February 17, 2022 • 73 mins
This conversation features Dr. Angela R Rounsaville, Associate Professor and Director of First-Year Composition here at the University of Central Florida. Dr. Rounsaville’s research works at the intersection of transnational literacy studies, rhetorical genre studies, and writing related transfer. In this episode we discuss the evolving needs of the composition classroom, and how we as professors are striving to support and empower our students to develop as writers. We also discuss the writing about writing pedagogy in college composition, and why mulitliteracies and linguistic diversity should be recognized and supported in first-year writing. The collaborative development of course outcomes in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric's ENC1101 and ENC1102 are also discussed.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:07):
Greetings and welcome to DWR discussions on writing and rhetoric, a space for informal conversations around research and practice in the field.
At the university level, a place inclusive for curious novices, blossoming scholars, and seasoned academics to consider and share their inquiries, experiences, and passions surrounding writing and rhetoric.
(00:29):
We are your hosts, professors Meeghan Faulconer and Nikolas Gardiakos, with the University of Central Florida.
Thank you for joining us.
Now let's get this conversation started.
Our conversation today is with Dr.
(00:50):
Angela R.
Ronsell, associate professor and Director of first year composition here at UCF.
In addition, Dr.
Brownsville's research works at the intersection of transnational literacy studies, rhetorical genre studies, and writingrelated transfer.
In this episode, we will discuss the evolving needs of the composition classroom and how we as professors are striving to support and empower our students to develop as writers.
(01:16):
Thank you so much for being with us today.
Thank you for having me.
Do I need to say your entire name every time I address you? No, not at all.
But if anyone is wondering, the R as Ray, that's my middle name.
Okay, very nice.
I didn't know that.
Yeah, it's a good mix of short and long.
There you go.
There you go.
(01:36):
So like I said in the intro, you are our director of first year writing studies here at UCF.
And I think that it's worth discussing for a moment the approach that we take here in terms of our writing about writing.
Pedagogy.
Is it pedagogy or pedagogy? I'm never sure.
I hear both.
(01:57):
Okay.
I'm good with both.
The more variation the better, I think I should say.
It definitely every time I'll just put the emphasis on it.
Pedagogy.
Yeah.
So this writing about writing approach emphasizes writing as both the content and the activity.
Right.
So why is that important in terms of composition classroom to think about writing as the content and the activity? Yeah, I love that.
(02:20):
This is the first question because I think for me, as you know and listeners who are in our department know, we are kind of evolving, broadening animating differently our curriculum, but the core is still the tenets from writing about writing.
(02:42):
I can talk about the content and the activity, but I think maybe I'll talk a little bit first about just the broader context of why I am just have been and still am and probably will always be a big fan of that approach.
So that approach at its core has a couple of things that I think are just we can't really find other ways to think about how writing works in the world right.
(03:15):
Which is writing is situated.
I don't think anyone's arguing against this anymore.
We're 2022.
And for me, what this means is writing happens in communities, for communities, by communities, and communities are broad.
I mean, they can be disciplined, they can be religious communities, you name it.
(03:44):
And so this approach for me, starts there.
And as a result, it asks us to situate how we teach writing within a community.
So then the question is what community? And this is where I think there is a combination of both writing studies research and pedagogy.
(04:07):
And perhaps political is the right word.
Let me know if you think political is the right word.
But first we've got a situated community, right? And so we know that from literacy studies theory, sociolinguistics theory, writing studies theory.
Like, there's no debate there.
What community are we going to situate in? Well, we are writing teachers with expertise in writing.
(04:36):
If we want to teach genres that are situated and mediate activity, we need genres that connect content and form, because genres are actually the intersection of both of those things.
There isn't a contentless genre or a formless content when I write, right? And so let's take that as another presupposition.
(05:00):
And we can agree with that.
There's research and theory on that.
So we've got to center that.
Now, what genres that are going to unite content and form are we going to teach to first year writers? Well, there's also a lot of research on how declarative and procedural knowledge and this is not just in composition.
(05:21):
This is in cognitive psychology.
A lot of fields talk about this.
But when we unite, both content and form is over here.
And then we unite declarative and procedural knowledge.
Students, learners are more likely to get a multifaceted depth right because they are learning the what and they are practicing the how.
(05:44):
And that works together for learning.
Yeah.
And so we want students to learn.
So we have content informed in the genre.
We have declarative and procedural right from educational theory, and then we have who are we as instructors and what do we know? If we really want to help students grow as writers, shouldn't we be pulling on our own expertise to do so? And we are experts in writing theory, in writing research.
(06:18):
So for me, all of those combine and it just makes sense.
And then that latter part, so that third portion of it's, what we know, it's what we do, let's bring our expertise to the classroom.
That is the part that also has the I'm calling it for now, the political dimension, which is if we want to create a labor structure within a first year writing program that is ethical and that actually kind of responds back to a really retrograde history about how composition was considered by the university, any old John can teach it right? You don't need expertise.
(07:03):
All you're doing is these surface level universal skills.
That's not true in this model.
That's not possible.
We have to elevate who we are as teachers, as experts.
And I guess the reason I say it's political is that is a direct affront to how the university historically and in many cases continues to view first year comp in those who teach it.
(07:33):
Maybe I'll pause.
I'm getting a little animated here.
I forgot how much I love this.
I shouldn't recall because at 57 five the other night, they couldn't shut me up.
Well, I think you talk about that historical approach to any old person can teach this class because traditionally composition looked very different.
It was we're going to write on a theme, on Shakespeare.
(07:56):
You're going to look at literature, and you're going to write back about literature, which is great if you're a freshman who's going to be a literature major.
But for the 99% of everyone else that comes through the classroom, it really wasn't doing a service, which I think is part of where this big paradigm shift came towards the approach of how we teach composition.
So it's like the rest of the way that the university thinks about that approach to who teaches what is caught back a few steps behind where the research and everything is gone, because they're not the specialists in the field.
(08:26):
They don't see the impact and how much it influences the students and their outcomes and their potential as scholars in general or success in life.
Yeah, and on a classroom level, I love that example because that's kind of how I present it to my students in a composition class when I want to talk about what the effect of research in a field and knowledge making in a field looks like.
(08:52):
It's fun to get very meta in that moment and say the class you're in right now is a direct result of that is a direct result of the way in which we think about what a composition class should be.
And it's affecting your life because you're in this composition class doing these kinds of assignments or observations and applying these theoretical frames to the things that you choose to look at in the world.
(09:21):
But the fact that we're doing that approach in this class is a result of what we're talking about and the effect that can have.
So it's kind of fun to present that to students of this is not just something that may happen or might happen later on in your career that you might experience as a student.
(09:42):
This is something that you're experiencing the way this class is different than other composition approaches right now, the way we're talking and what we're reading in this classroom.
So that's a really kind of fun way to bring that in for students, even in composition one and two.
I love that because I think the other dimension about the approach we do, the writing about writing approach, is that we teach realistic conceptions of writing.
(10:12):
And then those realistic conceptions, the students can see in their lives, they can see in the world.
And so we're not trying to, I feel, teach an idealized version or a version that will only happen this one time in this one class.
(10:35):
But we have an opportunity to talk to students about how writing and language work in the world because it's a ubiquitous phenomena.
Like go through a day where you do not write, you can't do it right, it's not done.
And there's a text that I adore.
(10:58):
I don't know why it didn't get as much circulation as Literacy in American Lives, but it was Deborah Brandt's kind of most recent and maybe last.
I don't know.
Maybe she's still going to publish again.
It was called The Rise of Writing, and she does a study it's similar to Literacy in American Lives in the sense that it's interviews of large swathes of people.
(11:22):
And she's doing a kind of sociological analysis, meaning she's looking across all of the data for patterns to raise them to a level of kind of consistency, in a sense, to say something about how writing is working in this context in the US.
(11:43):
At this time, and et cetera.
But what she argues in that book is that we have and of course this is an argument and people may disagree, but we have really transitioned as a culture from one where reading was the height of literacy to where writing is the height of literacy, meaning on a daily basis, what the kind of work a day people that's her phrase engage in? Is writing writing first? So reading is still it's not removed, but we write first.
(12:27):
That's the first impulse.
And then we do it in all kinds of ways, in all kinds of spaces.
And so for me, the argument that she makes here convinces me, persuades me even more that we need to talk about how writing works in the world for students because they will never not do it, and they can kind of move along in the vagueness of life and encounter it and kind of bounce back and forth between writing situations where they could have a different relationship.
(13:05):
And I feel like on the largest scale, what we're trying to do is give them a different relationship to the ubiquitous reality of writing in the world.
Well, writing might be the most accessible that it has ever been given.
I love that, given the variety of platforms in which we communicate in the written word and the way that as a culture, we put so much stock, a tweet can be on the news by someone who is not a person that is a celebrity or an expert, but that well crafted tweet is suddenly something that is part of the zeitgeist and part of what we know.
(13:48):
And there's a lot of tweets that don't make it, but every now and then, anyone can strike gold and see themselves on the news or, you know, have the most likes they've ever seen or it goes viral or whatever it may be.
And I think that part where there's a now that it's become such a part of our fabric and our daily activity and how much power that has to them is so eye opening because no one's ever told them that that is important before.
little bit of that idea that writing was really only accessible to a certain amount of people, at least successful, powerful, writing was really done by a small group of people, just like academics or anything else that was limited in accessibility to a lot of different people.
(14:35):
It's kind of like laughed at.
But there are people that make a living now on making tik tok videos that have never thought they were going to be content creators or consider themselves that way, but suddenly had something to say and it has traction and there is value in that.
I don't think it should be necessarily looked down on as some sort of form that isn't equally as value as writing long pros or other types of writing.
(15:04):
Yeah, and not only exploring those relationships to everyday writing, but just for students sometimes, especially in the composition classes, it's just expanding that view of what writing is.
I was talking to my eleven two students yesterday about the intersection between content, format and medium, how that creates different platforms and different technologies and different access, creates genres and creates those literacies that we gain and use every single day, all the time.
(15:44):
And so it's really kind of what I like about that, again, is in getting students to maybe try something new with things that we look at in terms of a research project or asking those questions.
We're also in the classrooms leveraging and accessing what they already have or making them realize what they have in that sort of assets based approach, which is a really great part of it as well.
(16:15):
Angie, how do you see that connecting to the writing about writing approach? Yeah, I think it's funny.
Recently we've been having conversations in the composition program about really forwarding an asset space approach, meaning that what students do, what they know, what they bring is powerful, it's a discursive resource, there's nothing lacking per se, there's not a limitation.
(16:58):
And so we can expand what students know through our approaches, we can help students use what they know to bridge to other kinds of writing and other ways of thinking about writing.
