Sid Dobrin “A Future of Writing Studies”
A Session Featured Speaker
Dobrin cites Gregory Colomb that we are not service but a franchise responsible for teaching the nation to write. However, if we focus only on the rhetoric of privilege (read: academic essays), we're doing a disservice to the field.
I can't say how many times I've had this argument with peers. The service/academic essay thread is so ingrained in the minds of some faculty, I fear the only way to force them to reconsider their pre-existing, current traditional view of our field is for their employment to be directly connected to their ability to adapt. I recognize this is a harsh statement, and I know that the staffing and hiring complexities that affect a WPA are challenging. But what harm comes to our discipline when, for example, instructors who perpetuate this thread retain employment to meet an administrative implied demand to offer more sections of FYC? It's messy. I know. Dobrin is really making me think.
Dobrin also make the distinction that writing studies is separate from composition studies. Writing studies shifts the focus from subject/product (academic work) to writing/activity (intellectual work).
I think one of the biggest thing I've learned in my Ph.D. studies is that studying writing and studying composition is not synonymous. So often it seems WPA work centers on FYC. But a writing program is more than FYC. McNely keeps emphasizing the importance of a vertical curricula--and I can see how a larger writing program can produce English graduates who can understand the seeming tension that exists between writing and composition studies. Might these even be concentrations that could exist within a writing program? I'm not sure...it seems our love for naming and differentiating areas of specialty is important. Otherwise, why would I have been corrected by a 3rd Ph.D. student for saying I was a doctoral student in composition in rhetoric? ("It's rhetoric and composition," I was told.) Writing, rhetoric, composition, literature, linguistics, folklore and so on. English is big.
Amy Dayton-Wood, “Learning from Other Disciplines: What the Existing Research on Student Opinion Surveys Can Teach Us”
from D.39: "What’s Our Relation . . . to the Mean and the Median? The Contested Place of Student Course Evaluation"
Dayton-Wood says so many decisions (hiring, promotion, funding) are affected by student evaluations, yet it's not addressed much by composition researchers.
Last year fewer than 20 percent of my online students completed course evaluations. Of course, I was able to address this in the reflection of my annual review and my department is understanding; however, moving up the food chain, I become less the awesome faculty member I know myself to be and more the data that "represents" me.
Our current political environment tasks us to look more closely at student evaluations and their validity. We must look to multiple methods of feedback for assessment and consider the design of the evaluations through the lens of the WPA outcomes statement.
It was this idea of reconsidering course evaluation design that made me think, "Well, of course, how have I not articulated this before?!" Multiple methods of assessment makes sense; redesigning the evaluations to reflect the outcomes statements is a *must*. It also makes me want to think about reviewing the material from Committee on Best Practices for Online Writing Instruction to see what they have to say about online course evaluation and reconsidering our questions for online courses. Yeah, I have a lot of work ahead of me...
No comments:
Post a Comment