Author: aandrzejewski

As this semester comes to an end, instructors are starting to think ahead to the role technology and low-stakes writing assignments will play in their classroom and course requirements next semester. I used to be wary of technology, especially, and didn’t find it necessary to create the kind of classroom experience I wanted–and I know I was not alone in this sentiment.

But then I read Jason Tougaw’s “Dream Bloggers Invent the University”and everything changed. Dream-blogging (Tougaw had students blog about their dreams under pseudonyms) is an excellent example of a low-stakes writing assignment that allows students to make deep and broad connections about the course material, without the fears and insecurities that come with being asked to write formally within a discourse community they are unfamiliar with. Tougaw addresses these insecurities when he describes a student’s, “Drei’s,” un-authoritative language: “several things I guess,” “I think,” “I am also not sure,” etc. (256) while talking about his own dreams, as well as other students’ insecurities in feeling that they lack “the expertise and authority to comment on each other’s dreams” (258). For instructors who are not comfortable using blogs in their classroom, they might have heard similar comments from students during peer-review sessions or any kind of group work. In many ways blogging and other kinds of low stakes writing assignments are a kind of consistent, frequent type of peer-review. But peer-review only works when all students involved believe that they are capable of “reviewing” in constructive ways.

Tougaw argues later on in the article that students may benefit from “low-stakes writing, presumably because, like dreaming, such writing provokes students to avoid the “tightly woven” or “overlearned” regions of the mind’” (266). I think this is so important, because many freshmen come in with mindsets like “Drei,” and in order for them to push their way into what Gaipa calls “The Academic Ballroom”–to write in ways that change the conversation–we must, as educators, find a way around these ingrained beliefs of inadequacy, our students’ perceptions that they are not able to, or expected to, make important interventions through writing. I haven’t found another way to address and change this kind of mindset without low-stakes writing assignments as a foundation.

As a way to incorporate “low-stakes” writing into the classroom, Tougaw argues that blogs of any kind “are to formal essays as dreams are to waking thought…a process through which students internalize the lessons of a course sufficiently to produce their own cognitive blends and express the emergent ideas in their own voices” (266). In my own experience, indeed, blogs allow more introverted students to become a part of class conversation, and more extroverted students to realize that they aren’t the only ones in the classroom formulating these “emergent ideas.”

In this way, Tougaw’s article has a lot to do with why plagiarism happens. Students, in my experience, have the capability to participate in what Bartholomae deems, “the real work of the academy” through their “academic writing” (qtd. in Tougaw 254). If we create spaces in which students begin as experts, in this case framing a course around their dreams, their subconscious, and their selves, and then provide an academic framework for this expertise—Freudian interpretative theory, for example—to build upon their “voices” and ideas, then we might find that plagiarism is not only easier to detect, but also happens less frequently in our classrooms. One of my marginal notes while reading Tougaw’s article was, “he takes his students seriously,” and I think this is of the utmost importance in not only bridging constructivist and expressivist composition theories, but also nurturing students in a way that inspires them to take pride in their own voices and writing assignments.

To conclude: but “what about students who don’t dream?” This is a loaded question I’m often asked about the syllabus I designed based off of Tougaw’s article. First, everyone dreams–the issue is whether or not the dreamer remembers these dreams. Tougaw addresses this question in a discussion of the “feedback loop” in both blogging and in the students’ cognitive processes:

“The blogs have provided a formal structure for the making and expression of meaning that is both cognitive and social, and because the class is linked in this enterprise, collectively the blogs create what might be called feedback loop, whereby each student’s blog has the potential to catalyze the cognition of her fellow bloggers and vice versa” (263).

Tougaw seems to make the argument, here, that by encouraging the students to learn about and focus on dreams, they begin to have and remember dreams, even certain types of dreams. In closing, I wonder if this phenomenon is not necessarily particular to Tougaw’s vision of low-stakes assignments, but to any kind of writing assignment that troubles the assumption that there are some students “who don’t dream,” so to speak–low stakes and high stakes writing assignments that take for granted each student has something important to say.

References:

Tougaw, J. (2009). “Dream Bloggers Invent the University.” Computers and Composition 26, 251-268.

Gaipa, Mark. “Breaking into the Conversation: How Students Can Acquire Authority for Their Writing.” Pedagogy 4.3 (2004), 419-437.