And I think the assets based approach while we're talking about it now.
(17:23):
I think it has always been part of writing about writing.
But I think it has been like if you look at it on a kind of national level and just some of the conversations that go on in the discipline.
I think that has been overlooked and I think there's been assumptions that hasn't been there.
(17:44):
But if you go back and read some of Downs and Whartle's first articles about this approach, like their 2007 article Writing Misconceptions, the core of that is the student and the students writing lives, the students writing processes, the students writing histories, the students writing aspirations, and we build research and kind of inquiry around that.
(18:18):
So that that's the starting point.
And I suppose the difference now, I think, in how we're expanding the program is that we are really deliberately and kind of consciously and vocally trying to name a much wider variety of what exists as student experience from language variety to really expanding how we're understanding cultural experiences to really expanding how we're understanding genre and rhetorical repertoires across cultures, across communities.
(19:07):
So in some ways, and I will I'm going to shout out I don't know if Adele will listen to this but she said something to me about these new outcomes.
She said this was the next logical step in writing about writing given what we have to do as a program to respond to our students.
(19:31):
And I thought that was a really lovely and pithy way to think about like some things carry on and some things I feel like we've taken a core and we've expanded them to respond as we must.
Every approach has to respond to changing rhetorical situations in social contexts.
(19:55):
Otherwise you become conservative.
And in that sense, I mean, you're backward looking.
You're not thinking about both what students need in the world and who students are right now.
I'm so glad you bring that up because I wanted to mention this and I wasn't sure how to segue to it.
(20:18):
I don't know about you or you, Nick, but the most common response I get from people outside of work when I talk about what we're doing here and I say we're revising these learning outcomes to include or address language diversity and multimodality as being legitimate and important parts of the composition classroom.
(20:44):
And I get from completely different people unrelated, not listening to each other, other conversations.
So you're going to let them write whatever they want to and it doesn't form doesn't matter anymore.
Content doesn't matter anymore.
Grammar doesn't matter anymore.
And it's like where are you getting that from? And what I said I didn't say anything about getting rid of the idea of effective writing and the ways that we are effective in our writing.
(21:09):
We're just bringing in this other element of that.
So have you had similar kind of reactions from anyone that you've spoken to or has that ever come up or do you have a response to that that is universal? Do I speak to anyone delivered? Not in my work.
I have two people.
(21:32):
First, something that you said.
I think this is really interesting and I think this is the ongoing struggle which is the struggle against the myth.
Like the struggle against the ideology is never ending.
What you said was we are enlivening and broadening these outcomes to kind of both account for and invite in which truthfully has always been there.
(22:04):
Right? Language diversity of our students and multiple ways of writing beyond alphabetic text.
But then you said the response was what about content and form and grammar? The nutty thing is like what about language, variety and multimodal composition? Is contentless, formless and grammarless nothing, right? Those are also situated literacies that have developed patterns over time based on culture, based on institution, based on their relationship and proximity to different kind of centers of power, based on someone's family, based on someone's own personal development.
(23:03):
So I think when I hear something like that, it's more reason why every first year writing teacher needs to have expertise in writing studies.
Because the answer is those things have every part of that list.
(23:23):
But what's happening in that response is it is the whiteness thing of writing.
Here's the universal approach.
And I'm going to say that's true of all writing anywhere, all time, of anybody.
(23:44):
But that writing is just a really particular situated writing that has become big because it's been part of the power center.
So that's why I'd love to have that conversation with somebody.
Yeah, if I knew anybody.
(24:06):
That myth is really powerful.
I think that's kind of what that story says to me is that there's still work to be done to deconstruct that.
And that is something that I think that we see from students in the classroom.
Again, when we ask them about prior experience with writing, when we ask them what they bring with them in terms of what the quote unquote rules are and things like that and how they apply them, at least for me that's still there and interrogating that and bringing that up.
(24:50):
It's one of the most enjoyable parts of teaching compass is to be able to address that.
Like you said, Angie, in the reality of what is real again in the classroom, on the classroom level, feels really good about this approach with students is that it is in the reality of the way language works and not an idea that there is an artificial restriction or set of rules that's out there that they need to adhere to when they use language.
(25:33):
That it is situational.
And I think that is something that I don't know how much time it will take or effort, but it's something that is certainly still ongoing and we know that from just listening to what students say about what they bring with them and those experiences.
(25:58):
Similarly, students carry in this idea when we ask them what is academic writing to you? And they think it has to have a particular vocabulary or a particular tone that maybe does not meet their authentic voice.
And I like to ask them, well, consider where does that come from? Like what is the history behind what you think of as an academic voice or academic writing? And it was meant to be exclusive, it was meant to not be accessible to everyone.
(26:27):
And again, we're not saying that to write academically does not mean that you should be considering the content and vocabulary and all of that.
But just as we professors carry in our past formative experiences, when it comes to writing instruction and the way that we learned it, we were first exposed to the idea of composition.
(26:52):
And composition studies may not be what meets the world we're living in today.
Students are also carrying in that kind of baggage where we're now getting a chance to meet in the middle and be like no, we're going to do this together and we're going to move past and move to this new, better thing that is more empowering and more accessible, I guess would be the word.
(27:18):
I want to ask Angie.
As the director of the composition program, we talk a lot about what we want composition courses to do, the first year writing program to do.
And so we brainstorm, we come up with course outcomes for 1101 and eleven two.
(27:40):
And so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what that process has been like for you.
I know it's been a few versions of those outcomes recently over the years, so I think it would be interesting to hear from you, like how that process goes and what that process is like for you.
(28:02):
I'm just thinking here to find the point of departure because no stories has a beginning, middle and end, right, in a neat way.
Well, we have the existing set we do of learning outcomes that are still technically being used.
Yeah.
(28:26):
And then recently, probably like within the last year or so, I think I finally came to understand truly what the goal of an outcome is.
Now we have first year writing, there's all kinds of courses in the university and they all have outcomes.
(28:49):
But I think I feel very lucky and very privileged to have been able to work with outcomes in first year writing because outcomes.
As I've come to understand them.
Represent the construct meaning like the cluster of all of the theory and the ideas that one has about how one learns to write and what kind of writing one should know now in the world as a firstyear student in 2020.
(29:35):
So in first year writing we get the opportunity through outcomes.
And I think this is really powerful to basically present students with.
Guide them through and help them make sense of writing constructs.
(29:58):
Which are how we are saying now provisionally of course.
Right.
That this is how writing is working.
This is what you need to move along in this kind of stream of life at this point that will bring you in from your prior and move you toward what is in your future.
(30:20):
So the outcomes in a sense are that space where we are offering that to students.
And when I came to understand that, it became very clear to me that they have got to be based in a couple of things.
They've got to be responsive to local context because the writing construct that students are going to be excited by and see a need for is going to be based on who they are and what they do and where they're going.
(30:58):
It also needs to be based in theory and research.
So I don't see outcomes as something like I'm just going to one piece of writing has this dimension and so now it's an outcome.
Like an outcome is like this paper should have a thesis statement.
I mean, that is like so low level, we might teach that in the class, but that's not part of a holistic construct of how we want to consider what writing is now for students at UCF and what kind of learning would best benefit them right as they're in this transitionary period excuse me, between coming in and then moving on in their studies.
(31:46):
What was the question again, your experience in revising the answer? All your thoughts about outcomes? No.
But just to respond for a minute to what you said.
Angie.
About what the outcomes are trying to capture as a teacher.
(32:08):
It's a good thing to have because there are so many ways to get there.
As opposed to the example that you just used about making sure there is assignment where a student demonstrates that they know how to use a thesis statement or an assignment that demonstrates that a student can collect and annotate academic journal research.
(32:29):
Right? Those don't leave a lot of room for creativity and different approaches that us as instructors might have.
So one thing that makes the outcomes fun to work with but also interesting to connect to is that the multiple ways there are of getting to those outcomes or showing those outcomes.
(32:55):
And this is why we're constantly having conversations about the outcomes, revising them, and talking about the ways in which we try and get there with our assignments.
But to me that openness is exciting because it leaves room for an instructor to have that effect, to have that interpretation, to bring students there in various ways.
(33:23):
Well, if outcomes are formed more as a checklist like this assignment will satisfy this.
It's no different than write me a five paragraph essay.
That is argumentative that they have done all through high school and many of whom feel very limited by and discouraged by this idea that they have to follow this particular I need the sentence, the sentence and the sentence that I can get a 100.
(33:51):
Now, some students really like that kind of sense of security and there's that struggle as well.
But they also are learning in that moment that writing outside of a classroom is not a five paragraph essay.
Again, they're all these modalities, there's all these instances of writing in their world and every single day, every aspect.
(34:13):
And I love that moment.
First, there's that sense of relief when I say we're not writing five paragraph essays in class.
They're all like oh, thank goodness.
But also there's a little bit of afraid, I don't know what is it that I'm doing? I don't know this, but then towards the end where they really see that there is a life outside of just writing to check the box and to actually have it as something that they can use in an arsenal to make them effective humans in the world.
(34:41):
That's such a great moment in such a great part of our course.
That's why it's so easy for us, I think, to get excited about it because we get how empowering that is and we get to share that with our students and it's such a shift to think of writing as empowering for them.
Absolutely.
And I think I'm really glad that Nicky said and then, Megan, you followed up with example about this idea that the outcomes are not meant to prescribe what any one instructor does in their class.
(35:19):
It's like we have total faith in the expertise and the knowledge and the passion of everyone who works in the first year composition program.
(35:47):
they in no way determine how someone is going to get there.
And so I think that's where the personal dimension is so important.
What do I love? What am I very good at? Obviously, we're not just doing whatever, we're all working towards a goal, but I'm hopeful that these outcomes present that way.
(36:13):
I know, Megan, just from conversation that I went into your class, like, you do a lot with social media and so you move students toward that larger understanding of the outcome through that avenue.
Right.
And I mean, and I know Nick is going to be doing something different.
(36:35):
And that's something else, actually, that I kind of came to understand last year when we were in the composition committee and we kept trying to basically I don't know, Megan, if you remember this, but we would like rewrite the main outcome and then we would sometimes I wanted to jump wordsmithing, I think is putting it lightly.
(36:59):
Putting it lightly.
But we also came up with in retrospect, I realized this is what we were doing, so we would like rewrite the main outcome and then everyone would have their thousand ways of how they got there and those had to be included.
And I think it's important that they're included.
But what we need to say is those are included for you.
(37:23):
Right.
Like, we can all have our bullets, our pathways of how we're going to get there, but those are our decision.
And so but when we started the process of trying to basically impose that on everyone else, then the committee was like, but we forgot this pathway and we forgot that one.
