​In her article on “The Role of Explicit Teaching in the Learning of New Genres,” Aviva Freedman postulated that explicit genre instruction is 1.) unnecessary, 2.) impossible, and 3.) unhelpful for students, with a modified “Restricted Hypothesis” that allowed that explicit genre instruction could be helpful under certain conditions. After a review of more general genre studies in rhetoric and composition, literary theory, and American culture studies, I intend to examine Freedman’s hypotheses regarding explicit genre instruction and the process of new genre development and definition in my own work with USC Connect.
 
USC Connect is the integrative learning initiative for undergraduates at the University of South Carolina, and students who demonstrate integrative learning at the highest level can earn Graduation with Leadership Distinction (GLD). The defining requirement for Graduation with Leadership Distinction is an integrative learning E-Portfolio in which students draw connections between their cocurricular experiences and their classroom learning while at the University of South Carolina. In helping students develop their E-Portfolios for GLD, we (USC Connect) utilize explicit genre instruction through various methods.
 
My interest in examining our processes for helping students develop successful GLD E-Portfolios is not simply to test Freedman’s hypotheses, but also to examine how the genre of integrative learning e-portfolios has shaped its evaluative (assessment) and instructive methods. That is, how have the products students have submitted as GLD E-Portfolios interrogated or subverted the genre itself; how have we used those products to redefine the nuances, constraints, and expectations of the genre; how have our instruction methods adjusted to accommodate those changes; and are our instructive methods effective at helping students through the process of developing integrative learning e-portfolios?
 
This project will draw from genre theory, composition studies, higher education administration, curriculum instruction, and pedagogical theory in order to examine a case study of genre development, assessment, redefinition, and explicit instruction. I intend to directly address how assessment methods (specifically rubrics) have acted on the genre of integrative e-portfolios, and how the genre has forced the adjustments of assessment methods, a question that seems to hover on the edges of composition studies (especially as it relates to pedagogical practices), but never seems to be directly addressed (at least as far as I have seen in my own studies of composition).
 
Resources
 
Freedman, Aviva. “Show and Tell? The Role of Explicit Teaching in the Learning of New Genres.” Research in the Teaching of English, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Oct., 1993), pp. 222-251. PDF.
 
Hyland, Ken. “Genre-Based Pedagogies: A Social Response to Process.” Journal of Second Language Writing, 12 (2003), pp. 17-29. PDF.
 
Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “Portfolio as Genre, Rhetoric as Reflection: Situating Selves, Literacies, and Knowledge.” WPA, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Spring, 1996), pp. 55-69. PDF.
 
Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “Postmodernism, Palimpsest, and Portfolios: Theoretical Issues in the Representation of Student Work.” College Composition and Communication, Vol. 55, No. 4 (Jun., 2004), pp. 738-761. PDF.

 Keep it Simple and Make it Global: Benefits of Short Comments on Student Writing Development and Graduate Teaching Practices in FYE
     While compositionists agree that teacher response is integral to student writing development, research in the field has indicated the need for more inquiries into how students interpret their instructors comments (Taylor Smith, 2011). Theorists have also emphasized the positive impact that setting aside class time for students to actively engage with their instructors comments on in-draft writing can have on the revision process (Straub, 2000). When it comes to response, new graduate student instructors of First-Year English (FYE) may not only feel bogged down by the workload of commenting on student essays, but may also feel as though using simplified response strategies, such as minimal written comments or rubrics, are inappropriate methods of response. Additionally, upon receiving student revisions at the end of the semester, graduate instructors may also worry that their time spent responding to student drafts has not helped facilitate student gains in learning.
     The questions driving my research in response include: how can simplified response strategies be just as, if not more, effective than extensive commenting in helping facilitate both knowledge transfer and more global revisions? How might these strategies help reduce graduate instructors’ stress over commenting tasks? How might graduate instructors plan in-class workshops in which students engage with their comments, and how might these workshops lead us to a greater understanding of what types of comments students find most beneficial?
    In my essay, I will argue that simplified response strategies benefit both students and graduate teachers. Shorter, more targeted commenting on complete units of ideas and on the internal structure of student papers provides FYE students, many of whom may be inexperienced writers, a holistic snapshot of their writing that helps allow them to make revision choices that accomplish two things. Firstly, in the way that short comments address global concerns such as development, analysis and organization, these comments enable greater student understanding of the building blocks of effective composing. Secondly, these comments allow students an accessible route to global revision processes. Simplified response techniques benefit graduate instructors, because these techniques can lead to increased student revisions at the same time that they decrease instructor workload. A decrease in workload creates a space for response in which response is transformed from work into reading; from an imperative to justify the instructor’s evaluation of the essay through more comments to an opportunity for the instructor to provide insight as to both what the student is doing well and as to what opportunities the teacher sees for development.
     In addressing how instructors might plan in-class revision workshops using feedback generated through short commenting techniques, my essay will answer the call for more research into students’ understanding of instructor comments. In this section of the paper, I will outline a sample lesson plan for such a workshop and explain how, through both peer-to-peer and teacher-student dialogue, instructors and students can work together to identify which types of responses are most beneficial and why. Doing this helps to foster the types of learning partnerships that theorists such as Andrea Scott have argued are essential to increasing students’ success as academic writers.
​
Resources
Scott, Andrea. “Commenting Across the Disciplines: Partnering with Writing Centers to Train Faculty to Respond Effectively to Student Writing.” Journal of Response to Writing 1.1: 2015. 77-88.

