Musings on getting at coding - collaboration

Smagorinsky states the following on p. 401 Method Section as Conceptual Epicenter:

“My current approach to research within the sociocultural tradition of Vygotsky (1987) has led me to accept neither the traditional notion that agreement equals reliability not the post-structural view that agreement represents a chimaera masquerading as truth. I employ a second coder, that coder, a doctoral student, works with me throughout the coding process as we labor through the data and discuss each data segment before agreeing on how to bracket and code it…we reach agreement on each code through collaborative discussion rather than independent corroboration.”

I wonder if this explicitness in coding is what, perhaps, Jacobs was seeking with Sophia as Jacobs created the research project? Of course, this is all complicated by the different relation Sophia and Jacobs would have vs. Smagorinsky and a doctoral student (as he points out).

This made me think of an experience I had in the past – that also relates to something you have been mentioning in class about a whole slew of students bypassing a remedial writing course (as recommended) and succeeding in a regular English course.

While in PA, I taught high school in a rural school district. Frustrated that students were not able to take college credit while in high school if they should want to OR apply to schools that looked at AP scores as part of admissions, a colleague and I successfully rallied for and implemented AP courses to replace the traditional honors courses. Concurrently, college courses at the nearby university also became available to students. What was interesting was the way in which AP students could be admitted. Entrance into the honors courses required an A/B average from the 9^th grade to the junior year. This became the rule for AP courses as well – effectively cutting many really bright students out of these courses. There was a social belief, in rural Western PA, that only a few students were cognitively capable of taking these courses (I had my doubts).

It was eye-opening when I took a job in rural Maine (my “in” was that I had taught AP); there, AP English placement was based on open enrollment. Both schools had similar demographics (mainly white, rural students with a poverty rate at about 40-50%).

And enroll they did.

By my last year there, 2007, 80 of the 250 or so students elected to take the AP Language course (up from 30 two years before). And while I will not say the test is by any way, shape or form perfect, preparing students for it helped to motivate them to work on their writing & analysis of others’ writing in ways they may not have considered had they landed in another class (As long as I could use whatever texts and writing assignments I wanted, I could care less about the final assessment).

Why did so many take the course? Mostly for college credit or college admissions. Several were successful on both fronts. Just an interesting case of categories broadening – that allowed opportunity that might not have been afforded to some. Interesting how my own perceptions at first played into this. I had one young many who wrote a rough paragraph from the summer reading…I thought, “he’ll never make it.” But being in the class with students who were interested in talking about literature and writing was a social act – I have never seen such a transformation in the writing ability of a student within a year. And I am certainly aware it wasn’t so much me as it was forces that made him motivated. (I have referred to Moje and adolescent motivation before…thinking of Jacobs mention of Moje makes me realize I need to revisit her).

But beyond a feel good story of more students taking a rigorous course, the experience helps me to see some of what Smagorinsky was saying when he discusses codes.

With so many students, we had, what I believe, may not be typical in many high schools – 3 instructors teaching the same AP class. So we used it to our advantage. We shared students’ responses and scored them ourselves, then compared our scores with the samples and scores we were sent from the College Board (they have tons of sample questions/ scoring guidelines/ sample student papers: http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/ap/english_lang/samp.html?englang), then had students rescore the sample papers and their own. Again, the college board assessments are what they are – they can be arbitrary …but I do believe the collaboration of scoring with teachers and students made me much more aware and less arbitrary in the manner in which I categorize ideas, phenomena, etc.In other words, I had to explain myself in ways I really did not have to when I was the only one teaching a subject.

Link for Shanahan executive summary - just click on text below:

Oh, I am including a PDF in reference to a post on the listserv … an executive summary report concerning Emerging English Learners …what I need to do now is look for the original sources of the summary.

evolving research

Assessing the way in which I have viewed research, and how that is evolving:

As I had mentioned earlier, I have taught reading/ writing with varied groups (rural/ urban/ethnicities/ages)and settings – adjusting as I saw fit based on how practices worked out. But I am sensing a different approach here – really looking at what is happening, and really seeing WHY something might be working (social factors as revealed through Smith that has more of an impact than a quick observation may have revealed). Again, I find it to be quite powerful…sentence combining could work to make complex sentences…but because it was situated in a social practice…rather than overt exercises...which is pretty mind-blowing in my book.

