Experiments with Feedback and Grading in a First-Year Writing Course

It's been a while since I last wrote here about teaching, for a simple reason: I've been teaching the same course, First-Year Writing, for a couple of years now, and haven't really had much to say about it. (Literature grad students at UNH used to be able to get some lit courses to teach after a required year of teaching what we colloquially call 401, but various forces related to lower enrollments made my cohort the last to get any lit courses [when I taught Literary Analysis and then an American lit survey], and so for the past two years I've taught nothing but 401).

For the upcoming year, the university awarded me a Dissertation Year Fellowship, so I will not be teaching. Before all memory of the past few years leaves my mind, here are some reflections...

This academic year, bored to death with my own teaching, I decided to experiment with the course a bit, and those experiments worked out well generally, so perhaps they are worth sharing here.

Most of my experiments are stolen/adapted from other teachers. Last summer, I went back to the work of Peter Elbow, the single greatest influence on my teaching of writing. Elbow's books Everyone Can Write, Writing with Power, Writing without Teachers, and A Community of Writers were hugely influential on my teaching when I first encountered them as a young teacher, and I have returned to parts of each through the years to keep reminding myself of the basic principles of what I do.

While Elbow provides the foundation for what I aim for with writing courses, my recent experiments have primarily been inspired by the experiments of my friend Robin DeRosa, the writings of John Warner at Inside Higher Ed and Arthur Chiaravalli's piece "Teachers Going Gradeless", as well as by the examples of some of my friends at UNH who tried out similar things and generously shared their thoughts and materials.

The key changes in my teaching were the use of a "B Contract" and a portfolio system. These have worked so well that I plan to adapt them to as many courses that I teach in the future as I can.

Gratis & Libre, or, Who Pays for Your Bandwidth?

via Philip Taylor, Flickr

In talking with Robin DeRosa about open educational resources (OER), a lot of my skepticism was focused on (and continues to be focused on) the question of who pays for it. If I'm not just skeptical but also cynical about a lot of the techno-utopian rhetoric that seems to fuel both the OER advocates and, even more so, people who associate themselves with the idea of Digital Humanities, it may be because I've been paying attention to what the internet has done to writers over the last couple decades. It's not all bad, by any means — this blog is one of example of that, I continue to try to write mainly for online venues so that my work can be relatively easily and broadly accessed, and I put most of my syllabi online. I can do that because I have other income and don't rely on this sort of writing to pay the bills. Thus, in my personal calculations, accessibility is more important than revenue.

But that freedom to choose accessibility over getting paid, or over doing work other than writing that would pay me, is a gigantic luxury. I can only make such a calculation because I have other revenue (the stipend from the PhD program I'm in and money saved from selling my father's business, which, though it's not enough to let me stop working, pays a bit over half of my basic expenses), and so the cost of my writing for free here on this blog, rather than doing remunerative work, is absorbed by that other revenue.

Further, aside from blog posts and some academic material, I usually won't write for free. Both because there are, in fact, people who will pay me, and also because I don't want to de-value the work of writing. Letting people have your work for free means they begin to expect that such work ought to be free. And while yes, in a post-capitalist utopia, I'd love for all work to be free ... we are, alas, not living in a post-capitalist utopia (as you might've noticed). Bills must still be paid. Printers and managers and bosses and technicians all get paid. And therefore writers should be paid.

In our Q&A, Robin said, "For materials to be 'open,' they need to be both free as in no-cost (gratis) and free as in free to repurpose and share (libre)."

It's that "no cost" that seems to me dangerous — the idea that there is no cost. Of course there's a cost. There's the cost of labor, first of all, with somebody working, either for free or not (and if for free then how are they paying their bills?). But then there are all the other things: the cost of bandwidth and of technological infrastructure, for instance.

Somebody is paying, even if it's not you.

Q&A; on Open Educational Resources with Robin DeRosa

My friend and colleague (when I was adjuncting at Plymouth State University) Robin DeRosa has been spending a lot of time recently thinking about and working with "open educational resources" (OER), which Wikipedia (today) defines as "freely accessible, openly licensed documents and media that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing as well as for research purposes." 

I've been following Robin's ideas about OER, and at a certain point realized I didn't really understand the conversation. Partly, this was because most of what I was reading was Twitter feeds and Twitter can be confusing, but as an outsider to the OER world, I also didn't know what sorts of assumptions advocates were working from. I was especially concerned when thinking about academic labor — all the talk of giving things away and making things free sounded to me like a wonderful idea that would in practice just devalue academic work and lead to further exploitation within the highly exploitative world of academia. At the same time, I'm strongly attracted to open resources of various sorts (I'm writing this on a blog, after all!), and so, thinking about it all, I felt befuddled.

The easiest way to get answers to my befuddlements and to allay (or stoke) my fears was, of course, to ask Robin some questions. So that's what I did. Originally, I intended this to be more of an interview, with me adding more questions after she answered a few, but her answers to my first set of questions were so comprehensive that I thought adding to it all would be a bit much. Better to get the conversation rolling, and let it play out in the comments section here and/or on Twitter, other websites, etc.

I can't say I'm not still a little befuddled. But Robin's replies to my queries did help clear up some of my primary fears and misconceptions.