Straub, Richard. “Managing the Paper Load, Or Making Good Use of Time.”
The Practice of Response: Strategies for Commenting on Student Writing. Creskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2000. 253-260.
​
Taylor, Summer Smith. “ ‘I Really Don’t Know What He Meant by That’: How Well do Engineering Students Understand Teachers’ Comments on Their Writing?” Technical Communication Quarterly 20.2 (2011): 139-166.





     

     
     

     Knowledge transfer is an ability that many students lack when it comes to taking what they’ve learned in a first year composition course and carrying it over into other courses. This ability has, for many years, just been assumed to exist and so professors have not been trying to facilitate this transfer. Instead, they remained confused as to why it wasn’t happening and how their students could possibly be such bad writers. Recently, this lack of knowledge transfer has been an issue in composition journals, including Teaching English in the Two Year College, College Composition and Communication, and Composition Forum. These journals, among others, recognize that knowledge transfer is not only a problem in and of itself, but it is also a problem plaguing both two year and four year colleges.
​
        The fact that this an issue at both types of higher education institutions indicates that this is a serious problem that needs to be dealt with now before it gets worse. The results of a lack of knowledge transfer can be seen when examining graduation rates, retention statistics, and drop-out rates. While knowledge transfer can’t be blamed entirely for decreases or increases in any of those areas, it certainly is a factor. If students can’t transfer knowledge from their composition course to other courses that also require writing, reading, and critical thinking, something needs to be done. And while viewing composition as a general skills course is unpleasant, in many cases that is exactly what it is and in order for those skills to transfer and benefit the students, instructors must reexamine their teaching methods, values, and, most importantly, the content they are teaching. Implementing transfer theory and teaching threshold concepts are two of the major ways composition scholars (Blaauw-Hara and Nelms & Dively) recommend instructors facilitate transfer. Along with these changes, scholars also recommend students learn how to transfer knowledge in a course or setting between first year composition and their major courses (Frazier and Hassel and Giordano).

         Based on the research I will present in this paper, knowledge transfer can be facilitated at both the two and four year college levels. It can be done by using transfer theory to understand how transfer works and how to include that in instruction. Teaching threshold concepts is also important as they as they are the dreaded “general skills” that students need to have emphasized in order to figure out how they apply to other courses. Having either a course or some kind of learning space, like a writing center, that can cater specifically to enabling transfer would also be helpful. These solutions come from a small, but informative, sampling of the articles published on the issue of knowledge transfer. Three of the articles in particular, “Transfer Theory, Threshold Concepts, and First Year Composition,” by Mark Blaauw-Hara, “First Steps Beyond First Year: Coaching Transfer after First Year Composition,” by Dan Frazier, and “Perceived Roadblocks to Transferring Knowledge from First Year Composition to Writing Intensive Major Courses: A Pilot Study,” by Gerald Nelms and Ronda Leathers Dively, were most adamant about these solutions.