It is no secret that City Tech has a large population of students who are multilingual writers, as the questions and concerns from faculty members at WAC workshops and in meetings constantly remind us. First of all, we are all “English language learners” when it comes to academic writing, but here are some strategies I’ve found help, as someone who has not been directly trained to work with this specific student population:

Refrain from passing the ball; assuming others are somehow more trained or qualified to help than yourself; and giving insensitive recommendations. Often, and understandably, instructors feel powerless to help students struggling to learn the English language. It’s easy to refuse to grade a paper; recommend the writing center where, more often than not, tutors are just as unequipped to help these students as instructors are; or make recommendations based on harmful assumptions, for example: “start speaking to your friends in English to practice.” It’s incredibly hard to navigate worlds in which you do not speak the language fluently, and it’s often not a matter of working harder or only speaking the language you want to improve in—many students don’t have the luxury of only speaking English, as they are often translators for family members or in intimate relationships with people who don’t speak English. To ask students to suffer and isolate themselves in order to get a better grade on a formal assignment disrespects this experience and suggests that they aren’t working hard enough, when often they are working much harder than native English speakers to succeed.

Create a rubric from which you can grade their writing assignments honestly and fairly alongside their classmates, that gives them every opportunity to succeed. Holding multilingual writers to different standards than their classmates, in the long run, doesn’t help students strive to become better writers, nor does it improve their confidence. Instead, these allowances suggest multilingual writers are incapable of doing good work, which is not just a dangerous assumption to have—it’s simply untrue. Here is an example of a rubric I use for papers that incorporates grammatical and stylistic concerns, but does not warrant an F by these standards alone. If students are grasping content; articulating ideas that you can understand, despite patterns of error; and organizing these ideas in ways that make sense, then they should have their ideas responded to and engaged with, and allowed the opportunity to continue to practice their writing without fear of of failure.

Assign a variety of writing assignments that allow students to be part of a conversation. It is not surprising that many students are not motivated to continue to practice joining academic conversations when they are perceived as a problem or burden as opposed to part of the conversation. In my classes, I make sure there are many low stakes writing assignments that are not graded on punctuation, grammar, or spelling, and that the ideas articulated in these assignments are taken and responded to seriously (here is a link to example syllabi descriptions for readings quizzes and blog posts). Whether it’s a brief reading quiz that asks students to articulate memorable moments, questions they had, or key concepts (here’s an example), or weekly blogs and responses to their peers’ blog posts that offer a space to have discussion about the course materials outside of class (some prompts), the more students feel comfortable conversing with each other and their instructor, the more their writing will improve.

Remind students that many native English speakers also struggle to get through reading and writing assignments. I remember one case in which a husband of a student of mine, who was a native English speaker unlike his wife, e-mailed me concerned about the difficulty of the reading—suggesting that it had no place in an introductory level class because even he could not understand it with “multiple degrees.” (Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams). I did not respond, of course, but this incident is just one example of the general assumption that many multilingual writers have—that grasping course content is easy for native English speakers. Keep in mind that many students who are learning English sit and read with dictionaries in hand, often unlike some native English speakers who encounter many words they don’t know but have the confidence to assume the reading is “too hard” or continue to skim until they get the gist. I make sure to articulate to all of my students, but especially to my multilingual writers, that they do not have to look up every word they don’t know, to wait until words repeat consistently or they are completely lost to go back and translate, and that it’s OK to read a summary before and to contextualize and then attempt to read through the text.

Remind students that there are no quick fixes, and appreciate that assignments do often take them longer to complete with less return on their time and effort. Often high achieving students who have put intense time and effort into their work will come to me after receiving the grade on their first draft or paper in tears. I let them know that, while I ethically cannot grade them using different standards from their peers, I acknowledge and appreciate the hard work they put into the course and assignment and that the next draft and assignment will be better for it. I do not promise them that going to the writing center; working harder next time; or any other quick fix will guarantee an A on an assignment. I do design my courses, however, to allow them to succeed while practicing and, consequently, create the space for all of my students to be an integral part of the class and conversation. A C- on a formal assignment does not ruin their chances of an A in the course, should they complete all of the low stakes writing assignments—assignments built into the course that allow them—as any student—to converse without judgement. These kind of spaces, ultimately, are what allow for any writer to improve.

For more, see Amy J. Wan’s Producing Good Citizens: Literacy Training in Anxious Times (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014) and Marcos Gonsalez, “When ‘Good Writing’ Means ‘White Writing’”:
https://electricliterature.com/when-good-writing-means-white-writing-afb6510185ae

As the new Writing Across the Curriculum fellows discussed and revised “Effective Assignment Design,” the first of our writing intensive certification faculty workshop series (for more information, please visit our Writing Intensive Certification website), questions came up around student preparedness, effort, and assessment—what are instructors to do with students who are not prepared, do not make the effort necessary to catch up, and consequently fail in the various ways we assess them?