(37:44):
I think it was actually a really fantastic kind of like, experience for me to see that this is a passion of how everyone wants to get there.
So we need to have the conversation about like, you are totally within your right and it's your.
Prerogative to get there in that way, but like, maybe Lisa doesn't want to get there in that way and that's her prerogative and her right.
(38:07):
So if the outcomes are strong and if we've had conversations around them where we've come to terms we haven't normged right.
We're not all the same per se, but we've come to some terms about the theory that informs them and what they mean and what they're trying to do.
I think then we can like it's exciting to come up with our ways to reach them.
(38:30):
I am a firm believer and I don't know if I came up with this.
I'll take credit if I did.
So you hurt? Yes, totally mine.
I believe in this idea of contagious enthusiasm that if I'm enthusiastic about something, I can get you on board.
And so that's what's so great about each of us bringing what is it that excites me that I can use? How can I give this to you in a digestible way? But I also am really excited about that.
(38:57):
I think you should find value in and that's what helps move that along instead of I'm having to teach this this way, I don't quite understand it.
It's not my area of expertise or my forte or I don't necessarily agree that social media is a legitimate way to look at writing studies, whatever it may be.
But I think those sessions were where we were experiencing those little sniffs of other people's enthusiasm.
(39:21):
Like, this is what is so important to me.
And I had moments where I was like, oh yeah, am I doing that enough in my own courses? Am I making sure that that is being met, that need? It was an interesting process to get a glimpse since we all go off to our rooms, that most people don't even have windows and we don't really get to see what the other people I'm not naming building names, but that'll be off podcast.
(39:53):
This chance to get a peek into what other people are doing because it is exciting, it is to see how other people approach it and it's always inspiring.
I think that's a really great Angie observation about the pathways and the way that they were functioning and how we were all approaching them in that way.
I think that really kind of rings true to me about how we wanted to make sure that there were stated connections between maybe more assignment level things that we were doing connected to the outcomes, which I think now that you said that makes me think of.
(40:31):
I think that comes from a lot of us as instructors.
When we design an assignment, we want to present those to students, right? So here are maybe the sort of higher level ideas behind this particular assignment and then also presenting the examples, presenting ways in which you could get to those ideas.
(40:53):
So it really kind of stands to reason that when we were thinking about our course outcomes, that we would want to do the same thing.
I think that maybe ambiguity about just thinking about the outcomes themselves wasn't enough at a certain point that we needed to kind of go through that process of thinking about connecting those so that we could be sure.
(41:21):
Like, we would want to be clear and sure with our students about how you get to those kind of higher level things in an assignment that we might give them.
Look at those course outcomes the same way.
But again, I go back to your comment that you just mentioned about having that trust in the culture of the department and the approach that we can get to those outcomes in a lot of different ways.
(41:44):
And so I think that's a great observation about what's going on and what might be behind some of those ideas of wanting to know exactly the connection there.
And I understand that 100%.
I mean, I totally do.
And I think we can regenerate pathways through conversations, but I would worry that they would become public and stand in for the outcomes.
(42:13):
But I think that regeneration.
Or whatever you would want to call it.
Comes from our continuous conversation as committed faculty of first year writing about what we do.
And then we pull from the pot.
And then we adapt and we exceed it.
And we revise it.
And then we come back and we continue.
(42:34):
Which is one of the things I truly love about our program.
Is that it's very living.
It's a very alive program.
Everybody is open, even if it's scary.
And I don't know, I feel very fortunate that it's the school that I've been able to work with faculty on first year writing outcomes.
(43:07):
So you talk a little bit about what it was like bringing them and workshopping them with faculty.
Yeah, but part of the work that you and me as a program have done this past year was also taking it into the classroom and asking students for their feedback.
So what was that like in terms of getting that feedback after we had done all of this work and intensive thought and hours and hours of picking the perfect sentence? Yeah, well, if we think about the timeline, I mean, it's really hard for me to believe that last year, given what last year was in 2021 was rough, that we also committed to reworking the outcomes, but we did.
(43:55):
So we worked all last year in the curriculum committee, and then over the summer, there were two consultants that we worked with, norbert, Elliott and Mayapo, and they were part of if we just think of the process, I want to, I don't know, like, shout out to them because they were extraordinarily helpful and continue to be.
(44:18):
And it was actually through Norbert where it clicked that it was a construct we were developing, a sphere.
We weren't developing, like a slice.
And what that sphere meant was this complicated combination of like, theory, research, rhetorical, local context, and what they suggested is like, what you believe in, which is a funny thing to say about an outcome, but like, Angie, what do you care about? Because that's part of what we do.
(44:57):
We can't remove ourselves.
And then there was the beginning of the semester and there was a draft of the outcomes for eleven one and eleven two, and they were the best draft at the time.
And they're our faculty and both of you are them not to toot our own horns or anything.
Yeah, no, I think big time tooting of horns because I also piloted the eleven and one outcomes and I mean, some of them were the core was there, but the verbiage was a little rough.
(45:35):
But people went for it.
And then throughout the semester, the process really was talking with faculty through focus groups, talking with students at the end of the semester.
And then for me, every conversation, every curriculum committee meeting, I left and I made notes.
(45:57):
Even if someone had kind of an interpretation that was not really intended, I made a note of that so that we could get to a point where we were talking in a language that was I mean, obviously the language isn't transparent, but was as close to what we wanted to try to communicate as possible.
(46:19):
So the end of the semester, there were focus group interviews with students and Megan's class was one of the classes that we went into.
And it was awesome.
I will say, without that, these outcomes would not be what they developed into.
Even those tags that are at the beginning, there was a student, it was the very first focus group I went to.
(46:45):
Students were saying all kinds of really wonderful and helpful things, and then someone said, I just really wish I knew, like what like the main point was, could you just say the main point? And then the outcome and then it clicked in my mind because I've been studying outcomes across the country and what they look like and what they say, and there was an outcome statement from like, information literacy in the library studies that had used those tags, and I thought, that's it.
(47:15):
So that was from a student.
We did that because of a student.
I don't know.
I'm not going to go into the weeds here, but the students are really what took them to the next level, I think, without their feedback.
(47:38):
And the fact that I never thought about that before kind of boggles the mind when those are the folks that we are beholden to.
But if I ever do this again at any time in my life, I will always include students every step of the way.
(47:58):
I was speaking with another colleague of ours, Meg Lambert, before this, and she was talking about how one of the reasons behind this was a lot of this was stuff we were already doing in practice.
So it's like putting into actual policy per se what it is that we're actually already doing a lot of these things.
(48:20):
But making it so that this is like.
OK.
So now we're stating we're doing these things.
But if we're talking about how much we value student agency.
I thought it was just such a great experience for them that it's one thing to say.
Yeah.
These are our outcomes and we're piloting them this semester.
So you're part of this group that's working to see how all this comes together and then they actually have the chance at the end to give feedback and input to the way that the program is going to serve them as they continue on into eleven two, or if they were in eleven two, their peers.
(48:48):
Future students like that's hugely impactful.
And in a large university you often feel like your particular voice isn't necessarily the most important thing or there's so much volume to compete with in terms of your impact on the school.
And what a wonderful experience for first year writers that they got to actually be a part of making the policy for people coming after them and they move forward.
(49:16):
It's really powerful.
Yeah.
While it wasn't a focus group about revising the outcomes, I did have a day last semester that was a really fun day in class, where we took the outcomes towards the end of the semester, where they would be applying them to their own work in the E portfolio.
And I asked the students what they thought these outcomes meant.
(49:37):
I asked them to just give me a reaction, a definition, without any kind of although I'd been working with them all semester, I'd never asked them that direct question before.
And what I like about it is that again, this idea of we're teaching students to apply these writing about writing ideas to the world around them.
(50:00):
And so I always think, well, why not this class as well? This class is an experience we're all sharing right now, so why not look at interrogate question things that I'm asking them to do in this class, right? Because I have thought about them and what they mean, but I haven't heard from these group of students with these outcomes, what those interpretations are.
(50:27):
And it was a real eye opener.
And then I asked them to connect those to things that they've done in the class and they were presenting arguments for connections that I had a list in my head ahead of time of what I could use, sort of what I could use to introduce or connect them.
And they did rhetorical moves and argumentative moves and making a case, things that I hadn't even considered yet for the outcomes.
(50:59):
And so that was a real eye opening experience with new outcomes.
I'm excited to see what students make of those or the connections that they can make because teaching them those moves and ways of looking at anything.
Even something I'm asking them to do in their class.
(51:19):
I think is a really great way to sort of practice what we preach or practice what we teach students in the classroom.
That the materials that they're being giving are also fair game.
Are also there to be analyzed and interpreted.
Talk about the content and the activity.
Right? Yeah.
(51:40):
So I wanted to say there's a couple of things and now that they're like fleeting, there are so many things I wanted to say while you were talking, but I was like, don't interrupt.
But I think probably the biggest one or the main one is that one of the things that I think is really going to be really important about how we proceed with these outcomes is to construct what they capture from students.
(52:18):
So we have outcomes that we've developed that provide present, invite a particular kind of construct, which I think is what we've done and is also aspirational.
I mean, I would say there are some things in there that are not what we necessarily have all done.
(52:38):
For example, the multiple literacies within writing process.
To put that in an outcome is to say that we are actively pursuing non alphabetic literacies and elevating those.
To put writing and power in an outcome is to say this is a conversation, a content conversation and even a process conversation that needs to be had to understand how writing is working in the world at this moment.
(53:08):
The multiple ways of writing at eleven two, information literacy, I guess I will say I think some of them are things we've done, some of them are aspirational.
I think it's a good mix.
But I think to the point I was making before, that as we collect portfolios, as we learn from one another, as we write our assignments, or do some small revisions on existing assignments, or just simply do existing assignments, students are going to connect to those in new ways because of the holistic experience, right.
(53:46):
Of all of them tied together.
And I think that is when we start to learn what does that outcome really mean, because they're going to provide us with the full feature of the construct for writing at UCF.
(54:08):
And I'm really excited to see that.
And we know it will happen because it can't not you cannot not make meaning when you are asked to connect something you're doing to something else.
No matter how hard you try, you get to make something up.
Right.
Because that's the prompt.
Yeah, the prompt is to make a connection, fill in that blank space.
(54:33):
And I'm really excited to see what that is, especially for the outcomes that are these kind of aspirational outcomes that we don't know yet what that looks like, we learn as a result.
It actually just gave me an idea because I'm encountering a lot of students very recently that are using talked to text software to compose, which was typically only accessible to a small group.
(55:04):
And now it's become very common.
I think it's that extension of texting.
They're speaking texting and now they're speaking to it and you can really see it when you're reading their papers.