            In my paper, I will agree with these scholars, and a few others, that these methods would definitely improve students’ ability to transfer knowledge from first year composition to other courses. I will point out that while knowledge transfer has more at stake at the two year college level, it is still important for four year colleges as well. I intend to make a call to action in which I ask that composition instructors consider this issue and attempt to implement these solutions in order to immediately begin to remedy this problem of knowledge transfer.
 
                                                  Works Cited
Blaauw-Hara, Mark. “Transfer Theory, Threshold Concepts, and First Year Composition: Connecting Writing Courses to the Rest of College.” Teaching English in the Two Year College (2014): 354-365. NCTE. Web.

Frazier, Dan. “First Steps Beyond First Year: Coaching Transfer after First Year Composition.” Writing Program Administration 33.3 (2010): 34-53. Web.

Hassel, Holly and Joanne Baird Giordano. “Transfer Institutions, Transfer of Knowledge: The Development of Rhetorical Adaptability and Underprepared Writers.” Teaching English in the Two Year College 37.1 (2009): 24-41. NCTE. Web.

Nelms, Gerald and Ronda Leathers Dively. “Perceived Roadblocks to Transferring Knowledge from FYC to Writing Intensive Major Courses: A Pilot Study.” Writing Program Administration 31.1 (2007): 214-240. Web.

Robertson, Liane, Kara Taczack and Kathleen Blake Yancey. “Notes Toward a Theory of Prior Knowledge and Its Role in College Composers’ Transfer of Knowledge and Practice.” Composition Forum 26 (2021): 1-21. NCTE. Web.

Tinberg, Howard. “Reconsidering Transfer Knowledge at the Community College: Challenges and Opportunities.” Teaching English in the Two Year College 43.1 (2015): 7-31. NCTE. Web.

Throughout the majority of our course readings (the Timbur piece for this week specifically), I’ve noticed that composition scholars do a lot of worrying over the writing classroom’s position within a democratic society. Timbur claims that the books under review “all locate their concerns in relation to the much publicized literacy crisis in American education,” a crisis that is often and easily correlated if not equated with/to “a cultural crisis that runs deeper than declining test scores…the problem of literacy is equivalent to the problem of democracy in contemporary America and the practical political task of fostering the rhetorical processes needed to negotiate differences within a divided and unequal citizenry” (108). Put practically, many of these authors are concerned not only with figuring out how to teach students to write (as a ‘practical skill’) but also with the perhaps hidden social and political agendas that get smuggled into and reinforced within the composition classroom. The focus on the “cultural politics of literacy” (109) makes perfect sense when framed within the social turn in composition research, and as someone who wants to spend 2-7 years of her life focused on learning how to teach writing, I obviously think it’s very important and agree with the article’s (and authors’) sentiments. However, I’m curious as to why we (by ‘we’ I mean people who are composition nerds) automatically conceive of teaching writing in such grand, influential terms. Does Math and History research paint itself as changing the world, too? Or is this a hippie-dippy English major thing? (P.S. This is not a criticism but a question about composition research in context of other fields, as I am a proud hippie-dippy English major.)
I found the Kent book fit in nicely with classroom conversation and my last discussion question (I asked if there was an overall “Theory of Writing”). On the very first page of the introduction, Kent writes “Post-process theorists hold – for all sorts of different reasons—that writing is a practice that cannot be captured by a generalized process or a Big Theory” (1). Further, at the beginning of Dobrin’s essay, she quotes Kent’s claim that “[n]o course can teach the acts of either reading or writing” (132). It seems that my question about an ‘overall writing theory’ has been, according to prost-process scholars, answered. Dobrin’s essay in particular did a nice job of articulating the invisible problems that “process pedagogy” (139) necessitates; I also found the assertion that the practical pedagogical “translations” of post-process research are not “possible yet” (147) helpful (I was having a hard time finding anything ‘practical’ in regard to teaching writing and felt like I was missing something, but, apparently, I wasn’t). Again, this is not a critique – the answer to my question about a big theory seems to be that more work needs to be done, that maybe all there ever is is work to be done, and that’s perfectly okay with me.
However—I hate to use this terminology because it annoys me—but what are the ‘practical’ implications of this book we’ve just read? Many of the articles (Dobrin and Foster stand out, here) talk about practical stuff in overarching, theoretical terms, but I can’t quite figure out their research means in regard to teaching composition. Statements like “moving beyond examining structures that affect users of discourse to a critique of how individual moments of communicative interaction create the illusion of those structures” (Dobrin 146), or facilitating “a classroom structured around conflict as a mode of being, rather than one developed to use conflict as a dialectical strategy (Foster 162) sound nice, but I don’t know what to do with them. I get that both of these authors make it a point to not put forth any pedagogical strategies, but, still, how should/could this affect my classroom? To put it very dramatically, how do I continue to teach writing and reading when the pedagogical scholarship in my field tells me that such things are unteachable, and that it isn’t interested in or capable of providing ‘practical’ advice or “translations” (Dobrin 147) for the composition classroom?   

