Reflection for “Opening the Doors of the Academy” — Audience Awareness and Freewriting on Blackboard

Obviously, blackboard posts have a different potential audience, but I actually found that what altered my process was not the audience, but the knowledge that the prompt writer is a peer and also getting evaluatedMore precisely, knowing that the prompt does not come from the teacher does take off some of the burden of answering all aspects of the prompt.  When I receive a prompt from the professor, I am careful to work in all aspects that I view as requirements.  I realize that the instinct to follow the professor’s prompt so closely might not be a useful one.  It is close to viewing prompts as rules instead of heuristics. I understand that this inclination to view heuristics as rules is exactly what some scholars, such as Elbow, are working against.  However, it is hard to not care about fulfilling all the aspects the teacher’s prompt seems to be asking for directly.  In the end, I do want a good grade.

The strong desire to get a good grade might inherently cause any student to follow heuristics as if they were rules.  What interests me more is that I felt less obliged to follow my peer’s prompt as closely.  Partly it is because it is easier to attribute any confusion to the way the prompt is worded.  Also, if I find any part of the prompt too restricting, I am more likely to attribute that to the skill of the peer.  With a student prompt, I felt freer to free-write.  Of course, I then went back to the draft and revised, but because I felt less shackled to answering the prompt precisely, I allowed myself more space.

Also, my freedom is fueled by the knowledge that my original responses would not be graded.  The whole exercise has been a good prompt for experimenting with the expressivists’ philosophy.

As for writing the prompt, I found that having an audience in mind helps to narrow my ideas.  I was more sensitive as to whether my sentences are saying exactly what I mean.  Especially because a prompt was so short, I edited my prompt closely.  In this case, I found that having an audience in mind helped me expand and clarify the points in my prompt.

Throughout this exercise, I was aware of the following two experiments: social-epistemist audience-awareness and expressivist evaluation.  These two experiments pull against each other, and it is interesting that I found the evaluation experiment to impact me the most.  Perhaps this is because I usually work mostly in a social-epistemist fashion, keeping audience in mind, and wanting to research everything in the field before starting to write.  I have never freewritten as formally as I have for the blackboard response, and found them to be helpful, especially because these freewrites are now the foundation of this week’s response paper.  I found having more formal freewrites at hand such a great way to organize my thoughts.  Interestingly, though I’ve always practiced social-epistemist way of writing, I am intellectually an expressivist.  Maybe this is because I have recognized the benefits of expressivism that I know I am not currently enjoying.  This five-week exercise has been useful because I now know another practice (formal freewrite) that could work for me, and I want to experiment with it more in the future.

Opening the Doors of the Academy (blackboard composite)

The last few weeks’ explorations have strengthened my view that expressivists are more in line with my personal teaching style (as opposed to cognitives or social-epistemics).  I recognize the expressivist problem of possible self-isolation, which I will discuss in more detail later, but first I want to share a personally unexpected discovery: that my inclination toward any school of teaching stems mainly out of my concern with the barrier between insiders and outsiders, that is, the barrier of entering the academy; I want to lessen the barrier, make it easier for those who want to become part of the academic world to do so.  Expressivism, I’ve found, is the most practical out of the three schools of teaching in opening up to students the doors of the academy.

Cognitivism is the furthest from my inclination.  Although I mostly agree with cognitive rhetoric’s fundamental argument that logic leads to the truth, my biggest concern with the rhetoric is its inaccessibility.  The cognivist language is taught in schools and in universities where they prepare “the managers who were to take this new body of practical knowledge into the marketplace,” creating an “elite” class that would “assume its rightful place of leadership in church and state” (Berlin 121).  Empirical thinking has the risk of excluding those who think in another way, and mark them not only as different, but as “wrong.”  I cherish the process of logical deduction and I root for science to push the boundaries of thinking, but I am weary of the belief (or ideology) on which the cognitive rhetoric is based: that truth is “inscribed in the very nature of things as indisputable scientific facts,” and not open to discussion (Berlin 126).  Cognitive rhetoric says that logic leads to the only truth, and I believe we’re in trouble when language starts shutting down possibilities.  The strictness of cognitivist thinking protects the insiders as members of an elite club, hampering the unconventionality needed at times for progress in the domain.

That said, let us put cognitive rhetoric aside for now.  I want to spend most of the space with my struggles between expressivist rhetoric and social-epistemic rhetoric.  Though I end up agreeing mostly with the expressivists in their ideology of teaching freshmen, both schools of thinking have their valid points.

For social-epistemics, I agree with much of their attempts to be self critical and to locate the writings in culture and society.  However, what turns me away from their school is that these writers, especially if they are inexperienced, are susceptible to becoming overly political, forsaking to the actual goal of the course: to improve academic writing skills.  Better environments in which social-epistemic melds well with the curriculum are the social studies, politics, or history courses in which human political and economic conditions are under study.

More importantly, since social-epistemic rhetoric focuses much more on information gathered outside of the writing course, the outside information is likely to distract freshmen writers and possibly hamper their creativity.  For social-epistemics, information comes from the outside, and therefore there is always more information to be gathered.  This type of learning increases the risk of regurgitation, and worse yet, it easily takes agency away from freshmen writers because the authority is shown to be placed on the outside, rather than within the writers themselves.

