary learning outcome for writing instruction was facilitas, the “habitual capacity to produce appropriate and effective language in any situation” (Murphy 2001, 36). Up until the eighteenth century—and here I’m getting necessarily breezy; see A Short History of Writing Instruction for the details—facilitas was practiced in the Western world almost exclusively in Greek and Latin, in exercises in imitation, literary analysis, invention, style, declamation, letter-writing, argumentation, elocution, and “themes” (written, says one Renaissance writing teacher, “with exceeding paines and feare” by the schoolboys; Abbott 2001, 161). Many of these exercises were meant to prepare students to use their writing to master public speaking. The idea that you’d write in your own vernacular (English, e.g.) for a private reading audience was not widespread in writing classes in the West till the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

I’m compressing the story in pursuit of a higher theme: Writing instruction is a historically dynamic, culturally contingent practice that has never really been “one thing.” Over the centuries, rhetoric—as classically conceived as a mode of invention and eloquence for public discourse—has waxed and waned as the theoretical base for teaching young people to write. But in some form or another, it has remained a paradigmatic constant, perhaps because it is hard to suppress language’s sociocultural telos (though I had a few language arts teachers do their darndest). College writing instruction has been influenced by larger cultural trends (like, who goes to college, like technology) and by the sponsors of literacy at the colleges and universities that popped up in the United States between the Civil War and World War I—the era of the “Great American University” (Thelin 2004).

Forcing Students to Write

But our story—yours and mine, as first-year writing teachers—takes shape from two pivotal historical moments: (1) the invention of first-year writing as a required course at the university, and (2) the construction of something called “composition studies” or “writing studies” as a profession. In 1885 Harvard University instituted if not the first then the most influential required first-year composition course, English A, with Adams Sherman Hill’s Principles of Rhetoric as the primary text (Brereton 1995, 11). According to an early, rather grouchy report (in 1892), the course required teachers to perform “mental drudgery of the most exhausting nature” and was believed, by many Harvard intellectuals of the day, to be an “absurd” distraction from the “proper functions” of a university (75, 77). And yet English A spread across the country, becoming by 1920 the most required undergraduate course on campus (with an undergraduate student population cresting 1 million). It was also perceived as an academic backwater, an embarrassment of remediation, taught by an underappreciated cadre of overworked teachers and taught as a futile, audience-irrelevant task of correctness.

Welcome to the team!

Wait, there are alternative histories. John Brereton’s collection of primary documents presents a complex intellectual struggle for the soul of first-year writing, with plenty of theoretical fuel for a more compelling model of learning to write. Even in an era obsessed with efficiency, there were progressive heroes in “comp,” carrying John Dewey’s banner: Scholars such as Edwin Hopkins, Fred Newton Scott, and Gertrude Buck (early writing program administrators) and various contributors to English Journal believed that FYW could be “student-centered, project-oriented, community-based,” rhetorically sophisticated and intellectually engaging (Gallagher 2002, 21). More forward-thinking institutions serving underrepresented populations (women, African Americans, the working classes) taught writing as community service and civic engagement (Kates 2001). Institutional reformers developed writing programs that made FYW just the beginning of knowledge-making persuasion in the disciplines (i.e., students’ majors), in the professions, and in public culture (Russell 2002). We have quite a legacy to draw from when we approach methods for teaching FYW and other writing courses beyond.

So, that’s the first legacy: the creation of required FYW as a battleground for various ideologies and an enduring site for contingent labor (see Crowley 1998). The National Census of Writing tells me that 96 percent of the 643 institutions surveyed require FYW and that 54 percent of those require two semesters of it (National Census of Writing 2013). On the labor issue, in a 2008 study 76 percent of writing teachers at two-year colleges and 58 percent at four-year colleges were non-tenure-track faculty (Jaschik 2008). Our institutions want to teach writing badly enough to require it for incoming students, but not badly enough to offer full-time status to all those who teach it. Many of you are grad students passing through a writing program on your way to full-time careers. If you are an adjunct, I sincerely hope that the institution you work for is making efforts to apply the recommendations found in the “CCCC Statement on Working Conditions for Non-Tenure-Track Writing Faculty.” I’ll have more to say about professionalization at the end of this book.

The second historical trajectory has more to do with the content of the class you teach. When I interviewed to teach FYW for the first time in 2001, I was asked, “What kind of texts would you use to teach writing?” I said, “Uh . . . like . . . the Best American Essays, maybe?” I didn’t know it at the time, but my clumsy answer reflected an unspoken theory, however half-baked, about teaching writing. In this case, my assumption seems to be that you teach writing by having students read what Alan Lightman or Cheryl Strayed believe to be the year’s best magazine nonfiction. By reading Stephen King’s account of being hit by a car in 1999, my students would . . . what? Well, learn what it means to write good! Lacking any pedagogical content knowledge, I had full faith that students would internalize the tricks of the masters just by reading them—kinda like you’d learn to bake a good razzleberry pie by eating one at Marie Callender’s restaurant.

All teaching, whether the teacher knows it or not, proceeds from certain assumptions about the way the world works—in our case, the way we learn, the way language works in the social world, the way (and the why, and the ought) people develop literacy practices. These assumptions can come from experience—intuition about language cultivated by a lifetime of reading and writing and forming judgments about them—and they can come from a more systematic inquiry into these questions—what we would call research. In the early days of required FYW, it seems the leading intellectuals thought of teaching writing as an art, not necessarily a science worthy of the name “field” or “discipline.” It didn’t stop them from forming the first professional society concerned with teaching writing, the National Council of Teachers of English, in 1911. But it wasn’t until the 1960s that a research agenda started to emerge, with graduate programs encouraging doctoral students to study student writers and the processes by which they write. As Louise Wetherbee Phelps explains, “Composition Studies” became a self-aware field in the 1960s and ’70s, when three major traditions merged: a teaching tradition in higher education, a rhetorical tradition that renewed the paradigm situating writing in the classical study of eloquence, and a new research tradition studying the writing process using a variety of methodologies (including ethnography or sociolinguistics) (Phelps 1996, 124). This merging made possible a variety of theories related to teaching writing. To paraphrase the Geoffrey Chaucer character from the movie A Knight’s Tale, we walk in the garden of this turbulence.

(A quick aside: When we talk about research in FYW, we often separate composition studies from writing studies. Writing studies is a more broad field of inquiry about writing as a human activity in any setting, for example, workplace writing or public writing. When folks in the field talk about composition, they’re most likely talking about FYW and the research/admin apparatus of that single college course.)

The Metatheories

Call them theories (Berlin 1982) or approaches (Fulkerson 2005) or pedagogies (Tate et al. 2014), we now ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Designing Tasks for Mindful Writers
• Part II: Plan
• Part III: Practice
• Part IV: Revise
• Part V: Reflect
• Part VI: The Mindful Teacher
• References
• About the Author
• Index