 In Trimbur’s “Taking the Social Turn,” Trimbur articulates anxiety about where certain theorists might “end up” if followed to their logical conclusions. He says, for example, that “Spellmeyer winds up, ironically enough, in the same place the process movement did, back in the belletristic tradition of the thoughtful non-specialist writing for an educated public” (Trimbur 114). George Pullman articulates another result of the composition models pre-process as “genres rather than as strategies to be employed differently within different contexts” (Pullman 17). We have in recent weeks discussed how genre fits within composition studies (and pedagogies), but given that pre-process theory was modeled as genre (if we believe Pullman) and that the process theory model puts us back into the “belletristic tradition” of the same pre-process model (belles lettres being a key component of composition in the late 19th century), alongside what we’ve said about the merits of genre and its responses to/constructions of certain situations and constraints, I wonder two things: 
1.)    Are we returning to a pedagogy in which genre is the motivating force for strategy (given that we have loosely defined genre as responses to common contexts or situations in class)? And if we are, what implications might this have for theory and/or pedagogy?
2.)    Would Trimbur be critical of post-process theory because it “ends up” where both process and pre-process models did? (I say “would” simply because his reviews were published before Post-Process Theory.)
 
 Unrelatedly, I’d like to ask about the form of Clifford & Ervin’s “The Ethics of Process.” It’s written in a somewhat expressivist mode (that is, personal and generically memoire-ish) and seems to align with the description of the essays in Schlib’s article immediately following their article. Why might Clifford & Ervin have chosen this particular form for their article? What effects does this particular product have on their discussions of process? Where does the argument “end up”—if it “ends up” anywhere at all?

(I ask these things because I found it particularly poignant given its location in the anthology, its subject matter, and in relation to the questions posed above, and I wonder if anyone else had thoughts on the product, especially as it discusses the process theory model.)

Finally, given the trajectory of the entire Post-Process anthology: What is the purpose and/or benefit of theory for theory's sake? Mary Elizabeth once asked why composition studies is always couched in pedagogy, and I think this--more than any other--is the time and place in which to be asking and attempting to answer that question.

 In “Modeling and Emulating: Rethinking Agency in the Writing Process,” Barbara Couture attempts to articulate moving from the “dualistic device paradigm of writing as process to what she calls writing as “design” (31).  Concerning her desire to recover a personal agency in writing not based on mindlessly model[ing] (31, 30), Couture is perhaps the most forcefully eloquent when she writes “we pay a price…by reducing those acts that make us uniquely human—speaking and writing—to a device or technology to be mastered, ignoring their more central role in shaping the way we are and live” (39).  Others, while still calling for release from prescribed ways of writing, as in the case of Olson’s ire with the constricting demands of adopting a “rhetoric of assertion” (9), or DeJoy’s “critical” position, “identification of” and analysis of the “dominant approaches to process” (172, 170), seem to erode the very robustness of any subjectivity vested with the capacity to write without any coerciveness of experience, inasmuch the social turn and “post-process” attends to the “larger forces that affect the writer and of which the writer is a part” (132, emphasis hers).  To what degree is any vestige of agency determinable within such a mutually constitutive framework and, by extension, what does this say of the impetus behind projects that attempt to extricate and fashion the self out of the social in order to interrogate context(s) of composing?
 