You can tell it's something that they have done conversationally on mobile devices with them all the time.
Yes.
And so that actually just gave us think about that and consider that in the way that I'm approaching these multimodalities in class and how many of them are doing it and not even realizing it.
(55:29):
That's the thing.
Most of them are doing these things and don't even realize that they're as exceptional as they are.
Yeah.
And that's part of our work.
Right.
Help that excavation, in a sense.
Yeah, I think that's a great idea.
So Angie, can you talk to us a little bit about what's next? What's on the horizon? What are you excited about? Either maybe something you're working on or something for the comp program.
(56:00):
What do you see in the near future? What do you have coming up or what are you excited about? Well, I'm excited about this semester.
I mean, I could go like short term and longer term.
(56:21):
I started this job in 2017 and Megan, you weren't here, but Nick was here.
And I sent out this inter office memo.
I found it the other day.
I'm like, this is weird.
Inter office memo? Was it printed? It was.
I put it in people's boxes.
Wow.
(56:42):
It's the old colburn hall.
And it survived.
That was only five years ago.
So what is going on with time? But anyway, that was a genre and it basically announced that the composition program was going to now dedicate its energy to transforming or kind of building on writing about writing from a social justice assets based approach.
(57:14):
And that was like what we were going to do.
And so I feel as though we're at a place where over those years there's something that's manifest in the world that we're going to start to operationalize.
And so what I want to do this semester is like through any means, help faculty feel like they're ready to take that large concept.
(57:46):
We've already gone from the theoretical kind of goal to the concrete in the outcomes to really get in there and have like conversations and generous, I don't know, sharing of ideas so that we can get to a place where we all feel like we could do this in real life.
(58:12):
So we have working groups that we're going to be offering this semester for eleven one and eleven two, where we're basically going to start with whatever anyone's assignment sequence is this semester.
And we're going to start with a mapping activity.
And I'm going to do this too.
I'm going to do this along with everybody.
And I'm really excited.
(58:33):
We're also going to do this with those shells that we created and we're going to map.
Where do we meet the outcomes, where are their gaps, where have we over saturated ourselves? Meaning I met the third outcome like nobody's business, right? And we all have that.
(58:56):
The students are really good at that one.
So working through that and kind of been coming back together in a round table style, sharing, helping each other figure out how to fill the gaps, make sense of the oversaturation, and then develop a kind of community repertoire of major and minor assignment examples that are not trying to determine what everyone does but gives us a menu.
(59:28):
So that's a goal this semester, just on the level of, as I said, getting things done for the classroom.
Because that's like, I feel like that's where we are.
And then in terms of the assessment, we'll start in the fall and kick off really with the portfolio, which both of you do and most people do, but we'll have some kind of work there and then figure out how we're going to read those.
(59:59):
I think that will be a really fun activity.
That's something the curriculum committee is going to work on.
How do we read those from an asset space perspective, from a translingual perspective.
And what I mean by that is a perspective that sees language and rhetoric in motion, where things can make contact with other traditions and other languages and other types of writing.
(01:00:21):
How can we kind of make sense of that from an assessment perspective and not, I don't know, put that to the side? Because that is writing now.
Writing now is not writing in silos.
Right? It's writing that is pulling from so many different modalities and languages and traditions.
(01:00:41):
So I think those are two things that I'm really looking forward to.
Yeah, those will be assessment.
That will be a lot of great conversations.
I think it's going to be great.
I'm really excited.
And I will say this is just one other note.
So I collected last semester some equity gap data on our ensuven two starting in fall 2018, ending in spring 2020.
(01:01:08):
And I asked Institutional Knowledge Management to collect data for eleven one and eleven two by semester, including summer, that was broken down by gender, race ethnicity, Pell, grant status, first gen status, and maybe those are them.
(01:01:31):
I need to go back and ask for modality too.
But what we see in that data is that we have some work to do.
So I asked them to break this down by DFW rate, which is DF withdrawal, and ABC, which as you know, composition is of course that anything below a C minus is a fail, or of course there's the withdrawal option.
(01:01:58):
But there are gaps in students who have identified as first gen, there are more higher DFW rates, there are gaps in race and ethnicity, there are higher DFW rates for minoritized students.
And so what I see as our kind of next step is to figure out, can this new curriculum address that, and how and what other policies and practices do we have going on that can address those? And so a longer term assessment is tracking those numbers in relation to our activity visa, VR portfolio assessment disaggregating across those categories so we can see if we're making any movement so that all students are getting what they deserve in higher ed.
(01:02:56):
So that's, I guess, a bigger picture for assessment for us, for the program.
It's so interesting to think about what it is that we might be I don't want to take it as a deficit based approach, but what current assets we have that we can build upon to better reach those communities.
(01:03:17):
Yeah, I mean, I think we just need to do research at this point.
Like I said, I need to break down by modality sometimes students struggle with online.
I don't know, you know what I mean? So I don't want to put out there, but I think the kind of interventions at this point are at the level of outcomes and curriculum, but now we've got to try and see and keep doing that work and also at the level of some policies, which is really what prompted me to send those emails about the NC and the Gordon rule.
(01:03:53):
So, for example, in the NC two, that's where we have our largest gaps, our largest equity gaps in DFW and ABC.
So eleven and two is also a course that is pretty tight.
It is pretty unforgiving.
(01:04:14):
So, for example, if I said my proposal, my bib, my lit review, and my research paper all Gordon rule, and if you don't get one of those, then you fail the class.
Well, if someone started to struggle during, I don't know, that second assignment, there's not a lot of recovery time, and so it becomes a snowball effect.
(01:04:42):
And so this is a theory that I have, but I think this intervention into the Gordon Roll policy, I'm hoping will give us some data to see right.
If that's making kind of any difference.
So that's an example of kind of from a policy perspective and then from a curriculum perspective, two ways to address this data that we see.
(01:05:09):
Yeah, I think those are all kind of really important questions to ask, and I agree with your thoughts on eleven two.
It's something that I try to intervene with students, even trying to be more aware of when that snowball, because I think of it exactly the same way.
(01:05:29):
It's a snowball that can accumulate and make it hard for students to recover because of how things build upon each other, especially in eleven or two with the research projects that we have students do.
Yeah, I think considering all avenues and policies along with that is going to be a really important way of assessing what's going on with students.
(01:05:59):
I think it's interesting, too.
It's one of those instances where we as professors feel that snow, like that sense of we have to get this back on track just as much as I'm sure students do.
Like, this now seems insurmountable.
Like that same kind of feeling where we're kind of in it together with them, like hey, we have to get you back on this path or it's going to be too late.
(01:06:20):
And that is a very dire sense for a class that we're trying to encourage and foster and support and show them that this is something they can do.
It'll be fruitful, I think.
But maybe there's the possibility that one of the eleven two outcomes is now multiple ways of writing and then we've kind of given a more capacious definition to contributing knowledge.
(01:06:46):
We've brought in the types of genres, public and academic research genres.
So maybe there's more room, right? Like within the fear in a sense to bring some assets to something that's already hard.
That multiple ways of writing outcome actually came from the focus group interviews with the students, a couple of students, one student said it and then everyone kind of pawled on.
(01:07:21):
They said want to be able it was something like I'm really good at visual stuff, I'm really good.
And they were naming some things and it would be really cool if I could have used that.
And I thought, why can't you? Because we can still teach the social actions, right? We can still teach the habits of mind and the ways of thinking and the transferable possibility of research with someone doing something multimodal in a final research project.
(01:07:57):
I don't see why not.
The mirror is a genre, right? It's not the genre.
And so it's like stepping it back a little bit from like a singular product toward the processes and like the core of what we want them to learn and transfer.
(01:08:18):
Yeah.
And I think that's what you said, Angie, is something that I think when I think about what's on the horizon or what I want to do next, or what I want to change or what I want to try, or what I want to improve upon.
It's having those kind of core foundations of the way in which we teach composition with the outcomes, but again, the creative way of getting there.
(01:08:46):
And I don't know what that is today or right now, but I think what's cool and exciting when I think about it is I wonder what that's going to look like when I try to form that solution, right? It's not there yet, it's not created yet, but it's out there.
(01:09:07):
And I think to me that searching of different ways of getting to some of those kind of outcomes or expressing those core values that we have as a program is something that keeps that sort of desire going or that sort of core motivation going for trying something else or changing something else.
(01:09:33):
And I think creating a department or a place where that's the norm.
Right.
That's what we do and that's what we're doing together.
I don't have to do it alone.
I know there's going to be people to talk to, conversations to be had, workshops, all those kinds of things.
It is exciting, even if you don't know what that looks like yet.
(01:09:56):
Even if you don't know what the wording of that assignment is or the presentation to the students.
Maybe it'll come from a student right.
And their reaction to something that will make something click.
And then we're like, oh, this is how I need to present this.
Yeah, I don't have it yet, but I'm excited to try and figure that out.
So that's something that I think is kind of a nice kind of ongoing thing that we do in the department.
(01:10:23):
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I was just thinking the parallel between teaching composition is teaching how to do a theme in literature.
Similarly, M rad isn't necessarily the only way to learn how to write academically.
And so it is exciting to think about how else can I approach this? What other things can I bring in that will serve more students? Because the EMRA doesn't necessarily serve every student.
(01:10:49):
Yeah, I think it would be cool to have a conversation or a workshop around like because we still are writing about writing program, we're still situated, we're still content and activity together.
But how many journals are there out there in the field that are doing all kinds? Some do web texts.
(01:11:09):
Right.
How many public research genres are there? Some people blog, some people do podcasts.
It's capacious, I think.
More capacious.
And I wanted to say make about what you're saying.
It just is so thrilling to me.
I could never have said it better.
(01:11:30):
That idea of being drawn to something and being okay with not knowing exactly what, but knowing you're going to get there with others is just really inspiring.
I felt like you could just tell me to shut up because now we're going to go off the rails.
(01:11:51):
But it's like a magnetism to what you love and you want to be drawn to it.
You want that.
And we need an environment, and I think we have one where we can want to be drawn to that.
(01:12:12):
I feel very fortunate in that way.
Yeah.
And I think that's, again, I think what sustains that motivation over in the fall, it'll be ten years that I've been working in the department in some form or fashion from being an adjunct and graduating in 2012.
So that's shocking to me, again, how time works, but I think that's it.
(01:12:38):
And looking back at things that I've done before and how they're changing, I think, like you said, that is something that can keep it keep it going.
Or does keep it going for me at least.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Well, it's always so fun to sit and chat with you because.
I mean, I left making notes on my notepad of ideas that I'm having as we're talking about things that I want to look into on my own and things I want to bring into the classroom.