The big issue, then, is writer’s authority. Penrose and Geisler have conducted a research with the writing processes of a Ph.D. student, Roger, and a less experienced writer, Janet.  The experiment shows the importance of having writer’s authority.  It becomes clear that Janet places authority outside of herself, referring to the selection of published articles as “the book,” becoming confused when the articles present different opinions.  She treats the ideas she reads as set in stone.  She views herself as a receptor, not as a fellow academic.  Roger, on the other hand, sees himself inside the academy, and therefore reads and writes with authority, uses the differences of opinion to further his own arguments.  Certainly Roger’s knowledge of the domain helps him in writing with authority, however, Janet, even with less knowledge, has come up with her own unique ideas.  It is just that these ideas are not in the final paper because she dismisses them as unimportant.  I agree with Penrose/Geisler that Janet’s devaluation comes from the lack of writer’s authority.  I want to point out that the source of her impulse to abdicate is not because she is less knowledgeable about the domain, but that she is less knowledgeable about writing essays in general.

Students should be taught to develop their authoritative voice as early as possible, since it is a separate task than developing domain knowledge.  I agree with Penrose/Geisler that it is vital to help students understand that their voices count.  Then they can build upon their knowledge base, and their essays will become increasingly inclusive in their arguments.  It is important for the students to understand that their domain knowledge will unlikely be as all-encompassing as the professor’s, but their lesser domain knowledge does not prevent them from creating strong essays out of what they have already learned.

I am not arguing that only expressivists want their students to write with authority.  Of course social-epistemics want it also.   I merely want to point out that social-epistemics reinforce the practice of acknowledging the authority of others, and this nodding toward others’ authority is an old tune.  High school has trained students to be vessels of information instead of analyzers.  Since writing composition class is an introduction to college writing, it is a perfect place to show the students that they, too, have the authority they see in published works.  Their ideas count just as much.  Their ideas are not “wrong” just because they contradict with what they have read.  I agree wholeheartedly with the factor of expressivism that makes gaining authority the visible task of writing composition teachers.  I find this philosophy more enabling than the lack of focus on writing shown by the social-epistemics.  That is, expressivists focus more on the writing itself, while social-epistemics are lured to be distracted by agendas, especially large social agendas with lots of discussions already in print and therefore overwhelming to the student writer.  These are rough generalizations, but I believe these tendencies are at the cores of these schools of thought.  I share the goal of social-epistemics to help students become “agents of social change rather than victims” (Berlin 134).  However, first student need to gain confidence in their ideas, and learn how to argue their point.

Another issue with which these two schools of teaching struggle is writer’s naiveté.  Social-epistemics point out that expressivists could be naïve and be out of touch with the actual social economic situation, and become ineffective through isolation.  While this is indeed the risk, I emphasize that the goal of a writing composition class is to teach students how to write.  I agree with Elbow in that if the writing cannot be created, then the ideas, whether of social-epistemics or other groups of thinkers, cannot be related.  He writes,

When I get a strongly felt, fully committed, arrogant paper, I am happy to wrestle and try to get tough with the writer.  But so often with first year students it is the latter: timidity and lack of deep entwinement in what they are writing.  (80-81)

Becoming less naïve is a different agenda than learning to write academically.  In fact, if naïve ideas are well presented in the language of the academy, then that ideas can then be debated.  But the ideas have to be presented first, and presented in a form understood by the academy.

A great example is the student essay “Queers, Bums, and Magic,” in which the student might be displaying homophobic and classist ideas.  But the problem with analyzing that paper is that readers cannot be sure whether the paper is a satire.  The student is ignorant of the audience and the discourse in which he is asked to participate.  This is a failure of academic writing, not the failure of an idea.  If the author were truly homophobic and classist, but knew how to speak the academic tongue, then the paper would more readily become a conversation piece in the classroom.  It is the uncertainty of the author’s academic craft that hampers the arguments against its apparent reasoning.

The naiveté and ineffectiveness that social-epistemics accuse of expressivists is the precise sin against which the expressivists are fighting.  To lessen naiveté, students need to first learn to present their naïve ideas in the academic tongue.  Then the next step is for them to engage in conversations that mould and mature those initially naïve ideas.  As seen in “Queers, Bums and Magic,” some ideas can be potentially vulgar.  However, it is the academy’s job to encourage students to be unafraid to voice their opinions, because opinion itself is not the thing that prevents the student from entering the academy.  This encouragement leads to the ultimate purpose: to discuss ideas, not just as a mode of self-expression but also as an attempt to create a better society.  If the author of “Queer, Bum, and Magic” presented his ideas in the academic language, then others are able to counter those ideas, instead of being just confused and disturbed.  Discussion brings ideas to the surface, and gives society a chance to reason against prejudices.

