Presentation for English 820

Here is my presentation for my English class (in PowerPoint):

http://www.slideshare.net/markblaauwhara/bloggingincomposition

I find it easiest (after clicking the link) to click on the black forward arrow to the immediate right of the green forward arrow in Slideshare. That will let you click through the slides at your own pace.

What's Comic about a Course Syllabus?

            For my pedagogy project, I explored whether some aspects of a course might be better addressed through comics rather than straight text. Graphic novels and comics have been steadily gaining recognition in academic and popular circles as valid forms of expression and communication—note MAUS winning the Pulitzer, for instance—and the process of taking meaning made in one form (text) and re-interpreting it in another form (comics) can lead to a consideration of “what [to] move forward, what [to] leave out, what [to] add,” as Kathleen Blake Yancey describes writing students doing as they move between media.

            I selected three free online comic generators—Stripcreator.com, Chogger.com, and Stripgenerator.com—and reinterpreted sections of my syllabus in ways I hoped would be more memorable to students and perhaps cast me in a different light. My goals with my syllabus are to lay out the structure and policies of the course and to give students a sense of me as their professor. It can be difficult to walk the line between respectably firm and a complete jerk. What is ideal for me would be a blend of strictness and approachability—after all, I view my purpose as being to help students reach their potential, and my policies are in place to ensure a fair environment in which they can work. Intimidating them on the first day of class is not my goal.

            For the purposes of this project, I examined my syllabus for English 111, the first course in my college’s first-year composition sequence and a required course for nearly all degrees and certificates. I chose this course because it includes students from a wide swath of our college, many of whom do not have an interest in English (and may be resistant to the course). I thought that the use of a blended comic/text syllabus might diffuse some student resistance while still effectively presenting course policies and structure. I began by visiting Stripcreator and “translating” my attendance policy, which currently reads like this:

If you need to miss class, I always appreciate a call or e-mail AS SOON AS YOU KNOW YOU WILL HAVE TO MISS.  If you do this, I’m happy to sit down with you in office hours and talk about what we covered (although it won’t substitute for coming to class—it’ll be brief).  I do not like it when students don’t show up for class and then tell me what happened in an off-handed way the next time they show up.  Would you do that with your job?  If so, you’d soon be out of a job.  I don’t need intimate details; I just appreciate the respect of having you let me know, in a timely manner, that you won’t be able to make it.

            The gist of this policy is that students should come to class, and if something comes up, they should contact me to let me know they will miss. I decided to represent this in comic form as follows:

I think the comic version of my attendance policy is more effective than the text version, especially when coupled with some oral explanation. The heart of the policy is intact, but it is presented in the context of a (hopefully) humorous story. Through some brief contextualization, I could let them know that they need to come to class focused and ready to learn, and that if they choose to miss, they need to contact me and make an effort to make up the material. This would stand to be more memorable than straight text, which would probably lead to better student attendance, and it is certainly more lighthearted than the current text.

Stripcreator is the easiest to use of all the comic generators I tried. It allows the user to shift between one, two, or three panels, and it contains a number of pre-drawn characters to take pressure off of those who are less than artistic. Dialogue and captions are entered through a series of text boxes and pull-down menus, making it possible to generate a simple comic within a couple minutes.

I next visited Chogger to re-present my office location, contact information, and office hours. Here is how it looks on my current syllabus:

Professor:                   Mark Blaauw-Hara

Office:                        138

Office Phone:             (231) 348-6631

Office Hours:             M-Th 1-3

E-Mail:                       mhara@ncmich.edu

Web Site:                    http://angel.ncmich.edu

And here is how it looks in comics:

      

            This time, results were mixed. The text-only version is easier to skim, allowing students to locate quickly whatever contact information they need. Also, Chogger is less easy to use than Stripcreator: instead of offering pre-drawn characters and drop-down menus, Chogger requires drawing and user placement of text, which is simultaneously more powerful and more maddening. If one is fluent with on-screen drawing and graphics, Chogger might be a gift in that it removes some of the limitations of Stripcreator; however, although I am not a novice computer user, I still found it difficult to move beyond a stick figure. While the comic version of my contact information does present the information in a light-hearted way, I do not think I added value to the information.

