Meta Matters about Expectations in Writing, Teaching, and Learning:
Donna Qualley Western Washington University
Elon University June 2013
Using the “Pliable Genred Discursive Space” of the FYC Program to Re-Design and Align Expectations about Writing in the University
Background
Eight years ago, I set out to learn something about the ways seasoned English professors re-conceptualize and contemplate those courses that they continue to teach year after year by spending a quarter as a participant observer in 5 different classes: poetry writing, film studies, Children’s literature, professional and technical writing, and 19th century literary empiricism. One of the questions I was wondering about at the time was whether teaching played a role in the development of these professors’ professional and scholarly identities and whether our pedagogical practices and
approaches connected or divided us as a discipline. I was interested to see whether and to what degree these “resident experts” (to borrow a term from Rebecca Nowacek)--continued to grow their pedagogical expertise.
In my current project, I approach some of these long standing interests from a different angle by focusing on MA-level graduate students who are neither residents in their subject matter nor experts in teaching (writing)—yet.
Initially, I set out to examine how graduate students’ utilized and repurposed their work from one context (teaching FYW) in another context (their graduate studies courses) and vice versa. I hypothesized that being a learner and teacher at the same time would contribute to a heightened meta-awareness in each discourse, especially when explicitly “cued’ to look for connections. Although I suspected their first connections would be obvious and routinized applications, I hoped that eventually they would begin to articulate and differentiate the principles underlying the practices in each context.
I selected six MA-level graduate student teachers, three males and three females, ranging in ages from 23-37 when they entered the program in the fall of 2011. Originally, all identified as literary studies majors with a range of interests, but one person subsequently switched to creative non-fiction. All were interested in learning more about teaching and becoming co-inquirers with me in this project. At the end of each quarter, I conducted hour-long, semi-structured interviews with each graduate student. In addition, I collected all syllabi and graduate seminar papers. They would also self-report their observations to me. This past winter, we co-wrote and presented a paper for 4Cs in conjunction with Carmen’s research. Building on Joseph Harris’s well known observation about composition as a teaching subject, we explored how a first year writing program comprised of non-resident teachers might serve a larger and more visible teaching mission within the university, one that could uncover tacit assumptions and help integrate and align writing expectations.
Our FYW program is unusual for a couple of reasons. The course is taught almost exclusively by graduate students. While most schools require TAs to have 18 hours of graduate level course work prior to teaching, our teachers begin teaching their first quarter. I should also note that in our FYW course, teachers are learning to teach many of the same intellectual moves and inculcate the same kind of rhetorical awareness that I was looking for in our conversations. In my own experience, the proximity of activities to each other contributes to and cues connection making. I also thought that teaching might act like a meta-language and allow these graduate students to articulate for themselves what was happening in their own reading and writing.
Would the heightened sense of meta-awareness that comes from teaching-while-learning loop back into their own graduate coursework? And would they be able to recognize it when it did?
I don’t know. Maybe. Perhaps. It depends. As is often the case with interesting problems, things get messy quickly.
SLIDE 1 Based on very preliminary findings, I have begun to think about my information using a Venn diagram. (I got the ideas of using a Venn diagram came from looking at how Harry Collins and Robert Evans’ depicted their theories in their book, Rethinking Expertise)
SLIDE 2. Space (1) represents knowledge and practice associated with teaching FYW. (2) Represents the reading and writing students do in their graduate studies. Individuals who occupy these spaces can perform the work of each discourse but see them as separate domains. (3) Represents general dispositions and habits of mind. Dispositions are predilections to think/act in certain ways; personal qualities and general abilities rather than expertise in a specific domain. There’s a lot more work needed in identifying particular dispositions and teasing out the role of dispositions in learning.
(4) represents reflectiveness applied to teaching and (5) represents reflectiveness applied to graduate course work. Individuals who occupy 4 and 5 demonstrate meta-awareness within each domain. In other words, they not only can perform the work of the domain. When cued, they can talk about what, how, and why they are doing it.