Now, even though I find expressivism to be more enabling to a freshman writer, I am also wary of its dangers of isolation, which can hinder the student from entering the academy.  Elbow’s teaching strategy includes a different system of evaluation that he finds more enabling to the students.  Elbow argues that the current A-to-F grading system hinders the learning of the students.  But he is not arguing against judgment so much as arguing against “that crude, oversimple way of representing judgment—distorting it, really—into a single number” (Elbow 391).  He suggests other ways of judgment.  He points to the H-and-U method, which attempts to take away the linear judgment that Elbow seems to feel cannot do a paper justice, and provides a hazy evaluation that might has well have “see me” after the mark if the student is to get more concrete feedback (which some students crave).  This type of evaluation gives Elbow the room to explain his opinion to the student, rather than distilling the opinion into a number to decipher.  He also suggests the grid method, which does the opposite of the H-and-U method, and provides the student with a roundhouse of feedback, still not distilling his opinion into a single number.  This method also gives him room to express his opinion more fully.

It seems, then, Elbow’s discomfort with the grading system is that it fails at communicating with the student in a way that would help the student to improve.  The number does not tell students how to improve.

I agree with Elbow that the point of any sort of grading system is to help the student on the journey to self-improvement.  However, I want to highlight a complication that Elbow brings up but then sidesteps: “grading is unfair and counterproductive but that students and institutions tend to want grades” (393).  Even if one teaching community changes the value of grades for its students, those same students would need to go on to the larger academic community where the rules and implications of grades firmly exist.

So, in a larger sense, Elbow’s attempts against ranking as shown above is helpful only if the students can then be integrated into the academic environment, or become a source powerful enough to be recognized by the academy as an ally.  The danger of Elbow’s utopic approach (which is self-recognized) is that it could isolate the individuals and hinder them from entering the already existing academy.  That is, the risk of not playing by the rules of the game is not being able to play the game at all.

I realize that I am speaking in a vague philosophical sense.  An example of what I mean is the possible ramifications of Elbow’s comment that “a good number of [the students used to getting As] discover that they can’t get them [in his class], and they soon settle down to accepting a B” (397).  Elbow says that this settling gives them “less anxiety and more of a learning voyage,” but fails to mention that this settling could shut them out of higher institutions that still use grades as a measuring method.  Also, Elbow ignores in this essay the complicated issue of student motivation.  If students realize that they can’t get As, some, like me when I was an undergraduate, would not sign up for Elbow’s course at all, or if they were stuck in the course, would be less motivated because they would feel that their hard work would not be justly rewarded.  I felt exactly this way when I had to take an obligatory English course in which it was rumored that no one ever gets an A.  Motivation is important for students to do well.  If students are not doing the best of their abilities, the danger then is not only that they might not enter the academy, but that they are cheating themselves.

A difficulty of creating a small utopia is dealing with the ways in which it rubs up against the reality of the outside world.  I agree with most of Elbow’s thinking in fostering learning, but I am more cynical, and am perhaps more concerned with the difficulties his students will have in integrating into the part of the academy not presided over by Elbow.

I have talked in length now about my struggles with two schools of teaching, circling around the problem of lessening the boundary that prevents outsiders from becoming insiders of the academy.  My main concern is not which school I prefer (which is useless to the study of teaching composition), but which ideas presented by all of the schools are the more helpful in integrating students into the academic discourse.  I have found expressivists’ ideology to share my main concern the most, though I look toward the social-epistemics for the ultimate goal of teaching.  That is, I agree with the goal of the social-epistemics of empowering the students politically and giving them agency to voice their opinions, but I find this sort of social political empowerment a distraction from writing-authority empowerment.  I agree with Elbow that the main problem of freshmen writers is finding their ideas and becoming passionate about them.  Naïveté of society can then be addressed.  I look to these teaching philosophies with the specific lens of teaching writing composition, and I believe that first we need to give students the power to write, and then work toward the power of social change.

Works Cited

Berlin, James.  “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class.”  Teaching Composition. Ed. T.R. Johnson.  3^rd. ed. Boston/New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008.  117-137.  Print.

Elbow, Peter.  “Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting Out Three Forms of Judgment.” Teaching Composition. Ed. T.R. Johnson.  3^rd. ed. Boston/New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008.  387-405.  Print.

Penrose, Ann M., and Cheryl Geisler. “Reading and Writing without Authority.” College Composition and Communication 45.4 (1994): 505-520. Web.

Reflection for Autobiographical Essay — Finding My Process

During my entire writing process, I enjoyed writing the first draft the most.  To think while writing comes to me more instinctively than structuring a discussion.  I loved running my thought process on the page and then seeing if the language has formed a coherent thought or opinion (Berthoff would like this part of my process).  I used the workings of language to get myself to spell out a thought.  This technique worked well, but in undergraduate the problem was that it was my entire process, it was where I stopped—no revisions, just completion (as in fulfilling the page number, which is not always the completion of an idea).  For this essay, writing the first draft has been like frolicking in a playground because I still like to think on the page.  I realize now that this frolicking is my first draft process; it is a great way to solidify my initial ideas and to expand using questions, but it is only part of the effort to create a complete and coherent essay.  I have been realizing this need for organization since my undergraduate days.  Now I am getting used to the idea that revision, or in my words, rewriting, is an indispensable part of my process.