            My final experiment was to visit Stripgenerator and re-work my plagiarism section. Here is how it appears in my current syllabus:

Plagiarism is defined as the undocumented inclusion of another person’s work within your essay.  Students who choose to plagiarize will be in violation of North Central Michigan College’s Academic Dishonesty policy.  Plagiarism is grounds for failing the paper and/or the course.  In some instances it may result in expulsion from the institution.

Although my current policy represents an accurate description of my college’s stance on plagiarism, it comes off as overly pejorative and scary. For the comic adaptation, I decided to highlight the idea that many students plagiarize because they are under pressure and don’t know where to turn, and that I can help. Orally, I could still make students aware of the actual handbook policy, but it would be framed in the context of my willingness to help them solve problems they’re having with their papers. Here is the comic version:

This seems effective to me. Stripgenerator.com is something of a middle ground between Stripcreator and Chogger in that it offers more characters and flexibility than Stripcreator, but does not require the drawing skills of Chogger. The character representing me in the strip is one of a host of different pre-drawn characters that can be positioned in different spots within the panels, and the speech bubbles can be repositioned, too, and automatically adapt to what you type within them.

            As someone who is relatively unskilled in the creation of comics (or any type of computer-generated art), I found Stripcreator to be the easiest generator to use, and I would recommend it to other instructors who might be interested in integrating self-created comics into their courses. They seem to have the potential both to bring some of the more inherently boring aspects of a course to life and to recast the instructor in a lighter, more helpful way. Although both goals are possible with straight text, I think it is positive to bring different modes of writing into the classroom, and the process of taking a message from one medium (text) to another (comics) encourages instructors to examine what, exactly, they are trying to say, and whether they might say it better.

Works Cited

Spiegelman, Art. The Complete MAUS: A Survivor’s Tale. New York: Pantheon, 1996. Print.

Yancey, Kathleen Blake.  "Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key." College Composition and Communication  56.2 (2004): 297-328. Print.

Online comic generators--for my grad peeps

—http://comiclife.com/

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—http://www.stripcreator.com

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—http://chogger.com/

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—http://www.stripgenerator.com

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—http://www.bitstrips.com/landing

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—http://www.toondoo.com/

Excellent tips for dealing with zombies during the holidays!

Expanding Argumentation to Include the Working Class

Welch, Nancy. “We’re Here, and We’re Not Going Anywhere”: Why Working-Class Rhetorical Traditions Still Matter.” College English 73.3 (2011): 221-43. ProQuest. Web. 28 Feb. 2011.

Welch’s article is a fascinating study of labor, production, and academia, and how our understanding of each has shifted over the past few decades. Her thesis is that the common understanding of composition as a middle-class zone, coupled with the prevailing view that changes to our economy have included a lessening of workers’ power, has resulted in writing teachers neglecting “some of the most contentious, creative, and powerfully influential arguments this country has witnessed”—i.e., the job actions of the working class.

The anchor of Welch’s piece is a discussion of a successful worker occupation of a Chicago window and door plant in 2008 after Bank of America cut off credit to the company. As she relates, the workers not only argued with their bodies, they also seized a kairotic moment by aligning their issues with the general public frustration with banks and bailouts, adopting the “Yes, we can!” slogan of the Obama campaign, and demanding attention from the public and government.

“Imagine,” Welch writes, “what a provocative multimodal, multicultural text the six-day sit-down […] could provide for study and discussion in composition classes.” Composition instructors should teach stories of similar job actions, she argues, not only because sixty-two percent of the workforce is working-class (which means a large percentage of our students are as well), but because the arguments of organized labor are often effective, and part of our job is to teach effective argumentation. Students can practice soapbox speeches and sloganeering, for instance, and Welch provides an example of how, when her university did not listen to faculty concerns about decreased health coverage, tuition hikes, layoffs, and class-size increases when faculty couched their arguments in middle-class ways (recommendations from the faculty senate, letters, committee work, private meetings), what worked was “demonstrations, pickets, speak-outs,” and other working-class-esque techniques.