(01:13:06):
So thank you so much for spending the time with us and giving us a chance to peek behind the curtain a little bit and allow access, everyone, to see a little bit of the thought and the work that goes into what it is we're doing.
So thank you.
Well, thank you for having me.
This was a lot of fun.
Great.
Thanks for being here, and thanks for listening, everybody.
(01:13:28):
Yes, thank you.
We'll see you next time.
Greetings and welcome to DWR discussions on writing and rhetoric, a space for informal conversations around research and practice in the field.
At the university level, a place inclusive for curious novices, blossoming scholars, and seasoned academics to consider and share their inquiries, experiences, and passions surrounding writing and rhetoric.
(00:29):
We are your hosts, professors Meeghan Faulconer and Nikolas Gardiakos, with the University of Central Florida.
Thank you for joining us.
Now let's get this conversation started.
Our conversation today is with Dr.
(00:50):
Angela R.
Ronsell, associate professor and Director of first year composition here at UCF.
In addition, Dr.
Brownsville's research works at the intersection of transnational literacy studies, rhetorical genre studies, and writingrelated transfer.
In this episode, we will discuss the evolving needs of the composition classroom and how we as professors are striving to support and empower our students to develop as writers.
(01:16):
Thank you so much for being with us today.
Thank you for having me.
Do I need to say your entire name every time I address you? No, not at all.
But if anyone is wondering, the R as Ray, that's my middle name.
Okay, very nice.
I didn't know that.
Yeah, it's a good mix of short and long.
There you go.
There you go.
(01:36):
So like I said in the intro, you are our director of first year writing studies here at UCF.
And I think that it's worth discussing for a moment the approach that we take here in terms of our writing about writing.
Pedagogy.
Is it pedagogy or pedagogy? I'm never sure.
I hear both.
(01:57):
Okay.
I'm good with both.
The more variation the better, I think I should say.
It definitely every time I'll just put the emphasis on it.
Pedagogy.
Yeah.
So this writing about writing approach emphasizes writing as both the content and the activity.
Right.
So why is that important in terms of composition classroom to think about writing as the content and the activity? Yeah, I love that.
(02:20):
This is the first question because I think for me, as you know and listeners who are in our department know, we are kind of evolving, broadening animating differently our curriculum, but the core is still the tenets from writing about writing.
(02:42):
I can talk about the content and the activity, but I think maybe I'll talk a little bit first about just the broader context of why I am just have been and still am and probably will always be a big fan of that approach.
So that approach at its core has a couple of things that I think are just we can't really find other ways to think about how writing works in the world right.
(03:15):
Which is writing is situated.
I don't think anyone's arguing against this anymore.
We're 2022.
And for me, what this means is writing happens in communities, for communities, by communities, and communities are broad.
I mean, they can be disciplined, they can be religious communities, you name it.
(03:44):
And so this approach for me, starts there.
And as a result, it asks us to situate how we teach writing within a community.
So then the question is what community? And this is where I think there is a combination of both writing studies research and pedagogy.
(04:07):
And perhaps political is the right word.
Let me know if you think political is the right word.
But first we've got a situated community, right? And so we know that from literacy studies theory, sociolinguistics theory, writing studies theory.
Like, there's no debate there.
What community are we going to situate in? Well, we are writing teachers with expertise in writing.
(04:36):
If we want to teach genres that are situated and mediate activity, we need genres that connect content and form, because genres are actually the intersection of both of those things.
There isn't a contentless genre or a formless content when I write, right? And so let's take that as another presupposition.
(05:00):
And we can agree with that.
There's research and theory on that.
So we've got to center that.
Now, what genres that are going to unite content and form are we going to teach to first year writers? Well, there's also a lot of research on how declarative and procedural knowledge and this is not just in composition.
(05:21):
This is in cognitive psychology.
A lot of fields talk about this.
But when we unite, both content and form is over here.
And then we unite declarative and procedural knowledge.
Students, learners are more likely to get a multifaceted depth right because they are learning the what and they are practicing the how.
(05:44):
And that works together for learning.
Yeah.
And so we want students to learn.
So we have content informed in the genre.
We have declarative and procedural right from educational theory, and then we have who are we as instructors and what do we know? If we really want to help students grow as writers, shouldn't we be pulling on our own expertise to do so? And we are experts in writing theory, in writing research.
(06:18):
So for me, all of those combine and it just makes sense.
And then that latter part, so that third portion of it's, what we know, it's what we do, let's bring our expertise to the classroom.
That is the part that also has the I'm calling it for now, the political dimension, which is if we want to create a labor structure within a first year writing program that is ethical and that actually kind of responds back to a really retrograde history about how composition was considered by the university, any old John can teach it right? You don't need expertise.
(07:03):
All you're doing is these surface level universal skills.
That's not true in this model.
That's not possible.
We have to elevate who we are as teachers, as experts.
And I guess the reason I say it's political is that is a direct affront to how the university historically and in many cases continues to view first year comp in those who teach it.
(07:33):
Maybe I'll pause.
I'm getting a little animated here.
I forgot how much I love this.
I shouldn't recall because at 57 five the other night, they couldn't shut me up.
Well, I think you talk about that historical approach to any old person can teach this class because traditionally composition looked very different.
It was we're going to write on a theme, on Shakespeare.
(07:56):
You're going to look at literature, and you're going to write back about literature, which is great if you're a freshman who's going to be a literature major.
But for the 99% of everyone else that comes through the classroom, it really wasn't doing a service, which I think is part of where this big paradigm shift came towards the approach of how we teach composition.
So it's like the rest of the way that the university thinks about that approach to who teaches what is caught back a few steps behind where the research and everything is gone, because they're not the specialists in the field.
(08:26):
They don't see the impact and how much it influences the students and their outcomes and their potential as scholars in general or success in life.
Yeah, and on a classroom level, I love that example because that's kind of how I present it to my students in a composition class when I want to talk about what the effect of research in a field and knowledge making in a field looks like.
(08:52):
It's fun to get very meta in that moment and say the class you're in right now is a direct result of that is a direct result of the way in which we think about what a composition class should be.
And it's affecting your life because you're in this composition class doing these kinds of assignments or observations and applying these theoretical frames to the things that you choose to look at in the world.
(09:21):
But the fact that we're doing that approach in this class is a result of what we're talking about and the effect that can have.
So it's kind of fun to present that to students of this is not just something that may happen or might happen later on in your career that you might experience as a student.
(09:42):
This is something that you're experiencing the way this class is different than other composition approaches right now, the way we're talking and what we're reading in this classroom.
So that's a really kind of fun way to bring that in for students, even in composition one and two.
I love that because I think the other dimension about the approach we do, the writing about writing approach, is that we teach realistic conceptions of writing.
(10:12):
And then those realistic conceptions, the students can see in their lives, they can see in the world.
And so we're not trying to, I feel, teach an idealized version or a version that will only happen this one time in this one class.
(10:35):
But we have an opportunity to talk to students about how writing and language work in the world because it's a ubiquitous phenomena.
Like go through a day where you do not write, you can't do it right, it's not done.
And there's a text that I adore.
(10:58):
I don't know why it didn't get as much circulation as Literacy in American Lives, but it was Deborah Brandt's kind of most recent and maybe last.
I don't know.
Maybe she's still going to publish again.
It was called The Rise of Writing, and she does a study it's similar to Literacy in American Lives in the sense that it's interviews of large swathes of people.
(11:22):
And she's doing a kind of sociological analysis, meaning she's looking across all of the data for patterns to raise them to a level of kind of consistency, in a sense, to say something about how writing is working in this context in the US.
(11:43):
At this time, and et cetera.
But what she argues in that book is that we have and of course this is an argument and people may disagree, but we have really transitioned as a culture from one where reading was the height of literacy to where writing is the height of literacy, meaning on a daily basis, what the kind of work a day people that's her phrase engage in? Is writing writing first? So reading is still it's not removed, but we write first.
(12:27):
That's the first impulse.
And then we do it in all kinds of ways, in all kinds of spaces.
And so for me, the argument that she makes here convinces me, persuades me even more that we need to talk about how writing works in the world for students because they will never not do it, and they can kind of move along in the vagueness of life and encounter it and kind of bounce back and forth between writing situations where they could have a different relationship.
(13:05):
And I feel like on the largest scale, what we're trying to do is give them a different relationship to the ubiquitous reality of writing in the world.
Well, writing might be the most accessible that it has ever been given.
I love that, given the variety of platforms in which we communicate in the written word and the way that as a culture, we put so much stock, a tweet can be on the news by someone who is not a person that is a celebrity or an expert, but that well crafted tweet is suddenly something that is part of the zeitgeist and part of what we know.
(13:48):
And there's a lot of tweets that don't make it, but every now and then, anyone can strike gold and see themselves on the news or, you know, have the most likes they've ever seen or it goes viral or whatever it may be.
And I think that part where there's a now that it's become such a part of our fabric and our daily activity and how much power that has to them is so eye opening because no one's ever told them that that is important before.
little bit of that idea that writing was really only accessible to a certain amount of people, at least successful, powerful, writing was really done by a small group of people, just like academics or anything else that was limited in accessibility to a lot of different people.
(14:35):
It's kind of like laughed at.
But there are people that make a living now on making tik tok videos that have never thought they were going to be content creators or consider themselves that way, but suddenly had something to say and it has traction and there is value in that.
I don't think it should be necessarily looked down on as some sort of form that isn't equally as value as writing long pros or other types of writing.
(15:04):
Yeah, and not only exploring those relationships to everyday writing, but just for students sometimes, especially in the composition classes, it's just expanding that view of what writing is.
I was talking to my eleven two students yesterday about the intersection between content, format and medium, how that creates different platforms and different technologies and different access, creates genres and creates those literacies that we gain and use every single day, all the time.
(15:44):
And so it's really kind of what I like about that, again, is in getting students to maybe try something new with things that we look at in terms of a research project or asking those questions.
We're also in the classrooms leveraging and accessing what they already have or making them realize what they have in that sort of assets based approach, which is a really great part of it as well.
(16:15):
Angie, how do you see that connecting to the writing about writing approach? Yeah, I think it's funny.
Recently we've been having conversations in the composition program about really forwarding an asset space approach, meaning that what students do, what they know, what they bring is powerful, it's a discursive resource, there's nothing lacking per se, there's not a limitation.
(16:58):
And so we can expand what students know through our approaches, we can help students use what they know to bridge to other kinds of writing and other ways of thinking about writing.
And I think the assets based approach while we're talking about it now.
(17:23):
I think it has always been part of writing about writing.
But I think it has been like if you look at it on a kind of national level and just some of the conversations that go on in the discipline.
I think that has been overlooked and I think there's been assumptions that hasn't been there.