On another note -

Currently, while at SRU finishing up my degree in reading, I work as a part-time GA with Action-Research projects…where student teachers find a research question during student teaching and observe the results. Much attention is paid to students NOT presupposing an end result...I would actually like to take a look at the guidelines for the project.

This inquiry I am seeing in a state school educational setting for student teaching bears out some of the movements from in the Berlin article you gave to me. What intrigues me is that it creates an awareness of INQUIRY ; and this is powerful stuff – interesting in that this wasn’t so much part of the discussion when I student taught years ago—this keen look at what, exactly, is being done in the classroom, and how it impacts the classroom…can shift what has traditionally happened in many classrooms.

On another note again, I am including a list of what I'd like to take a look at in terms of research (a very wide-ranging list, I might add...and very much a partial one). I got a letter this past weekend ... in which I learned I was accepted into the program. I have to say...it helps situates the way I look at research. Need I say, I am extremely excited about this opportunity.

- L

WWriting programs situated in job training programs, specific disciplines, community-based writing (particularly with typically marginalized writers) (Started with Moje)

- Instructors/ teachers - inquiry/ practice (started with Berlin)

- Reading (comprehension) and Composition – connections between the two? What are they? (Moje)

Ecological concepts in writing/ research

Writing - dominant discourses - science - (I looked at ways in which language was used by different stakeholders for rhetorical in the discussion of hydrofracking in Pam's class -- but I just scratched the surface)

For fun, had always meant to write a grammar book based on creative writing with a rhetorical thrust (like, write a sentence using say, a telescopic sentence to show anger - students choose speaker and, to some extent, content...practicing actually using sentences for a purpose via a made-up character might lead them to investigate using sentences for their own purposes...also, identifying these sentences (or parts of speech, usage etc. have been used with real craft -- again, that concept of "playing" with language. Interesting how much of this we did in my art courses -- playing with different elements of design -- and how those pieces emerged, sometimes years later, in art, when I had a clearer purpose for them.

Lynch Wysokci (sp) – multi modality in composition --Ok, it is funny to post this in light of part of class discussion yesterday... here is what I am curious about. Multi-modality (whatever, really, that is) has been embraced in different forms in different composition classrooms. But there are so many uncertainties about what it is. In every class I've taken here at Kent, the discussion of the term has brought about discussion of what a composition course is supposed to teach. Is it writing? Semiotics of all kinds that make an argument?

I've only seen SOME of how different instructors tackle this...and at its worst, have seen a limited scope of what it means to read and write (a student can only create so many pamphlets and powerpoints & standardized test prompts before it is ok to explore other types of writing) - which I saw in some classrooms. At its best, meaning making and literacy are woven together -- constantly evolving and feeding off of each other (but, I think it takes a fairly skilled instructor to pull this off -- and often one who is skilled in analysis of a lot of meaning making systems). I took a bookmaking class as an undergrad while an art student. The class was part of the printmaking department -- it was fantastic. We made decisions about how to bind a book, what paper to print the graphics on, what graphics to choose and even what printing process to use (we did it all by hand...back in the day ('96)) ...each of these decisions brought forth very different statements that happened to be in the form of an Artist's Book. We worked in images and words...for me, a really interesting way to combine two ways of making meaning that I loved (writing and drawing) -- and showed how the two can work together.

HOWEVER, to really delve into what it is to use language in written form to create meaning, a semiotic system in which I employ different tools...and to some extent, try to control that meaning...is a different journey. And it takes a while to build those skills. All forms of meaning-making relate (yes, a drawing can get me started on a piece of research, highlight research, etc.)...but I didn't just "know" how to use this semiotic system. It was years of negotiating my own social interactions with others which has developed my own epistemology, different compartments of higher ed that use writing systems differently (art, English, education, environmental studies -- all, I've found, have their own language patterns), and looking at and practicing at a lot of writing. Somehow, I feel this room for students to WRITE can be a casualty of some applications of multi-modality. And certain writing styles (and critical reading) can be a powerful part of making choices and setting policy.

