Hello all!

Here is a link to the event page for my webinar. It should have the webinar itself, as well as an interview with my friend Jenna Pile about her education experiences. This interview was done on Facebook, so I presented the interview that way.

I also shared the video of the webinar itself, and the other interview is in the description if the event page doesn’t work. Behold, the Great Webinar video!

 

Initially when I thought of my blog this week, I thought I would do an in-depth look at the articles and videos about multimodal projects. Then my computer crashed, and I lost all my highlighting and notes on the articles, so I lost interest. Instead, I shall discuss my ideas for the multimodal project itself. I’m not sure what to do.

The first idea I thought of was to write a story and create a cool book with it containing illustrations and pictures. I wanted the story to center around my father and his own struggle with education. I have a personal theory about his… let’s say eccentric social media posts that my relate back to how his schooling may have stifled him. Yet, the more I think about it, the more I wonder if this will be a particularly flattering story to him, and I think my mom will be mad if I do share my theory with others. I do, however, still kind of want to do it.

My other idea centers around the webinar example we saw in class. I have friends from many walks of life and from different areas of California, so I thought it might be interesting to talk with them about their education experiences. I hope to ease into it with questions first about if they ever felt stifled in early education – perhaps a teacher told my sweet English major friend she was bad at math, so she chose not to pursue it – then get into if they used the five-paragraph essay (to bring in a little bit of Wiley.)

I’d then probably ask about their idea of “inventing the university” – if they themselves felt they had to belong to the university community when they first arrived and didn’t know how. My hip recording engineering friend went to UC Hayward before transferring to an art college, so I wonder if she may have interesting insight on this. Perhaps then I could ask about the idea of first-year comp classes – do they think the concept of comp at CSU Chico is better than at their college? Did they even have to take first-year comp at all?

Finally, I think I would end with discussion about multi-modality. My sensible graphic designer friend (and former college roommate) loved the more art centered projects, and seemed in her element when doing those opposed to the papers she had to write for other classes that she stayed up all night doing.

I have asked these three girls if they would be interested in the idea, and only one responded so far. Another did as well, but she proclaimed she was too inebriated to make any clear plans. I’m waiting until her hangover wears off to ask again. I think they all would do it (though they all have real jobs with their degrees, and I am the old peasant still in school with part-time jobs supervising children and writing terrible romance stories), but I worry about my technical skills in setting up a webinar. I am not the best at new technical things, so I feel there will have to be practice runs with my boyfriend as we sit in the same room on two separate computers.

At this point, I am not sure what I will do. I think the webinar sounds good, if only to give myself an excuse to have a nice conversation with my friends who live far away. Still, I have the story in my mind, so maybe I’ll still do that. I’m not sure.

Behold, my cat-centric video blog! (hopefully this works…)

So, I had this vision of doing this great video that showed my views of multimodality with the cuteness of my cat, but when I actually sat down to do it, I realized a) my cat doesn’t want to be followed around with a phone pointed at her, b) I don’t really know how to use my phone, and c) my house is pretty dirty so maybe I should have rented a sound stage or something (God forbid I actually clean.)

Normally, I would just do an in-depth analysis of the texts, but I thought I would give the video blog thing a shot. I tried to then upload the video, but it was too long (Or perhaps too rambling) to post, so I uploaded it to YouTube, as you can see. In this exercise, I realized how much effort it takes to make a video blog, and if my students were to want to do that, good for them. I love the idea of allowing my students to express themselves creatively (whether it’s successful or not) because it allows them to understand the concept I’m trying to teach in a different way.

Since I want to teach high school AP English Literature preferably, I think it would be incredibly interesting to see how students interpret the books they read. Of course, I would want them to write essays because the AP test kind of requires that, and I want them to be prepared for classes in college that want them to write essays (especially in English Lit classes if they decide to go that route.) But perhaps I could give them the choice to write essays for only a few books and then do something else for the others. Or, like one of my classes in grad school, have them do a creative kind of portfolio where they can do art, write stories, make videos, try to cook recipes related to the books, or whatever. We still had to write essays in that class, but we still had an outlet.

Multimodality makes the idea of teaching incredibly exciting. I hope it’s something I’d be able to implement in my own classroom (at least in the sense where I’m not behind the camera filming my cat.)

As a child, I enjoyed writing creatively from as long as I can remember. I mostly wrote to get stupid romance fan-fiction type stories out of my mind, but it helped give me something to entertain myself. As I went through school, my passion for writing continued into the academic realm, especially in eighth grade when I had a particularly eccentric and supportive English teacher. The things she taught me helped through most of my high school career until I got to AP English classes, especially my twelfth grade AP Literature course. Those higher English classes were where I learned the “Schaffer method” as referenced in Mark Wiley’s article, “The Popularity of Formulaic Writing (And Why We Need to Resist)” (62) as a tool to help pass the AP test (which I did in all my four AP classes, by the way.) Though Wiley argues against “formulaic writing,” I feel both the method and the way my teachers taught it has helped me get to where I am now by creating a strong structure for my academic writing. Further, I don’t believe this took away my creativity or individual thoughts.