(17:44):
But if you go back and read some of Downs and Whartle's first articles about this approach, like their 2007 article Writing Misconceptions, the core of that is the student and the students writing lives, the students writing processes, the students writing histories, the students writing aspirations, and we build research and kind of inquiry around that.
(18:18):
So that that's the starting point.
And I suppose the difference now, I think, in how we're expanding the program is that we are really deliberately and kind of consciously and vocally trying to name a much wider variety of what exists as student experience from language variety to really expanding how we're understanding cultural experiences to really expanding how we're understanding genre and rhetorical repertoires across cultures, across communities.
(19:07):
So in some ways, and I will I'm going to shout out I don't know if Adele will listen to this but she said something to me about these new outcomes.
She said this was the next logical step in writing about writing given what we have to do as a program to respond to our students.
(19:31):
And I thought that was a really lovely and pithy way to think about like some things carry on and some things I feel like we've taken a core and we've expanded them to respond as we must.
Every approach has to respond to changing rhetorical situations in social contexts.
(19:55):
Otherwise you become conservative.
And in that sense, I mean, you're backward looking.
You're not thinking about both what students need in the world and who students are right now.
I'm so glad you bring that up because I wanted to mention this and I wasn't sure how to segue to it.
(20:18):
I don't know about you or you, Nick, but the most common response I get from people outside of work when I talk about what we're doing here and I say we're revising these learning outcomes to include or address language diversity and multimodality as being legitimate and important parts of the composition classroom.
(20:44):
And I get from completely different people unrelated, not listening to each other, other conversations.
So you're going to let them write whatever they want to and it doesn't form doesn't matter anymore.
Content doesn't matter anymore.
Grammar doesn't matter anymore.
And it's like where are you getting that from? And what I said I didn't say anything about getting rid of the idea of effective writing and the ways that we are effective in our writing.
(21:09):
We're just bringing in this other element of that.
So have you had similar kind of reactions from anyone that you've spoken to or has that ever come up or do you have a response to that that is universal? Do I speak to anyone delivered? Not in my work.
I have two people.
(21:32):
First, something that you said.
I think this is really interesting and I think this is the ongoing struggle which is the struggle against the myth.
Like the struggle against the ideology is never ending.
What you said was we are enlivening and broadening these outcomes to kind of both account for and invite in which truthfully has always been there.
(22:04):
Right? Language diversity of our students and multiple ways of writing beyond alphabetic text.
But then you said the response was what about content and form and grammar? The nutty thing is like what about language, variety and multimodal composition? Is contentless, formless and grammarless nothing, right? Those are also situated literacies that have developed patterns over time based on culture, based on institution, based on their relationship and proximity to different kind of centers of power, based on someone's family, based on someone's own personal development.
(23:03):
So I think when I hear something like that, it's more reason why every first year writing teacher needs to have expertise in writing studies.
Because the answer is those things have every part of that list.
(23:23):
But what's happening in that response is it is the whiteness thing of writing.
Here's the universal approach.
And I'm going to say that's true of all writing anywhere, all time, of anybody.
(23:44):
But that writing is just a really particular situated writing that has become big because it's been part of the power center.
So that's why I'd love to have that conversation with somebody.
Yeah, if I knew anybody.
(24:06):
That myth is really powerful.
I think that's kind of what that story says to me is that there's still work to be done to deconstruct that.
And that is something that I think that we see from students in the classroom.
Again, when we ask them about prior experience with writing, when we ask them what they bring with them in terms of what the quote unquote rules are and things like that and how they apply them, at least for me that's still there and interrogating that and bringing that up.
(24:50):
It's one of the most enjoyable parts of teaching compass is to be able to address that.
Like you said, Angie, in the reality of what is real again in the classroom, on the classroom level, feels really good about this approach with students is that it is in the reality of the way language works and not an idea that there is an artificial restriction or set of rules that's out there that they need to adhere to when they use language.
(25:33):
That it is situational.
And I think that is something that I don't know how much time it will take or effort, but it's something that is certainly still ongoing and we know that from just listening to what students say about what they bring with them and those experiences.
(25:58):
Similarly, students carry in this idea when we ask them what is academic writing to you? And they think it has to have a particular vocabulary or a particular tone that maybe does not meet their authentic voice.
And I like to ask them, well, consider where does that come from? Like what is the history behind what you think of as an academic voice or academic writing? And it was meant to be exclusive, it was meant to not be accessible to everyone.
(26:27):
And again, we're not saying that to write academically does not mean that you should be considering the content and vocabulary and all of that.
But just as we professors carry in our past formative experiences, when it comes to writing instruction and the way that we learned it, we were first exposed to the idea of composition.
(26:52):
And composition studies may not be what meets the world we're living in today.
Students are also carrying in that kind of baggage where we're now getting a chance to meet in the middle and be like no, we're going to do this together and we're going to move past and move to this new, better thing that is more empowering and more accessible, I guess would be the word.
(27:18):
I want to ask Angie.
As the director of the composition program, we talk a lot about what we want composition courses to do, the first year writing program to do.
And so we brainstorm, we come up with course outcomes for 1101 and eleven two.
(27:40):
And so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what that process has been like for you.
I know it's been a few versions of those outcomes recently over the years, so I think it would be interesting to hear from you, like how that process goes and what that process is like for you.
(28:02):
I'm just thinking here to find the point of departure because no stories has a beginning, middle and end, right, in a neat way.
Well, we have the existing set we do of learning outcomes that are still technically being used.
Yeah.
(28:26):
And then recently, probably like within the last year or so, I think I finally came to understand truly what the goal of an outcome is.
Now we have first year writing, there's all kinds of courses in the university and they all have outcomes.
(28:49):
But I think I feel very lucky and very privileged to have been able to work with outcomes in first year writing because outcomes.
As I've come to understand them.
Represent the construct meaning like the cluster of all of the theory and the ideas that one has about how one learns to write and what kind of writing one should know now in the world as a firstyear student in 2020.
(29:35):
So in first year writing we get the opportunity through outcomes.
And I think this is really powerful to basically present students with.
Guide them through and help them make sense of writing constructs.
(29:58):
Which are how we are saying now provisionally of course.
Right.
That this is how writing is working.
This is what you need to move along in this kind of stream of life at this point that will bring you in from your prior and move you toward what is in your future.
(30:20):
So the outcomes in a sense are that space where we are offering that to students.
And when I came to understand that, it became very clear to me that they have got to be based in a couple of things.
They've got to be responsive to local context because the writing construct that students are going to be excited by and see a need for is going to be based on who they are and what they do and where they're going.
(30:58):
It also needs to be based in theory and research.
So I don't see outcomes as something like I'm just going to one piece of writing has this dimension and so now it's an outcome.
Like an outcome is like this paper should have a thesis statement.
I mean, that is like so low level, we might teach that in the class, but that's not part of a holistic construct of how we want to consider what writing is now for students at UCF and what kind of learning would best benefit them right as they're in this transitionary period excuse me, between coming in and then moving on in their studies.
(31:46):
What was the question again, your experience in revising the answer? All your thoughts about outcomes? No.
But just to respond for a minute to what you said.
Angie.
About what the outcomes are trying to capture as a teacher.
(32:08):
It's a good thing to have because there are so many ways to get there.
As opposed to the example that you just used about making sure there is assignment where a student demonstrates that they know how to use a thesis statement or an assignment that demonstrates that a student can collect and annotate academic journal research.
(32:29):
Right? Those don't leave a lot of room for creativity and different approaches that us as instructors might have.
So one thing that makes the outcomes fun to work with but also interesting to connect to is that the multiple ways there are of getting to those outcomes or showing those outcomes.
(32:55):
And this is why we're constantly having conversations about the outcomes, revising them, and talking about the ways in which we try and get there with our assignments.
But to me that openness is exciting because it leaves room for an instructor to have that effect, to have that interpretation, to bring students there in various ways.
(33:23):
Well, if outcomes are formed more as a checklist like this assignment will satisfy this.
It's no different than write me a five paragraph essay.
That is argumentative that they have done all through high school and many of whom feel very limited by and discouraged by this idea that they have to follow this particular I need the sentence, the sentence and the sentence that I can get a 100.
(33:51):
Now, some students really like that kind of sense of security and there's that struggle as well.
But they also are learning in that moment that writing outside of a classroom is not a five paragraph essay.
Again, they're all these modalities, there's all these instances of writing in their world and every single day, every aspect.
(34:13):
And I love that moment.
First, there's that sense of relief when I say we're not writing five paragraph essays in class.
They're all like oh, thank goodness.
But also there's a little bit of afraid, I don't know what is it that I'm doing? I don't know this, but then towards the end where they really see that there is a life outside of just writing to check the box and to actually have it as something that they can use in an arsenal to make them effective humans in the world.
(34:41):
That's such a great moment in such a great part of our course.
That's why it's so easy for us, I think, to get excited about it because we get how empowering that is and we get to share that with our students and it's such a shift to think of writing as empowering for them.
Absolutely.
And I think I'm really glad that Nicky said and then, Megan, you followed up with example about this idea that the outcomes are not meant to prescribe what any one instructor does in their class.
(35:19):
It's like we have total faith in the expertise and the knowledge and the passion of everyone who works in the first year composition program.
(35:47):
they in no way determine how someone is going to get there.
And so I think that's where the personal dimension is so important.
What do I love? What am I very good at? Obviously, we're not just doing whatever, we're all working towards a goal, but I'm hopeful that these outcomes present that way.
(36:13):
I know, Megan, just from conversation that I went into your class, like, you do a lot with social media and so you move students toward that larger understanding of the outcome through that avenue.
Right.
And I mean, and I know Nick is going to be doing something different.
(36:35):
And that's something else, actually, that I kind of came to understand last year when we were in the composition committee and we kept trying to basically I don't know, Megan, if you remember this, but we would like rewrite the main outcome and then we would sometimes I wanted to jump wordsmithing, I think is putting it lightly.
(36:59):
Putting it lightly.
But we also came up with in retrospect, I realized this is what we were doing, so we would like rewrite the main outcome and then everyone would have their thousand ways of how they got there and those had to be included.
And I think it's important that they're included.
But what we need to say is those are included for you.
(37:23):
Right.
Like, we can all have our bullets, our pathways of how we're going to get there, but those are our decision.
And so but when we started the process of trying to basically impose that on everyone else, then the committee was like, but we forgot this pathway and we forgot that one.
(37:44):
I think it was actually a really fantastic kind of like, experience for me to see that this is a passion of how everyone wants to get there.
So we need to have the conversation about like, you are totally within your right and it's your.
Prerogative to get there in that way, but like, maybe Lisa doesn't want to get there in that way and that's her prerogative and her right.