Here is an example - my parents live in Western PA -- they have been approached by energy representatives of many stripes to gain access to their land for fracking. Their relatives, who live nearby, have signed. It has taken my siblings and I all of our rhetorical resources to get our relatives to understand why we are opposed to this practice, and why the family was also opposed to land being used as a thoroughfare for a gas well on someone else's land, or why we'd be very opposed to holding ponds of chemical crap near our home at all (even if it were not our land) and most of that was done through writing (yes, some video clips and pictures, but writing wove those pieces together). The upshot of all of this is that while fracking will most likely occur around our parent's home (which is hard, in many ways, to swallow), we convinced (mainly through weaving together an argument of words) our relatives who live nearby that we have legitimate concerns about the practice and they have backed off asking my parents if they use our land as some kind of right of way to get back to their land. It is clear through this experience how much power certain industries have -- and much of that comes through the argument they are making...and much of that comes through written language. Hey, if I am dealing with this issue, I can't help but think what others through time have had to deal with...and why writing is such a powerful tool for those situations.

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Actually, seeing how all of this is playing out (rhetoric of energy companies vs. rhetoric of several environmental groups I belong to vs. rhetoric of locals who want the industry vs. rhetoric of locals who don't. Sifting through these words and arguments has had a profound effect on me and made me even more sharply aware of the power language can have. And..in this instance, the power of language to enact certain kinds of policy that will have consequences in communities for generations to come. (My god, I think as I visit home, the dragging of feet when it comes to renewable resources...and the quick acceptance of extractive economies - language plays a large part in arguing for either, but so do embedded and constructed social attitudes).

So So what implications does this have for a research question? I suppose what I am getting at is that composition courses can be very instrumental in introducing students to the very handy skill of analyzing and making an argument through many modes...but this understanding plays out in many different ways in many different classrooms (and is tied to educational funding/ trends/ etc.) -- so investigating what the different definitions of what, exactly, this term means and implies is really interesting.

U

Research...and where we see it in practice

I find the implications of two very different types of research to be intriguing.
First, Berlin, which we discussed in detail last Wednesday. As discussed in class, this piece was influential in the field of writing...with the following premise: "Ideology is here foregrounded and problematized in a way that situates rhetoric within ideology...This position means that any examination of a rhetoric must first consider the ways its very discursive structure can be read so as to favor one version of economic, social and political arrangements over other versions" (477)/.
His move to discuss ideologies of the following: cognitive rhetoric (incompletely, as we discussed in class), Expressionistic Rhetoric, (again, a somewhat limited conversation), and Social-Epistemic -- where he clearly places his stamp of approval. His discussion of language, observer, discourse community, historics and social conditions --places rhetoric (when understood in this light) in a epistemological light "This means that in studying rhetoric-the ways discourse is generated - we are studying the ways in which knowledge comes into existence" (489). His further discussion of Shor's empowering classroom, which challenges the traditional hierarchical classroom - in favor of the "complextity of the behavior recommended in the classroom, behavior that is always open-ended, receptive to the unexpected, and subversive of the planned" (492). The focus on the" liberated consciousness of the of students" is argued to be the highest goal. The piece becomes well-known in the field...and influential.
I have used much of this in my own classroom experiences (In a previous post,I wrote about my realization that I in naming my course "Empowerment through Writing", I was making assumptions that writing would empower...you wrote back with a series of titles. In fact, I was and still do use Malcolm X's passage, "Learning to Read", along with Sherman Alexie's "Indian Education" or "Superman and Me" -- even when I questioned my own assumptions for using these, I could not deny that the pieces resonated with students, so why not? I am moving towards a more complex understanding of my decisions to teach particular texts in a classroom -- and acknowledging complexity does not mean I have to throw the whole thing out.
As such, though the "liberated consciousness of the student" is a vague term at best...it can lead, as an ideology, to some interesting literary/ composition exercises in that, in my experience, it often provides a CONTEXT for students to write. A reason -- found not in the cues of the instructor as explored by Smith and Combs, but within the writers themselves. But it is difficult to explain what this looks like...and interpretations of this classroom are many. It is, after all, an ideology. So what does that mean for the teaching of writing? How did this impact the teaching of writing (as we discussed, it did)?

Here is where the juxtaposition of the Smith and Combs with Berlin is quite interesting to me. I began Smith and Combs without much interest. Sentence combining and T-stops seemed profoundly uninspiring after the sweeping vision of Berlin. Yet, I do teach a day of sentence combining techniques, along with some other overt lessons in word choice, usage, conventions.
Smith and Combs pushed me to consider exactly WHAT I was doing when I did this...and how students respond to it. Why did some students continue to use words throughout the semester I had explicitly told them to avoid ("thing, a lot, really")? This nitty, gritty level of looking at what is going on both in the lesson and the ways in which students are thinking about the lesson are something that deserves attention. Smith and Combs were able (as I responded to Megan's post) to, however tentatively, (Sentence Combining must have been quite entrenched at the time) suggest that a widely held practice may not quite be what it seems. I have some issues with the Smith and Combs (as articulated in my response to Megan's post) -- but I find fascinating that Smith and Combs get at decisions made by the writer in response to the covert moves of the instructor. For the most part, I will buy the method, the representation and the documentation of the Smith and Combs article. Of course, our class discussion on Monday may very well complicate this.