Sommers says that revision is “re-vision,” attempting to separate fixing errors from developing and organizing, or even possibly changing, the original ideas.  This type of revision is what I attempted–an overhaul instead of a simple polish.  For my rough draft, I uncovered an experience from my freshmen composition class, after which I examined the two main barriers I felt in that class: lack of motivation and fear.  For a while these two barriers remained my discussion points.  I created two subheadings in my rough draft for these discussion points and wrote/explored around those points, using the essays we have read for class.  My thesis became “Before using the critics’ strategies for freshmen composition classes, we need to get over the hurdles of the lack of motivation and fear.”  When I revised the draft, I discovered that separating these two hurdles as two completely different problems does not work because they are interconnected.  I explored my thoughts more through writing them down, and discovered that not only are they interconnected, but fear is a contributor to the lack of motivation.  The thesis changed; the new rhetorical purpose is to analyze the main factors contributing to the lack of motivation, and provide a few ideas that teachers could use to tackle those factors.  All of a sudden my essay became more focused.  I felt more concrete in the argument for this new rhetorical purpose.  Also during the revision process, I realized that I have been using my felt sense (Perl) in finding my autobiographical experience as well as in picking out the concerns that came from it.  Those concerns that I thought stemmed from the experience is actually my own take on the experience.  This realization did not make me think that I was wrong, but it gave me an authority on my subject.  So that during the revision, I not only discovered my rhetorical purpose, but also found my own authority.

After the re-visioning of my rough draft, I settled down to write another draft, to rewrite.  Becoming conscious of Sommer’s idea of re-vision confirmed my view of my writing process that writing is rewriting.  I fully agree with Joseph Harris that revision should be “an usual mode or method” for critical activities, e.g. academic writing (591).  For me, since writing and thinking happen almost always hand-in-hand, rewriting is rethinking, or expansion of thinking.  Rewriting is refining my ideas.  Re-vising this essay helped me to gain confidence in my composing process.  By this time in my academic career, I want to start to refine the writing process that I have found useful.  Re-vising works for me, so it is an idea that I am going to consciously emphasize during my composing process.

That said, although I have been touting that I re-vise my ideas, I am by no means certain that the final draft that I turned in is, in fact, the final draft.  I am not displaying some perfectionist angst, but rather raising the concern of what I find most difficult in writing an essay: gaining distance from the writing so that I could be analytical enough, so that I would be able to provide enough reasoning to convey on the paper the connections I have made first by felt sense.  I have realized that it is hard for someone new to my ideas to follow my argument when connections are not presented on paper.  For me, the most difficult aspect of essay writing is making sure that communication is achieved.

So, going along with the idea of re-vision, I am adding another layer of re-vision to my process: after finding the argument and authority through the Sommer’s idea of re-vision, I will step back and try to view the paper from the perspective of someone first reading it.  Of course, at this stage, peer review is helpful.  However, my idea of seeing the paper through a stranger’s eyes is an exercise that I have fund helpful in picking out obvious thought leaps.  What I am talking about, I realize, is a finer type of revision.  Sommer is getting at the idea that revision is not just fixing errors, and I agree.  I am talking about after revising the paper keeping Sommer in mind.  I find this second, finer layer of revising helpful because I am still not getting down to simply grammar, and am still working with the ideas.  Then, after the paper is well-argued, the last layer of revising is grammar–sentence fluidity, word choice, diction, etc.  Harris argues that the specificity of text creates meaning, and I respect that thought and agree that an ill-placed comma could sometimes change the meaning of the text, and resonate through the piece, maybe even affecting the argument.

The revision experience for my autobiographical essay has been one of the most useful experiences I have had in learning my process of academic writing.  As of now, my process includes these points:

* writing as exploration of those ideas, organize these into a rough draft

* re-vise in Sommer’s terms

* revise as if being first introduced to these ideas

*grammar / polish

I realize that it is a risky move putting down what appears to be a linear process when many of the critics we have read argue that writing is anything but a linear process.  I agree with them.  I want to make clear that I am not arguing for a linear process.  I do not expect to do these activities purely chronologically.  They could be seen as what Mike Rose calls heuristics, since they are only bullet points to keep in mind while writing.  They are also what Sommers calls “strategies to handle the whole essay” (200).  I am finding and confirming the tools, strategies, heuristics, and processes that work for me.  The writing (which includes revising) of this essay has been helpful in guiding me toward a more complete understanding of how I write academically.

Reflection for “Using Popular Culture to Motivate Student Investment in Research”– An Experiment with “Writing Out of Chaos”

The easiest part for this essay was, surprisingly, the rough draft.  Usually I spend most of my writing time struggling with the rough draft, and once I finish the essay, I have found what I have been trying to say, and reorganizing it is the more enjoyable bit.  For this essay, however, I consciously tried the “writing out of chaos” strategy, and the rough did come out, just messily.  My ideas were jumping all over the place.  I know some of the jumps might seem more abrupt because I did not pay too much attention to transitions the first time around, but then the group of peer readers agreed that some of the ideas didn’t seem to fit in anyway.  I agreed with their notes, and realized the main task of re-visioning my paper, which is to find a central thread of discussion and hold on to it.  My individual peer reader brought up an opinion slightly in contrast with that of the peer group, which I noted with interest.  I knew that the decision had to be mine whether or not I cut certain ideas or how much of the ideas to put in the final draft, but discussing them with peers helped tease out my feelings about how important I think certain ideas are for this paper.  The peer edit experience allowed me to hone in on what I had to do in revision and also to think about what was important to me for the paper.  I am a great believer of peer readers.

