In the summer of 2012, I participated in the Summer Institute funding by the National Writing Project at my university. We explored writing as a social construction and also practiced our skills as writers, leaders, and inquirers in our teaching practice. It was a good preparation for teaching writing at the university level and also a great way to reflect on my previous teaching experiences and how I can adapt my practice to my newly emerging pedagogy. Writing is a process and a social construction.
In "On Writing," Stephen King recommends that writers complete the first draft with the door closed and the second draft with the door open. I would like to add there is a time to close the door and get down to business, and there is also a time for talking out a topic. It really helps to join a writer's community, and it really helps to open the door when a writer needs inspiration too. I personally prefer to talk out my ideas before closing the door too. I am learning to open up the door again for the second draft and my students have actually embraced peer revision workshops this year. This is a complete surprise to me, because usually most writer's are resistant to feedback, especially those who are insecure about their work. I prefer to think of a teacher's response as feedback and not constructive criticism. I hope that my students appreciate my responses, and I also believe that taking some of the grading out of the drafting process and involving peer groups in several phases of the writing process is a way to create, not just better writers, but a better writing community.
Objective: Writing to explore and describe a discourse community.
See Writing about Writing, pages 574-575.
Choose a discourse community that has made an impact on you or one that interests you and find a preliminary answer to the research question: “What are the goals and characteristics of this discourse community?” Write a 4-5 page mini-ethnography that tries to answer your research question based on a careful observation of the community.
Writing to Explore:
These writing assignments are intended to be like field notes for your investigation. You will use them as data on your ethnography, so take careful, detailed notes.
WTE 3: Explore My Community
Observe members of the discourse community while they are engaged in a shared activity. Describe very specifically what you see happening in the environment and with the other members. Your description may address some of these questions:
1. What are they doing and how are they doing it?
2. What kinds of things do they say?
3. What do they write?
4. How do you know who is “in” and who is “out”?
WTE 4: Interview an Expert
Set up an interview with an “expert” or experienced member of your discourse community. Formulate 20 interview questions using the Data Collection and Data Analysis section to help you (on pages 574-575). Make an audio recording of the interview. You should also take notes. I will check in class for (at least) 20 interview questions and at least one page of notes. The notes can be hand written.
Writing a Mini-Ethnography
Getting started with the writing:
Consult 2-3 sources to learn about your community. These sources may be of any relevant genre; for example: a menu, a receipt, a website, a business proposal, a news report, etc. Review your field notes from the Writing to Explore assignments. Review Swales’ six characteristics of a discourse community and choose three to focus on in your report. Write as objectively as possible. Use third person, not ‘I’, ‘we,’ or ‘you,’ unless it is a direct quotation from your interview.
Your Mini-ethnography Report
1. Introduction: ½ - 1 page
Include background research and give an overview of the community.
2. Methodology: ½ page
-Describe what you did to conduct research and gather data. You may use first person only in this section.
3. Results: 2-3 pages
-Chose three characteristics of Swales’ list (pages 471-473).
-Use them to explain why your community is a discourse community, giving evidence from the data you have collected. (See Branick on pages 563-565 for an example).
4. Conclusion: ½ - 1 page
Answer some of these questions in your conclusion.
-What did you learn about the conventions of this discourse community?
-How does one become a member of this community?
-What does this community value or believe in?
-What is its purpose?
5. Works Cited and Appendix:
Include a bibliography of all of the texts you consulted to do your report.
An interview is a text, so include that too. Include your interview questions and copies of any sample texts that you may have collected and analyzed from your community.
The daybook was helpful because I could percolate without putting it down in complete sentences. When words go on the screen, they are revised and edited. When words go in my daybook, there are mostly lists of things to do, diagrams of connected ideas, words in bubbles. Writing into the day usually led me to a poem where I could justify just making a list and not being coherent. The daybook allows my right brain to get involved. This showed me that I really need to journal more often for creative writing purposes too. Sometimes the screen is a little too much white. At least the daybook already has pages filled before it. At least in a daybook I have begun before I actually begin. Another word for writing in the daybook: Plogging. Not just blogging on paper, but also pre-blogging. Blogging comes from the word web log. Cut out the B and you get Pre-Logging. A blog is just a log, a report of experience. Nothing profound, just a collection of memories and experiences. However, the act of logging the memories changes the texture of experience itself.
