Author: Francois

One of the most eye-opening revelations of critical pedagogy in the 1990s was that learning technical academic discourse—whether how to formally analyze the meter of a Shakespearean sonnet, the articulation of a mechanism for an advanced engineering course, studying the evolution of the myth of American exceptionalism in a history seminar, or how to read warranted implications in a mathematical proof—is a terribly difficult and arbitrary process that leaves many confused students overwhelmed by feelings of powerlessness. When we consider that students are often simultaneously learning 4-5 competing sets of technical academic discourse on the fly, and that this stress would be most pronounced among cohorts of incoming freshmen, it comes as no surprise that longitudinal studies have found that students are most likely to succumb to feeling  helpless to marshal so many discourses all at once during their first two semesters in college. Although we tend to think of this problem in the narrow framework of improving academic competency in one particular classroom at a given moment in time (e.g., how to prepare students for an upcoming midterm or for an upcoming research paper), WAC pedagogy reminds us that no class unfolds in a vacuum, as it were, and, furthermore, that the most instructive perspectives for teaching often originate from a dynamic interdisciplinary approach. With this in mind, I would like to discuss the wide-ranging benefits of giving a valued place to regular (low-stakes) creative nonfiction writing activities in the classroom.

As we all know, student learning outcomes are a process, and not a product. Each student’s relative success unfolds within the interdisciplinary fabric of not just their other coursework, but through the sociocultural richness of their other personal interests and commitments outside of school as well. WAC philosophy invites us to use writing to seize on the untapped potential of these interconnections, and one of the most intriguing ways of doing so involves featuring regular creative nonfiction writing exercises throughout the semester. I should note, in passing, that these writing activities need not add to an instructor’s workload or radically change how an instructor would calculate  the final grade for a course. In fact, the most straightforward and organic way to add creative nonfiction writing to a course would be to subsume it under participation or extra credit. It is precisely the “low-stakes” nature of these regular writing activities that can benefit students.

My interest in implementing creative nonfiction writing in the classroom can be traced to the work of  rhetoric scholar Douglas Hesse. Having witnessed the parallel evolution of creative writing into an autonomous academic program and studied the subsequent explosion of creative writing programs in American higher education, Hesse looks towards the model of untrammeled “process” writing and workshopping that takes place in creative writing seminars for inspiration to reinvigorate the conventional teacher-student dynamic. And while Hesse concentrates on how to adapt these intensive writing methods to first-year English composition curricula, my starting-point is that these very same principles and techniques can have far-reaching liberating effects across and between disciplines.

A regrettable consequence of the bureaucratization of higher education is that departments are often fenced off from each other in competition for ever-more exiguous resources, and, as a result, in can be very difficult for instructors to consider their course goals and design beyond the cloistered compound of their respective departments. However, building on Hesse’s innovative theories, I would submit that providing a regular (low-stakes) space for students to creatively reflect on their development—in terms of learning course material in addition to the holistic totality of their evolution as college students and young adults—would empower teachers and students alike to creatively tease out and engage with the intersections between their respective courses and other fields of study and experience. Indeed, what student or teacher wouldn’t benefit from creatively thinking and writing about (these are but a couple hypothetical examples) the thought-provoking parallels between the indeterminacy principle studied in a Physics class and Gödel’s theorems in mathematics, or, perhaps in a seminar on modern American poetry, how the terms and concepts of theoretical science are wed with a Romantic poetic vision in the work of A.R. Ammons? These intersecting perspectives would deepen and enrich each other by facilitating students’ in-depth understanding of their coursework.

Hesse maps out the terrain of writing into two distinct, and seemingly diametrically opposed worlds—the “Terra Facta” or “Terra Argumenta” of “thesis and support, information, . . . assertion, and evidence”—in short, our quantifiable expectations of student proficiency which form the basis of grading criteria in any given course—and the “Terra Imagina” of fiction whose “open lands” are exhilarating precisely because they don’t lead anywhere in particular. Without getting bogged down in a minute recapitulation of Hesse’s argument, the gist of his intervention is that our academic discourses all too often leave little or no room for the “Terra Imagina” of fiction—the open-ended terrain that imaginatively involves students in the writing of their own narrative as they find and develop interconnections between new forms of knowledge. Viewing Hesse’s theory through the lens of WAC pedagogy, I suggest that an interdisciplinary approach to using creative nonfiction writing in the classroom can provide an inclusive educational framework for students to explore, synthesize, and reflect on their own learning paths.

In anticipation of our upcoming November 21st student workshop on Plagiarism, I would like to focus on how integrating scaffolding and frequent low-stakes writing into the structure of a course can help to counteract plagiarism by holistically addressing the needs of students. Each and every semester, plagiarism is the most common problem cited by instructors regardless of academic field or course level taught. Although a cottage industry of subscription-based services (such as Safe Assign and Turn It In) has sprung up to facilitate the detection of plagiarism in student writing, resources for dealing with the challenge of student plagiarism before the fact are comparatively scarce.

We tend to think of and deal with student plagiarism and academic dishonesty in a moral vacuum—as if it were a prohibition whose infringement must be detected, quarantined, and automatically punished. A student “charged” with plagiarism or academic dishonesty faces the rhetoric and sanctions of criminalization, and the penalties at an instructor’s disposal for responding to plagiarism and academic dishonesty are often Draconian and retributive. We must ask ourselves: does automatically failing a student who plagiarizes or recommending a student for academic suspension actually serve to prevent the incidence of plagiarism and academic dishonesty in the classroom, or do these punitive measures merely criminalize plagiarism as a kind of unspeakable taboo in the hallowed groves of academe?  It can he helpful to think of this prohibition against plagiarism and academic dishonesty as a negative command: we are enjoining our students—who sometimes have little or no support in the form of tutors or robust writing pedagogy—to learn and master the codes and conventions of academic writing on the fly.

