My
Research Project (or How I Transformed My Freshman Composition I Class to
Highlight Student-to Student Communication)
For
years I had been striving for the Kempian Ideal and the
“achieved utopia of the networked computer classroom,” but I felt I always fell
short. Sure I perfected peer response
and made it run smoothly in the computer classroom, but I looked closely at how
I taught there and saw that I didn’t have as much student-to-student
communication as I felt I needed, especially in a large group forum. I saw I
was not following some of my own theories about extending the shared discourse
of the networked computer classroom, so I became anxious to change my teaching
practice.
A
couple of things came together to inspire this change. Last Christmas, a colleague in ESL gave me
the book by Robin Varnum, Fencing with Words, about the English 1-2
program at Amherst in the 40s through 60s.
I was instantly intrigued by the idea of a sequence of writing
assignments on a single theme or idea.
I like the idea that the students writing on the theme would be building
as the sequence progressed--it seemed a ripe environment to seek the social
construction of knowledge. Similarly,
Theodore Baird’s theories behind what writing is and how writing growth happens
seemed in line with my own notions coming from modern rhetoric that writing is
not a skill that can be packaged and handed to the student to swallow--instead
it is an innate capacity that can be fostered and promoted to grow.
The
second influence that inspired me came in the spring during a graduate class I
was taking in Computers and Writing.
One of our readings was Bakhtin.
While I was familiar with heteroglossia, it was something else about
Bakhtin that struck me this time. One
article by Charles Schuster about Bakhtin discusses how he transforms our view
of the writing triangle (writer--subject--reader). Traditionally, the dynamic corners of the triangle were thought
to be the writer and reader as one sought to influence the other. The subject had been seen as static. Bakhtin asserted that the subject was as
dynamic as any other element in the triangle.
He called it the “hero.” The
subject as hero was not static but changed as the reader and writer interacted
with it; likewise, the hero influenced the reader and writer:
But
the hero also "speaks"; it too contains its own accumulation of
values and terms. It too carries with
it a set of associations, and ideological and stylistic profile. In essence, it has as much an identity as
the speaker and listener. Speaker and
listener, in the act of engaging with the hero (which is, like them, both a
speaker and a listener), become charged by the hero's identity. They change as a result of the association,
for they are just as affected by the hero as they are by their close
association with each other. (Schuster 459)
Baird’s
sequences of writing assignments on a single theme meshed well with Bakhtin’s
notion of the hero. I wanted to have a
hero in my writing class, and I wanted to set up the sharing of writing text so
that my students would grow in knowledge of this hero simultaneously as they
grew in their writing ability. The
means for this growth would be through collaboration and the social
construction of knowledge.
I
received an Innovation Grant from my school to revamp my Freshman Composition I
class last summer. My work for the
grant took me on a journey through many books, and for a long time I had a
general goal but no clear idea of where I would end up. I read multiple books by William E. Coles,
Jr. who is the leading disciple of the teaching techniques started in
Amherst. I also read books by Walker
Gibson, Roger Sale, and David Bartholomae.
Into the mix of these Amherst-influenced books, I returned to a book I
had read years ago by C.H. Knoblauch and Lil Brannon called Rhetorical
Traditions and the Teaching of Writing.
From
the crucible of all these writers, I formed my Fall 1999 Freshman Composition I
curriculum. I ended up creating 29
writing assignments all on the theme of boundaries, barriers or borders. To explore more in depth what I came up
with, you can follows these links:
Part of what I came up with for the sequence
of assignments was a certain rhythm to sets of writing assignments. I would assign two or three “thinking” assignments,
usually exploring different aspects of the topic. Then students would be asked to write a final assignment that
called on them to synthesize ideas they had discovered in the previous
assignments into a new piece. (view Writing
Assignments)
Typically,
students would share the first two pieces in large group and then the third in
smaller peer groups. This continual
sharing of text is the “laboratory” conditions I have set up to examine
student-to-student communication.
My
challenge has been to come up with ways to test if social construction is
occurring, and if so how it happens.
What’s going on inside the students’ heads as they read and share text? How has the group thinking influenced the
single student? How much of the new
“knowledge” translates into improved writing?
Currently,
I have three chief means of exploring these questions. First, I have asked students to write
reflective pieces after they have been involved in student-to-student
communication to describe what is going on for them and what they gained from
the experience. Secondly, I have had
them do self-reflection as they participate in the sharing and reading
of texts. For example, as students read
shared drafts in the mail or participate in a chat, I have them keep a second
document open. With Windows it is easy
for them to click back and forth from the shared text to the text where I ask
them to record some of their thoughts as they are involved in the
exchange. It is a kind of adapted
talk-aloud protocol. The final way to
get at these daunting questions will be to examine student texts for signs of
growth and influence.