When I was a high school teacher, I developed this method of writing called "Framing the Question." After teaching the five paragraph essay in 10th grade, students were accustomed to this frame so I simply tweaked it. The thesis statement was now a big question and the topic sentences were little questions branching off. I was teaching My Forbidden Face by Latifa and the big questions and little questions all came from active reading. We were just using the five paragraph structure to organize our questions. Also, students could use quotations from the page where their questions had emerged, so I was showing how to incorporate quotations into a paper. The reason why I developed this was that students did not know how to expand on good questions that come from flashes of insight. Therefore, we started with the little questions that were made while reading a very specific scene in a novel and tried to broaden these into bigger questions. I thought I had reversed the linear mode of planning an essay by starting with the small stuff and working outward. This is what most of us do in our research, but when it comes to writing an essay, teachers and educational rhetoric demand that we have a focal point to structure our ideas. I see the thesis statement as more of a conclusion that really should be worked up to in a text, and perhaps left open at the beginning, but this is not what the standard five paragraph essay demands.
In SI, we were asked to do an inquiry. We started with a book. I, myself, started with two books of seemingly unrelated topics: Make Me a Story: Teaching Writing through Digital Storytelling by Lisa C Miller and Ways with Words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms. Miller's book was instructional, giving simple implementation advice for teaching digital storytelling in the classroom. However, in my demo, I primarily based my instruction on content from Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community by Joe Lambert. Miller is related to Lambert, Lambert is related to Heath. I could not decide which inquiry to do: to delve back into Digital Storytelling, an interest I have had for the past few year or: to explore new/old territory, ethnography. The later was old territory because my BA degree is in anthropology and it has re-emerged as ethnography for my classroom.
Because of all the Demos and how they focused on ideas to implement in the classroom, my mind returned to my syllabus several times and I realized that I have a section on ethnography (discourse communities) and a section on literacy narratives (which could be made into digital stories as a final project). The Digital Story is a new genre: a documentary style mini-movie made by the self about the self. A version of the personal essay and personal narrative that explodes into multiple modes (with videos, pictures, and music). My inquiry began to focus on how to use this information in my classroom, not just juggling with the information itself.
The last Demo asked us to consider my inquiry in research paper form, and the genre totally disrupted my exploration because I tried to fit all the categories together. Although they were connected, they could be explored throughout an entire semester linking genre, to discourse communities, to the self and narrative. However, I could not write a paper on all of these topics because they were seemingly too disparate; they could not be contained in a thesis statement, nor could they even be contained in a question.
Let's say that inquiry started as a tree. A trunk and then the branches. In "Framing the Question" I tried to start with the branches and move toward a trunk, but not all questions can be unified. Actually inquiry is very much like a tree, but there are roots underground that expand as the branches do. My inquiry has been underground creating a base to support a syllabus and a semester of English 1101. In Teaching College English, I created the branches above, but the tree was not stable because I had yet to explore in depth the content of my course. While experiencing these topics as a student (learner) instead of a teacher ("expert"), I was able to move into the role of inquirer. The inquiry actually was stifled by the structures above ground, in this case, the idea of a final product: a paper or a presentation.
Also, my inquiry happened a lot inside my head, which is why it was "underground." To come above ground it had to explore in private and also grow organically without being forced. It is my writing process to do a lot of thinking and finally write a whole lot at the end (very fast and seemingly without much effort). Actual revisions go on in my head as ideas are synthesized. I felt a little guilty at SI because I was unable to process the ideas at the speed of the course. Therefore, I was unable to blog about it. I needed time to let my questions sink in and really be absorbed. I am always the last to finish a test, the straggling student in the classroom; but it doesn't mean I am blocked. It just means I am percolating.
A good way to percolate: plogging, otherwise known as day booking, otherwise known as journaling.
A member of a Linked in professional forum asked about teaching with movies. Which novels have the best movies to use in teaching. Here is what I wrote as a comment, which shows how I came to an idea for using a fiction text in English 1101.