Now for the re-visioning.  The biggest problem that I had with this paper was that I could not figure out a way to organize all the different information that I had found, in addition to “motivation” being a vague notion.  I had to find a way to explain and support a vague notion with information that did not seem to want to come together.  This was why re-visioning the paper was difficult.  I must have re-visioned the argument ten times, trying to tie in motivation with investment with tools with popular culture.  I found that when I was willing to drop my original vision of the paper, the re-visioning became freer.  I think in the end I have gathered together some sort of statement, but the process of finding what I was trying to say was long and tedious.

My rhetorical purpose while writing the essay was to get a more concrete idea of my writing process.  Like I said, I consciously tired the “writing out of chaos” idea, and on some level it worked very well for me.  I was able to go on about the topic and get all my thoughts down on paper.  I think, actually, that for this paper I needed to do get thoughts down first and then organize.  But I think now that I might have focused too much on the writing process in that I neglected the research aspect.  I feel that research is like writing in that it is also recursive.  At first I had found articles that I thought were relevant, and as my drafts piled up, my paper might have been served better if I went back and did more research.  Instead, for this paper, I stuck to what I had and tried to work it out through writing alone.  I have always been the person who checks out the entire collection on a topic before I attempt to write the paper, and this time I might have swung a little too far the other way.  I realize now that research and writing are integral to each other.  They are both part of the larger process of writing a research paper.  So, I know what I would have done differently with writing this paper, but I also believe more firmly now that every paper calls for its own process.  For this paper, I needed the “writing out of chaos” technique because the ideas were so interwoven and complicated that for me, getting them on paper makes it easier to organize.  Other papers might not be as complicated and might call for a different approach.  For example, the autobiographical essay for this class called for a more straightforward essay in that the argument was clearer to me from the start.  In papers similar to that one, I might do a lot more organizing during the first draft.  I realize that I have skills (such as writing a chunk of words that might or might not go into the final draft), and in different situations those skills could come into play differently.  I don’t necessarily think that there is one writing process for me, but that there are a few processes that I might work for me under certain circumstances.  I think the more essays I write, the more I will be able to figure out all of those preferences.  Right now I have a better idea of what I do well, and what I should keep in mind (such as writing and researching for me are recursive), and some of the processes I prefer under certain broad circumstances.  I am grateful that I am now aware of what happens when I write, and am looking forward to getting to know myself better as a writer.

Using Popular Culture to Motivate Student Investment in Research

How do teachers motivate students to do research?  It is hard enough to get them to invest in just writing the paper, it is harder to ask them to invest in background research that might or might not be useful in the final paper.  My research so far shows that there are methods for teachers to help motivate student to invest in their research, and these methods all relate to using popular culture in the classroom (teaching popular culture and letting students write about popular culture topics).  I will discuss arguments from four articles, each of which is inadequate on its own in regard to what I’m attempting, but I want to pull ideas out of all three to, in the end, present ideas about how to use popular culture to motivate students to do research.

To invest in research, students need to first be interested in the research topic.  When popular culture is part of the curriculum, students somehow bring “a passion for and investment in [the popular culture’s] texts and practices” (Callahan 55). One reason could very well be that students are more probabilistically inclined toward the more familiar popular culture topics than toward “academic topics,” such as the true identity of Shakespeare.  Another reason, states Frank Pajares, comes out of A. Bandura’s social cognitive theory, which says that “how people behave can often be better predicted by the beliefs they hold about their capabilities…than by what they are actually capable of accomplishing” (Pajares 140).  Basically, students would not be as invested if they felt that they cannot do well, if they felt like outsiders to the academy, like incapable writers.  If “self-perceptions help determine what individuals do with the knowledge and skills they have,” then a major problem that teachers are faced with is students’ lack of self-confidence in their academic work (Pajares 140).  If students do not think they can do it, then they will not go the extra mile to put in work for which they know they will not get rewarded.  Why work for nothing?  Self-confidence is a block to students who might otherwise want to invest.

How does using popular culture increase students’ self-confidence in their writing ability?  Well, popular culture gives students a power tool: authority.  David Bartholomae talks about students mimicking authorial voice in order to sound like they have authority.  These students are trying to sound like they fit in.  But one problem with mimicry is that while it attempts to override the boundary between those inside and outside the academy, it simultaneously makes the boundary more distinct.  Here’s where popular culture comes in.  In Callahan and Low’s article, the teacher, Rob, tries to give students authority so that they do not have to feel fake or inadequate when writing about their subject.  He does this by asking students to do projects on subjects in their popular life, such as hip-hop.  A student has told Rob that “there ‘was a lot going on in school that teachers don’t know about’ and decided to record some of these hallway artifacts for group discussions” (Callahan 54).  In this way, Rob has “relinquish[ed] the role of the expert” and given it to the students, who can then take “control of the media as insiders” (Callahan 53-54).  It is unimportant whether or not the teachers also know about the student’s topic, because whether or not the teacher is an insider, this student feels that he is, and therefore can find his authority with the specifics of his topic.  To put it another way, the topic does not have to be never-before-seen (it is not reasonable to ask for ground-breaking originality, especially from freshmen writers), but it does have to belong to the writer in that the specifics of the topic should be uniquely the student’s.  This is original thinking, or, it is the student having something to say.  The hard part is that these ideas usually generate from the writer, and therefore cannot be “taught.”  However, teachers can inspire and encourage this type of personal topic discovery by allowing popular culture into the classroom, which gives students the freedom to talk about subjects about which they feel more knowledgeable. With authority comes increased self-confidence as writers.  Feeling that they have ownership over what they will present in the research essay gives students a belief in their abilities as academics.