Ewald, writing on postmodern commitments to the “interrogations of agency, perspective, and values” on the part of those who would tout post-process theory, foregrounds the fractiousness of this enterprise amongst “critical and feminist approaches” inclusive of “accusations of cultural bias and uncritical cultural reproduction” (119-120). She does so amidst thoughts that would seem very much to align with Couture on the resuscitation of agency, inasmuch as she accepts the  “inherent value” of post-process theories seeking to establish “subject/subject” relations” in which “student contributions” have value” (129).  Yet these are “relations” fraught with peril for those students striving to initiate community while the ideology of some scholars binds them to the rack of “privilege,” as Foster, in conjuring up the frustration and distress of identity politics gone awry in his discussion of a pedagogy of “contingency” (154-157), demonstrates in explicitly referencing two of such bent:
Patricia Bizzell has argued that well-meaning efforts to develop community in classrooms made up of…middle-class majorities that do not recognize their own privilege, inevitably silence disempowered others…Similarly, Susan Miller is uncompromising in her insistence that “no amount of mutuality, sympathy or collaborative, ‘dialogic’ and dialectic interaction [can reduce] this difference” that makes me “always an ‘object’ to you, even in ‘public’ spaces where we write collaboratively. (qtd. in 161)
What might generously be said of such positions within a more expansive unfolding of context comprising the social turn in composition studies, given what seems to be an incessant desire to impose a paradoxically extensive and localizable culpability to individuals within social relations that clings to notions of a concretized hierarchy of difference? 
 

The readings about technology and composition this week have been interesting, to say the least. Particularly because of the state of writing, and electronic modes of writing in last ten years. Yancey writes about how technology has allowed for a “writing public made plural” and that “no one is forcing this public to write” (300). I suspect that our writing students have much more writing experience under their belts as they enter college as compared to how much writing experience I had when I entered college. Now the quality of that writing (by which I mostly mean the genre of writing, not so much a dig on student writing) is largely suspect, but the actual experience of producing textual content is there: texting, tweeting, bloging, facebooking, etc. Yancey also mentions that students need “neither self-assessment nor our assessment: they have a rhetorical situation, a purpose, a potentially world wide audience, a choice of technology and medium—and they write” (302). Having that said, it is the composition teacher’s job to turn their writerly sledgehammer in to a writerly scalpel (or at least lead them in the direction of the scalpel).
 
These readings, I found, do raise more questions than they offer answers (something I think I mentioned last week; so I should probably stop expecting answers, eh?). The discussion of technology is a tricky one though, something that both concerns and excites me as an academic because technology these days shifts and develops rapidly, and that shift can be observed in these articles. Ten years is a canyon-sized gap that makes composition research seem desperately outdated. Yancey speaks to this back in 2004: “I have to wonder out loud if in some pretty important ways and within the relatively short space of not quite than ten years, we may already have become anachronistic” (302). I found Haas’s discussion on materiality interesting, but she is writing about the capital-N InterNet, which, to be fair, was twenty years ago.
 
I originally had more specific questions about Haas’s book on materiality and Yancy’s article on multi-modality, but as I write, more pressing questions about technology and our role as compositionists come to mind. So, because these articles seem to have quickly dated themselves, and the academic research process can be quite slow and labored, how does the development of composing technologies impact our field? Are we agile enough to keep up? And considering the research in Haas’s book, how do we bridge the gap between digital compositions and more traditional physical modes of composition (which I think might be the theme of that UNCC FYW conference)?

So, what I’m finding with a lot of these articles this week is a discrepancy between what I expect out of the article and what the article actually gives me. I start reading an article and after the first pages, I expect a new concept or theory to blow open an apparently closed door, but what ends up happening is that the door is gently pushed open to a maze of corridors leading to other ill-defined doors, which is, I guess, a silly way of saying: complicating an issue as opposed to resolving it (although I think some of these ideas are marching in the direction of resolution).
 