Firstly, Wiley suggests that the “Schaffer method” comes from lazy teachers trying to teach their students with some kind of miracle cure for writing; however, the teachers who taught me the method were (and still are) supportive, creative, and active in their teaching. Wiley worries in the beginning of his essay “that too many teachers are looking for quick fixes for students’ writing problems… [T]oo many of these teachers are poorly prepared to teach writing. Those few new teachers who are prepared are eventually defeated by less than desirable conditions” (61). In this, Wiley puts the error on the teachers’ hands because they do not have the resources (or skills) to teach a horde of students. Admittedly, my high school was the only one in our over 50,000 people city, but my teachers did not treat us like wanting, demanding masses; rather, they focused on improving our success for the AP test and other academic writings to prepare us for college. Further, Wiley insists the “exclusive focus on format does not encourage teachers to help students explore a literary work and come up with alternative interpretations, even contradictory ones, that engage readers in both an intellectual and emotional struggle to construct meaning from their various readings” (64). My AP Lit teacher actually taught my peers and I how to close-read quotes and use them to their fullest potential. Many students had different interpretations, and he appreciated them all – he pushed us to explore our ideas with the quotes we used as our “Concrete Detail[s]” (62). Wiley’s assertions about the Schaffer method-using teachers puts them into a boring box he suggests the formulaic structure is and makes them nameless, faceless characters to tear down.

With this, Wiley assumes that if students are taught to worry about formula and not content, they cannot rise above the formula to make their own ideas. As he states, “[f]ormulaic writing… forces premature closure on complicated interpretive issues and stifles ongoing exploration. In attempting to take the mystery away from writing and make it more accessible, the formulaic approach winds up hindering students from exploring their ideas, reactions, and interpretations–the rich chaotic mess from which true insight and thoughtfulness can emerge” (64). Although having only two sentences for interpretation offers little time to explain ideas, it does teach concision in writing, which helps in the future with longer essays that get bogged down with repetitive ideas and syntax. Furthermore, using the word “true” for “true insight and thoughtfulness” puts a strict value on student writing: if students are not branching out from a structured formula, their thoughts are not “true”; they are fabricated, in Wiley’s mind. He furthers his disparaging connotations of formulaic student writers by saying, “real writers must decide what they will compose based on their intentions, who will read their texts, and what effects they want their texts to have on these real and projected readers” (64). Here he uses the words “real writers” as a way to differentiate these unskilled, formula-utilizing writers as lesser from those who create their own structures. Yet, choosing the strongest details for evidence and setting them up for a cohesive, understandable argument does take skill beyond just filling in the blanks; it prompts the seemingly “fake writers” to plan out a strong, concise paper with meaningful quotes and analysis. Wiley believes Schaffer’s method cannot possibly be the building blocks to more complex writing because it constricts the writer so much that she is not even a “real writer” anymore.

Building on that, Wiley’s ideas that focusing on structure mixed with concrete evidence and commentary makes content “a kind of afterthought” (emphasis original, 64) without any concrete evidence of his own makes his argument sound like an op-ed rather than an informed study against a writing technique he disagrees with. One of the (scant) examples Wiley shows “[s]everal high school teachers whom [he has] spoken with” who liked the approach mixed with a teacher who didn’t, but he only directly quotes the dissenting teacher: “‘Yes, Schaffer’s approach does remove the mystery for students about what their teachers expect in their essays.’ Unfortunately, she observed the method also removes the need for these students to judge for themselves how to shape their essays” (63). By not quoting the “several high school teachers” who liked the method, he does not give their words agency because he disagrees with them. Instead, he focuses on the teacher he does agree with because she wants essays to be more than “what’s easy for teachers and not necessarily what’s best for students” (63). He continues this with sweeping statements like “[t]hese students [who do not use formulaic writing and were encouraged to explore] enjoy a decisive advantage over struggling writers who are not accustomed to offering interpretations and opinions about what they read and who have no confidence that their views will be considered seriously by their teachers” (66). Here he differentiates “advantaged students” from “struggling writers” without any concrete evidence – such as statistics or studies – showing this strict difference in writing students. He references Judith Langer’s study about formula-utilizing teachers being unable to “escap[e] familiar pedagogical routines” even when trying to be adventurous, but does not use further evidence to back up the rest of his claims – such as studies showing how not using a formula helps students be more “advantaged.” This does not mean that freer students do not write better than those constrained by a formula, but it also does not provide facts to back up Wiley’s strong assertions.