These are big questions. I’ve written for Fellows Corner before offering strategies for teaching the unique and particular students at the New York City College of Technology, from English language learners to students who find themselves at varying stages of readiness for college learning and writing. I hear my colleagues’ frustrations, but no matter how much construction we do as instructors in the classroom, learning is not possible without the intellectual curiosity, engagement, and unique experiences CUNY students bring to the table. I am often frustrated by my students, but more often than that I am inspired by them. I demand and receive pieces of writing I could’ve never dreamed of producing, that could’ve only come from them. My belief is that if students are met with empathy and sincerity, and that our assessment practices reflect this relationship to our students, then our students will, in turn, approach the assignments we give them with more openness, willingness, and effort.

Some questions to ask when thinking about designing and explaining empathetic assignments to our students are:

1. What skill is this assignment meant to assess, and why do I think it is important and necessary for my students to have this skill?
2. Have I conveyed this to my students—why I believe in this subject matter, that they learn and absorb it, that they spend their time on it?
3. Are there different ways to assess this skill, for students who are struggling with the assignment in its current form?
4. If an assignment fails, or many students fail an assignment, have I talked with my students about why and involved them in the assessment process? (For more on “co-authoring” in the classroom, see Danica Savonick’s “Community Guidelines: Fostering Inclusive Discussions of Difference and Christina Katopodis’s “Structuring Equality in my American Literature Survey Course.”)

Allowing space for students to bring in their own interests, passions, and experiences to the classroom is another aspect of empathetic assignment design. In one assignment I give my students, I offer them two distinct approaches to their second paper: one historical/cultural and the other theoretical. The goal for this second paper, which I make clear to students, is for them to show me they are practicing formulating and articulating a clear argument, and writing paragraphs that present evidence supporting this argument. They learn to close read figurative language in the first section of the course, and in this paper I hope to expand on these skills, teaching students to include peer-reviewed sources to back up what they see in the literature. This assignment requires that the scholarly sources students include do not directly discuss the piece of literature in question—I encourage them to bring their own disciplinary knowledge and interests to the literature, to use the information and theories they are learning in other classes to illuminate parts of the text. It is not until students have worked on and fashioned arguments based on what they see in the literature that I have them find scholarly sources on the literary texts in question and see how their argument fits into the existing conversation (this Annotated Bibliography and Preliminary Statement serve as the final research assignment).

Some papers I’ve received in the past are: “The ‘boiled-down juice of human living’: Reclaiming Narrative through Folklore & Sisterhood in Toni Morrison’s Sula”; “The Shiver of the Heart: Musical Connections in ‘Thailand’ by Haruki Murakami”; “Expectations and Vermillion Markings in Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘Mrs. Sen’s’”; and “Under the Influence: The Alcoholism Allegory in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

I think these gorgeous papers, and the effort it took students to write them, exist in part because students appreciate and hear faculty when they spell out why we all come together in the classroom at its best. So, I tell my students constantly—we need your voices in the academy, as part of the fabric of academia. I want to hear you, your voice, your ideas; I want you to bring yourself to this piece of writing, this essay, this literature. I tell them their time is precious, that if they’re bored writing an essay and I’m bored reading it, then why are we here? I tell them I wouldn’t be able to look at myself in the mirror if I didn’t believe it was important that our citizens, our dental hygienists and computer programmers, partners, mothers, and fathers, read Christopher Marlowe, Jimmy Baca, Mary Shelley, Nam Le, Haruki Murakami, and Annie Baker—that all kinds of people and professionals know how to read sources critically and suspiciously, communicate their ideas with an audience in mind, argue their point persuasively and confidently to authority figures, loved ones, children.

We move forward from there, and, more often than not, my students meet my call: to write with skill, integrity, and passion.

In order to be engaged in the classroom, students at City Tech must have the basic skills required for college learning. As any student knows, being engaged takes constant work, practice, and motivation. The etymology of the word engaged is tied to risk-taking, to “have promised one’s presence,” “to undertake to perform,” to be entangled or ensnared. (“engaged, v.” OED Online). The exhaustion many of our City Tech students bring to the classroom (speaking from the experience of teaching Thursday evening and Saturday morning sections of College Writing) makes being engaged at all difficult enough. To ask our City Tech students to engage with us and with course material over and over again is asking a lot. How can we, as instructors, support them in this endeavor?

Without a space to practice the basic skills academic engagement requires, our students are swimming upstream. Alternatively, building time into each of our courses to review skills such as effective note taking, skillful / critical reading, and being a part of generative class discussions will help our students manage the task of being motivated and present in the classroom each day.