Promoting a classroom environment of student writing from the very first day of class can yield very fruitful results in giving students confidence in their abilities, which will in turn combat against plagiarism. As Richrad Arum and Josipa Roksa found in their landmark book Academically Adrift,

“Fifty percent of students in our sample reported that they had not taken a single course during the prior semester that require more than twenty pages of writing, and one-third had not taken one that required even forty pages of reading per week. Combining these two indicators, we found that a quarter of the students in the sample had not taken any courses that required either of these two requirements, and that only 42 percent had experienced both a reading and writing assignment of this character during the prior semester.” (71)

It seems self-evident to state that plagiarism is fundamentally a problem of students not becoming personally invested in an assignment by staking out their ownership of their own ideas and language. If we assume that Arum and Roksa’s alarming findings are broadly representative of the state of higher education in America, can we reasonably expect students who are not being given the necessary opportunities to develop proficiency in academic writing and critical thinking to be able to scrupulously apply these abstract skills in their formal assignments?

During our last faculty workshop, we discussed some of the far-reaching benefits of scaffolding course content in the context of developing plagiarism-resistant assignments. The piecemeal nature of scaffolding affords several practical advantages to instructors who wish to proactively defend against plagiarism.  Scaffolding dynamically reorients what would otherwise be a daunting, be-all and end-all final paper or project as a cumulative process consisting of several smaller assignments. It is vital for instructors to engage with the reality that plagiarism is not simply the result of “student laziness”; plagiarism is also the consequence of a crisis of confidence because students (quite naturally) feel that they cannot master academic writing. Scaffolding plays an important role in making a major assignment less intimidating by helping students overcome this fear and inertia of getting started to tackle an assignment. There is a direct inverse correlation between how much confidence students can build in these critical early stages of an assignment (when the stakes are relatively low) and how likely they will be to plagiarize the work of others on the eve of a due date.

Plagiarism will always be a perpetual problem of the classroom and scholarship. I have to imagine that, among the very first cohort admitted into Plato’s Academy for philosophical training, at least one student was surreptitiously cribbing notes under his robe. And while there will never be a fail-safe remedy or panacea for dealing with plagiarism, fostering a classroom climate of frequent writing exercises, encouraging students to write about their own heuristic learning process, and developing feedback-based learning activities can all contribute towards a more holistic understanding and approach to dealing with plagiarism. Please encourage your students to attend our November 21st student workshop on plagiarism in Namm 601A!

By the time that students reach our college classrooms, they are already veterans of the same education system that has shaped us as instructors. Although we may not always think of the students in our classroom in this way, it can be helpful to remind ourselves as instructors that each student is already an old hand at learning—their roughly two decades of experience as learners means that they have likely seen some iteration of every pedagogical trick in our repertoire. One of the central principles of the pedagogical movement known as Writing Across the Curriculum is to always strive to maintain the classroom as a space of dynamic hybridity where teaching cannot “go stale.”  In WAC parlance, this is known as fostering “an interactive multimodal learning environment,” but the meaning of pedagogical buzzwords such as “hybridity,” “interactive,” and “multimodal learning” can remain frustratingly vague in practice. How can an instructor create a classroom that is dynamic, interactive, and what does “multimodal learning” actually entail? The purpose of this article will be to seek answers to these questions by sketching out one approach in detail called “Snowball.”

The start of each class is always a somewhat fraught moment: instructors have about 5-10 minutes to project themselves and the organization and purpose of that day’s learning activity. This can take the form of outlining the overarching themes of in-class close reading or getting important content from homework problems to students. Research shows that lectures or lessons often “go stale,” as it were, during these vital opening moments of each class when students are liable to tune out and remain that way for the remainder of the class. “Snowball” is a novel kinaesthetic learning technique that takes inspiration from WAC’s imperative to creatively innovate and rethink how instructors teach and how students learn. It can be a highly effective tool for maintaining an engaged, dynamic classroom environment. A brief scenario will follow, but in a nutshell, “Snowball” contributes towards students becoming active learners through sharing and responding to each other’s concerns and ideas. Oh, and they are able to get out of their seats and throw things (at the instructor!).

At the start of class, instead of launching into the preordained script of a lecture or lesson plan, an instructor encourages all students to tear out a piece of loose-leaf and write down a question or problem that they had about the reading or homework without putting their name on the paper.

Each student then crumples up their paper into a ball and throws it to the front of the classroom in the direction of the instructor (extra points optionally awarded for targeting the instructor).

The instructor then shuffles around the mass of “snowballs” thrown by students, and all students come to the front of the class to retrieve one “snowball” to bring back to their desks.

The class then begins in earnest as each student opens up the snowball that they have retrieved and anonymously responds to the concern(s), question(s), or problem(s) raised by their fellow (anonymous) classmate. Students can then lead the classroom discussion by sharing their snowball and response with the rest of the class.

Snowball can be a great way to break the ice at the start of class. This technique is similar to a flipped classroom in that it is a participant and cooperative teaching and learning activity that empowers students as the agents of their own learning. It also has the advantage of removing the sense of shame from class participation (what the education reformer John Holt refers to as “the cat on a hot stove” phenomenon) since each snowball is anonymous and students are actually sharing and exchanging each other’s ideas. Snowball facilitates students’ dynamic engagement with course material by giving them opportunities to participate without worrying or second-guessing themselves. At the same time, each snowball becomes a meaningful vehicle for instructors to deliver course content that is truly tailored to the unique needs of their students. And, of course, it allows students to throw things at their professors—what’s not to like? I’m thankful to our co-coordinator, Rebecca Mazumdar, for initially demonstrating this novel learning technique to us.