(6) Represents low road connections and routinized applications between discourses; these involve seeing connections between similar practices. I think we (or at least I) may have been a little quick in dismissing the important role this kind of connection-making plays, which often results in “a-ha!” moments for students. Noticing similarity between domains is a necessary step, just not a sufficient one for what Nowacek calls “integration” or Wardle sees as “repurposing for expansive learning.”
SLIDE 3 Here, Aimee demonstrates this kind of connection when she recognizes how the work she has been asked to do in her graduate seminar is very similar to a move she is trying to teach her own students.
Teaching makes me hyper- aware in mostly positive ways. . .I am finding tie-ins. . . between what I’m teaching my students and what I’m doing at the exact same time. My students were doing the “they say/I say” practice and I had just written my prospectus for 540 [20th C Global Literature] and it’s exactly the same: Here’s what’s been said before; Here’s what I’m adding to the conversation. Here’s what’s important to me. Here’s where I hope to take this whole project. So I pull it up [for my students]. “Here are quotes setting up the conversation. Here is where I want to extend on what they said. This project is important. It adds to the field in this way. Look, I’m still doing this six years after you are starting to do it. . .you are going to have to show wherever you go that you know what’s been done and that you’ve got something to add to it.
SLIDE 4 (7) represents the space in which integrative learning and interdisciplinary understanding between first year writing and graduate studies courses occur. Individuals who occupy this space are able to perceive and articulate connections between different domains.
SLIDE 5 In this excerpt, Sam is beginning to articulate the underlying principle that links Bourdieu’s ideas about how people construct concepts of taste in the negative with Reiff and Bawarshi’s concept of “not-genre.”
[Bourdieu] has the social critique and construction of taste. . .It’s something that [the Professor] teaches in Trash Cinema; we look at trash aesthetic and trash taste. One of the things that [Bourdieu] said that’s really stuck with me is the idea that people construct their taste in the negative, where we know what we don’t like. . .I see that as having parallels with the idea of "not-genres" where it’s constructing in the negative, and not in a pejorative sense. . .I agree that thinking in the negative can be more beneficial than not. That is to say, by touching on a previous genre, like the five-paragraph essay, and talking about what students are doing now as being not 'that,' we can maintain this sort of attachment to it and so it’s not like we’re asking our students to just throw it in the waste bin and get rid of it.
SLIDE 6 What I like about this diagram is its flexibility and how it brings dispositions to the fore.
SLIDE 7
So here is my first ball. I think this mapping could be useful for thinking about how and to what extent individuals perceive connections between concepts, texts, discourses, cultures, and experiences as well as the role that various dispositions play in these processes.
I am still working through piles of data, so today, I’ll talk about more conceptually and suggestively about a couple of pieces that may fit into the “transfer” puzzle before we move on to hear what Carmen has to say. After she speaks, I’ll return with a few more thoughts about why graduate student teachers may be prepared to contribute to conversations about teaching and writing in the university.
SLIDE 8
In her book, Agents of Integration, Rebecca Nowacek uses the term “genred discursive space” to refer to the “entire constellation of associated relations. . .within which individuals operate and make meaning.” This constellation of both tacit and explicit associations includes knowledge, ways of knowing, identities, and goals. The first year writing program and the graduate student teachers who teach in it comprise the most “pliable genred discursive space” in our university.
Our program functions as a kind of way station where everyone (except for the single resident WPA ) passes through in route to somewhere else. As I mentioned, the course is taught almost exclusively by MA-level graduate students (who have come to study literature, creative writing, and sometimes teaching). Half of the teaching staff is new every year. However, the constant movement of new students and new teacher-learners through this space, where the flow of knowledge, ways of knowing, identities, and goals are always in flux, gives rise to a culture where both individual understanding and programmatic approaches to writing, learning, and teaching can be continually examined, re-purposed, and re-designed.