(38:07):
So if the outcomes are strong and if we've had conversations around them where we've come to terms we haven't normged right.
We're not all the same per se, but we've come to some terms about the theory that informs them and what they mean and what they're trying to do.
I think then we can like it's exciting to come up with our ways to reach them.
(38:30):
I am a firm believer and I don't know if I came up with this.
I'll take credit if I did.
So you hurt? Yes, totally mine.
I believe in this idea of contagious enthusiasm that if I'm enthusiastic about something, I can get you on board.
And so that's what's so great about each of us bringing what is it that excites me that I can use? How can I give this to you in a digestible way? But I also am really excited about that.
(38:57):
I think you should find value in and that's what helps move that along instead of I'm having to teach this this way, I don't quite understand it.
It's not my area of expertise or my forte or I don't necessarily agree that social media is a legitimate way to look at writing studies, whatever it may be.
But I think those sessions were where we were experiencing those little sniffs of other people's enthusiasm.
(39:21):
Like, this is what is so important to me.
And I had moments where I was like, oh yeah, am I doing that enough in my own courses? Am I making sure that that is being met, that need? It was an interesting process to get a glimpse since we all go off to our rooms, that most people don't even have windows and we don't really get to see what the other people I'm not naming building names, but that'll be off podcast.
(39:53):
This chance to get a peek into what other people are doing because it is exciting, it is to see how other people approach it and it's always inspiring.
I think that's a really great Angie observation about the pathways and the way that they were functioning and how we were all approaching them in that way.
I think that really kind of rings true to me about how we wanted to make sure that there were stated connections between maybe more assignment level things that we were doing connected to the outcomes, which I think now that you said that makes me think of.
(40:31):
I think that comes from a lot of us as instructors.
When we design an assignment, we want to present those to students, right? So here are maybe the sort of higher level ideas behind this particular assignment and then also presenting the examples, presenting ways in which you could get to those ideas.
(40:53):
So it really kind of stands to reason that when we were thinking about our course outcomes, that we would want to do the same thing.
I think that maybe ambiguity about just thinking about the outcomes themselves wasn't enough at a certain point that we needed to kind of go through that process of thinking about connecting those so that we could be sure.
(41:21):
Like, we would want to be clear and sure with our students about how you get to those kind of higher level things in an assignment that we might give them.
Look at those course outcomes the same way.
But again, I go back to your comment that you just mentioned about having that trust in the culture of the department and the approach that we can get to those outcomes in a lot of different ways.
(41:44):
And so I think that's a great observation about what's going on and what might be behind some of those ideas of wanting to know exactly the connection there.
And I understand that 100%.
I mean, I totally do.
And I think we can regenerate pathways through conversations, but I would worry that they would become public and stand in for the outcomes.
(42:13):
But I think that regeneration.
Or whatever you would want to call it.
Comes from our continuous conversation as committed faculty of first year writing about what we do.
And then we pull from the pot.
And then we adapt and we exceed it.
And we revise it.
And then we come back and we continue.
(42:34):
Which is one of the things I truly love about our program.
Is that it's very living.
It's a very alive program.
Everybody is open, even if it's scary.
And I don't know, I feel very fortunate that it's the school that I've been able to work with faculty on first year writing outcomes.
(43:07):
So you talk a little bit about what it was like bringing them and workshopping them with faculty.
Yeah, but part of the work that you and me as a program have done this past year was also taking it into the classroom and asking students for their feedback.
So what was that like in terms of getting that feedback after we had done all of this work and intensive thought and hours and hours of picking the perfect sentence? Yeah, well, if we think about the timeline, I mean, it's really hard for me to believe that last year, given what last year was in 2021 was rough, that we also committed to reworking the outcomes, but we did.
(43:55):
So we worked all last year in the curriculum committee, and then over the summer, there were two consultants that we worked with, norbert, Elliott and Mayapo, and they were part of if we just think of the process, I want to, I don't know, like, shout out to them because they were extraordinarily helpful and continue to be.
(44:18):
And it was actually through Norbert where it clicked that it was a construct we were developing, a sphere.
We weren't developing, like a slice.
And what that sphere meant was this complicated combination of like, theory, research, rhetorical, local context, and what they suggested is like, what you believe in, which is a funny thing to say about an outcome, but like, Angie, what do you care about? Because that's part of what we do.
(44:57):
We can't remove ourselves.
And then there was the beginning of the semester and there was a draft of the outcomes for eleven one and eleven two, and they were the best draft at the time.
And they're our faculty and both of you are them not to toot our own horns or anything.
Yeah, no, I think big time tooting of horns because I also piloted the eleven and one outcomes and I mean, some of them were the core was there, but the verbiage was a little rough.
(45:35):
But people went for it.
And then throughout the semester, the process really was talking with faculty through focus groups, talking with students at the end of the semester.
And then for me, every conversation, every curriculum committee meeting, I left and I made notes.
(45:57):
Even if someone had kind of an interpretation that was not really intended, I made a note of that so that we could get to a point where we were talking in a language that was I mean, obviously the language isn't transparent, but was as close to what we wanted to try to communicate as possible.
(46:19):
So the end of the semester, there were focus group interviews with students and Megan's class was one of the classes that we went into.
And it was awesome.
I will say, without that, these outcomes would not be what they developed into.
Even those tags that are at the beginning, there was a student, it was the very first focus group I went to.
(46:45):
Students were saying all kinds of really wonderful and helpful things, and then someone said, I just really wish I knew, like what like the main point was, could you just say the main point? And then the outcome and then it clicked in my mind because I've been studying outcomes across the country and what they look like and what they say, and there was an outcome statement from like, information literacy in the library studies that had used those tags, and I thought, that's it.
(47:15):
So that was from a student.
We did that because of a student.
I don't know.
I'm not going to go into the weeds here, but the students are really what took them to the next level, I think, without their feedback.
(47:38):
And the fact that I never thought about that before kind of boggles the mind when those are the folks that we are beholden to.
But if I ever do this again at any time in my life, I will always include students every step of the way.
(47:58):
I was speaking with another colleague of ours, Meg Lambert, before this, and she was talking about how one of the reasons behind this was a lot of this was stuff we were already doing in practice.
So it's like putting into actual policy per se what it is that we're actually already doing a lot of these things.
(48:20):
But making it so that this is like.
OK.
So now we're stating we're doing these things.
But if we're talking about how much we value student agency.
I thought it was just such a great experience for them that it's one thing to say.
Yeah.
These are our outcomes and we're piloting them this semester.
So you're part of this group that's working to see how all this comes together and then they actually have the chance at the end to give feedback and input to the way that the program is going to serve them as they continue on into eleven two, or if they were in eleven two, their peers.
(48:48):
Future students like that's hugely impactful.
And in a large university you often feel like your particular voice isn't necessarily the most important thing or there's so much volume to compete with in terms of your impact on the school.
And what a wonderful experience for first year writers that they got to actually be a part of making the policy for people coming after them and they move forward.
(49:16):
It's really powerful.
Yeah.
While it wasn't a focus group about revising the outcomes, I did have a day last semester that was a really fun day in class, where we took the outcomes towards the end of the semester, where they would be applying them to their own work in the E portfolio.
And I asked the students what they thought these outcomes meant.
(49:37):
I asked them to just give me a reaction, a definition, without any kind of although I'd been working with them all semester, I'd never asked them that direct question before.
And what I like about it is that again, this idea of we're teaching students to apply these writing about writing ideas to the world around them.
(50:00):
And so I always think, well, why not this class as well? This class is an experience we're all sharing right now, so why not look at interrogate question things that I'm asking them to do in this class, right? Because I have thought about them and what they mean, but I haven't heard from these group of students with these outcomes, what those interpretations are.
(50:27):
And it was a real eye opener.
And then I asked them to connect those to things that they've done in the class and they were presenting arguments for connections that I had a list in my head ahead of time of what I could use, sort of what I could use to introduce or connect them.
And they did rhetorical moves and argumentative moves and making a case, things that I hadn't even considered yet for the outcomes.
(50:59):
And so that was a real eye opening experience with new outcomes.
I'm excited to see what students make of those or the connections that they can make because teaching them those moves and ways of looking at anything.
Even something I'm asking them to do in their class.
(51:19):
I think is a really great way to sort of practice what we preach or practice what we teach students in the classroom.
That the materials that they're being giving are also fair game.
Are also there to be analyzed and interpreted.
Talk about the content and the activity.
Right? Yeah.
(51:40):
So I wanted to say there's a couple of things and now that they're like fleeting, there are so many things I wanted to say while you were talking, but I was like, don't interrupt.
But I think probably the biggest one or the main one is that one of the things that I think is really going to be really important about how we proceed with these outcomes is to construct what they capture from students.
(52:18):
So we have outcomes that we've developed that provide present, invite a particular kind of construct, which I think is what we've done and is also aspirational.
I mean, I would say there are some things in there that are not what we necessarily have all done.
(52:38):
For example, the multiple literacies within writing process.
To put that in an outcome is to say that we are actively pursuing non alphabetic literacies and elevating those.
To put writing and power in an outcome is to say this is a conversation, a content conversation and even a process conversation that needs to be had to understand how writing is working in the world at this moment.
(53:08):
The multiple ways of writing at eleven two, information literacy, I guess I will say I think some of them are things we've done, some of them are aspirational.
I think it's a good mix.
But I think to the point I was making before, that as we collect portfolios, as we learn from one another, as we write our assignments, or do some small revisions on existing assignments, or just simply do existing assignments, students are going to connect to those in new ways because of the holistic experience, right.
(53:46):
Of all of them tied together.
And I think that is when we start to learn what does that outcome really mean, because they're going to provide us with the full feature of the construct for writing at UCF.
(54:08):
And I'm really excited to see that.
And we know it will happen because it can't not you cannot not make meaning when you are asked to connect something you're doing to something else.
No matter how hard you try, you get to make something up.
Right.
Because that's the prompt.
Yeah, the prompt is to make a connection, fill in that blank space.
(54:33):
And I'm really excited to see what that is, especially for the outcomes that are these kind of aspirational outcomes that we don't know yet what that looks like, we learn as a result.
It actually just gave me an idea because I'm encountering a lot of students very recently that are using talked to text software to compose, which was typically only accessible to a small group.
(55:04):
And now it's become very common.
I think it's that extension of texting.
They're speaking texting and now they're speaking to it and you can really see it when you're reading their papers.
You can tell it's something that they have done conversationally on mobile devices with them all the time.
Yes.
And so that actually just gave us think about that and consider that in the way that I'm approaching these multimodalities in class and how many of them are doing it and not even realizing it.
(55:29):
That's the thing.
Most of them are doing these things and don't even realize that they're as exceptional as they are.
Yeah.