Welch’s goal is not limited to the classroom. On a larger level, she advocates a study of the working-class because she seems to believe the country is moving in the wrong direction in significant ways. For example, she writes that our (at least public) beliefs that we are post-industrial, post-Fordist, post-production—that we don’t actually make anything anymore, and that the way the work-world operates is significantly different than how it was four or five decades ago—have led to longer hours, decreased benefits, and a harmful emphasis on producing more with fewer workers. Welch argues that these trends have been harmful for most workers, not just the “working class.” In short, Welch wants us to realize that workers are still important in America, and that we can be strong.

Welch’s article is interesting and potentially far-reaching. I agree that we need to teach effective argument in its many forms, and, as she points out, many of labor’s arguments have been very effective. I would suspect the principle challenge to such a pedagogical shift would come not from the students, who would probably enjoy writing and giving a soapbox speech, but from faculty who are somewhat uncomfortable with the lack of middle-class decorum that characterizes such argumentation.  I would hazard a guess that most composition instructors tend to be biased toward logos-centric argumentation—the “surely if we sit down and have a reasoned conversation, we’ll reach a fair conclusion” school of thought. As Welch points out, though, sometimes a closed fist is more effective than an open hand.

Zombie Professors

From my lovely wife come these two zombies, one composing a lesson plan, and one grading (complete with a brain-and-chocolate cookie):

Blogs in Developmental Reading

Shu, Hui-Yin, and Shiangkwei Wang. “The Impact of Using Blogs on College Students’ Reading Comprehension and Learning Motivation.” Literacy Research and Instruction 50.1 (2011): 68-89. ProQuest. Web. 22 Feb. 2011.

In their 2011 article, Shu and Wang report on a study they did on the use of blogs in developmental reading courses. They write that recent research suggests that helping students develop a command of digital (and multimodal) literacies is important so that “students can successfully access and create the evolving language required in higher education and future workplaces.” However, they assert that not much research has been done about “how […] college reading education respond[s] to today’s students who are familiar with and motivated by […] digital technologies,” revealing what they see as a bias toward print in higher education.

Shu and Wang focused on nine sections (three instructors, each teaching three sections) of developmental reading at the same four-year U.S. university; two sections (taught by different instructors) incorporated blogs, while the other seven sections did not. The curriculum between the blog-enabled and traditional courses was standardized; in the blog-enabled sections, instructors supplemented traditional instruction by asking students to post responses to and analyses of textbook chapters, news articles, and YouTube clips. Students were encouraged to marshal Internet sources in support of their posts and to read and respond to others’ posts.

Appropriately, an extensive section of this article is devoted to their methodology, and I do not have the space to go into it in detail here. In brief, though, they incorporated demographic and academic data such as age, race, GPA, pre- and post-course COMPASS measures, post-class retention rates, and a thirty-one question survey “divided into four factors: self-efficacy, confidence in prerequisite skills, self-directive and initiative, and interest in learning the subject.” They also interviewed the two instructors who used blogs. Shu and Wang’s research questions focused on whether blogs affected students’ reading performance or motivation, what other factors might affect reading performance, and what instructors’ perceptions were about integrating blogs in their classes.

Their findings were extremely interesting. Their study did not support the contention that blogs (at least as they were used) improved reading performance or motivation. While Shu and Wang found several factors affecting student reading performance, blogs were not among them. However, student retention correlated strongly with blogging: students in blog-enabled sections signed up for another semester of classes at around a 10% higher rate than their fellows in traditional classes. Interviews with the instructors suggested that students in blog-enabled classes formed stronger learning communities and were better able to express themselves (due to the equalizing nature of the online environment).

Shu and Wang appear somewhat disappointed with these results. In their conclusion, they admit that, in retrospect, they do not feel they spent enough time training the instructors in blog usage, and they devote the majority of their conclusion to a discussion of why non-tech-savvy instructors might be resistant to using much technology and how such resistance might be addressed. However, as someone who has served on a committee for several years focusing on, among other things, student retention, I found their retention results astonishing, and I wished they had spent more time discussing them. A “payoff” of 10% for a relatively small change is incredible, and I plan to share the article with my committee. I would also recommend this article to a colleague interested in how to design and report on a research study—the discussion of research questions, methodology, and findings is exemplary.

An Interesting Progression

Stine, Linda. “The Best of Both Worlds: Teaching Basic Writers in Class and Online.” Journal of Basic Writing 23.2 (2004): 49-51. ProQuest. Web. 12 Feb. 2011.