* Note - I was able to make it to the other Berlin article you gave to me (do you need it back?) - the last paragraph "Teachers must emphasize the oppositional nature of their work as researchers, questioning the forces that would make them technicians in the reproduction of an exploited social order" is explosive...and I look forward to pursuing the rest of the Daiker/Morenberg book you lent me (thanks for that)...as well to trace research beyond these texts. These situate me in what I was "feeling" but not finding words for -- that I had been working with students, literacy and social situations that were all playing off of each other in meaningful ways (I have done some research on Elizabeth Moje's work with literacies as embedded in adolescent's lives -- and look forward to more of that exploration). So thanks!

Science, questions and Language

Today, while in the office, I worked while listening to The Promised Land, one of the many American Public Radio Broadcasts I tune into when I have the time and the task allows it. It had been awhile, but as I listened todayI was struck how places outside of writing composition studies research mirror themes evolving in class.

In one segment, the show’s host, Majora Carter, whose own non-profit “Greening the Ghetto” provides a shifting lens…and shifting practice…for land-use in areas urban zones that have been written off (she works primarily in previously blighted areas of the Bronx), interviews Wes Jackson.

Man, I love Wes Jackson. I met him years ago when he spoke at Pitt – while I was pursuing my Sustainable Systems degree. An academic turned sustainable agriculture advocate, he must have been about 70 , in front of the room there in the lecture hall, talking about no-till systems and saving the world with perennials vs. annuals to his 20 something audience.

As I listened today, (he is now 75), I felt now, more deeply than before, just how important it is to think about the questions raised in research – certainly theme in the literacy class in the fall…and now, this course.

An excerpt from Wes: "We need to feature questions that go beyond the available answers and by doing that we now have a chance to drive knowledge out of its categories and in doing so create a yeastiness of thought that we have not had before….so as long as we are asking questions that have available answers, we are stuck.” He discusses the questions in terms of the daring of those willing to ask those questions that have no answers, and to get out of the knowledge as “embedded in categories.”

Wes is talking about the long-term consequences of soil depletion – instead, suggesting the “genius of place” with ecological principles with local adaptation. Sounds a lot like what I have recently read in terms of research on bilingual learners and literacy – which flew in the face of “immersion in English” practices.

So, I am becoming increasingly interested in ecological terms to describe literacy, composition and research in both. As such, the following link leads to another scholar in science. http://www.physorg.com/wire-news/87543687/utah-biologist-wins-2011-aaas-public-engagement-with-science-awa.html

What interests me here is the attention this scientist (who, by the looks of her initiatives, publications and research) finds communication of science to be at the forefront of her work. That discussion (she has a pretty clear ideology/agenda – awareness of environmental issues) is held in all sorts of places:

“In particular, said Shirley Malcom, director of education and human resources at AAAS, Nadkarni's outreach efforts "have brought an awareness of environmental issues to people in settings ranging from prisons and churches, to boardrooms, bookstores, legislatures and rap music stores."

It is this discussion that intrigues me – I am increasingly becoming interested in how those in sciences choose to have discussions with the public – and what the ramifications of those choices are.

This composition of how to deliver science is so ubiquitous, I hadn’t realized the extent at which I was immersed in it until we talked about “sponshorship” through Deborah Brandt’s article. Suddenly, I was able to grapple with the ideologies my relatives were espousing when we argued over Marcellus Shale extraction.

On a recent trip from DC to Ohio, I drove through PA and a tale of science & sponsorship revealed itself in a story…through billboards. Some proponents of coal (the most laughable one in my eyes, read something like “Sun Sets, Wind Dies, But Coal Lasts Forever” – as though your household would just sort of shut off were the wind to stop blowing for a day or two. Seriously. Who writes this utter crap much less posts it on a giant billboard?), others natural gas ( keywords: Clean, Jobs, JOBS, JOBS! -- to which I repy…for whom and for how long?), and still others: solar, wind & geothermal. All of these discussions along I-76... with wildly different arguments for future energy. To me, here are a range of compositions worth investigating