The importance of increased belief in their abilities is that now the teacher can now spend less time coaxing the students out of their shell and more time discussing the thinking behind those ideas and how they could work academically.  Using topics more familiar to students makes the topics less intimidating.  The students do not worry as much about whether their ideas are “right” or “wrong” because they too feel like their opinions matter regarding these topics, and “students and teachers can become coinvestigators of culture” (Callahan 52).  The point is, popular culture gives students and teachers a meeting ground where the students could feel more like a participant in the classroom culture instead of a receiver of information like they are used to being.  Having authority over their topics gives them the courage to share their ideas and arguments, which makes their papers more interesting.  Also, now students can use popular culture as “a site where the intersection of student and teacher expertise results in genuine dialogue” (Callahan 55).  The ideas are now able to get out on the table, and teachers can now do the other part of their job, which is to help them sort out those ideas.

Critical thinking is vital in sorting out research.  The students need to know what is in front of them and what they think about its content.  Guiding students to think about popular culture can help them along the route to thinking academically.  Jerome Evans talks about using popular culture as the talk points for students to learn critical thinking tools and literary analysis tools.  Evans teaches high school, so his strategies will not be used extensively in the writing composition classroom, but they still exemplify the basic ways in which popular culture can assist the teacher in helping students to start thinking academically.  Evans teaches American Literature “by listening to Don Henley’s 1989 hit song ‘The End of the Innocence’ and Sheryl Crow’s more recent ‘Soak Up the Sun’” (Evans 32).  He asks students to identify the themes in the songs and the class has a discussion.  And then

students find greater success at identifying themes … [in literary works such as The Crucible and The Great Gatsby] because they have already done so with popular music.  (Evans 33)

Evans attempt is to ease the students into critical thinking and analyzing, first by using contents that do not intimidate students, such as popular lyrics, and then by applying similar thinking and analyzing tools to literature.  “Artifacts of pop culture serve as advanced organizers for students, who can then connect new material (…themes in American literature) to their own experiences with literature (song lyrics)” (Evans 33).  Evans talks about teaching with popular culture in a basic guidance way, which is not the tone of a freshmen writing composition classroom, but it is important to note that popular culture does function in the classroom on this basic level, and the writing composition teacher can use popular culture to exemplify what types of thinking should be going on when they are researching their topic.

I have applied both Callahan/Low and Evans’ articles to discussing the ways that popular culture can help students to take charge of their research, whether through increased self-confidence, augmented authority, or more honed literary critical skills.  These two articles’ arguments lay the groundwork for exploring what I find most interesting about teaching with popular culture: how students are given the room to really explore in their research by making personal connections between the materials.

The exploration I am talking about is a type of thinking, a way for students to “cast themselves within a culture of seeking” (Davis 431).  Because they have the confidence, the authority and the analytical tools, they can now “cultivate the ability and desire to engager multiple perspectives on issues that remain open for further inquiry” (Davis 431).  That is, when they read about certain ideas, they can trust themselves to engage in those ideas.  Because they have taken charge of their topic, when two ideas conflict, they are now more likely to consider both of them in different lights instead of just being confused and feeling blocked from “the right answer.”  This type of fluid thinking allows the ideas to evolve into what Davis and Shadle call the “multi-writing project,” which “shows the purpose and nature of research writing changing to meet the demands of a fluid world of complex relationships” (Davis 439).  These projects ask students to

write reflectively about (and, often, within,) their projects…[they] ask students to refract, to think about projects deflected from the original, threads left hanging, questions remaining, or questions not yet asked. (Davis 439)

In this way, the multi-writing project “would call into its fold, bit by bit, all of discourse” (Davis 440).  Now, I personally find Davis and Shadle’s suggestion to veer from the topic of teaching research writing.  They are trying to figure out a more inclusive, more accessible way for students to learn, but I want to tie their ideas back to research.  Their multi-writing idea is crucial in the research process.  It sounds to me that these projects are really the research aspect before the ideas settle into some cohesive order, at which stage perhaps the paper is drafted.  These projects are fueled by student passion, which is what I’m seeking, and which I have discussed above in regard to why investment might be prompted by using popular culture in the classroom.  The important note is: the process of these projects is a perfect illustration of the fueled research stage in which I am trying to engage the students.  The writing aspects throughout these projects are great free writing or drafting; they might even be whole paragraphs that only need to be connected together by a single document.  I am taking Davis and Shadle’s idea about a new type of research project and turning it into a step in the research process.  It is a crucial step, a period of research when student investment is fueled by personal interest, authority over subject, and critical skills.