And that's part of our work.
Right.
Help that excavation, in a sense.
Yeah, I think that's a great idea.
So Angie, can you talk to us a little bit about what's next? What's on the horizon? What are you excited about? Either maybe something you're working on or something for the comp program.
(56:00):
What do you see in the near future? What do you have coming up or what are you excited about? Well, I'm excited about this semester.
I mean, I could go like short term and longer term.
(56:21):
I started this job in 2017 and Megan, you weren't here, but Nick was here.
And I sent out this inter office memo.
I found it the other day.
I'm like, this is weird.
Inter office memo? Was it printed? It was.
I put it in people's boxes.
Wow.
(56:42):
It's the old colburn hall.
And it survived.
That was only five years ago.
So what is going on with time? But anyway, that was a genre and it basically announced that the composition program was going to now dedicate its energy to transforming or kind of building on writing about writing from a social justice assets based approach.
(57:14):
And that was like what we were going to do.
And so I feel as though we're at a place where over those years there's something that's manifest in the world that we're going to start to operationalize.
And so what I want to do this semester is like through any means, help faculty feel like they're ready to take that large concept.
(57:46):
We've already gone from the theoretical kind of goal to the concrete in the outcomes to really get in there and have like conversations and generous, I don't know, sharing of ideas so that we can get to a place where we all feel like we could do this in real life.
(58:12):
So we have working groups that we're going to be offering this semester for eleven one and eleven two, where we're basically going to start with whatever anyone's assignment sequence is this semester.
And we're going to start with a mapping activity.
And I'm going to do this too.
I'm going to do this along with everybody.
And I'm really excited.
(58:33):
We're also going to do this with those shells that we created and we're going to map.
Where do we meet the outcomes, where are their gaps, where have we over saturated ourselves? Meaning I met the third outcome like nobody's business, right? And we all have that.
(58:56):
The students are really good at that one.
So working through that and kind of been coming back together in a round table style, sharing, helping each other figure out how to fill the gaps, make sense of the oversaturation, and then develop a kind of community repertoire of major and minor assignment examples that are not trying to determine what everyone does but gives us a menu.
(59:28):
So that's a goal this semester, just on the level of, as I said, getting things done for the classroom.
Because that's like, I feel like that's where we are.
And then in terms of the assessment, we'll start in the fall and kick off really with the portfolio, which both of you do and most people do, but we'll have some kind of work there and then figure out how we're going to read those.
(59:59):
I think that will be a really fun activity.
That's something the curriculum committee is going to work on.
How do we read those from an asset space perspective, from a translingual perspective.
And what I mean by that is a perspective that sees language and rhetoric in motion, where things can make contact with other traditions and other languages and other types of writing.
(01:00:21):
How can we kind of make sense of that from an assessment perspective and not, I don't know, put that to the side? Because that is writing now.
Writing now is not writing in silos.
Right? It's writing that is pulling from so many different modalities and languages and traditions.
(01:00:41):
So I think those are two things that I'm really looking forward to.
Yeah, those will be assessment.
That will be a lot of great conversations.
I think it's going to be great.
I'm really excited.
And I will say this is just one other note.
So I collected last semester some equity gap data on our ensuven two starting in fall 2018, ending in spring 2020.
(01:01:08):
And I asked Institutional Knowledge Management to collect data for eleven one and eleven two by semester, including summer, that was broken down by gender, race ethnicity, Pell, grant status, first gen status, and maybe those are them.
(01:01:31):
I need to go back and ask for modality too.
But what we see in that data is that we have some work to do.
So I asked them to break this down by DFW rate, which is DF withdrawal, and ABC, which as you know, composition is of course that anything below a C minus is a fail, or of course there's the withdrawal option.
(01:01:58):
But there are gaps in students who have identified as first gen, there are more higher DFW rates, there are gaps in race and ethnicity, there are higher DFW rates for minoritized students.
And so what I see as our kind of next step is to figure out, can this new curriculum address that, and how and what other policies and practices do we have going on that can address those? And so a longer term assessment is tracking those numbers in relation to our activity visa, VR portfolio assessment disaggregating across those categories so we can see if we're making any movement so that all students are getting what they deserve in higher ed.
(01:02:56):
So that's, I guess, a bigger picture for assessment for us, for the program.
It's so interesting to think about what it is that we might be I don't want to take it as a deficit based approach, but what current assets we have that we can build upon to better reach those communities.
(01:03:17):
Yeah, I mean, I think we just need to do research at this point.
Like I said, I need to break down by modality sometimes students struggle with online.
I don't know, you know what I mean? So I don't want to put out there, but I think the kind of interventions at this point are at the level of outcomes and curriculum, but now we've got to try and see and keep doing that work and also at the level of some policies, which is really what prompted me to send those emails about the NC and the Gordon rule.
(01:03:53):
So, for example, in the NC two, that's where we have our largest gaps, our largest equity gaps in DFW and ABC.
So eleven and two is also a course that is pretty tight.
It is pretty unforgiving.
(01:04:14):
So, for example, if I said my proposal, my bib, my lit review, and my research paper all Gordon rule, and if you don't get one of those, then you fail the class.
Well, if someone started to struggle during, I don't know, that second assignment, there's not a lot of recovery time, and so it becomes a snowball effect.
(01:04:42):
And so this is a theory that I have, but I think this intervention into the Gordon Roll policy, I'm hoping will give us some data to see right.
If that's making kind of any difference.
So that's an example of kind of from a policy perspective and then from a curriculum perspective, two ways to address this data that we see.
(01:05:09):
Yeah, I think those are all kind of really important questions to ask, and I agree with your thoughts on eleven two.
It's something that I try to intervene with students, even trying to be more aware of when that snowball, because I think of it exactly the same way.
(01:05:29):
It's a snowball that can accumulate and make it hard for students to recover because of how things build upon each other, especially in eleven or two with the research projects that we have students do.
Yeah, I think considering all avenues and policies along with that is going to be a really important way of assessing what's going on with students.
(01:05:59):
I think it's interesting, too.
It's one of those instances where we as professors feel that snow, like that sense of we have to get this back on track just as much as I'm sure students do.
Like, this now seems insurmountable.
Like that same kind of feeling where we're kind of in it together with them, like hey, we have to get you back on this path or it's going to be too late.
(01:06:20):
And that is a very dire sense for a class that we're trying to encourage and foster and support and show them that this is something they can do.
It'll be fruitful, I think.
But maybe there's the possibility that one of the eleven two outcomes is now multiple ways of writing and then we've kind of given a more capacious definition to contributing knowledge.
(01:06:46):
We've brought in the types of genres, public and academic research genres.
So maybe there's more room, right? Like within the fear in a sense to bring some assets to something that's already hard.
That multiple ways of writing outcome actually came from the focus group interviews with the students, a couple of students, one student said it and then everyone kind of pawled on.
(01:07:21):
They said want to be able it was something like I'm really good at visual stuff, I'm really good.
And they were naming some things and it would be really cool if I could have used that.
And I thought, why can't you? Because we can still teach the social actions, right? We can still teach the habits of mind and the ways of thinking and the transferable possibility of research with someone doing something multimodal in a final research project.
(01:07:57):
I don't see why not.
The mirror is a genre, right? It's not the genre.
And so it's like stepping it back a little bit from like a singular product toward the processes and like the core of what we want them to learn and transfer.
(01:08:18):
Yeah.
And I think that's what you said, Angie, is something that I think when I think about what's on the horizon or what I want to do next, or what I want to change or what I want to try, or what I want to improve upon.
It's having those kind of core foundations of the way in which we teach composition with the outcomes, but again, the creative way of getting there.
(01:08:46):
And I don't know what that is today or right now, but I think what's cool and exciting when I think about it is I wonder what that's going to look like when I try to form that solution, right? It's not there yet, it's not created yet, but it's out there.
(01:09:07):
And I think to me that searching of different ways of getting to some of those kind of outcomes or expressing those core values that we have as a program is something that keeps that sort of desire going or that sort of core motivation going for trying something else or changing something else.
(01:09:33):
And I think creating a department or a place where that's the norm.
Right.
That's what we do and that's what we're doing together.
I don't have to do it alone.
I know there's going to be people to talk to, conversations to be had, workshops, all those kinds of things.
It is exciting, even if you don't know what that looks like yet.
(01:09:56):
Even if you don't know what the wording of that assignment is or the presentation to the students.
Maybe it'll come from a student right.
And their reaction to something that will make something click.
And then we're like, oh, this is how I need to present this.
Yeah, I don't have it yet, but I'm excited to try and figure that out.
So that's something that I think is kind of a nice kind of ongoing thing that we do in the department.
(01:10:23):
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I was just thinking the parallel between teaching composition is teaching how to do a theme in literature.
Similarly, M rad isn't necessarily the only way to learn how to write academically.
And so it is exciting to think about how else can I approach this? What other things can I bring in that will serve more students? Because the EMRA doesn't necessarily serve every student.
(01:10:49):
Yeah, I think it would be cool to have a conversation or a workshop around like because we still are writing about writing program, we're still situated, we're still content and activity together.
But how many journals are there out there in the field that are doing all kinds? Some do web texts.
(01:11:09):
Right.
How many public research genres are there? Some people blog, some people do podcasts.
It's capacious, I think.
More capacious.
And I wanted to say make about what you're saying.
It just is so thrilling to me.
I could never have said it better.
(01:11:30):
That idea of being drawn to something and being okay with not knowing exactly what, but knowing you're going to get there with others is just really inspiring.
I felt like you could just tell me to shut up because now we're going to go off the rails.
(01:11:51):
But it's like a magnetism to what you love and you want to be drawn to it.
You want that.
And we need an environment, and I think we have one where we can want to be drawn to that.
(01:12:12):
I feel very fortunate in that way.
Yeah.
And I think that's, again, I think what sustains that motivation over in the fall, it'll be ten years that I've been working in the department in some form or fashion from being an adjunct and graduating in 2012.
So that's shocking to me, again, how time works, but I think that's it.
(01:12:38):
And looking back at things that I've done before and how they're changing, I think, like you said, that is something that can keep it keep it going.
Or does keep it going for me at least.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Well, it's always so fun to sit and chat with you because.
I mean, I left making notes on my notepad of ideas that I'm having as we're talking about things that I want to look into on my own and things I want to bring into the classroom.
(01:13:06):
So thank you so much for spending the time with us and giving us a chance to peek behind the curtain a little bit and allow access, everyone, to see a little bit of the thought and the work that goes into what it is we're doing.
So thank you.
Well, thank you for having me.
This was a lot of fun.
Great.
Thanks for being here, and thanks for listening, everybody.
(01:13:28):
Yes, thank you.
We'll see you next time.
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