Obviously, I believe formulaic writing can be helpful to burgeoning writers based on my own experience. However, I understand that if teachers focus more on the structure and not content (or force-feed ideas for the students to use), they put their students at a disadvantage. Yet, I believe it puts little faith in both the teachers and students to say the formula cannot be utilized while also encouraging exploration and even improvement of the formula itself. The point of the formula, in my opinion, is to back up arguments with strong evidence as well as adequate analysis of said evidence. Two sentences may not be enough to explain such evidence, but it does set the precedent that there needs to be both evidence and analysis, not just a hit-and-run of quotes or no evidence at all. My teachers taught me that if my argument is structured well so it flows and the analysis makes sense, I can experiment with the “formula” however I want. I find that basis helps me to keep an end in sight for my papers because even as a grad student, I needed a mix of quotes and analysis. Having that formulaic background keeps me in check, but also does not constrain me if I want to mix it up – such as focusing on just one quote in a paragraph or even spanning that same evidence over multiple paragraphs. I understand what Wiley is throwing down, and I get how a formula can be constraining, but I don’t think it’s the demon he thinks it is. By acting as though it can’t possibly be what Schaffer says it can be, he disregards it and makes his way of writing the only way. And that, I would say, is just as constraining an idea as formulaic writing.

 

*Author’s note: I tried the five-paragraph essay kind of thing here. I didn’t do the mapping thesis in the introduction (as I learned in school when I also learned the formula) because it felt more complicated than it was worth, but I did the Schaffer method through the body of the post. I would have liked more than two sentences for analysis, but that’s because I do have a freer style now. I also probably would have broken up my paragraphs because I like them a little shorter in my own writing. Yet, I think the things I would change show that I have evolved from the kid who used this formula in high school. So, I still disagree with Wiley’s assertion that a “struggling writer” like me can’t rise above. Still, I can admit there are constraints to the formula; yet, I cannot admit that those constraints then make me unable to express my own thoughts.              

“A person’s intentions to learn are engaged and the meaning of learning is configured through the process of becoming a full participant in a sociocultural practice” (29).

It took me quite some time to not be mad about having read the first chapter of Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger’s book, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. I complained and complained about it to my boyfriend and made snarky notes in the book when I felt the same ideas were being repeated. Yet, after a few classes of discussion and general mulling over, plus my initial irrational anger dying down (a.k.a. finding something else to irrationally rage over), I started to see the benefit in it – especially in regards to my internship. Referencing the above quote which helps introduce Lave and Wenger’s theory on legitimate peripheral participation (LPP), it seems the mentor of my internship class focuses on helping her students learn by making them “full participant[s] in [the] sociocultural practice” of first-year composition.

Firstly, my mentor builds community among her students with the space, materials, and resources. I tie these together because when you step into class and see all the students in a semi-circle (or circle, depending on the day) with their laptops out and focusing on the task at hand, everything seems to go hand-in-hand. The formation of the desks encourage the students to create a community with each other and their teacher; in fact, because they can all easily access and see each other, they seem more comfortable to share their work. Furthermore, the mentor set up a shared Google Drive folder so the students can easily share with each other. It also teaches them how to organize their work. Since, as Rodby and Fox alluded to in their essay about the first-year composition classes, the workshop classes still do not award graduation credits, teaching organization (plus how to use Google Drive) offers the students additional worthwhile skills to help with their college career. By creating the shared folders and introducing them to the students, the mentor apprentices them in a way. She allows them to experiment with the resources Google Drive offers, while also helping them when necessary.

The relationships in the classroom, however, most remind me of what I interpret LPP to be: apprentices becoming part of a community by instruction from their mentors until, eventually, the apprentices become mentors themselves. The students in my internship may not choose to become writing workshop mentors, but by becoming immersed in the discourse community of university writing, they prove themselves capable to become academics. Being an awkward type, I felt anxious about entering the workshop space, but the mentor had such an air of kindness and tolerance that the stress faded. Further, the students themselves appeared at ease and part of the classroom community. The relaxed and accepting atmosphere of the classroom helps with this. As Lave and Wenger write, “learning is not merely situated in practice… learning is an integral part of generative social practice in the lived-in world” (35). Because the students feel comfortable socially in their classroom community (both with their teacher and each other), they are able to immerse themselves in the practice of first-year composition.

Moving to, finally, the mentoring itself, which sets all of these aspects into place. The space, materials, resources, and relationships – all, in a way, predicated by the mentor – “contribute inseparable aspects whose combinations create a landscape… of community membership” (35). The mentor set the stage for the workshop by first allowing her students to read an essay she’d written as a college freshman. By doing this she showed them that she once was a newcomer to academic writing too and needed to learn how to become a practiced member of the community. She also pushes her students to take ownership of their work and their constructive criticisms by letting them lead workshops (though with it being so early in the semester, the students are still getting used to the class and workshopping in general.) Yet, she also offers advice and pointers so the students know what they’re looking for in each other’s essays. She still acts as a guide, but because she also presents herself as a peer, she gives her students the confidence to experiment and improve their writing.

Overall, my internship seems to relish and thrive from learning in a community. Making the writing more social makes it also more accessible to the students – they seem to want to learn how to write better. Though Lave and Wenger want to avoid addressing LPP in the education sense – they treat it as a theory more than a prescriptive – their ideas about learning socially help make the internship class structure make sense. The social is important here because it creates trust and even compassion among the students; they want each other to do well while also striving to excel themselves. Plus, they see themselves as equals to their mentor, so they feel more comfortable making mistakes and learning from them.