Writing Across the Curriculum just gave a student-workshop on notetaking and reading strategies (materials are available here), and will be giving this workshop again on March 29^th at 4PM. By teaching students how to take good notes—notes in which they are processing information instead of simply storing it externally—instructors can nourish and inspire a consistent practice of in-class writing that promotes critical thinking and reflection from the get-go, changing how students understand what it means to engage with the information and concepts presented in their courses.

This workshop was given in collaboration with READ, as good reading skills are tied to note-taking. This is not self-evident to our students, who are often just trying to complete as much out-of-class reading as possible. In addition to reading difficult texts in class with my students, modeling how to write marginal comments and look up confusing words or references, I always have a discussion with them about how to skim readings effectively. If students believe that the only way to successfully read for college is to complete and understand every single assigned reading in its entirety, they will consistently feel like failures—and be more likely to give up on a reading a few pages in. In my classroom, students and I talk very seriously about discerning what the most important sections of a reading are; reading “the outline” of an article (the introduction, conclusion, and first and last sentences of each paragraph); and coming in with two, specific questions about readings, as well as pieces of information they find interesting. In reading selectively and purposefully, students begin to learn the shape academic writing takes, as well as how to manage heavy reading loads without giving up. When designing our courses as instructors at NYCCT, we should be mindful and realistic about how much out-of-class reading our students can complete, and how our in-class lessons might support them in this endeavor.

Finally, it’s not news that good class discussion helps students stay engaged, but most students have a simplistic view of classroom participation that is never challenged. In my experience, students believe that speaking as much as possible and showing instructors that they “know” the answer to a question counts as “good” participation, and staying silent is “bad” participation. Good classroom discussion often looks the exact opposite of this: students learn when they step back and listen to others speak; ask questions about the readings; articulate confusion and discontent—the list goes on. But we rarely, as instructors, take the time to talk about how to have, to practice, these kinds of generative discussions, or reflect on what a good class discussion looks like to start with.

An exercise I use in my classroom to “teach” students how to talk to one another in an academic context is called “Socratic Roles.” I divide the class into two sections (I tend to put the more talkative students in one and the less talkative students in the other). Then, I project some discussion questions on the board and tell one group to lead their own discussion while the other group takes notes based on these prompts. I do not speak or intervene in the students’ discussion for 5-10 minutes, taking notes on what my students say. After the allotted time, the groups switch, and the speakers become the note-takers while the note-takers pick up the discussion. Afterwards, we have a discussion about what makes a good class discussion, and students report back on their observations and tasks. In my experience, a large part of this debrief is the realization that a good discussion means actively making space for many different voices, and that different students have different relationships to class participation—some taking longer to formulate their thoughts, some preferring to listen, some who work out what they think out loud, etc.

The prompts in the handout can be adapted and changed based on what you, the instructor, would like students to pay attention to. My personal favorite is “list 2 important comments that are made” because when more than one student does this, the class realizes that different people learn from different pieces of information. I like doing this exercise in my classes, also, because if I organize the groups so the more introverted students have to talk, the extrovert students realize that they aren’t the only ones who can fill the silence / are doing the readings, which tends to be the assumption—and we talk about stepping back to allow for the presence of different voices in the classroom.

These skills—effective note taking, active reading, and being a part of generative class discussions—are skills that are tied to writing, to self-expression and communication. Our students too often assume that being a good student means parroting back information, giving the “right” answer, and powering through any given assignment. As instructors, we must actively fight these assumptions at the foundation of what it means to learn. Building time into a course so that students can practice these skills lets them know that you, the instructor, are serious about their engagement, and that college learning isn’t a one-way street. Student engagement begins with active efforts on the part of the instructor. Taking some time to go “back to basics” with your students doesn’t take time away from course content—it empowers them, lets them know you’re serious about their engagement, and creates a space in which they have the tools to truly learn.

“engage, v.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, January 2018, www.oed.com/view/Entry/62192. Accessed 20 February 2018.

As CUNY schools shut down across the city, many professors are left to re-organize “tentative” syllabi schedules. But instead of letting snow days wreak havoc on your reading schedule as well as the roads, use them to practice WAC principles, encouraging learning and understanding of the course material assigned for that day through low-stakes writing.

Here’s one of my favorite writing assignments to give on snow days that occur early in the semester:

Original Assignment:

• reading due (quiz): J. Allan Hobson, from Dreaming, Chapter 7

Snow Day Assignment:

• NO IN-CLASS MEETING: Professional e-mail assignment. By the end of our scheduled class period, send me a professional e-mail reflecting on one aspect of the reading for today, quoting with an in-text citation at least once (needs to be no more than 4-5 sentences).