I approached this article with great interest, since, at first blush, it appeared to contradict the 2010 article by the same author I reviewed for my last blog post. I was surprised to see such unequivocal positivity in this title and abstract after reading the 2010 article, which I would describe as cautionary.

Reading this article confirmed that Stine views hybrid basic-writing courses very positively. Although she begins by laying out potential difficulties basic writers may have with online environments—issues of access, technological fluency, and learning to read online, among others—the bulk of her article is devoted to describing the positive potential of moving at least some of the work of the writing class online. In the middle third of her article, she lists ten general ways in which web-enhanced courses can outperform traditional ones. Her reasons are compelling and cover situations both outside and inside the purview of the course—for example, hybrid courses can greatly simplify scheduling for working single parents, and they can encourage students with shaky academic skills to develop them by requiring students to use the Internet, research, word-process, and communicate online.

The last third of Stine’s essay focuses on her own experiences with hybrid basic-writing courses at her college, which, she relates, implemented the hybrid program two years before this article was published. Her college’s version of hybrid means that students alternate between meeting for a week face-to-face and “meeting” for a week online. Face-to-face sessions concentrate on describing assignments, grammar, groupwork, and quizzes; online, students write and revise, participate in discussion, and review each other’s papers. Stine writes that the hybrid environment provides advantages over both fully-online and face-to-face environments; for example, students form stronger interpersonal bonds through face-to-face interaction, but still can have the space to consider their posts in online discussion. Stine ends her article by asserting that her college’s hybrid basic-writing course “seems to offer our students the best of both worlds: the infinite freedom of the Internet enhanced and made manageable by regular classroom interactions.”

As I wrote above, the tenor of this article is markedly different from her 2010 TETYC piece, which states that “the intersection of adult education, basic writing, and online learning [is] a complicated and messy place,” and ends with a series of questions that seem to suggest how little we know about what makes a good online or hybrid basic-writing class. It’s true that the latter article focuses more on fully online courses than it does hybrid ones; however, many of her cautions in that article apply equally well to both environments. When re-reading the 2010 piece, I was struck by how Stine describes herself as “struggle[ing] each semester to decide what sort of an online teaching/learning experience to require […and] growing increasingly conflicted.” Hawisher et al. have described how the optimism of the early era of computer-mediated composition was gradually supplanted by a more critical, theoretical mindset—practitioners realized computers were no panacea and began to advocate a more critical examination of their place in the writing classroom. I wonder if Stine may have experienced a similar progression (as I have over the past decade or so).

Stine is a thoughtful writer, and I enjoyed this article. The model of hybrid class she presents is interesting and worth trying at other institutions, and she provides a good theoretical underpinning for her argument.

Hawisher, Gail, Paul LeBlanc, Charles Moran, and Cynthia Selfe. Computers and the Teaching of Writing in American Higher Education, 1979-1994: A History. Norwood: Ablex, 1996. Print.

Adult Basic Writers

Stine, Linda. “Basically Unheard: Developmental Writers and the Conversation on Online Learning.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College 38.2 (2010): 132-149. ProQuest. Web. 7 February 2011.

In her recent TETYC article, Linda Stine complicates the discussion of online and hybrid composition classes by drawing our attention to a group that she says receives little attention in the literature: adult basic-writing students. Stine begins by relating her growing realization that the students who appeared in “article after article filled with enthusiasm for Internet-based higher education” did not resemble the students she taught. Stine writes that, at least according to the articles she read, in order to benefit fully from online composition, students should posses a veritable laundry list of positive academic, financial, and social qualities, from clear academic goals to a good computer to the ability to learn equally well independently and from peers. As Stine asserts, “Most basic writing instructors would be hard pressed to fit their students into that general profile.”

Stine’s stated purpose is “to help close the knowledge gap by providing a preliminary exploration of some important factors at the intersection of basic writing pedagogy, adult learning theory, and online education research.” The three specific areas she focuses on are technological aptitude, academic skills, and individual learning characteristics, further subdividing each of these larger categories into smaller foci such as access to technology, emotion and learning preference, and cognitive load. Her technique is to present, in brief, relevant research, which she then connects to her own experience with adult basic writers. Stine’s emphasis is on the research rather than on personal anecdote; indeed, the article serves as a useful synthesis of a fairly wide range of sources and could be used as an annotated bibliography of sorts for those who wanted to examine any of the many issues she raises in more detail. (For instance, I was intrigued by a meta-analysis of online learning studies she referenced, which I saw as connecting to my own research. The analysis appears here.)