But what if students come up with research materials that are malicious (such as racist propaganda) and plan to present them in the paper?  This is a legitimate fear because the teacher has abdicated power to the students, and now they could abuse that power.  This fear is also especially tied to the use of popular culture because the academy has traditionally thought of popular culture as having a “fleeting nature” and “questionable content,” which will open up the classroom to a variety of possible complications unrelated to motivating research (Callahan 52).  However, like Peter Elbow, I, too, would rather “get a strongly felt, fully committed, arrogant paper” so I could

wrestle and try to get tough with the writer.  But so often with first year students it is the latter: timidity and lack of deep entwinement in what they are writing.  (Elbow 80-81)

If the research process brings out malicious views, then at least those views are now out in the open, and therefore can be debated by the teacher or by peers.  Also, I argue that the power given to students through popular culture is what starts the whole process of self-confidence and beyond.  The power is given at some risks.  Some teachers might not feel comfortable with those risks, and that is personal choice.

So, teaching with popular culture has shown to increase self-confidence, augment authority, and better analytical skills, which all contribute to the ability to research topics in the way that Davis and Shadle describe.  Popular culture comes with risks that might be un-compensatable to some, but still, it is a useful tool for teachers to motivate students to invest in their research, and it gives students the tools to do in-depth research with original thinking.

Works Cited

Callahan, Meg, and Bronwen E. Low. “At the Crossroads of Expertise: The Risky Business of Teaching Popular Culture.”  English Journal. 93.3 (2004): 52-57.  Print.

Davis, Robert, and Mark Shadle. “‘Building a Mystery’: Alternative Research Writing and the Academic Act of Seeking.” CCC. 51.3 (2000): 417-446. Print.

Elbow, Peter. “Being a Writer Vs. Being an Academic: A Conflict in Goals.” CCC. 46.1 (1995): 72-83. Print.

Evans, Jerome. “From Sheryl Crow to Homer Simpson: Literature and Composition through Pop Culture.” English Journal. 93.3 (2004): 32-38.  Print.

Pajares, Frank. “Self-Efficacy Beliefs, Motivation, and Achievement in Writing: A Review of the Literature.” Reading and Writing Quarterly. 19 (2003): 139-58.  Print.

The Use of Fairies in “Creature of the Night”

Kate Thompson’s Creature of the Night uses fairies in an intriguing way.  During my first read, I really did wonder why Thompson bothered with the fantastic at all.  In class we discussed reasons why Alan Garner put the Welsh myth in Owl Service.  The myth intensifies the teen problems in that novel.  What do fairies do for Thompson?

It could be said that the book is about the reform of a juvenile delinquent, a topic that seems to butt heads with fairies.  Why would a kid whose main concerns are drugs and money care about fairies?  But I think sometimes seemingly unrelated topics could achieve something haunting when mashed together.  For this book, the concern about fairies gives the book a metaphorical aspect.  The fairy is the creature of the night, who in the end takes the blame (in some respect in Bobby’s mind) for the stabbing of Lars.  At an early point in the book, Bobby proudly claims that he is the creature of the night.  It could be read that throughout the book, Bobby has to project these dark, latent desires onto another being, and therefore escape himself.  He identifies with the fairy in that it also lacks love.  He transfers his darkest rage onto the fairy.  Theoretically, he identifies himself in another and then to separate from it.  It doesn’t really matter if he believes in fairies, only that there is the possibility of something looming out there, and he does not want to be part of it.

Now that I think of it, there is an axe that shows up in the beginning of the book and is not used by the end.  He does not use it, but someone has.  Someone has chopped up Lars.  They say that if there is a gun on the mantelpiece in Act I, it better go off by Act III.  Does the gun go off?  I think the whole point of the story is the avoidance of putting the gun in Bobby’s hands.  That’s the whole point.

We could talk about the fantastic as metaphor all day, but what about the reality within the story?  Does the possibility of the fairy change anything?  It makes Bobby afraid.  But what does that do?  Does it scare Bobby into going to the Dooleys?  Actually, in a way it does.  But the Dooleys live right next to where the fairy is supposed to live, so it’s not a physical fear that drives him.  Perhaps another function of the fairy is to show the readers what exactly Bobby has been afraid of the whole way through—not the physical fairy, but the will of the fairy.  In a way, the will of the fairy is very real, since someone had to have killed Lars.

The fairy is also a physical presence of danger throughout the book.  Without it, danger of a murderous mind cannot be personified.  Without it, there is only the real murderer, which, if shown in the book, brings up another stew of plot deviances that the book as is does not delve into, and does not seem to be about.  Even if the fairy is not a personification of Bobby’s dark side, its presence shows that danger is out there.  With the fairy, the book is oddly a realistic depiction of the world.  Not that there are fairies, but that there are minds that has a motive just as sad and sinister.

Why the comics form?

I would like to pose the question: what types of story need to be told in the comics form?