I wrote: The best book that is also a wonderful movie is a Clockwork Orange. Unfortunately, there is no movie version of the original British version of the text. Burgess argues that the British version is the only real novel, because it has a real resolution, and not just a Hollywood ending (in the text). American publishers disagreed, and he wanted to get paid, so they cut the 21st chapter and hence this was never shown on the film. Burgess explains this on the audio version of the book, which I highly recommend to actually hear the anti-language of the characters. I think I saw a clip of Clockwork Orange in a psychology class once, but I have never taught it my self as an English teacher. It may be a little violent for high school, but many students haven't seen movies from the 1970s.
I have taught One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Kesey) and the movie is excellent too, but quite different and is interesting to investigate point of view. I had students re-present the book using different themes (job related). One group was "The Entertainment Industry" and they made a music video of a Brittany Spears parody they wrote called "I'm sick."
Back to Clockwork Orange: re-making the end of the movie to include the last chapter would be an awesome activity for a Lit class. Also, the discussion about how publishers and their hegemonic power changed the story...that is a good one too. Lastly, a clip of the movie and text would be useful to teach how one's dialect shapes and is shaped by one's identity. In the last chapter, the protagonist comments on the way his friend (droog) has started to speak like an adult (and how he feels about that). I think I have just convinced myself that I could use the last chapter for my First Year Writing class.
I really enjoyed making this image. It was one of my inquiries, because I was doing a lot of digital storytelling and editing with new programs. I wrote a song parody, my group wrote a song and I made it into a video, and lastly the class made mini documentaries and I consolidated them into one cohesive text: a movie. While I was working the last night, I was editing movies on I-Movie and I uploaded a picture of myself that a classmate took. I put text over the picture, and I repeated the text in a Word document.
In this visual text, I wanted to show the different places we can write: Word with normal typed text, typed text with images, and also the photograph of my process, which was taken by my husband. It made me think: while my hands were working and I was writing on the Mac, but I could not take a picture of my hands. Therefore, this image was a collaboration of 1. a classmate who took a picture of me 2. my text on top of the photograph 3. my husband taking a picture of me. 4. Lastly, I uploaded the image in our group video as one of the scenes in the movie.
This is an image of the inquiry process: What makes someone a writer? And in short, it is one who writes, but we can write with many different kinds of texts: oral, audio, photo, video, drawings, and writings, and combinations of them all in an endless chain of discourse.
Over the past week, I have looked over my three units: genre, discourse communities, and literacy narratives. I read all of the articles that I plan to use for genre and made some very detailed revisions to my syllabus. I cut out some readings that I found too difficult or dry for FYW (and for myself personally) and I added my Writing to Explore activities.
I think that students will benefit from the Writing to Explore activities to help them understand how all of the ideas in class connect to the big project. I read a little bit about genre and pedagogy and found two strains of thought: writing to learn and learning to write. I believe that the first year writing program is more about writing to learn and metacognition. We are not trying to write any particular genres or learn any specific conventions, we are trying to learn how to learn about particular genres and conventions. Additionally, I am trying to find a balance between being open for creativity, and also being structured enough so that some students do not feel lost or without direction.
Lastly, I planned two conference days to encourage the students to bring me their writing and ask for spoken feedback. I was concerned about students turning in late work, so I added a policy that I would not provide written feedback and commentary on WTEs and 2nd drafts that are submitted after the deadline. However, I will make myself available for spoken feedback about student work at any time, but they have to schedule a conference with me. This also is trying to find a balance between respecting my own time constraints and the time constraints of my students. I have to adapt my style a little bit to cater to college students instead of high school students.
We finished our SI video and it is awesome. I did some of the final revisions and editing of sound and transitions, and it was difficult but it was worth it. It is a good example of writing as a group. We all created a story of SI 2012 in about 6 minutes which poignantly documents our progress as inquirers, writers and leaders. I think I am working on all three all the time. My inquiry did not get much blog time because I was really focused on producing a coherent product for the group. Now I want to do a inquiry as a reflective process and how this can be implemented in the classroom with genre, ethnography, and personal narratives (except this project was a social narrative or a collaborative narrative). I am not going to back post, but rather blog in the future to document my reflections of daybooks and learning processes in the Summer Institute.