The first year curriculum itself is an always-evolving, home-grown hybrid--consisting of fancy mutt genres and approaches that I devise in order to help both students and teachers learn to make and convey connections and learn and teach certain rhetorical moves. Nowacek claims that “genres are not just a resource for crafting a response to a social situation;” genres also “provide a resource for interpreting (and indeed constructing) that situation in the first place” (18). Thus, the genres we utilize in a FYW course not only have implications for students, they also serve an important role for new teachers.
SLIDE 9 So here is my second ball. It’s a bit of a mouthful. If genres play a role in determining what kinds of connections are appropriate, invited, or even possible, and if genres that are not strongly linked with disciplinarity offer a more pliable genred discursive space for transformative and integrative learning (since they are less saturated with prior associations), might working with certain kinds of open-ended mutt genres also provide the exigence for these forms of learning? Not only for undergraduate students but also for graduate student teachers in their own teaching and writing? (This is an idea that I hope to be able to talk about next year at 4Cs J).
One such mutt genre is what I call the inductive inquiry essay. This essay begins with a critical inquiry question or “thinking problem” that emerges from the writer’s examination of the particulars of the texts they are working with. The aim is to arrive at a new insight or understanding, something the writer couldn’t have said when they began writing. The essayistic structure often mirrors the writer’s thinking practice and follows a path of question-hypothesis-question. The language of this essay is tentative: Perhaps, Maybe, I wonder, Could it be?
For Justin, who entered the program after a successful ten-year career as a prosecuting attorney, no genre could have been as antithetical to his experience. Everything stood in direct conflict with his prior legal writing experience where he had to frame arguments, find evidence, and anticipate objections ahead of time. In this excerpt from his 4th quarter interview, Justin explains how he finally began to grasp this genre while he was writing a seminar paper on The God of Small Things.
SLIDE 10
. . .the voices of the characters in that novel that would be considered subaltern are so strong and so compelling . .. Why are the voices of the subaltern characters in that novel so memorable and what made them that way? A lot of it seemed to come back to inventing new forms of language and hybrid forms of language, And where I ended up in that paper was how this linguistic hybridity mirrored social and cultural hybridity, and how that ultimately could promote brand-new epistemologies of knowledge, of ways of thinking and speaking and communicating and challenging the dominant discourse. It took a long time to get there. . . And every time I wrote about it, it raised more questions, which ended up bringing in more theory that I didn’t fully understand , which in turn raised more questions.
DQ cues: See? You are doing Q-H-Q.
Yeah. It really followed that Q-H-Q . I’m going to do more of that this quarter before I teach the inductive essay.
So if what I am calling open-ended mutt genres can provide the exigence for connection making for both students and teachers, then how might our understanding of the purpose of FYW change? Based on my local context, I’ve been thinking about how FYW acts as way station and exchange portal for both undergraduate students and their graduate student teachers. But rather than a being a portal into disciplinary writing and thinking, perhaps the FYW course could set in motion a connection-making capacity for what Veronica Boix-Mansilla calls "interdisciplinary understanding.”
Slide 11 In her words, interdisciplinary understanding is “the capacity to integrate knowledge and modes of thinking drawn from two or more disciplines to produce a cognitive advancement—for example, explaining a phenomenon, solving a problem, creating a product, or raising a new question—in ways that would have been unlikely through single disciplinary means.”
SLIDE 12 And here’s my last ball before I turn things over to Carmen. While our first year course is not exactly interdisciplinary (certainly not like the classes Rebecca Nowacek highlights in her work), the focus of the course is on learning to make connections between ideas and concepts from different texts and utilizing certain rhetorical moves in order to do something or say something that would not have been possible otherwise. The principle I take from Boix-Mansilla, then, is both a habit of mind and approach for doing intellectual work. (Others have used different names for describing similar practices: borrowing and extending and taking an approach (Joseph Harris) bricrolage, lamination (Paul Prior and Jody Shipka), expansive learning (Elizabeth Wardle), repurposing and remixing).