We have said in class that plot-driven stories, action-packed stories could benefit from the art, and also benefit from the gift to the readers of the ability to speed up or slow down at their own will.  Indeed, most of our booklist include action-packed books: InuYasha, Tintin in Tibet, and American Born Chinese.  For American Born Chinese, another benefit from the form is to be able to show the visuals of the monkey king as well as the different versions of Jin.  Since the whole book is concerned with the truth of appearance, the comics form works well.

But what about stories like The Babysitter’s Club and Fun Home?  Raina Telgemeier has said that in adapting The Babysitter’s Club, she made a conscious effort of making the characters do something since they sat around most of the time.  But Babysitter’s Club is not originally conceived as a graphic novel.  Personally I think that Fun Home utilizes the medium fuller.  The reason that Bechdel could not have told the same story in prose form is that she has already tried, and failed.  She says so in her journal.  Words, pure words are too one-dimensional.  The comics form is a way to juxtapose words with something else to create a resonance that otherwise would not be there, or at least in the same way, to the same degree.  This juxtaposition is special to comics, and Bechdel uses it in spades.

Picture books versus Comics

I agree that the line between picture books and comics is very blurry.  But why is it that usually people have no trouble identifying one from the other?  I have noticed that for picture books, the images are not possibly sequential.  That is, for comics, there will very probably be at some point a series of images that connect to one another.  I am thinking about the two pictures in McCloud’s book where we perform closure to understand that the gentleman is raising his hat.  By the images alone, some sort of story is told.

Picture books, on the other hand, seem to work more with individual pictures.  They seem to depend more on the text to carry the plot.  (I am, of course, speaking generally here.)  There is a sense that pictures and texts in picture books are more additive, or interdependent, as opposed to parallel. Perhaps this goes back to the intended audience.  Younger children might not be expected to perform closure.  The pictures are, in a sense, “pretty.”  They are what the children look at while the adults read the text.  In a way, it could be grotesquely generalized that in picture books, the pictures are for the children and the texts are for the adults.  However blasphemous that statement sounds, on some level it is true.  If we are talking about the picture books written for children, and not written for “adult literary purposes,” then they are targeted at people who have just started or learning to read.  For better or worse, when comics and picture book writers think about how to present their ideas, the target audience does matter.

Exploring the boundaries of comics

Personally, I think comics is just another form of art, like film, or theater, or music, or even the more minute categories of the written word such as novel, short stories, and poem.  In that way, comics could be for children or they could be for adults, or they could be ageless.   I do agree that historically comics have been mostly slated as “kids’ stuff,” maybe it’s because it mostly has been targeted at children.  I think that with more critical analysis about comics, more and more writers are starting to realize comics as a form, that to use the form does not require a specific content.  This is a catch-22 because the reputation of comics makes many “serious critics” shy away from discussing them, and without being taking seriously, comics could not shake a reputation that is now becoming untruthful.

I agree with Matthew Prickett (from class) that maybe some “mature” graphic novels are part of the resistance to the concept that comics are just for kids.  I don’t believe that’s the whole reason though.  I think with Matt’s primary source of the graphic novel of the Alice’s daughter returning to Wonderland, the choice of the comics form is intentional in that it is playing with the idea that comics is a “children’s medium.”  The choice of medium parallels the original story.  And the perversion of that story goes along with the perversion of the medium.  (I use “perversion” here to mean an exploration that deviates from the supposed intent, or the socially presumed notions, of the original story and form.)

Tintin in Tibet, from comics to film

The film version of Tintin in Tibet is an amazingly close translation of the comics.  The major difference I noticed is that the film medium has a need for close-ups that comics do not.  Often it looks as if a scene in the film is an animated picture, only shown not at once but through a pan.  The panning shows sequence that comics can show through the order of the speech bubbles.  Both forms have advantages and disadvantages.  The film version shows reaction in real time, which could seem more realistic.  But sometimes the trade off is that the action has to be slowed down.  For example, the walk into the mountains drags on because it is in real time.  In the comic, the page space shows time, and the reader can go at his or her leisure.  Of course, there are cinematic techniques that could show time passing while not having to make people experience it.  The film version does it to some degree.  It fades out /fades in, and uses the slowing down of music to denote the mood of the travelers.  However, the film still takes some time in showing the passage of time.  Another difference with film is that it has to show the event from beginning to end.  That is, film cannot take a snapshot the scene at its most heightened emotional moment and have the viewer receive the emotional impact.  The film can create emotional impact through the playing out of a scene.  In this way, what seems dangerous in a comic book might not seem as dangerous in a film version.  An example is the scene where Captain Haddock crosses the wrong bridge.  In the comic book, I as the reader imagine the danger.  Watching the film version, I did not get the same sense of danger because everything is shown, and therefore there is not as much closure (in Scott McCloud’s sense of the word).  Of course, film is also capable of closure, such as panning away when an axe is raised over an actor.  However, there are some scenes such as the bridge-crossing scene that does not offend sensibilities and therefore does not call for a panning away.  In these scenes, the viewer is less free than the reader to impose an emotional reaction.

Sometimes stories lend themselves to specific forms.  The choice of the form could create different audiences, critical discussions, or as simply as different experiences.  For Tintin in Tibet, the film version seems to have a narrower audience than the comics version.   It seems to be targeted solely at children.  It could be argued that the comics version also targets children, but I personally feel that it reaches a broader audience.