In Amy Devitt’s “Generalizing about Genre: New Conceptions of an Old Concept” is certainly doing this. I’ve taught genre in the FYE classroom before, usually in the form of genre analyses or a genre-recreation. My goal in these instances have been to raise the students’ sense of genre awareness, to, perhaps, offer the students the skill of learning the components to either an unfamiliar genre or to learn to become better acquainted with already familiar genres. I like the complication that Devitt offers, that “genre not only responds to but also constructs recurring situation, [but also] genre must be a dynamic rather than static concept. Genres construct and respond to situation; they are actions” (578). If we (and students) are understanding genre in very formalistic terms, then we are seriously misunderstanding writing and what it does. Writing could then be statically boiled down to five modes. Genre makes meaning. As soon as we can identify the genre of piece, the reader then infers meaning, to a point anyway. The reader can infer situation and context. Genre is certainly rhetorical.
 
But after reading through all of these specific ideas and notions of viewing genre through this more considered lens, I don’t think she’s really made a very large distinction between old understandings of genre and these new considered understandings of genre. I mean to say that, as I read, really wanted to get a sense of why these distinctions are important. Devitt mentions “Aviva reedman’s research [which] suggests that some novices may learn to write particular genres without explicit instruction, even ignoring explicit feed back” (583). And I think this is true. Some of these notions of genre (basic notions) are really self-evident. How situation and context are important. A resignation letter that communicates appreciation verses a resignation letter that communicates “you can’t fire me because I quit!” have obvious differing social contexts but still fit under the genre of resignation letter, largely due to the purpose of the document. If I’m not incorrect, then what are we doing here? What value does pointing out the obvious have for a class of freshman? Or, is this stuff obvious to our freshmen?
 
Generally, I’m always on the lookout for the connection between theory and practice—where the rubber meets the road—and when I can’t readily find that connection, I get antsy. Devitt writes, “[t]eachers of writing need to discover how to teach novices the situations and forms of the genres” (583). I point this sentence out because she has presented the theory to us, but no real sense of where the rubber will meet the road, perhaps putting the impetus on us. “[S]tudents may know the genre of letters to the editor in a superficial way, but if they have never felt the need to write such a letter—if they have never experienced the situation—they may be incapable of writing one that appropriately responds to that situation” (583). She is speaking to having a sense of agency here, I think. Arguably, language is imitation. We learn it by imitating what we hear. We often acquire new genres by imitating (writing) what we read. So, what is the limitation to imitation? Is agency a prerequisite in composing in new genres? Particularly if students, truly and legitimately, don’t give a damn?

I found much to appreciate about this week's reading, specifically ​Cooper’s “Ecology of Writing," which I found refreshing in the sense that it offered a theory on complexity (which she uses in the form of an ecology or "web") that is more satisfactory to me as both a teacher and writer -- which, she would remind us, we are always both.

She seems to take (although it may not have been called this when she wrote the essay) a new materialist perspective: 
 
“An ecologist explores how writers interact to form systems: all the characteristics of any individual writer or piece of writing both determine and are determined by the characteristics of all the other writers and writings in the systems.” (368)
 and:
“the systems are not given, not limitations on writers; instead they are made and remade by writers in the act of writing.” (368)

That is to say, writers (teachers, students, etc.) are constantly constituted by what we write as we are writing it. As Heidegger would say, it's a co-creation, one that is not constituted *by* a particular system or audience, but systems and audiences which constantly co-produce one another.

Cooper does, however, at one point, mention the distinction between audience and reader, which I would like to question further. While I realize this is not the primary focus of her essay, it did get me thinking along lines I hadn't considered before. That is, how do we write for an audience (or teach students to write for an audience) when that audience is constantly changing? Yes, we may have one audience (or reader? Still not sure of the difference) "in mind” (whether imagined, or imagined as actual), yet that audience will inevitably change. Fundamentally, I teach my students to consider audience; however, should they consider a reader? How does one consider a constantly shifting audience/reader? And, more drastically, *should* we focus so much on the audience in our teaching? 

Additionally, I appreciated much of Devitt's "Generalizing about Genre," in which she claims that:
 
“This reconception of genre may even lead us to a unified theory of writing.”
and
“our theory of genre, therefore, must allow us to see behind particular classifications (which change as our purposes change) and forms (which trace but do not constitute genre).” (575)

My question, however, is would a unified “theory of writing” be a good thing? What does it buy us or allow for? And conversely, why is a dichromatic theory of writing necessarily a bad thing?
 
And isn’t she simply re-classifying genre? (re-genres genre) What does that really do?