And now, before we begin, an official bio:

Robin DeRosa is professor of English and chair of Interdisciplinary Studies at Plymouth State University, and she is also a consultant for the OER Ambassador Pilot at the University of New Hampshire.  Recently named as an editor of Hybrid Pedagogy (a digital journal of learning, teaching, and technology), in August 2015 she'll be be a Hybrid Pedagogy Fellow at the Digital Pedagogy Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Her essay "Selling the Story: From Salem Village to Witch City" was published by the open uneducational resource The Revelator in 2011.

You can find out more about Robin at her website or follow her on Twitter: @actualham.

Today, Tuesday 9 June, at 8pm EST, Robin will be moderating a Twitter discussion about OER via the hashtag #profchat. [Update:] The chat is over, but you can read it via Storify here.

Matthew Cheney: In the idea of open educational resources, what does open mean?

Robin DeRosa: Generally, OER practitioners tend to use the Hewlett Foundation definition of “Open Educational Resources:

OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.

Another way to think of “open” is to use the libre/gratis definitions of “free.”  For materials to be “open,” they need to be both free as in no-cost (gratis) and free as in free to repurpose and share (libre).  In addition, we generally think of open materials as allowing learners/teachers to do all of the 5 R’s with those materials: reuse, revise, remix, redistribute, and retain (these are David Wiley’s criteria; the fifth R was added more recently to contrast OER with “free” ebooks that disappear after a certain amount of time, or rental textbooks, etc.).  Key to all of this is the Creative Commons license, which is the general way that creators of OER make it easy to share materials.

Programmed

Elif Batuman's London Review of Books essay "Get a Real Degree", which is partly a review of Mark McGurl's The Program Era, a book I read a year or so ago, has been getting a lot of notice on the intertubes.  Because it's been a year since I looked at McGurl's book, I won't really address Batuman's analysis of it; my memories of The Program Era are just vague impressions at this point -- I found the discussion of Raymond Carver and Joyce Carol Oates especially interesting; disliked the charts and some of the jargon; thought many of the discussions/evaluations of individual writers were idiosyncratic and distracting (what McGurl says about Nabokov seemed so bizarre to me as to be humorous); was grateful for some of the research, but finished feeling that it was only touching the tip of a gigantic iceberg, and that, for instance, it was incomplete without any mention whatsoever of the parallel and complementary evolution of composition studies alongside workshop practices, though that may just be because my undergrad degree is from UNH, where Donald Murray's shadow loomed large.  For a good dissection of Batuman's representation/distortion of McGurl's book, see Andrew Seal's excellent blog post on the subject.

I felt about Batuman's review much of what I felt about The Program Era itself -- that interesting insights were again and again undercut by something under-analyzed, simplified, or distorted.  Mostly, I'm just tired of people complaining about some monolithic thing called "MFA writers" and their boring books/stories.  It's a straw man argument, because to be convincing (to me, at least) a critic must show that a giant glob of the fiction being published in the U.S. today is 1.) boring; 2.) boring because of the effect of writing workshops on the writer -- that, in fact, this writer would be less boring had she or he studied investment banking.

Batuman and I agree that much of the fiction published today is uninteresting.  We definitely disagree about which kinds of fiction are interesting and which aren't; beyond that, we disagree about whether this is anything to carp about.

Those Kids Spelt So Much Better with Typewriters!

There are many things that can be said about technology and education, and various issues related to both fields that are complex and not easily resolved. Over at The Chronicle Review (part of The Chronicle of Higher Education), Mark Bauerlein instead decides to go for useless simplification. (Which I discovered via Scott Esposito.)

Commenting on a comparative study of written errors in student papers from the '80s and now, Bauerlein decides that though the authors of the study, Andrea & Karen Lunsford (well-respected researchers in the field of composition and rhetoric), say that their study does not support the fears of "hard-core worriers who see a precipitous decline in student writing ability and who often relate that decline to the creeping of IM and other digital lingo", he knows better, and, in fact, the Lunsfords' study proves their own statement wrong -- computers have made student writers worse! (Note that the Lunsfords were speaking specifically of the sorts of errors that would be produced by students mistaking the diction of IM or text messaging for the diction of an academic paper. Bauerlein broadens the category to any computer-assisted mistake.) Bauerlein concludes:

Have the tools to support writing, such as spellcheck and grammar programs, made students too dependent upon technology? If a student tries to write “frantic” and the computer comes up with “fanatic” and the student accepts it (L & L’s example), doesn’t that suggest something about the potential disadvantages of digital tools? Don’t the problems with citation point to the potential disadvantages of over-fast downloading and cutting and pasting?

These are open questions, but I think we can say that instead of dispelling fears about the impact of technology on student writing, the Lunsford study raises them to a new level.

The best response to this idiocy is given by one of the commenters on the post:

Doesn’t the rapid use of keys on this new-fangled thing called a “typewriter” encourage the erroneous transposition of letters, e.g., “aslo” instead of “also”? Don’t these typewriter things mean that a student can get a friend to do the final draft, and [the] student won’t be able to make additional changes for the better during its writing? And doesn’t that correction ribbon on the high-end SelectWriters encourage careless speed?

(The commenter also points to this YouTube video of a Medieval helpdesk and then makes some cogent points.)

Even if arguing against digital technologies was a useful argument, to make it convincing the arguer would have to show that the types of errors those technologies introduce are both worse than the errors encountered without them and so heinous as to outweigh any advantages the technologies offer. Bauerlein instead looks like an old grump who's particularly angry today because somebody forgot to turn off their cell phone before class.