Early in the semester, I explain to my students that professional emails include a thoughtful subject line, address to the recipient, organization, and sign offs. They are concise, to the point, and read over more than once. Professors often complain about student e-mails, so give students a chance to practice this crucial professional skill while also having them respond to course material in writing!

For those of you who don’t use online platforms in your classroom, a snow day might be a good day to require students to watch any video clips you planned to show in class, or even movie or film versions of a text you’re reading (depending on how long the class session runs—a good rule of thumb is to not give students more work than they could realistically complete during the class period). From the warmth and safety of their home, students can watch and respond to material that would otherwise take up valuable class time—or even read and respond to some material you had to cut in constructing your syllabus. Their written responses can be turned in and / or discussed during the next class, depending on how much time you want to take to read and respond to additional writing. Here’s an example from one of my literature classes that could be adapted for any relevant media:

Original Assignment:

• reading due (quiz): Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus (to end) (on the reading quiz you will be asked what word you looked up in the OED and what denotations and connotations you discovered)

Snow Day Assignment:

• CLASS HELD ONLINE: During class time, please watch the following clips from Julie Taymor’s Titus (Youtube links uploaded under “reading questions and responses”). Write a response to the film in which you discuss the OED word you looked up and one aspect of the film adaptation that is different from what you imagined (about two paragraphs).

Finally, in my classes, my favorite way to use snow days is to teach students how to respond to each other in writing. If you use a class blog or other online platform in a web-enhanced classroom, facilitating class discussion online becomes an opportunity for students to respond to one another in writing—practice for future writing groups, editing, and other forms of professional feedback in academia. Here is an example from my literature course, but, again, it can be adapted for any reading material across disciplines:

• CLASS HELD ONLINE: read one story from Dubliners not assigned yesterday and write a “new post” (top right corner) about the kinds of violence represented in the story, as well as the stories assigned on Wednesday: how is paralysis represented in Dubliners and how do these representations depart from the more obvious violences we’ve encountered thus far? Make sure to quote specifically from story, as well as incorporate a close-reading using the OED in order to answer this question. Post and respond to at least two of your peers’ posts by 11:59PM.

When you first begin asking students to respond to each other in writing, it’s important to provide example responses to comments for students so they know that one or two lines isn’t sufficient. I try to pick example comments to show students that are written in simple language, as to not discourage writers who feel they don’t have strong skills. An example from one of my students:

• I have to agree with what you said about Eveline justifying her father’s actions. She’s well aware that her father has had violent tendencies in the past, and as she’s gotten older, it has not improved. Yet, she mentions that there are times where perhaps he isn’t so bad, and weighs this rather heavily when deciding whether to leave with Frank or not. Many of the characters in Dubliners are creatures of habit, and when their habits are disturbed, paralysis sets in. Eveline has been no exception.

This comment is a gorgeous example of “Agreeing and Disagreeing,” a skill Gerald Graff encourages students to master in They Say, I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing. In a short paragraph, the student agrees and disagrees with his peers’ post and draws larger conclusions about the text. Even if the grammar and mechanics were less polished, I would use this response as an “A+ example” of what I expect from students.

If you’re just beginning to try out online discussions, you might not have examples. Sometimes, I’ll respond to superb comments or posts to let students know I, too, am reading and engaging with their writing and that this snow day assignment isn’t just busy work. For example:

• Prof. A says:
• January 13, 2017 at 12:52 pm (Edit)
• I really love how you chose to also focus on “how they handle” their paralysis–I think Lauren Berlant’s concept of “lateral agency” comes into play, but at the same time characters like Mr. Duffy and Eveline have been taught the “best” or “right” way to handle themselves, and it doesn’t always work out for them. “Handle” is also a great OED word because it suggests control and the ability to grasp–feelings / abilities Joyce doesn’t necessarily give his narrators. Well done!

Here, I incorporate key terms, databases, and how to quote from source material (it’s powerful for students to have their thoughts respected in this way—they often deserve this level of engagement, too!). Remember, though, it’s always more powerful when students see excellent examples of other students’ writing.

Finally, and I believe most importantly, I never grade my students’ participation in these assignments on low-order writing concerns such as grammar and mechanics. These assignments are a space to give introverts a chance to join the conversation, as well as students who struggle with writing a safe place to practice their skills. Emphasize to your students that their participation for the day is being graded on how well they engage with their peers’ ideas—do they ask questions, quote from the original post, make connections to other course materials, disagree respectfully? All these skills are far more important to good writing than grammar and mechanics and take practice, as well.

Hopefully this post inspires you to get your students writing tomorrow or on future snow days!

Stay warm,

Alicia