Despite Stine’s cautions against assuming that adult basic-writing students will automatically benefit from online and hybrid writing classes in the same ways that, say, full-time or tech-savvy students might, she does not advocate shying away from technology-rich writing environments. Instead, she writes that “it is essential that we learn more about how to provide a successful online experience for this vulnerable student population,” and ends her article by suggesting a number of research questions to help us in this quest.

Stine’s article was interesting, and I would recommend it to a peer principally as a very readable annotated bibliography. As a teacher of basic writing, though, I found myself wishing for more answers than questions. I agreed with her cautions and was enriched by her thorough research, but I still found myself wondering how to proceed in my own classes. It may be unfair to criticize Stine for failing to provide a clearer path, since her purpose seems to be to highlight an area that has been under-researched. However, I did finish her article thinking, “OK…now what?”

Classy Language

Borkowski, David. "Language: The War of the Word." Rhetoric Review 21.4 (2002): 357-383. Print.

Borkowski’s article focuses on William Cobbet’s 1818 text, A Grammar of the English Language, positioning it as a subversive work intended to disrupt England’s social hierarchy, both by its own existence and by the results of its teachings. As Borkowski writes, Cobbet’s book was written at a time in which the principle style and language guides reflected the upper-class view that “lower-class language [was] inherently inferior” (358). Borkowski states that the upper classes “believed that it was their responsibility to repel the vulgar who polluted language, in all of its facets, with coarse usage” (366), and supported this goal not only through grammar and style guides, but by implementing curricula in the schools that reinforced the current socioeconomic hierarchies—for example, by standardizing pronunciation to match that of London’s upper class.

In contrast, Cobbett’s book differed in presentation and purpose from the prevailing pro-hegemonic texts. Borkowski writes that “Cobbett objected to these texts for presenting language as intricate and mysterious, the product of a hostile governing class that deliberately used discourse as a gatekeeping device” (372). Cobbett alleged that the rules and definitions in the prevailing grammar and style texts were purposely constructed to be convoluted so as to exclude the working classes from civil discourse. As Borkowski relates, one of Cobbett’s central goals was to present guidelines for grammar and style that were easy to understand and clearly written, stating that the “best words are those, which are familiar to the ears of the greatest number of persons” (quoted in Borkowski 358). In fact, Cobbett believed that the simpler linguistic constructions of the working class were often superior to the more obtuse writings of the upper class, and he reinforced this view by including writing from upper-class writers as examples of poor composition.

Borkowski compares Cobbett’s goals to those of Paulo Freire, terming Cobbett’s book as a sort of “pedagogy for the oppressed” that he hoped would enable his readers to “someday even manage to topple their oppressors” (375). In addition to Freire, Borkowski sees Cobbett as laying the groundwork for a number of current scholars who concern themselves with language and power, writers such as Ira Shor, Victor Villanueva, Geneva Smitherman, Bruce Horner, Brian Street, and many others. Borkowski ends his piece with the suggestion that “as more and more compositionists call for advancing social literacy […] the past work of William Cobbett could help guide us into the future” (381).

I found this article to be engaging, and I would recommend it to a peer—especially if that peer were interested in demonstrating that liberatory pedagogy has a history that extends beyond Freire. I found the descriptions of the educational and political systems and their connections to language especially intriguing, even though I came out of them a bit disheartened. Borkowski does a good job showing how the climate of England in the late 1700s-early 1800s resembled today’s America, at least in the limited respects of language, class, and power. In fact, seeing the parallels so strongly established was a bit of a downer—how, then, are we to change things?

Here are the British: highly aware of class, highly aware of language, highly aware of how language serves as a key class marker. And here WE are, in our supposedly classless society, grappling with the same issues. Here are our students, whom we hope to empower in the same ways Cobbett hoped to empower his readers, and here’s the rest of world, which doesn’t care. (And here’s me, putting “whom” in that last sentence, ‘cause I’m an empowered member of that upper class and I want to be sure everyone knows it. J )